knowing more about a person (a multimedia novel)

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Cover: “very Dickensian and nureyev outfit” 1987 by Karen Kilimnik; Page 4: “Main Title” by Quincy Jones, from John and Mary Soundtrack; 

Bournemouth

She committed suicide at our house in Bournemouth, a chalet bungalow off Holdenhurst Road.
          She used to take me to church, and I remember once after it had been raining– She had dark hair, which she parted evenly in the centre and wore to her shoulders. There was something about that day–
          We were listening to the Smiths, it was playing in the car– I think it was the Smiths– But it left me with a feeling I can’t quite put into words, about the weather– I and I’m sure this is where she lost her religion. There was this stony building on the beach– The way she walked out of church into town, it was incredible; her charcoal tartan skirt and black wool blazer, little beige kilts that she wore, or lambswool twill skirts. An ivory leather belt and a pull-on shirt of white silk, dull grey in a certain light, by Margaret Howell.
          She looked so beautiful.

She wrote about nineteenth century French literature, sometimes about painting, although often she would champion current women writers that had impressed her, like Nicola Barker or Lydia Davis. But she was of her time in that she was a renaissance woman, and she could happily write about literature as she could– As I say– Impressionist painters or difficult, atonal music, like Schoenberg, which as a child I found horrible.
          She was often unhappy; when she thought she was alone she would whip a tea towel into her face, screaming at the top of her lungs.
          Then I would come and find her–

Introduction

Never before have I looked forward to going to work so much. But I say this because there is nothing else going on in my life. My house – my parents’ house – is a prison of memories and familiarity. I walk around it and feel lost. 

A couple, the main couple of this novel, lay in bed and half-watch a film – Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven.

At sunset, a girl chases a peacock. A woman walks up to an old house and a man asks where she is from. The girl cooks the bird over the fire with two sticks entwined. A couple lay in the hay, as the horses head out to the field, snow on the ground.

‘N- No, stop.’ ‘Just keep going.’ A steam harvester sounds like techno on the chaffed wheat fields. The working day is so present. A man settles accounts whilst his partner reads, looking at the woman through a telescope, out on the field. Close-up of a fire. Hay falls in front of the camera as it is hurled with a pitchfork. The horses are beautiful.

White and brown, dark brown horses cross a shallow lake, mud-covered. A pigeon coos the end of the day. At night, the blue house, people throw their hats and steam rises. A horse looks nice. The man and the girl stand by a rectangular casement window. She walks past a Tate-n-Lyle tin of syrup, rusty on a pine shelf, painted white.

 An incredible moment with a black man doing rudimentary tap-dance on a wooden board with the girl, accompanied by harmonica. The couple sit in the long grass, in the field; he eats cereal from a bowl and mentions something about a federal case. Beautiful still of the girl, hair up, looking dark, against the ever-recurring sunset.

A donkey eats grass, and thunder begins. The woman talks to the girl, both darker, against a curtain. They smoke. They pronounce Chicago ‘Chicaga’.

At the wedding she looks impossibly beautiful, like a little dog.

‘You’re an angel,’ – when she’s in bed, beautiful white covers, four-poster bed.

She walks through the woods. Black and white hat on green, her face, the music. ‘We’d never been that rich.’ They sit under the stand, white bandstand, out on the dust of the field.

Now they are rich. The bandstand at night. A husky ranges across a field. Drunk, at a lake, holding their glasses over the water. Her dress, like a doily, off-white. ‘My hair’s still the same.’ The glass, at the bottom of the lake.

The girl, blonde, wearing black, hair up, reading a book, as if she has never a read a book before, alone in an upper-class house, in a way she never has been before.

A Persian carpet. She pulls off her black stocking. ‘I always thought that being alone was just something a man had to put up with. Like, you just got used to it.’

President Wilson visits Panhandle. The light under a closed door. Creepy scarecrow.

Day in the heath. ‘Buster, fetch!’ A pheasant tilts its head. The wings in my head sound like gunfire, when it flies away out of the heath.

Flying circus. A man and the girl sit in the field. (This is when I lose interest, when the midget creeps in. Then I fall asleep.)

The woman in black with a nice gold diamond square on her neck. The girl, hair up, in front of a film projector. ‘I think the devil is on the farm.’

~

I woke up next to him. My nighting gown looked different in the light. Dim light of the morning. I wondered how I looked. Probably okay. Don’t worry. Just go back to sleep.

I kissed my own hand and did that.

The film started playing again.

~

‘Get down on the bed and let me fuck you.’

She lay on the bed wearing a white négligée, her little ass raised up in the air.

She moved back onto it again and again, up, up, like only that very part of her body wanted it. Even when he had stopped fucking, she kept moving back onto it.

It was serious. She clawed at the pillow.

Israel

Elizabeth

I had a lovely little boat in Israel. I’d never done any travel writing before but part of my love for the country had come directly out of my Jewish heritage. I never told my daughter about this, about my being Jewish. I thought it could change things between us. I wanted her to enter the world in her own way. My father never liked to talk about what he was, as if his own mind– as if he was not enough to talk about. God came into it. The way I thought about myself, when I was travelling– I hired a little bike, a little motorbike, peteing and puttering around the Middle East, changing the oil out on the dry desert. It was lovely. And I loved myself then. They say travel broadens the mind but really it defeats it. We are shown, no matter how much warbling and interesting discussion comes after us in bars, that fundamentally depending on our mood everyone is either so different as to be terrifying, something to really shun, or different – no. Sorry, yes, that’s right, so different as to be wonderful, you feel the breadth of the ocean on an old man outside a maqha’s weather-beaten, or so complex as to be samey, you can nullify it all – like, this man here is the same as my father, in Gdansk swimmers, bathers, all look the same, act the same, like animals truffling at the trough, that one wonders why painters bothered to ever paint them. Then, it can also be the either thing, that they, we are all the same and therefore universal. But I never aspired to this, or if I did it was only on the days I was drunk.

Mirror

Bess

There was a mirror against the bed. Floral patterns were indented at the bottom that swirled upwards. ‘I hate this mirror,’ he said. ‘It looks so cheap.’ ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘I fucking – hate it.’ He kicked it off the bed and I watched it shatter on the ground. I heard it – the worst kind of outburst – shatter on the floor. ‘We should go to the shops,’ he said. Jesus, I thought. We were at his father’s house, and I was watching his mood change from bad to worse; I was there as if he needed a spectator for it to take place at all. I didn’t know what ‘it’ meant.

When I woke up and found him next to me I realised that everything we had worked towards – everything we had recorded – was null, was redundant. There was something new in the air now, something impenetrable: the flow of collective human interest, which could waffle into the new born. It was an incredible noise, the beast. The internet was a large creature, with welts, inexplicable in the night, in the forest. And I had nothing to say to it.

Under the bed was a matchbox car, an Aston Martin DB5, and he played with it.

The Bulgari Connection

Bess

David asked me whether I’d heard of a novel called the Bulgari Connection. I told him I hadn’t, and he told me that the author, Fay Weldon, had been given £18,000 from the jewellery firm Bulgari to mention their name at least twelve times. He asked me what I thought. ‘I like the idea,’ he said. ‘I like the idea of a commercially, like, up-for-it’
          Everything’s falling apart anyway. Literature is quite sweet, quite young, in some respects.’

I wasn’t sure what I meant by that.

We but after looking at both the British and American Amazons he opened it on the American Amazon because he preferred the cover. 

We read the beginning together.

‘Doris Dubois is twenty-three years younger than I am,’ David read from the screen. ‘She is slimmer than I am, and more clever. She has a degree in economics, and hosts a TV arts programme. She lives in a big house with a swimming pool at the end of a country lane. It used to be mine. She has servants and a metal security gate which glides open when her little Mercedes draws near. I tried to kill her once, but failed.’

‘I like it,’ I said. ‘I might buy it.’ I laughed through my nose. ‘Or see if there’s a pdf of it.’ ‘Yeah,’ he said, looking at the screen.

There’s this book of Rachel Whiteread drawings, I said.

Maria Margaronis

David

Maria Margaronis, dressed in black, talked about the BBC’s rolling news channel, laughed at a joke about Fellini, they were talking about the Pope’s resignation and the legitimacy of celibacy in the twenty-first century, Britain and how determined, the willingness Republicans were about accepting a radical defence cuts than the closing of tax loops on the rich, the pain of austerity in Europe, and something else. He mentioned her work in the Nation. She was wearing beautiful shoes, I could see, from under the large red oval table, her legs askew. There was something about the bold brown of her smiling, worried eyes, and her dark hair, something like an old teacher, a really reliable source of wisdom, measured belief. It was a long while before I realised I was fantasising, nodding along to her as if she were my mother.

Maria Margaronis writes from the Nation’s London bureau. Her work has appeared in many other publications, including the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and Grand Street.

Slazenger

She thought for a few minutes about writing a novel based around or featuring left-wing academics, considered the term ‘left-wing people’, wondered whether this was worth writing down, turned the channel over to the Haikou World Open, thought of a dark green ball she had found once in her grandfather’s back garden that to her, as a child, somehow seemed to symbolise tennis, golf and snooker all in one go, a colour that symbolised, crystallised the feeling of dull Sundays, or Saturdays with the television volume down low (she turned it down) and now, something of class, something to do with smoking, something ticking quietly in the corner in a glass case, something she would not have thought of until now as right-wing but now seemed simply right. The dark, Slazenger green, as it were, of Slazenger, of sports enjoyed by the upper-classes, smoking, or the aspiring middle-class, the endlessness of cricket, once so boring as to be fetishistic, now mythic, a part of lost time, a symbol of a search for lost time.
          What had her grandfather thought about the world? He had been so quiet. He had considered himself Jewish, but he was Italian, he owned a restaurant in London, came from St Albans, she imagined a long, staunch stretch of feelings, admirable impatience that lead to the support of UKIP, anger that the Chinese/Japanese had become among the best snooker players in the world, but then this could not be true, didn't have to be true, and that was part of his mystery, if it had been his mystery.

She remembers – the most profound – the crisp, what she would term now as Proustian, white tough linen sheets as the spare room as she slept, on her own, in a room that her Great Nana had slept in whilst she was alive, in a house of glass ornaments and silver objects in cabinets, trying to get to sleep, even though her mother was not there and the bed, was much too big for her, and the yellow of the lamp on the bedside to sleep in. The tips of the white blanket like a doily.

Natascha McElhone

David

I fell asleep watching the Truman Show and thinking: Natascha McElhone is beautiful.

When I woke up I went into the kitchen to find, not Bess, but my father, crushing a box of Caffeine-Free Diet Coke in order for it to be recycled. ‘Son,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘You need to get a job. I don’t want you sleeping in on a Sunday. There’s so much to do.’ ‘Okay, Dad,’ I said. ‘And you can bring girls back, just don’t– I don’t know.’ ‘Okay.’ He seemed reasonable.

My father and I had similar tastes in women, which was a little disgusting, but I imagined girls outside might find it sweet, even attractive in itself.


My father and I had similar tastes in women, which was a little




Bess

I woke up next to David and started going over the depths of our career together. I placed my hair over my face and watched him sleep. I’d first met him at– The twinkle of the light on his external hard drive in the dark. No, I’d first seen him at a college talent show, playing in a band. Playing bass. In a white shirt. And I hadn’t quite disliked him – I can’t really remember what I thought,  something along the lines of, there’s a man that’ll do for me right now – there was nothing profound about it, not initially, but there was something there– Something about the way he did his hair, which was quite long then, or his face, two black babies’ eyes, a large face, and I remember thinking: There’s someone I can dominate. Really. There was nothing to it. I thought: I just want him. There was a lasciviousness in me then, quite noble. No, I saw him, like a rat-racer in the dust. I had just finished revision for my French oral, which was the next day, and I was full of confidence and flighty nerves, I suppose, a little of summer beckoning, at the curtains by the shatterproof windows in the school hall where it took place.

David
She had dark hair and then she dyed it blonde.

Wood

Andrew

The fire in front of the leaves. A bird calls overhead, a sustained sound. I sat out in the woods, on the four hour break I had between classes. The crows that reminded me of Resident Evil. I sang to myself. I wondered if I would, or could, lose my mind in the forest. I thought of Wolfgang Voigt, his experiences with acid when he was a child, in Kornigsforst.  Could I ever get out of something that was so obviously a forest? When I had wanted to come to the forest in Harlow and listen to the Smiths recordings I had found, old ones, I actually found myself more interested in the sounds, proven to be really happening. The news, documentary redundancy, undebatability of real sounds in the woods, where I had walked before and listened to Grouper, stunningly up against the mark incredibly, or at least, beautifully, tired, hoping no one would come into the woods, my woods, just that day, or each day, another day.

Before I started writing I had looked at the cover of Rhye’s Woman, an album– I wanted to go as far as I would go. But what would my friends think? Of me posting a video that looked like a serial killer video, so lost– Or like, so jejune I worried whether I would sound like my dad on recordings, breathing heavily. I did a little, on one of the videos, or it didn’t come out properly, I can’t remember. It was only a few minutes ago–

‘Perhaps even made me’

David

Wearing a camo shirt of hard cotton and jeans that hugged to the top of her perineum, ochre brogues on her feet. Her hair was the perfect colour; a whitish light brown, fluctuating in how it had been cut short, with a long clump on one side of her head, but for all this she looked like the kind of girl that was interminably popular and this recent look had been a way of branching out into something new as she became a new person. I like girls with short hair, that's one thing I've realised. I don't know why. If I see that camo girl again I'm going to be so happy. I hope I see her. This bench I'm sitting on reminds me of a certain shade of red that I used to see at a certain school, near Gareth Surridge's house, or with something to do with it. His mum was so weird. She let him do anything he wanted. I heard from a girlfriend once that he stitched the fingers of his skin together in her textiles class. We compared penises once, when we were ten, I think, if I remember rightly, at the Firs Primary School toilets. We couldn't work out why I was circumcised and he was not. I remember pushing the tip of my penis in to try and make it appear more like his, whilst he was there, in the toilets. Tommy Hilfiger. I was so happy when I saw that camo girl, it was like the morning had opened, was opening up to me, everything up for grabs, all grey, my mind was in a tired, fucked-up, right place. Now my stomach is bloated and I am undergoing irritable, dyspeptic, gastrointestinal distress, but it will soon pass, so that's good. Bess: 'We never got to discover Lena Dunham's work together. We could have watched Girls together. In Girls they're constantly talking about stomach problems, so perhaps she could, or would have related to that.' Holding iPhone and Coke can, a girl, a model, in a taxi to London, early in the morning, sends a text message. Sitting on the top of the ramps I remember how the sun used to gleam off the bottom, where the curve became flat. What's sad and beautiful, I realise, is that a capsule of time in which my friends and I grew up – that is, tirelessly, shamelessly imitating America, in skateboarding, nu metal, a certrain strain of pop punk, Kerrang!, Metallica's One video, a time when downloading was difficult, when the Internet was reserved for wealthy families early on, people put up with dial-up, I attempted several times to install Duke Nukem 3D on my dad's computer – will never be repeated in quite the same way; in itself it was a repetition, which is sad, but now I feel my brother's repetition of our repetition – he even listens to the same bands I did, the same records – probably feels real, and respectable on its own terms, but it isn't the same, but then people growing up in the nineties probably feel the same way about my generation – if we take generation to loosely mean the decade in which one grew up – but then I don't believe them. My generation, my time of growing up, was the one that had the most meaning, and I can't believe they would suggest otherwise. I think of the man that lives over the road to me, about eight years older, who I once saw stomping around town in Doc Martens and a Slipknot t-shirt when I was eight or nine, and I remember thinking that whatever Slipknot was it likely represented something with purpose and was solitary, harsh, not to be taken lightly, to be taken seriously, like a court case. I kept thinking of a noose, something severe, like suicide. Then, when I first heard Slipknot, when I was twelve, I remember thinking it was still very scary, but in a kind of Halloween black humour, clever kind of evil humour – which I understood as I had already listened to Eminem's the Marshall Mathers LP over and over again during a family holiday on my father's Discman, before my parents took it away and told me the artists that produced this music were evil – they also took away Dr Dre's 2001 – the former really fucked me up, (especially the song 'Kim') – but the track titles, of Slipknot's album – the fact it was simply a string of random numbers – seemed very nihilistic, exciting, and I knew I would be into but not quite now. I had a lot of respect for people who were into it currently. Especially my friend's brother and Brack, who introduced me to electronic music proper, and who committed suicide in 2011 by overdosing on sleeping pills. He was so funny. I remember him once telling us about drug slang – but we were so young we just thought he was talking gobbledegook, calling up Matt, my friend's brother, and saying, 'Have you got any blue PlayStations?' There was a Chinese man they used to prank call and intimidate, who they had Christened ToadFu$h, and which we all had to save him in our phones as, although I never called him up on my own. Usually he just hung up but sometimes he could be coaxed into a conversation. Even our phones - Nokia 3210s mostly seemed the height of authenticity, the way the first group of girls/girls we met, one called Lorna, had a Tigger fascia on hers that I thought was attractive; I thought it was so attractive of her to have personalised something she owned like that. I never personalised mine. Then there was Clare, at Bayly's, with Mark (who was joking about us getting together, liking each other, as he obviously liked her at some point, playing pool on Bayly's tiny thin table with net pockets), Clare who (Clare Bear, as possibly all Clares are called at some point) who wore I think a yellow crop top, showing off her stomatch, which I loved, thought was immensely erotic, her hair coppery, in pigtails, which seemed almost ludicrously pornstar-like, as if she was getting off on playing with me in, toying with me in, fulfilling some ludicrously sexy fantasy, and a pleated grey tartan skirt, and thick woollen socks that came up to her thighs, some kind of trainers, Converse, so much like a cheerleader, that I couldn't believe I had her or was allowed to have her, and I felt – when we visited a house party at L's – that I had become one of the elite, the most popular in school, as seen in American high school television shows and films, but this, of course, only existed in my mind, and in our collective culture, that time lapse capsule. There was something about her face which was so perfect, so simple, distilled. As if all my deep-seated ideals of beauty had been sketched out accurately. The way her uniform – a black suit, the kind girls wear at school, cheap, polyester, hanging off her thin body as she were a scarecrow, rake, but she wasn't that thin, she was perfect, something about the way Bayly referred to us as Vampires, we both looked like Vampires, as we stood under the awning of the church - he had recently watched Queen of the Damned and was obsessed with it – and we drank Fanta, and something about the black and white, the colours, perhaps even made me.

Young English girl

Andrew/David
The beautiful girl at the end of the bus. She is around twelve, her blonde kinked hair up and hanging at the sides of her face, a ramp, kicker nose like Imogen Poots, perhaps too much eyeliner, blue eyes, a little shy, moving shyly. Now she has left the bus.

After reading Kafka writers feel the need to act more desperately.

 I imagined myself in a classroom saying to a girl, after her seeing me reading a large block of text on my laptop, with a large notebook open at nothing but pencil-marked words, ‘There’s some great images too.’

My headphones that saved me, red and black Philips in-ear buds. I thought I had lost them, but then I found them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmUPJJHcVus

Though the narrator experiences a particularly extreme gap between his surroundings and his internal conception of beauty, it is arguable that a degree of discrepancy is characteristic of modern life. Because of the speed of technological and architectural change, the world is liable to be full of scenes and objects which have not yet been transformed into appropriate images, and may therefore make us nostalgic for another, now lost world, which is not inherently more beautiful, but might seem it because it has already been so widely depicted by those who open our eyes. There is a danger of developing a blanket distaste for modern life, which could have its attractions but lack the all-important images to help us identify them. ––Alain de Botton

 Though the experience a particularly extreme narratores gap between his surroundings and his internal beauty, it is arguable that a degree of conception characteristic of discrepancy is modern life. Because of the speed of technological the change of architectural change,––Alain de Botton

Bess’s Travels
7^th March 2013

Bess

I began to ‘miss’ certain webpages. The thought that when I returned to them days later they would be different, or even the constantly changing results of a Google search, left me with a pain, as if I had lost a love. This was when I began print screening entire sessions on the internet, fascinated by my own personal twists and turns and my ability to document them.

I can’t remember why I was searching for Anouck Lepère.

Oh, that was right. I was proving to my mother that Jefferson Hack was Kate Moss’s previous partner. Jamie Hince was her current husband.

This was the tab at the end, which I was not sure whether to include in this compilation, because it didn’t follow on from the third tab from the right’s history. I think this is how to phrase it. Then I began to worry about the lack of cursor in a print screen. Was it truly real, did it really happen, was it really representative, without the cursor? I began to believe, still believe, that the place I left the cursor in said something about me, as would the minutest change in pixels say something about them.

David’s Dole

I was under the impression that I had developed a certain degree of fame at the Job Centre. When I walked in there, heads turned to look at the man in the Barbour jacket who had been unemployed for six months, and who would sit in the waiting area reading books by David Foster Wallace. I was never entirely sure how much these clues – the jacket, the books – occurred to the staff at the Job Centre, and whether or not they were all getting together after work and saying, 'He's obviously some kind of genius. / He's not meant to be here because he has an otherworldly aspect that I can't yet, or perhaps never will, understand. But what should we do with him.' 'He's obviously the voice of his generation, to some extent,' one of them, in a bar would say, clutching a shot of vodka. 'When I come to the Job Centre every day he's the last kind of person I want to see: someone with genuine talent, going to waste.' 'I know,' the other would say. 'I just want him to be happy and I don't want to see his cadaverous face every day.' 'He really does look like a corpse, doesn't he?' the other would say. 'Perhaps he's not a genius,' one would say. 'Yeah.' A few of them would laugh under their breath in agreement. 'Fuck him.'

          'Anyone that arrogant will probably never have any real place in society,' a kind woman, my youth [long term unemployment] advisor/, would say. 'Someone needs to tell him it's a different world from what he grew up thinking it was. There isn't room for artistes anymore. There isn't room for any bullshit. We all have to knuckle down and do some real work, work together, if we're to drag this stinking cunt of a country out of its crab infested, uniary tract infected, pus-dripping state of mind/being/disease,' the man with the shots would say, who would have already done both. 'The youth of today really do turn my stomach,' an old woman, one of the oldest at the Job Centre, would say, clutching a beverage. 'I wish they were all dead,' the first would say. 'Then there'd be no more global warming.' 'I can't relate to any of them and wish they would not exist anymore,' said the old lady. 'If my child said to me the kinds of things I think that boy would like to say to me, given the chance, I would gut him and hang his innards from the washing line outside my house in Madrid,' said the shot taker. 'It's bad enough that they're all parasiting worms living with their parents, but they're not even nice people. They've lost all capacity for kindness.' 'They're fucking nihilists,' one said. 'What have they given?' another asked. 'Nothing. Yet.' 

          'It's such a waste,' the old woman would say, dribbling into her pint. And then they would all chant, 'Such a waste.'

'I promise not to kill myself.'

          'All right. I promise not to kill myself.'

           'There, that's settled.'

On the way back from the Job Centre I considered the phrase, The entire generation thinks they are geniuses because they are, relative to time and defining intelligence as a capacity to store [extremely] disparate information.

Section involving dialogue
between Bess and David

Things seemed so much more innocent at the turn of the century. There could be anything: bands, people reliving the past through fashion, couples kissing [at new year's eve parties]. I remember being at a party at the turn of the millenium, [fourteen/fifteen if it's David] a strange house with lots of single men, red lights and cheap [flashing] traffic/disco lights on the brown carpet, the black cable/wire trailing on the floor - there was a sense, I think/no one had considered, on any level, that we [as a soceity] would have to rebuild our/the very ideas of culture, and how much of a strain/work that/it would be. The/That naivety [is very present/real for me], entirely/almost/completely embarassing, and yet [sweet] it shouldn't be, because it was me, and it was my life. [Sometimes I think how much time was wasted, not learning, not using the Internet, but in our idleness <> perhaps we achieved something like happiness. What I do miss, is the idea that live music was romantic/is a certain romantic feeling you might get, out [at night], at a gig, or at a club, [kind of] hovering in the air. Perhaps I just miss smoke machines.]

On her bed there lay a half-eaten bowl of porridge and a single bite of toast thickly spread with Nutella. He stared at the floral pattern around the rim of the bowl. He wondered whether she would knock it over when he woke her up. He touched her.
            She turned over. 'What is it?' she asked.
            'I have nothing to say,' he said. 'Ever since I turned twenty-five it's as if the possibilities of language have dried up. It's probably from reading Wittgenstein.'
            She turned back into the bed.

I find my hand very beautiful, she wrote in her notebook, how thin it looks, the thumb tucked in as I lean back off my bed. It looks as if it should have a face, like the grain in wood, almost birdlike. The way the hand sits, perpendicular to the table, desk. Is it wrong to find one's own hand beautiful?
            I lay on my bed and looked up at the light bulb. I imagined myself in a film, where my character was in such a state, with so little to do, or that they deemed worth doing, that they stared, in a haze of amitriptyline, at the light. I had taken around seventy-five milligrams of amitriptyline, three times more than my doctor had prescribed but nowhere near a dangerous dose, I was aware of that. It was almost enlightening. The music in my headphones, the soft cushion behind me, ambient music, added up to the sense that I was free and alone, in another place, in someone else's living room. Against the white cushions and in the yellow light of the room I felt happy, as if someone were watching me lie there, spaced out, and happy, numbly stare at the light. I imagined them taking in my face. Like a child approachng the mirror stage I had stared into the mirror for hours, at my own reflection, which still came as a surprise. Its beauty, the harsh, acute lines of my jaw, the broad blue eyes and the hair, thinner at the front, the paleness of my skin in the light, seemed timeless and classic, so lifelike, calmly correct or white, mixed with light brown.

Bess and David lying in bed: 'What's awesome about Auster - and if possible I would like awesome in this sense to mean provoking a sense of… awe… rather than the other thing… - is that he tantalises the reader with a vision of introversion, their introverted real… in America, a country that could often be said to pride extroverted behaviour over all else… It's unbelievably sweet.'

David: 'I spent a week in the devil's lap. One of the scariest things was forgetting what love felt like, who my ex-girlfriends had been, why I'd loved them and what we had even done. But after a while I would visit her Facebook page and gradually begin to remember who she was, what she had meant to me.'
            ‘This is after the MDMA?’
            ‘Yeah.’
            ‘Mm.’

'The reason everyone's depressed is because of energy saving bulbs. I really think this.' -David

Bess lay on the bed reading the Rivkin and Ryan Literary Theory.
            'Dave-, what... does this mean?'

At the end of the day, sun:
            'Aw, I just want to be with you all day.'

I think Ebert was a little harsh with David Lynch, he thought, when he, and then he thought something outside of language to do with Lynch's early work, before skipping ahead to the phrase: But he liked Mullholland Drive, as everyone did. He imagined what his best friend's opinion would be. It's all to do with your way of viewing the world, he thought, watching the field in the summer.

They go to watch Hyde Park on Hudson.

He leaves his pillows the way she left them when she leaves, the house ‘warm’ with her presence.

People want to demonstrate their class on the Internet. Especially on Facebook, once you reach a certain age (twenty-five) my experience has been that some people use it as a platform for subtly boasting about their own normalcy, about what are fairly common borgeious jobs. Wanting to seem normal extends to everything. We are a generation of 'normal' people. This is why people post images of their well-prepared food on Instagram; because they need to tell someone about their understanding of food; they are doing something which befits their class. It worries me when a swarm of people like something on Facebook because it fits with their idea of class. All my working class friends swarm around a picture of something working class and all my middle class friends swarm around a picture of a receipt, or something middle class, and all my upper class friends- I have none. But if I did the little upper class friends I had would upload videos of themselves playing the church organ to less than thirty views on Youtube. In a sense they are the most moral people, the most sympathetic, the least engaged with social networking. At least people with money are enjoying themselves. I hate what I write, I hate what I read, I hate everything. I understand Fernando Pessoa; there is nothing, there are some things, there is beauty.

Then there are the things everyone can get behind. Fashion photgraphs of A$AP Rocky in tinted monochrome, for example.




Sitting in the white living room listening to one of David's playlists just surfing the web silently, looking for great images, next to each other. It was bliss.

Reading in dim light, or in the dark

Reading in dim light, or in the dark, because it was the truest light, more so than the screen of the laptop or the halogen energy-saving bulb that sometime hung above his head, not like an idea, but in reality, for a sense, that is it was there, above his head, was much more truthful than reading in any other light. Even - as it grew dim - and he looked outside at the light at the opposite house, at their bedroom or study, which they had chosen to leave on, and which was halogen or in any way looked a warm bronze colour, like the real light, his own room, left in what was now arguably the dark, not only dim light, or considerably dim light, which meant that in front of him waves of visual snow came, as he had damaged his eyesight but did not like to dwell on it, some of the truth of what it meant to be in a room in which the light was dimming, at the end of the day, susbsisted, or even, was actual, or, better, was so clearly there, like all the parties, like the real presence of everyone he had ever known, or at least a certain degree of something that they had not known but were, in light of their being substances.

As if - and he did think this - he had left, much in the same way as in their house at university, the power, the electricity, to fade off and they were sat in the house without any light, only natural light. That was all right.

University

David
Spotify playlists I hadn't looked at our listened to since university, cascading memories of being alone in my third halls of residence, so happy when the sun came out, listening to 'Headache' by Girls, late at night and into the morning, writing, surfing the web, finishing off coursework and occasionally stirring up the bravery to play Tetris online against people I had never met, film class, where I met a few extra people before I left forever, smoking weed out in the university wood and coming home to show a boy I met Eraserhead. the subwoofer from my computer shaking the walls of the room, keeping up I was sure.

Cocteau Twins' Blue Bell Knoll

The Moon and the Melodies

'Sea, Swallow Me'

'Bloody and Blunt'

'She Will Destroy You'

'Take Time'

Lying on the pillows with Eleanor, on the bare bed, doing ketamine, exploring it like never before, seperately, as if I were in hospital, such a wonderful time, heaven, on the pillows, doing it over and over again [until I began to develop bladder problems,] [later down the line]. listening to 'Keen on Boys'

Eleanor saying, what is this music? [It's perfect for this.]

  

'Pulling Our Weight'

I nervously, impatiently asked her if I could try some. 'Yeah,' she said, letting me know that she wanted to be helpful, that it wasn't a big deal.

That room became a different room.

She asked me if I’d tried ketamine and I told her no. She said,

            I’ve got some in my bag if you want?

           

            It only cost me twenty.

            Do you want some money for it? I asked.

            a/her large handbag and pulled out a transparent bag, the edges speckled with white powder. The ketamine was thin-looking but still speckled with tiny crystals, like miniscule, pearly beads.

        

I watched him tap out the beads onto the black veneer surface of the desk 

ten pound note

{a nearby book, a hardback of poetry with a black, red cover, the sleeve removed. It had faded in the middle and was dented, from where Thomas had used a spoon to crush up caffeine tablets, as he told me earlier.}

Back in the room we did another line and jumped on the bed. It felt like my limbs were huge. It feels like my head is massive and my... It feels really weird. This is bizarre.

            Have you seen your hands? she said.

            I looked down at them, my tendons working as I clenched my fist and released it. They were like two birds. The proportions looked like they should make sense, but were too alien for me to accept.

            The Radio Dept.’s ‘Keen on Boys’ came on [loop] as we began to move again on the bed. Something about the layers of electronic fuzz and femininity of it made me feel genuinely moved. It was as if it was made for how we were feeling. It sounded chemical and impossibly blissed-out, light as a feather.

Bess

            

Wine

What was it you were saying about Middlemarch? he asked.

            It was so relaxing to spend time talking, the bonus of the drugs we were waiting to kick in drifting unspoken around the room. I had a feeling I’d had before, that the drugs simply wouldn’t work, or that their effect would pass us by unless we scrutinised how we were feeling.

            After we had used up the bed we sat on the floor and drank some more wine. There was a bitter taste at the back of my mouth which went strangely well with my wine, and I thought about how to describe it. It was like you would expect it to taste in some ways, like the kind of thing a robot would like to eat, like someone out of Ghost in the Shell. Happy, I asked Thomas if he had any pillows. When he said there were four at the top of the wardrobe on account of someone leaving them behind I could have kissed him. I started to find things very interesting. I realised Thomas was talking.

            I’ll get the pillows, he said.

            Two lines later we were lying on the floor. He had left a film playing on the computer: Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise. Because the lines we had made for ourselves were quite greedy, we were able to experience mild, open-eye hallucinations. We both agreed the nails holding up the lights in the ceiling were zipping up and down in horizontal and vertical lines, like insects or some kind of animation. The conversation lapsed for a while as we lay there and I closed my eyes, the purples on the insides of my eyelids like news footage and faces, some friendly, some disturbing. I saw the twin towers collapsing and a voice explaining to me that this was the age I lived in, as if on a guided tour. The towers fell in a loop, over and over again, simultaneously, as if a film projector were jammed. The voice was so deep and suggestive I felt it might be God.

            I couldn’t move or felt I didn’t want to, or that it would be disrespectful to the experience, and so I didn’t. At first I felt the bed behind our heads was annoying, claustrophobic, and then it became a huge cove, with me turning my head over and over to look at a camera, as if in a music video, and then the cove dissolved, and then most everything dissolved and I could go anywhere I wanted, or wherever I was taken, which ended up – after much mental travelling, through tunnels and dark, purple and images of my past – to be my uncle’s flat, which I visited when I was sixteen. I was lying on his carpet, I realised, a cream, woollen carpet, convinced that somehow that flat harboured everything I had found alluring throughout my life: the bikes in my grandparent’s garage; Christmas presents you didn’t like; a colour of dark brown I had seen in luxury apartments in New York, in mahogany, in the old hardbacks of jazz collectors. If I had time I would have realised that this was what Thomas was talking about before, the power of the drug to transport you to another location, not of mind but of settling and orientation, in a way that felt physical, emotional and highly important. It was really something to hold on to.

           
Eventually she touched me, through her own, private trance. She touched my shoulder and my muscles moved again, creaky after so much inactivity. We opened our eyes sporadically and looked at each other, gathering together our perceptions and making sense of things instantly, knowing we had been dreaming, but still pleased with our slowness, our reduced heartbeats, our sense of nothing really mattering. I felt like I had won a lot of money or had a birthday, but I came to realise it was wearing off slightly.]

            [You feel like you’re somewhere else.It’s quite a powerful feeling. It can be. Sometimes it’s insane. Once I felt like I was on the beach, when really I was just lying on my bed. It was so vivid. I was crawling around in the sand. You couldn’t have convinced me otherwise.]

A boy called Rupert asked if any of us wanted to buy ketamine, and after much mutual staring Thomas and I bought a gram off him for £20, went to the toilet upstairs, and snorted two heavy lines, giggling, and as I looked at him I wondered if he might be gay and then remembered what we had done together, and after another silent stare we kissed for a while, quite tenderly, and I felt the chemical taste dripping down my throat, pleasant, bitter, reminded of the few times I had tried it at university, the slideshow of images, the surprising significance of your life as presented by its effects. The drug stirred something in my soul, and when Thomas and I broke away I had a strong feeling I had once been in love with him.

            We danced in the living room and outside for a while, a couple dancing in the cupboard under the stairs, before we retired to a girl’s bedroom upstairs and lay down together. My legs had seized up and I was willing to submit myself to stillness, and in time we were curled on the bed like cats after having kissed for a few minutes, now with no desire to do anything other than close our eyes and zone out, until we reached some kind of distant shores. On that bed I felt I could have been anywhere, scrabbling in the desert for water on the sand, on a beach washed of colour, white, white, the whitest of whites, a cove nearby.

When I woke up I went to the bathroom to do some more and did too much, or at least too much to have an initially controllable situation. I went outside, where a handful of people stood talking in low voices, and followed a path to the back of the garden, unable to feel anything at all. There I sat, on a loveseat, trying to calm a rampant feeling of depersonalisation, my eyes rolling endlessly into themselves. There, completely numb, I worried sincerely about how I would get home, how I would talk to the cab driver, when I could walk the distance, and whether Thomas had already left, forgotten me, of which I was now sure. In a panic I rushed from my seat, my legs jelly, with the feeling that I was nothing but two eyeballs on sticks.

            I headed slowly up the stairs, holding the banister, to the toilet. My body was so numb, my buttocks like invisible ice, my legs gone, my entire skin like the a dream of a hollow man; I could barely feel whether my anus was allowing anything to pass, the only hint being a general sensation of release and contraction. The entire room was white, covered in shadows that had a blue tint, a casement window above me. Everything had fallen apart; this was something I felt very strongly. I’m in a modern update of Edvard Munch’s the Scream, I thought. But I didn't scream. I sat on the toilet for an hour.

            Sometimes, in defiance, I would stand slightly above the toilet and look outside, down at the garden, where a group of people my age were smoking and talking in hushed voices, shadows from the two flower pots and a small imitation Greek statue that fell across the lawn. Then I would lapse into trying to stare at the slit of light below the bathroom door, but again my eyes were rolling; it felt like four in the morning out there, but it could have been any time; it looked dark enough to be the beginning or the end of night, the slanted rhombic shape of the French windows sprayed onto the grass.

           

When the hour was up it felt like it could have been an entire life, and I wandered across the landing into a bedroom – the parents’ – where I lay down on the floor and entered into the deep trance some have described as a k-hole. There I saw painstaking visions of bones bouncing deep in somebody’s gut, doing strange little flips continuously, images, like photographs of buildings, the inside of hospitals and coastal towns I had never been to, and then – in remembrance of the bones – I realised I could back flip, endlessly, as if I were in a vacuum or in the vision of heaven portrayed in Don Bluth’s animated children’s film All Dogs Go to Heaven, or simply lost in time itself.

            On awaking I realised the room was a lot larger than I had remembered, longer and wider, and that there were coats in front of me where I had slept on a rolled-out piece of foam crossed against a sleeping bag. The dim morning light spilt through a grey curtain pulled tight against the window, and, in this light, on the bed, I saw Fiona, moving on her knees in flesh-coloured knickers to a boy, completely naked, his hands at her waist. At first I thought it was Thomas, [and it disturbed me, but he only looked like him. ]

            She seemed regal, pleased with herself, savouring a considerable pleasure as she pushed and kissed him, his foot curling into the sheets as they fell back on the bed laughing breathily, her breasts jerking forwards. She helped him inside her, breathing onto his cheek, his dark hair shifting, and leant back, her hands on her legs as she hopped up and down on him, gently nodding, humming short little cries that hit drily against the walls.

            I looked up at the muted stabs of bass vibrating the lampshade by the bed from the R&B downstairs and considered pulling the sleeping bag over my face, but continued to look. It seemed so much like a performance, Fiona lifting herself up, encircling the rounded clump of hairs, her lips buckling, looking up at the ceiling. When he became close he made a noise and said, ‘Whoa, whoa,’ and she got off him and moved onto the floor beside the bed, still wearing her knickers, he having pulled them to the side to penetrate her, where she proffered herself to him again – he took off her underwear and kissed her back, entered her.

            It was a while before I noticed that Fiona was looking at me, her head grinding and rubbing against the carpet just past the bed, in masochistic ecstasy, staring right into my eyes as if we had seen all of time together.

I remember sitting in Davinder's room, somewhere, when he was showing me Deezer, his lyrics, and thinking, I'm here, this my life, we're going out later. [So sad that I never go out now.]

[David talks about the possible ending to his novel, featuring:]

[Suicide 'Surrender']

Internet Friends

As an author he had several Internet friends, of which one... a young woman called Alice, with whom he was quite enamoured for several years, without ever meeting her. Once, after she failed to responde/reply to a message he sent to her via Facebook, he was despondent and upset for weeks. The women he met originated almost entirely online, ever since [the end of his relationship with] Lydia Lewis, where he cultivated a considerably rich correspondence before meeting them. When he met Stephanie Young, a girl of seventeen, when he was twenty-one, he described it as 'like a person had suddenly become animated; every new angle to her face was a [uncovered] blissful secret, a series of images I had not yet been shown, and now was, at a rapid framerate, which was life, an incredibly high definition thing/representation,' as he had studied her in hundreds of photographs she uploaded with a/the wanton/vain abandon of the time, in all variety of poses and outfits, to MySpace, as if by her very decision, by the frequency/ of images, she had [decided/ defined/summoned/ demanded /brought] her own [instantaneous] celebrity.

Asia

After [doing so many drugs] it was as if he wanted to hide [with]in Asian culture [as if he wanted nothing more than to be a lithe/slim Japanese, Chinese or Korean girl]. His Facebook became a detailed node of facsimiles, his profiles pictures pictures of little-known Asian pop stars, as if through sheer suggestion he would become/everyone would be forced to accept/believe he had become truly feminine, away from the pack, [and in his own way] perfect.

Bess

   

Reading Janet Malcolm's the Journalist and the Murderer

Bess lay on David's bed, her hand at her face, and read Janet Malcolm's the Journalist and the Murderer.

David in his Room

Spilt water on my headphones as I was putting up some new images on the wall in my bedroom in John's house. To check the headphones were still working I listened to 'Gee' by Girls' Generation, and then, after tidying my room, I listened to the eleventh track from an album by Fleeting Joys, a My Bloody Valentine clone (and a very good one at that).

New Forms

Fuck publishing companies, fuck the agents, sometimes I just want to stab a fork into my eye at the dinner table. There's nothing. There's nothing. [There's nothing.]

What we need is nothing less than new forms.

I think what I am doing goes directly to the core of - It reminds me of - When I was at primary school I used to draw these big 3-dimensional letters, this series of lettering. It was what I was known for. So somehow, at the core of what I found interesting in my childhood, was a sense of how words could affect people visually. People often used to ask me to draw things for them.

Then I went to the library and read Vogue. This is where I took this picture/photograph. I ended up extremely annoyed with the photograph, as as you can see, the phone does not understand the particular shade of orange Vogue went for and has therefore pixelated it, like an idiot than cannot understand something complex. So many things attacked me, for example, would I be able to use this part in the novel, when in the toilet I had been/seemed so confused/ whether I would use it and now, although [I wanted to use it] the part would end up in the novel they would never know why it was not the way I wanted.

I wanted it to look like this:

And now it never would. It would never look like this. Even this was not the right shade of orange

More introverted, more about the stuff of the internet

Back In Time

When I went back in time, that morning, looking at her jeans on the chair or on the floor, or the image imprinted in my mind of those jeans, [and he boots], the thought of how I had gotten into dub techno occured to me, and appealed to me, and something was solved, or something was hinted at that made my hangover, the lovely wisps of hair of my mental state, or the new wash, the off-[white-]cloud that had come over me that weekend, and I had entirely forgotten about the joy of smoking weed, can back over me, that made my [weed-]hangover into something that made me look at the objects in my room, memory, as something /with new/fresh potential.. [as if I had never seen these objects, or this memory, before, or had not [previously] given it enough attention.]

The times I had scanned through fashion blogs looking for the most beautiful images, listening to Andy Stott's We Stay together, the first record/[EP] that/which first got me into dub techno, and then I went back over the entire Chain Reaction catalogue, am [just getting into/then] Basic Channel [proper], Porter Ricks, [and I would scan these fashion pages,] [these beautiful images], listening to music that was so cold, so something that my parents would not get, something that to me seemed representative of the future, judging, at high speeds, the beauty of models on Tumblrs, on endless scrolling blogs of crisp, white fashion photography that always featured a lot of white objects or backgrounds, [Asians,] [//]until, and not [presupposing] eventually something [clicked] until one morning I came across Karl Lagerfeld's Spring/Summer 2013 haute collection for Chanel, and he had used Andy Stott's 'Numb' as a backing track for the show, and it was 2013 and the year looked really good to me, full of promise; he had chosen Edie Campbell to be his bride and the whole thing confirmed something about techno and fashion that made me feel unalone and had been on the right path with this, what I was just talking about you to with.

Robert Wagner

David

The real-life immediacy of Seinfeld’s referencing brand-names and existing entirely in the present, George talking about the mirror in the RESTAURANT and wondering if Seinfeld’s being committed to the idea of the present was more right than what creative writing teachers had told us at university and the light that I imagined coming down around George or anyone’s face

I love the mirror in that bathroom. I don’t know what in the hell it is, I look terrific in that mirror. I don’t know if it’s the tile or the lighting…I feel like Robert Wagner in there.

lead me to Robert Wagner.

Vanessa

Andrew

Vanessa was struggling to find a certain way to talk to me. At the hours of the shift I was on we struggled – or part of it was that – I ideally struggled around her, wanted her peach blouse.

The Algarve

Elizabeth

The Algarve

Elizabeth

Think Algarve and you'll probably picture a place colonised by English and German holidaymakers. But there is another Algarve, with its red-cliffed coastline and idyllic whitewashed Moorish villages dotted with lattice chimneys and orange groves.

I was working on a travel piece for my NTCJ in magazine journalism when I found out

______
All rides at the White Stallion ranch are led by an experienced wrangler, and are divided into slow rides (peaceful and relaxing, perfect for enjoying the beautiful scenery), fast rides (tighten the Stampede string on your cowboy hat for exhilarating loping across the desert plains), mountain rides (this was our personal butt-clenching, sweaty palms Man From Snowy River moment: with the horses picking their way down rocky Movie Pass in what felt like a near-vertical descent!), half and full day rides (I did an afternoon half day ride into the Javelina Canyon – it was incredible. back to the ranch on Packer as the sun was setting was truly magical) as well as a wine and cheese ride (with lovely wines and cheeses served mid-ride under the shadow of the mountains), beer and Cheetos ride (which we didn’t get to do unfortunately) and the wonderful Breakfast ride (blueberry pancakes with whipped butter and syrup, sausages, eggs, camp potatoes, and strong coffee all served up in the desert. I could almost read poor Packer’s mind when I mounted up again…right after loosening my belt a notch! He certainly made his point with a judgemental look in my direction and a snort of his nostrils ;). The ranch also offers lessons plus team penning and barrel racing, and a rodeo on Saturdays.

While the White Stallion is a working longhorn cattle ranch, you won’t need to roll out your swag and sleep under the stars. Accommodation is in comfortable casitas (ours was a deluxe suite), with a small terrace and sun loungers out front where you can read, watch the sun go down or just collapse after a long day in the saddle. Meals are served in the old Adobe ranch house in the middle of the property and are taken “family style” so you grab a plate, load up with mouth-wateringly delicious food (Mexican night was my favourite), and pull up a seat next to your fellow guests to eat, drink and discuss the day's activities. That was one of the best things about the ranch: meeting people from all over the world (U.S.A, Sweden, Canada, Australia and the U.K. were all represented during our stay), of all ages, with wildly different backgrounds and riding experience. Some guests had their own horses back home and were extremely experienced while others had never ridden a horse before. It didn’t matter: we were all there to enjoy the horseback riding and embrace our inner cowboy/cowgirl in this slice of Tucson paradise.

Apart from riding, the White Stallion Ranch offers guided hikes, a pool and hot tub, tennis court, petting farm for the littlies, and a games room. The ranch is also close to golf courses, Old Tucson studios, museums, and Saguaro National Park (which is adjacent to the ranch). Bottom line: if you are going with someone who doesn’t want to ride or who only wants to ride occasionally, they will find plenty to do.

I could go on and on about the awesomeness of the White Stallion Ranch – we absolutely loved our experience and didn’t want to leave when it came to saying goodbye. If you read the reviews on TripAdvisor, clearly we are not alone in our sentiments. Guests rebook year after year (I think I read that one guest was up to 50 or so return visits!), a testament to the hospitality of the True family, the wranglers and the ranch staff. Will we be making the trip back to the White Stallion Ranch in the future? Yes siree! And you might just see me in a fringed jacket, chaps and rhinestone cowboy hat yet.

The Algarve

Elizabeth

hink Algarve and you'll probably picture a place colonised by English and German holidaymakers. But there is another Algarve, with its red-cliffed coastl

hink Algarve and

ine and idyllic whitewashed Moorish villages dotted with lattice chimneys and orange groves.

fed coastline and idyllic whitewashed Moorish villages dotted with lattice chimneys and orange groves.

hink  A-ofugqe   [p]yv  i2yr

a place colonised by English and German holidaymakers. But there is another Algarve, with its red-cliffed coastline and idyllic whitewashed Moorish villages dotted with lattice chimneys and orange groves.

fed coastline and idyllic whitewashed Moorish villages dotted with lattice chimneys and orange groves.

That Girl

Andrew

And then I felt so much better, so much newer. That song, it sticks in your head like a piece of glass. (Rhye – ‘The Fall’) One thing leads to another. One school session leads to another memory of the maths block. I love the idea of, or having been an English schoolchild. All the things everyone else miss; the way on the way to school, on a certain blank morning. You know, the characters in this book are as real as any of us. They represent me. When David walks to school listening to My Bloody Valentine, that was me. When Bess fantasises about herself, her reflection in the mirror, that was me. I wrote it in my first book, Worshipping Someone, which I wrote when I was fifteen. It was highly autobiographical, about my friends and I and our girlfriends, times spent at the ramps, the skate park near our houses and school, or the time I had been obliterated after getting my haircut for her, by Claire, and I had not wanted to spend the whole of the next day watching Star Wars but not even seeing the screen through m/y tears and another friend saying, Masturbation helps, the next day, the day after I had not come into school because I was so shocked at how life could shock me, that I wasn’t a cyborg walking staunchly through things for other people, but that everyone out there had the potential to really change me, to absolutely wreck me in some case[s], bring about love so useless it left me here to avoid working and became or become another new, real obsession, as a kind of obsession with sniper rifles leads school shootings, other, singular things, the Smiths, and myself to drain myself from love.

One thing that makes me think we aren't all animals is the diversity of people. Apes all look the same, but people, for whatever reason, have diversified, so we can have a girl with hazel eyes and light brown hair, wearing a peach [x/basque] as much as we can have a businessman with black eyes wearing a grey suit or Kafka. Everyone's different. This keeps me from killing myself. As although we are all animals, there really is nothing, there's still a hell of a lot of [difference[s] within all that/ what we call life / what we are, that is humans].

Sarah Silverman

Sarah

‘We’re all just molecules, Cutie.’

Scanner

They watched A Scanner Darkly at home, years after they had graduated from university.
He wanted there
'I love Keanyew,'
'What.'
'I love Keanu...'
He was [decided to be] silent as they watched the end of the scene.
'I love Keanu in these man against the system type roles. indignant, raging against the machine.'
'But he's not against the system,' he thought he heard Ella say. 'He's ambivalent, about...'
'He's lost in drugs.' [someone else had said.]
A few minutes later someone said, 'I love this bit.'

[music clip]/ [movie clip]

The pain, so unexpected and undeserved had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs. I realized I didn't hate the cabinet door, I hated my life... My house, my family, my backyard, my power mower. Nothing would ever change; nothing new could ever be expected. It had to end, and it did. now in the dark world where I dwell, ugly things, and surprising things, and sometimes little wondrous things, spill out in me constantly, and I can count on nothing.

[Friends had come around their house.]

'He's good at playing a madman isn't he?' she asked, talking about Woody Harrelson. [in a later scene.]
'Hmm. Yep,' he said. [with a slight laugh.]

Technology

I'm a terminal supporter of underdogs. [That's why] I like have the [x] use these old phones amongst. I like the specifity of technology. You can have an iPhone 4 8gb in 2013 and a Dell laptop covered in scratches that you don't particularly like. Then you've got my old desktop, I often refer to it as she - like an old mare [with/retired after a long career on the track] - and she shudders and whirs into the night, [my constant background noise]. I cling to her - this old Spirit computer with a Pentium 4 and a broken CD drive, hooked up to two different hard drives, one of which became corrupted and failed recently. But essentially I am stupid, I don't really know the ins and outs of technology, just a surface layer of mulch; my knowledge is full of holes [in general.] I like how scraggy and fragmented the knowledge of people is about the technology they use, and things in general. Everyone is a specialist, in their own way, whether it be the housewife who has explored her own mind with more psychological flow than any [other/ one else] whilst washing the dishes, the electronic engineer who has worked for the MoD on infra-red rifle sights or audio technology/systems at airports, the girl who knows the ins and outs of her iPhone or a single musical, or the musician himself, [mastering a single instrument.] This/these is/are a description[s] of my family.

Duchamp, Twentieth Century Art

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

Here Duchamp is very correct, but what he has said seems to me a buttress, something very simple. Most of Twentieth-Century art was built on this 'They bring something else' premise.

One way in which to love Duchamp is to appreciate the value of his giving up art for chess, but also to like him for returning [again and again] to [art/ Étant donnés in his way]; he was a romantic [art-] at heart, or something/ thereabouts.

[He spent a lot of time thinking about what that piece could mean, and that is romantic.]

The problem is that all Duchamp did was change the way intellectuals thought about the world, the top [layer], [but that is no mean feat. It's extremely impressive, but throughout time, as he knew, art is nothing.]

Wittgenstein is who people who think about language think about. Wittgenstein was very loveable, with his suicide wishes, suicidal brothers [, scalding baths] and eventual finding God. [He took scalding baths.]

One thing I love about Wittgenstein is that he took scalding baths.

If in the way Duchamp and Wittgenstein are brothers there is a brother, another form, the two men are brothers, I think. To put it prarsely, Duchamp tried to destroy his thing and Wittgenstein...

He pulled apart philosophy. But I can pull apart him. When he says 'Certain words are not useful in philosophy and we cannot use them,' I say, 1) You only found God because of mental gymnastics and a fear of suicide, whatever that means, 2) Not only does philosophy not matter but [pulling it apart /[neither does] its destruction.] does not matter.

A person does not use philosophy and does not use art. What do they use? Nothing. They use molecules of an object in their hand. Why? Because they wait.

I get excited when Beckett talks about scribbling on the page and talks about misery.

The next thing to talk about is reconfiguring the language. One cannot be one thing and be the other. We need to smooth in the gaps like sand.

More words, more words must be invented to match our frilly minds. We are getting too intelligent for language.

Now, everyone reads. Language, on the internet, has become like the sand with all filled in gaps; this is what language must be like.

Its usage is sometimes okay. [like now] But this takes time. For the average learner more words are needed fleur[it]. This would be the word for and quick[it].

When one uses these shortened words, fleur flee flag, (and quick he ran the track) time can be saved. Duchamp might have finished Étant donnés fleur.

One thing that has not changed throughout language is that it always comes from the next. The key to our next age, I think, is to explore arbitrary possibilities.

For example, as in a Barthelme story one must not worry about whether one is being 'clever' and 'doing the thing right'. The thing is only word.

But I love Barthelme.

There is not meaning[it] but there is mood[it].
[This is why people like David Lynch.]
To summarise, sudden arbitrary changes would throw the sense of history off track, off our backs. To be truly arbitrary one must look deeper into the sand cracks of what is being wrong so far.

Gertrude Stein was considerably okay with this, but no one took her seriously because she was a cunt. The [general user of concepts such as 'modernism' [did not accept her [/the simplicity of what she had done]]] textbooks did not accept her [definition of] modernism.

But in the Making of Americans, she got it right. Pretty right, pretty good.

There is only time, not the thing itself, but what we do when we are reading. Something like that (not at all actually).

Now the thread comes undone.

Flaws with Reality Hunger

All David Shields does is tilt the pendulum back. Is this all we are ever going to do? It's one thing or the other?

That is not what he is saying, but I don't know if that is not what he wants to say. One thing leads to another.

Fleur the flage.

Reality Hunger has to market itself, as a book. It is called Reality Hunger. It thinks it is about reality. Someone wants us to think it is about reality.

There is no reality, as he knows. What are we hungry for? Change. The change will come from the person who demands that his words have meaning when they in fact do not. The person will be a new person, doing a weird thing that then becomes unweird. It may even be a person doing a weird thing that no one ever gets. Like Pessoa.

But now we get him. Perhaps, under the sand, there is a new person who was never found, like Achelin, his treasures lost in Rome, good thoughts, food for thought, a load of bollocks really.

He is the one.

Conversation Probable

[I think within] Classic emo [you would get] flashes of leopard print [like Vans brothel creepers with like leopard print on the top] within the graphic design of it.

She's a white Jameela Jamil

For some reason we want to master culture

InDesign

 Bess

Writing things

Writing things sitting in a coffee shop wondering whether they will notice me, what I am writing, or assume I am reviewing the place. I am not reviewing the place. Instead I am trying to get to an idea that summarises the feeling held walking across Blackfriars. It is a coffee shop I have written about, in fact it is the coffee shop written about in the last chapter (or shall you call it page?). Hands are a little numb. Kaffeine is very steamy and I enjoy this. Now, with the word on the page, I am convinced they will think I am reviewing the place. I am not reviewing the place. It puts me on edge a little bit. This is not a place I could relax, unless I came here regularly. It reminds be of Leo, or not necessarily of Leo but of his brother and sister. The woman who made my cappuccino just took it away. It was finished.
      When I first started walking around today, after I had realised my work experience was not scheduled, as it is, was, a bank holiday, I was amazed at all the architecture, all of that, and I thought: I must put all this, all of that in the novel, but I didn't really know what 'all of that' was specifically, other than it was a something, something there, that was it: The fact that even if a city is minimalistic, like my work, it can still be complex due to a build up/combination of different typesit of minimalism. Then I was thinking: London is a plain city, compared to New York or Tokyo, for example, and this, in a similar way to how translators talk about plain language/something and mathematicians talk about beauty as if it is getting to the bread core, the savoury quality of when something is distilled to its essence, like the coffee, which was like, as if, some other life where everyone was used to coffee with a fruity richness, and that was the norm, and that was considered good, although I couldn't tell the difference between a pound of wine and the pope's toe.
      Jews I like. Feel like I am on some insane time limit because I had not bought any food. It's all in my head. It's all in your head Andrew, you are a paying customer, you can stay here as long as you like. Feel like this entire chapter, whatever you want to call it, is contrived, really ruined, feel like I want to throw myself in front of the road. Thank God work was closed today. Imagine what I would have been like sat in front of that smelly Mac.

I find [ the contrast between/ this] these two pictures/images very disturbing. I think this is a lesson, from Salinger, not to shut yourself away, not to try and preserve yourself. The look in his eyes in the second picture, [I can feel his heart seizing [up]], his world collapsing/falling away, everything he had built dissolving [in a second] his horror at the camera, [more horrified than if it had been a gun]. Salinger was a beautiful man, perhaps one of the most attractive writers in history, but now, in the time of the image was taken, he was just a [fucked-up] lump of old skin on a stick. [context]



1969

Donald Barthelme

A City of Churches

FROM The New Yorker


"YES," MR. PHILLIPS SAID, "ours is a city of churches all right."

Cecelia nodded, following his pointing hand. Both sides of the street
were solidly lined with churches, standing shoulder to shoulder in
a variety of architectural styles. The Bethel Baptist stood next to the
Holy Messiah Free Baptist, Saint Paul's Episcopal next to Grace Evangelical
Covenant. Then came the First Christian Science, the Church of
God, All Souls, Our Lady of Victory, the Society of Friends, the Assembly
of God, and the Church of the Holy Apostles. The spires and
steeples of the traditional buildings were jammed in next to the broad
imaginative flights of the "contemporary" designs.

"Everyone here takes a great interest in church matters," Mr. Phillips
said.

Will I fit in, Cecelia wondered. She had come to Prester to open a
branch office of a car-rental concern.

"I'm not especially religious," she said to Mr. Phillips, who was in the
real-estate business.

"Not now," he answered. "Not yet. But we have many fine young
people here. You'll get integrated into the community soon enough. The
immediate problem is where are you to live? Most people," he said, "live
in the church of their choice. All of our churches have many extra
rooms. I have a few belfry apartments that I can show you. What price
range were you thinking of?"

They turned a corner and were confronted with more churches.
They passed Saint Luke's, the Church of the Epiphany, All Saints
Ukrainian Orthodox, Saint Clement's, Fountain Baptist, Union Congregational,
Saint Anargyri's, Temple Emanuel, the First Church of Christ

504 DONALD BARTHELME

Reformed. The mouths of all the churches were gaping open. Inside,
lights could be seen dimly.

"I can go up to a hundred and ten," Cecelia said. "Do you have any
buildings here that are not churches?"

"None," said Mr. Phillips. "Of course, many of our fine church structures
also do double duty as something else." He indicated a handsome
Georgian facade. "That one," he said, "houses the United Methodist and
the Board of Education. The one next to it, which is the Antioch Pentecostal,
has the barbershop."

It was true. A red-and-white striped barber pole was attached inconspicuously
to the front of the Antioch Pentecostal.

"Do many people rent cars here?" Cecelia asked. "Or would they, if
there was a handy place to rent them?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Mr. Phillips. "Renting a car implies that you
want to go somewhere. Most people are pretty content right here. We
have a lot of activities. I don't think I'd pick the car-rental business if I
was just starting out in Prester. But you'll do fine." He showed her a
small, extremely modern building with a severe brick, steel, and glass
front. "That's Saint Barnabas. Nice bunch of people over there. Wonderful
spaghetti suppers."

Cecelia could see a number of heads looking out of the windows.
But when they saw that she was staring at them, the heads disappeared.
"Do you think it's healthy for so many churches to be gathered
together in one place?" she asked her guide. "It doesn't seem . . . balanced,
if you know what I mean."

"We are famous for our churches," Mr. Phillips replied. "They are
harmless. Here we are now."

He opened a door and they began climbing many flights of dusty stairs.
At the end of the climb they entered a good-sized room, square, with
windows on all four sides. There was a bed, a table and two chairs,
lamps, a rug. Four very large brass bells hung in the exact center of the
room.

"What a view!" Mr. Phillips exclaimed. "Come here and look."

"Do they actually ring these bells?" Cecelia asked.

"Three times a day," Mr. Phillips said, smiling. "Morning, noon, and
night. Of course when they're rung you have to be pretty quick at
getting out of the way. You get hit in the head by one of these babies and
that's all she wrote."

A City of Churches 505

"God Almighty," said Cecelia involuntarily. Then she said, "Nobody
lives in the belfry apartments. That's why they're empty."

"You think so?" Mr. Phillips said.

"You can only rent u .-m to new people in town," she said accusingly.

"I wouldn't do that," Mr. Phillips said. "It would go against the spirit
of Christian fellowship."

"This town is a little creepy, you know that?"

"That may be, but it's not for you to say, is it? I mean, you're new here.
You should walk cautiously, for a while. If you don't want an upper
apartment, I have a basement over at Central Presbyterian. You'd have
to share it. There are two women in there now."

"I don't want to share," Cecelia said. "I want a place of my own."

"Why?" the real-estate man asked curiously. "For what purpose?"

"Purpose?" asked Cecelia. "There is no particular purpose. I just
want —"

"That's not usual here. Most people live with other people. Husbands
and wives. Sons with their mothers. People have roommates. That's the
UoUol pattern."

"Still, I prefer a place of my own."

"It's very unusual."

"Do you have any such places? Besides bell towers, I mean?"

"I guess there are a few," Mr. Phillips said, with clear reluctance. "I
can show you one or two, I suppose."

He paused for a moment.

"It's just that we have different values, maybe, from some of the
surrounding communities," he explained. "We've been written up a lot.
We had four minutes on the 'CBS Evening News' one time. Three or
four years ago. 'A City of Churches,' it was called."

"Yes, a place of my own is essential," Cecelia said, "if I am to survive
here."

"That's kind of a funny attitude to take," Mr. Phillips said. "What
denomination are you?"

Cecelia was silent. The truth was, she wasn't anything.

"I said, what denomination are you?" Mr. Phillips repeated.

"I can will my dreams," Cecelia said. "I can dream whatever I want. If
I want to dream that I'm having a good time, in Paris or some other city,
all I have to do is go to sleep and I will dream that dream. I can dream
whatever I want."

"What do you dream, then, mostly?" Mr. Phillips said, looking at her
closely.

506 DONALD BARTHELME

"Mostly sexual things," she said. She was not afraid of him.

"Prester is not that kind of a town," Mr. Phillips said, looking away.
The doors of the churches were opening, on both sides of the street.
Small groups of people came out and stood there, in front of the
churches, gazing at Cecelia and Mr. Phillips.

A young man stepped forward and shouted, "Everyone in this town
already has a car! There is no one in this town who doesn't have a car!"

"Is that true?" Cecelia asked Mr. Phillips.

"Yes," he said. "It's true. No one would rent a car here. Not in a
hundred years."

"Then I won't stay," she said. "I'll go somewhere else."

"You must stay," he said. "There is already a car-rental office for you.
In Mount Moriah Baptist, on the lobby floor. There is a counter and a
telephone and a rack of car keys. And a calendar."

"I won't stay," she said. "Not if there's not any sound business reason
for staying."

"We want you," said Mr. Phillips. "We want you standing behind the
counter of the car-rental agency, during regular business hours. It will
make the town complete."

"I won't," she said. "Not me."

"You must. It's essential."

"I'll dream," she said. "Things you won't like."

"We are discontented," said Mr. Phillips. "Terribly, terribly discontented.
Something is wrong."

"I'll dream the Secret," she said. "You'll be sorry."

"We are like other towns, except that we are perfect," he said. "Our
discontent can only be held in check by perfection. We need a car-rental
girl. Someone must stand behind that counter."

"I'll dream the life you are most afraid of," Cecelia threatened.

"You are ours," he said, gripping her arm. "Our car-rental girl. Be
nice. There is nothing you can do."

"Wait and see," Cecelia said.

Using prose for poetic purposes

In one gentry a certain admonishment can be scored - and our our it, that a man from which a certain disposition can be leant/lent

by means of architectural structure, white, blunt, bland, / bread[y] [savoury], [that which*] each sentence like a prarse, each chapely hint, very white, pure, but not white enough, never white enough, to [really] ruin an idea, bring it to its knees etc. etc. Like I have just done/did theretofore *that which is good prose. One prose shard/sentence, chapel, room, dorm, unviersity block, parliament of concrete, can achieve - with[in]/out a certain lost/loss that poetry always gains - real affect
[edness] [true], that is pure [invention, pure nothingness]


**[I begin editing more heavily]

It's not that I thought it had to be difficult. It just was[it].

If I would use the word manifesto I would use the word manifesto.

**

Conversation with mother (next page)

I really like tuna, I always forget how much I like it. As Jerry Seinfeld said, the whole concept of lunch is based on tuna.
Who said that?
Jerry Seinfeld.
I thought the whole concept of lunch was based on surprise.
He just means that... tuna goes with everything. Pasta, salad, sandwiches. [It's light but filling, tasy but...[And it goes with everything...]]
Good old tuna.

Sometimes

Sometimes... I relate to Barthelme... There is a certain thing that I imagine to be unlikable... But it might not be unlikeable... What was on the opposite page...

Edie Campbell

Can you imagine if this was your girlfriend? I'd tremble holding her body but want to. My nerves when fucking her... My nerves when fucking her... God, [her- this] beauty. Holding her face, rose,

trashing her, spanking her arse, fucking her, forgetting who you are for a while, there's nothing, there's nothing.

From love to madness.

There's something sinuously fascist in Edie Campbell [as if she's been drawn from a drawing of a little girl on a box of fifties colouring crayons/pencils from the /fallen out of an Enid Blyton book]. [Too pure to be pure.]That's why Lagerfeld loves her.

The Suicide

~Bess~

It began with a train ride to Bournemouth. I stared out the window listening to music – Bill Evans’s Village Vanguard Recordings – and letting my thoughts wander on. They were nothing much. I considered the various scenes and characters that had lodged in my memory over the years from the novels I had read, giving critiques of these novels, and the music that played in my ears, to an invented person, telling him why certain elements of a work were beautiful. Later in the journey I began to reconstruct – as if showing off to someone – what had happened on my last visit; what my mother and I had said to each other, how the light had been, and how we had looked.
          My mother was an academic in her sixties with dark hair, navy blue eyes, and cyclothymia, the mildest of the manic depressive disorders. On a typical day she wore tartan skirts, thin leather belts, silk pull on shirts by Margaret Howell, and black wool blazers she called ‘Jerry Coats’. She favoured worn clothes that were rough in the shoulders and elbows like the corners of blankets, but expensive, and this look suited her: she behaved in a way that deterred both children and the middle-aged. As a recluse she was a woman set in her ways, proud of her solitude, but even after dad died she was by no means boring. Around the right people – generally me or other academics – she became a fireball of language, flinging out theories whose topics ranged from governmental conspiracy to obscure Irish poetry. As a writer it was her prerogative to stay well-hidden and well-read, and in her devilish way she brought me up with the implication that I would one day be living her life. And she taught reading as an essential part of this life; it was unacceptable, in her books, to miss out on such a crucial world.
          She was not only bookish. Since I was born she supplemented her lecturer’s income with criticism, translating her opinions on literature, film and music. She casually introduced me to what I would call a colourless hard-line counterculture, leaving books on my desk by Joyce or Beckett, papers she had written on Lydia Davis; worn VHS tapes of Eisenstein or Godard films; and playing the groove-widened records from her large collection that would jump and skip as dust and lint collected at the needle like hair to a balloon. Her favourites were Prokofiev and Schoenberg, the Rolling Stones and Penderecki (when I was nine she played me ‘Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima’). When she wasn’t culturally educating me she was in the study writing, her head a swirl of progressive politics, fear, and depression. Her outlook veered from ecstasy to hysterical bleakness. As she put it herself: I have hope for a future I do not trust.
          It was three months ago when I last visited her. I took the train to her house, opened the door with my key and walked towards her. She looked up, sunlight behind her head, flicking through a hardback compilation of Katharine Hamnett advertising campaigns, which gave me the impression she wanted to appear busy, as if she were involving herself in activities before a party. We hugged and kissed and said hello and she placed the book on the coffee table, open at a black and white photograph by Juergen Teller of a model, Iris Palmer, lying on a Persian rug, flat on her back in French knickers, stilettos and vest, all black. The shot came from a few metres away, emphasising her legs but not her face. I liked that. It made me feel I could be a model. My mother tapped the book as she sat down, saying,
          ‘If I had the legs, Bess,’
          before smiling at me.
          I smiled back, relieved by her good mood.
          Considering what happened it is surprising how little I can remember of our chatter. I know we critiqued the image together – she referred to a sliver of Iris Palmer’s buttock as a ‘lamb’s tail’ and argued it was feminist (I told her the camera angle was representative of the male gaze in fashion photography and that it should be looked upon as sinister; I said it reminded me of Peeping Tom) – and then moving out to the garden, cold light on an open space, grass shot and lawn dried and burned like a cricket pitch, talking about... something. It’s depressing not to know the details, now that she’s gone. How is it that I can remember the outfit I had worn to meet her – a dark navy men’s shirt patterned with pale blue diamonds, black jeans, tortoiseshell Ray-Ban Clubmasters (the sunglasses were an in-joke, referring to the time she said I would wear them indoors now I was a minor celebrity), and a beaten-up black panama that contrasted with my hair and made it look a lighter brown – and not what we said? I took the sunglasses off when talking to her, of course.
          I remember drifting off to sleep in my bedroom staring at the wall that separated us with a thought that she might be my only listener. I stayed the night, as always, ‘monitoring her condition’ as her doctor put it, but this time it seemed unnecessary. She was happy. Once she took her Rivotril / her mood was always jovial. I had been working as a musician with gigs books throughout the week, so we had lots to talk about, although I won’t bore you with those details now. Suffice to say my manager believed that if we were to take our product more seriously in these difficult times (or was it ‘in this harsh climate’?) we would have to set a £300 minimum live fee otherwise we would be blacklisted by venues and publications within the industry. It was surprising. At this time I recorded under the name New York, making electronic music with my own vocals, playing small venues, accompanied by samplers and Ableton Live. All this got in the way of my visits to see my mother, which, for while, she understood. Now I had butterflies at the thought of seeing her. Although we were similar – one mood melting into the next – I had become afraid of her, no longer used to her presence. Moving to London had brought me a modicum of success, which made her jealous, and it didn’t help that my music alienated her. Sometimes we were like two artists whose work had been compared, a gulf of pretentiousness between us.
          After a while I became used to my head nodding rhythmically against the train’s seat, a kind of metronome, and my thoughts drifted into abstractions too strange to pin to words, until I was floating along that track, never quite falling asleep, watching the landscapes and forms of momentary dreams. There was a new kind of logic to each dream that felt as if I had been taken to another place entirely, where people behaved more readily like animals.
          Bournemouth station felt familiar. The light from the glass ceiling shone onto the platform, cutting it into pale triangles. I had been surprised by the light, as if emerging from a cinema, and as the train stopped I looked out with a certain wonder. It was November and there was a chill as I walked quickly through the side door past a hoard of passengers, looking across for a cab, standing by the iron gates lighting a cigarette – two arrived and were taken; I made a snap decision to walk – it wasn’t far and I would have my thoughts to keep me company.
          I walked up Holdenhurst Road towards the town centre. I remember wondering whether I could carry my notebook as I walked, which seems ridiculous now, but I attempted this, taking it out and flicking through the year’s work: lyrics and sketches, collages and clippings, reviews of my extended play. At the beginning I found drawings of a pair of girls – one with blonde hair always up, the other with dark hair always down – from a while back, before I came to London. The brunette whispered to the blonde, her features washed out, strong lashes on the page but faint in comparison to the fat kohl-eyes and smiling teeth of the blonde; the brunette was older, a woman with crow’s feet; the pearls on her neck looked like something I had seen before, perhaps something I had dreamt on the train. I crossed the road, looking down, almost dropping the notebook in my fleeting glances at the cars. It was a drawing of my mother, I realised, looking up at a Cinquecento. It all came back to me – dying my hair blonde when I was fourteen, pearls I’d seen on my grandmother’s dressing table – and I couldn’t wait to show it to her, twisting imagined reactions in my head as I approached her front door and knocked, still deep in thought. When she didn’t answer I checked whether I had my key, before opening the steel garden gate and heading along the side of the house, where I found the backdoor open. I stepped into the house and called out to her. I wondered if she had fallen asleep – the antidepressants made her drowsy – or gone out, as she was forgetful. I remember feeling annoyed with her; I had a vision of her at the pub with friends, playing a prank on me. On the bed, however, I found a note and a full box of pills as some kind of ridiculous, unnecessary paperweight, or a statement. At first I couldn’t believe it was a suicide note. My first reaction was to shout at her, which would have done no good, and then, with surprising calm, I began to wonder where the body was. In a wave of panic I realised I would have to look for it. I went downstairs first when really I knew it was in one of the cupboards upstairs as when I returned the smell was obvious. I began opening them and quickly found her.

2.

I went outside immediately, the smell stuck in my nostrils. My brain was making gradual connections, hysterical thoughts flying through my head. We need to get everyone together and light one of those lanterns, I thought. To celebrate her life. I was not yet aware of how trivial and inappropriate that kind of thinking was. I had not yet equated her with what I had seen up there.
          I actually began to worry I was not feeling enough grief because the films I had seen had made me numb. I was, of course, in shock. I crouched on the patio, holding my wrist for some reason. I sat on my shoes in a crouched position paying attention to my breathing. I tried to take deep breaths but my lungs kept hitting a wall as if I were having an asthma attack. I felt on guard, defending myself against my body and an array of thoughts that made no sense, which I remember thinking was a good thing because I didn’t want to take any steps towards comprehension. It was a few minutes before I realised the thing against my thumb, a gentle throbbing, was my pulse – weak and fast – and I knew that meant life. In a split-second dramatic sketch I imagined a girl in my position feeling her pulse, glad to be alive, and then imagined myself acting the sketch feeling harrowed and delirious, but in truth I felt nothing. The pulse alienated me. Apparently I had been speaking, and so I stopped, but my mouth continued to move. After a while I realised the word it had been continuously making was ‘God’.
          I stood up and walked onto the lawn, which gave me a head rush. I thought I would throw up but didn’t. I walked towards the pond. I was convinced I was thinking rationally now, which is why I went back into the house and into the room: to find out if I had really seen what I remembered seeing. When I stood at the door I realised I would not go in. When I realised the wooden frame around the bedroom door was repeating itself I understood I had to leave the house as soon as possible.

I checked into a Bed & Breakfast, having told no one about what had happened. By chance the old woman on the door asked if I was all right and said I could talk to her any time. I took the key from her hand in a daze and floated up to my room.
          On the first night I lay on the bed, smoking, and eventually cried. Once I achieved this, the waterworks kept coming. Eventually I fell asleep to dreams of walking to the off license near her house; I had never felt the need to drink so strongly before. In my dreams I stumbled there as if blind drunk already, took a bottle out of the shop – I think it was a Magners for some reason – and quenched an intolerable thirst as soon as the cider wet my tongue. I woke to this, stumbled to the bathroom for a glass of water and considered making that dream a reality, considered numbing my pain, but that world had lost its logic, and I didn’t want to move from my room, I didn’t want anyone to see me. When I woke again it was late the next evening. I remember going out for a walk and ending up in an alleyway with a god-awful familiarity, an alleyway from my childhood, and I realised that although the Bed & Breakfast was tolerably unfamiliar the rest of the town would not be as forgiving. It was where I grew up, after all. From where I stood in the alleyway I could see the window to my room at the Bed & Breakfast, the sun already setting. My new room.
          It didn’t matter where I was now. Bournemouth and London had become the same thing to me. It was all so much hell. I made desperate, tonal sounds that are embarrassing to think of now. I remember scratching my knuckles along a nearby brick wall for a while and then standing by the road looking out at the lit car park in front of my building. Everything I did that night was done in an experimental haze, in the knowledge that I was being filmed and that no one could stop me. I’m talking about arbitrary things. I dropped a plate out of the window and drank water from the tap. Every so often I would hear a man in my head talking about the five stages of grief and go outside and scrape my knuckles against the wall again.
          It was all very dramatic but I feel inclined to tell the truth here. I have never been an emotionally stable person and I allowed myself to have an episode. I was going mad, after all, or already had, and it was unlike anything I had ever felt before. I felt like there was a split in the centre of that road. I stood outside staring out at the busy road over the car park for hours. It occurred to me that I was now living alone in the world. I was away from my friends in London, I was away from family.
          When the sun came up on Monday I was lying on the bed in my room listening to Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville. I stared up at the emulsion on the ceiling. Like cum, I thought, although that may have been the influence of her lyrics. The breezy beauty of a particular song – ‘Fuck and Run’ - motivated me to movement, and I looked across at the room’s telephone. I imagined calling 999, telling them my mother’s body was at 13 Grader Avenue. I wouldn’t be there but all the doors would be unlocked, the backdoor open. I imagined they would send someone round.
          But I didn’t call anyone.
          I smoked a cigarette lying on the bed. The numbness made me feel vaguely cool, as if I could survive anything. Constantly these feelings were confronted by a sweeping sadness that the woman who breastfed me, clothed me, listened to me, would no longer be in my life. Then the calm feeling would return. I even laughed. It made me nervous to think of the people I was obliged to call. Her colleagues at the university, her friends, my aunts and uncles. Her sister. When I raised my fingers to my mouth to take another drag I found tears above my lip. It was the thought of how kind they would sound that froze me. I was in no state to make those calls, but I would be.

 I stayed at the Bed & Breakfast until the funeral four days later. I spent the days making calls to her loved ones and trying to get them to bring the forms to the Bed & Breakfast for me to sign, which I managed. At night I went to the beach and threw stones at the sea. I drenched my music collection. Every song became water and the nothing I could see towards the horizon. I stood under Boscombe pier and smoked and looked at the lights in darkness and the boats out at sea like lamps in a dark room. I felt I was on holiday. I read the sign that said BOURNEMOUTH VOTED HAPPIEST TOWN IN UK. Some eighteen-year-old boys shouted at me from the stones. I brought one of them back to my room at the Bed & Breakfast and fucked him. I think I was still under the influence of Liz Phair.

Berni Stephanus

Spent the day sitting in the patio in the sun rumminating (with her laptop) on the collages of Bernie Stephanus (www.stephanus.com) [an [disenfranchised] artist] a Geneva. from /existing on the internet in near [obscurity]/invisibility, with only 10 Twitter followers (she/he gave him one more) and then sent him an email - all sitting on the patio with her mother's cat - describing x.

Robert H. Frank, La course au luxe – l'économie de la cupidité et la psychologie du bonheur

Bess sits on the patio after her mother's suicide, back at the house,

[His website looks like this:]

then...
[Figure 3.2]

then goes out, it is sunny, pub horses...

(has horses)

Rebecca Smoker, neighbour, has horses, she goes to see them, had a house fire

http://www.equestrian-escapes.com/riding-holidays-West-Country/

Fucking her, holding her, having her, being her, [loving her,]

Run on Real Device

I want this to be a celebratory venture

I want this to be a celebratory venture. I've contacted Karen Kilimnik to use her image as the front cover. I want there to be an aura... Of beauty. [But there needs to be nastiness, in this. If there is any point in doing it.>] I don't to offend Edie, I don't want to hurt her. But there may have to be a surplus... offence, [or damage.]

PHONE DOCUMENTATION OF A LIFE
(thing)

Fart.docx

the arse up the valley

Fart II.docx

the key to investigations is not to let anything get you down. a runner, no, well an army... I,m the ranking officer involved with the murder of Fiona Bruce and I will have known - now - that I won,t take any shit.

Fart III.docx

The pain of being a model. The pain of being a mediocreit model, I should say. No, but I'm good, I'm okay. The pain of being a woman. David gave me one of his My Bloody Valentine albums, I'm listening to it now on my phone. He is so sexy. I teased him about being a paedophile - because of the way he touches his coffe cup with his tongue before his/licks his lips. I'm writing in my journal.

The girls in the photo are from America's Next Top Model. I used Shanti as my thinspiration. She's so thin! I'm in love with myself. I hope David hits me over the head with a rock in a dream, and fucks me, and fucks me! Xx

Fart IV.docx

I love and respect Liz Harris. 

Fart V.docx

Norah Jones on the breeze.

Fart VI.docx

Reachable only after great effort. Shapeshifting. It impresses. Explore your own mind. The question is how should one explore their mind? The joy of fiction is that it allows for "if only". Perhaps one should write fiction when one is unhappy with their life and non-fiction when they are (reflect)? 

Fart VII.docx

Sitting in town, what do I feel? Why does it matter what I feel? All towns across the country are going bad, like unusable food. It's one of those pretty summer days, but it is never that pretty, in a town... Possibilities, the possibilities of pretentiousness. I should number my work without titling it and go from there. Climb up, my own... Into a Western. At night. Other things. So many things I want to do... Unexpected bridge. So bad. Is it bad? Hqve I fucked myself up for all time? Does it matter. I have to remember that it doean't matter what anyone thinks. They are not there. Maybe they are there... Either way. I like this one. It's happy. Other things. You can't type very fast on this thing. It takes a while to load up. Just write constantly. That's the only way. Read and write constantly. Get back to reading. It's everything. However you have to do it, do it. What you predicted is happening, but you can see it, you can see it. The world is less dramatic without music. Someone would want to read this. Someone out there would want to read this. Someone like me. Don't want to meet up with people now, just want to write. This is good. Sunday, 21 January. Some things should be kept secret. But for you... The date doesn't matter. Words matter. Which ines to use, and the new language. Maybe I should start work on it tonight. Now I'm in the pub, on my own. Is this a relief? Feels okay. Shades on, pint of Guinness. No one will know. My spelling is getting really bad lately. This phone has no spellcheck so it could help. Feel relaxed-ish, feel okay. Feel like Leo is alive,or should be,in this weather, or something... The barmaid is nice. Earlier wanted to write: Phones are social armour, something along those lines. Other thoughts came in. Will now call Hass. On his way. I often want to blow my nose and smoke at the same time. Thinking about Ben Lerner, what he said about the social function of a cigarette. How he wouldn't be able to punctuate conversation without it, this is the impetus to keep smoking. Still can't get the hang of the q/a thing; it thinks I'm typing q when I mean a. First boring thing I have typed here. Maybe it needs a new document. Can't believe I'm alive. Seems amazing. This document is getting very slow now. The future is not in phones, it is in something else. How about this: Philosophical 'true' meanderings like this with images of beautiful women. Then it would be like Godard. Why does it have to be like Godard? It could be like anyone, it could be just around him. It's possible to add one thing to the other, follow the flow of the day. When we're out we begin to believe that "anything is possible" which is why we don't want to go home. Xx How many toilet doors have I opened today? Children. It could be like I had a dream about the coffee I will be ordering. Caramel machiato. It was richer in the dream. And now the end of the day, when it's wrapping up. We will never have those days back, Rose Arkell, at a house party. A garden, a certain arrangement of things in a garden. Whatever's French for garden. Perhaps I should chase these. Using French and translating back... Seems true. Every world is ongoing. Light in a pub.

Fart VIII.docx

Listening to Andy Stott. Some kids to the left of the bus stop starting screaming and going crazy just before the "drop" of Numb. Sounded exciting, like summer, water on the ground. I have come down from the high of finishing shorthand. Why di I qlways do this? Ruin things. Funny thing is, as I was writing, before, I thought, No, that is not true, you are happy. I'm okay. Amused by this. It could just be [Unfinished]. Amusing how in writing "Unfinished" another voice comes in, another presence filling the space. Maurice Blanchot. Andy Stott is so fuck deep. Amusing. I remember that ubfinished sentence: Back pain. Boring; probably all right. The key is to write furiously, really quickly, then I'm really geting something of my mind. Cute girls in front of me, other things. It coule be good to have adocument ready to go, actually, for when "inspiration" strikes. Inspiration does not strike. Other things.

I'm going ti the cinema tonight to see the remake of Evil Dead. Feel okay about it, nothing bad. I do really like the idea of these more journalisti pieces amongt, like, fragments of a policeman's journal / plot. Seems true. What would David Foster Wallace say? He's dead. The girl in front of me has milky shoulders. Seems an underrated concept, milkiness of skin. It's lovely having this. It's good not having internet in this phone temporarily, I think. It's almost like 'Heres a fragment of fiction and here's a slab of autobio / whatever. Because that's all we want, maybe, from a eriter, this direct connection, don't like this bit... From... Fragmentation is mine. Is it? Always has been. Since Stu showed me Dorine Muraille in the library. Would that make it not mine? It's one of my things, one of many. Seems arrogant, but people like arrogance. Rappers use it as a kind of subconcious mind trick, for themselves and for the listener. It isn't a "trick". The writing world seems more real than walking around now. Seems interesting. Either this is the longest I've waited for a bus or it's been and gone as i've been writing this. Worried / Aware about what using the bus will do to my brand. Worried that the bus comments were too caring, too soft, want to project a harder image. Other things. I remember reading Raymond Carver on the way from work,that was fun,and Lydia Davis. Comment was... No, comma was left in deliberatley, I liked what it did to the "sponteneity" of the piece. Sorry for lying to you. On bus now, or will be. I do not have a nice car. Hot bus. Like it here, I think. Enough. Sorry if I was too boring. Twitter. Wasps in the brush. The last track on the Andy Stott record is so exceptional. That's right, I've reached the end of the record.

Fart IX.docx

This document will not necessarily be involved in the novel. I had a bad day today, feel bad. Perhaps I should intergrate these chapters with images / something else, like a Jacard loom. Some girls, some things. I think Charlie's setting me up with some girl tonight. Can't think about it. Enough.

Imogen Poots-looking girl

Chloe Norgaard

Chloe Norgaard. Fashion model

It’s the Best Isn’t It

Andrew

It’s the best isn’t it? This world I have created with words. I sit down
behind my computer, with my techno on, in an entirely private world.
It’s all for me. None of this is for anyone else. But it can be. Paved
streets, whole clusters of indecisive planning permission that rears
up as entirely whole ideas, cream cracker, old women talking on the
beach, you just hear them over your trip. I need to assert my control.
Even more. Even now, as I “write” this so many ideas about what
they will think, what this means, beckon, and I need to be arbitrary,

reductive, without any prisoners. Jesus, the bass on these headphones
is absolutely ridiculous. I’m listening to ‘Multidirectional I’ by Fluxion,
from Vibrant forms II from a Dell laptop with Philips SHE8000 in-ear
headphones. I could feel myself losing my hearing then. I felt physically
sick. Nice. I might turn it up now, just so I can write to you how I feel
now, having turned up the headphones so it can be… A new one, like now,
you know? Okay, here goes… Ooh, like a bad trip. So muggy. Nice.
Crystal. Begging for loose change on an alleyway of bad breash.
Freak on a leash. For a long while I’ve been thinking about
putting together my own, new language. There’s a chance
you might see it develop within this text, but only a
chance reader, I love you. Yes you reader, I love
you. Yes, reader. Love. You. So secret, all this
writing. No one will know! They’ll never
find out! Anyway. One example of the
new language, which I came up with
in the bath the other night, was
the word ‘fres’ to mean ‘the
translucency of cotton’.
I wanted a way to
write ‘sheer’
without

Now I know, if you bang on the gates, whether you really want to read on. Whether you really want to know about my ideas, whether you feel something of this is necessary, whether a part of your mind likes a part of my mind, heart, soul etc. No soul, actually. There is no soul. Anyway. I wanted a way to write ‘sheer’ in the context of cotton, because ‘sheer’ is a generic term that applies to any fabric, and incredibly! I discovered that there is this entire system of gradation – called its numeric denier – which applies to and describes sheer fabric and its density. Still, this does not quite match what I am looking for, and I would love for some Frenchman or woman – or any nationality – to tell me (write in to the imaginary radio station this is going out on now, or the radio station that featured in my dream the other night, or may not have done, there are always many layers) that there is in fact a word that already has the purpose I desire a word to have. But as for the specific definition – the quality of cotton’s being sheer – as opposed to its denier, the quality of anything being sheer (I wonder if there is a word that describes this quality). Anyway. I want to create an entire world, the right world, and these are the words I feel I must be armed with to go into there and make it. And. Anyway. These are the things I have been up to.

Bloom

David

The young bloom, in bloom. Is that a song… By Nirvana. Is that song… Is it real… is it a song. Is it… Am I saying something? I sit in this room, the sun shallow over the hills, from the trees. I feel young. Writing… I feel… happy. Something distant, the mood of this room, when I was young, when I would come home from school and there would be a feeling – games, things I couldn’t have, the house I used to play games in, the smell of dog food, tomato juice – that my parents would want to go to the pub. In the summer, parents want to go to the pub. This was before they ended their marriage. Like Bess’s parents, they ended their marriage, not as… drastic as hers. Sad as hers. The certain way the light filters around my eyelashes, the spring summer, the mood changing, we go out, things change, one you met, gradually into, that summer’s mood. When well we…

David’s psychiatric notes: AS A PSYCHIATRIST I HAVE DEVELOPED VARIOUS THINGS THAT PERTAIN TO WHATEVER I WAS MEANT TO TALK ABOUT. STOP. DAVID HOWELL. STOP. AGE 23. STOP. WHAT’S THAT? STOP. AGE NINETEEN. STOP. AGE 27. STOP. WE NEED TO GET OUR STORY STRAIGHT. STOP. WHO IS IT? STOP. DAVID HOWELL, YES THE NAME IS RIGHT. STOP. DAVID. STOP. HOWELL. STOP. THANK YOU. STOP. DAVID HOWELL SUFFERED FROM ACUTE SCHIZOPHRENIC DELUSIONS THAT MADE HIM FEEL LIKE HE HAD GONE A BIT ‘A BEAUTIFUL MIND’ IN THE HEAD. HE SAW SOME THINGS THAT HE DID NOT EXPECT TO SEE AND THIS EVENTUALIZED, HANG ON, ENDED, EVENTUALIZED WITH HIS PRIOR CONDITION BEING REPLACED WITH A NEW FEELING THAT RIFFED OFF THIS PRIOR CONDITION WITH WHAT SOME WOULD CALL ALARMING TWEETS. STOP. THIS WAS NOT HIS DESIRE. STOP. HE SPENT SOME HOURS RUINING CONFECTIONS OF ‘THE RETURN TO OZ’ / ‘RETURN TO THE WIZARD OF OZ’ IN WHICH HE WOULD CATEGORIZE THESE FEELINGS AS CHARACTERS FROM THE PLAY. STOP. FILM. STOP. THE PUMPKIN-HEADED ‘JACK’ WHICH REQUIRED THAT HE DID CROSS-SECTION EXAMINATIONS AND SOME OF THE IMAGERY OF THE FILM FELT PROFOUND ETC. STOP. ECT. STOP. HAHA. ETC AND ECT LOOK SIMILAR. STOP. FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT MY MUGGINS OR ANDREWGOLDSPINK @GMAIL.COM. STOP. PROBLEMATIC. STOP. SUFFICE, ANYWAY, SUFFICE TO SAY HIS BEHAVIOUR MANIFESTED MOST MARKEDLY IN THE CONTEXT OF DIGGING FOR THINGS FOR A NOVEL IN HIS DREAM, LONG-ASS DREAM, WHICH REQUIRED THAT HE – WHICH ENDED UP THAT HE – OOH, LOOK THE SUN IS BACK – THAT HE, THAT IS, HE, INVENTED THE CHARACTERS AND SPIRALED THEM INTO HIS OWN LIFE. ETC. STOP. A FORMAL JOKE. THIS HAS GONE TOO FAR. THE POINT IS, THERE WAS A WHOLE CHAPTER ABOUT THIS IN WHICH HE HAD SO MUCH TO SAY ABOUT ‘THE RETURN TO OZ’ DETAILED HERE, IN HIS INFORMATION PACK (PSYCHIATRIC, 2011):

PSYCHATRIC LOG, 2011: (Information: David Howell): (Novel Extract, from ‘Cambodia’ 2011-2012): As soon as I met him I realised/it was apparent he was mentally ill. The drugs had done something to his brain, turned his thought processes into labyrinthine fantasies/assault courses, obsessive compulsive twitches, opening the door and closing it four times before he would enter a room. He/His housemate [John] told me, in no uncertain terms, blankly, that he had been informed he was suffering from schizophrenia.

His delusions were significant, and whenever we talked/I tried to talk to him he would stare out across my shoulder and shout ‘Hey!’ as if something were attacking me, but then I would realise that he didn’t/couldn’t could no longer care about me, and that he was simply shouting from surprise, and it reminded me of my mother, the way she would ignore me, the way she was embroiled, terminally, in her own solipsism.

John told me he had been sectioned, put on watch for a month, released, and put on mild medication, which he was not taking. John was convinced that there was enough of him left to ignore the majority of him that was lost, constantly referencing conversations he had had with him recently where he appeared to be completely lucid. As the weeks went by John continued to talk about these moments as they drifted into the past and it became clear – from David’s detailed ‘scratch-paintings’; drawings of faces surrounded by word salad text, scrambled, paranoid and persecutory – that he would have to return to the hospital.

[CHAPTER BREAK]

My schizotypal personality disorder, which was effectively culled with x, y, and variety of other medications, including encouragement (to go out into the “real world” and pursue sustained employment). During the height of my neurosis/psychosis I withdrew from my friends (or anyone I knew, for that matter [xManager, promoter, A&R, Adam Stout]), deleted all social networking accounts, and developed a complex fantasy world based around [Walter Murch’s] Disney's Return to Oz. Walter Murch’s film provided me with ample material to edit and imbibe to my mind's desire. I imbibed the characters – and invented new motivations, occupations, and personalities for them. I was not so interested in pursuing their original meaning. I simply spent time with them, not as Dorothy, but as a/her male, (and sometimes asexual), replacement.

It all started when I began to bang my fists on the desk on which my computer sat. I did this once, a week after I had lost Bess, and after I had ingested psylocybin mushrooms, when my brain had become incapable of dealing with the complexity of my thoughts, weighed down, as they were, by the despair of losing her, and powered by the funds of my recent success. I ingested around ninety of these [liberty cap] mushrooms and saw skulls on my walls calling for me to kill myself. ‘Kill yourself,’ they said. ‘Kill yourself, kill yourself,’ with the emotionlessness of monks, and naturally I hid my head under my duvet and then (because they were under there too) lifted it out and placed it in the centre of my pillow, which I folded up over my hears, so as not to hear them, and because it felt necessary, or else because I was desperate. Then what they were saying became muted, or else it became a simple repeated drone/ a murmur, very bassy, and then, once I had lifted the pillow away, these skulls, these fucking skulls! – And you’ll never guess what! – began to change, or I began to realise they had changed, and the hissy quality, the treble to what they were saying was clear, [as a bell, pure] and I realised that a part of my brain (I speculate) had come to the foreground and began playing determinedly – like a striker – towards my advantage, that is, racking its own brain to determine the best possible route for us away from what has commonly been referred to as a “bad trip”. Lo! That striker's own brain had hit the back of the net! And from there we decided (or rather he did, he was very much on his own here, but not for long...) that we would see things, the world, in a very different light.

I began to kiss my hand tenderly and look at its tendons, expanding and contracting in the dim light from the window. Yes, there was a man in there, I thought/knew now, with neurons and a central nervous system, and he was more than up for having a good time! Well, let me tell you I gave it to him, or was given it to me by the striker. I twisted and turned on the bed, and the skulls seemed to have the forlorn expression of the Scream mask, but they were sad, to be sympathised with, and they only wanted the best for me after all!

Then, in the heat from x, from Brian Eno’s Ambient 4: On Land, I saw that skull, the skull of a pumpkin, and I realised it was Jack, from Return to Oz, that long-lost childhood nightmare that had stayed with me ever since my parents had rented it out thinking it was a wholesome family film for my sister and I from the xGloustershire video shop, when I was ten. He knew me and had known me all this time! The next day I set about digging in my head for the vaguest of memories, fond moments whispered to me by girls I may have had an inkling for, when I was six and stayed in their house playing Goosebumps Escape from Horrorland on their computer, that is, girls, or moments in time, the way someone may have chosen to look at you at a sleepover (when we were allowed them with girls, which was actually often when I was young, under ten) in a certain light, under a lamp, or by their favourite bedcover (duvet!) or, that is, you didn't understand the house but you knew there was something about it. A house I once saw when I was out walking around Bournemouth had a similar look (in some cul-de-sac): as if you had known it for decades and it had been waiting for you to resume your previous life, but even more complex than that, something else...

an aspect of my life

Fart X.docx

Here we sit in the living room and wait for the owl to cut and call. I am so worried because this does not fit the picture. One thing leads to another©, one owl leads to a brother©©©. I imagined Jefferson Hack, what my subbing teacher had told me about Jefferson Hack, when I worked at dazed. If I was gay I would fancy him. All thw fucking women, can you imagine? All the openings in art galleries. Secret story. White on black. Another world. It's boring for you to describe it this way and you'll never get it if you do describe it this way. Pete just called. That was interesting how it disrupted the flow, came into the world of the phone. I'm listening to Andy Stott again. Seems like eveyone has worked for Dazed at one time or another.

Fart XI.docx

The week without drugs reared up, the idea of it. How would I fair? It was thw largest thing to happen to me in a while. I had been convinced - like at the uncle's - that I would be better, that it would change me for the better. Now I was not so sure, and equally, sure. A girl I was convinced was wearing a primary school blue checj dress, said, Is that my dad? As I walked home. I imagined it could be my daugher, from the girl I made pregnant at university. I imagine saying, I don't remember impregnating you. Perhaps it is time to face the "real world". Everyone else is doing it. God, I wonder what it is. Kids, playing, on the cut grass, sun in the background. That is their life. It was not alll that different from mine.

Hopefully it'll feel... Disappointingl similar. But it could feel... Much worse. All those elecrical inpulses at night. I could have nightmares. But I suppose, as long as I have this phone to write things down, it will not all have been for nothing.

Fart XII.docx

This is Cara Delevingne. [She looks sexy.] Other things...

As I was writing, this happened:

Reading Blake Butler's Nothing

Reading Blake Butler's Nothing - I realise I must depend on memory in order to remember how I went forward - what I clicked, how I proceeded - in order to retrace the steps the Kindle back button had undone.

Earliest Memory of a Blog

I remember my earliest memory of a blog. It was the blog of a Japanese man, perhaps a photographer, with the text [just spiralling on] endless [down the page]. I remember I was really confused about the fact it was in reverse-chronological order. I was about twelve.

6

I sit at the keyboard. ‘There’s nothing,’ a voice in my head says. It feels necessary to confront this. Repossi, 6, Place Vendöme, Paris, are words that are above my head. I am making fine judgements about what to leave out. I believe. A stick of gum produces a calm in me, I hope. Cat. Photography by Liz Collins. The austere demand, sexual demand, of Edie Campbell. Seems contrived. I know, in another mood, her sexual demand moves me. Cara Delevingne, in the same shoot, is sweet, with her little cat. She seems cute, and I love her, in this little minute. What she is wearing... (I wear... underwear...) seems sweeter than what you would expect. That’s nice for a girl. Her thigh, and her, is pretty. She is pretty. I like her.
          Now onto something else. Will all I do discuss images. Word did not find that to be an incorrect usage. Word is a pig. Fuck it. Feels less beautiful than before. Mia Farrow... seems amphibian, seems nice. Her skin is washed out, drained, like an amphibian. White. Her crystal eyes hold a ball into which I pour Trussel. In a garden party I moved... across the lawn and felt in another world, in-between the kidney-shaped plantings, looking for somewhere to piss. I pissed. That was in a house with a drum kit in a concrete shed. It happened. Saying, ‘It happened,’ drowsily, in that shed, to myself, about all of them who would not hear it, about that life.
          Blueberries in a pot. I am not a sexual being anymore. I see a woman, in jeans that do not fit her, tight, her arse... Fucking sexy. And it true, and it’s true that there is something happening... down there. But what is happening down there? An appreciation in a context, a ragged... I do not see myself as someone that wants to dominate. In the heat of the moment I want awesome nothingness, but the moments are alone... The moments are not, with anyone else. Incorrect usage.
          The pig... bladder. Should this have been a new paragraph? I have discussed this elsewhere. I need to slow down. I have discussed this elsewhere... Trying to get out of this folder... (I laugh) so difficult. The girl... She’s like an amphibian. To be less aware of oneself, that’s all that we desire, in sex... elsewhere... We desire... the more that lets us give less, the more or less. Does it affect you? It affects me more or less. That was something I wrote to myself... When I was stoned. How does it affect you? It affects me more or less. I thought it was good. What are good, in these wor lds? War lord. I come off the beaten track. Tonight we were talking about war. Topical, very... religious talk. At Starbucks. Is that what you want to listen to? Anger fragments the speech, rips it up like fabric that has bunched up mistakenly. Somehow, when I think, now, I’m in the curve of what the town park meant to me, the sex I had there on my birthday, with her, grass on her back, pummelling my cock into her. Haha! That was good! That was a good one that one. Beckett. It must be her arse that she shows us always! She showed me. She showed me that arse and I fucked it, like a slab of human meat, cold on the grass, I fucked it. One flashy thing moves on. The tilt the dance, the flash at the end of heaven. Bras, Pickett fences, everything you never ever wanted, climbing into scalp, you little devil. Sigh and the sighs and the monk. One paragraph leads to another. All the muck. All the mucky madams. All the Victorians.
          Next image. Jean-Michel Godard. Jean-Luc. With his tousy spouse. Going bald but still beautiful, still convincingly “with it”, still convincing them of all his intellectual mores. They can tell when you make a wrong choice of word, you know. They can feel it, slipping and sliding, on the mat. They knew then. They knew exactly what I had thought, what I had meant to mean to want to mean. The silly slimers. Big bank. I stopped myself. I would’ve wrote something silly. Silly old sacks, brass bands and big-wigs. The old whore, with his Jemimah Puddleduck britches, the word galoshes, anything that convinces them. Just speak, and be done with it. The old cattle, the old Cadillacing cattle duck. The old marsh. The prick. The vegetation, all around. The old mouse, with his ham on his head. First time I’d laughed, that old nut. The old building, with all its stuff to say. Everything coming out, like a ball at a wedding. The uncle’s nut. On the dance floor. Telling your dad how to feel. Dads are one thing. Lots to say about dads, we ‘ave. Anyone can bang on for ages about their fucking dad(s). Silly slimers. My dad did this and my dad did that, and his particular brand of admonishment, punishment and what forth brought me up this way and that, and left me with this here burden. They can cut their own giblets. Silly arse. My dad was a monkey. He lived in a tribe and cut his teeth on moors with the best of them. He could put two pound a’ flesh and be done by sunrise like the best a’ them, by morning, on the fire, near the beach. I meant one thing, wanted to get an image. Any psychiatrist will to tell you to unwrap the dad story is to unwarp your own personality. Like a duckold in the breech position, the old fuck-fuck. He’ll never win. He’ll never defeat me. Like a game of chess, I chuck my influence into his... I grind my hand down on his piece... I– I– I–
          Next image: knickers flashed on an old bicycle, beyond the skirt. This is what they want from you, women. They want a nice bit of kek flashed at the right moment, the enterprise, the love moment, the fucky-fuck. That’s what they want. That’s all they want. Is it? Other things...

Grimes. I had a dream she said she loved me. She leant over, drifting out of sleep on my bed, reached out for my hand and said she loved me. You do not know the bliss. It was heaven. It was a nice thing. I continued. I can’t go on. I’ll go on. This kind of... logic pervades in Western religion, balls thrown at pygmy girls at a sports day I was involved in. More like It’s a Knockout. More like E=MC2 am I right? Already the tone of this has... changed. There is something different going on here. You have to do exactly what you want, that’s what I told myself today. With language, one ball just isn’t enough. That’s why Hitler could not–
          To be... normal. To be so succeeding in so many ways at the top of the Duck and Waffle in London. I look at my receipt. Four thousand gold doubloons for one pick-me-up, one treaded line making you feel better, that’s what these c—ts pay for. One gold doubloon flung into the face of an old alleyway, an old alleyway... monster. A woman, skin flailing, beckoning in the night, that you might join her failure. That’s what gets me off, etc.
          There’s this boy I know who posts videos of himself playing the church organ, every Sunday or whatever. He lives the country life. He seems proud of his... class. And bitter towards others in a way that is... surprising. He used to write good stories at university, or poems, or whatever. University, the word, seems gold, but for me university was not gold. It was green, wandering through... It seems... distant, like another life, quite boring, etc. etc.
          That boy puts etc. at the end of his posts on Facebook. That’s what I mean about bitterness, that the commoners, with all their muck would ever be able to appreciate... Schubert... or whatever. But I don’t have a chip on my shoulder, oh no... It’s... Uh... Powerful... Uh... Power makes me think... Uh... One gaffold... Uh...
          A paragraph is intimidating. Someone thinks it fits together. They want to think you will be able to fit it together, mentally. But you might not. They never take that into account. Silly c—ts. I blank out c—ts because my sister might be reading this. She doesn’t like the word, never has. Other things...
          Baggins comes down the alley. Oh no. Start again.
          Jackson comes– NO
          They say “no” is a masculine world, well I’ve never felt it up. No wasp, no noodle. Niddly-noo. noob. We live in a new age. Nine noodles nings the naggett. It would be weird if there were words... Oh! There are. Words. Gangrene, walk the plank, Bob’s your uncle. No one’s dead. No one can die. One widget leads to the other n—let. One inlet leads to the other island. One pork pie leads to another and then fatter and fatter. I get fat, sometimes. When the rhyme is shy. Then I get in the bath, fart, and see I am fat– But you can’t rely too much on – how you say – toilet humour. One n—let leads to another inlet. I’m bleeping out myself cause not racist. Racist language is fucking weird. One racist bumps into another moob at the shop. ‘Do you frequent 4chan?’ the n—er asks. ‘Why, yes I do you old c—t.’ ‘Do you find the racist language on sister site...’ He has walked away. To do his shopping, like a normal person, as a normal person. A racist and a black person are much the same thing. One sleeps with another n—er.  Tyne and Wear, shine my shears. Go into the morning and chop my head off. 1,600 words, 1,600 birds. At my doorstep, in the winter. I remember our doorstep used to get so hot in the summer. I remember standing on it. It was metal. Stuff just comes flying out doesn’t it? Of your head. I don’t know whether I should feel ashamed. A ssured. Saggy tits, in brine. It’s time to shine. I wasn’t even on drugs when I wrote this. That’s new.

NEW

Good word. Useful. People never get tired of the new. Unless their sick of it. My girlfriend – I call her my girlfriend – used to always use the possessive... Did I like it about her? Who can tell... Her mother... What we did. Mike can. He can tell. I knew a guy called Mike... I thought he would hang himself... at university... I wear... underwear. Harold Pinter is a God. For real. He makes... bliss. He backtracks. He allows his characters backchat. He moves forward into...
          A new paragraph. I won’t tell you... what he moves... into... I love... ellipses... So... beautiful... very... feminine... indecisive... These are the things that get me off. Little squiggles on a page. It must be her arse that she shows us always. Diddle-doodle. My day just got real. Can’t end this... Can’t... end this... Who will be... end... enough to... end this. They will not read this... They will not read this far... already... feeling... love... slipping away, into the hay.
          Hey!
         

No, not that ending, a different one. This will never end, this document. They cannot make me and they will not make me. Nearing 2,000 words. Don’t get scared now. We’re just brief... a pair of briefs in the wind. It’s like that song. Thong song. It’s a song about a thong. I like thongs. Not on boys though, no, that’s a different morning glory. Wang-woodle. Where my poodle! In the lawn? Under the stairs? Where’s his hairs? I like to be... English... I think I like... English... They’ll know how good I am when they read this. I like writing this, thinking about them liking this. I like wondering why the wizard’s pipe is full of old poetry that he puffed out his pith. Pithy old dick-dick. I miss my best friend.
          Passed the 2,000 word mark. No turning back. Turning black. I have to walk the plank. There’s a lot of... piratey... in this. Ions hitting the back of the sports hall. Is that all? My mall, my mum. I like my mum, she doth cum, late at night, in the caravan, she was loud. I heard my parents... at it. It was real. One writer means another girl’s fighter. It is enough to explore another’s mind. What whilst thou find? In his mind. A rind of mind, a rind of Lind, a rind of behind, a rind of beehive, a behoven bollock, Beethoven’s mullet, milking, grass, you missed it, you missed each other, echo, summer.

12

Feeling that I have gone far enough to be in - the current mindset [of young people, that is of passively observing things and taking everything to its philosophical extreme] - but being 'enough myself' and away from it to represent a realistic opportunity for the traditionalist readers and/or critics to see me as a 'kindred spirit' yet 'exciting' and representative - enough - of 'the new generation'.

Blake Butler represents taking the coldly, colourless, vague lounge of long thoughts to an agreeably moral place. 'I thought this long ago, so...'

Tao Lin represents - fundementally - a lack of fear (moral embrace) of accuracy/ emotional acuity, regardless of whether this is 'ugly' or not.

I believe in beauty, so... I mean, what does Godard represent? Godard brings multiple ideas to the table and sets them alongside each other. The perfection of cold beauty, the sadness of the void, the sadness of power, the exquisite meaninglessness of [sex / something like it].

The only way for me to be true (or anyone?) is to synthesise everything you like. This does not seem true. I suppose the sensible/reasonable thing is to seperate them each into different genres - essay, poetry, philsophical reflection - but who is to say what represents a body of work anymore? If I publish something on the internet and no one reads it [has anything been published?] In other words, is a body of work all the physical books you have published or is it every comment you have made online? Where does the line end for a body of work and is it even possible to control what 'they' see as your 'body of work' anymore?

I like writing essays, I like 'getting to the point'. I don't, however, like the sound of my own voice. Does one have to 'like' their work for it to have moral purpose? Again, I don't think there is a problem with seperating essays from fiction. I like to think of essays - like journalistic efforts - as 'trash'; it seems important to me that a 'special space' be kept for true art, for the truest, purest thing, although assessing that now [looking at it 'objectively'] it seems pretentious.

This is what gave rise to my novel. The messy versus the slim, perfect. And never the twain shall meet. But what if the twain shall[it] meet? As in Shakespeare, what if all the elements are accounted for and everyone has a reason to read it? The important thing - and it does seem this - is for things to seem right[it]. This goes here. But where am I getting that guidance from? Because if it is not from myself then I may well be duping myself. I like the look of words, and this is a large part of it. But where does that leave me? Should I just be a typographical artist? I want to be well known as an innovator, but is that enough to actually pursue[it] innovative ends? Will it satisfy me to only innovate, rather than dominate/master? I suppose there's only one way of finding out. I won't know until it's done. Anyway, it's not as if you can put these things into motion overnight.

Still, it seems a guiding principal is lost/ missing. Is it enough for things to perfect. It certainly sounds enough. Perhaps the difference is that it takes time to hone a style - but I'm so impatient! - then again, the reasons for my impatience are futile/ not morally defensible. They stem from vanity (Will my hair look good in my first author photo?) rather than any real search for art.

Is that what it's about - search for art - What does that mean? What purpose does that have for me? I suppose that is the point. But that doesn't seem enough - to rest on that laurel. It takes so much time, each year, to reach the next big conclusion, and when you add that time together, look back, it seems that the conclusions are by increments. I don't want to be like Lydia Davis and look back on my work - work that I had devised a perfect style, a perfect stratagem for - and realise it has all been in the wrong mode, somehow contrived - unlike Tao Lin, for example, or perhaps the mood / mind she was in after reading Reality Hunger, if she was in a mood. Everything is contrived really. It's just whether you can make money off that contrivance.

[This is something I don't really/truly feel either.]*

Liz

as if I had seen her in images on the internet. Elizabeth. When I first saw her from afar she seemed disappointed but aware this was not polite, and so her face wrestled infinitesimally with itself. That face was so obviously beautiful it seemed as if carved from stone in the desert. The colours of her face were so bold and blunt they seemed as if they came from the palette of a cave painting. She appeared as something I had never seen before and always wanted to. Her face had the clarity of averages and yet piqued features – the X or a slight chin bottom... Her lips were like a duck’s beak.
          Sometimes I dream of running into her in the city, working in a clothes shop or bar, or out on the street. I tend to imagine it in a closed location as she would have less chance to escape, not because I want to trap her but because I tend to imagine the worst outcome – that is, her horror at not being able to escape me – which allows me to turn myself more adequately into a creature in her shocked gaze. I don’t believe that is an exaggeration; I am sure she does not see me as an option with which to communicate. Through her eyes I see myself as the worst kind of masturbating, submissive failure. Or perhaps she sees me as completely asexual; a date in her diary since blown over with multiple flings, excitement, and accumulative changes.
          The horror I imagine to be on her face when she sees me as I walk into her shop is such that I am convinced she would be physically disturbed. I imagine she would even gasp or emit a strange sound as if the worst had finally happened. I have a vision of her calling out to a security guard to remove me; she would not hear a single word I said. But then all this bad feeling I imagine in her is partly my fault. I sent her multiple strange props and configurations in the post, such as large maps stained with tea and covered in slogans of my love, or nuts and bolts, flowers, ridiculous, pathetic gestures beyond redemption. To consider the stereotypes of what women want: security, honesty, mental stability, I must have appeared as a frothing nothing to her. A lunatic.
          Often in films you see a sensitive man put to the test of love and he always fails, because films portray the writing of poetry and the composing of ballads as broadly sissy. It is a good joke! In Bedazzled for example, when the protagonist is attempting to find out what women want he turns himself briefly into a more romantic, sensitive type in order to win the affections of the woman he loves, but, as with all the other examples, he fails as this psychotic beta type because women only want you to be yourself. What women want, according to the film, is a perfect man that is himself and never breaks character. If Kafka was alive now women would find him repugnant because he is too sensitive and cries too much, and none of us would have read his work because it is too sissy, because we are on our way back to reliable gender roles, having had our fun with postfeminism./feminism having run its course.
          For a while she was straight-edge because of globalisation. Having outgrown what she loved for a long time – the natural world, the folksy world of England’s southwest – she needed a new project or template with which to define her life. It was easy enough not to drink, smoke or take drugs, and she was already vegan, so being a straight-edge punk came naturally to her and she became boring. With each new stage in her personal revelation of self-immolation through blandness, she became less attractive to me, as I could observe clearly on the internet. But then, one day, she snapped back and I saw a picture of her online where she was standing behind a clothes shop counter, uncannily similar to how I had imagined, wearing a bluish dress, her skin pale, her hair up, looking healthy, questioning her life, but generally happy. This was when I truly wanted her again. I tried to work out what shop it was through multiple means – Googling her name, enlarging the picture and studying the clothes behind her, checking social networking sites to see if she had listed an employer – but eventually gave in one night, disgusted, although I saved the picture to my hard drive. I admired the picture frequently, as tiny as it was, and imagined how the pores in her face might have changed, or whether she regretted the tattoo on her left breast. God only knows what I would have done if I discovered the address of that shop. Perhaps I would have even gone there to see her. Perhaps we’d be back together now.

David Masturbates

She was so beautiful I just wanted to come on her.

At first he felt he was too in love with her to masturbate over her [/to her image], but then he [found a picture of her wearing a skirt on Facebook and] managed to get it up by thinking, You're all whores, [Y]ou're all whores in the end, [and then came] but then afterwards, looking at the image, he felt distantly guilty and [looked/gazed into her eyes and] [felt/knew] that he loved her.

 

Michael Finnissy and the New Complexity, by Elizabeth Hayes

Some might say there is an evil to Michael Finnissy's music but what it actually represents is truth. It sounds like someone [a Godless person, with the capacity to tear up life, doing so] tearing up life. Its intense anger, genuine despair and maximalist, farcicle organicism seems to direct its bitterness at Art itself. 'We really have reached the end,' it seems to say, 'and now there really is nothing to do,' crying all the time. The fact remains, however, that something does exist, as represented by the score, and so behind Finnissy's huge, [black] noxious cloud there is not a silver lining but a certain humidity in the air that could suggest one, at some time. The contour of his melodies sounds like a child's realisation, or madness, for a while, slowly, before collapsing into a series of notes described on the score by the composer to be played, 'Even slower (almost motionless)', [atonal] pin pricks as gentle as [and perhaps as redundant as] acupuncture. But they are still there. Like freckles. It is pessimistic music, but ultimately, despite everything, in spite of the world, [it says enough to be [called]/is human].
That is one way of looking at his music, treating it as a single body [of work], generalising, launching oneself towards the pretty/useful metaphor and the simple sentence. But this is something that people have decided to call the New Complexity, after all,



The beginning of the second part/movement/track, serving as our/the island, floating in the midst of dark black waters.

I wanted a kind of music for her to begin to relate to.

'My hands smell of dirt/mud, as if I'd /had been digging in the dirt'

‘What's striking about the music is its feeling of utter spontaneity, and its incredible emotional power . . . the remarkable thing about Finnissy's music is that despite its frequent sorrow and anger, it has a marvellous power to affirm.’
Ivan Hewett, The Telegraph

http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/category/music/composers/finnissy.do


Roman Vlad
Cornelius Cardew - Song for the British Working Class


'Observing one of the student rehearsals on Sunday night, I was impressed by how unbelievably perceptive he was in rehearsal, pulling up the players for the quarter tones and fractional rhythms that so often get glossed over as gesture or detail merely present to give a sheen of complexity to the work. It would be foolish to fetishise the composer’s ears, but it is worth noting that he knows what he wants and it is not just about comprom­ising the performers’ comfort.'

What Tim Rutherford-Johnson observes in Les froissements d’ailes de Gabriel as an attempt ‘to create a musical thread that is im­possible to assimilate, such that barely grasped recollections and images pile up in the memory, like the detritus of history, to be sorted through on some as-yet-undetermined future occasion’ seems to me to be a characteristic attempt on Ferneyhough’s part to engage very directly with questions about how the audience is listening. Ferneyhough said ‘musical language carries its history on its back’ so it is hardly surprising given his historical position that he is aware of and sometimes uses terminology borrowed from research in to perception and brain science. That’s not academic or obscure, it’s an honest attempt to deal with the realities he faces as an artist in a rational fashion.

http://www.chrisswithinbank.net/2011/03/backwards-through-a-telescope-brian-ferneyhough-at-the-rncm/

Bess and David at the computer

And we spent so long at the computer, sifting through the files we'd made, that we ended up absorbed, at the screen, in the dark, [by the yellow boxes that meant there were some things inside,] like little children at the television. Bess and I made so much music, but the sadness of it was that we could not get it onto the mp3 player we had bought, [by Archos] a little grey thing we had bought [from Argos] from some electrical store/shop cheap, and we thought would work, but displayed a message of, 'File unavailable,' at some of our greatest/proudest songs. It was denying us access to what we had made.

Bess's Herringbone [tweed] riding jacket was beautiful. She used to wear it around the house and sit with me, in the white, eating [duck/deer liver] pate on [toast/ fancy toasted bread] and drinking coffee. I loved the taste of pate, I had never tried it before, and ever since I have associated it with her.

Her brogues, the way her brogues looked against her thin black tights, her leg askew by/at the computer, twisted on the chair, eating her [toast], made me feel that [we were not right for each other], or that she was not right for what we were doing, the music. But then, [once I had craved Hula-Hoops [or some other derogatory snack]], I [started] thought it could have been me that was not right for [the project], that it had become herit project.

She was so [posh], and so beautiful, [so mysterious in her good taste], it was almost impossible to see through her to her heart. Every day was just another excuse for her to be [fabulous]. [I felt like a gay man looking at her.] like someone appreciating [someone] beauty from afar, but her beauty would always lead me to [kiss/peck] her on the cheek, and kiss her, and we would move to the bed. [and we wouldn't do any work.] [It was okay. I mean it felt okay, not to do any work.] It was the best sex of my life. [Clit lick]

Buckingham Palace, David Stays Up Late

'When I was [living with my parents] signing onto the dole,' David began, 'I used to go to sleep very early, sometimes, so that I could both/ it would look good to them when I got up at eight/seven thirty in the morning looking/to look for work, but also [so that I could/because I liked to] pretend to be a child, who's bedtime was nine-thirty, and then I would have the thrill - when I wasn't doing this - of "staying up late".'
'But you know,' Bess said, 'that my mother always made us go to sleep at nine-thirty. She was convinced/obsessed by the idea that waking up early in the morning [improved your health]. [She used to say that watching the sun come up/rise is a reminder that it really does rise. That sometimes people - on the way to work, [or at a barbeque] etc - are/go long periods entirely unconscious of the very thing that sustains/give us light.] <> You know that. I told you.'
'Oh, maybe that's/that must be where I got it [from].'
<> ['Sounds Pagan.']

[Perhaps Bess becomes suspicious after the nine thirty gaff, or perhaps she says nothing about it]

In the morning when I would head across x to y/Buckingham Palace, and fall across the gates outside, staring up at the building, wondering what it could possibly mean.

Riding Jacket

Bess wore her riding jacket around the house a lot. Once she had bought it, spent [£4,190] on it, she became a different person, someone obsessed with a riding jacket made of herringbone tweed. It was a charcoal colour and looked incredible on her; she looked so austere.

David and Religion

'Your songs often have religious undertones. Do you believe in/Is there a God?'
'I don't think there are any real atheists. But equally, I don't think there are any real Priests. I don't think there is anyone that is religious. I don't think anyone is devotedit enough to [really] be called religious. I think even the most hardened /would find even the most hardened atheists praying if their plane went down. But I don't think there are agnostics, either. I don't think anyone is ever unsure. Belief is a momentary flux. I think most of the time people have [literally] no stance on God/ believe nothing, because they [simply] aren't thinking about it. [It can be one of those things, like a trinket, or a bracelet you wear around your arm, and you forget it's on.] Saying that,/But for the sake of decisiveness/simplicity I identify as an atheist. But I have felt the eyes of God on me. /Sometimes I feel.'

a copy of the New Testament printed on white [paper] with/and golf leaf [,] that/which he was given for his Christening.

Bess in the Library

In the library I felt so tired I began to read things incorrectly and imagine beautifully/ augmented things, like different ways I could represent narrative in song, and as I sat there I became nothing but a young woman's figure - my stomach taught against my hand/ribbed [t-] shirt <> stomach, which was tight and I felt thin (beautiful, as I hadn't eaten anything since yesterday evening) - and a book. I was reading David Foster Wallace's essay on David Lynch from his collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Againit. It had already occured to me that I would have to keep reading, the book spread open vertically in front of me, the pages pressed down firmly, as the cover was so grotesque [I couldn't bear to look at it]. A little girl was playing to the left of me and I looked over at her sometimes; she was dressed in pink, Russian, to judge/ing by her parents, who were to my left, and who she kept visiting, endlessly tracing laps around me, but not in an obtrusive way/unobtrusively. The shape she made, I thought, in a Wallacian way [I thought], traced more of a sharp [pointed] ellipse and x [, like a [long,] thin/ closed/closing/half-closed eye]. It didn't bother me at all.

[Bess's Daughter]

[Craving]

At Cambodia

Just a bass drum and sub bass against [the backbeat] [dim light/the room, which appeared almost pitch black before one's/your/a person's/the eyes had grown used to it.]

There was something almost calming, Thomas felt, about being with her against the music's simplicity/ of the music; it was so [simple] as to suggest one single, [obvious]/simple truth [over and over again,] continuously. When he looked at her he saw the simplicity/fact [of] a type of girl, too intelligent to be with him, dancing [aridly/comatose], comatose on her feet. Her beauty, what she was wearing, [what appeared to be the greyness of her shirt or blouse] seemed to suggest her as something [extremely/plainly] exotic [and <>]. [almost plain] [Something he had never seen before.] [After a while he realised a minor chord, on something like a low, colourless pad, was drifting in and out of the mix in a way that moved him.]

She was older than him, but fragile. A hi-hat crept in.

[As they danced he [noticed he] was taller than her.]

David's White Shirt

[David leaves a shirt at Bess's]

and held the shirt up to the light. The way the light hit the [thick] cotton made it appear [almost glow-in-the dark [toy] / [light/] faintly green/yellow-green/midori/nyanza] , like [the hands of] a glow-in-the-dark clock. [paint]. It was a different kind of shirt to my mother's: - cotton, rather than silk, thick [against the/compared to the thin silk], cheaper, but it was his shirt, and I could smell him on it. [Stupidly] I even felt that in wearing the shirt could be a way of gradually embracing colour, of petering/edging out into life [where I had been stuck in black-and-white/[a monochrome prison].
          I remember sitting on the bed and thinking over what had happened between us that day: how he had sat on the bed and talked about what he could remember of my mother. He said he felt she was mad [or referred to her as mad in passing,] forgetting how determinidely she had proved this assertion, the methods with which she had used to do it. We were on those covers, the bed was not quite a real bed yet but he had managed to make it seem a lot more real than it had been, with his boxes that he had brought to slot under the mattress/wooden blocks/tables/selection of boards/metal bed frame he had brought over making it make more sense, which I had covered in the billowing sheets. I was white. Everything was white. And it was all right.
          We tumbled over the sheets to each other after he had told me his story, about how my mother had once hit him in the back of the head, a real [old-skool] whack, a clip round the ear, as it were, and it had surprised him so much that he laughed. When he looked at her she had smiled / broken into a smile, he said. [<He had been throwing up and catching one of her records, near to the record deck in the living room] They had recognised each other's ridiculousness.
          That room always seemed dim, as if the curtains were perpetually drawn. The room was always cast in the colour of the curtains, an off-orange-black, a cheap velveteen glow. The day we last spoke ... the day/that day it was strange, I remember [now], it was strange that she had drawn the curtains, letting in the day/light.
          We moved out heads towards each other. 'I'm here for you [now],' he said. 'I know that sounds... You know.' He paused. 'I know we haven't really, like, set up any ground rules, or, I mean... What I'm trying to say, is.' He threw his karate-chop hands down in front of me, demanding himself to make sense. 'I'm so glad we met up. But you know I've got a girlfriend. It's going well, honestly. She's a little older. [She's twenty-six] Anyway. I'm here for you. Any time of day, whatever you want. What you've been through... Anyway.' [He did it again.] 'I want to be up front about this being a friendship. A rekindling of... [stuff/minds, [or] whatever. Whatever you want.]
          'Can I have a kiss?' I asked.
          He looked at me.
          'It's just you keep leaning /if you're going to be on my bed, leaning over/lunging at/ me, I think you've already broken whatever pact you were starting to form with yourself/ about us having a mutual friendship.' I stood up. 'This is bullshit. Get out.'
          He looked hurt and moved back against the wall. Something about his position [, on his knees and hands,] reminded me of a cat about to prowl/attack from the long grass, but afraid. Eventually he exhaled [lazily/grumpily, as if he had just woken up] and said, 'What...'
          'I can't believe you would make a speech to me about not meaning to lead me on whilst doing exactly that,' I said.
          After a while he said, 'I'm sorry.'
          'Are you used / Have you gotten used to duping other girls?' I asked, staring at him, my hands embarassingly at my hips.
          After a long while he said, 'So you're interested,' and I said, 'You forget what I'm like,' at [more or less] the same time [, so our voices mingled discordantly, with a strange rhythm].
          'Yes,' I said.
          'If you're interested that means I'mit interested,' he said. 'This is fucking stupid. I shouldn't have come out with you. What are you doing, stalking me, anyway? [What use does that do? You think that makes you look good?]'
          'Shut up,' I said, moaning, and sat in the chair by the/my dressing table. I looked into the mirror at myself/my reflection. Perturbed. Less pretty than I had expected. When I turned back and saw him on the bed I began to cry. I lifted my hands to my face. He rushed over and tended to my wounds. He pressed hard on the back of my neck. He pulled up my hair in a pony-tail and [slowly] let it fall, playing with it. And then I pushed my face towards his chest, [his head was already low] and got him to kiss me.

'What we had was so large,' he said, 'so huge, so massive, so uncontainable. It would be quite a Pandora's box to open again. But, you know what,' he said, looking at me, as we each clocked each other's irony, I could feel my pony tail banging against the back of my head, 'I'm up for it.' We crossed the road awkwardly, [I] almost getting hit by a car/large lorry. 'I'm up for going through it all again,' he said. When we were at the other side of the road he said, 'Does that make you happy?'
          'Yes,' I said.
          'I'm happy with the arrangement,' he said.
          I took his hand. 'Good,' I said.
          'I want to get to know you again.'
          The sentence faded away in the ambience of the city, a cyclist passing, and the horns and the wind created by cars, [distant voices].
          'A lot's changed,' I said. 'You would be surprised. I read Proust, I listen to Bill Evans, I even get a full wax sometimes. Down in the cellar.'
          I could see in his face he was [un/pleasantly] happy to be reminded of my ease when talking about my cunt.
          'Dooown in the cellar,' he said.
          'Cellar door,' I said.
          'I'll open your cellar door.'
          He put his arm around my shoulders and kissed my head.
          [I think I said,] 'I can't believe we're doing this,' I said.
          'I know,' he said. [It's happening.]
          We walked in front of a Costa, and as I looked inside the building I imagined us sat [standing in the queue] there, two months, or perhaps two days from now, having another, different conversation. Soemthing simple, about what to buy, or something.

River Court West

River Court West ...an off-white [that reminded me] of the Trade Federation Battleship from Star Wars: Episode 1 on the PlayStation, a game my cousin used to play. Upper Ground - on the way - Enterprise House (near) (Smashed window seven floors up - brown tint?) Made me think of Star Wars, Princess Leia.

White walking into Blackfriars, under construction.

Bankside, Falcon Point, Piazza.

Bouyant concrete turrets / Grime that dripped off, a faded idea.

Kings Reach

Queen Elizabeth Purcell Room

Lemon yellow - the fractured, speckling on the rubber floors, like David's shirt, like my mother's house / Past to Prsent - Close my eyes and I can see them. A brunette girl kisses a thinly/elegantly balding man with stubble/a [thin small beard] / Pencil in ear / A Love Supreme, with his daughter Sasha, by an Indian woman -- People can notie simularities between them.

The Importance of Failure in the American Experimental Tradition, by David Howell

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PONE DOCUMENTAION OF A LIFE (THING, CONT)

1

What happened? What in me changed so much to leave me alone in a field? The dry field, the sun setting. It would be a perfect place to sit in a circle/field with friends. What will change, tonight? Out on my own, some minor piano, some [kids] shouting [across the field] [, summer sounds] I was one of them. [Now what? Well, that seems funny.] The ghost at every feast, the charm in no bracelet, [/the lack of charm in a bracelet,] [the knowledge of knowing, so dour now.] The end.

A new beginning. [That's what's needed- 'Bundle!' - [a voice] from the past, if I force it.] But this music is so sad. Or is it? I can't know. [Tao Lin talked about different styles.] Perhaps it is good to scream.

Everyone looks so normal. Perhaps I will go for a drink. I'm hungry; that is a problem. Or good. [[I can't remember.]] Everyone has changed now.

I write in this phone when I most need comfort. Far away... [The lizard speaks.] It is getting colder, much windier, now. 'Bye guys!' on the wind. Another day, they will be back for another day. 'It's past my bedtime.' [A joke. Another kind of cool [Nothingness.]] I think of how horrific it must be to see me, [how confusing.] Imagine someone I know see me. But they are all gone. I don't know which [one] is worse.

Girlfriends, they all have. Settling down. Seems purposeless, or not ready yet. They are bending to the big Other, some other force.

Not sure I want to get up; writing seems good, [as it often does.] So sad. So limitless. I think I'll get up. The sound of those dogs makes me feel like I'm going to have a heart attack, incredible burts of pain in my heart. That's [It's] probably how I'll die.

A very depressing album. Righteously so. It is right. The end of the world. [Couldn't get much worse than this.] A blink of summer, then nothingness. I'll have an apple. Make it better [/easier] to understand. Think deeply. Never leave.

The righteousness, the nothingness, the hellishness of that dog. Not that bad. But could be. When did I get like this? How will I survive? To the deepest place. That is where it is worth it. Come out of nothingness. Rob Brown hid his face cause he could bare/ did not want to be seen. His face. Music may be... Damaging.

Maybe they think they're on suicide watch. Or maybe they're interested. Former seems likely. You follow him and I'll follow him. It's He's scaring me. Then the OC sessions would be... A way of... getting me... to cheer up... If they find the other account, then we'll know. Instinct. It's all instinct. Dan's life, going out, rainy day, everything new. It's other people that make things [new / good.] Let's get out of here...

At the park, at night, stoned. That literally feels like another world. Well it would, wouldn't it?

Think I might just get to know loads about apples... How does it feel to sit on this step? If it malfunctions that's the end. Let's check.

Are

And the man next to him said it would not be a problem for him to come over and tell him what the matter was but this made the man very unhappy. The guy in the alley judged him.

Dark hair

Novel: [While everyone else... [Dave x and y]]... By sheer stasis I had managed to accomplish... [Another kind of me, another world...] [Another past...]

Prepared to be shouted at wherever I go...

Shorthand flickering in my head... That beautiful girl, pink top, cutoff denim shorts, [black sheer tights,] on the summer solstice, [wet] and windy.

Dark hair...

The novel is called Dark hair...

A whole story could arise out of the lower case hair, its title, the author, on the internet's use, demand, like the French...

This [useless,] deeply important stubborness is part[it] of the title, essential to the title/very important.

I feel comfortable being myself, with shorts.

[was previous]

I might just stay pur here until it starts to get dark. He does stay, thinks about Smashing Pumpkins, thinks about the yellowish light on the street that will come, wearing shorts, chilly. [It occurs to him/me it's the summer solstice.] [Do we have to mention this?] He begins to feel comfortable, smoking, [Used to the cold/chill] knees grow pimply but used to the cold, hard.

Wandering. The only one left... In these streets... St Michael's Mead...

Got in the toilet, thought, The reward.

After the cold...

The man outside the toilet seemed a deeply offensive presence, completely unfair, somehow linked to my dad.

With the best of things, he could not even be.

[It's possible to completely ignore the colour of something, [make it an enirely new colour.]]

Everything's just normal. Looking across the sun, down[it] the carpark. A normal summer...

Fart XVI

Rough hands. These. If you ever want to be understood.

How can anyone make me happy?

At the train station.
At the house party.

Sometimes you look back, throw your head back, and it's so shocking, so shocking. You see it.

Woman across from me that looks like alien. Anything's possible.

A timeless zone on the train, a bed where you go.

A large white bed, cold and crisp, on the train, where you go under the shade of a bridge. You don't know where you go. Things changing. The light in that partit of the train. Your mother waits. White, white.

Wo

Listening to My Bloody Valentine as it rained outside I felt something drop away, the very crest of love, what it meant to be in love, showering, crumbling, physically pulling my heart down, a cavernous drop away [at/ a huge expanse] at how clearly it conveyed to me it felt, and smelt like, to be in love. It never failed to comminated exactly this to me (amongst other things).

In the flat I could finally think...

Bess

In the flat I could finally think. I didn’t want to think about anything in particular, I just wanted the space to let in whatever was to come. I suppose I was craving a kind of meditation, or at least longed for the kind of thoughts you have in the bath after long trains, huge trains, and you have gotten off at a station you don’t recognise, have no idea where you are, and are so, so glad of it. I thought it was funny that I had ended up in a flat very similar to the fantasy I had described months ago when walking around the city, about a girl that, in my own words I imagined ‘living up in a plush high-rise opening a package on cream carpet (polystyrene pieces spilling out) and thinking about whether she liked the view of her new place and feeling pleased that the only things she had to worry about were domestic, that this was a calm moment in her life’. That is so where I was. The only difference was that my girl, the girl I had imagined, had a boyfriend who was in the other room. She was somewhat like Clara but with reddish blonde hair, whereas Clara had dark brown hair, although she had dyed it blonde before. Clara had dyed her hair blonde to hook a job, or so she told me. She wanted to work for a magazine in New York and although she was sure she was losing her mind, or else had a perfectly sound mind and it was the world that had lost something, she felt having blonde hair would benefit her position. She felt they would think it was progressive to hire a woman with blonde hair, although as she kept telling me, she wasn’t sure whether her opinions were coming from the current decade or from years and years ago, from books. It was one of her chief worries and she often sat propped up in the kitchen doorframe and told me about it, her knees up. Bess, she would say. I just don’t know what to do. A part of me is living here and another part, I don’t know! It’s like a phantom part of me is taking advice from fucking... Henry James or something. (I had encouraged Clara to read at this point, but unlike me she expressed her inspiration in the form of poetry rather than in lyrics – she was generally more formal than I was, a little more organised perhaps but in terms of beauty exactly the same, precisely the same as I was: an eight or nine to most, a ten when you’re in love with them). Henry James! I said, being over-the-top, which often made her laugh. That old virgin!
          She smiled.
          It’s just... I don’t feel like I’m real sometimes, you know?
          You’re not, I said out loud.
          As soon as I had said it she vanished, and I was struck over the head with the fact I was sitting on the carpet of my flat, near the window, imagining a girl in the kitchen doorframe I could tell my problems to, and she to me. Then I had a sensation a cat was in the room, going up and down the radiator, but there was none.

I began to believe it was necessary for me to buy something online that was guaranteed to come in a box full of polystyrene pieces. I wanted to open it up and see what was inside, see the pieces on the cream carpet, and then I would know something, or so I believed. After some languorous surfing with my new cat (a ginger tabby, although that kept changing, almost as if its fur was a projection, ever morphing) I stumbled across the small, pitiful website of an old woman that happened to be selling china ornaments, similar to the one that Thomas had stolen from our kitchen cabinet. I paused, looking away from the laptop, resting my head on my shoulder, sweetly I thought. It was strange to think about him now; at first I thought it felt like a dream, when in fact the feeling was the exact opposite: that he represented a reality I was desperately trying to escape. What worried me then was not that in the end I would forget this completely, but on the contrary that I would not forget it quickly enough. I imagined what had come before as a splinter to my smooth, new world. It was a slice of colour that was not part of the new scheme.

That evening when I was cooking the dinner Clara came to apologise for disappearing, which I found so typical of her, of her kindness. It was only me that needed to apologise, and yet she was so keen to re-establish our friendship that she took it upon herself to come back. Of course I considered that her apology was only a means to get me to apologise, a kind of bluff, but I let it swing by as the halloumi and couscous was frying up nicely, the steam rising into my face. I could feel Clara’s eyes on the prize and so experienced the uncomfortable realisation that I would have to prepare a meal for her; otherwise she would know I didn’t think she was real. It was not that I believed in her as such, more that the only logical move to make next was that of behaving as if she was going to eat with me, otherwise she would leave. Of course then I started to consider the difficulties of making her a meal: if she left it that would also prove she wasn’t real. Would it be acceptable to give her an empty plate? Since she had no physicality it seemed reasonable. Of course, I could pretend that she had not been hungry, but where did that leave us? Would I have to watch her waste away in front of me? It was a terrifying to think of her stalking, bone-thin around the flat whilst I was asleep at night, at the doorway like something out of Sixth Sense. It seemed that the only solution was to give her an empty plate; as long as I carried it in for her and washed it up afterwards she would have eaten.
          As luck would have it Clara was far more relaxed at dinnertime than I was. She smoked blue Camels and ate little of her meal, biting little dabs of couscous occasionally and drinking from a tall glass of water. I should have felt offended but something in the way her thin wrist moved made me aware that this is how it had always been with her: a meal was simply a time of day, and if she was to eat anything it was only to stay within a comfortable band of consciousness. Her determination to stay thin was as consistent as the freckled skin on her arms. Of course she would then binge on delicious burgers and fries from McDonalds, but that was part of the lifestyle. Just as a social smoker lights up only on weekends, Clara ate only when the need shot up inside her, a craving to buy the thing she shouldn’t, to feel it in her mouth.
          We ate silently, our forks quietly digging and scraping the plates. I looked up at the smoke around her.
          I tell you what, I said.
          What’s that? she asked, her arm as vertical as the cigarette.
          I paused, editing what I was about to say.
          Do you think I should make music again?
          If you want to.
          I think I do, you know.
          Clara paused, stroking the cat from afar, which had found its way up onto the table. Since it was only a kitten I concluded she must have put it there. Perhaps you should start by writing lyrics first, she said. You could see if you could create a world, and then perhaps the music would follow.
          I don’t know if I want to use words anymore, I said.
          Oh? she asked.
          Her confidence unnerved me. She was different today, taking over.
          I think I just want to use samples, I said. I might go to the library and see if there are any old spoken word discs. Actually!
          What?
          I’ve never been in a London library before. How ridiculous is that? I was still working my way through the books I had brought from home.
          I thought about what home could mean.
          You know they have the internet now, Clara said.
          I know, I said, exhaling. But I feel like because the first thing I thought of was the library – those little stacks of CDs they have – it must be something I have to do. Or not something I have to do, but it’s strongly advised.
          By whom?
          I don’t know. By fate. Or by God. It feels like a person has said something to me.
          You think God wants you to go to the library and get out a spoken word CD.
          Yes. Kind of.
          Clara lit another cigarette and threw me one, apparently registering my nerves. I like CDs, she said. I like how awkward it looks in prose, where the capitals stick up naively as if it’s some specialist term.
          Oh, no, I hate that, I said.
          I love CDs in fact, she said, staring into the centre of the table. There’s something about opening a jewel case. Even the name is good! Opening a clasp and seeing what’s inside.
          I know what you mean, I said.
          Are you going out tonight? she asked me.
          Um. Maybe?
          I think you should go to Cambodia. It’d be good for you.
          Are you going to come?
          No, I’ll stay here. I’ll walk you down if you like.
          I felt overcome by nerves.
          Please come in with me, I said.
          Could do, she said, as if it had just occurred to her. Are you going to talk to me whilst I’m there?
          Of course! I said. Why wouldn’t I want to talk to you?
          She smiled, holding her forehead with her fingertips, covering her eyes. It now appeared that she was the one who was nervous. Okay, she said. Thanks. You know I can get shy.
          Of course I do, I said.
          I wanted to reassure her that I had not forgotten her traits, who she was.
          I know we’re really going to meet some nice boys tonight, she said.
          I know we are, I said, taking her hand.

I had been very inventive with Clara in my boredom at the flat, and it wasn’t until I felt the cold of the night that I realised I was obeying her. I told myself it was simply a desire of my own that had manifested in her voice, but the cascading nerves I felt riding the underground would suggest otherwise. There was an old Jamaican man with a grey beard sleeping next to me, wearing a tweed flat cap of some sort. I enjoyed looking at the contrast between the grey frazzles of hairs and the dark, blanched tweed and so I did that for a while. The theme to Rosemary’s Baby was in my head, but I hadn’t yet realised it. I looked up the train and everyone was so asleep, so dead, and I knew why, deep in my soul I knew why. I looked down at my bony arm and felt Clara congratulating me. I knew I was looking good; I felt good. And then I thought of who I was going to see tonight: Thomas, John, Sarah, perhaps even David. Were we supposed to be playing there tonight? I hardly knew anymore. I thought I was Mia Farrow. I thought to look up at the window would bring the image I desired. A thin, beautiful woman with faint orange hair, dark blue eyes like the Fremen from Dune, coral lips and freckles. But all I saw was myself, Although perhaps you could argue I was Mia Farrow in another life, another colour scheme, I told myself. After all, I had faint freckles (only on my nose), dark brown hair (which was so short then!), dark blue eyes like the Fremen from Dune and lips that were a kind of coral but... desaturated. Yes, I thought, with a burst of happiness. I was her after all.
          When I got off the train onto Waterloo station I was still behaving much like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby; I felt skinny and very precious. Was I wearing a dress? No, I told myself, looking down. I was wearing a baggy grey shirt, white jeans, black socks and my favourite moccasins. I felt so good about myself. I felt so proud that they were finally going to see me in the state I was now.

When I got there, however, no one was there. There was a lot less gear up on the desks, a lot less that usual, just two decks and an iMac, and a DJ standing behind wearing dark colours and playing drone music. It lent an extremely surreal air to the club, I felt. Instead of kick drums skipping and snares cracking across the space
there was what sounded like a single tone, white noise and some other, more textural timbres. Everyone around seemed to be uninterested, were acting completely normally, save for a couple that were paying attention to what now appeared to me to be a kind of sonic experiment, but the drone made me feel claustrophobic, as if something was pressing on my head, which it was. Feeling brave, as I could feel Clara’s hand above my elbow, I decided to see if I could walk in this new substance that seemed to be almost visibly in the air; I walked across the almost empty dancefloor to the bar and put my elbows up on it. Clara stood.
          I was reminded of two things as I sat on the tall bar stool at Cambodia, listening to the drone: one was an incredibly strong feeling I had when on a family holiday once, when I came down to the bar area in the morning for a group session with the other children at the camp, a kind of crèche; the other was when I tried something called binaural beats a few years ago, which is effectively when two tones are played at slightly different frequencies from a stereo pair of headphones, and the tones create a new tone in the centre, in your head, a kind of “difference” between themselves. It was certainly hypnotic, the sound. Sitting there I became quite happy with my decision to come here, forgetting it was Clara’s. I felt I had happened across a secret daytime club that the more hardcore, fringe members of Cambodia frequented (explaining the feeling of seeing the bar area in daylight at the family holiday) and that this was likely a slot for more avant-garde artists and DJs to showcase their work, to experiment with the space. There was even something nice, I thought, about the fact the barman couldn’t hear me even if I did decide to order a drink, as the tonal frequencies were so loud, obliterating all communication but that of the body, turning the space into what felt like a giant orb, black grey and white, revolving but always staying the same size. This was how I saw the sound, and what was strange was that it became quite undeniable that the effect of the drone was visual; I felt I couldn’t be making it up, not like the cat or even Clara. I realised if I was hallucinating, or perceiving as I decided to put it, it was because most of the light had been shut out of the room, only a thin line of dusk light entering where we all were, together.
          I suppose what I was enjoying about the experience (and it did feel more like an experience, less like “music” per se) was the fact I was alone, but also with these people. It was a paradox I loved, like the feeling of walking along with quick commuters, being bustled through the underground, or up on top on the pavement, or through life, always living but always to the side, always apart, like the homeless, the beautifully desolate. I felt I was standing at the corner of the street screaming, hitting my shopping bag against the Xpeb wall, allowed to be mad whilst everyone else had to walk by, completely, utterly free, remarkably free. I was like the lizard, I began to tell myself, laughing (although I couldn’t hear it and nor could anyone else). I was like the lizard that crept along a wall, a hot wall, in Portugal. A personified lizard that could make his way to the bar, all the way, dodging the traffic, with a lizard’s-eye view of the road, the kerbs like buildings stretching for miles, the redbrick pavement a salmon colour, going on and on across newly laid tar and red tar (?), which was surprising, sneaking round the back of the bar area to where they wash up the dishes, sneaking in, finding some food on the floor, a little C, eating the little square and carrying on, on through into the kitchen where the Chef chops me in half with a butcher’s knife. For a while I couldn’t stop laughing at this idea; I felt it was so perfect for me, so what I was – the scale, the images, the chef (who I imagined as so ridiculously, stereotypically French, like the one out of the Little Mermaid when she grows her legs and heads out to the man’s mansion), the redbrick. I sighed with happiness.
          But then the pitch of the drone started to increase, almost like a drug’s effect suddenly kicking into motion, and it felt like such a genuine change in reality that my heartbeat increased in genuine panic. I realised, my rational self kicking in, that I had gotten so used to the tone before that it had become a temporary reality and this new, sudden aping of pitch had appeared to be a real
shift in what I knew to be true. Now I was not alone: the rise in pitch had a similar effect on the people around me, who looked at each other and grasped their hearts in the kind of shock you might get after a ride on a rollercoaster. They were looking at each other to see if their boyfriend, or the person they were going through this with, had experienced a similar feeling. But the pitch was still rising, and eventually it reached its plateau at a series of tones that to my ears seemed extremely loud, dangerously so, sickeningly so, to extent that I thought “They won’t get tinnitus but I will; I’ll be deaf and I’ll never be able to listen to music” so I rushed queasily to the toilets, closed the door and sat in the cubicle, having completely forgotten about Clara, about who I was, about everything.
          Luckily she joined me in the toilets, poking the toe of her moccasin? underneath the door. I had been breathing heavily, had hated even the recurring buzz when the main door swung open as she entered. I was sure I was going to vomit, so opened the toilet and stared down at the water, not heaving yet but with my head still swimming.
          It’s a good job I cut my hair because I doubt you’d do a very good job holding it back, I said to her, my voice wavering.
          She touched me to prove I was wrong. She touched my t-shirt, which was tight and faded, an off-white, almost yellow.
          I’m not going anywhere, she said. I’m not leaving you.
          She had used a coin to get in, I realised, hearing it drop into her pocket with a tut.
          Oy vey, I said. I think that music really did something to me. Aren’t you feeling it?
          I glanced up at her briefly. She was holding her hand over her temples as if she had a migraine.
          Yeah, she said. It’s bad. I don’t feel sick though. I’ve just got a pumping headache.
          Whose idea was it to come here, then? I joked.
          At least it had an effect, she said. All that experimental bullshit. It would have been too much if nothing happened.
          Her voice sounded lovely in the ambience of the bathroom.
          I’m glad you felt something, I said. I thought I was going mad.
          Didn’t you see everyone else in there? she asked. It was like they were at fucking IMAX.
          I sniggered and then coughed up bile in my mouth, swallowing it back down.
          Fuck, I said, looking up at her. Did you know they had this on tonight?
          No idea, she said, looking down at me with accusation. I wanted you to meet up with your band mates, your friends. I wanted to help you get back to something like normality. I feel bad about you.
          You can’t feel bad about me, you are me, I spat. You complete cunt.
          I started giggling at this.
          I held my head, thoughts swarming at my mind. She was me, I thought. What if she became separate? My mind was probably in a poor enough state to allow something like that to happen; where she would become not a manifestation of my mind but a “voice in my head” as it were – I would have little if any control over her.
          I held the side of the cubicle, lying diagonally across the toilet.
          That was called delusion, I told myself. And I wasn’t deluded.
          I felt a surge of pride to assert myself so boldly. Then I realised I might be lying in my own sick, so I stood up quickly, but there was only a drape of spittle, dripping into the bowl. I felt it looked adorable. It was woman’s spit, I told myself. Men spat on the railroad tracks in phlegmy gulps; women spat little white coins. So adorable. I shuddered a little with how pleased I was to have spat in a toilet.
          As I opened the cubicle door I wondered again what might have happened to Clara. She seemed quite sensitive, but then most people would be when you questioned their existence. I looked up at the box-windows letting less and less light in, the bluish porcelain tiles and the white sinks, the yellow bars of soap, the Dyson power-dryer, the black-brown floor. It was like a school toilet save for the Dyson; quite grotty. I imagined what a boy’s toilet might be like. Had I ever been in one? I heard a voice say Yes. It could have been Clara: it sounded either far away or simply quiet, under-the-breath. I was standing at one end of the cubicles. I told myself plainly what I would do. I would walk to the end of the cubicles, turn the corner and look, and if Clara was there I would have to admit that something in my mind had changed: either I wanted her to be there or she was, to some extent of her own accord. I began to walk, slowly, as if torturing myself like a child afraid to look up at the window at the top of his bedroom door in case a rotting head were there, or a man watching his every move. I tapped the doors to the cubicles, and although I had expected myself to move my head suddenly, I simply stepped out and looked.
          She was there, crouching down looking at something she had found on the floor, which was a fifty-pound note. She stood up and looked at me squarely, oblivious to the test I had played on her.
          Can you believe this stuff happens? she asked.
          No, I don’t believe it happens, I said. I think it’s a forged note.
          She dropped it on the floor and I picked it up for her.
          It’s real, she said.
          Weird, I said.
          Are you sure it didn’t fall out of your pocket?

After a generous round of drinks courtesy of the mystery fifty, Clara and I caught the tube home, apparently in much better spirits than before and much more prepared to get along. How I had squared it to myself was thusly: if she was slightly out of my control (I was positive I could still get rid of her very easily although I hadn’t tried it for the sake of simplicity between us, I didn’t want to hurt her), then that made her more interesting. If I couldn’t predict what she was going to do or say, or at least if my predictions were sometimes off, or she was moving faster than my mind, as if on a different track, my intuition or some kind of Freudian “true” version of myself, or my ideal or whatever, then that might also be interesting. In the middle of my train of thought she began to talk, bringing up Fiona, almost as if to prove a point, that of her own importance.
          It’s a terrible thing, she said.
          Yeah, I said bitterly, thinking immediately of myself, of my mother. It’s not the only terrible thing.
          I know, Clara said. But we’ve put so much thought into your mother. I mean, we’ve talked about her so much. Don’t you want to mull over that one day when you met Fiona?
          Well, I’ve done that quite a lot too, I said.
          But I’ve never heard it, she said.
          I sighed.
          Where I used to live, in XDerby, I began, we used to hang out at the ramps, the skatepark.
          I was talking loudly, and so some of the other passengers had turned their heads towards us ( /me).
          Ever since Thomas showed me the picture of her I’ve felt ripples of connections, to my past, to her, to that old life. She was so young when I knew her. I say I knew her but really it was only through friends of friends. I saw her once down the ramps, sitting up the top of the halfpipe, looking so beautiful, in the distance. She was so long-legged and untouchable. The boys must have loved her. She must have been fourteen at the time, full of such zest. I remember she came out dressed as a cheerleader once; she looked like something from a Hookups deck. That’s a skateboard reference. I was a lot older at the time but I had a short period of fascination with shooting photographs of the young skaters, not necessarily tricks but more to get a sense of the life they lead, which was complex and simple. These kids were just starting to fall in love properly, and I must say that in some ways I fell in love with her.
          I gave a small laugh and looked up to the heavens. Several faces were looking at me, almost breathing on me.
          I should have told Thomas really, perhaps it would have helped, I said. But I couldn’t bear the thought of verbalising what she meant to me. Especially not now that she is dead. Dead at seventeen, I said to my onlookers. Who’d a thunk it?











Whenever I cut my hair there was a strong feeling, similar to what the doctors had called mania, before. But it was not mania, I am convinced of that. Rather I think it came about from not having a cigarette in a while, and perhaps from not eating in a while. Although I was full up with water I felt a great and pure lightness, a weightlessness, and cutting the hair seemed to simply aid this excellent feeling. I stood in front of the mirror snipping away and seeing my face become clearer, more prominent and defined, and fell in love with my features all over again. To put my hands through my hair and find it short and easy was a feeling of profound simplicity, and I felt to walk down the street would bring everyone’s attention to me, for all the right reasons. Looking down at the carpet it was amazing to see how hair that felt so thick and full when attached sort of shrank when it was snipped, like tiny spawn shrivelling up and dying. Like the little warts or long moles of a dragon that shrivelled up on the carpet. Or tadpoles, I thought. There was still a lot of it there but now it was dead. And then I considered whether or not to hoover it up, at first deciding not to, that it was more spontaneous and perfect to leave it there, but then concluding that no, it wasn’t. It was more perfect to hoover it up and leave the house like nothing had happened, with the hair separate from me.

I felt bad about lying to the people on the tube, especially since they were real people.

[GIRL IN LIGHT BROWN LACE/ BEFORE OR AFTER ABOVE SENTENCE]

There was an eighteen-year-old girl in the hall that looked around fourteen. I had a feeling she was eighteen. She was wearing a light brown lace blouse, thin black tights and a white lace skirt with a black waistband, which she lifted to the side like a bird showing off its wingspan. She leant against the radiator against my series of printouts and magazine clippings, but this time they were her own images; mine had been replaced. There were a lot of articles about musicians, photographs, but none of me. There were posters of album covers I thought naive and sweet: the Strokes’ Angles and X. The choice of the Strokes may have been purely because she liked the cover, I thought, or simply because it was the newest album. I liked that she was asking no questions. A pearled Alice band crept through her clumped brown hair. She was bone thin. A framed series of photographs were on the floor near to her leg. She twirled quickly in order to watch her skirt spin out. Her eyebrows were bold. I watched her dance, her tights catching on the carpet and making a fricative noise as she turned. She had the whole place mapped out. It was as if silver duct tape squares were on the carpet, as if she were at the cabin she had her dance lessons in, a mug on the side near the sink. Her teacher was black and had kind eyes, but often she would get angry, when the steps were not performed correctly. She was quite bulky for a dance teacher but she was excellent with her limbs, as if she knew the steps so well she didn’t waste a single cell on them. My girl had taken this skill in her own direction. I watched her a little longer and then walked across the flat, thinking about retiring to bed. I had drunk so much coffee that I felt a disconnect from the objects around me. It felt like a luxury to go to bed. I lay down on my dark brown – mahogany brown! – covers and collapsed into sleep.

Chapter break

In my dream I was a new woman. I stalked the streets more vigorously now; I had confidence on my side. I was unafraid of the people that walked by me: children, old women dressed in navy with navy umbrellas. Nothing mattered. I felt the places I had been in all my drug-use crushing down on me. It wasn’t unpleasant. It was nothing. I could see a gate outside my primary school that I once examined when stoned, when I was fifteen. It was tall and black, the water fountain beyond it. A boy had once put stones in the water fountain so no one could drink from it. What was he doing now? I almost felt I knew. I felt shamanistic in that dream; I floated on my own self-knowledge. I could almost see people moving their arms, up on the field, and that meant something, but not to me. I could almost see a boy playing with a specific garden toy out in the garden, a bucket and spade, red and yellow; it was almost like a fragment, as if I could see only his limbs, this little boy. There was a sense of how kids act in summer, somewhere else, out in the streets. Water on the streets. Grey, then black, on the stones, long forks. I felt I knew everything. I had been here before.

When I woke up I walked over to my window and put on The Weeknd’s “The Zone” (2011) on my laptop, which sat on the table underneath. Outside it was pitch black. I had fallen asleep to early, six maybe, and now I was up in the middle of the night. It was a feeling both scary and extremely relaxing. Looking out I felt a part of the world, as if I was watching it sleep.

< The Dream Flat – On the Bed

It was as if I was having a crisis but watching it quite calmly as it happened. I lay on my bed and shuddered at the thought that the only things I had in the world were my music, the internet and myself. What else gave me pleasure? I had isolated myself from my friends, I had become very far away, generally. It was as if I could see my life’s years in colour up until now, the past year. But then, when I was being honest with myself – as I was, on the bed – I could see the years leading up to now as possessing an abstract greyness too. It felt like it should feel inevitable but it was a slightly queasy feeling as if I had made a choice after all. What made me sad – on that bed – was thinking about all the boyfriends, the friends, the days I’d had and now apparently I didn’t give a toss about them. It was like two versions of myself finally meeting up. One too innocent to even be appalled at what the other had become, which was me, the life I had sleepwalked into. That was what was so surprising. Even though I was doing exactly what I’d always wanted to, there was still a lingering sense that I had become abnormal, and not in a funny way but more in a deeply tragic way, as if I had distanced myself not from what made me human, but what I’d always liked: liking, really liking, someone else. Being in love. When would I get that back? I wondered. The question seemed ridiculous and with an obvious answer – When you want to, or When you’re ready. But that did not comfort me, because I did not know where to begin in order to feel “ready”, or indeed to feel much of anything at all.
          On the one hand all this was exciting. It was thrilling to be able to look back on memories with a kind of abandon, a kind of betterness, as if you had seen if all before, reached a peak. But I really wanted to love, that was what came jabbing at me in the ribs, and yet there was no one I could think of. That was it, obviously. You don’t just think of them. You get on with something and then they take you by surprise, not just knock you off your feet but completely devalue what came before. That’s love, I told myself. When you want to be them. When you want to fuck them on some secret level but the only level you know is of romantic slush, out in the field, and it makes masturbation seem seedy. A poor way of showing your love for them, even to yourself. You just want to talk to them or not. Perhaps all you really want to do is lie so your bodies touch. It’s their smell, that’s what it is. Memory and smell. It’s the smell of that field, it’s the smell of all the days. From my experience drugs can bring this smell back.

[Bess gets some?]
Cambodia visit?>

< I was in a vacant mood and so I scrolled through my collection – my hoard – of pictures in a folder on my computer I named “Art”. What I liked was the contrast and compliment between these disparate images I had dragged out of certain death, pulled from the wreckage of the internet. It was important for me to have the window at a size that only displayed the thumbnails in rows of four; I had since found that full-screening the mother was simply too much to look at. I suppose it in a similar sense that the classic band setup (drums, bass, guitar, vocals) is pleasant to most ears as it is just complex enough without being too complicated. Hence the success of the Beatles. I’m boring myself and you to tears.
          The first image was of some precious thing from Facebook; a friend of a friend (female) with beautiful, still eyes colour had been swept up and intensified in the light of the flash, a murky blue, her features simplified to a few, fleshy pencil strokes, overexposed, her hair spilling down behind her ears and in front, chocolate brown. I was not sure precisely what had made me save the image; often it was the colours alone. As long as there was not an offensive colour in the image (which I find most photographs are made up of) then I would often feel a pang of regret, imagining myself without this image, the missed chance. Perhaps it was her expression – confident, piercing and loveable.
          Next was a black-and-white photograph of experimental filmmaker Maya Deren staring out a window, her hands against the pane. There was something decidedly “arty-farty” about it that I liked but also the face that the angles in the image – vertical curtains obscured behind her, the reflection of a tree –seemed to bring to notice the wonderful sharpness of her nose and chin. There was a pensiveness in her gaze I enjoyed. I liked that no one I knew would like her films, that I was alone with her. I was on the other side of the window, the camera lens, the computer screen.
          Next were a few jpegs of Karen Kilimnik drawings: sketchy, girly things with Spanish and advertising slogans written next to finely-put, rough suggestions of beautiful girls. The text-influence was from Basquiat or seemed to have something of that lineage, but there was something so utterly perfect about the attention she paid to her female subjects, presumably torn from magazines. It was as if she knew exactly what made a woman beautiful, from vanity, an appreciation of female beauty or from simple instinct. She had rushed the shading of their dresses, and their hair was as rumpled and imperfect as real hair, but then the eyes were so delicately proportioned and fussy, and the collarbones, the shoulders, the eyebrows, the noses, the mouths so laboured over it looked as if she had spent two minutes on the business around the face and twenty on the details that mattered, I suppose what you could call the feminine signifiers. Or the beauty signifiers. I loved that.
          Then the 1964 Livre de Poche edition of André Breton’s Nadja: something I have always loved and wished I owned. Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all. A sketch in brown or aged pencil of Nadja, presumably, a heart with A3 and her name written inside making up her nose, as if carved into a tree, a chin becoming triangular like the point of a pencil and then a hand, upside-down, bold, a cut-out of a tracing, an honest drawing that seems to be a part of the curly-haired beauty. A black background.
          That was a single row of 1,787 of my precious images, and they were precious, are still, except now they rank in the hundreds of thousands, each folder a town that houses my city of influence. My visual dream. My love.
          I love pictures so much.>

< Something about listening to the second take of Bill Evans’ “Detour Ahead” from the Village Vanguard recordings (1961) whilst looking at a picture of Elle Fanning from a Marc by Marc Jacobs campaign made me extremely calm, even classy-feeling. Following the bluntness of my family (my band) I felt a need to retire to my room and surround myself in things I knew were beautiful. The girl was. Elle Fanning wore a deep red, floral, loose-fitting dress, a cadmium red bag which she clutched with her impossibly thin, young wrists, demonstrating a gorgeous gold, black wristwatch that made her look so mature. She leant against a Xsilverbirch tree, staring at the camera with the eyes of a child who is brilliant before her time, her hands clasping the strap or her heart, a strand of straw-blonde rebelling softly onto her face. Something about her; the way she held herself or was dressed, made me desire a daughter. It was the first time I had ever felt broody not in the sense that “It would be nice” or “When he’s ready” but in an aggressive way, one that caused me to have flashes of empathy to women that leave the country with their one-night-stand’s baby to bring him or her up on their own. Perversely it was not that I desired a wailing red baby, but a young girl, only just a teenager, who I assumed I would take and mould into a more perfect version of myself. I wanted someone, in essence, who I could have a conversation with. If I brought the girl up watching the right films, reading the right books and asking the right questions, how could I fail? I considered adoption. Even if I got back with David he wouldn’t want to. But then how unlikely to find the perfect child out in the world! I realised at that point she could only ever exist in my mind. It would take a change of mind or a change of contraception to achieve what I wanted.>

Eventually I began to spend the money in my account. Without thinking about it I donated two-hundred thousand to Oxfam. Not knowing how to go about it I simply emailed their main contact address (giving@oxfam.org.uk) with this message, which I have to this day in my outbox:

Dear Sir/Madam,

My name is Bess Hayes. I’m a musician. I’m not sure how to go about this but I offer you £200,000 for your charity. This is not a joke.

Yours faithfully,
Bess Hayes

I was in a daze as I typed, sitting on the floor of my living room, giddy with the thought of my own generosity. I had no idea what kind of impact it would have on the charity but what was money? I only paid a thousand a month for the flat and the label had me on a retainer of fifty-thousand a year anyway. I didn’t even know why. Perhaps they felt I was an integral part of the band. They were paying me to be alive, in the hope I would return from the grave. It was a crazy thing. Once I sent the email I began to laugh hysterically, so I lit a cigarette to calm myself. I lay down on the living room carpet and stroked it, watching my thin fingers dig into its surface. And then, as if I was being tossed from God’s hands to the Devil’s, I began to think of all the other things I could spend my money on, which stood at something like £514,466 last time I checked, take the two-hundred grand I just splurged, although those final four numbers could have been anything. Just thinking about those numbers made me laugh until I choked a little, full of happiness, mania, sheer sickness. I would buy a cat. The most perfect cat, a bronze-gold cat. A pedigree or whatever it was for cats, whatever a well-bred cat was called. No, fuck it, I told myself. I would get four. I love the number four. I had visions of gold jewellery. I could doll myself up like a Klimt painting; walk around the flat like an Egyptian goddess. First I would get some of that woman’s china so I could pour out the polystyrene pieces on the carpet and see if that changed something in me! That was the starter. Anything could be the main. Clothes. Records. Instruments. Drugs. There I stopped. I hadn’t thought about drugs, and the idea that I was too unhinged not to overdose on deliciousness really got to me. I tasted the memory of cocaine on my teeth from all those months ago in that member’s-only club the Throne. What about my kids? Didn’t I want a house for them? I didn’t have a husband or anyone who could even fit the bill. I had no friends. I was alone in my thoughts. I had finally isolated myself completely. When I was sixteen would I have cared so much about this money? I started to cry. If I told anyone I knew about this, about how I had become they would treat me like a monster. That was why there were member’s-only clubs – so they could protect the secret of their wealth. It was Hell, I thought. I thought of Louis Vuitton bags, Rolex watches and Chanel dresses. It was heaven. Deranged heaven.
          I would have to be conservative with what I spent. I would coordinate gorgeous outfits. I would support small British labels. I would create the kind of classic looks I had always dreamed of. I would buy all the records I had always wanted. I would buy all the books everyone said you needed to read and read them, one by one. And a Kindle. Like my mother.
          And then I was crying again, or rather trying to make myself cry, to appease her memory. My body convulsed in small, confused movements. Lying on my side I lit another cigarette. After the cigarette I would sleep this madness off. The veil had dropped and it was too much for me. Perhaps it was putting on the veil that had disturbed me. I could buy an expensive veil and wear it. The real of my desire. When I woke up I would have some clarity. I didn’t even have to give Oxfam anything. I hadn’t signed anything. I could buy a house.

On the floor I dreamt of family. I dreamt of my Elle Fanning daughter and hot cross buns. I sang to her. I kept trying to explain something complex to her, and I got the feeling – very pronounced in spite of sleep – that she thought I was a charlatan, that all these words coming from my mouth were meaningless, and that her generation would come up with something better in an instant. But that was her, I told myself – after I had stared at her without moving my eyes for several minutes – that was the way she was. That was the mother in her, I thought. I began to speak, saying, You remind me of your grandmother sometimes. And she laughed it off in a girlish giggle and picked up a bun. She knew what had happened to her grandmother and she knew very well that it could happen to her own mother, but she never brought it up, out of politeness or fear.
          In my dream I began to feel that my daughter could be afraid of something else; the way she moved and the shape of her eyes made me feel something else could be wrong and I got a sudden suspicion – almost as if based on the map of another dream – someone was in the other room. The living room. Already she had rushed towards me and leant into my hip, aware of everything, and I held her head. It was Clara in the other room, and she had been here before. She had taken it to herself to come over, over and over again she used the key she had or invited herself in (I couldn’t be sure which). She just sat in the living room and smoked, waiting for us to come out so she could put us down or “tell us the truth” as she called it. But her truth was warped and fractured. At least I know that, I told myself. At least I know not to trust her, and I’m pretty sure I’ve told B—. not to trust her. That was her name in the dream, a simple sensation to do with “B” and to do with gold, for in truth she had not been named and had been made to settle for a series of names, or rather a feeling, like a hidden person in a realist novel at the turn of the century. Such was her beauty that she didn’t mind and perhaps that’s what the letter stood for. In the dream I didn’t know. I stared out the kitchen door imagining Clara’s head suddenly sweeping into view. After some scared minutes holding B—.‘s hand I decided to venture forth into the next room, moving forward inch by inch. She resisted at first, my little girl, but eventually she realised it was necessary to settle it once and for all, if only in my mind. She appeared to possess incredible, unstated foresight, almost as if I’d had this dream before and she could remember being in it, or perhaps this was her life and she lived it whether I was present or not. But we made it to the door – a cuckoo clock hanging in the alcove between the two rooms, as in my mother’s house – and stepped onto the living room carpet.
          Clara was there, but standing up, quite unlike I’d expected, no cigarette to be found. She had red eyes – little dots steaming out of her pupils – and was dressed in whites and greys. She stood with her head hanging forward slightly, as if considering what she was about to do, but her expression was one of fury and impatience, like a soldier before battle. It was as B—. let go of my hand – well practiced in running away – that the woman ran towards me. When she neared me she plunged something into my gut, although I hadn’t seen a knife on her. [Like a knife but softer] When Clara raised her head to look at me as I died she licked her lips seedily, like a man, like a snake and like a damned creature.

It took me quite a while to get over my dream. Seeing this old woman version of Clara was so disturbing that I worried I would see her differently when she turned up. But for a long while she didn’t, and I was left alone to think about how to phrase what I saw in her, in the dream, that I thought it was more of an amalgamation of imagery, and nothing to do with her. The speed with which I leapt to her defence gave me confidence that what I planned to say was true, but then perhaps that confidence was merely a mask for a new kind of fear, or at least disillusionment, with her. I sat on the settee staring at the blank screen of the television (I hadn’t turned it for twelveX weeks now) until she came.
          When she did turn up it was business as usual. She walked into the room and sat down next to me and I felt she wanted to hold hands, as if she knew about the dream and wanted to apologise, but how could she know anything? She just wanted to join in with what she perceived as a game: my pretending to watch television. After a moment she raised her hands as if holding a racing wheel for a video game and, disturbed, I left the living room for the kitchen, asking if she wanted a glass of water.

Time

Time became a mystery in that flat. “A wide-open dungeon of flat joy” was how I described it in my notebook, when I could be bothered to write in it. Most of the time the notebook was a source of overwhelming complexity and confusion for me. It was painful to read the state of mind of another person entirely, and especially confusing to read about our success; it was as if it had never happened. The idea of my small fortune in the bank became yet another mystery I would occasionally put to myself, and eventually I ended up believing I had simply been blessed, that anyone’s bank account had the capacity for these numbers and something out there had decided that mine deserved to be in six-digits. One particular day I thought I had cracked it, the reason for my luck: that I had defended a girl against bullying in primary school, a girl that picked her nose and quoted Titanic. When I realised I had never known that girl, that she was simply part of a story David had told once, I broke down and accepted there was something deeply wrong with me.
          But I did not seek outside help. For a while I felt that it was quite outrageous that they hadn’t sent anyone, any psychiatrists or doctors to take my temperature and listen to my heart (through “headphones” as I kept calling them) and mend me, that somehow the fact I had been left alone meant I had to be alone, if only to prove that society, friends and family really didn’t care in the end. I was making a point to no one but myself. It was a matter of some time – days, weeks? I can’t be sure – before I remembered the reason no one had come to look for me was because I had shut myself away, and that no one knew where I was.
          I eventually began to wish it was like it was before; when I felt everyone knew where I lived, when I was paranoid, when I thought of myself as desirable. Now I was something entirely different; a quivering wreck, I suppose, a completely different manifestation of guilt and horrible success, loneliness and irrelevance. It disturbed me continually how much of myself had died along with my mother, as if all this time I had deluded myself so successfully, with such devious cruelty, into believing I was a real person. In fact I was only my mother’s daughter, and all that was left now she was gone was a kind of primordial person, a kind of paste trying to stand up in the hall. But in spite of this I did not hate myself. In fact I learnt of the beneficial nature of delusion, of living in such a selective manner, with such a short attention that I had no choice to go on. It was as if through sheer forgetfulness I was able to forget who she was, as if this was a survival mechanism with me throughout all time. The more brutally I ignored recent memories of her supporting the band, visiting the cinema or even shouting at me over the phone, the easier it was to cast her into oblivion.

----

I had written nine new songs. It seemed to me that the most enjoyable thing I could do was to select nine images to accompany the songs: Polaroids of models, seventeen-year-old girls and a picture of Sylvia Plath wearing a cardigan that reminded me of my own. The problem was that I didn’t know how I felt about these songs. I hadn’t written them in the way I used to; before I would simply listen to what David had produced and feel something, and write it down, grappling with something so complicated that I ended up with something rich that we call art. Now it felt like all I was doing was making tongue-in-cheek thought experiments. In “Tripped Me Up” I sampled Ill Ease. In “Flat Grey” I sampled one of David’s guitars. In “Small White” I sampled a Jaco Pastorius bass note. In “No” I sampled Avey Tare and Kría Brekkan’s “Lay Lay Off, Faselam”. In “Smith” I sampled Patti Smith saying “Boy was in the hallway drinking a glass of tea; from the other end of the hallway a rhythm was generating” from “Land”. In “From Work” I sampled Bon Iver’s “Minnesota, WI”. In “Y P Kst Un” I sampled Bill Evans and Micachu. In “Bolaño” I sampled Daniel Alarcón reading Roberto Bonaño’s “Gómez Palacio” for the New Yorker Fiction Podcast. And finally, in “X” I sampled Y. I wasn’t proud of these songs but I suppose I was proud to have been true to a moment, even if that moment had been riddled with failure. I was analysing a kind of life where people had made a decision to make music. Stealing just as Stravinsky had told me to all those years ago when I read that “Good composers borrow, great composers steal”: a printed quote in my homework diary at secondary school. I no longer knew what anything meant.
         
It was necessary to start again. I uploaded the songs to YouTube with their accompanying images without a second thought. Some were more serious compositions, some were jokes. Some were minimal techno, some hip hop. The important thing was that I had done something on my own.

[Notepad doc]

How else to start again? I answered myself in these ways:
          I bought a new computer with Windows 7 – lucky number 7, I thought – as the old one, my laptop, was riddled with viruses from searching for pornography of pretty boys that reminded me of David. Later I trashed the hard drive with a meat tenderizer I had found in one of the kitchen drawers and never used.
          £679.
          I bought a brand new large black Moleskine notebook from W H Smiths with what I imagined to be my mother’s blessing. I kept it up to date with my thoughts and feelings and filled it with images that seemed perfect to me, young girls with undeveloped faces.
          £15.99.
          I bought three new outfits from Margaret Howell: a supersoft twill white Alice shirt, a moss Donegal slipover and a pleated wool linen navy gym skirt; a heavy corduroy warm stone work blazer, a heavy corduroy chestnut chino skirt and a raglan loopback marl grey t-shirt; a drop waist modern crepe black shirt dress.
          £1,765.
          I considered moving out of the flat, but after some deliberation (without Clara) I realised my survival depended on staying here. To move out would be too easy and besides, the view was good. The key thing was to tidy up the rooms. To this end I bought a Dyson vacuum cleaner and got to work sucking up nail clippings, pieces of mud and cigarette ends. I’m spring cleaning, I said to myself. I had to sit down on the bed because I was laughing so hard. I felt like I was doing a poor imitation of a domestic goddess and it cracked me up, but I never lost sight of the importance of cleaning the flat. I used the waste disposer in the sink to destroy all the uneaten meals I had left to rot in piles. I destroyed all plates, bowls and mugs with the meat tenderizer and put the pieces calmly in a bin bag, and then I took the bin bag to the park and chucked it into a litter bin. As I sat on the bench smoking a cigarette after the cleaning experience I felt elated and wiped clean myself.

The main process had not yet been set in motion, which was to follow through with my promise to donate two-hundred thousand pounds to Oxfam. As I tapped my pencil on the open Moleskine after writing the figure down I thought that it might be better to give them two-hundred and fifty thousand pounds, since that was closer to half my savings – an idea that pleased me – and because no one in the world needed more than quarter of a million pounds. How ridiculous to want anything more than that, I thought. I didn’t think about whether the label would stop giving me money or that my fortune wasn’t stationary and would have to be spent at some point. I simply knew that it was more money than most people in the global mud could dream of – this is how I put it in my notebook, still a bit batty – and therefore I was still guilty to have it at all. I thought briefly about giving the whole lot away to Oxfam, but then who was to say I should give it all to one particular charity? No, I countered. To split the money up would be like splitting up siblings; it would have to be a lump sum or it wouldn’t have enough effect. I wanted the money to be like a tank that came to protect them, not a fucking picnic hamper. A quarter of a million would do.
         

Cambodia

I made my way to Cambodia again on the Friday. As it happened they had turned Fridays into a night of black music, and so instead of the fidgety house and broad genre sweeps we were all used to by then the night played out as a kind of history, from work songs to the Harlem Renaissance to Motown to Parliament to hip hop, modern R&B and grime. At first I found it a little contentious and contrived, but as the night wore on and Miles Davis’ “Pharaoh’s Dance” began to play I began to think it was quite an inspired idea. For a moment I wondered if they wouldn’t play Bitches Brew in its entirety and I began to think of the trance that album put me into and of the house, and of David, who in spite of everything – I had another jolt of realisation about my mother – still haunted my thoughts. I was sitting on the settee near the creepy mannequins at the back in the quiet area. My thoughts drifted. As “Pharoah’s Dance” crashed into itself and mutated I realised the world was mine. “Footsteps in the Dark” melted into J Dilla instrumentals into Madvillain’s “Accordion” into Kanye West’s “Devil in a New Dress”. In short, it was a backpacker’s banquet. These were just the tracks I recognised.
          It was velvet hip hop, the best. It had been a long time since I’d listened to any – too long – and it reminded me what I loved about the genre; the fact it was a boy’s game. It was the sound of boys hanging out together, a continual form of life. And there was something quite timelessly manly in the best hip hop. It was an eloquent, elaborate mating call of excess and twisted earth. The oral tradition. All this was waffling though my head as David approached me.
          He sat down next to me.
          I love this song, he said. I also love the video. It’s black guests dining with white servants. That’s how the world should be. Endless slavery. Sadomasochism under the stars.
          He leant over, trying to kiss me.
          I can’t believe you, I said.
          My heart was beating like crazy. I was staring at him as is he had something on his face.

More please sir...
----

I sat on my bed stroking the back of my hair. For a moment I had pretended the back of my hair was somehow to do with my cat, but I got rid of that idea. I was stroking the back of my hair simply because it was something that calmed me.
          I began to wonder why New York seemed to mean so much to me, or at least enough to call my music project by that name. I had certainly seen plenty of films set in New York and read a lot of literature about it. It was iconic. Perhaps it was even the centre of the world. The Age of Innocence. A man in a flat-cap walks by followed by a woman in black with a taught face and platinum hair wearing furs. A sense of things being gold. There was so much yellow in New York that it could only end up being gold. London was black, white and red. It was bloody. It was a black-and-white film. New York had necklaces in windows and crystals hanging on washing lines that swept from one set of windows to the next. A taxi-driver wearing a bundle of pearls because it was safer for him to be wearing what he had stolen earlier. You never got any of that in London.
          I still loved London and I would probably come back here – I was 90% I would live here. Come back here? I asked. Since when was I going to New York? But then I started to consider Charndeep in those streets, those absolute wigwams. Lovely people. I would buy a paper and look at the font of the New York Times. It wasn’t the one and only Times but it had more gold in it than any other. I wanted some breakfast at Tiffany’s. A big breakfast of eggs, bacon, sausages, tomato, fried bread and black pudding near a huge diamond crochet. Oh yes, Bessie. That was the life. America was calling. Was it? I felt like I wanted to pick up the phone and tell someone, or at least ask their opinion, but I had seen the way Sarah looked at me at the last supper, not hatefully but simply as I was: redundant. She had enough money coming in I assume, although not as much as David and I. We each had thirty percent shares in the royalties. She and John had twenty. That’s because they were fucking idiots, and there’s not a whole lot you can do about that in the end.
          If I was planning to move to New York it would mean I would have to move forward towards the computer, turn it on, open Chrome and type “flights from London to New York” into Google. In a moment of excitement I leapt forward and did just that.
          Eight hours and three minutes. That was all it took. British Airways, of course, I told myself. I clicked, typed in my details and let the idea roll to the back of the bed.
          £3,926.65
          First Class, eh? I said.
          You’re going to be living it up, I replied to myself in a northern accent.
          I know, I said.
          A fourteen-hour wolf.
          I know. What does that mean?
          Forty-two fifty. Faggot. Uncle.
          Shut up.
          Bess, you’re going to have a really great time, you know. I’m getting literally giddy just thinking about all that you could do there. And on the first day! Once you get off the flight it’s just money, money, money. And all you do is use it to get from one checkpoint to the next, one hedge and over the next, like a maze without any challenge. A life lived. Oh yes, my darling, Bess. You gorgeous one. You pretty cunt.
          Thanks, I said.
          It was incredible to think of everything I could do once I was there. Just to step off and be on American ground! It was astonishing and I felt my heart race. On the first day I could have just walked up and down Manhattan and that would have been good enough for me. Just touching newspapers at newspaper stands and knowing it was American paper, that would have been good enough for me. Seeing American people, so used to being American, so used to being blessed, to being angels with complex, earthy, rich lives with the right colours that they were jaded. I would be stunned that they could be that over being the purest, the freshest new page of any race, the youngest and most talented child in the world’s family. I could kiss a Jew and bite the nose of a gorgeous black transvestite on the lower east side. I would shop at the shops God shopped at. I could forget all about poverty...
          ...But that was the thing! I had earned it! I had earned the right to forget the world’s troubles because I had given Oxfam that delicious lump sum. I had put a bookmark in their whole enterprise. I couldn’t possibly have any guilt now. I would walk around New York wearing amazing British clothes, my Margaret Howell outfits, and people would stop and say, Where did you get those from? And I would say, London, England. And they would nod and make a face of general approval. I might even help Howell along. She was a God in herself. I had seen on their website how pretty she was.
          The flight was due to leave at eight-thirty the next morning, and so I had some waiting to do. It would only take an hour at the most to get to Gatwick. I would get to the airport early and enjoy the idea of travel, look at the gorgeous people sleeping in the airport. Sleepy Village as David had once called them. It made me sad to think of him, but the feeling was so brief it was genuinely motivating to think of how far I’d come. Sleepy Village. I had around nine hours to wait and even then I knew I would stay up all night awaiting my new destiny.

I read snippets from whatever was lying around. I realised I would have to say goodbye to most of my books and the thought made me rather sad indeed, but there was nothing to stop me paying the rent on the flat and leaving all my mess here, if only to have the luxury of coming back to it when I decided to return, whether that was weeks, months or years. The key thing to remember was that I could afford to do all this. If it so happened that I felt it was not worth spending thousands to save the emotional value of the dog-eared-ness of the books then I would simply buy new copies and invest new love in those. Fuck it. I could buy signed first-editions if I really wanted to. The thought of that made me giddy again.
          I took the entire Proust, Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, the entire Seamus Heaney and a tiny red copy of
Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son with German in it. I took Ali Smith’s The First Person and Other Stories because I really liked the cover, Paul Auster’s Moon Palace, ZZ Packer’s Drinking Coffee Elsewhere and the entire T S Eliot. I took Lydia Davis’ Collected Stories, thinking of my mother. I took Bolaño’s 2666, Paul Edwards’ How to Rap and the entire Nicola Barker. I took Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Dorothy Molloy’s Hair Soup, my old black Moleskine and my new black Moleskine.
          I took two records: Loveless and Bitches Brew.
          Looking around the flat I found a Louis Vuitton suitcase that I didn’t remember buying. The object’s presence surprised me so aggressively that I considered not going to New York. How bad was I that I could not remember spending five-hundred pounds on a suitcase? Was I still living slightly above myself? It made me have a dizzying turn. I stood up from looking under the bed and suffered a head rush. Then, laughing, I picked up the suitcase, opened it, and began placing the books gently inside. There was plenty of room for my other two outfits and four pairs of shoes. The new computer would have to stay here.
          It’s been short and sweet, I said, blowing it a kiss.
          I realised then that the only thing the computer was to be used for was booking the ticket. Now its purpose had been served I didn’t really need to worry about it. I would buy another computer in New York. Anything I fucking wanted.

Because I had now defined the computer’s only purpose I had no choice but to leave it. I was not allowed even allowed to touch it in order to shut it down, and so I set about making preparations to enjoy my last night in my dream flat, in London, on this planet. I made toast to start and boiled the kettle and poured myself some tea. I ate both, and although I was dying for a cigarette I simply help off, because although the baby might like tea and toast, it was not yet a smoker. That was certain.
          For the rest of the night I gazed at my bedroom ceiling, the mottled white waves. From where I was situated I could see a sliver of the window and the black night sky. There was the branch of a tree, or a leaf, or some dash of very dark green, but other than that only the white and the black.

I thought my excitement had peaked on the airport bus to Gatwick. I listened to music and it all seemed to be calling me home. This is the music you always listened to, it was saying. We know you well and we know what you’re doing. We wish you luck, but we’ll still be with you. You can put us on whenever you want.
          More excitement awaited me, however, at the airport itself. I walked through Sleepy Village looking at these amazing people, whole families, with delayed flights or long nights, drifting off to an abstract sleep of movement, their dreams always in the knowledge that they were going elsewhere. It was so beautiful, so needed, that I almost wept, there, in Gatwick. Instead my eyes only watered. I thought of my mother in a heaven not unlike that of an airport, everyone in sleeping bags, everyone chattering in sleepover talk, everyone not happy but in the process of living, that is, sometimes sad and often with a problem. Willing to detail it. That was what kept us alive.

I grabbed a coffee and read Molly’s soliloquy, completely absorbed. Outside the sun was just coming up – like someone bringing a slide projector into a dusty room, a sudden brightness.
          I ate a Ploughman’s Panini and Jesus Christ was it delicious. I sat there scribbling in my Moleskine about Sleepy Village and how much I loved everyone in the airport like the deranged, full, sleepy, nicotine-starved mother-to-be I was. I tell you what, reader. I liked it.

When the flight to JFK Airport, Queens, began boarding I was feeling ever-so-slightly crashy, but as I queued I bought a can of Diet Coke and drank it. I stood there, my legs buckling from the joy of caffeine, of my whole life, of my decisions, and pretended to want to be one of those puppets in the Diet Coke ads that are really quite adorable, really chic little puppets. For God’s sake! I was an expected mother wearing Margaret Howell in Gatwick on her way to New York. I held my child. I couldn’t feel him or her particularly – the weight wasn’t quite there yet, or else I imagined the pull had changed more than it had – but I definitely felt pregnant. I felt different.
          The woman checking our passports – and how good is the British Passport design? It almost makes you want to stay – was black, which I thought was really perfect. I almost wanted to congratulate her; I was so pleased that this whole thing matched my fantasy completely.

On the plane the fantasy became more real. I was sat next to a larger man with a copy of Nuts magazine against his chest on one side, sleeping, and a Southeast Asian woman with a baby against her chest on the other. The cabin was remarkably quiet.
          Although I told myself continuously to give it a rest, I watched the woman’s baby incessantly. He or she looked only a few months old and was turned away from me, a slick of black hair on the head, a hand grasping occasionally for the shape of something, perhaps a necklace or bra strap. The strange thing – looking at this baby, which I immediately pretended was Cambodian – was how easy and natural it was to be intoxicated by a baby. It was all very well seeing laughing babies on television banging their hands against highchairs – all actors, all idiots – but to see the calm of a real baby was profoundly normal. It was as if throughout time we had learnt to see the truest meaning of a baby, from tribes, from when it had rained in Africa and there had been good news and condensation on leaves, from our oldest parents, and that it was a meaning we knew in our bones and in our skin, in everything that made us.
          It was a little like John’s kitten in a way. I had loved meeting that thing first off, and I had liked playing with it occasionally. A supposedly fun kitten on television would never match the fun of a real one biting your finger. A baby was not only the ultimate pet but somehow the real, after all the training grounds we had walked through, after all the nightmares we had had. Now the new nightmare, and the new dream, was a baby. It was the baby that grew inside us. The baby that could sting us through our stomachs like a wasp. The nightmare baby. The only baby.
          Thinking all this heavy rubbish made me nod off, and I had a cool four hours sleep before my neighbour’s baby started crying wildly and I woke up, holding my own stomach, stupidly.
          The woman tried desperately to make the baby stop crying but that baby was fired on its own arrogance. That baby thought it was king of the world and deserved everything the cabin crew could throw at him or her. That baby didn’t want to suckle. That baby didn’t want to read Nuts magazine – the man didn’t offer, that was only in my head. That baby was wailing as if it had had its leg cut off.
          I looked knowingly at the woman, although I knew nothing at all.
          She nodded at me in a way that made me feel her English was not brilliant.
          I looked at the seat in front, at an advertisement. I was so tired, but still up for New York. How could I not be?
          Out of the corner of my eye I saw the woman jerk her head back and then she said,
          Can you look... after her?
          On some level I had known as soon as I got onto the plane that I would have to hold the baby at some point.
          Yes, I said. Of course.
          The woman nodded at me gratefully and headed down the cabin to the toilet.
          The baby had calmed down now, but she was sniffling and now her mother had left she felt like a warm bomb about to go off. I pulled her head onto my jacket and immediately began to worry that corduroy was too tough a surface for a baby’s eyebrow not to get scratched off on. Weirdly, the baby almost felt asleep on me.
          When the mother got back from the toilet she clapped hands together quietly.
          Do you have one? she asked.
          I took one of my hands away from the baby’s head, nodded and pointed at my stomach.
          You’re wonderful mother, she said.

After the high of holding the baby had settled down I opened Ulysses again, randomly, and started to read little chops of the brothel scene. All of Stephen and Bloom’s hallucinations came back to me, and with a smell that I realised was of the Goldsmiths library, back in London. Somehow the words had carried that smell across editions, as I never stole from libraries. I thought I missed my city then, but I was only pre-empting missing it, I realised. I was just preparing myself.
          Thinking about what the woman had said I realised it could also be, “Your wonderful mother”. I liked that so much and felt so strongly that my mother would be proud of me, that quite without thinking, I crossed myself.




















What was so strange was that we were all at the beginning of the century together, as if staring at a giant monster to be defeated.