Pulp Review by Andrew Irwin

pulp re vie w 2014

5 7/38 15/37 17 23 27 28 31 33 41

Peter Zahnd, Stairwells Emma Hinds, Kitty Evans/The Plight of the Wicked Nora Keller, Sister Snake/Dog Days Andrew Irwin, Embodied Anna Samson, A Sheet of Paper Éadaoín Lynch, Diotima/Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought Ilinca Vanau & Livia Marinescu, Ephemera Claudia Daventry, L’Autrichienne India Doyle, Monopoly B. T. Joy, The White House on Wachter

stairwel l s by pe t er z ahnd

illustration: EMILS GEDROVICS 4

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Stairwells Above the granite echoes of footfalls lowering, Whirring into slow erosion down A slant in the half-hewn garden Path; above the comings and goings of guests, stepping out Of rooms and into themselves, gathering Their voices round the broken, cross-legged song Of a community Above the shifting architectures of life The oak door opens with a fond low wail. Trod again, the withered crimson of the tiles Claps like sun-scorched stone lapped by water. Dust in the pale light sways and Dances at the new approach; years of distant Living smoothed the room into a relic. Some final pious rays still cast A veil, sepulchral, haggard, on the wall And the worn-out frescoes. The dusk at times Ignites them with a burning orange glow, And character on character revived from dimness Courts or hunts among their heraldries; Until the limping of the days obscures Their eye into a sleepless drowse. Season after season the bedside flowers drop A rice-paper petal, wrinkled like the hand That picked them by a river where the water made her song Against the stone. Years of distant grieving Have relegated life to some other place.

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ANNA O’CONNOR 6

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KI T T Y EVA NS EMMA HINDS

never do actual hairstyles in assembly. All of Kitty’s friends ended up doing the same simple thing: sitting, admiring the way the gentle pull of gravity unfurled Kitty’s magical hair.

Kitty Evans had the best hair in school. It was straight and nearly black, falling right down beyond her shoulder blades. She always wore it with a velvet headband that reminded Martha of Snow White, and never tied it up, not even at playtime. When Kitty hit the ball in rounders and ran, Martha would watch her hair follow her, waving, like a cape or a flag. Kitty would allow whoever sat behind her in assembly the unique chance to play with her hair. The girls would braid it and comb it, pushing each other aside with bossy condemnations. They held their hair pins in their mouths and clucked their tongues in the way they had seen hairdressers do in the local salons. Martha had never been to a salon, but she understood them to be full of frustrated people. Swapping hair accessories was forbidden. The teachers said it was because of ‘the great nit outbreak of 2002’ so they could

One fateful Thursday an unexplained nosebleed allowed Martha the chance to play with Kitty’s hair. Miss Lloyd rushed Alex Slater out of their class line, a bloody paper towel clamped over his face, and told them all to shuffle up. Martha slid her bottom along the floor towards Kitty Evans in trepidation. Kitty peeked around, and then tossed her hair over her shoulder. Martha slowly picked up a piece of the hair and ran it between her two fingers. It was thick like a horse’s tail. She fiddled, unsure, and began separating it into heavy sections like she had seen the other girls do. Martha knew there was some sort of twisting technique to be done (Kitty’s friend Joanna Green was an expert) but Martha couldn’t make the pieces hang together.

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Martha stared straight into the bright light of the overhead projector bulb, waiting for her vision to go orange and fuzzy and the rash on her neck to de-flame. She was allergic to embarrassment. She sat in the left over puddles of laughter like a guilty puppy. Long after the other children had returned to their stupor, Martha could feel the accusation clinging to her – hot and sticky. She had not been looking at her underwear, she wanted to stand up and say. Just saying it inside her head made her belly twirl like a corkscrew and her eyes prickle, she had not been doing that. But then she would have to admit to knotting Kitty’s hair, and they were not supposed to play with each other’s hair because of the nits. Martha thought about nits instead. There had been a whole assembly about how they could not only jump between the heads of two idle little girls having a sleepover, but about how they might swing like monkeys between free flowing locks of hair, infecting a whole class in a matter of minutes. Everyone had to wear their hair tied back now. Everyone except Kitty. Martha thought that maybe Kitty’s hair was just too shiny for nits. She imagined them gliding of the soft strands, helpless as their tiny lice claws scrabbled, unable to grip or prevent their fall.

Her hands moved in a wild, haphazard way, flicking parts of Kitty’s hair over itself, in an attempt at least to look the part. She began to panic. Kitty usually sat like a patient dog when these grooming sessions went on, but as Martha frantically twiddled her hair, she flinched. Immobile, Martha watched in horror as Kitty scooped her curtain of hair over her shoulder and began to comb it like a mermaid. Putting her pink mouth close to the ear of Joanna Green, she whispered something. Joanna Green glanced back with a look of disgust. Martha felt a blush starting in her inner ear. She tried not to watch Joanna Green leaning over to Tara Spence. Instead she burrowed her face into her school skirt. The aggravated whispering increased. Hissing like an approaching snake, she heard the word ‘knots’. She wanted to tell them that her Nana had short, old hair and fingers that hurt when it rained, too much to do her hair properly. She wanted to shout at them that she didn’t have a big sister to teach her how to braid, even though she knew what they would say. If you didn’t have a big sister or a mother to teach you, then your ballet teacher or riding instructor would instead. Martha didn’t want anyone to know she didn’t have those either. She rubbed her face against the coarse material of her school skirt. It was scratchy. ‘Martha Bales, stop looking at your underwear at once!’ The headmistress’s voice cut through her thoughts. Martha whipped her head up and clamped her knees shut, her face still scratchy. The assembly laughed and looked around, thousands of grinning teeth. The girls either side of Martha shuffled away so their sweaty knees no longer rubbed hers.

Thursday was a bad day to be out of favour with Kitty Evans. After assembly Martha’s class were going on a trip to the Pettigrew museum and a school trip only meant one thing: partners. Since Martha was the only one without a partner, she had the onerous task of being the partner of Mrs Hall, the elderly classroom assistant who needed help with her walking. Mrs Hall remembered meeting Mr Churchill in Hyde Park when she was a child and she talked about it all the time. Martha thought she was slow and smelled like

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could feel the excruciating climb of the redness in her cheeks. She tried to concentrate on the animals instead, staring into the moth cabinet and trying to not feel the hot clammy warmth of the sweat from Mrs Hall’s underarm. The moths reminded her of the enlarged picture of a nit she saw in assembly – his tiny legs scrawling from a fat tummy and head. Her Nana said that every person swallowed twenty insects a year. Martha could imagine the bitter taste of a moth body, fur tickling the gums and wings crumbling like rice paper. ‘Hurry up Martha, stop dawdling please!’ Miss Lloyd called from the farthest end of the museum. The class had assembled around a small display table. ‘Maybe she’s looking at her pants again,’ a girl sneered. Martha’s gaze hovered above the wall of small, pleased faces, a sharp ringing in her ears. Mrs Hall walked. Every step made Martha tighten up inside. She felt she was hanging limp off the old woman’s arm, an amusing curiosity. Miss Lloyd frowned. Martha didn’t think much of Miss Lloyd. She had won the respect of Kitty Evans when she first arrived by telling them that her family had kept and bred race horses. Martha had once asked Miss Lloyd what she wanted to do when she grew up. ‘Not this!’ she said, before telling Martha to put her hat on properly. But she said it in a funny way. ‘Can ya put your hat on for me, Hun?’ she said, her voice deeper and her t’s flatter as she jutted out her jaw. She spoke to Kitty Evans in a grown-up ladies’ voice. It was the same voice she used on her mobile phone, or to talk to the headmistress. This made her seem odd to Martha, somehow too untrustworthy to be a reliable teacher.

marmalade, but she did have one story that Martha liked: ‘I once saw a cow give birth to twins joined together at the head,’ she said, ‘horrible business.’ ‘What happened?’ ‘They shot it didn’t they? Right between the eyes,’ Mrs Hall sniffed. ‘Course, they had to do it twice.’ Martha had thought about that all day. ‘Did you know,’ Mrs Hall began, Martha let her use her arms to lever herself up the steps to the Pettigrew museum, ‘that I once met Mr Churchill in Hyde park?’ Everyone went to find the giant dinosaur foot – that was the best bit. Martha hung back, slowly walking along the glass cabinets with Mrs Hall. Mrs Hall stopped for everything. Martha could hear the other children laughing by the dinosaur foot. Mrs Hall stopped in front of the large, floppy body of a naked squid in a jar of green fluid. ‘How interesting,’ Mrs Hall said, sucking her old teeth and clamping Martha’s arm under hers, ‘How int-ter-rest-ing.’ Kitty Evans and some others stood hissing with giggles nearby and Martha blushed. Mrs Hall’s bulbous white calves in her thick socks looked a bit squid-like. Martha looked away, embarrassed, and saw the smiling face of Kitty and her friends. ‘Ewwww, why are they looking at that?’ A whisper, shuffling past her back. ‘That’s so gross.’ ‘She’s so weird.’ Fits of cruel snickering. Martha tried not to look around and tried to pretend there was nothing strange or weird about looking at dead Mrs Hall-like squid legs in jars. Everything she did after this morning would be weird and funny. They wouldn’t stop giggling. She

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voices, ‘make Martha do it.’ None of them turned to look at her. She gripped Mrs Hall tight. The old woman tilted over towards her, unaware. Miss Lloyd didn’t look at her either. Her eyes settled somewhere else. She doesn’t like me, Martha thought, and tears rose up in her throat. ‘Martha, come up here please.’ Martha walked forward, her legs numb. She was on her own. Miss Lloyd was on their side and something bad was coming. Something had to be coming, she knew it in her stomach, and it was sickening her slowly, bile building under her tongue. Her knitted tights were sweaty at the back of her knees. Trembling, she extended a hand to receive him. The class closed in around her, a curtain of uniform and faces, fascinated and mocking.

Kitty and her friends huddled together near the table in front of the glass cabinet with the baby narwhals. Kitty’s hair was especially dark against the glass and marble. Miss Lloyd told them all to pay attention. ‘This is the least weasel, yes, like The Wind in the Willows, you might see them in your gardens at home, has anyone met one? Now, his Latin name is mustela nivalis and it’s very important that when you pick your animal for your project to try and remember to put their Latin names in, don’t touch!’ The weasel had a violent, swooping curve in the long space between its neck and back, as if it had uncurled itself like a hissing snake. Its face looked towards its unseen attacker, eyes bulging and little teeth exposed. Its light brown fur looked sticky to touch. Martha watched the students’ faces as they peered in, approaching it with a caution reserved only for dead things. After the boys marvelled at his tiny jaw and rows of shiny teeth, Kitty and her girls shuffled towards the creature. There were squeals and screeches, they pushed their silly faces in then pulled them swiftly back, disgusted and hysterical: ‘He’s so pretty! He’s so lovely! Look at his little hairdo! He looks so furry!’ ‘Who wants to be the first to hold him?’ Miss Lloyd sighed against the squealing refusals from the girls, and the shouting and shoving from the boys. Martha watched their contorted faces, wiggling with dares and laughter. ‘Come on now, he’s already dead, he can’t hurt you.’ Miss Lloyd scanned the group. ‘If no one volunteers I’ll have to pick someone!’ There was quiet. ‘Martha will do it,’ someone said. Martha’s stomach lurched. ‘Yeah, Martha will do it,’ a chorus of

He was light and cold, like a pet that waits outside the post office in winter. He seemed victorious to her, his final breath a fighting one. For a releasing moment Martha imagined the living weasel elevated about the crowd of adoring children, glorious and fearsome, his roaring teeth embracing the light and his shiny coat lustrous, ready to bite out hair and eyes. Then there was a pale, small grabbing hand. Then came the harsh outbreak of screaming and scuffle as shoulders buffeted her, catching her hair. Martha stumbled and he was gone, her open palm brutal and empty. ‘Ewww it’s dead, it’s dead!’ the girls screamed, ‘look what she did!’ Martha looked down at the cracked form of the least weasel on the floor, his head flopping on his long neck. Her head was fuzzy and tears erupted in her eyes. Squatting down she grabbed him back up, his fur now horrible and loose, and tried to rearrange his dangling head. She could feel it clicking and scraping on the inside as his fragile bones wore against each

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She wished the least weasel was strong and alive and had ripped out Kitty’s eyes. Mrs Hall tucked her under her arm, cushioning her with crinkly arm fat and a heavy orange smell. Martha couldn’t stop crying. They had turned into hiccoughs now, and they hurt when they came up. She was spitting them out with wet and snot and – she couldn’t help it – dribble that slipped out and down the creases of Mrs Hall old saggy skin. ‘… Such a baby.’ A vicious hiss. Out of the red and yellow of blurry tears Martha saw her. Kitty Evans was flicking her hair and gliding back into the pack. The carcass lay on the table, defeated. Poor weasel, Martha thought, poor, poor weasel. ‘Don’t worry,’ Mrs Hall said, ‘Those blighters are all over the place. Farmers shoot them for sport you know, and stuffing them is right quick. They’ll have another one sorted out by tomorrow and no one will remember what happened. I promise you that.’

other. ‘She killed it!’ they screamed, ‘look, she broke his neck!’ ‘I didn’t, I didn’t!’ Martha cried, but her voice was croaky and feeble, too small to be heard. She was unable to help the tears. They were ugly uncontrollable sobs, loud un-repressible honks up to the blaring lights. Everything was a thicket of green jumpers and white teeth, screams and the yellow lights. Sick and panic were coming up, she wasn’t sure she could hold it down, and then she would be sick, be sick all over the weasel. Through her bleared vision she looked for someone, anyone, who would take him away from her, Miss Lloyd, her grandma, perhaps her mum would come back and lift him away. His neck was hanging like a spongy sock. Then there was Kitty Evans, stepping into the circle. She was pulling down the sleeve of her school jumper and grabbing Martha’s trembling hand, tipping the contents upside down into her own with the smallest wince. Martha gulped and snorted as Kitty, flicking her soft, touchable hair back over her shoulder, turned to Miss Lloyd. ‘Here you go, Miss Lloyd,’ she said, ‘I’ve got him for you.’ ‘Thank you Kitty,’ Miss Lloyd said, frowning at Martha. ‘At least someone isn’t squeamish about dead things. Martha,’ her voice was stern, ‘stop crying immediately and go back to Mrs Hall.’ The streaming snot from Martha’s nose was stinging her upper lip. She had nothing to wipe it with. She knew what they would all say, but she couldn’t help herself from licking its slimy bitterness. Her spit was wet and warm. It helped a bit. She walked back to Mrs Hall, wishing for a tissue and a hot bath and for the cosy snuggles of her grandma’s chest. She wished Alex Slater had never had a nose bleed.

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illustration: MIRANDA BURNET T-STUART 12

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sist er snake BY NORA KEL LER

illustration: EMILS GEDROVICS

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Sister Snake Worshiper of shape, you learned how to talk with the bodyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; each swayback a shifting letter, one long tongue of ribbed ribbon. It is hard to imagine you loving. All throat, you hold onto nothing. Do you find us foolish when we feed on our gods or is that sideways look a longing to know if what we swallow is the same dust that silenced you? You spend your life digesting these questions.

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illustration: ALEXIS de CHAUNAC 16

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EM BODI ED ANDREW IRWIN

The blouse was a light cream, edged by darker beige detailing and when she saw it in the shop, she knew it just screamed her. She walked over, stared at the price and considered it a moment. She could have just stolen it, slipped into her bag, walked out – no one would have seen. But what fun would she get wearing it then? She always felt just a little bit dirty wearing clothes she had shoplifted. And this was not a blouse she would want to feel dirty in. Begrudgingly, she took it to the counter and paid full RRP, with no discount or sale price. Unhappily, on that week slink-aroundthe-house-in-just-a-slinky-new-silk-blouseand-pants-night had coincided with spaghettinight. Above her left breast now was a large, amorphous tomato stain, eating into the cream-coloured fabric. She had tried, in vain, to lick it clean, throwing her entire head down towards the rich meaty tomato sauce wasted on a shirt. Sadly, her equally meaty neck would not allow for the movement.

So, tonight was the night. The big weigh-in. Glenda stood alone in the half-lit bathroom, avoiding her reflection in the mirror. Music was playing – a slow, soft, rhythmic jazz that poured from the speakers next to the bath. She swayed her hips to the music, losing the pulse occasionally and letting her hips keep moving of their own accord. She unbuttoned her blouse, enjoying the feeling of silk brushing over her puckering flesh. She felt sexy. And tonight Sylvia, her daughter, was out. Glenda had taken her, twenty minutes earlier, to her evening dance class. So, for the next hour and a half, she wasn’t Glenda the mother – she was Glenda the animal. Glenda had bought the top just the day before and, having a company-imposed uniform at the cafe where she worked, she had to take advantage of these after-work hours to put it on and treat herself. This brief time before bed was her luxury: a transient catwalkcum-home-spa where she could be pampered.

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fact that his parents were not dead. He had not grown up in Cambridge and he had never owned a dog. Why exactly he had chosen to make up these fictions was never made clear, beyond a kind of primitive desire to re-describe himself in the world. Five months after she saw Frank for the last time, Glenda gave birth to Sylvia. And so, from that one relationship she had been left with both (a) a daughter and (b) a carbohydrate-consumption-habit – a habit that had led her to gain seventy kilos of thick, creamy fat, all with the texture of freshly churned butter packed into translucent skin.

And yet, now, standing in her bathroom, she was managing not to think about it – the stain would come out. She was sure it would. In fact it was not uncommon that Glenda found small droplets of forgotten food scattered over her clothes, given that she always ate supine with her food transported to her mouth from where the plate lay on her stomach. On the top of her right thigh a strand of spaghetti, whose fall she had not noticed, had dried solid and was sticking tight, now bonded with skin. The night before, for the first time in years, Glenda had gone on a date. Aged thirty-nine, she had taken part in only one relationship of note and it had ended fourteen years ago. Her partner – a gruff yet broadly peaceable man – had been called Frank and the couple stayed together only six months. The end came without fanfare. One Saturday morning, as Glenda drank her Nescafé and Frank blearily recounted the previous night’s revelries, two details had not matched up. He had begun with “so, we’re at Kev’s place,” and moved on to, “and so we leave the bar.” The truth, predictably, did not lie in between. He had spent the evening at another woman’s house. The Mastercard receipt that she’d later found in his jeans pocket for two bottles of champagne and a pack of Durex Fetherlite was the first solid clue. The initial revelation was followed by a string of others – painful discoveries that stripped away long-settled layers of belief. He had been telling lies from the beginning it seemed. Some, like the first, were for his self-preservation; others seemed to be simply for the thrill of an untruth. Left beyond was a strange, unknown man who, for six months, had shared Glenda’s home and her body. In the end, it became apparent that almost all of what he had said was untrue, including, bizarrely, his middle name, and the

Despite her highest hopes, the date last night had not gone well. The man had been called Bryan. And he had called her a “thing”. That’s the one memory she had taken away from it. She had barely sat down and he had already said it. So, I just have to say it now, from your pictures on the site, I’m not sure I was expecting anything like you. Not “anyone” –“anything”. To a certain extent, she had anticipated this response. They had met online. And, never having expected to meet any of her suitors in the flesh, she had lifted a photograph of a beautiful blonde girl from Google images for her profile pic. But his comment shocked her nonetheless. Glenda had only agreed to the real life date because Bryan had seemed different from the other men. All those other creeps on the site had been interested only in her profile picture. Bryan had seemed, somehow, ineffably, interested in her. These days, she lived out her social life from behind her veil of online anonymity. After all, it was the real her that they were seeing online – her true self, unobstructed by the body she’d found herself stuck with. After last night, she had resolved that her profile picture was all the world would ever see of her. At least until the diet was finished. Her picture was a lie, certainly, but a lie that revealed her as

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continued warmly. But now something had changed. Her mood had fallen and with it the space transformed around her. Her skin prickled. Her eyes grew hot. Looking down, she noticed her blouse, crumpled on the bathroom tile. Removed from her skin she finally saw it clearly. And all she noticed now were the creases and the dampened sweat patches. And the stain. A red wound in her beautiful, clean silk. She felt herself sinking. Glancing around, she spotted a pair of nail scissors, resting on a small glass table, glowing softly in the light. She extended her voluminous arm toward them and after a few abortive attempts to get them between her fingers, finally picked them up. She drew them over for careful examination. They shone.

she truly was. When she was thin again though – that’s when all of this lying could end. That’s when she could finally re-become herself. Glenda undid the last of her buttons, and let the blouse fall to the floor; it drifted off her arms with a sensual glide. As the shirt slid away, she took care again to avoid the mirror, concentrating simply on the tactility of the movement. She stood there a moment, topless, swaying gently. The sound of jazz from the speakers. Her own soft breathing. And at last, she took the step forward. The scales were set out on the floor – they were white and heavy with a rubberised surface, covered by little cross-hatched lines of raised plastic. She lowered the first foot down and closed her eyes. She was sure that she had lost weight – and probably quite a lot of it. In the two weeks since she’d last weighed herself, it had been nothing but solid dieting (spaghetti-night notwithstanding). It had been hell. But tonight she was going to see her payoff. She took a deep breath in and placed the second foot on. She squeezed her eyes tighter and the folds of skin around her eye sockets bunched up, taking the layers of subcutaneous fat with them, leaving thick ripples of meat and air fanning across her cheeks. Glenda let out her lungful of moist air and opened her eyes. She stared down at the plastic screen that gave out a digital reading – an external measure of something quite intimately hers. And it wasn’t good. She’d gained two pounds in the last two weeks. She was meant to have lost five. She was regressing. And all at once, she didn’t feel so sexy. Her new body – the one that would let her resume her life – moved only further away.

Glenda took a step backwards, off the scales, and at last positioned herself square in front of the mirror. Her eyes instinctively avoided the glass but she forced them upwards and held them steady. Staring up at her reflection, she could scarcely believe that this person was her. How could she be this thing? Over the last few months she had begun to identify ever more with the young girl whose image she had taken. Confronted with reality, she felt a pain – a real physical pain deep in her body. She leant forward towards her reflection, letting a large portion of her gut droop into the bathroom sink. She flicked on the additional lightbulbs surrounding her mirror and the room was filled with new clarity. All was visible. When Glenda was not looking in the mirror, and she was not thinking about how she looked, and she was undressing and feeling sexy, she could be anyone at all. But as soon as her eyes fell on a reflection, she found herself trapped in a little four sided glass prison. There she was.

The music was still playing. Her breathing

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staining her. And she felt nothing. And she stared. And the blood flow grew as the blades drew closer together.

Glenda watched herself with an ever greater intensity, hypnotically, obsessively, until she somehow wanted to eat the mirror, to consume herself, to do something. She extended her hand and curled her fingers into a claw, dragging them down the glass surface, across her hard, reflected face. Her other hand still clutched sweatily at the scissors. And the claw returned to her real body away from the image, and began to grab at the skin. It kneaded the flesh between two fingers, feeling the warmth and the oil surfacing. And Glenda could hold her hand at some distance from where she should have ended, where the outer surface of her body should have stopped, but where her fingers were still full of flesh. Her body. It really was a thing. And that thing – somehow – was her.

Glenda gazed at her body in the mirror. She was in control. She was transforming. She saw herself getting thinner, more beautiful. Soon she would be ready to go out into the world. Then she would leave behind her online fiction and present herself as she was. She would find Bryan again and he would look at her once more – filled this time with lust, with adoration. But by then she would not want him anymore. So, slowly, carefully, she prised the blades apart and pressed them together, driving further into the skin, until a jagged cut had formed the width of her torso. Her body now opened up, Glenda withdrew the metal from her flesh, planning to to bury it in again, ready to dig deeper into the wound, to liquify the pulpy fat beneath. But it was only then, with the blades removed, that she finally felt the pain. It was a terrible burn that ran through her skin, and which throbbed with sharp, intermittent spikes. Where the scissors had been, the skin separated easily, the lower level sagging softly under its own weight. A thick streak of dark red was visible, around which she could see the faintest hint of yellow. She was getting closer. Soon. Very soon.

She lowered the scissors towards this sheet of skin that extended from her stomach to her hand, over a foot away from her. She drew her scissors closer and imagined them cutting down through the skin; it would part graciously beneath them to reveal layers of blood-streaked white, gushing fat beneath. She could scrape it out easily with the back of the scissors. She could step out of herself. No longer an embodied animal, swaddled in its own skin – but a person, free to escape, to rise above her flesh. There was no mystery about it. Here was the chunk of body she had to get rid of, and here was something that could remove it. What was all that dieting for? All that worry and confusion. The answer was so much simpler. She drew the scissors closer towards the willing body. The sides of the blades closed down around the furthest edge of skin, and she began to apply pressure. In the reflection, she saw the skin beginning to give way, not just compressing under the blunt blades but tearing open. A trickle of blood worked its way down,

But once the pain arrived, it soon became unbearable. Through the wound, a geyser of hot blood erupted, and it was not long before she lost consciousness. Her body fell to the tiled floor with a thud and, an instant after, her head cracked down. She kept her eyes open, even as her mind drifted away, and her thoughts were of waking up the next morning, feeling beautiful. She would feel sexy again. She’d wash the stain out of her shirt and she’d free up another evening alone in the house. She’d put on the clean blouse and feel the silk

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brushing softly over her skin once more. *** Sylvia finally arrived home at around 11pm. She was thirteen years old, short, slight and brunette. And she’d been left waiting outside her dance school for over an hour. When her mother hadn’t answered either her mobile or the house phone, Sylvia began to worry and resorted to calling her friend, Jennifer, who had got her mother to drive over and give Sylvia a lift home. As the car drove up outside Sylvia’s house, the lights were on inside. Sylvia stepped out of the car, walked up the driveway and turned her key in the lock. The door swung open and Sylvia could hear the television playing from the room next door. But the space was empty. From upstairs, Sylvia noticed the sound of running water. But when she called out to her mother, there was no reply. Sylvia ascended the stairs whilst Jennifer’s mum waited outside in the car. She called again but her mother did not call back. Sylvia looked into Glenda’s bedroom but found it empty, the lights off. Still, she heard water running, gurgling in the bathroom sink. She crossed the corridor and stood outside the toilet door. She turned the handle and leaned against it, but the door would not open. She pressed harder but still the door resisted. Something heavy blocked its path. Panicking, Sylvia ran downstairs to the car where Jennifer and her mum were still waiting. She couldn’t find her mother, she said, and the bathroom door wouldn’t open. Jennifer’s mum came upstairs with the two girls and told them to stand back from the door. She depressed the cold metal handle and pushed with all her strength. And after an instant, she got it open about a foot and peered inside, letting out a sharp gasp then a strange,

animal whimper. Sylvia stepped forward to look but Jennifer’s mum held her back. “Please don’t look inside,” she said, “not yet.” Through the narrow opening, Sylvia could see only her mother’s head, lying on the tiles and turned at a funny angle. Her mother’s face was slack against the cold floor. Her mouth was curved upwards into a tight, lifeless smile. The sad smile of a pyrrhic victory. Her eyes, glazed and empty, shone in the bathroom light.

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illustration: ANNA O’CONNOR 22

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A SH EET OF PA P ER ANNA SAMSON

I wasn’t sitting in the silent zone. I never do. The people there always frown if you so much as move, as if the mere disturbance of air could somehow affect the grades they’ll get for their International Relations Essays. It’s too hot up there too; the windows are long and high, channelling the weak Scottish sun into strong shafts of scorching light. The air is close, as though all the anxieties and sweat of the people on the lower floors seem to have floated upwards, lingering amongst the bookcases and slowly closing in on you. Instead, I was sitting in what I think of as the unofficial quiet zone, on the ground floor and at the back. It’s much darker there, away from the glare of fluorescent lights. There seems to be a mutual consensus amongst everyone who sits there that it’s fine to whisper a little, or eat a bag of crisps, so long as you don’t act like a dick about it. I was making my way through a bottle of Irn Bru, swirling the neon stuff around my mouth in an attempt to

wash away the sticky residue of whisky from the night before. I hate whisky, but once I’ve had a few cans I tend to forget that, or suppress it, tipping the tawny liquid in hot streams down my throat. It’s a curious sort of warmth brought by whisky. A physical one, for sure, but also a warmth towards other people. I’ve always wondered how my ancestors managed to use it to prepare themselves for battle, as my father told me the McIrvines had done for centuries. “The sound of the drums came long before the pipes, Angus. And then…” he’d say, pausing for effect, “when the clan swarmed over the hill with the fire of whisky in their bellies, the enemies would turn and run, feart they were of the wrath of the McIrvines”. This was my favourite bedtime story for years when I was a wee boy. It made me feel woven into something terrifying and beautiful and ancient. I hadn’t realised I was staring until it

A SHEE T OF PAPER

people. Whether they’d always think back to that dim corner of the library, and laugh about how it was a misplaced piece of paper that had brought them together. Would they tell that story to extended family at barbecues, and use it as a form of small talk at other people’s children’s christenings? It might become family legend, passed down throughout generations. Their great-great-great-great grandchildren would gasp when they were told the tale, because the myths were true; pens and paper were real, once. Finally the story would die out, but their descendants would live on, only existing at all because a girl in a canary yellow dress had been a little ardent in tidying up. It felt a little voyeuristic, me overseeing this brief flash of significance in the lives of strangers, but I couldn’t bring myself to depart. They were still talking when the library attendant interrupted. He had carefully hung his ID cards round his neck as if they were medals, and his wrinkled face was peppered with freckles, making him look extremely old and very young all at once. “Excuse me,” he said, tapping the girl on the arm. “You shouldn’t be having personal conversations in this section of the library. Could you two please be quiet, or move to the front area.” A red dusting swept its way up the girl’s neck and onto her cheeks. “I’m sorry, I was just returning this,” she said, turning. “I’ll see you around…” “Yeah, thanks again for that,” he replied, as she moved off in a swirl of yellow silk. “See you.” Seconds later, she had disappeared. Go after her, I wanted to say to him. But I didn’t, of course. It wasn’t my place. Maybe they’d run into each other in the pub that night, and wave, and he’d buy her a drink

was too late. I wasn’t really staring at all, but just sitting with my eyes unfocused, as I often do when I’m feeling rough. Unfortunately, they were directed right towards another guy, who was sitting across from me and rifling through a pile of papers. I looked back to my philosophy notes. The jumble of letters and contradictions swam in front of my eyes. Maybe I should go home, I thought, and accept that today’s not going to be productive. But my musings were interrupted by a piercing laugh, and I glanced back up. A girl was standing over the guy from before, holding out a limp sheet of paper towards him. “I didn’t realise!” she said, loudly enough for me to hear. “I must’ve picked it up when I was sitting here earlier, next to you, and I didn’t notice until I was all the way home. I’d have just tracked you down later, but y’know, it didn’t have your name on it or anything… So yeah, I thought I’d just come back here since I live pretty close, and thank goodness you were still here. Otherwise that would’ve all been a bit pointless.” She swallowed and laughed again. I don’t think she was used to striking up conversations with strangers, but the guy smiled at her. One of those proper, genuine smiles, that etch creases into your face, not one of those fake, shop assistant ones. He thanked her, and told her that he needed the notes for his essay. She mirrored his smile, and said it was alright. Then she told him that she’d read his notes on the way back to the library, and thought it sounded quite interesting, the Anglo-Scottish Wars and all that. He said it was probably the best module he’d taken so far. As I sat there, watching this conversation unfold in front of me, just next to the bottle-recycling bin, a thought wandered into my head. I wondered if I was witnessing something defining in the lives of these two

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to thank her for returning the notes. Or maybe he’d direct a play next year, and she’d audition, and they’d chuckle with the hazy recollection of having met once before. Maybe they’d be introduced by mutual friends years later, and marvel about how they’d both been at the same university and never known each other. Or maybe none of that would happen, and their memory of that brief conversation in the library would fade, until there was nothing left of it at all.

É adaoín Lynch

illustration: OLGA LOZA 26

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Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought Wanton waste, to spend the day picking blackberries. Our hands are prickly with thorns and cold. The inky treasures found in bramble are thrown into a copper pan and left to boil. Steaming hair, sleek from bathwater, fogs up your glasses; our hands are patched with juice and sugar. No news, none wanted. We turn off the lights and eat hot jam from the stove. Leave the morning where it belongs, beneath the curtains.

Diotima Arms and the man I sing an impossible song of desire, meriting legs on land for the price of silence loud enough to tender the gods’ pity and a journey over the Styx but I’d never have cause to look back. The man I sing, caught by the Gordian knot but never a thought to unpick the tie. Trees preserve, reeds hide and gat flies hum about my ears to run me wild; vultures pick at flesh on an outcrop, the seasons change for grief and the world rests on one man’s shoulders. And when out of this box disaster flows, one sprite remains, and then the lid will close.

ephemer a

It was towards the end of the summer... although, in truth, I’ve never really understood, when people write that kind of thing, whether they have some moment in mind where they became aware of that end - does it feel like the sudden realisation that you’ve forgotten something at home and you go back for it, or is it just a kind of easy way out to locate events in time, you know, once there’s so much time behind us... So yes, for me at least, it was the end of the summer, and I don’t know if you remember that high, blue fence behind Nora’s house, where we sometimes used to light a fire and pretend we were homeless in a big city? One day Ivan and I went through that crack in the fence, into the woods. Well I guess I never told you this before, but that day I confessed to him how much I thought I loved you. He was walking in front of me. You know how he always wanted to feel distanced and then to need to look back when he talked to people? He said ‘I think he... already knows’, taking a long pause after ‘he’. We kept walking and then we stopped for a while. As we sat down close to each other, I took a photo of his knee. ‘Isn’t it a bit silly to come all this way and then take a photo of my knee?’ he said. I understood much later that he spoke like that because he was almost ready to come back, almost ready to be present there, in our closeness. I wish I had kept quiet, but I laughed. Then Ivan found this little dead animal in that spot where we sat, covered with leaves and wet grass. It smelled a bit like mouldy bread, and a bit like charcoal or something burnt. He took it in his palms and weighed it. Then he put it back and said ‘Actually, Mara, I don’t think he knows’. When we came out of the woods I asked him: ‘What do you think, Ivan, are you and I like brothers?’ And maybe these kinds of moments are just thoughts we make up when we look back. Well, yes, I still stop sometimes in the middle of a sentence to wonder whether I started it as I intended. But I guess I also have all these words I can choose from: like the end of the summer, or towards the end... And maybe when I take a picture I just begin and end at the same time. I see and weigh, and then puff, it’s all gone... There isn’t all that space in between, all that uncertainty, you know, it’s all so very close... Anyway, here it is, I thought you would want to see it... And maybe you’ll write back.

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This is part of an ongoing project called E P h E M E R A, in which the history of a photograph is invented and shared through a fragment from an imaginary letter. Photograph: Ilinca Vﾃ｢nﾄブ. Text: Livia Marinescu.

Lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;AU T RICHIENNE by claudia daventry

illustration: OLGA LOZA 30

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Lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Autrichienne

She felt alone. She missed the Court, her dog, she couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t understand the way they spoke, the lack of kindness in their perfect food, the way they stuffed their geese with grain until the liver burst, the bland and nutty paste they served with brioche toast and moscatel, the paper cone they used to hide her face when powdering her hair, the ruches, whalebone and the laces of the corset, pulled to snap against the eyelets with her gasp, the hairline-fractured rib, and how her breasts, pressed flat as champagne saucers, sprang to freedom like a pair of sans culottes - flushed to the tips with red, enragĂŠs; young.

monop oly

illustration: OLGA LOZA 32

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M ON OP OLY INDIA DOYLE

farmer leaves his house and goes to Italy. He is a part time wine connoisseur. White is all there is to see now; the boys are surrounded by nothing. Bored, they play Monopoly with real money funded by parents who are more concerned with their boys getting away than getting to know them. These games last for days at a time. They both take it seriously, and breaks are scheduled to ensure optimum concentration. During the day, they play by the fire and drink tea. At night, after a reading of either Dickens or Wodehouse, they play by the fire and drink whiskey. One evening, both inebriated, they begin to fight over who has won the game. They have been playing it for a month straight, and both are emotionally highly invested. Samuel has landed on Park Lane. John swears that he had a house on Park Lane. The rent owed would render Samuel bankrupt. Samuel insists that no no, John has a hotel on Mayfair.

Samuel and John are stuck in a cabin in the outback in New Zealand. It is winter. There is ten foot of snow. They cannot go outside; the nearest shop is a hundred miles away. They’re on their second gap year. They felt more adventurous this time; they wanted to go somewhere off the beaten track that wouldn’t sell them a tee-shirt at the end that said you’ve gone off the beaten track. Samuel is twenty, tall with brown hair that hasn’t been washed in months. John is shorter, rounder with big teeth and cheeks that are doughy and perpetually red. They have enough food and alcohol to last them for months. The farmer who rented them the cabin told them to make sure they stocked up on supplies, just in case. They also have a telephone for emergencies, and Monopoly. The game was in the cabin when they arrived. In the summer the cabin looks over a valley of lustrous green. Writers rent the cabin and write about how lustrous the green is. In the winter, the cabin is usually empty. The

monop oly

else is around. Rambo wonders whether the station will have to close because of the snow. He hopes so. He wants a day off. He has been working hard. In total the journey takes him five hours and thirty seven minutes. Rambo likes specific details, he thinks they create a sense that he is knowledgeable and wise. The roads become smaller, they are badly maintained. Rambo worries a bit that the car might break down, but remembers he has roughly half a can of petrol and one spare tyre in the back. When Rambo eventually reaches the cabin he finds the two boys passed out over the monopoly. He is angry and he is cold. He tries to wake the boys up but they do not move. One of them has blood on his head, but they are both breathing. The fire is beginning to die, and Rambo feels cold. There is not much in the cabin apart from the game and canned goods. Rambo is disappointed. He sees a bottle of whiskey on the bookshelf in the corner. He decides to treat himself to a glass or two before the long journey back. The whiskey is delicious, the best that he has tasted. He watches the boys sleeping as he finishes his third glass. He puts a blanket over them, picks up the whiskey and leaves the cabin. There is nothing that he could do. On the way back Rambo feels a little drunk, but in control mainly. The radio plays smooth jazz. No chance of Abba now. The stars are clear, Rambo thinks, as he looks out at the wilderness. Rambo thinks about the things that he’d like to do tomorrow. There is a rugby match between his favourite teams. He will get some beers, maybe a woman, a nice woman with thick thighs and they will watch it together. He feels tired. The way the wheels turn on the road is soothing, it is gentle. He wants to fall asleep. He can feel his eyes begin to shut. The car swerves as Rambo’s head drops to push the steering wheel left. As

John is confused. He stands up and swings his fist into Samuel’s shoulder. Samuel jumps and retaliates. Samuel is lither and faster than John; they grapple with each other. Their limbs connect in a haphazard way. They find themselves interlocked in an almost affectionate cuddle. Samuel is trapped, bent over John’s shoulder. He is facing the sofa. John staggers backwards a bit more, allowing Samuel to get close enough to the book they had been reading. Samuel reaches out, picks it up and smashes Wodehouse onto John’s head. John falls face first onto the sofa and does not move. Samuel realises that a hard back edition is quite heavy. John is not dead, Samuel checks, but decides to call the police anyway. “Hello sir, I’m stuck in a cabin with a madman. I think he’s trying to kill me,” he slurs with conviction into the phone. Samuel knows that when John regains consciousness they will need some sort of mediator to settle the game. The station in the nearest village decide to send out Rambo. Rambo is an isolated sort of man who lives in a caravan and enjoys getting out into the wild. Besides, no one else wants to drive that far and Rambo is the least liked in the station. Rambo isn’t called Rambo, but he won the nickname when he was eleven years old at a school trip to an adventure camp. He had been the first to complete the assault course. Rambo likes the name; he thinks it imbues him with a certain strength of character. It takes a few hours to arrive, what with the treacherous conditions and it being so far away. On the way, Rambo looks out into the white and thinks about nothing in particular. It is still almost light, and the roads are quite icy. In between mediocre 80s pop songs on the radio, they tell him that it is forecast to snow heavily the next day. He sings along to the songs that he knows, hoping for Abba. Abba is Rambo’s dirty secret and he can only enjoy the band on drives like this when no-one

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his body droops forward, the car accelerates. Rambo does not wake up after it hits the tree on the side of the road. The radio presenter announces that coming up next is The Winner Takes It All. Rambo is not found for days. It begins to snow in the early hours and the body of the car is covered in the white. The next day, the two boys wake up. They take the blanket off of themselves and begin to make a fire. They are hungover and have no recollection of the events of the night before. “We must have drunk the last bottle of whiskey last night,” Samuel says, staggering across the shack. “Well that’s a shame,” says John as he rubs his head. The boys cook themselves baked beans and sit down at the table. The heat turns their cheeks red as it steams up from the bowls. “Monopoly?” Samuel asks, rifling in his pocket for some change. John nods and sips some tea. They both sit and look out of the window into the pure, fresh white.

DOG DAYS BY NOR A KEL L ER

illustration: EMILS GEDROVICS 36

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Dog Days I remember the beach your prints fleeting fossils when suddenly I lifted you from sand to sea your four legs placed beside the two of mine until I wandered out cross current and as if on cue your buoyed body made its way across a groundless expanse to hover at my hip come the waves when they would

T HE PL IGH T OF T HE WICKED by EMMA HINDS

The Plight of the Wicked Let’s fly, you and I, let’s do it together. Forget your coffee cup, leave it sitting on this grubby table in this grubby town. It will make a ring and I will draw a moon made out of sugar to be its companion. A heap of moon-dust, that’s all we’ll leave, and cold coffee with my lipstick on it. (not red enough for femme fatale, but more a slimy childhood pinkthe colour of saliva and playing at being grown up) Come on! Just put it down and let’s be gone There is a night hovering beyond the door that is a giant dog, panting, and I want to be chased. Under puddles made by lamplights we trip our way to twisted spikes of metal gates. Fe Fi Fo Fum, I smell blood. You keep laughing, choking on us like vomit, coughing us up in splutters which I hush. hush hush hush, someone will hear. They will hear the scrape of my shin on the spire of the gate, the squeak of your untied shoes against the lock on the door. Will they hear our flumping bodies and hissing breath as we land, baby seagulls out of the nest, drunkenly squawking? Will they hear me asking you with no words for things we can’t have? Grass in my ears and your absurdly long eyelashes lit up for a second, like gold and wheat or something like that. I think of honey on pancakes and lick my lips. The sky above is blue with the twilight weight – the erotic un-darkness of a Scottish summer where everything is seen and alive that bit longer. We’re here now, I want to say,

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We’re here now, and your hand is so close to my bleeding shin. It’s dripping down into my socks. So very close to the end, and the start, and the fucking heart of things and my jeans get sticky with blood and sweat. Lie with me on the edge of friendship and this fragile bridge of doom made of dewy grass – Let’s fly.

T he whi t e house on waCh T er

illustration: MIRANDA BURNET T-STUART 40

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T H E W H I T E HO US E O N WAC H T ER B. T. JOY

What four years of prison therapy couldn’t give him. A little burn rimmed with green waterweeds flowed on its peaceful passage south from the Missouri River. Damien could hear and smell the water from the darkness of his second-storey bedroom. He sat up there most nights. Fitting into a civilised society, as the New York judge said. Keeping himself out of trouble, like warden Reznik had told him. Being a whole person, as his prison counsellor had coached. He’d put his desk by the window and, at night, he sat there until he felt tired enough to sleep; looking out at the little burn and the old telephone wires and the white house across the road, mercifully shielded by the peacefully tilting branches of a brace of white elms. As it was the white elms lined the entire length of Wachter Avenue; making it virtually impossible for Damien to see in through the black glass of his neighbours’ windows; or into any of the bedrooms of any of the houses that

He hadn’t noticed the name in all the stress of the relocation. Wachter Avenue. That would have made Damien laugh if it wasn’t so tragic. Wachter. Like the typo of what it really meant; the error that pointed clearly towards the plain truth. Wachter. Two letters too early and one too late. Some kind of sick joke. Fortunately for Damien the name was as far as things went. There wasn’t actually anything to see in this part of Bismarck and, after the crowds of New York City, it seemed that Damien’s little problem was beginning to simmer down and the clashes and collisions of images that usually boiled up under the skin of his eyelids were letting him sleep for longer and longer periods. The night before had been the best. He’d managed to grab three hours at a stretch. This was exactly what Damien needed.

T he whi t e house on waCh T er

tiny female to the beach-floor and beginning to mate with her from behind; and her whining and biting at his fat and tumorous trunk. Damien remembered watching. Watching as the loser-seal watched. Watching. Still watching. Locked in a room for four years for watching. Name noted indelibly in a Registry of perverts for watching. Life ruined for watching. Sitting in a prison rec-room watching – a bleeding elephant seal – the runt – the loser – the naturally selected for loneliness, derision, pain, death, childlessness – watching it watching them – screwing – the massive victor and his squealing prize – two balls of grey flesh twitching on the shifting stones – bucking – hollering – filling the stench of the Sound with the dissonant ring and peal of their copulation. Damien remembered the weight of male aggression too. Not the formless, wild male aggression captured through a lens by Natural World, or National Geographic, or even the amateur bedroom roughness he’d caught in his own lens when the streetlights of New York went up and the lights of the apartments dimmed. No. Real and tangible male aggression. The feel of a claw-hammer thudding sickening into the spongey pit of his temple. Damien remembered going down hard on the laminate floor of his old 19th Street apartment. He remembered his hand slipping off the door and reaching for his split and cracked head. He remembered the blood thick and sticky on the mock-wood and the already drying spatters on the head of the metal tool that the guy had brought over just for the occasion. And he remembered the guy too; thick bodied and pissed as hell. He hadn’t even waited for Damien to get back up. As though this hundred-and-thirty pound weakling posed no threat at all. He’d moved through the

ran along the western arm of the street. On the east the residential area stopped dead where the road hummocked over the quiet burn and the buildings only picked up again some five-hundred yards away. So, it would seem, in many ways, that Wachter Avenue, despite its ironic name, had been the perfect place for his rehabilitation. Only the white house made his mind in the slightest uneasy. The white house, and the blue shadows of those tall white elms that danced the strangest kinds of dances on its horizontal panels of outer woodwork and on the single bedroom window – the single window in the entire long street – unobscured from Damien’s view. *** Damien wanted nothing but peace now. Four years in a New York prison had beat any more ambitious thinking clean out of his skull. He’d had enough of what people do. Luring you in with so much promise and vital energy only to make you look foolish or, worse, like a deviant. Damien had never understood what the problem was. Once, in New York State, in the prison that is, he’d seen a nature documentary on TV, Natural World, or something. On the Los Coronados Islands, in Baja California, the elephant seals had been fighting; each gargantuan wedge of testosterone and wild shaking blubber was beating its wide chest against the other, both mewling and fizzing at the mouth, and battering at each other until the bite marks were red and gory on the grey fat of both their faces and necks. In the end the larger seal prevailed, as the larger always does, and he hefted his fivetonne body triumphantly over the slithers of slate and shingle; pinning the comparatively

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Damien had been watching – as usual – keeping his eye on the only window he could see through the trees at night. His mind had been carrying him off into a thousand different questions about the sex-life of the occupants. If they kissed. What positions they enjoyed. Then, as though responding to him through some indecipherable code, the blue curtains in the window twitched as though tugged by a hand. It was like a clumsy prowler had broken glass and the shards dug deep and painful into Damien’s chest. He flung himself down, in far too practiced a way, under the small wooden desk that he’d placed by the bedroom window; pulling the chair in around his body. A hiding place. He understood himself now and the shame was unbelievable. A deep black well of shame thumping where his ventricles should have been. I so much as see you with a camera again. I’m bringing the hammer back to finish the job. You understand me, freak?! Damien closed his eyes, half in terror of the memory and half for the present moment. Squatting there. Like a sick animal. Like a pervert under his desk in the dark. Hiding out in his own house from every tug of the neighbour’s curtains. He breathed in hard through his nose and then expelled the smoky, nervous breath through his mouth. He jammed his sweatyframed glasses against the bridge of his nose with his sweaty hands and then forced himself to pull up from under the desk. He twisted his body into a hunch and lightly pulled himself up, one hand on the window-ledge. He stuck his head up into view; peering over and out through the glass. Again a searing pain in the chest and the feeling – Christ he knew he’d felt it – of a claw-hammer impacting with the skull.

apartment like he owned the place and, sure enough, Damien didn’t move; watching as the alpha-male intruder found the camera cassettes he’d stowed away religiously in his sock-drawer for years and then smashing each flimsy piece of plastic to a hundred pieces with his red and greasy hammer. He’d stormed back. Damien could hear his work boots slamming down on the laminate. He tucked himself into a rudimentary ball – some beaten animal – some prey-item waiting for the killing blow – the guy, the boyfriend of the girl from the other side of 19th Street, grabbed Damien hard around the nape of the neck, forcing him to give eye contact. Damien noticed that the guy was holding his HD handy-cam in one capable hand. “Listen careful you pervert!” Damien had been listening. Damien would never forget those words as long as he lived. The shame of them. “I’m taking this camera. You hear me?!” The guy shook him and Damien responded with a frightened nod. The assailant leaned in closer. “I so much as see you with a camera again,” he whispered, “I’m bringing the hammer back to finish the job.” He forced the cold claw against the weaker man’s face. “You understand me, freak?!” Damien could do nothing but nod his head again. *** Damien had been watching out his bedroom window for hours now. For the first time since moving to North Dakota something had happened across at the white house.

T he whi t e house on waCh T er

So what if the guy in the white house had caught him looking? Damien bet that he’d looked out his own window at midnight before. Damien bet that he’d been caught looking into his neighbour’s window at least once! So what? He hadn’t seen them having sex. He hadn’t used his camera. So what? He’d done nothing illegal. Nothing to be ashamed of. He kept on driving, up to the hardware store on 5th Avenue.

He slammed his body down under the desk again. Then he started to cry like a kid when he looked down at the seat of his pants. His beige corduroys were darker around the crotch and the urine was already puddling on the floor under his ass. Tears ran red furrows down his cheeks. He breathed in iron. He breathed out smog. He cried and closed his eyes so hard that the bunched up skin ached beneath his glasses. But he couldn’t deny what he’d seen. The occupant of the white house had pulled back the curtains and it was still over there, even now, the unmistakable shape of a man, standing in the dark window; staring directly over at Damien’s bedroom.

*** He was back in the house on Wachter before midday and went straight to his bedroom where he used his limited DIY skills to thread the loops on the rail and to screw the rail to the patch of wall-space just above his bedroom window. He looked out at the white house while he worked. No one was there to see him in the one window that wasn’t obscured by the elms. Damien almost wished those blue curtains would twitch and open again. He wanted the dude across the way to see him now. Not pissing himself. Not hiding. Not crying like a little girl. But doing something to keep the world out! You hear that, guy!? He thought. I’m not pissing myself, guy! I’m not pissing! I want you guy’s out! I don’t want to see you anymore! All the while, as he worked away like this, he watched the neighbour’s window. It was only later, as he finally began to clip the cotton lengths of his new curtains onto the loops around the rail, that the thought occurred to him: In the six weeks since moving from New York, he hadn’t seen a single soul go in, or come out of, the white house across the way.

*** Next day Damien found himself driving uptown. A pathology. That’s all he had. A sickness. And a sickness could be fought by the proper application of medicine. He was determined not to end his life here on Wachter Avenue hiding under a desk and pissing himself in his cords while the ‘normal folk’ lived and screwed as they pleased – occasionally staring at him disconcertedly through their pretty curtains – occasionally braining him with a claw-hammer and smashing up his painstakingly collected hoard of homemade cassettes. Listen careful you pervert! I’m taking this camera. You hear me?! The old voice of the thug rang in his memory and he nearly ran off the road at 9th Street. He blinked away the past – years ago in New York – the little white scar that still starred out in his temple under his glasses. He even put the previous night behind him. He kept on driving.

***

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the television tube. He stared at their new whiteness for a long moment. Then he turned back to the movie. “– and sometimes she’d beat me – make me wear a dress – and watch her doin’ it–” Watching. Still watching. Damien zoned. The actor playing a killer kept on whining about in the unreal world of celluloid neurosis. He’d seen the movie before after all. He’d seen a lot of movies before. In many ways his counsellor had been right – though she’d been full of shit in more than one. Television, though, that was one thing she’d got right. Television had been his first voyeurism. Blood and killings and sex all spilling out in the shape of light from behind the dark glass. His generation had been brought up on smut and gore and so many of the guys he knew from school had only gone on to exchanged the TV screen for a computer monitor in later years. Even now there were phones and tablets and laptops. Even now the secret voyeurs sat in their innumerable rooms watching the sickest things imaginable on their glossy and expensive technologies. Damien had been different in only one way. In adolescence he’d traded the TV screen for his neighbours’ windows instead of virtual reality. His parents had moved home three times, settling all over the state of New York, and Damien had squatted in the bushes of Scranton and Albany and Poughkeepsie – staring through the pretty curtains, at the pretty women, in their pretty silks – watching the pretty things they did for their husbands. He looked back at the curtains. His eyes were still and sleepy under glass. Watching. Still. Watching. The curtains were white and had

The night rolled in over Bismarck, leaving the streets blue and misty in its darkening drag. Damien had taken his small dinner sitting on his unmade bed and, afterwards, he left the lights off as he always did. Force of habit really. If you want to see out, and no one else to see in, it’s best to make friends with the dark. His prison counsellor had given him a tip for dealing with his pathology. He’d admitted in a session to having watched a lot of television while growing up and, being close to forty now, it was the horror movies of the 1980s he apparently had to blame for the onset of his condition. As he’d grown older the sickness had, of course, grown proportionately but, according to her, that’s where it had all got started: with the network premieres of The Hills Have Eyes II and Re-Animator. With Hellraiser, The Fly and with Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers. Tonight too a grey and perpetually fretting light tossed and changed in shape and luminosity over Damien’s inert and reclined body. He was laying on his bed facing the TV he’d rigged up on a pair of crates. The room around him was a real shit-hole – stale sheets – stinking clothes – old dishes and pizza boxes littering the floor – on TV some of the more disturbing scenes from Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer spilled and shivered into the empty room. “My momma was a whore,” Michael Rooker, playing Henry, told the story on screen, “but I don’t fault her for that – it ain’t what she done it’s how she done it – long as I can remember she’d be bringin’ men up to the house – my daddy was there too but it didn’t matter none to her – and she made me watch it–” Watch it, Damien thought. Then he looked across the room at the hang of the curtains; they were flickering faintly in the ghost-light that emanated from

T he whi t e house on waCh T er

There’d be grudging sex after arguments. There’d be copulations in lieu of divorce. The motels off Bismarck Expressway would admit their streams of infidelities. The city’s prostitutes would continue to ply their trade within earshot of their sleeping sons and a mound of sinuous grey blubber would rise from the Mexican seas and belly-flop into an orgy of violence and coitus where the elephant seals gather and fight and fuck on the Islands of Los Coronados. The thoughts of the day spun in Damien’s rusty mind. Until his eyes blinked and closed behind his glasses.

no pattern; though the way they doubled up blocked out all possible light from Wachter Avenue. Good, Damien thought. Good. I don’t want to see another window again. I want to keep them out! I’ll regress, he thought. Back through this filthy, failed experiment called manhood. Back through prison and sexual frustration. Back through impulse and straight on, back through puberty. Away from the windows of Scranton. Away from the windows of Albany, Poughkeepsie, New York, Bismarck. Away from the window of the white house on Wachter and back to TV. TV. Sweet, clean, violent, sexually depraved TV. Where you can watch anything – and no one can do anything about it. “You tellin’ me you ain’t killed nobody before?” Michael Rooker, playing Henry, was grilling Tom Towles, playing Otis. “I ain’t sayin’ that.” Says Otis. “Then you’ve killed before, right?” Asks Henry. “Well maybe I didn’t have no choice.” Says Otis. “You didn’t have no choice here neither, did you? Did you?” Asks Henry. “I don’t know. It ain’t the same.” “It’s always the same.” Henry says, “And it’s always different... it’s either you or them, one way or the other... ain’t that right?... Open your eyes, Otis, look at the world.” Damien pointed the remote and killed the TV. He was goddamned if Michael Rooker was going to tell him to open his eyes and look. But he did look. He always looked. The room was much darker now; and the curtains he’d bought hung the way that a pall hangs on one massive corpse. Behind the sweet new material the old rot of the universe continued to revolve on its off-kilter axis. Men would beat their wives tonight.

*** It wasn’t a nightmare he had but the shard of a nightmare. Someone had broken into the house. Someone was holding him down from behind. Laminate floor sticky with head-blood. Another guy had a drill and was leaning, faceless but angry, over his useless body. The sharp end of the drill-bit pressed down under the guy’s muscular weight; digging its tiny borehole into the glass over his eyes. Then the sound of the drilling started; drowned out by a distant scream. Damien woke up. His intact eyes were already staring across the room. At the curtains. Suddenly the dark room filled with an ominous presence. It felt almost as though there was something out there – on Wachter – in the street – standing by the little burn – or under the stands of elm that lined the avenue for miles. He knew at once what was going on. Or maybe the nightmare had just unlevelled his brain. There was someone out there. Behind the curtains. Someone was watching him.

Pul p Re vie w

back cover illustration: EMILS GEDROVICS

The Pulp Review is a writing magazine founded and run by students on the Creative Writing masters course at the University of St Andrews. Funding and support are generously provided by the School of English.

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Cover image by Alexis de Chaunac 47