VESPER
VESPER
006
Images by Mitali Das
010
Two Poems About the Past
Words by Ivan de Monbrison
012
Note to Self at Dawn
Words by Taliesin Gore
Illustration by Estella Mare
014
In the Debris of the Dusk
Words by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, translation by Huzaifa Pandit
015
We Bribe the Night to be Dawn
Words by Huzaifa Pandit
016
Word-Forming Before Dark
Words by Mahbub Shahriar, translated by Sourav Roy
Illustration by Estella Mare
018
The Evening Star
Alexander Limarev
022
Stories Around the Campfire
Edward Alport
024
Agglom’d-Wounds of Barren Gleam
Original Bangla: SubhaDip Sanyal
English Translation: Sourav Roy
034
Poem #16
Words by Kalyan prasad Dutta, translation by Sourav Roy
035
Untitled #2
Words by Kalyan prasad Dutta, translation by Sourav Roy
036
Sad Blood / Stuck Breath Series - Poem #12
Words by Kalyan prasad Dutta, translation by Sourav Roy
038
Howling
Words by Kalyan prasad Dutta, translation by Sourav Roy
042
On Circular Memory: Whispers of the Buried and Burnt
Words and Images by Annika Schmeding
054
Obsolete Skygazer/ Enlightened Observer/Ignorent Truthseeker/Emaciated Entourage: A Metalpress
Biopic
Pinak Banik
056
‘Evenings’
Words by Kazi Muntasir Billah Mishu, translated from Bangla by Sourav Roy
064
She was Very Good at Her Job
Words by Liam Foley
068
Images Surojit Ghosh
078
In the Hell Plutonian
Words by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy
080
When the Daylight Draws Again…
Words and image by Phil Sawdon
082
Let the Lights Shine
Words by Kayleigh Kitt
Illustration by Estella Mare
084
Images by Raktim Chatterjee
088
Morning Star
Words by Ae Reiff
092
The Citizen
Raktim Chatterjee
094
The Blood Twilights, Bangladesh
Curation and Text by Sourav Roy
108
Raga by Puriya Kalyan
Vocal by Kabir Altaf
Tabla by Iftikhar Joseph
110
Words by Gabriella Garofolo
114
Under the Light of a Fading Evening
Words by Anthony ILacqua
118
Images by De Villo Sloan
152
First Light
Words by Robin Dennis
154
Guapalupe’s Misfortune
Words and image by Daniel de Culla
156
It was on Lancrese and Pembroke Beach
Words and image by Daniel de Culla
158
I’m Going to Become a Millionaire
Words and image by Daniel de Culla
160
12 Pigeons
Words by Daniel de Culla
Image by Isabel G. de Diego
162
A French Toast in Torija
Words and image by Daniel de Culla
164
The Girl on the Curve
Words and image by Daniel de Culla
166
The Opposition
Words by Robin Dennis
VESPER
ISSN 1746-8086 www.stimulusrespond.com
The cover this issue is by Surojit Ghosh
Editor in Chief Jack Boulton jack@stimulusrespond.com
Editor – Art Hemant Sareen hemant@stimulusrespond.com
Editor – Literature Sourav Roy sourav@stimulusrespond.com
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For contributor’s contact details, please email the editor-in-chief.
Disease of Princess. Watercolor on Nepali handmade paper, pasted on handmade paper. 8” x 10”.
Images by Mitali Das
Queen. Ink and watercolor on Nepali handmade paper, pasted on canvas. 30” x 36”.
TWO POEMS ABOUT THE PAST
Words by Ivan de Monbrison
he could not remember anything about his childhood except that he was very lonely his parents always going to parties leaving him with some baby-sitter he only felt really free each summer when he went to Corsica to visit his very old nanny born in 1905 staying in this crazy old village up in the mountains playing with the other children up and down steep paths no cars cactuses fig trees some stray donkeys here or there idly wandering around he liked to eat both ants and figs like a wild boy finally free he also remembers now now as an old man the tiny dim apartment from which you could always see at dawn after opening the shutters the flat horizon of the sea and then as the quiet evening came the Sun slowly sinking into it as night gradually overcame the island.
He never had any women for almost ten years between the age of 27 and 36 his life being very frugal back then as a poor artist in Paris only spending money for canvas and paint he never met anybody never went to see movies nor to attend parties nor concerts he had no cell phone no computer focusing only on his work his small studio being filled up to the ceiling by his art there was only then enough space left i to go from the door to his bed when he was not painting he spent his time drinking porto smoking the pipe reading every night like some lost Van Gogh without any cut off ear though yet in the twenty first century.
NOTE TO SELF AT DAWN
Words by Taliesin Gore
Illustration by Estella Mare
There’s no one watching. No one knows or cares what you do when you’re alone. How hard it is to wrap your head around this fact. And how the vanity of an unrequited infatuation turns your head. You feel so stupid, but it’s egotistical to be embarrassed; it’s just another ploy to win the pity of an imaginary observer—her. This story in your head, this part you’re playing in the movie of your life, of which you are director and the only person watching, can’t be stopped. Nature wired you up to be this way. And maybe if you weren’t so self-obsessed you’d realise how normal all this is. You’re not the centre of the universe. You’re just an animal shivering on the ground, an animal whose kind are killing the earth, and the earth doesn’t care one way or the other. Unnatural mother, she murders all her children in the end. And if you lie here, very quiet, you can hear the silent sound of genocide. And where do you fit into all of this? This human self-importance, very grand and simultaneously very petty, this desperate, bathetic self-assertion, this insistence someone notices you’re here, is all you have to shore yourself up against the vast indifference of everything. This wall of sand you build against the tide, and have to rebuild every time the sea returns, reclaims it, is like the nests birds build. The ego needs its habitation just as surely as the body. It’s the curse of too much consciousness: the further it grows the greater is its need to find significance and purpose in itself, absurd and childish as this need might be. You’re only thinking all this now because you have been disappointed—because in one fell swoop you’ve scattered all the house of cards you had been building up so doggedly against your better judgment.
Still, you hear the murmur of the sea in memory: maybe a childhood holiday in Wales, or that excursion with the hiking group at university. And suddenly, in spite of everything you think(,) you know, it feels like someone’s watching after all.
IN THE DEBRIS OF DUSK
Words by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, translation by Huzaifa Pandit
The charred evening star drowned in the debris of dusk. The tresses of the night of separation flutter in the forlorn sky.
Someone protest aloud: It has been an eternity Since the carvan of night and day has been instituted by the sky.
Etched in my memory insistence of fellow devotees of tavern and wine: no moon glow at night, no cloud pour during the day.
Again, the breeze has knocked at the prison door to whisper: Don’t despair, dawn will soon erupt on the sky.
Shafaq ki raakh mein jal bujh gaya sitaara-e-shaam
Shab-e-firaaq ke geysoo fiza mein lehraa’ey
Ko’ee pukaaro ke ik umr honey aa’ee hai Falak ko qaafla-e-roz-o-shaam thehra’ey
Yeh zid hai yaad hareefaan-e-baada pemaa ki Ke shab ko chaand na nikley na din ko abr aa’ey
Saba ne phir dar-e-zindaa.n pe aake di dastak Sehar qareeb hai dil se kaho na ghabra’ey
WE BRIBE THE NIGHT TO BE DAWN
Words by Huzaifa Pandit
We bribe the night to be dawn and leave the bed for the stranger in the final parting of cold between our hands. We look ahead and find grief –the windows, the river, the sky, and the apple trees all becoming grief. As with us there is water at the beginning of the sea within me. We fill it with your absence or the apparition of your absence. We rise to the land within you and fill every window in the city With daisies of your shadow.
We bribe the moon to rise and leave the bed for the stranger in the first meeting of the scent of the butterfly of your dimples. The butterfly puts its secret in the body and thus we part, one stranger from other –the smell of daises on our fingers a moon quiet and the call of the scent – a warm darkness bound together by bright red lines of our blood.
We bribe the ink of the sky to write the scriptures of our longing and leave the need for the stranger in the dream of the butterfly. The passersby drink our water under the chandelier of the stars, still warm from the night while we await the thirst of silken blue of freedom. We carry the prisons of the butterfly within us And fly it, the bridle of our mirages clutched firm in our hands.
WORD-FORMING BEFORE DARK
WORD-FORMING BEFORE DARK
Words by Mahbub Shahriar, translated by Sourav Roy
Words by Mahbub Shahriar, translated by Sourav Roy Illustration by Estella Mare
83)
Grey afternoon, soaking in the rain, you get spent under the flyover
Never did you wade like a swan in the knee-deep waterlogged streets of this city Stuck like a fake fire in a magazine
A tong grabs you like a rotting teeth at the back of the Judges Court how long have you been like this how long will you be like this will keep on living and coughing will wipe your fingers in the Bahadur Shah Park wall and in the forgotten Sultan Chacha's khyal
You'll even wipe your grey sadness on the white swan's wings never did you swim in the knee-deep water logged at the Kaptan Bazar goat godown, Sad, grey afternoon all you did, you got spent mid-flyover, on a snuffed out Monsoon day.
84)
Dear evening, hold fast twilight's hand
Is there any need to get lost in the night?
Don't you hear the pensive muezzin's azan, that bounce in the alley's brick and cement walls the strains that just got lost calling you to the wazūkhana?
An evening is about to step out alone. I keep telling you keep scolding you Why go out alone? hold fast twilight's hand.
Limarev
Limarev
Limarev
AGGLOM’D-WOUNDS OF BARREN GLEAM
Original Bangla: SubhaDip Sanyal
English Translation: Sourav Roy
The twilight is still smouldering softly, bluish bodies are evanescing from the edges of the terrible light, and greyness;— golden skins are falling through the air, and my mummified make-up face — torn eyes torn lips and well-rounded rot, to extract outbreath from it all, the deep labour I put in— sinking this tsunami is, hurt by inconvenience, budding wounds of oh so many kinds: roast-muscled, hollow and depressive, oh so many kinds of red and flaxen garrrrdens of yours (the just-sprung bud with the serrated teeth is soaked with that pre-birth blood, the buttery mess of which sinks the thighs, sublimates;)the barren woods are caught by the day-end’s pointed fangs, thickset petals inside fumes with their respectable flames and the sweet taste of their half-charred bodies’ half-healed wound-smells, next comes death—the blessed thronging deaths, the badnight will drag the wrongmoon of dawn, drowning sleep of dogs to as low as it can, hoarse with shouting— the way water’s downward spiral, as if the light is dripping through the deep depths of the wet—we have concreted our earthen shores with vomit, we don’t have any protest or longing anymore, no shrouds of moonlight, blackheads blackheads sea of humans together and humans dispersed, humans gathered and humans apart, and our hungry cruelty of breaking down — the sharp nervous high of laughing at our own tears;— ha ha ha ha hah....ah the cacophony of rows and rows and rows of teeth, the fame of our sharp sharp talons – the burnt visages of this twilight lanes are our familiar faces in the mirror – we are doing ourselves in – the golden zygotes of our ropes were so deep, my love I just asked for a lightly lit lap, adorned with the mossy, dappled light as if a twilight descending on thighs for me!
POEM #16
Words by Kalyan prasad Dutta, translation by Sourav Roy
After listening to gnossienne 1
A smooth black stone is throbbing drunk with a dew-drenched dawn. Cold night’s present, like a prologue. Moist breeze and the birdsong ambient turn our visible fields Elysian, as if.
All pains turn mundane - and on their skins cold veins branch out and dream afresh, anew. Ah, and you think it’s just a show The stone hits you, you roll down…. Made alive with the stream, dead leaf floats in a midnoon lake paints a beyond Death watches from afar, transfixed, forgetting He too was born once.
A sacred drop of time, wrapped in a hymn been here since long, it seems. You want to walk away while it’s beautifully still, while the vanishing trail is still saffron strewn with startled pollen. Each death occurring secretly, like each dream.
UNTITLED #2
Words by Kalyan prasad Dutta, translation by Sourav Roy
Why such fear!
The cold sweat snaking past my nape screams.
I button up the shirt And prove once again, I am well. Happens, sometimes.
Some things to say, At least the terrorism-free ones after I’ve run combing operations on my feelings the onesyou want to leave behind.
Someone’s breathtaking grace egging me on.
But I would rather forget many things. How the moonlight forgets itself and dives into the rice field, Pushed by the sharp current I step up on ambition again And topple back - bloodied!
Why so afraid, why?
Everybody eventually melts into the fated grace.
Unsure if it is fear inside or a rare fever!
SAD BLOOD / STUCK BREATH SERIESPOEM #12
Words by Kalyan prasad Dutta, translation by Sourav Roy
It was thrown because the road was wide
Like a squiggling snake slithers hither thither - Yes, I am talking about magic in a furry sky, turning limitless
Your wails and crawls - sometimes vanishes when women turn their silken attention on Many know that as poetry
But song of a man with freshly chopped wings who is crossing the highway, crawling on his chest
That song is brewing inside the blood
The sunheat, before it fades into the bluish phlegm of larynx
Grab it, throw it like holy ash into the fire feast, into the paper, into the dying flames into the terrified eyes smeared with ashes of the dead Into the enlightened tunnel
No rest until body ejects the wave Looking askance to the hijra clapping the wheel turns again syringe dips liquid darkness runs amok in veins Magician smiles from the wings.
HOWLING
Words by Kalyan prasad Dutta, translation by Sourav Roy
Sliding myself free from everything
Shaking myself inside out and breaking myself loose
I earn adequate disquiet
29 horizons are howling today, stripped
Who will release me now, who will soothe?
Terror stomps and the fluid cage shakes I want to be leaving with the salty stamp of whore in my tongue snatching me from myself
Today men’s faces are splinters on my sides
Why did the cry of my first night was not my last - I feel like a dolt thinking of the heap of khaki ropes, coiled neatly kept inside the trunk, bought for Rs. 116
One day they’ll gag me - like a kiss from Rumi
Let me be please
Please let me forget why did I howl like a baby after love was made
A battle wages inside my skull, demon vs. sage Unsure which side to pick on this duel
Seeing my biodad slaughtered I giggle in my dream a sharp moment of greed flashes like a cat’s eye, shines
The litter of humans are not leaving me in peace
The wrinkles of my mother are running a roller on my heart, nonstop
My father’s gaze, like a crazy, mute searchlight is scorching my canals and craters
The radioactive murder in a single drop of blood looms like a wondorous why on my face
Can’t heal myself with any kind of love I can’t
My vision bathed by the hot blood from my eyes a blind waterfall diving into its own shadow on a stunned rock
Those who broke my bread with me
They are ringing, cling-a-linga-ling, as pets of pretty thots
day and night
Oh powerless me, so grimly alone am I
All those born bastards got into the pen, and got their 24 karat pens
Only their market prices rise
And I am doing my time, crying for myself
In this face-off with time, today
So then that is it?
Within the money’s grip
lovebodybloodlusthoneywinehunger will forever be gripped?
Those who fuck fast and loose first thing in the morning, in the fiery sunrise beach
Someone give me a glob of cunts
I will grace it with all the sins and shames of my tongue until the clits sing that slippery song and I meet and greet the angry corpuscles
A stripped Kalyan of a million howls, runs with torch in hand
Ohhhh I will die I will die
Will kick straight into soft balls of sundry Systemics and will throw Molotov-ed Mars at its soul
Contractual love had already done me much damage
Like the blackboard had cremated my youth
I dream of peeing all over that classroom one day
The dank perfume of my strong urine will tell themThat fucker is not dead yet, Alive and kicking, his heels strike sparks!
I think and acoustic guitar plays in my blood
Those who leak out their entire brains through salivary glands slobbering nonstop on the legs of the Chair
Only their market price goes up
Why do I hunt poems instead of jobs
A worry shutting down periods of many
Vain world
Vain
aches
Speeding through the tunnels of despair slaughter sounds come at me
I fail to feel shocked
The terrifying ledge of loneliness
Vain whining
with smellfatmarrowmeatmemorywave
is sucking me in like quicksand
Nothing to lose sans sounds from years past
Nothing to win over for me
Scrolling through zillion surprise crests
Falling through unknowable nothing topsy turvy
I will go crazy one day
Ahh Life
Ahh Dreams
You are building on my very chest
An abominable vomit pyramid
Ahh Death
A mangy dog whines relentless all day and all night no peace anywhere
A parallax joke gnawing into snaking grooves, incessant
I run away from the constitution of rules
My wall of patience is shedding mortar I want to be away from all the directives
When I go for a walk on my own
A pair of feet rise through the asphalt Nothing feels good, nothing right
At the shade of my sex-pumped arms I learn all the tips and tricks of life
While writing poetry
I see my skull on fire, hit by the cremator’s road is vomiting anger that agrees with none
While writing poetry I can see
My bomb-lit navel getting fucked by the pyre flame
Exploding into a cosmic hiss
Ahh Bliss
Ahh Orgasm
Today everything but poetry feels fake
I want to return
to a darkness more primal than the prime fear
My esophagus is folding itself
Thinking of the last journey at the omphalic knot danging at the end of my mother’s sari I leave my sin
ON CIRCULAR MEMORY
WHISPERS OF THE BURIED AND BURNT
WHISPERS OF THE BURIED AND BURNT
Words and images by Annika
Schmeding
Words and Images by Annika Schmeding
Between one political configuration and another, when night has come and gone for one regime and the first dim light arises for the next, where do we find solace? Do we set fire to old existences, burning what has passed? Or do we hide away the objects that reflect our experiences and aspirations, hoping they can be excavated in some distant future?
In the crepuscule of politics, Vesper marks a transition zone, fraying at the edges with uncertainty, filled with hidden heroic attempts of the everyday. It is the decisions that might otherwise go unnoticed that create new worlds, the packing of a box, the lighting of a match. The eye that keeps watch over the horizon to see the first light appear.
It is in this penumbra of historical changes, in the space between the perfect shadow and the full light, that partial sight offers only best guesses. What will the next rulers allow? What will they disavow? How to keep one another safe in moments in which the context for what safe means—whom to love, what to write, say, think—are shifting beyond recognition? And yet, while each situation might present a novel constellation, echoes of past twilight zones surface for those navigating the dimness of the in-between.
Sitting in my friend Fatima’s living room, with a view of treelined streets and the high-rises of Kabul’s inner city, penumbras of past decades surface as fragments in our conversation. It is July 2021, the foreign troops are packing up, and Kabul feels like an island in a rising tide. As we keep scrolling through the news of cities falling one-by-one to the Taliban, Fatima’s thoughts keep reverting to her uncle Fareed, a poet, a book lover, a writer. Someone she never knew personally, but who loomed large in her family’s narrative of loss.
In 1989, after a decade of Soviet occupation that propped up the Communist PDPA regime in Kabul, the Red Army was leaving and a power vacuum threatened to unleash new violence. Fareed’s mother - an astute observer of her surroundings, must have felt a profound sense of foreboding as the Soviet troops marched northward to the border. In that uncertain moment, she realised the perils of keeping all the books around in the house and urged Fareed to protect things that mattered to him. Fareed might have also hoped for a time in which the threat would be overcome and a different time could emerge. So he packed a box.
In an act of silent conviction, he sealed his literary treasures, the books and writings he had collected in his lifetime, and buried them in a secret place on a mountainside, in the hope of retrieving them once the fighting would subside—retrieved and appreciated, in a sense, reborn.
It was a prudent decision. With hindsight, we now know the Soviet withdrawal would engulf Kabul’s once tightly-knit neighbourhoods in a period of relentless urban warfare, bombing and maiming, fragmenting and scarring both the physical and mental landscapes as the
Mujaheddin fought for power. When it passed, Afghanistan’s civil war would be erased from Afghan history books, swept under the rug, forgotten.
The leaders of the anti-Soviet warring parties—who then fought among themselves before fleeing Afghanistan in the face of the Taliban—emerged again after 9/11 as the international community’s favoured sons. In that penumbral space between the horrors of what had just passed and the horrors to come, yesterdays butchers were transformed into tomorrow’s political advisors.
It was as Fareed had guessed, though not exactly. He had intimated a different future, but only in broad brushstrokes, with the dusk of transition obscuring the details. His books had been buried to guard them against the vicissitudes of the civil war; they had remained buried during the rise of the first Taliban regime, though not because Fareed chose to keep them buried: he was killed as the battles raged in Kabul. The family moved from one place to another and the knowledge of where the books were buried died with him.
“We never found his books again,” Fatima rued, “They are lost.” But our conversation seemed to reanimate them, their ethereal presence hovered at the edges of our sight as she contemplated what to do with her own book collection. Framed by intricately carved wooden boards, novels from Jojo Moyes and Elif Shafak mingled with Persian poetry collections of Hafiz and Mawlana, Orhan Pamuk and Frankopan’s newest Silkroad books sharing space with political analyses from inside Trump’s White House, Zalmai Khalilzad’s memoir, Dari-versions of Ana Karenina, and the indomitable Rebecca Solnit’s Guide for Getting Lost. A secular symphony of Fatima’s adult life as a reader.
But there was something else, too, a hint of the shift in Afghanistan’s circumstances. Three weeks later, the Taliban would march into Kabul and establish a new Islamic Emirate. We had spent the past weeks together, discussing what had changed in Kabul as a feeling of impending doom encroached on the otherwise sun drenched streets. In the 1990s, the Taliban developed a reputation for burning the books they felt were undesirable for their vision of society.1 Their selective targeting of books was not unique. The Mujaheddin before them had used thousands of books published by the Communists as fuel to fire their heaters.2 The post-2001 government of the Republic of Afghanistan has also been accused of throwing books into the Helmand River3, and in the years of Taliban insurgency, the burning of schools and libraries was no rare occurrence.4 For urban residents who experienced past political transitions, the potential for another Taliban takeover renewed intergenerational fears of yet another fraught period for book lovers.
1 In a radical move against poetry, the Taliban officially closed all literary associations and cultural organizations in the 1990s, while poets and professors of literature kept them unofficially running as hidden “sewing circles.” Reports emerged of unofficial yet systematic burning of Persian books and manuscripts at this time. Naderi, Partaw. 2000. “Kitab Suzaan Deegar” [Another book burning]. Khorasan Zameen, http://www.khorasanzameen.net/php/read.php?id=1274
2 Sharifi, Mohammad Omar. 2018. “Language, Poetry, and Identity in Afghanistan: Poetic Texts, Changing Contexts.” In Modern Afghanistan: The Impact of 40 Years of War, edited by M. Nazif Shahrani, 56–76. Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 69–70.
3 Mohammadi, Reza. 2009. Afghanistan’s War on Books. The Guardian, 8.June 2009. See: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/jun/08/afghanistan-burning-books-shia
4 See: Hedayatullah. “Taliban set fire to high school in Takhar, burning 10,000 books” Salaam Times, 17.07.2020.: https://afghanistan.asia-news.com/en_GB/articles/cnmi_st/features/2020/07/17/feature-02
“Other people who have collected books must now worry about their collections, too.” cautioned Fatima.
Three years later, her fears, like those of her uncle before her, have proven correct in broad terms, if not in the finer details. In the weeks that followed the Taliban takeover, I found not only members of the arts and culture sphere scrambling to save Afghanistan’s historic and contemporary heritage, but scores of Afghans burning documents that could associate them with the previous government and the international presence.5 From university diplomas to workshop certificates, NATO media training certificates to NGO work documents, two decades of lives built on the back of the neoliberal marketplace of internationally-backed governments and NGOs went up in flames.6 And once again, many began hiding away the books they feared might not be acceptable in the new political configuration.
To a cultural anthropologist, the acts of burning and burying in the face of danger raise some critical questions. Is this mere survival instinct in a reactionary moment? What is encoded in these acts of destruction and preservation? Are burning and burying extremes along a continuum, or two interrelated sides of the same coin? What exactly is being hidden or destroyed? Is it materiality alone—a book, a document? What values, identities, and lives are imbued in these objects when they are hidden, destroyed or reformed? What identities and memories are bound up in them, in script meant to outlast us, or to be carried over into different, or sometimes even digital, forms?
In an attempt to grasp the layers of significance of these acts, I looked for literature that had dealt with the caretaking of books and their afterlives. In some writing, burial of books is described as akin to the burial of a body, seeing a book as “a living thing, deserving respect in its passing.”7 This seemed to resonate with how Fatima remembered her grandmother thinking about Fareed’s books, that had been buried “like a child of hers”. In his recent writing on the material (after)life of books, Brian Cummings describes book burial in various religious traditions as a form of caretaking for the textural remains of spiritual insights, such as the Jewish genizah as a safe last disposal for sacred texts, and Buddhist sutra burial in bronze containers placed in Sutra burial mounds. Old Qur’ans could also be buried by wrapping them into a pure textile and burying them in a place where people do not walk.8 Formal book burials take place in many religious traditions and can be found even centuries afterwards, such as the granthasamadhi [book tomb] next to the sixteenth century temple in Uttar Pradesh, Northern India, containing a grave of Sanatana Goswami, which contains original manuscripts in their final resting place. In these instances, books can attain the status of reliquaries, achieving a kind of divinity and immortality. They become revered and imbued with their own power to bestow blessings.
Were the books that were buried in Kabul and other cities in Afghanistan seen as living companions, revered and thus in need of the reverential treatment that burial imparts? Their
5 Sanatan, Rebecca/ Faiez, Rahim. “Two years after the fall of Kabul, tens of thousands of Afghans languish in limbo waiting for US visas. AP news. 11.08.2023: https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-taliban-refugeepakistan-us-visa-a89918dfda998dce8d8d26568f4feca1 ;
6 Abbasi, Fereshta. In Afghanistan, Burning Our Past to Protect our Future. Human Rights Watch. 1.03.2022. See: https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/03/01/afghanistan-burning-our-past-protect-our-future
7 “The Body and the Book” Chapter in Cummings, Brian. 2022. Bibliophobia – The end & beginning of the book Oxford University Press.
8 Keyes, Allison. How to properly dispose of sacred texts. NPR, 23.02.2012. https://www.npr.org/2012/02/24/147321213/how-to-properly-dispose-of-sacredtexts#:~:text=The%20Quran%20may%20also%20be,dispose%20of%20their%20sacred%20text
value was not limited to religious sacrality. A precious copy of a Qur’an might have been among the books, but there were also others: poetry collections, notebooks, political and historical commentary. And despite some books remaining in the earth, never to be found again, this did not seem to be the primary rationale for burying them. The act of burying seemed to index not only the respect paid to the insights of these literary companions, but an act of wishing their future into existence, hoping against hope. Burying was thought of less as a last resting place than a place of waiting, as hibernation in inclement weather, hoping to be resurrected.
If hibernation was the actual goal of the burying of these books in moments of political precarity, then the bookseller Amir was a master of sowing the seeds of knowledge widely.9 “I am sending them to provinces, into rural areas,” he told me when I visited him in his private home in Kabul, where he lived among a dazzling collection of books that ranged from the low-cost reprints of school textbooks to valuable manuscripts adorned with Persian miniatures and calligraphies. Burying his capital would not have made sense if he wanted to stay in business. On the other hand, it also became clear that he loved his own collection, and that some of the volumes were not for sale. “They are staying there with trusted people. Nobody will expect them there.”
The tactic seemed simple, yet ingenious. Over the preceding two decades, rural areas had been at the frontlines of the NATO war against the Taliban. Fighting was distributed unevenly throughout the country, with certain provinces bearing the brunt of bombing, firefights, drone attacks, and night raids. Travel within Afghanistan in general had become a gamble. Highway 1 between Kabul and Kandahar was known as the Highway of Death, and roadways that led into the country’s most peaceful areas, such as Bamiyan or Mazar-e Sharif, were often impassable as certain districts were overrun by insurgents who threatened kidnapping or killing. While others consolidated within the capital, hunkering down for the coming storm, scattering books away from Afghanistan’s urban heart was a clever strategy, possibly because it was least expected. Why would precious manuscripts and folios that would otherwise be displayed in a museum be hiding away in farmhouses in rural Afghanistan?
The tactic came with risk, of course. Transitions are fickle beasts, and in their unfolding, anything can happen. In an instance in late August 2021, as military evacuations were reaching fever pitch, I received a photo of a private library that I had visited years prior. While I recognized the wooden bookcases once brimming with leather bound volumes, the big tables onto which would unfold historic maps, and several chairs ready to receive curious minds, the photo showed the room to be empty, bereft of the hundreds of books that had breathed life into it. Where had they gone? Had they been taken? Burned?
The photo was posted on social media, without further explanation. It seemed to be an example of the destructive changes that were afoot. And yet, in actuality it was an example of the care that the owners had shown to their collection. After asking around, a friend told me that the family that owned the library had packed it up themselves and sent it on a truck into the countryside.
9 Name changed to protect the individual. With exception of Fatima and Wahid Wafa, who gave their explicit consent to use their real names, I have changed the names of the people who spoke to me. They agreed to their pseudonyms and some have read versions of the passages in which they are quoted.
Riskier than Amir’s limited dispersal, the entire library traveled towards a rural area that was known to be a safe spot and easier to defend because of its valley’s narrow entry points. The convoy was not so lucky though. Halfway through, they were stopped at a Taliban checkpoint. The Talib who manned the roadblock demanded to look into the boxes to see what freight the truck was carrying. The drivers tried to dissuade them, saying that it was only books. But books come in all flavors. From the Talib’s perspective, who knew whether they were propaganda or harmless tales? The driver dithered, well-aware that many of the volumes would not be to the taste of Afghanistan’s new rulers, but at gunpoint, he was forced to concede. A box was opened. To the driver’s relief, this one was filled with copies of the Qur’an. The Talib looked approvingly through the contents with a “why didn’t you say so to begin with?” expression on his face and took one of the copies – an old, precious version – as a keepsake before the truck traveled on.
The story seemed like a fabled dream. Could this have really happened? Regardless, the underlining allegory was clear to my friend: God protects knowledge. The books remained safe.
These dispersals were classic in the sense that they did what many before have done: physically moved books to ensure their safety. In the digital age, a similar function is served through digitalization. The Afghanistan Center at Kabul University (ACKU), a renowned research centre with more than 200,000 documents on Afghanistan, had already begun digitizing books, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals and reports in 2007.10 By 2021 the collection included photographic and musical collections as well as magazines from various fighting factions over the course of the decades-long wars. The question in that summer of transition in 2021 then became: how to keep this digital master copy of the thousands of books and documents safe? A plan was devised in which an international researcher would take a massive hard drive with all the original files outside the country. “There were a lot of uncertainties before the Taliban takeover,” Abdul Wahid Wafa, the ACKU director at the time, recalls. “We just didn’t know what would happen. But the documents are intact. We took one digital copy out to the United States and the rest of the documents are still there.”
When the Taliban came, the archivers and librarians showed them around the collection, including documents from different regimes and eras. They quickly lost interest and left. The physical library was safe, for now. Wafa, however, was cautious. “The Taliban have no interest in them, and neither have donors. But without funding, the documents can also suffer because they cannot be tended to correctly.”11
Neglect, too, can be a form of erasure.
While fear of outright destruction might not have become a reality for most collections, one could never know, as some cautionary tales suggest. Another book collector found himself less lucky in his choice. Former Minister of Justice, Fazal Ahmad Manawi, who joined the National Resistance Force against the Taliban, had reportedly moved his book collection with an estimated 4,000 books, from Kabul to Panjshir province, where he owned a mansion. When the Taliban took over Panjshir, they seized his house, turning it into a military base. In
10 Afghanistan Center at Kabul University. Digital Collections: https://acku.edu.af/library/ last accessed: 3.July 2024.
11 Telephone Conversation 25.June 2024.
January 2023 reports emerged that the library had been burned to the ground. Taliban officials stated that the fire started due to an electrical short-circuit, but locals accused the Taliban of setting fire to it and preventing anyone from extinguishing the flames.12
A Kabuli friend who writes screenplays and is an avid reader told me: “you just never know. The Taliban can come to check houses. They are also sometimes stopping young people to check what they are reading.” This came weeks after rumours circulated of a young man who was arrested for carrying a book with Ahmad Shah Massoud – a former Mujaheddin commander who fought against the Taliban - on its cover. “Some now disguise the books they are carrying by changing the covers,” my friend said. He himself decided to hide his books away in a family member’s cellar while burning his own documents that showed how he had given media and cultural trainings to NATO troops in the past decades.
In the evenfall of political change, the twin acts of hiding and burning oscillated between care and erasure. One Afghan documentarian, who had been writing about her own experiences, described to me her decision to burn her diaries, photos, the documentation of her life’s work: “Burying, no. I didn’t bury them because I didn’t know if they would really be safe. I mean, on those hard drives there were records of my personal life and other people…and they were sensitive. If they hadn’t been that sensitive, I would not have destroyed them. I didn’t want to put their life in danger.” At the time of the Taliban takeover, she was out of the country for work. She discussed what to do with family and colleagues. Initially, they decided to hide the material with different family members, spread the risk. But then Taliban authorities started house to house searches. “I told my brother to burn all of them, the hard drives, my diaries…”
She was not in Afghanistan at the time, but she insisted on remaining on the phone as her family destroyed her belongings. “I didn’t do it myself, with my own hands, in person. But when they were doing it, I was always on the phone. I was listening. I could see it.” Destroying all of it took many days and weeks as the family did not want to rouse suspicion. They chose to destroy smaller quantities spread out over a longer period of time, some burnt in the stove, some in the backyard of their house. The documentarian still speaks about the nightmares she endures as the memory inserts itself into her dreams. “I dream, oh my God, where are they? Where is my stuff? I am running around and I try to save them, try to hide them, and then suddenly, I get this realization that I have lost them.”
The emotional toll still reverberated with her during our conversation. “They were part of my life.” She said. “When you pick up something, you create memories with it. And I wanted to use them in future projects.” While recounting what it meant to her, a memory surfaced. “I cried a lot. And it was crazy, because I remembered that when the Mujaheddin came to power, my dad had to destroy his books and documentation.”
These inter-generational experiences, their circularity, kept haunting conversation after conversation. “I couldn’t believe it that the same thing happened to me decades later,” the documentarian recalled. “I was very young at the time when the regime was changing, but I remember that my dad burned his books in our bukhari.”
12 Hasht-e Sobh. 13.January 2023. Fire Breaks Out in Library Building in Panjshir: Taliban Prevent the Fire From Being Extinguished. See: https://8am.media/eng/fire-breaks-out-in-library-building-in-panjshir-talibanprevent-the-fire-from-being-extinguished/
Books in burners, books buried among bushes. The literary companions seeding the air and the soil, saturating times to come with stories untold. My friend Kaihan remembered digging a hole for burying books with his father during the civil war of the 1990s. He experienced the time as a ten-year old living huddled in a shelter for months between the fault lines of urban warfare. What he didn’t understand at the time was that his father had planned to use the dug-up spot as a burial place if his wife or Kaihan’s yet unborn brother would not make it through child birth. “Even though we dug this hole for various reasons that I did not immediately understand as a child, the act of digging this hole in the ground impressed on me the importance of the books.”
A few years later, during the first Taliban regime, it would be he who was sent by his family to pack all potentially compromising books into a duffle bag and burn them in the backyard of their aunt’s house. Rumours had been circulating that people were taken into custody who had connections with foreigners, and books in English or about un-Islamic topics could be seen as compromising.
“I was really scared to death that they would come, and everyone would be in trouble. I literally sat there, in front of the samovar, tearing these books apart one at a time, and burning them, to make chai. I burnt any book that could be construed as being against Islam. I remember sitting there and thinking, I worked so hard to get hold of these books, and I didn’t even get a chance to read them all, but I will have to burn them.”13
The act of burning the books to care for his family kept haunting him. “I couldn’t sleep for days because of all the books I had burned.” he recalls during a phone call. But it turned out that some books had escaped the burning.
“There were a few books left.” Apparently, some books had offered a dual purpose in the household: “My bed was lower, and I put some underneath the bed to prop it up and I had forgotten to burn those. And those were also controversial. According to the Taliban they were all bad. But I didn’t dare to burn those. I couldn’t sleep for days because of all the books I had burned. When I got hold of that next bunch that I had forgotten to burn, I put them in my duffle bag and went to Shar-e naw park early in the morning and threw them on these little flower bushes. I was biking, I just took it in my hand and put it there and that was purely out of fear that they would come, and I had to get rid of anything that could cause trouble for me and my family.”
But the books, hidden in a public park, would resurface. As if stubbornly marking their own presence. “I think, I found them again, during the Karzai regime in Kabul. I had a little sign that I made into my books, and when I saw them at the secondhand bookseller, I opened it and saw that little sign in the front.” Kaihan muses with a smile in his voice. Like an old friend, the book had greeted him at an unsuspecting corner, carrying the memory of all the places Kaihan had traversed with it.
The books were finding their ways, with the help of their guardians, into parks and gardens, mountainsides and digital hideaways. Not all made it. Some were burnt, their transformed particles floating into the air, to be breathed in by unsuspecting passers-by. Others might be lost in lots never to be found again, seeding their stories into the soil and waterways from which new stories could emerge. Some remained waiting, to be found, both in the actual or the byte-sized online soil, waiting their turn to be disinterred by the ones who remember.
OBSOLETE SKYGAZER/ ENLIGHTENED OBSERVER/ IGNORENT TRUTHSEEKER/ EMACIATED ENTOURAGE
A METALPRESS BIOPIC
Pinak Banik
Single channel video Duration - 35.49 mins
This video essay encircles the various timezones around modernity’s extractivist noble fables, when - the Obsolete Skygazer went to the oriental school ; The Enlightened Observer went to the observatory ; The Ignorant Truthseeker went to the ferryghat ; And the Emaciated Entourage went to the langarkhana!
The measured marks - tormented traces - dialectical designs - pedagogized pictograms - subterranean samplings - indelible imprints - of altered knowledge structures and dismantled socio-cultural sovereignties become time’s eye-floaters, mimicking the comets and stars in the so-called ‘third space’.
One radiant star emerged amidst a cascade of shooting stars, casting its soul adrift on a journey across the river of oblivion from its hunger-striken body, singing evening vesper of neocoloniality.
A metalpress remain silent witness and loud propagator of psycoepistemic disorders in the sky of coloniality.
This piece traverses the era of one of the first investigative journalist in modern Bengal, Harinath Majumder and the epistemes of subjectification. Centering Harinath’s printing press as an enigmatic instrument it embodies the paradoxes of truth-seeking in modernity, bearing its somatic memory reverberating into present times.
‘EVENINGS’
(Excerpts from a work-in-progress book-length manuscript The Great Era of Three Fools)
Words by Kazi Muntasir Billah Mishu, translated from Bangla by Sourav Roy
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Evening - 1
Past 6. Having tea. It was August 2017, I think.
The evening is ensuing with its naturally messy melancholy.
Often, when am done and dusted, I try to think about the why’s of this evening melancholy. No, not the exploration of an universal ‘Why’ about the influence of this juncture of day and night on our biological and sociological essences. Nothing of that sort. My generosity for generalisation is merely generic. I am grappling for, yes, you guessed it right - superficial, surefire and mundane reasons, and no, not for universally applicable, deep, complex and vespertine reasons. None of that for me.
For me, evening used to signal one thing - playtime is over (if outdoors) or cartoon time is over! ( if indoors), get-set-homework threat. And me, or us, sitting down to study, unwillingly. So evening meant yellowish light from the tungsten bulbs and the plaintive tune on TV, “No you will not, you will not get Khoda, if you grieve your fellow men” in that flowed my grief - of having to study (what I don’t want to study). That’s the sorry riff that played on, for us and for me. The pressure of having to study what I don’t want to flattened me into a rare, bitter critter. Many and most can take that pressure if they need to. I thought I did, too. I lined up to become the sheep, but could not launch myself as the ship. Stuck in failure, I gave plenty of laughs to my foes and brought tears to my loved ones.
But this momentary melancholy of now has another reason. A ‘particular-er’ reason for this uncanny ‘nothing-doing-stewing-in-my-own-dark-juices’. I am afraid to go home. It has been a few years after leading a failed and selfish life. Now I get regular visits from the Dementors - indoors, outdoors and inside me. Especially just before the sleep drops down on me - either I sleep like a baby, like baby Don Quixote after winning the fight with Dementors and windmills, chuffed and stuffed with big win energy. Else I lie awake agonising - ‘whatever-I-could-be-but-could-not-be’ (not quite ‘Que Sera Sera’). But for the last few months, after Baba had become bed-ridden - newer and mightier Dementors have been visiting. It’s like Dementors are in chorus : “We’re just brutes clowning ‘round in cahoots / We’re just brutes looking for shops to loot / We’re just brutes hoping to have a hoot”. The kind of situation where one hopes that either the Good Lord above will lift you up by the hand (as hoped Kaykobad) or the ground beneath you will slide open to give you some R.I.P. shuteye (as hoped Chandidas).
Taking tea.
But the tea is hard to take. Foul enough to give in to projectile vomiting.
The blame objectively isn’t as much as the tea’s as it is of the subjective state of my mind-body. Empty stomach, acid reflux and a hopeless, aimless mind, are what’s poisoning my tea.
Still lingering on my poison. Wanna get home as late I can.
Nah, can’t worry no more. Tonight, right after reaching home, or late at night, or right before coming back to school ‘morrow morning, or days after that, or through eternity, Dementors can keep attacking me. I will worry as and when it happens. Don’t they say, night falls, right where the fear of Dementor calls?
So, what will I write in my diary when I get home? That’s the only happy thought I can muster right now.
I had just written in my diary though, sitting in my current little haven - our school library.
After my classes get over at four thirty, I sit in the Pathshala school library for an hour or a half. That is the happy carrot I dangle in front of me all day - looking forward to sitting down in the tiny library, with a mugful of hot tea. To scribble in my diary. To read books.
But I can do all that at home. So why don’t I go home?
At home, Baba lets out sudden screams at night. Parkinson’s. Swarms of Dementors descend on me that very moment. I can’t create my Patronus charm. I break down. I shatter.
I have been revising Harry Potter the last few days. Desirous of my own Patronus production, I took out the Theree Investigator Series ‘Mummy’ from the library book shelf. After reading the mundane sentence ‘Getting busy at the Pasha Salvage Yard’, I was stunned for whole three minutes at its beauty. O beauty! O my pathological nostalgia! Although Patronus Charm has to be harvested from our individual or collective memory, our nostalgia is a Pharmakon - both a bolt and a bait for Dementors. I slapped ‘Mummy’ shut and got back to my diary. Today at lunch break, I was eyeing some ‘Rainbow Bridge’ models at the Std V classroom. Kids’ doings. There are no better bridge-makers or bridge-pursuers than kids. At least I have not seen, or seeing. I wrote all that in the diary. For, you know, producing a Patronus. Because the scribblings in my diary pages for the last few months are toxic. Screaming at myself. Cursing the world and everything in it. Even ‘I sometimes wish I’d never been born at all’. Or in the words of Chandidas ‘good for all if the luckless dies’.
Drinking tea.
Where the Uncle’s Tea Shop is, under the banyan tree with railings, at the corner of our E Block park. That’s where. Empty gaze at the round, red charity donation box, chained to a tree. Surely belonging to the darbar sharif of some holy baba. Gazing vacantly and singing Bohemian Rhapsody in my head. I don’t need no headphones in my bag for this. Whenever I need to hear this, I can press play in my mind.
After reaching ‘Goodbye everybody’ from ‘Is this the real life?’, a godsend darkened my doorstep. As if the universe hearkened to the ‘Alchemist’ conspiracy of aiding me in what I wanted. “Mishu bhai, still here?” Startled, I looked up.
An era ago, in another evening, I got startled inside the Medical campus. I was keeping my head down, walking on. Dented by Dementors. A few steps ahead, a classmate was walking, unbeknownst. He sneezed all of a sudden. His sneezes were (in)famous for their decibel level. I got startled by it, what I should have become used to by then.
Immediately Big-Brother-Voice-Over inside my head got on my case. I still remember his unkind cuts, deeply. What kind of a coward ‘man’ was I? Big-Brother-VO asked me, what right do I have to live if I get scared by just a sneeze? I don’t, Big-Brother-VO said. Go kill yourself, Big-Brother-VO said. I took his word to my head and heart and got set to die. Suicide was attempted. Didn’t kill meself though. Still writing to you.
But today’s startling is of a different colour. It’s like discovering the viridian line of an island by a sailor lost in the sea. It is that kind of startling.
“Mishu bhai, still here?” came from the voicebox of my colleague-cum-comrade Tofa, My friend. Currently the head of Pathshala, our school. He sat down next to me. Asked for tea.
We are having tea.
Sitting next to each other at Uncle’s Tea Shop.
It has been a while I grew distant with Tofa. And in this, Tofa was not alone among the fellow teachers. I hardly talk to any of them. To borrow the words of Agatha Christie, I was retiring further and further within myself as a reaction to my surroundings.
Tofa had empathy in his voice. Or my hemmed-in mind painted that empathy I desperately wanted to hear. So his question tugged at my heart and touched my gut. Something snapped, I vomitted. I kept vomitting all my pent-up feelings.
Fundamentally, Tofa has the kind of kindness like Dineshchandra Sen or Abdul Karim Shahityabisharad. He has that ‘engaged warmth’. Unlike objective scholars, he has no ‘detached coolness’. Tofa becomes my oracle that evening. A godsend. And because Orcales ‘speak selectively / selecting what the hearer wants to hear’. Therefore Tofa cajoles out and like an expert midwife, births the ‘something’ from me. ‘What is to be done’. What I wanted to do.
Me and Tofa keep having tea, one cup after another. The elastic evening keep stretching for us at each cup, not too much, not too less, just about right. All the momentous conversations, in my life at least, are brief. A five minute conversation with Amal bhai, about ten or eleven years ago, I still remember, changed the course of my life. Or it takes even less than that. Thirteen or forteen years ago, in another evening, when my boat reached the shore of Shalla village at Sunamganj, Krishnakanta Sir was waiting. He had tears in his eyes, a smile hanging on his face and a small packet of mixed small fish in his hand. The life changing conversation didn’t take a single word, It took a single moment. It was done in a joined glance.
With the tea, Tofa and me, mostly me, reach the decision ‘to do something’. More about that later. If you want a ‘one word ’ summary, it is the decision of a ‘journey’.
The desperate pathos of ‘let’s do something at least’ doesn’t let me down. May be I have the Don Quixote gene. ‘Something has to be done. Something at least!’ This desperate dictum, whether from Madan weaver or elder bro Ritwik Ghatak, twined me with Pathshala. Was it right or was it wrong? I don’t know. But Dementors stayed away from me for a decade.
I start walking home.
blowing.
Evening - 2
That very day, I mean that evening, I got my Dementor vaccine. Whenever Dementors glide towards me to suck my happiness out, I can put up a Patronus charm in seconds.
Another evening, three months later.
Drinking tea.
And we are making a model. After making four walls, the roofing has got us into trouble. The Bangla/ bungalow style curved cornice is proving to be a cruel catastrophe.
Again, Tofa was sent for. He is supposed to be an artist, and good with his hands. He started playing MacGyver. I joined the audience. Made myself a mug of tea to enjoy the ringside view of the master at work.
Here, ‘we’ means some of the current and ex students of the Paathshala School - Hridoy, Sharif, Seema, Absar, Rajib, Mehdi, Asif, and Shakil. We have been making a miniature model of Baba Adam Masjid of Sultanate Era. It has been two weeks. The month is December. School is off. Still we are ‘Getting busy in Pasha Salvage Yard’ sorry! ‘at Paathshala School’. This is the very first project of our Paathshala History Club. Moreover, it is part of my aforementioned ‘journey’. How can making a model be the part of my journey? Again, the aforementioned ‘more about that later’.
From noon to night, we make that model. Then I come back to my bed, a Sompur Vihara is built there with my books. That too is a part of my journey. The most vital part.
Is journey just locomotive?
Now evening doesn’t ensue no more with its naturally messy melancholy. Now evening means the woodfire being lit. That fire will make hot and steamy chitui pancakes for us, the pancake saleswoman helps us stuff our faces. Asif puts his phone on loudspeaker mode, Jalali Set plays. We gobble piping hot chitui-s with eyewateringly pungent mustard sauce or blood-red dried fish pickle paste. And we keep at making the model. Some days, we gobble chatpati snack mix with Bangladesh flag coloured toppings - green coriander leaves chopped and red chilli powder popped. And we keep at making that model.
Dementors stay away, they go lurk elsewhere. Why should evenings ensue with messy melancholy, at all? I too have sprung from that time-space, I too hold the phenomenology of that-then-those - when in the late Eighties and early Nineties the all-around upward progress to smartness of us, wet-behind-the-ear noobs, was monitored by our elder cousins, with a specific song. All those smart and rebellious cool among our first, second, third, fourth, half cousins swore by the Bangla song - “The Evening Is Here Again”. There was joy in the name of the singer. Happy was his name, Happy Akhand. And this generation-defining song is the call for celebrating evenings. Happy’s evenings are not melancholy. Or messy.
Flashback. Five hundred years before Happy. Maybe more. Rup Goswami tells us in one of his Sanskrit poems:
“Rēņurnāyam prasarati gabām dhumadhārā krṣānōra / bē urnāsau gahanakuharē kīcakō rōrabiti. / Pasyōnmatte rabirabhiyayau nādhunāpi pratīcīm...”
Radha’s dear friend is telling Radha to tarry a little. From the grey smoke of the kitchen fire, she thinks evening has arrived and it is her time for the tryst with Krishna! So, even before the evening arrives, she wants the evening to arrive! Therefore the evening is not to fear, but to be drawn near. Not “evening falls, right where the fear of Dementor calls” but “Wherever the beloved, there falls evening’s shade.” Whether it is the belov(He)d or
Let’s consider the symbolic side of the evening. Not one, but several sides.
Evening is an eventide juncture. A transition. Neither day nor night, but both. Messy, non-binary. We are safe and snug with binary - day, night.
Evening comes twice in the day. It transitions twice. In the day-break and at the day-end. But day-break is looked at positively because a nightful of darkness transitions to a dayful of light. But negative is the day-end where the daylight gives way to the darkness of night. So between the two byproducts of the day-night binary, day-break brings comfort and hope and day-end brings discomfort and despair. Dementors, too.
Radha’s state of heart is just the opposite. The Radha-s, the lovers, the ascetics of the world upend the symbolic universe. Radha doesn’t fear the onset of darkness. Sunlessness is fine, even moonlessness is highly welcome. As Bidyapati said, “Bihi mōra bara mandā/ ugi janu jā’ē candā” - “Luckless me! Hope the moon doesn’t rise ( to expose my tryst)! ” Bidyapati’s Radha concurred with - “With the lights out, it’s less dangerous.” (Nirvana, ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’).
And what about Chandidas? Who, according to another poet Kanuram Das, is the thinker’s thinker, the lover’s lover, the aesthete’s aesthete, the ascetic’s ascetic? About whom Kanuram wrote: “Hrdē bhāba uthē mukhē bhāṣā phutē
Ubhaya adhīna yēna..”
Our tongues and our hearts, our feels and our speaks are under the total subordination of him, he who is Chandidas. The key to our loving subordination to Chandidas was unlocked by Kanuram Das, like nobody else’s business. May be like somebody else’s - Shankari Prasad Basu’s. Anywhoo, the master of our couplings and couplets Chandidas and / or the Radha as written by him unabashedly moon-bashed thus: “Kahi’ō bamdhurē nati kahi’ō bamdhurē.
Gamana birōdha haila pāpa śaśadharē..”
Do tell my friend that the bright moon stood in my way to meet him in the tryst tonight.
“Yadi camda kṣamā karē ājukāra rāti. Tabē ta pā’iba āmi bamdhura sanhati..”
(If the moon takes leave tonight, we can take each other in.)
So why should I, us, the ‘Happy’ or ‘Post-Happy’ generation be afraid of the evening? Those of us whose feels and speaks are under the eventide shade of Chandidas’s wings, why should we fear darkness? How dare evening be distraught, distasteful or depressing for us?
Evening - 3
Last dregs of late evening. Will a melancholy, messy evening descend now, much like a Miles song? Munshiganj. 2019. December.
The Masjid we made the miniature model of - Baba Adam Masjid - we spent the whole day there today. Also the majar shrine of Baba Adam. And the Mandir of Binoy Sadhu. After all that, at Anik’s ardent insistence, we have come to Shonarawng.
Our autorickshaw stopped right at the grounds in front of the building of Shonarawng Jora Mawth. On the wall of another monastery nearby an Argentina flag is painted. Anik piped up, “Look there, your Argentina”.
I sagely replied, yes, another proof of the ancient Argentinaphilia of Bengal.
Anik asked, so how ancient are these monasteries, anyway?
Not too old, say, two centuries or a few decades less.
Anik started laughing, the Argentina flag is that old too, yes?
I said, of course! We had a ‘medieval’ poet named Donagazi. Named after Maradona.
With smiles on our faces, we kept roaming around in the compounds of Shonarawng Jora Mawth - two monastery building Siamese-twinned. The evening is deepening into the night. We look up at the great noise of birds - hundreds and hundreds of parrots. The twin peaks of the monastery has small niches, the birds might be nesting there.
Our upward eyes fixed on parrots, we heard, “This is nothing! Wait for much more. Thousands and thousands will come soon!”
I see a very old man grinning from ear to ear, his left hand holding a young green gourd and his right shoulder wearing a large mass of green gourd vinse. He asked where we came from.
“Wait around a bit more”, he said. “You see birds to your heart’s content.” We said, “Dhaka calls, need to be back.”
He offered, “Why don’t you stay at our village? This green gourd curry has your name on it.” Me and Anik politely declined. I am not that young anymore that I will spit out - “Will there be shrimps in the green gourd curry? Only then I will stay.”
But that old man is still that young. He started walking back to his house, smile still intact. He walked by a vast pond in the compound till he vanished into a dot. I looked on.
The background music played on - birds are going back to their nests with much noise. I was reminded of ‘The Evening is Here Again’“The birds going back to the nest / Chirping songs of zest. ”
Walked till I found a tea stall. Sat down to have tea before going to the bus stand. Having tea.
Evening - (number not known)
Evening. Stretched out and very long. Almost a month-long. An evening only symbolically. In the sense of a transition.
I am at the last leg of my journey. I am supposed to write about all the legs at this step. I am writing. I am halfway through. But then this evening came and blocked me. Can’t progress at all, no forward movement. In the words of Robert M. Pirsig, ‘lateral drifting’.
Why? Some authors say, exactly midway of your writing, a specific writer’s block attacks like a Dementor. In some cases. Am I a case like that?
May be not. I can specify the onset of this block exact to the date and time. It has direct and indirect links to a real event. There’s one person mentioned above, who has died - shot by a bullet. And my symbolic evening descended right then. I started feeling that - what I had done for last two decadeswhatever I said, wrote, thought - are wrong. If not wholly, mostly.
I am stuck, locked in. That killing and the many other events after that are despatching battalions after battalions of Dementors at me.
At a symbolic level, the people around me, the people of my country, are in transition too. A large number of people are busy in lateral drifting. The headcount is not small. I know quite a few personally.
In fact, may be the whole world is in transition. A few, once upon a time, about thirty years ago to be exact, thought that the humankind has done transitioning, dialectics are dead. We have entered our final and infinite climatic present.
Thereafter Lord Voldemorts started rising. Or Minotaurs. Whatever they are, they sure are male. ‘El estado opresor es un macho violador’( the oppressive state is a macho rapist). And why just ‘estado’ or state? It could be any other unit - racial, ideological, communal, religious.
May be the whole world is trying to undergo a transition. We are just adding -post and -post-post to our ‘modern’-s.
Let’s think a bit differently, because may be we can. Every moment of ours is a transition. Each moment is a juncture. An evening.
Present is a volatile thing. The moment we are done writing or saying ‘present’, it had already become past by then. ‘Present’ is nothing but the transition between past and present.
I am an optimist though. The wish-fulfillment of the unable. Maybe all the people around me, in my nation, in my planet, won’t be defeated by Voldemort. Maybe the sky will light up with fireworks of Patronus charms. May be.
Those who have read Potter know that Patronus charm is not reciting the magical words alone. It takes preparation and thought. You have to remember the happiest, strongest memory.
On the other hand, ‘Stranger Things’ taught us that to run away from Vecna, one needs music - your favourite song. When Max escapes the Vecna’s bind by listening to Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up The Hill’, the song actually works as her memory bank. We see Max listening and running but in reality, she is browsing the jukebox of her mundane happy memories in full shuffle mode. Music as Memory Bank is either ROM or RAM, either already deposited, or being deposited right at this moment, unknowingly. So the medicine of ‘Stranger Things’ is memory, accessed via music.
And what about the ‘Muse’ that is yearned for by the artists and the poets? She is, as per Greek Mythology, the daughter of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. Also, the word Museum is derived from the word Muse, perhaps.
But yes, be warned! Memory is also the tool of the evil Vecna. He trawls for trauma and guilt in his victims’ memory. He picks his preys with these. So beware of trauma, individual or collective!
Anyway, I keep my hopes up. The nation or the world will fear its ‘present’, its eternal transition, no more. It won’t fear the evening. Even when it signals a long night of unknown in the future. Happy sang “Let’s go have a trip to the unknown” in ‘The Evening is Here Again.’
But what is to be done by me? How to arrest my lateral drifting? I have written on the whiteboard in large letters, the wise words of Walter Benjamin - “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”
But it’s not working. Dementors are descending slowly and surely.
But what is to be done by me? Tea is my transition to cure me of transition. Freshly zombified, when I have to come back to the living, to do or not to do work, I go and make tea. Then take my tea. Even as a student, I used to have tea between two periods. Even as a teacher. If it was a long period, I used to take a tea-break in the middle. The one who used to get me tea, is dead. Shot. In the head. Bye. Going to make tea. Tea time, here we meet again.
SHE WAS VERY GOOD AT HER JOB
Words by Liam Foley
Ten million strangers. That’s what I thought when Mum told me the population. She’d been offered a job. Nothing special, but we wanted a change. Her last bloke, Rick, had been unpleasant and we’d had to get a restraining order. London is gigantic. At first, it was impossible to find my way around. Then I met Michelle. I was in the pub and she asked if I wanted to play the quiz machine. I didn’t do too well answers-wise, I couldn’t remember the capital of the Faroe Islands, but nor could she, so it didn’t seem to matter.
Three hours later, we were back at hers giggling and tickling, a pile of black clothes next to the bed like the remnants of a vicar (she’s a goth).
After doing it, we sat with the covers pulled up and chatted. She told me that she’d studied anthropology, but there weren’t any jobs in it. There’s no place for a modern-day Indiana Jones, she said.
I explained that he was an archaeologist, but she wasn’t having it.
After a year of working offices, she’d trained as a nurse, which showed in the post-coital cleanup. It was incredible. I was clean as a whistle and all the items were deposited in the correct bins, which were lined up against the wall and labelled.
Up until then, I’d never had too much luck with girls. And she was beautiful. I just led there and watched her chatting away.
We saw each other the next week. She suggested going to an escape room but I thought it was too soon, so we went to the park. We talked and fed the pigeons and ended up back at hers again.
This time she was more hands-on. She doused patches of gauze in iodine using a pair of surgical forceps and wiped our bellies and genitals before, during and after. I didn’t say anything because she did it in a fun way. She just made it seem normal. She was amazing at that.
Michelle lived alone in a big four bedroom house in the suburbs. She told me it belonged to an aunt who’d gone mad. I pressed for more information. She said she’d lost it one day on the patio. She couldn’t handle the neighbours. Kept repeating ‘viper nest’. Eventually she’d gone out with a pair of secateurs and decapitated all of the flowers in the cul-de-sac. ‘The great deflowering’ she muttered as she paced from garden to garden. In the end, she had to be tasered. The policemen were left with no choice as she was armed. She’s never returned to the property or been allowed to hold anything sharp since, though, according to Michelle, she’s taken up flower arranging in a therapeutic capacity.
When I took Michelle to Mum’s house, Mum gave her the biggest hug. We had tea and hobnobs round the kitchen table and chatted about nursing and London. Michelle explained how hard it is for a lot of people in the city. She said that the majority of patients in the hospital don’t have anyone to care for them. And that
a lot of old people come into A&E with nothing wrong. They just want to talk to somebody.
When the time came, Mum didn’t want us to go. She cried a bit and told Michelle that she was welcome whenever.
Over the next months, we became like boyfriend and girlfriend. Sometimes she’d go off for a night shift and I’d stay at hers watching tele. Just after the sun was up, she’d come into the bedroom in her uniform smelling of cleaned-up vomit, and she’d stand over me and ask if I needed anything. How is the patient? she’d say. Do you need some morphine? And she’d giggle and jump under the covers. She was always playing.
And her spare room! Without having to nose around, it was clear to see that it was full of hospital things. She said they were free to take but I knew some of it was the result of theft. On Tuesdays, we had hospital food in the special trays and one time, when I was hungover, she put me on a drip. The X-ray machine in the office was too much though. It was fully functional. She’d even hooked it up to her PC and installed the necessary software.
I’d lie flat on the desk (she hadn’t got round to sorting a hospital bed at this point) and she would operate the moveable arm with the camera in it, pressing it up against different parts of my body. She’d then retreat to the corner, hold up a big screen to cover her face and press the button.
There was no flash, just an intense feeling. Then a click like the noise a bat makes. There was always a weird smell in the room after too. Very hard to describe. The photos are decent.
It was around that time that Mum starting seeing Rick again. She told me that he’d reached out to her on the internet. She said he’d changed. When I reminded her what he was like, she just asked how Michelle was. The next time I went round, she had bruises on her arms.
I didn’t tell Michelle. She had enough on her plate with work. I just made excuses when she wanted to visit.
A couple of months went by. I think Michelle could tell I was worried. Over breakfast, she asked me to go and see her at work. It’ll cheer you up, she said. I’d never spent any time in a hospital before. I was amazed at how public it was. I was free to grab a can of Fanta from a vending machine and wander round unchecked.
It’s mostly people sat or led waiting, and then there is a huge range of hospital employees. Some were young and vital like Michelle, others looked very old. I saw one man, he looked like he’d discharged himself from the morgue. His
skin was the exact colour of mould and he had a blocked nose. I think he was a dermatologist.
I made my way up to geriatric where Michelle was working and sat in front of the reception. Various people came and went, but nobody took any notice of me. After a couple of minutes, I heard a “Chh Chh” from down the corridor. I leaned forward. Michelle’s head was poking out of a cupboard. She raised her eyebrows and beckoned me. Then she disappeared inside.
I made sure the coast was clear and stepped in. It was more spacious than I’d imagined. There were stacks of boxes, mops and buckets, and shelves for hospital-sized products. There was even a row of zimmer frames. Michelle locked the door.
Put these on, she said, passing me a folded set of blue robes. I knew immediately what was going on. She wanted to do it. I pulled a shocked face and shook my head but her enthusiasm was overwhelming. Once it was finished, she tugged her uniform down at the sides, gave me kiss and was gone.
I was left there in the dark leaning against a ride-on floor polisher with my boxers around my ankles and a half-empty can of Fanta in my hand. I’d never done it anywhere except in a bed before.
That was the first time. By the end of the month we’d done it in every cupboard on geriatric. It was hard going but we got it done. We then moved onto the trauma ward. Less sneaking was necessary down there due to the nature of the injuries.
One time, an old guy with a broken pelvis saw us scoot into a cupboard. I was worried, but Michelle allayed my fears. She said that nobody would believe him as he was doped up to his eyeballs. She even sometimes emitted pleasure noises insisting they would blend in with the natural soundscape of the ward. I remained tight lipped.
She often brought different items of clothing for me to wear too. Tunics, nurses’ outfits, overalls from X-ray, whatever she could grab. Once she came with a patient’s belongings, walking stick and all. When I put them on I looked like a farmer from the 1920s. She loved it.
We continued like this for months. Tireless. The spirit of adventure. Then one Thursday, I arrived usual. We were tying up the loose ends on postop care. Michelle passed me a blue hospital gown and she kissed me a bit. Then she held out two large pills in the palm of her hand. Take them, she said, they’ll cheer you up. I washed them down with the end of my can of Sprite. She smiled and we did a bit more kissing, and then I climbed up onto a hospital bed that was being stored in there and went to sleep.
I dreamt of my dad, who I’d never even seen. He had a face like mine and he was hugging Mum. They looked happy.
I awoke stiff. I could see an old guy in a bed to my right touching himself in an agitated sleep. I knew where I was. The beds in lines, the nurses attending to the patients, the people coming and going.
As the sun set out the window, I watched the grey suburbs fade and thought about Mum.
Michelle came in doing her rounds. She stood above me and stroked my brow and told me that I’d be going home soon. I really didn’t want to. She was very good at her job. As the night became still, and the ward came to life, she tucked me, drew the curtain around me and I fell into a fragile sleep.
Images by Surojit Ghosh
Opposite: Saleem the Langda. Mixed media on paper 11.7” x 16.5”
Next spread: Mixed media on paper 11.7” x 16.5”
The Bori-Geoisie. Mixed media on paper 11.7” x 16.5”
The Corporate Pimp. Mixed media on paper
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IN THE HELL PLUTONIAN
Words by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy
Of course we’ve all read about the dream boats sailing the rush between planets the girl racers steepling the asteroid belt the boy aces looping /Sol/ the inbees and enbies and every you and me riding the tides from this yellow
For ourself weeye live here in a shadow on a plain planely entombed as alive on an old disparaged orbital jecta on old god /Pluto/ on the shore of a big big night weeye assure you weeye do not hate the waves of hope hoopla hoppitybopping the system but for usme it is not wanted
Live here on choice tell weeye live here in magnanimity
Follow precepts of /Churchill/ in VICTORY DEFEAT WAR PEACE
Which is this? War never ends. A superbman said.
Of course we’re told Pax fills all the spaces we are in the loss of and we’re told our absence has had a salutary impact on the populi well very well see if we care here in the /Fletcher/ memorial
Weeye memoranda of the grand days the giant aeons /Asoka/ before Budd Billy the Kid you not days of sail and master of whip and lash wow of tar and oil rubber steel sulfure sutures knitting the boys back together send them to die again for Desh
War never ends
Ask: The Gall Ssumolini Suleiman Boosh Boosh Again Atahullah Bambaata Salauddin Ricardt Hister(ic) Poo Tin O(s)(b)A’ma King this King that Regina Vexatious Victorious Rexes Chingiz we we we we we eye are am monks and liars and lechers and cousins and cozens and wretches and redeyed hatehaired gunskinned fingerswords leaders of men bleeders of human
They tied us all together. Fuckers. Poisoned us and pinioned us and our memories and our ideals and put us on this downgraded stone.
Fucking excised that part of speciesmind
Weeye languish as they race and laugh and vie not for la vie or der land or the glory but just for fun a bo jest a fine espirit a lark not even for trophy or medal or ashes they don’t even keep or break records
Usme could puke
&often do so soulssick and
Live here at own sufferance believe you usme for weeye are not without resources could always break out of here snap these titan chains like that snap ourmy fingers sore soar off &back into contention bring back the age of war which gained so much for the race
Live here on own accord watching in a mirror on the bottom of a well the races forever gliding zoom zip eternal Avia of skie
Able were we ere
Now rot like /Bonaparte/ please keep lock of this here hair
We so hate their
Hate their Peace.
241223
WHEN THE DAYLIGHT DRAWS AGAIN …
Words and image by Phil Sawdon
For PUCKEE
Recollection and Reminiscence
The Player
Phil Sawdon [Artist, writer, editor, sometime academic, founder and Keeper of The Fictional Museum of Drawing]
The Scene
The Fictional Museum of Drawing. [A white room with black curtains]
ACT
EARLY EVENING
To be read aloud: In the white room the Keeper squats and looks around from one [drawing] to the other. “stimulus” → respond
THE KEEPER [Pause to fill a silence]: “Come now; we can begin the day.” [Not rising, exaggerated, talking more or less to themselves over the evening star]
Jaded faded and slightly yellow. [Wonder in the voice, free sobbing anguish]
A reluctant shimmer flashes softly. [Slightly on the defensive, blank pages; hollow]
Ostensibly elusive, dawn laments any sleeping touch. [Down, down and down again]
So far indifferent. [Lies on the floor, balances pencils on a forehead, puts it beside, as if the opposite were expected in a derisive sing-song]
Covetous darkness skulks to the time of day. [Wincing a little, shaking, a tiny silence erasing … erasing … erasing … erased]
“Lay down!” [In nervous impulse French Fondant Fancies Flicker, not the accent, but the … the words … the words … resist the lure of birds]
A furtive beam in the evening murk. [Looks over, a little dreamlike, unseen as if we don’t know where we are; muttering, “Phosphorus is Hesperus is Phosphorus …” ]
Thoughts of misplacing triggered devices not yet controlled. [Reaches the archway; turns to answer a question that has no answer, rises, re-enacts, follows the trace then lies slowly back on the gallery floor]
Twilight colour shades.[Smiles to see that words have no apparent effect]
So my mind craves familiarity in a sea of chalk dust [Soft, now; soft and slow, almost a Monochrome; a silence in the room, numb, slowly stand; the drawings are inaudible and subdued from here on, distinct in strained conversation]
Eyes seeing easy in all the black, twice the two melodies love and leaves whistling.
[Still holds a pencil, but not pointed; seen simultaneously; awkward and facing up]
So love lies easy. [Pause, with bags]
“Come now; we can open the day. Good night.” [Not rising, exaggerated, talking
more or less to themselves over the morning star]
EXIT [Subdued and sleepy]
CURTAIN
Phil Sawdon, When the daylight draws again, 2024, digital print. Image courtesy of the artist.
LET THE LIGHTS SHINE
Words by Kayleigh Kitt
Illustration by Estella Mare
The town is sleeping, windows observing empty streets, roads sucking up the silence.
From a box, she plucks a snowy butterfly. Silvery chiffon twirls around her shins, her porcelain fur cape swinging from her shoulders, contrasting her dark wavy locks. The wand in her hand twinkles, the wings on her back accompanied by fireflies, winking soft amber light. She smiles, brushing a strand of hair from her face.
She sweeps the rod in her fingers, skipping along the cobbles, through the streets, inviting, gifting charming help. Threads of warm light glitter, one, two, three, and way into the distance. Primary colours glimmer later on, above the lonely pavement.
Shop fronts greet her, smiling faces in doorways, people waving hands in the chilly air. A brown bear wakes from his slumbers, with a sloth of friends, saluting her cause.
She moves through an archway, her shoes skimming the flags, her wings aloft, the butterfly dancing in her grasp, a circlet of candleflies in her hair.
Finally, she comes to rest opposite a man wearing a heavy chain over his scarlet scarf, and a thick coat to keep out the cold. He smiles, bowing majestically. Welcome he seems to say.
She curtsies deeply, pirouetting whilst dabbing her wand and baubles burnish the tree alive with trinkets of scarlet, teal, and ochre flecks.
Then she shares the sparkles of the night with you, blowing dust from her palm, and the whole world shimmers.
Raktim Chatterjee, Resting Beside the Last Shore. Photoshop painting, 19.973” x 13.12”. 300dpi.
Raktim Chatterjee, Room. 73.4” x 45.3”. Digital.
MORNING STAR
Words by Ae Reiff
The trip to the Morning Star shows the transit between the 3 and the 4. I have a pencil map for the up and down roads to Morning Star. It had rained. We end up the next commune over, a Chicano redoubt, New Buffalo, pull up about dark, mufflers blazing. Those inside hear the car and think it’s Andres, a friend, which is what they called me in Central America before, so I call out, Esta, and go in to get directions. A buxom the jefe welcome until he comes out and threatens. Looks like it will end bad until Cleopatra comes and shows again the pique and steel she’s made. She has done this since, fierce, she interrupts the malcontents with ferocity. We get away. Back down, up another mud hill is Morning Star. Nobody around, we camp in the dark, ignored.
Drizzling. The commune sheriff patrols by night. Next day, giving homage to him, says he heard me and Cleo noodling and talking to sleep. It reminds him of himself and his mate, daughter of the great pitchhitter, Dusty Rhodes, who won the 1954 World series. Next day, Sunday, I propose we go get some drink, didn’t quite know he was an alkie then, says he knows a place open at 9 AM, wants to drive the Mustang. So he and I take off over hill roads deep in mud and I buy bottles to bring back. This is a way to make friends if done with no intent. But imprudent. Next day we go with his Dusty along the river to breakfast with friends who make hand tortillas and pan fry in the rain. Dusty says am I OK to drive the mud? I am OK to drive mud, rock, river sand, always saving a piece of chicken wire. I am still getting indulgence for who I will become.
We get to Arroyo Hondo from Eugene that late August, at Christmas send them a pkg of spirits. For some reason I open one bottle, an Irish whisky and then wrap it up good, like a drink offering maybe, packed up snug in a box so it won’t break. Later a would-be who was there, an embezzler, said that when the sheriff said he was a harm to the community, but that rascal only gave presents to himself. They let him stay out of deference to good will. This guy provided a down payment for our house when he was caught. A hundred sins and a thousand mark the sins of our youth. Remember them not according to your mercy. But there are more.
After a feast that night we are invited and descend in the kiva to smoke deep in the earth. It is intense below, like a passage tomb. They tell stories of the Streptococcus running free in the soil from a cavalry massacre of women and children that occurred there. It poisoned the soil as a curse. Very OT, that behavior curses the land. This undocumented response and outgrowth of reprisals against the Taos Revolt and especially the Arroyo Hondo Massacre has no record in historical writ. Massacres against the myth of dominance don’t
count. I see and hear the ghost shapes in the kiva like at any spit back karma group where they confess the damage done. Spit backs accost in alleys and on trains. To recognize the wrong done another is like the wrong done to God, so use the word with respect, the one Lord must be followed and proclaimed. To mistreat another imperils. I see them replay.
Two weeks as a boy at scout camp the youngest, 11, swimming, canoeing, hiking, games good beyond years, this got a mascot status for this innocent among the elite campers who ranged up to 18. My question for knowledge is, how does it stop? When a group of bikers and their women came one weekend, taken along, in the jousting one weak boy was the victim I was baited to fight. The beginning of an immense journey downstream on my back, simmered and steamed, boiled and fried, pushed down, bubbled up, innocence declining. I took him down with a natural, left, left, left, headlock flip, to much approval. Injustice never dies, it has a pay check. Four years later at midnight I am in a friend’s car to get paid. We pull into the diner where the biggest of the town stands. Hey I hear you lookin’ for me. He comes up to the car. The window is down. I say to friend, get outta here. But providence is calling on karma. The car begins to move as the mallet fist hits the side of my head. Kaboom! the memory the boy payback, a deal between Lion Gardiner and Yovawan, Sachem of the Pommanocc, an expectation of the Massachusett pummunnum, she gives away the paumpanummunum, offers it habitually by custom.” Woe to them who harm the weak.
The kiva smokes. Pass to Padre Island, Galveston, driving an old MGB roadster. Two six volt batteries hooked up in series rot, four cables not two, under the back seat. Take out the seat, there they are. Batteries weak had to be caught in gear the same way the starter stuck. Put in 4th and rocked back and forth the teeth released. We stopped just over a bridge. Tall grasses, sea trusses, sand, wood. It wouldn’t start. I have her to pop the clutch, another innocent to count the cost. Doesn’t seem fair, that two are one. Push the car, no prob, I’m strong. She pops the clutch. Sputter and die. Have a little query, do again harder, pop and die. Take a break. Maybe change from first. Give it gas! Push hard. Pops and dies. I curse God, really a curse at her. Amazed I would do that. The fourth time it works. We drive off in the air around my head. Driving N Lamar, Austin, Saturday, same car, same companion, six weeks later, stopped at a light, truck behind me can’t find the brakes. They’re on the floor! We’re stopped. Hits the MGB from behind, 30 mph. Kaboom! Big fist in neck and shoulders. She gets it too, but not so hard. A big balsam fir truck goes by, heading the other way, on its side emblazoned: O Lord our Lord how excellent is your name in all the earth. To impress, He teaches the humble his ways
We are still down there in the dugout, just a fire for light in the kiva, wisps in the air no menace. Why should they be, I lean among the pots, the wings of his dove are covered with silver and her feathers of shining gold which went on a long while as we were entertained, and everyone in the underground slept.
Many sense memories accompany this experience. Visiting along the river and entertained by people with a wood stove cooking tortillas on the grill, the smells, the warmth of welcome, the shared life, for they welcomed me to the max seeing the spirit revealed. That night up on the mountain, from an anchoress who lives alone, come long sonorous songs directed at me who never met the singer. The community says this happens rarely. Where is this community now? Where has all the bright company gone/ Waking the next day in our tent I hear that otherworldly high soprano echoing again from the Sangre de Cristos up high where they say their morning star is singing, which she does. I hear the greeting, like later, stopping in Keams Canyon, as wife and daughter shop. I lean against the hood of the car. A Hopi elder, ancient, next car over, does the same. We never speak for that half hour.
That day, back at Morning Star, directions given to Black Rock hot spring in Rio Grande gorge, I am lean muscular and weak. In the hot spring a naked father and three buxom daughters pass smoke, hang breasts on the water. From the hot spring I dive the cold water and swim across and back. Then appears a really beautiful girl, yes, naked. It weakens me more. I almost see her face, like on the shores of naked Comanche Trail. Cleo is smashed at the sight. I dive in again and almost drown, though swim pretty good.
We get out of there. At break camp I find a piece of elk horn left behind by Bob Northcott who gave me the pencil map. We camped on his spot. He used to carve pipes out of elk horn, had left the days before. I still have the elk horn, waiting. He turned up later in Austin afflicted. Said to ask his name if he went off. Which worked. He stayed over that night and the house, all stone, was hit with heavy winds and blown. He showed up one more time after a winter alone in the Alaska bush, selling photos I bought. Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth.
I didn’t yet know why I am there. I had married Cleo and changed her name to Eden. After an invitation from her patient, slouching in an overstuffed chair, I look away as they go prepare. Bored, I walk this complex of six large pools like beds whose inmates are old Jewish folk, women and men. Wander back to the lounge and the doors are already closed, the lobby vacant. I go in to join the event. It is a Kamu, a “catch,” a Hausa pre-wedding for people to come and “catch” the beautiful bride. Her face is covered as she hides among her friends, a garden enclosed, hands dropped with myrrh to feed among the lilies, as friends haggle for the bride price to be paid. Veil lifted, we see her face. The King’s daughter is all glorious within; he clothes her all of wrought gold. All kinds of people, happy and sad, all shapes, sizes and statures are kneeling, some sitting. Eden is on stage. I am just coming in as it starts, all saying bless the Lord oh my soul and all that is within me bless his holy name, when suddenly I wake in the hearing, and begin aloud, bless the Lord all sea and mountains, birds of the field, grass, trees and all that is made. Bless the Lord rivers and hills, sea and the dry ground, small and great, open & shut, living & dead, everything that has breath or had breath or will have breath and all that is within me Bless the Lord and Bless his Holy Name. Then I realize what they are doing, but not sitting or kneeling, I join the praise and wake to continue the psalm.
THE BLOOD-TWILIGHTS, BANGLADESH
Curation and Text by Sourav Roy
Ending an interminable July, the 2024 Bangladesh quota reform movement climaxed into the two-days One-point Movement, toppling a 16 year old dictatorship on August 5. The movement reached its goal on the wings of platformised social media content - online and hundreds of Bangladesh’s youngs shot, maimed, and killed - on ground. While transitioning from a nationwide rising action to a climax, there was a series of blood-twilights, when the day-long propaganda circus mirror of the dictator turned to her night-time Kristallnacht fangs. Killings, arrests, raids and mass burial of freshly-deads followed till the sunrise.
, Images by Various
0. July 29, Khulna. Riot Police looks on as a student writes: “Drama by Day. Death by Night. #Stepdown”.
Source: https://www.facebook.com/@tbtKU/
1. August 2, Dhaka. A rickshaw-puller salutes the passing march of students. Source: https://www.facebook.com/ArifaJannatNafisa.Official/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jGOYAuTHgo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jGOYAuTHgo
Bangla Lyrics : Shezan
Bangla Lyrics : Shezan
English Translation: Sourav Roy
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English Translation: Sourav Roy
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[Chorus]
[Chorus]
‘52 and ‘24 are same my brotha? Speak up!
'52 and '24 are same my brotha? Speak up!
Nation is free but we are still not? Speak up!
Nation is free but we are still not? Speak up!
Sis and Brotha gettin’ killed but you still ok? Speak up!
Sis and Brotha gettin' killed but you still ok? Speak up!
The cobra’s at your neck, bite its head off, yeah up!
The corbra's at your neck, bite its head off, yeah up!
‘52 and ‘24 are same my brotha? Speak up!
'52 and '24 are same my brotha? Speak up!
Nation is free but we are still not? Speak up!
Nation is free but we are still not? Speak up!
Sis and Brotha gettin’ killed but you still ok? Speak up!
Sis and Brotha gettin' killed but you still ok? Speak up!
The cobra’s at your neck, bite its head off, yeah up!
The corbra's at your neck, bite its head off, yeah up!
[Verse 1]
[Verse 1]
[Verse 1]
[Verse 1]
Might is right, yeah right, but who has the first right?
Your rod breaks my pen, and my peace killed by your fight
Killed me that day, killed me this day, wanna kill me still tonight!
Raja kills you, doesn’t keep you, then who da ‘Rajakar’ be might?
My map cries today seeing state of my territory
My red green flag is blood red, soaked n wet n all gory
The shield cuts like sword today, this is da opposite story
2. A robot bleeding out while sitting down. Illustration by Russian illustrator Waldemar von Kozak, aka Waldermar Kazak.
Sheikh Hasina smiles on. She flees three days later, facing a nation-sized crowd long marching towards her palatial residence. Source: https://x.com/itsA9D
9. 'Laced Table Cloth', Guy Gladwell, 1987, Oil on Canvas. Colour palette match with a bloodsoaked national flag of Bangladesh merely coincidental.
You sinner! Our Truth burns you, oh no!
Get lost motha-traitor of ‘71, just go, go!
Shelter yo goon brothas n slaughter mah brothas, why so?
You turn Bangladesh to cash, how are you a patriot?
My sistah’s killed n killah’s yo sistah, are we idiots?
SHEZAN - Kotha Ko (কথা ক) | BANGLADESH
Boys and girls fight frontline n online’s where the scene at Your thugs kill us, and your silent cops just watch that Kill or get killed, do or die, what?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jGOYAuTHgo
Bangla Lyrics : Shezan
English Translation: Sourav Roy
Don’t be afraid of the night Darkness is the darkest, brotha Just before the first light
[Chorus]
[Chorus]
[Chorus]
[Chorus]
[Chorus]
‘’52 and ‘24 are same my brotha? Speak up!
''52 and '24 are same my brotha? Speak up!
'52 and '24 are same my brotha? Speak up!
Nation is free but we are still not? Speak up!
Nation is free but we are still not? Speak up!
Nation is free but we are still not? Speak up!
Sis and Brotha gettin’ killed but you still ok? Speak up!
Sis and Brotha gettin' killed but you still ok? Speak up!
Sis and Brotha gettin' killed but you still ok? Speak up!
The cobra’s at your neck, bite its head off, yeah up!
The corbra's at your neck, bite its head off, yeah up!
The corbra's at your neck, bite its head off, yeah up!
‘52 and ‘24 are same my brotha? Speak up!
'52 and '24 are same my brotha? Speak up!
'52 and '24 are same my brotha? Speak up!
Nation is free but we are still not? Speak up!
Nation is free but we are still not? Speak up!
Nation is free but we are still not? Speak up!
Sis and Brotha gettin’ killed but you still ok? Speak up!
Sis and Brotha gettin' killed but you still ok? Speak up!
Sis and Brotha gettin' killed but you still ok? Speak up!
The cobra’s at your neck, bite its head off, yeah up!
The corbra's at your neck, bite its head off, yeah up!
The corbra's at your neck, bite its head off, yeah up!
[Verse 2]
[Verse 1]
[Verse 2]
Making beef stakes of your brotha and cannibalize like shameless You troll the truthsayers and the soothsayers and the blameless
Making beef stakes of your brotha and cannibalize like shameless You troll the truthsayers and the soothsayers and the blameless Students gave us our Bangla, Students made us Bangladesh Students need to live and learn, and you kill and eat student's flesh? If you made us free before, then why are we not free now?
Students gave us our Bangla, Students made us Bangladesh
Students need to live and learn, and you kill and eat student’s flesh?
If you made us free before, then why are we not free now?
If you won us our speech, why are we so mute now?
Where are your clothes, king? Where da fuck your sweet nothings?
Breaking our spine, is it? Or digging your own grave?
You talk big on the tele, and slink away when we need braves?
Whose blood are you stepping on for your booted victory march?
How many more skulls yo need to build up yo victory arch?
Yo think yo r alive, but yo dead inside, living dead
Yo can’t shut up all of us, yo can’t gather dat much dread
Oh Ma, if one falls dead, six will rise to take his place
We live to die, we die to live, nothing never makes us stop
If a ‘SHEZAN’ dies, millions ‘SHEZAN’-s will speak UP!
[Chorus]
[Chorus]
‘52 and ‘24 are same my brotha? Speak up!
Nation is free but we are still not? Speak up!
Sis and Brotha gettin’ killed but you still ok? Speak up!
The corbra’s at your neck, bite its head off, yeah up!
‘52 and ‘24 are same my brotha? Speak up!
Nation is free but we are still not? Speak up!
Sis and Brotha gettin’ killed but you still ok? Speak up!
The corbra’s at your neck, bite its head off, yeah up!
A vote of thanks to Mohsin Rahul.
3. July 18, Uttara, Dhaka. Snipers from a highrise shoots a group of students catching a lunch break in between protest demonstrations.
Blood-red ripe bitter gourd seeds on black and white print. Razib Dutta, 2020.
5. August 3, 2024. Preparation poster for nation-wide long march to Dhaka. Collage of Facebook Profile pics marked blood-red to signify solidarity to the movement. Source: https://gygupoxnewsbd.blogspot.com/
6. July 28, 2024. Graffitti reads: “Be scared, be very scared. When Spring unfolds, we’ll be twofold.” Source: https://www.facebook.com/bdcarZZ18
7. August 4, 2024, Late Night. Fire engulfs the main market, fights erupt all around. Hajiganj, Chattagram. Source: https://www.facebook.com/rknews71
8. August 2, 2024. Blood on the streets near Dhaka University. A likeness of State Head Sheikh Hasina smiles on. She flees three days later, facing a nation-sized crowd long marching towards her palatial residence. Source: https://x.com/itsA9D
9. ‘Laced Table Cloth’, Guy Gladwell, 1987, Oil on Canvas. Colour palette match with a bloodsoaked national flag of Bangladesh merely coincidental.
RAGA Puriya Kalyan VOCAL Kabir Altaf TABLA Iftikhar Joseph
Words by Gabriella Garofolo
But how can’t they starve for God, And why do they give a cold shoulder
To unusual skies of mercy, to shrubs of grace, And their rare scent?
Voices: the blast in your mind
When you reset teasing pronouns, You him them her-
Don’t strive for answers, soul, As they might disclose to you
Why unyielding desires are muddling the air With quasars, lost replies, A grass that can’t heal, A grass you’re dying to crush, Don’t play the last chance, soul, If only through darkness they set free Stares, leaves, whenever you stumble On ancient weeds that cling
In a shiny obsession to concrete, and skiesJust be done with the music of rioting cells, Of limbs held fast in jolting sounds, Just keep in mind the story of a poet and his lover, He too was looking at her, But only blue shadows replied, As a relentless earth keeps her secrets forever, And water gives them to her sons, A shame she’s a motherAnd you, Heaven, can’t you realise Your shredded words are brewing troubleGive them a life, make other voices
Excite her ice blue, her mindA no brainer, look, if ever the moon
Stops sounding wild, and you stop playing With her tangled white hair.
To M.
To W.
Sorry, the party is over, life looks a shady outsider, The sky a no-man’s land where flowers, souls, Fresh skies, raw scents, shatter and riotDrop it, c’mon, as God never chances with souls, If you shield them from shedding minds, Frayed limbs out of the blue, if dancing away a soul In frenzied skies is her bright, harsh choiceLook, the sky’s so ripe, as she’s running Into dire births, a bracing wind, And her high voltage’s writing electric blue sparks Her soul begets, the drive setting fingers ablaze, Or shredding embers, a dim light posing
As a shy girl, anyway, time’s out, Her days are gathering now to send back Souls to the grass that breaks up poetry, prayers, Who cares, they even smell blue When she gets by with water, fields of daffs, Her blue hunt for other sites, A crippled ditch of soured limbsIs that you, warriors of the blue flame? You ready for a raid?
Hurry up, she can’t see you all over the sky, And you’d better move, all of you, right now.
To Y.
Wassup, souls, why are you riding Astride blue clouds in the sky?
Trying to make a hit with God?
But mind, tonight they’re hunting for a poet’s flowers, For souls too, as they go smiling ‘Have a nice day’, And time is breathing you, those boulders shaking souls, When loss and a wildfire stand close by you A tiny bit uneasy-
Careful now, your smashed hope is sleeping in the street, While passers-by are taunting womenNo biggie, though, the gamblers know the game, Sure as they are blackouts to God work, And your days look like scattered grassOnly they don’t, so you’d better leave, loss, Go rant and rave with earth, and water, Or cut it out, as the sky’s her only prophet, The windows only a slight hurdle
When beyond the glass they’re dancing, Children, and rainbows shunting them, A sudden alfresco singalong Where no predator lives on moon and words.
Whatever the harvest lend your hands, soul: Grass, briers, loss, Boys at the windows, tainted walls, As life’s feeling young today, and we talk dreams, Father, even if winter rustles your mind, And you can’t wait for bright days When grass has no time to dither, When words, and loss hang out at dusk, And to pure limbs rows get silent, Angels or clouds-
But are you afraid to cry for them, you look so antsy? Come on now, little blue sheens don’t bite, right?
Well, maybe only light, fathers, kidsBut are you a father, life? And you, God, Are you no man’s land?
Get dark now, soul, you and your crazy dreams, Not yours, never, a light hailing from heaven, Only rows you’ve got, troubles, dissections, A neon starbursts, maybe your eyes meeting life When dusk wrecks or skews early wombsAnd this be the jumble where hard blades go wrong, Your scant self as the sky slinks after your spots Where hunger rides roots, desire flaunts its splits, Where you find it again, your wild, halting words
Setting the silence ablaze just to talk lightDrop it now, will you, as they’ll never talk right, The North in your sky, your astral charts, Or your helpless hunt for unwashed limbs, Maybe green lights.
To M.
But where are her blue ink, blue quills, Those renegades cursed to write?
Only sneaky brambles in sight, or words Of farewell while the salesgirl chirps ‘Care for a gift wrap? It’s free!’Soon those blue, percussive summer blows Will smash minds, and souls, as they deeply resent A lost age, the green flowing through grass, And the sour taste of sinsDon’t look now, my soul, light is on the hunt, Not a shy girl hiding in blue winters, But a rebel fighter whenever Father forwards Births to heaven, among spasms, or bitesJust go easy on dark curtains, Those blue shades against you,
As in other stares life’s hiding, lost days, maybe your fearYes, of course it’s a bloody scam when food air souls They all breathe, but only lost leaves go back to April, While the missing stay trapped in your lap, A dark hideout where desire shuns dreams, Words fall away, but hey, no need to worry If he sneers at your fire, His life, his rules, and no hassle When his henchmen throw the moon to a rambling light, As a woman’s gaze is getting near To share her flow with loss and leaves, Or so fathers say, then run for the hills, Shreds of sky their only giftPainted trinkets, sure, but no good at all, And they can’t run away to boot.
UNDER THE LIGHT OF A FADING EVENING
Words by Anthony ILacqua
It was one of those unseen dilemmas, or unseen delights. It was only unseen because the whole scope of the activity didn’t mean a thing until the entire event was over. Harold was staring out the window of the number 12 bus. He just stared and did his best not to seem invasive, but the darkness of the evening made mirrors on the inside glass of the bus. His view of the couple was reversed, and he’d already grown accustomed to watching the reflection than to see them in real space seemed awkward.
So the man, it seemed, wanted dinner, or to move out or to move away and his tone suggested something, someplace. The woman, she had to have been drunk, but Harold feared that she had perhaps been a victim of stroke or head trauma. Whatever it was, there was the reference to a Fleetwood Mac record that made the conversation, or the fight, between the couple interesting enough. Fleetwood Mac, Harold thought. So old now, long ago, boring, or had it been too much radio play?
The bus was an older model, the kind which had the push bar stop signal rather than the plastic wrapped cables. The man in the reflection was on again about food, or some such thing and gliding off. Harold looked away from the reflection. Harold exhaled, folded into himself and rolled his neck, relaxed. The woman in a broken voice referenced a jukebox. Harold’s head hit the bar only to bounce upright at the ding-the ding like a pinball table might make. “Vine Street, short Vine,” the driver called. Harold moved forward on his seat. The man grumbled, the woman sighed.
“Vine Street, you say?” Harold asked.
“Short Vine,” the driver repeated.
“Short Vine.” Harold held the handrail as he stepped down. He crossed himself, some nervous tick. Once he stepped onto the sidewalk, the air brakes whooshed. The smell of diesel filled the sidewalk mixing with the humidity of the evening.
Walking the length of half a block, he looked up to the street sign there: Vine Street. Again, Vine Street. They all called it short Vine for no other reason that
this section of Vine was only three blocks long. It was stopped on either side by parks. And in all actuality, it was only a park on one side, and a cemetery, Riverside Cemetery, on the other. Farther south on the other side of the river, Vine Street was a main thoroughfare, a four lane street lined with strip malls, office buildings, billboards and parking lots. And to the north, on the other side of Paramount Park, Vine Street was a wide lane filled with the stately houses built extra large from ore mined money of the 19th century. But here, on short Vine, there were the derelict houses of times between: park ranger houses, and smaller structures of undertakers and grave diggers. Harold had no business here, it was just where he’d accidentally got off the bus.
He’d gotten off the bus here once before, not short Vine, but south Vine and that was a long time ago. The smells of the river were over there too, some time after his part in the war in Vietnam had ended. Some time, long ago, more than half his life ago. It was a time after he’d learned to accept things. It was after Vietnam, yes, after a short stop over in the Cold War Europe of the 1970s. On his return home, he’d taken a bus away from the Midwest only to stop here, in this town, and still almost 50 years later, he was still here. He’d come here initially because of Ted and Chris. He could replay all of Ted’s stories at will. Ted had been a keen story teller. Ted, had time allowed him more experiences on Earth, could have filled volumes with his anecdotes. Harold laughed as he crossed the street. “We had to go,” he whispered in a gruff Ted accent.
“We had to go, so I said to them, we gotta get outa here. So the bouncer’s sweating me and I couldn’t get us out of there. So, Chris was talking to this girl at the bar, some fat girl too, crazy fucker was into that shit, I guess it’s better than the real skinny ones. Anyway, he’s not going to move and the whole reason why I’m still in the club is because Eva knew the bouncer, or the owner, or someone. But Eva just split, I mean, it was the way she was so easy to embarrass. Knee socks, it’s what I remember most about it, that night. What I remember most about Eva is the stinky Schnauzer she used to have and her strict mother. The mother had problems with Americans. Anyhow, we had to keep the relationship secret, under wraps, you know, because she still lived at home. And I had to be on base most days. It was all just the way it had to go
down. Fucking cold nights in February. And you know the stalls in the German restrooms? The walls and doors go right down to the floor. Well, that’s it, we were in the stall and we were just going to town and the door rattled open, or whatever. We got thrown out, and Chris just sat there, sat there at the bar doing whatever it was he was doing. And me and Eva? I should have dated her in the summer time, I guess.”
Harold looked back across Tenth Street. The chain link of the cemetery’s fence, was oxidized mostly and somewhat rusting as it held the shrubs and corpses inside Riverside. He’d thought quickly, but it passed as fast, the thought of seeing Ted’s tombstone. Ted loved to party, and it had been fun. He died in 1981. Drugs. He was 30.
“Chris was into this fat bitch,” he muttered. Harold turned away from the cemetery and mounted Vine street. Harold shook his head. The consideration was simple enough. He should have explained to the driver that he’d inadvertently touched the bar and did not really wish to get off the bus. He knew he could catch the next bus, one would be along shortly. He hoped there wouldn’t be a drunken couple arguing on the next bus. He considered Ted again. Ted was always one of a drunken couple. Ted was never one to argue, he chose mostly to make love. Chris had been the one to argue. Harold had loved Chris even more than Ted. More rainy nights in more foxholes with Chris. After their return to civilian life, there had been more rainy nights in the kitchen at The Rendezvous. It had only been seven years, the two years of the Army and the five years of restaurant work that Harold and Chris had been together in battle, as it were. To Harold as he walked up Vine Street, short Vine, the seven years seemed more like a lifetime and that was more like a lifetime ago. Like Ted, Harold lost Chris in 1981. Drunk driving. Chris had opted not for burial, he’d chosen that during the war. His fear of being buried alive had moved into his fear of being buried after death. He opted for cremation and no interment. He also died at thirty.
And now, forty some-odd years later, Harold walked up short Vine.
Through the evening’s large orange-gold glow, Harold looked through the trees to the sky. What seemed like a shooting star crossed his vision. He shook his head, too soon, he thought.
On the next block, he watched a couple of kids, artists probably, sitting on the stoop of a house. They were laughing and smoking cigarettes, of course Harold would guess them for artists. These blocks for some reason or other had always appealed to this type of person. They were laughing and they did not take notice of Harold. Harold brushed over them quickly and looked instead at the oldweathered-paint chipped-worn numbers of the address: 1236.
1236.
1236 Vine Street.
Evening time. He hadn’t been older than the kids, the current residents of 1236 Vine the last time he’d been there. He’d been there. 1236 Vine Street. Harold would not have been able to recall the house if asked, but in the deepening evening, on Vine Street, there was no mistaking the place now. And from the looks of it, the numbers: 1236 had not been painted since the 70s.
Melisa stood on that stoop, a late summer’s party. A few lightning bugs crossed the distance between the peonies and the unkempt green lawn. She stood with a large grin like billboards of possibility. Her hand looked incredibly small on the bowl of the wine glass. She held a cigarette in the other hand. “Did you have trouble finding the place?” she asked. A Fleetwood Mac LP echoed through stereo speakers and came spilling out the open windows, the open door.
“No,” Harold said. “1236 Vine, pretty easy.” He climbed the stairs and
heard the laughter from inside augmented in funny harmony. “Pretty easy,” he repeated.
Harold’s eyes dropped. The kids on the stoop were doing the same things. Melisa’s flowers and grass had faded to bare patches and beer cans.
Harold looked ahead again, the park loomed in dark forests ahead. A mercury lamp buzz lifted above the roar of far off traffic or the far off river.
He crossed over thirteenth street and quietly entered the park. After initial groups of trees, the park opened up into a meadow vacant like the great plains of the world. He walked along the pitted asphalt path to the nearest bench.
He sat.
He inhaled deeply and held his breath.
Two women, each tethered to a dog walked up slowly. “Hello,” Harold said to the beagle who nosed him.
by
Images
De Villo Sloan
FIRST LIGHT
Words by Robin Dennis
The cold comes up his legs as his feet hit the rutted ground, and it feels almost good—good to run like this, after Christmas. There’s a band of purple on the horizon, like seeing up the sky’s dress. He loses his footing on the dark track, stumbles and rights himself. Slow down. Those headlights on the main road can’t be her, not yet.
Two pairs of pants and his balls still nestle up in him: swollen all through Christmas, all through New Year, bobbing like burning islands on the sea of wine and whiskey and beer. And now he feels them clear as a picture in each footstrike: pink, engorged, raw in his shorts.
He rounds the allotments and looks for her where the track leads into the woods. He slows, turns, looks around. The way’s black behind; there are no lights on the main road. Breathing hard, he leaves the path and crosses the grass, folding the frost under his Nikes. He waits at the mouth of the wood, the big stones too cold to sit on, hopping from foot to foot, watching as the field and trees are gradually unpacked.
At length beams swing off the road and beetle down the track. When the car stops and the lights shut off, he gets his first look at her of the new year: on her phone, staring at her lap. He opens the door to the smell of dogs and wellies, grunts as he eases himself into the seat. He takes in her face while she stows her phone and she’s different to how he remembers: hair darker, with lines around her mouth—but beautiful still.
Happy New Year, he says.
Her eyes narrow the dirty light. Happy New Year, she replies.
The heater’s on, but you still see your breath. In here, there’s a different quality of cold—thinner. Couldn’t you get away? he says. I been here ages.
Sorry, she says, Julian was making a scene. Same shit, different day.
Her problems. But now his problems, too.
No better? he says.
She throws up her hands.
Hey, it’s not my fault—
Just—stop with the stupid questions, she says. You know how much I pay for that school?
He shrugs. How much?
Well that’s none of your business, actually, she says. But a lot.
Just pull him out.
Pull him out! And put him where?
Dunno—lots of schools, though, in’t there? he says. He pictures them fucking, and he wonders whether the kid smells them in the car—smells him, without knowing. His balls begin to tighten, with a jolt of pain.
Where are your kids? she says.
St. Luke’s. He shifts in his seat.
That the Catholic one?
Yeah.
Well fuck that, she says, I’m done with Catholicism, her accent thickening on the last word so you can hear the Polish in it, see the gold of the altars.
You’re in a fine mood this morning, he says.
Well so would you be if your son had just threatened you with a kitchen knife, she says.
A big one?
Big enough. Harold had to throw the cafetière at him.
Full?
Yes.
Hit him?
No.
Did he go?
What?
To school.
No, he’s dead in the boot—of course he went to fucking school. What’s that smell? What smell?
That—pond smell.
A beat. It’s the cream. The ointment. Seriously? Have you smelt like that all Christmas? Could be the sweat, n’all—
Oh fuck it—just take them off, she says—but he flinches, instinctively lifts a hand. Yeah, he says, I can—I want to—but I don’t think I can do a lot— Why not? I thought it was okay?
Yeah, it is okay—I thought it was okay: it’s getting better—I think it was the running—
You serious? What did you call me out here for?
Well, you wanted to come—you asked me—
So you thought—what? That I wanted to sit in a car with you, in a field? So, he says. I’m trying not to be offended now.
Oh please—have you seen a doctor?
No.
What if they’re—ruptured?
I don’t think they’re ruptured; everything still works. What do you mean?
I mean I don’t think they’re ruptured—they just need a bit of time. What did you tell her?
Said I caught ’em in the car boot.
Did she believe you?
He shrugs. Yeah.
Has she seen them?
Yeah.
What, did you fuck her?
Hey, what d’you mean, did I fuck
Did you fuck her?
Did I fuck her?
Yes.
Did I fuck my wife over Christmas? Yeah—did you fuck your husband?
But you won’t fuck me?
Hey, you know what, I don’t need this shit right now, he says, pushing the door open, sliding into the cold. My fucking balls hurt, yeah—I come out here and you give me this shit?
He slams the door. Birds leave the trees.
He motions for her to wind the window down.
She doesn’t. He opens the door. Hey, I was fuckin’ playin’ it down, yeah, he says—and do you know why? Fuck off you bastard, she says, putting it into reverse, go and fuck your ugly wife; and she reverses at speed so he has to jump clear of the open door.
He watches the car bump backwards up the track. A wheel drops into a rut and the door swings to; it catches without closing, and it needles him almost worse than her going.
Abruptly, the car comes to a stop. The lights come on. Then the car lurches forward, and he sees her face in the first light, and he turns and he runs.
GUAPALUPE’S MISFORTUNE
Words and image by Daniel de Culla
\
In Madrid, Guapalupe
A good-looking dark-skinned girl
At the age of fourteen
Through gossip magazines
She began to fall in love
With Hollywood actors
Who gave her dreams
Health and shelter.
Devoted to Anthony Perkins
James Dean, Gary Cooper
Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum
Victor Mature, Charlton Heston
She carried them in her soul
As it should be
And, before entering her room
To rest or sleep
In their photos she kissed them.
One day that was Saturday
A well-dressed man
Approached her on Gran Via
When she was going to deliver
In a fashion store
A dress made by her.
Politely he went to tell her:
-I’m thinking
That being You so pretty
You shouldn’t go hungry
Because you’re a beauty.
I can make you
A Hollywood star
Like Elizabeth Taylor.
-What do you say, sir?
Guapalupe answered her.
I don’t trade
With my precious body.
Get out of my side
Or I’ll call the police.
The following Sunday
She went to mass to confess
To tell Father Isidro
That she had overcome
The temptation of a man Who wanted to trade with her.
That her true loves
Are the Hollywood actors
Anthony Perkins
James Dean, Gary Cooper
Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum
Victor Mature, Charlton Heston.
When Father Isidro told her:
- Those actors, my daughter
Although they seem very manly
Most of them are faggots.
Guapalupe began to cry
Answering him tearfully:
You, Father Isidro
Are a very bad priest. You have left me in disaffection.
You have no forgiveness from God.
IT WAS ON LANCRESE AND PEMBROKE BEACH
Words
and
image
by Daniel de Culla
Many times, in my dreams in bed
I remember Domique
At half past twelve sharp
When I was going to the beach
Of L’Ancresse, or Pembroke Bay
North of Guernsey
Rich, beautiful, lovely island
As the named Jersey
By rich lords and kings with wealth
Because it’s tax havens
For swimming and crashing against the rocks.
Beautiful, blue-eyed, and very fine-skinned
There she was lying on the sand
Half her body buried in the earth
Because of a paralysis
That affected her legs
That’s called paraplegia.
Her two high-balled bulges
Still covered by a bra
Seemed edible to me.
Her arms stuck out
Out of the sand
Reaching out for her right hand
My erect penis
“Very pretty” as she said
Standing out above her head.
Her pussy was female
And it peeked out from the sand
And no one entered there without her permission.
No difficulty swallowing
No problem spelling “Love”
Her only sublime sensation
Was in her Sex
Which received the blood supply naturally.
Seeing that the sand between her legs
Had blood, I asked her saying:
-The soft surface of the sand
Helps to mitigate the impact
Of your limbs
And joints against the ground.
Don’t you mind that when I penetrate you
Sand gets into your pussy.
She, smiling and very kind, answered me:
-Not at all.
Your penetration will speed up my rehabilitation
Besides I am on my period
All covered in blood.
But let it be in a moment!
-Like roses, the most beautiful I told her.
And we kissed and hugged
On the sand like loving dogs
Until some social workers came
Who separated us
And, in a health van
They took her to her residence
Leaving me lying on the sand.
I’M GOING TO BECOME A MILLIONAIRE
Words and image
by Daniel de Culla
A certain Marla Burla
Writes me an email telling me
She is writing to me on behalf of “Skoll Funfation”
An American Foundation
Whose vision is to live in a sustainable world Of peace and prosperity for all Catalyzing transformative social change. When she writes to me:
“When you receive this email Be very happy
Because you have been selected To receive 3,500,000 dollars.
Send me a postal address And a savings account, or bank So I can send it to you.”
I am not excited about this luck
Because I know it is a scam
Like any other
And that it is not the one who goes down That goes down
But the one who falls.
I have answered her with these words:
-Prove that you are telling the truth
Send me, first, a courtesy gift
And I will give you the address Of my bank account and a kiss.
After fifteen days
More or less
I received a package via Amazon
From Palo Alto, California
(That’s what the address said)
Containing a kilo of bottle caps Of Tropical Torpedo beers
Dirty Bastard, Blackwoods, California
Anchor, Bud Light and Flying Dog
Which made me laugh a lot
Because I will have the photo of the players
From the Burgos Football Club
And those from the Huesca Sports Society
So that my grandchildren can have A championship between them And play in Gamonal, Rio Vena And Barriada San Juan Bautista.
12 PIGEONS
Words by Daniel de Culla
Image by Isabel G. de Diego
The child defecated
On top of that mountain.
Since he didn't have any toilet paper
He wiped himself with a face stone.
-“This is my poop for the hummingbird”
He was singing
Going down the mountain.
“Or for that couple of lovers
Relatives of my house
Who come to love each other
Last midnight.”
Happy as a clam
With a snail and a beetle
From the potato in his hand
He came to his mother, saying:
-Mother, today I'm going to have
In my underwear
Twelve pigeons at least
Well, I wiped my ass
With a stone on edge.
-Let's see, my son.
The mother took the son's underwear
She put it belly down
On her legs
Beginning to pat his ass
As if it were a tambourine
While more than four girls watched him.
-My son, she said, You do have twelve pigeons
That I am going to cut now
To give them
To these four girls
Who are now crying with joy.
A FRENCH TOAST IN TORIJA
Words and image by
Daniel de Culla
I have read a real estate advertisement
On Poetess Julie Sopetran street
From Torija, Guadalajara
Located at the end of the narrow and spectacular
Torija Valley
“Beautiful place cut open
Between two plains of Alcarria”
Leaving immediately
To see the house or apartment for sale
With a deep sigh
Remembering the Poet in AZB, her magazine.
-You are coming, I said to my wife
And in a short time
We will leave this grotesque Madrid
And you will be in my company
Forever.
We spent one day, we spent two
At the Casa Rural La Felicidad de la Tierra
Which, in truth, was a happiness
Because we had sex three and four times
With air conditioning and free wifi
In addition to accessing the terrace
To breathe our love suffocation
After visiting houses and apartments for sale
With the Real Estate Agency
Happy as a pig and a mess
Giving a 9.0 to our Act
My mess on all fours
Looking towards Aragon.
-I would like to stay
Even if it’s only for a few days
In that medieval Templar fortress
Where here’s buried on an altar
In its Tower of Homage
The Camilo José Cela’s book
“Journey to Alcarria”
In addition to the fact that many years ago
Kings, scoundrels and outlaws from both sides
Passed through here
And in a corner of the fortress
There is a sign with a child’s handwriting
That seems to say:
“I was raped by a Templar”
I said to the real estate agent.
-Fuck, and me too
He answered me.
The next morning
We went to see the agreed house
To take advantage of the opportunity.
The house is close
To the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption
Where, inside
Under a large and beautiful plateresque arch
Which serves as the entrance to the presbytery
We have promised each other eternal love
My wife and I
Because she is a Christian and I am an atheist
A choir of angels coming down from the bell tower
Circling around us, saying:
“There, close by
In the medieval fortress
You have thrown a cap
With three pairs of noses.
From the window of the tower
You have thrown the condom into a well
Which the interpreters
Of the fortress have not seen
But we have
Because we have taken it out of the well
And put it in our pocket
To take it to heaven.
You can be happy
That we do not execute you in the Pillory.”
THE GIRL ON THE CURVE
Words
and image by
Daniel de Culla
A truck driver friend of mine
Who works
Between Asturias and León
Tells me that on a curve
In the Pajares pass
Of the Cantabrian Mountains
A naked maiden appears to him at night
As if she had left home
Without making the bed untidy.
That her disheveled hair
Reaches the Mount of Venus.
She stops you by the side of the road
And wants to start a conversation
But, as I have been told
By other truck drivers in the trade:
-She takes you to the high cliffs
Along roads and paths
Grabbing your member
And then, she throws you off a cliff.
He is afraid that he will die
Because he has no one to defend him
Through these valleys of the Pajares river
On the Asturian side
And of the Bernesga river on the Leonese side.
That is why he wants me to accompany him
On his next trip.
-Isn’t she a deranged woman
And with signs of Alzheimer’s?
I asked him.
-No, because she seems very bright
And she says, lowering her head
Pointing with her index finger
The crossing of her legs:
-Your parents and your brothers
Were born from this star
And, although they were thrown off a cliff
Don’t feel sorry for them
Because their souls are
Enjoying eternal glory.
With some fear
I went with him to that ditch.
There, like a naked ghost
She was still
Looking at the Moon and the stars.
When she realized
That the truck driver was coming with someone
She ran like a deer
Leaving behind her
A wonderful glow
That illuminated her ass like a sphere
And hares and wild rabbits
That played with the skulls
Of men that this terrible beast
Had thrown off a cliff.
THE OPPOSITION
Words by Robin Dennis
Too much time between now and then, between now and Thursday. Nearly a week: a week of wanting her — six days of waiting, like living on vapour. So he’s following this girl down the stinking hallway, stopping occasionally as she puts her ear to a door. It’s keeping mesen pure, really, innit, he thinks, lesser of two evils an’ all that shite. Like bowlin’ wi’ foam up the alleys — mock exam, don’t count. She’s a big lass an’ all: arse on her like a couple of seal pups fighting in a sack. His dick’s already flexing like a gym-boy’s bicep.
She gives a door a shove, but it sticks; another big ’un and she’s in. Room’s boxy: bare walls, narrow bed in the corner, window angled open despite the early-morning chill. It reminds him of the hostel in King’s Cross they stayed in when the kids were small. Fucking long time ago now.
The girl’s already thrown most of her clothes into a heap on the floor. Morag, she nods.
Sam. ’Ere, can I just pull me trousers down?
She shrugs, so he drops his pants to his ankles and trundles to the bed with his cock nodding. She’s older than he’d thought: up close, her face looks like it’s been shattered and glued back together. Her skin’s the colour of baking paper and she smells like the sea. He was going to ask if he could call her Hanna, but he decides not to bother.
She’s quite passive during foreplay. A bit huffy, to be honest, lying like the Queen in state as he does all the work — all the sniffing and tasting and prodding. She’s a bit superior — ungracious, even — and it’s a bit rich because what’s in some of her crevices is like pulling the fucking sofa out.
After a bit she orders him to get a move on so she can watch Switzerland v Cameroon at eleven. The group’s finely poised, she assures him, very finely poised indeed. He obligingly sticks it up her. She grunts once then stares over his shoulder, letting herself be rocked and shunted like a commuter on a dawn train. Hanna, he thinks. Hanna.
Come on, lad, she says. Put some welly in. Really fucking give it to me. Alright, he says, picking up the pace, I’m giving it to you now. The springs’ rhythm quickens; her flab shifts this way and that.
Good lad, she says. Hanna. Hanna.
He pictures Hanna in a meadow, coasting down a bank to a silver, puttering river. Hanna queueing at the post office, waiting to pay her gas bill. She’s wearing a white blouse and hopes it won’t rain. Sky’s grey, though.
Hanna in a short dress trying to get the lid off a recalcitrant jar of pickles — big fucking bollock-shaped pickles — but it won’t budge, won’t budge, ooh, it won’t fucking budge …
It’s the vinegar strokes already, so he reaches for the Gettysburg Address: Four score and seven years ago
our fathers … ooh, brought fuckin’ forth on this … ah … this continent, a new nation, conceived in … ooh … fuggin’ Liberty, and — ah — dedicated ooh
to the fuckin’ … the fuckin’ — ah — proposition that … oh that all men — ah Ooh … are created fuckin’ …
What the fuck are you on about? she asks.But electric traffic is doing laps of his undercarriage, from the nodes of his balls to his puckering hole and back. Hanna’s wrestling with the pickles, her summer dress hitched right up her thighs as she moans and strains; suddenly, spouts of gore squirt from her twat: viscous jets that slap the floor and make her lose her footing. Oh, he’s fucking close now …
He splurfs into his baggie, and as he opens his eyes on Morag he knows – he knows as though he’s looking at her down the barrel of a rollercoaster — that there will never be goodness in his life again.
You still got to pay the same, she says. Even if it drops off halfway through, you still got to pay the same. He clambers off her and shucks the rubber from his shrivelling dick. What do I do with this? he asks, holding it aloft, grey spunk bloating its little teat.
She stops yanking her pants up long enough to point at the window. Just lob it out there. No bins at the mo.
He flings it in the direction of the tilted pane. It hits the glass, adheres for an instant, then peels itself free with a lonely little backflip and plummets to the pavement below.
On the way home, he pulls his car over to the side of the road. He sits for a minute with the window down, smoking a fag, listening to the forest. The silence teems with sound — dripping, seeping, unfurling. All of life is here, says the forest. All of life is welcome here. He pictures Hanna, undressed and on all fours, pants stretched between her white ankles, shitting like a dog on the forest floor. He’s soon lurching through the bracken, greedy for relief.
He first met Hanna through Jack Sprat, a dating app for lean lads and fat lasses. His taste had always run to women of stature, women he could wrestle with a clear conscience and toss about the room. When he saw her picture, he wondered what she was doing on Sprat. She looked like an austerity Bonnie Raitt: thin as a prawn, nutbush frizz on her noggin, weak-tea coloured teeth in a six-year-old’s smile, shit charity shop jumper. He’d only right-swiped her on a rejection low after Wendy — over whose dimpled face he’d wanked
a week solid — had turned him down. Maybe Bonnie had bulked up since the pic was taken? What the fuck, he’d thought: he’d just go south of the equator, enjoy a spot of sub-plus tourism. At the very least he’d be sure of a fuck and have room in bed to boot.
He’d rocked up to the Pug & Coffin accordingly arse-half-wiped, still wearing his mac and sou’wester from an afternoon spent fishing the Trent, couple of mackerel in his pockets, half-pissed on Bass. He’d been in no way prepared. Before that afternoon, he’d known his life was fucked. Jus and the kids were never coming back — he knew it — and he’d never lifeguard again. But meeting Hanna made him see what a cunt he was. Yeah, a fucking piece-of-shit cunt trailing shit and rot right through his fucking life. She made him see that it was his fault he’d never see his kids again and that they were better off without him.
It wasn’t anything she said: it was the sheer goodness of her that fishhooked right through his maggoty little life that afternoon in the pub. Jus had been a bitch — just a skank, really. Hanna looked like shit but she bulldozed him. Two pints down and he was flat out on the bench, bawling into her lap. He’d gone for a piss and seen himself in the mirror — really seen himself, like: this fucking cunt is you, mate: this is what you’ve spent your fuckin’ life making of yersen. He knew straight up he had to suck that cunt right out the mirror, suck himself back in — suck all his fucking life back in if he wanted to live at all. And he saw Hanna could help him: — he felt, in that moment, that she’d been sent, somehow, to help him. He went back upstairs expecting her to be gone and seeing her at the table put him to his knees.
Sam sits at the foot of an oak, picturing Hanna on all fours, shit unspooling beautifully from her hole.
Their second date’s not till Thursday. Too long, mate: too much fucking time
Her arsehole blinks shut and cuts off the turd. It lies in a low pile, steaming like dinner. He’s wanking like the clappers.
She takes her cheeks and pulls them apart, showing herself to him. Her arsehole is beautiful: purplebrown, glistening — almost silver. The chill has lifted the down on her arms, and her nipples are long and prehistoric. She rocks back onto her haunches and puts her fingers up herself. She turns her head, looks at Sam over her shoulder. She’s fucking herself now, stabbing herself with her fingers — faster, fucking herself faster. Her ribs bloom under her skin as she puts her thumb up her arse and tips her head back, gasping soft little puffs of smoke, and then —
Alright if I join in, buddy, yeah?
— then poof, she’s gone.
His eyes open on a stringy cunt in a ragged wax jacket, wanking like a cannon.
Hey, what the fuck? Sam yelps.
’S all right, buddy, gasps the cunt, jus fuckin’ crack on, yeah, his fist a halo round his ridged dick, his mouth working terrible shapes. Fuckin’ stroke on, mate — don’t let me throw yer out yer stride; just fuckin’ carry on and I’ll watch, yeah.
Sam has stopped masturbating: his penis has quailed to a hard nub in his hand. What the fuck? he spits. Fuck off, you dirty cunt!
Oi, don’t be a fucking dick about it — give us a fuckin’ chance, yeah. His dick is crooked, gnarled — like something a dog would chew on. He’s got pointed black eyes and forest in his stubble. Fuckin’ come on, then, he barks, I’m-a fuckin’ slosh it in a minute, you cunt!
Sam’s back is flat against the oak. He tries to ram his dick back through the teeth of his jeans but it’s beginning to stiffen. Oi, buddy — what the fuck? he yells. This is fuckin’ private — like a private fuckin’ … service. Fuck off!
But his helmet’s hard with blood, and the cunt sees it. His smile lifts the bones through his face and he laughs, dilapidatedly. The lady … doth protest … too fuckin’ much, he says, his words emerging in little stuttering gusts. D’yer want us to come over and give yer a fuckin’ hand, like?
Sam jumps to his feet with his cock arrowing out of his trousers and hears himself making a shrill, girlish sound. Don’t fuckin’ touch me, ya cunt!
Don’t fuckin’ be like that, mate, he says, come on, s’alright —
Out of nowhere, a black dog rears up at the cunt, slathering and barking. Fuck off, ya tit! he roars, rounding on it, kicking out at it. Fuck off, ya fuckin’ slag! Fuck off! He boots it and it’s off, disappearing into the undergrowth.
The cunt wheels around, stabs a finger in his direction. Don’t make me fuckin’ come over, mate, he
cautions, face puce, silver temples gleaming. Shh, he coos, raising an open palm, Shh, yeah, … shh, mate … . He’s masturbating softly now, massaging his dick like a mother rubbing ointment onto a baby’s boo-boo. Shh, s’all right, mate, he says. Shh. Penny Mordaunt, yeah? Who?
Fuckin’ — J. K. Rowling, yeah? Shh, s’all right, mate. Shh. Just close your eyes, yeah. Just close your eyes mate … Daphne from Scooby Doo, yeah? Natasha Bedingfield … Bonnie Raitt …
Bonnie Raitt?
Fuckin’ Bonnie Raitt, right? Fuckin’ Bonnie Raitt, yeah!
Bonnie Raitt?
That’s right, mate! Bonnie Raitt! The fuckin’ Bonster!
Sam looks down. His fist is wrapped around his dick and they’re both wanking now, the cunt and Sam. Yeah buddy! says the cunt. Fuckin’ Bonnie Raitt!
But Sam’s not thinking of Bonnie Raitt; he’s not thinking of Hanna. He’s looking at the cunt, and the cunt is looking back. Soon the cunt starts huffing like a little fire has started in his mouth, sucking and blowing through the perfect round ring of his gob. I’m foamin’ mate, he howls, fuckin’ foamin’! And white light rips through Sam’s arse and cock as the cunt arcs perfect white jets onto the crackling leaves.
Fuckin’ hell, rasps the cunt, doubled over. Fuck me. He pats himself down for fags, lights one up. Pub then, yeah?
I don’t think I want to go to the pub, Sam says. I think I might go home. Nah, pub, mate. He straightens, assumes his full height. Nowt’s happened, right? I haven’t even touched yer. Mebbe didn’t even know you was there.
Yeah … ?
Nah, didn’t even know you was there. I was just pissin’. So was you!
Pissin’?
Aye, just pissin’! He gathers his red cock into his hand and points it at some ferns. Hot piss gushes out. Go on mate, piss!
Sam gets to his feet, aims his dick at the dirt. Piss bubbles up his pipe and squirts onto the ground. He looks at the cunt.
Just pissin’, eh! laughs the cunt.
Yeah, says Sam — and they are just pissing. A wave of lightness moves through his chest. When the cunt’s finished, Sam’s still turning his patch of dirt to mud.
#
They sit across from each other, drinking pints in the pub. It’s awkward. You into all that then, yeah? asks the cunt. Fuckin’ men in tights thing?
Well, —
It’s not my fuckin’ thing, like — no fuckin’ bother if it’s your’n, though: dun’t bother me, like. I’m more in it for the sociability, yeah: spot of bantz with the lads in the wood — just to be fuckin’ sociable, y’know. Dun’t bother me none if you’re fuckin’ into it, though.
Nah, I’ve —
Yeah, me and me bro used to wank loads, like — like when we didn’t have money to go out, we’d just sit and wank. When there was nothing on, like. Fuckin’ Coro or whatever.
You wanked over Coro?
Nah, just said we fuckin’ din’t wank over Coro, ya spaz! We’d just wank in the corner, private, like. Think of Spain or whatever.
Look, I’m gonna head off, like — get home.
The geezer slaps a meaty hand on the table, chucks back his pint, belches aromatically. Don’t be a twat about it, mate, he winks. There’s more things in heaven and earth, yeah. What’s yer name, buddy?
Sam.
Sam what?
Foundling.
Nice to meet yer, Founders. Jake Breadcrumb. Breads, yeah — he flashes a tat of a baguette going up his wrist — your round then Founders, yeah, I’ll have a Pride.
When Sam returns with the pints, Breads leans in to talk confidential-like: They want to fuckin’ keep you from it, don’t they — fuckin’ cunts, he says. Keep you in Primark with the wife, yeah? Keep your hand in yer fuckin’ pocket, yeah? Cunts. Fuck ‘em. Gotta live free, Founders, know what I mean? You wanna play darts? They sink a fleet of pints, and Breads ends up easing a plastered Sam into the back of his hoopty. He says he needs the room up front in case things go oblong and he has to use his elbows. They’ll pick up Sam’s car tomorrow, do donuts at Sherwood Pines.
As they start to pull away, a massive black dog slams against Sam’s window, barking and slobbering and clawing at the glass. Breads floors it, swerves out the car park and onto the main road.
Oi, is that your dog?
Breads’ eyes are on the road. No mate. Not got a dog.
At Sam’s it’s Beef & Tomato King Pots and Sam in his bed, Breads on the sofa under a Beano blanket. He wakes Sam early with strong tea and toast spotted with gobs of raspberry jam. No crusts, because crusts are for cunts.
Aw, cheers, mate.
No bother, mate. Get it down yer — set you up for the day, like. Ready yer for a rip-snorter, and I’ve got a fuckin’ proper one planned, mate — just you wait.
They pass Saturday morning in Breads’ local, over a barman’s breakfast of pints, chasers and chat with the characters. Breakfast becomes a lunch of pork scratchings and barley wine, cut short by Jake taking his hand to a welder’s monkey — fuckin’ insolent thing — and getting them turfed out. The welder gets a kicking down an alley for his trouble, as does the monkey.
Turns out Breads is on hiatus from his birdcage business, which he and a minion named Rav ran out of the hoopty, traversing the East Mids, ministering to those in need. Breads shut the business off for a bit when Rav fell on a railway track. Wasn’t the same after that. Plus, it was Rav’s job to source the mantraps from which they fashioned the cages: risky work for anyone who likes fingers. It had to be traps, though: Nice bit of upcycling — not yer fuckin’ London-cunt upcyclin’, says Breads. Nah, mate: proper Robin Hood reclaimin’ the keep-off-my-land-you-cunt weapons o’ fuckin’ capitalism. Weld ‘em up and sell ‘em back to the wankers and hope they crush their parrots.
You married or owt, like? Sam asks.
Nah, mate — fuck that. Was once, like, when I was livin’ out in Turkey. Ankara.
That her?
Nah, ‘s where I was fuckin’ livin’! Fuck me, Founders!
An’ what happened?
Dunno. Just went to shit. Drinkin’ and that. Dunno what I was doin’ out there, really. Just went for a laugh and stayed. German, she was — Ida. Couple of kids.
You got kids? You see ’em?
Nah, not really, like. They’re over there, I’m here.
What’re they called?
Big one is Trev — big fuckin’ Trev! — little one I could never say right. Bird-cup. Bird-cup or summat. Fuckin’ shit name.
How old’re they?
Look, it was a long time ago, mate. Different life — know what I mean? All over now. Got ter move forward, know what I mean? Yeah.
Want a Pernod?
I got kids n’all. Two of ’em.
So is that a yes to a Pernod?
I don’t see ’em, neither. Fuckin’ Jus — ex-wife — won’t let me see ’em, fuckin’ bitch.
Let’s ’ave a few Pernods and we’ll go round, mate — fuckin’ ’ave it out wi’er. Break a few ornaments and whatnot — apply some political pressure.
Nah — ta like, but … it’s just … I fuckin’ can’t see ’em. It’s complicated, like.
It’s always complicated, mate. Take her fuckin’ gate off and put it through her winder, then it’ll be simpler. Fuckin’ cunts.
No, I mean — not wi’ her. It’s … like, the whole situation. Yeah, I know about the whole fuckin’ situation: there’s a certain kinda fuckin’ woman makes it hard for yer — wants to make life fuckin’ hard for yer. Fuckin’ shuts yer down when you want this much fer yersen — he holds up a finger and thumb — fuckin’ this fuckin’ much, like — and she puts the fuckin’ spikes on yer. Fuckin’ cunts, the lot on’ em. Need fuckin’ destroyin’ mate — destroyin’. She got eyebrow ridges, yeah?
Eyebrow ridges?
Yeah, like bumpy eyebrows — like big fuckin’ eyebrows. Nah, dunno, don’t think so …
Weird tats?
She’s got a tat, yeah — boat on her leg, nowt weird, though, like. Why?
Rowin’ boat? Speedboat — what?
I dunno, just a … like, steamer with chimneys, why?
How many chimneys?
Fuck d’ya mean, how many chimneys — why does that matter? What you on about?
How many chimneys?
Fuckin’ ’ell, I dunno — three?
She smell o’ treacle? She smell o’ treacle when she shits ’an snots ’an cums?
I don’t fuckin’ know, mate. What the fuck are you on about? Fuck does treacle smell like, anyway?
Sweet, mate. Very sweet. Unnaturally sweet — ’specially when it’s a shit. Look mate, I’m not sure I’m ready to talk about me wife’s shits with yer, like, alright?
Ex-wife.
Yeah, mate, whatever. Fuck y’ on about?
Look, mate: tell me before yer see ’er, yeah. I strongly advise you to let me know before yer attempt to see ’er.
Yeah, I don’t see ’er — she won’t let me.
I’d say that’s to your considerable fuckin’ advantage, Founders. But tell us before yer attempt to, like — move against her, yeah. Attempt nowt wi’out me, mate. At this juncture I can’t say no more. Alright?
Yeah. Alright. But —
At this juncture I can’t say no more, mate. Alright? Yeah, alright. Alright.
I’ve got yer back, mate. I’m there for yer, yeah? Fuckin’ anytime — day or night, mate, you got me? Yeah, cheers, buddy. ’Preciate it. No worries, mate.
Yeah. You want a Pernod? asks Sam.
Say it to me, mate.
Say what?
Say what? Don’t leave me hangin’ mate, lookin’ like a cunt. I’m out on a fuckin’ limb here, yeah. Oh, yeah. I got your back an’ all, yeah?
Yeah?
Yeah. So you want a Pernod? I got beat wi’ iron bars once. What?
In Shadwell, like. Fuckin’ London. Fuck — what happened?
Cunts jumped me wi’ iron bars in the fuckin’ street. Broad daylight. Teatime: I were just out to buy a cabbage. Cunts fuckin’ jump us an’ fuckin’ beat shit out on’ us wi’ bars, mate — fuckin’ big iron bars — and then fuck off.
Fuck me. Why, like?
Is no why, mate. Is no why. But — it’s important, mate, fuckin’ important — to ’ave someone who’s got yer back, like. It is in no way to be underestimated.
Yeah.
Right.
You want a Pernod, then?
We are the opposition, mate — you and me. We’re the fuckin’ opposition. Opposition?
Right, the fuckin’ opposition. And we will have our day, mate. We will have our fuckin’ day, yeah? Yeah. So you want that Pernod, then?
#
Saturday afternoon sees the hoopty cruising the streets, windows wide to the summer sky, Breads winding the wheel slow and lazy, scanning the pavements for comrades-in-arms. Founders gives drink to their thirsty lips: Fanta, Smirnoff, tins of cold cider. Both are naked under aprons.
The evening brings beer garden drinks, hot baths in a stolen hotel room, and standing ovations when a lad gets stabbed in a topless bar. In consequence of an unfortunate misunderstanding, a pigeon is kicked to death. When it’s time at the bar please, ladies and gents, Breads stops traffic and commandeers a moped to take them to an after-hours pub in Sutton they never reach. After a game of Postman Loves Sven, in which players wank through letterboxes — points to first finisher, disqualification in the event of detection — they end up kipping in a cornfield near the A38.
On Sunday morning, they force fry-ups and pints in a roundabout Harvester. Jake lets his grievances spill: how his dad died in lockdown while he was in Turkey; how the sister he never sees married an orthodontist named Clive on the weekend of the funeral. Sam brings up Hanna, how there’s nothing of her but he can tell she’s strong — taking time off work to look after her mum with early-onset, trying to make the best of a fucked-up situation. Her brother couldn’t give a shit — wanted to stick her in a home, she said — but she took it on without a second thought. She’s sort of fit an’ all: like a young Bonnie Raitt if she didn’t have money for food or clothes.
Aye, fuckin’ Bonnie Raitt — I’d fuckin’ go there, mate. How far you got?
Just first date so far. See how it goes Thursday.
Fuckin’ get in there, mate. Bring us some pics, like — bring us some pics of Bonnie.
At the bar, Breads demands the landlord play I Can’t Make You Love Me for his mate, he says, pointing, who’s shagging Bonnie Raitt’s fit daughter while she nurses her mum through her fatal illness. Bonnie’s on her fucking way out, mate! he screams. Play it for fucking Bonnie! You fucking owe her that much, you cunt! Breads’ eyes are wet with tears and he’s smashing his fists on the bar, sobbing.
The landlord shouts up the stairs for Karen to send the lads down.
They roar from the bar:
Aye, Karen, send the fuckin’ lads down!
Bring out the fuckin’ gimp, Karen!
Why don’t yer come down yersen, Karen! #
On Wednesday night he takes it steady, just watches some telly and messages with Breads. He realises it’s the first time in a week he’s been alone. It’d come so easy, it’s like a clock has stopped. After Jus left, he hardly saw anyone, hardly left the flat — just sat watching faces talking out of the telly. The girls’ stuff is still everywhere. He has to kick Lisa’s trainers out of the way every time he goes to the door. When he gets headaches, he sleeps in one of their beds with the cool sheets over his head. Hanna in the morning, though. Get an early night, look your best.
But when she clocks him in the Gavel & Piston, she does this wave he knows — this wave kids give their mums when they pick them up outside the baths with their mates, this oh-shit-it’s-you wave. And when she smiles, it’s not a real one, just studs in her gums like tiny diamonds, eyes screaming to go. The shock of it hits him in the stomach, wakes whatever’s been hibernating there so he nearly brings it up on the table.
She looks like shit anyway: massive orange jumper with little arms and legs wisping out, nutbush hair frizzing off her head like a ginger Hiroshima. As he watches her walking over, self-conscious as a kid, he realises she looks about fucking twelve years old. And he couldn’t give a shit if the little scruff wants out: he’s going to make it fucking well happen whether she wants it or not. As a lifeguard you’ve a sense of how people look under their clothes, and he’s stripped her to her Pippin tits and tiny brown snatch before she’s even made it to the table.
But the chat won’t go where he wants it. She’s calling the shots, talking talking talking about her mum while she spears food on her fork and puts it back somewhere else. My mum’s a bitch, she says. This thing’s hollowed her out, she says. I don’t think I can do it anymore, she says — actual fucking tears coming out of her
eyes and leaving discoloured lines on her face. Fuck this, he thinks, topping her wine up every chance he gets. I’m such a fat shit, she says with flushed cheeks, so fat. What? You’re the skinniest person in the pub. There’s nowt of yer. If you’re fat, I’m — I dunno … Tom Daley.
Eh?
The swimmer.
What, reckon I look like him?
A bit, yeah. If he wasn’t a swimmer but, dunno, a farmer or something. What, yer reckon I look like a farmer? — yer cheeky … I am a swimmer, me! Lifeguard at Flood Plains — well, used to be. But he’s, like, some sort of downy man-child, inne? I’m not sure I like where this is going. No, he’s cute! He’s got a little pointy chin, like you.
What? Pointy chin? This is a square jaw, this — lantern jaw. Nothing pointy about it. I could crush birds with this thing.
She’s laughing and taking mechanical sips of wine, like a bridge that opens and shuts to let ships through, always the same little movement. What is it, Tower Bridge?
You drink like Tower Bridge, he says.
Eh? What? You don’t half come out with some bollocks, do you? Had too much salt water?
Ha, in’t no salt water in baths, like.
Why did you want to be a lifeguard?
Dunno. Always liked the water. Me mum and dad used to take us to Brighton when I was little, and I’d just run right in to the sea. They had to come in ’an catch me to get us out. And could they catch you?
Yeah, just about, I think. They’re not really about to ask any more. Where are they now?
Well — do you mind if we talk about summat else? It’s not somethin’ I find easy to talk about, really. Sorry. Why did you stop being a lifeguard?
Woah, fuck — that ain’t easy to talk about neither!
He’s going to tell her. He knew anyway he’d have to tell her. His dad’s in the slammer for killing his mum. Oh, shit. Fuck.
Yeah. S’okay. He was a mad bastard. Total mad bastard. What … happened? Or, I dunno — maybe you don’t … ?
Nah, s’ okay. He had this tortoise, Grant … he was dead into Abraham Lincoln, like — crazy into him, was his sort of job to do Lincoln, like, in pubs and that …
Sam can see him now: black frock coat, chinstrap beard, stovepipe — pushing his trolley through Asda. It was just … how he was, y’know? Just his style, like other dads are into ska, or whatever. But he was always fuckin’ blowin’ up at my mum — always fuckin’ on one. Said she didn’t abide by Lincoln’s principles or some bullshit. She fuckin’ worked all day in the chippy, and all fuckin’ night too, while he was out doing Lincoln in pubs, fucking cunt. He’d only ever give her grief, like: fuckin’ storm in and drag her out in front of the punters, leave the lights blazing, door open all night. People’d just come in and fry ‘emselves a haddock. And he’d be fuckin’ layin’ into her at home.
The crisis had come when his mum had started battering his dad’s stuff, in retaliation. She did his vinyl first, battered his Michael Jackson. He could still recall Michael’s eyes on the Thriller LP, peering through the orange glaze like a ghost. Then she did his documents: his address book, his will, his passport. The cops pulled him over one night with Sam in the back, and when he took his license out of his wallet, it was all crispy. A bloke dressed as Lincoln driving around with a battered license — the cops didn’t like that.
In the end his mum started in on herself, sometimes kept the shop open all night. Sam’d wake up alone, then she’d slink in with deep-fried headphones or a battered Casio, stiff socks, a crispy fringe. She did her handbag, her ponytail, her eyelashes. Battered her left hand.
Fucking hell.
I can remember me dad sitting her on a chair, walking circles around her, fuckin’ screamin’ at her, smashin’ the place up. She was just sat there like frosty the snowman. One day he picked up his tortoise — I wasn’t in, like: I was in school — and he just fucking battered her to death with it.
Oh fuck.
Tortoise was alright though. Grant. I fucking knifed him couple o’ years later, though. Couldn’t stand seeing him around the house. Feel bad about it now. Wont his fault, like.
Hanna’s listening raptly: her pupils are dangling in her eyes as fat as cherries. From the depths, he starts to get a tingle on.
What happened to you? she says. Who looked after you?
Me aunty Diane. Was alright. What happened to your dad?
Just gave himself up, like. Just … he knew he’d done wrong, dinne. Dunno. Just happened, dinnit. What more’s to say?
Do you see him ever?
Not much. Sometimes. Don’t think he’s very happy in there, not having a very good time. Don’t think the Lincoln thing’s helping. Complains of rape.
Fuck.
Proud man, though. Won’t take off the hat. He feels the thump of an incoming message. What you gonna do about your mum, then? he asks.
There’s nothing I can do. Just have to carry on like I am, she says.
What you doin’ for money?
My brother helps out. That’s the only way he helps out — with money. I’m doing a bit of work at a garden centre, on the till an’ that.
You like it?
It’s okay, yeah. I preferred working at the Crags, doing cave tours. Could use my degree — History, yeah, wonnit?
— yeah, but … dunno. This is where I am. Just got to stick with it for now.
As she speaks, her lips hardly move, the talk just seeps between them. They’re thin but soft — warmlooking, like sleeping animals she doesn’t want to wake. But her eyes are on him the whole time, clocking his reactions. He knows she’s deciding whether to buy, and he’s putting in the work, nodding and listening and asking. It’s just another fucking job interview, innit? he thinks. But she’s drinking, putting away the red, and he’s thinking how to take the chat in a more promising direction.
You miss uni?
She went to Stoke: kept it local after her dad died, to be close to her mum. Always came home at weekends. Her older brother was already down in London. She says even then her mum was quietly putting on the pressure.
Probably wasn’t helpful with the lads an’ that, like, havin’ to go home every weekend?
Yeah, no — not really.
Were you seein’ anyone at uni, then?
Yeah, not really. A few things … you know. Nothing serious, really. She goes to the bar so he checks his phone. A message from Breads: Are you rigging her rig her mate rig her like the north sea send INTEL
Another one, a photo of a horse lying in the corner of a field: Found this horse on the way home got meat come round
When she gets back from the bar, the mood has changed and he knows it’s on. And when he puts his mouth on hers by the taxi rank, it’s her tongue that’s first to snake out of the sweet, wet mess. He can feel her hunger in how her bones shift and click, in the violence of her touch. But her arse feels like a kid’s — just bones in her jeans — and under the thrumming of his blood, all he really feels is pity. When the taxi pulls her gaze across the car park and bends off into the road, he just stands at the kerb and watches her go.
#
Pints and pickled eggs in The Up Hill & Down Dale, Founders recounting the events of the previous evening and Breads listening, palms on the table, legs spread:
So no, then, says Breads.
Nah, I fuckin’ kissed her, mate — not no.
So no, then, mate: you kiss yer mam. Thought you lifeguards were handy. What do they teach yer at lifeguard school? You clearly spent too much time tossin’ yer hoop into’ drink and not enough on the actual point of lifeguardin’: bein’ a buff lad an’ thwockin’ the bostock. Thought you said she wont even that fit — pissin’ about at, Founders?
No — yeah, she is fit, mate. I proper like her. I’m seein’ her Sunday. We been messagin’ loads.
A beat. Tell us a story, Breads says.
What’d yer mean tell us a story? You tell us a story.
Lifeguardin’ story. Bet you got some good ‘uns, don’t yer?
Like what — picking hair out o’ filters?
Nah, shaggin’ stories. What’s the most fucked-up thing you done?
Dunno. Nowt really. Never really … wont really like that. It’s not like Baywatch, mate. More just — making sure no kids drown an’ that.
And did they?
What, kids? No, not really.
Fuck me. Do you want a line?
Nah, I’m alright right for now, mate. Thanks, tho. You strike me as a man who needs a line. If not for your sake, then fer fuckin’ mine!
Yeah, I’m alright for now, mate. Thanks, tho.
Fuck me! Gimme fuckin’ summat’, mate! Fucks the matter wi’ yer? You got off wi’ Bonnie last night, dint yer? Gi’ us a fuckin’ smile at least.
Well — there’s one weird thing. I once found this —
Yeah?
— this, like … I were checking lockers at the end of the day, and — like, the lockers have this top shelf, yeah — and I was checking the lockers and I found this shit, right —
A shit?
Yeah, right up on’ top shelf — too high for someone to shit it right onto the shelf, yeah —
Right …
— and this shit was, like — perfect, yeah? Like a perfect shit — like a shit you’d see in a magazine or summat: totally smooth and, like, all curled at the edges —
Like a detective’s moustache?
— yeah, all curled at the edges like a detective’s moustache. Proper sculpted, it was — and like, what the fuck’s a shit doin’ there anyway — an right up on’ top shelf n’all, y’know?
Alright, …
So I … I dunno, I wanted to leave it there, like — in case anyone came back for it, like.
See who done it?
Nah, just in case someone, like, wanted it.
The shit?
Yeah, it were, like, sort of perfect, y’know — just, like, a perfect shit, all smooth and that — and when nobody come back for it and it were still there next day, I lifted it up on a knife, dead careful like —
This is the fuckin’ best thing that happened to you when you was a lifeguard?
Yeah, no, but it was fuckin’ weird, like: what was it doin’ there, y’know, and it was perfect, like — just this, like, perfect shit — so I put it in a box —
Fuck me, Founders …
— I’ve still got it now, like, at home — it’s like —
Why, mate, why? Why you got a shit in a box?
It’s the fuckin’ mystery, mate — it’s dead mysterious — and it was, like, perfect —
So you got a shit in a box at home, mate — a fuckin’ desiccated turd in a box, yeah. What if someone finds it, mate? What’s in this box? Oh, it’s a turd, yeah. This man’s got a gigantic fuckin’ turd in a box.
It’s not gigantic, though — it’s, like, smooth — like, dainty, like a woman’s turd —
Fuck me: there we have it! There we fuckin’ have it, ladies and gents! Oh my fuckin’ God, Founders! Ha ha ha! Oh my fuckin’ days!
No, it’s not like that, mate: it’s, like — beautiful almost, like —
Oh my fuckin’ days, mate! Ha ha ha! Oh my fuckin’ days …
No, mate: it’s like — it’s like it’s this weird … it’s like this weird, pure thing — and where the fuck did it come from, like, y’know —
Ha ha ha! Yer a chipolata lad, Founders! A fuckin’ log flumer!
No, mate — it’s fuckin’ … why shouldn’t summat be fuckin’ beautiful, though — just ‘cause it dunt cost money, like? Just ‘cos it’s, like, not from a shop?
Aye, that’s the fuckin’ spirit, mate! Admire the fuckin’ woodpile!
Yeah, just ‘cos it dunt cost nowt, like, yeah —
You got a prize turd, mate! It’s a turd, mate! A shit! Oh my days, mate! Want me to chop a few logs for yer right nah?
Fuckin’ hell. I wish I hadn’t told yer now. No need to be a cunt about it.
I’m fuckin’ sorry mate — fuck, gimme a minute — I’m sorry, mate … I’m fuckin’ sorry …
I’m fuckin’ tryin’ to be serious with you here, mate — tryin’ to be fuckin’ honest with you — to fuckin’ open up, like — and you just take the piss.
Oh fuck, I’m sorry, yeah. I’m fuckin’ sorry … come on, mate, let’s do a line, yeah. In the bogs, yeah — yer happy place …
Fuck off!
Nah, I’m sorry, mate. I’m sorry. I’m fuckin’ sorry, yeah. Come on, ya twazzock. We alright, yeah? Yeah.
They shoot sidelong glances at the bar, drop the lid in a cubicle and get to chopping lines: a couple of fat ones for Breads, a pair of chipolatas for Founders. Straight up the hooter and then the slow, sour, salty drip, like the chlorine backwash at the baths.
You know why I’m not at the baths anymore, mate? says Sam. Why not, mate?
I’m not proud of it, yeah. Don’t know why I did it. Breads’ face is suddenly lit from within. What did yer do?
It were a few months back. I were on duty, at the pool, like — Yeah?
I were on duty and it was quiet, like — slow day, y’know — Yeah?
— and there were this girl, yeah — Yeah?
— and she were diving. On the diving board. Going up the ladder. Yeah?
And I was stood behind her. Yeah?
And I put my hand on her arse. Touched her arse. Yeah?
And — and her dad saw it, like. Comin’ to pick her up. Shit. That it?
Yeah.
How old was she?
She weren’t very old, mate. Like, dunno — twelve. What happened — wi’ the dad, like?
Fuckin’ kicked off, dinne. Ended up smackin’ ‘im, like. Had to — self-defence, went for me, dinne — Yeah, says Breads. Alright. He’s gone quiet, inward. He crouches, gnawing on a finger, sweat popping on his brow. So you lost yer job, yeah?
Yeah.
You can find another one, but, eh?
Nah, don’t think so, mate. Think that’s it — wi’ lifeguardin’, y’know. Feel bad about it, mate, to be honest.
Why?
Dunno. Well, she were twelve, like —
Yeah, fuck it, mate — fuckin’ used to marry ‘em off before then, dint they, mate? No cunt used to bother about that. Fuckin’ don’t worry about it, mate. Fit, was she, yeah?
Dunno, just — dunno, mate: don’t really want to, like — can’t think why I did it, to be honest. It were, like — when I done it, it were, like — dead distant, like. Like, I just saw it and it were all just dead quiet, like, and far away — like the sun comin’ up. It were all just, like — I just sort of reached out for it —
Fuck it. Yer not the first to fall foul o’ some young fuckin’ slag, mate. Pay it no fuckin’ mind, buddy. You want another line? Another chipolata, like?
Yeah, alright, mate. Cheers for bein’ cool wi’ it, like.
No worries, buddy. We’re fuckin’ mates, yeah. Fuckin’ opposition, right? Nah get this up yer fuckin’ hooter — cheer you fuckin’ right up, this will!
Breads tocks out a slinger, nods proud as a mother as Founders honks it.
Fuck! Hey, I tried to do mesen in, mate — after that!
After what? says Breads — big snort — the lass?
Yeah, I fuckin’ tried to do mesen in!
Ya daft twat!
I know, mate! But it was fuckin’ ‘orrible: Jus went mad, fuckin’ took the kids; an’ me boss were well fuckin’ heavy, man — like, got the cops in an’ everythin’!
Fuckin’ dick!
Yeah, so — I dunno, just seemed like the only thing to do, like! Couldn’t think of what else to do!
You pillock, mate!
Yeah, so I goes up to the top board, like — after the pool’d closed — and I just let mesen fall: wont gonna swin or owt, y’know — just let mesen fuckin’ sink, like!
You tosser! You daft prick!
Yeah, so I done it, like: just let mesen fall off the top board! An’ I was expectin’ — well, I dunno what I was expectin’, really — but the water was comin’ up at me, yeah, an’ everythin’ was, like, dead slow and like, dead clear, an’ then — an’ then I really wanted a cheese toastie —
A cheese toastie?
Yeah, a cheese toastie — it was this sort of, like … overpowerin’ urge.
For a cheese toastie?
Yeah: the water was comin’ up at me and it was like … like the clearest moment of me life — like a piece of glass in my head: cheese toastie! Then the water hits us like a bastard — bosh! — but I just pulled mesen out and went to a caff and had a cheese toastie. I’d never really had one before. Eat ‘em loads now.
Fuckin’ Jesus, mate.
Bit of butter on the outside, so it goes all crispy.
Fuckin’ Jesus H, mate. Words fucking fail me, mate. They really do. We havin’ another line then, you massive twat?
The air’s soft with dusk by the time they head back to Breads’. As they walk out of town, terraces divide into semis then into lone houses, bushes and branches spilling over their fences. Breads stops outside a semi thick with ivy and swings open the gate.
This your manor, mate? Didn’t know you lived around here.
Birdcage biz done us proud, yeah.
The hallway’s thick with functional clutter: a knot of jackets on a coat rack, a pile of boots by the door. The high walls are hung with prints.
Nice place, mate.
Aye, cheers, buddy.
I’ll leave me shoes an’ that here, yeah?
But Breads is already drifting through the door at the end of the hall; Sam gets a crack of kitchen before it closes. When he enters the room, Breads is pissing up onto the kitchen island with great concentration, like a gymnast waving a yellow ribbon.
Fuck you doin’?
Ritual, mate: marking me territory after a long day at’ office. Go on, mate — piss in a drawer or summat.
I don’t want a piss, you flippin’ maniac!
But Breads isn’t listening: he’s popped his cock away and is busy emptying cupboards onto the floor — plates and cups and glasses and cutlery, rattling and smashing in a rainbow of sound. He tugs a bottle of red from the rack and flings the fucker the length of the kitchen; it hits the back wall like a headshot.
Hey! You mad cunt! What the fuck you doin’?!
Breads just turns and laughs, eyes tiny with knowing.
Hey, who the fuck lives here?
Breads removes a carton of eggs from the fridge, studies one, then cobs it violently at Sam, who drops a shoulder to dodge but can’t move from the spot, as if stepping further into the chaos would make him complicit.
Oi, fuck you on ’wi?! he shouts.
Breads is breathing hard, bent double, laughing. He straightens up, grins, pulls out his phone and snaps Founders.
Oi, what the fuck?
Breads is chuckling, looking at the shot, laughter a low burble in his throat.
Hey! Fuckin’ wipe that right now! Who the fuck lives here, you mad cunt?
Breads is enjoying himself, gurgling, the dark points of his eyes focused on Sam. Sorry I cunt tell yer before, he says. If yer knew, yer might notta come. Needed to be done though, mate: big code red. Don’t be pissed off, mate, yeah —
Sam can see Breads is trying to screw his face down, but pleasure keeps lifting it at the edges. Whose fucking house is this? he says.
Don’t be pissed off, mate, yeah — let us explain —
Fucking just tell me!
It’s Hanna’s house, mate. Yer in Hanna’s house. Yeah. But she’s not who you think she is, mate —
What the fuck? Fuck we doin’ ‘ere, you fucking cunt? What the fuck —
She’s fucking poisonous, mate! A fucking cunt! A fucking witch! Yeah! She’s a fuckin’ witch, mate! A fuckin’ witch! I brought you here to fuckin’ protect yer —
What the fuck are you on about, you cunt? I’m out of here.
Sam is out the gate and Breads is two steps behind him, calling, pleading that he has to believe him, that he can read the signs, that he fucking knows — he’s seen it in Ankara — fucking all of it — seen it in his own fucking wife, so he can fucking smell it, and he can fucking smell it thick on this bitch and you gotta break the spell, man, fucking break the spell with whatever fucking thing you can, just fucking extricate yersen — fucking extricate yersen from this fucking cunt, man, because she fucking means to break you, mate: get your spods on fucking toast, yeah — you gotta fuckin’ believe me —
Sam’s on the main road and Breads’ pleas are just din in the distance by the time he wonders how the fuck he even got in there in the first place.
He awakens to thirty-six WhatsApps. Fuck that, not reading ‘em.
It’s more mad witch shit. He taps out a message, How the fuck did you get in? but the display stays dark through the morning. Maybe he’s on the piss; maybe he’s busted up his phone; maybe he’s hoarding Sam’s message like gold, cackling and hissing.
After lunch his phone pops, but it’s not Breads — it’s Hanna.
Did you fucking send him? I don’t want to see you again, it says. If you contact me again, I’ll call the police.
His mouth floods with saliva. Breads’ arm in her arse up to the elbow, shit streaking the sofa, dark with blood. Him stood in her kitchen, with red up the walls.
Send who? what’s happened? are you ok? he replies.
Pop:
You fucking well know who. No I am not ok.
Why did you smash up my fucking flat?
Fucking bastard! Fucking cunt! He smashed up your flat took me there last night and went mad i didnt do anything i didnt know it was yours im sorry can I call you? please
Pop:
Don’t call me. He told me what you did to that girl. Horrible things.
He says you’ve got one of my shits in a box. What the fuck??? I don’t even care.
Don’t contact me again or I’ll call the police.
He’s fucking lying, he’s fucking mental. please dont believe him can I call you please? please Hanna The thought occurs: do you know him?
Pop: ?
He’s my brother??? Don’t contact me. Don’t come near me.
I’ll tell the police you broke into my flat.
A moment’s silence, like at the football. WTF?
jakes your fucking brother? what the fuck? is this a joke?
Pop: ???
His name is Clive Atherton??? Stay away from him Stay away from me
Straight on to Breads: You cunt you fucking backstabbing cunt who the fuck are you? is your name fucking Clive? are you Hannas fucking brother?
i am going to cut your fucking face off you cunt
He stares at the phone for hours, wants to crush the thing in his fist, smash it to fucking bits. He leaves it on the counter with the sound right up, fills the kettle, drops a teabag in a mug, paces round the sofa listening to the water roar. He pulls his duvet downstairs and lies on the rug, closes his eyes, feels his heart pushing waves up his blood.
Phone-bleat from the kitchen. It’s getting dark; he must’ve fallen asleep. The phone’s lying on the counter like a toppled lighthouse. He opens the message:
Dont be angry mate im doing u a favour i know you wont understand dont believe a fucking word the bitch says shes a liar im not her brother my name isnt fucking CLIVE she raped me she is a fucking witch she used it to rape me
He realises he feels jealousy, mostly: the wish it’d been him. He wants her to come and dissolve his atoms — fold him into nothing, parcel him into the clear air. He wants the end of everything: a black and brittle seabed, with the air rushing above.
But he is a fucking liar.
He writes: What the FUCK? did you hurt her? what did you do to her?
Straight back: mate she raped me i swear down its not easy to say
He wants to smash his fucking phone, bounce it off the floor till it pops its guts. Fucking bullshit. Fucking cunt, fucking CUNT. He can’t turn this shit on Hanna. To Hanna: Are you ok? did he hurt you?
Pop: No. He didn’t hurt me.
Thank fuck. But: Nothing happened?
Fuck. He didn’t do anything?
Pop: ??? Like what???
Pop: ?????????????????????????
What the fuck do you mean?????????????????????? He’s my fucking brother??????!!!!!!
He touches her name, but it rings straight to voicemail. He leaves one message, two: Can I talk to you, just pick up, I hardly know him, he says hes not your brother, he says something happened, I know he’s a fucking liar, please let me talk to you, please, but he doesn’t mention the girl, he can’t mention the girl. But she knows about the girl. And he can’t talk about what she knows; he can never talk about it.
He pukes in the sink and he’s got to get out — to fucking anywhere, up the street, onto the first bus that swings in. He gets off at the edge of town, takes the road that ducks beneath the viaduct and cuts through the empty marketplace to the Ravenscroft. He downs a whiskey and a pint, orders up another.
Friday night and the place is full of cunts, old cunts who’ve been in here all day. He messages Breads:
Why did you tell her you fucking cunt?
why didnt you say you were her fucking brother you fucking lying cunt
fucking call me right now clive
He buys a pack of Lamberts from the machine and lights up in the street. Pairs of lasses are coming past early doors, all dressed up. It’s fucking pathetic — absurd, really. One of them gives him a glance as she passes. He bets he looks mad, like a fucking nutter. But he’s all of him still here. What he’s done is gone and he’s still here — intact. An intact person: an intact person who can push out into the future, with the same advantages as anyone. In the end that’s all anyone has: himself, here, now.
The lasses are at the foot of the hill on the market square, deciding where to go. He could have either one of them.
There’s no message from Breads on the phone. He’s got nowhere to go. There’s no one he knows. This whole fucking town goes up and down and fucking on and on, just perched on the earth like Playmo. The cunts in this town are scrambling on an asteroid. You’re in fucking space, the lot of you.
HEY! YOU’RE IN FUCKING SPACE, he shouts down the hill, but the lasses don’t hear him.
He’s on a bus full of empty pink seats to somewhere. He watches the driver in his cab, reflected in the windscreen. He’s winding the wheel as calm as you like. There’s nobody on your fucking bus, mate. Yeah. He couldn’t give a fuck.
As the bus climbs Crag Hill, he looks into the murk of the park and there’s a couple on a bench, necking.
One of them’s Breads.
The girl he can’t make out as they flow past the window and out of sight. He runs to the back of the bus, but they’re specks.
He closes his eyes and holds the picture in front of himself. He looks through the dark to the blur of her body, and Hanna’s face flowers in the gloom. They’re fucking necking: he’s got his hand up her shirt, on her tits, on her skin, and she is fucking wet for him.
He pulls out his phone. It’s dead.
He gets off at the next stop, sick. He pisses a black stain up a wall. Her house with its dark fringe of ivy, made of hundreds of dark handprints: it’s not far from here.
He rings the bell, hears it ringing inside. He hammers at the wood with his fist. HEY! he shouts, FUCKING HEY! so loud the words peel the skin from his throat. He kicks the door until he can’t anymore.
It opens a crack. An old woman peers through the slit.
Oh, she says. Well. You’d better come in.
She shuffles along the hallway ahead of him in her slippers and nightgown. It’s a bit late, isn’t it? she says over her shoulder. It’s a bit late for all this, isn’t it?
Sam follows her into the kitchen, Hanna’s kitchen. This must be her mum.
Where have you been? she asks, filling the kettle. She moves like she needs oil, as though her joints have fused — a tiny, bent-up old woman. She can barely lift the kettle back onto its stand. Where have you been at this time of night?
Are you Hanna’s mum?
She chuckles and sits at the table, fucking crackers.
Sam sits opposite. Have you got two kids — Hanna, and Clive? Or Jake?
She beams. Are you pulling my leg?
He takes out his phone to show a picture of Jake. Fuck. Still dead.
Hey, he says, can you just answer me question?
The kettle starts to boil. She rises unsteadily from the table.
Hey, cause I’ve just seen them fucking snogging, yeah? he calls. I’ve just seen them fucking necking, yeah? She turns round, horrified. Good
So your kids are fucking, yeah? Your kids are fucking each other, right? He’s on his feet now. Clive! she says. What are you talking about? Stop that right now! No more of that talk from you! What did you just call me — did you just call me Clive? I’m not Clive. What? I know you’re not Clive! she snaps. Are you Michael? … It’s Michael, is it? I want you to go now, Michael!
The thought occurs to him: this is when you rape people. He doesn’t want to, but on some level he feels basically obliged.
I’m not Michael. You don’t know me. I’m looking for Hanna. What are you looking for Hanna for? Who are you? I want you to go now! Go on, get out! What does Clive look like?
I’m not answering any of your questions! Get out of my house!
Hey, your kids are fucking each other, you mad cow! If it’s fucking someone’s job to stop it, innit fucking yours?
You get out of my house this instant, you horrible man, or I’ll call the police! Go on! She takes a knife from the block and starts stirring the air, making little stabbing motions in his direction.
Hey, you fucking mad bitch, he yells, I could come over there and stuff that up your fucking arse! Don’t you be pointing that fucking thing at me, you fucking get me?
Go now! she screams, and suddenly his hand is on her throat. Her eyes bulge at him, defiant somehow; her mouth is screwed to a tight line. The knife clatters on the floor. She’s silent, watching him with an awful calm. He squeezes tighter and feels a lump on the inside of her throat.
You fucking stupid bitch! You fucking stupid cunt! he shouts. What the fuck’s the matter with you? I ought to be fucking raping you!
This he instantly regrets. He releases his grip on her throat and feels her softening, going limp. He lowers her to the floor. She’s still watching him – silently, intently. From the waist down, her nightie is a translucent apron of piss. He backs away, leaves her lying on the floor in a pool of piss, staring.
He’s running now, pelting down the hill, and it’s cold, shivering cold. Fucking bitch! Fucking mad bitch! The sky’s still blue beyond the park gates: dark blue and scattered with stars. Fucking bitch could never — never fucking say who he was.
But he’s left his jacket! Has he left his fucking jacket? He’s left his fucking jacket! He’s going to die, going to fucking die — his heart is going to stop. Fucking cunt! Fucking bastard! Should he go back? He can’t go back. Maybe it’s not there. Fucking please don’t let it be there.
He slumps on the bench where they were necking and he starts to piss his pants. He stands up and pulls his dick out and pisses all over the bench.
There’s a dog-walker across the park, looking at him. Fuck her. He turns to the dog-walker with his dick out and stares back hard. She turns sharply through the gate, passing out of the park, followed by her bounding beast. Yeah, the world bends to the man with his fuckin’ dick in his hand, he thinks, with equal parts elation and contempt.