Brief Objects of Beauty and Despair
Welcome to Brief Objects of Beauty and Despair, the first sampler from some of the Year Zerø Writers. Year Zerø Writers is a collective of authors who believe literature should be a direct conversation between readers and writers.
Here you will find glimpses of our work. Many of us will be publishing novels from 1 September 2009. Details of all individual novels, our authors, and the aims of Year Zerø Writers, can be found on our website, www.yearzerowriters.wordpress.com. Please feel free to contact us, or to get in touch with our authors directly.
We hope you enjoy reading our work as much as we enjoy writing it for you, and look forward to a long and fruitful dialogue.
Each of the works here is © copyright 2009 of the named author. The authors are: Oli Johns, Sarah E Melville, Larry Harrison, Dan Holloway, Mary Banks, Anne Lyken-Garner, Karine Levecque, Simon Betterton, Annia Lekka, Julia Sutton, Heikki Hietala, Anna Le Pard, Marcella O’Connor. Each author asserts their moral right to be named as the author of their work. Each author has agreed to allow other members of the Year Zerø Writers collective to distribute in printed or electronic form the work included in this sampler on the condition that all work in this sampler is distributed in its collective format.
The cover art is © copyright 2009 Larry Harrison.
Year Zerø Writers is not a publisher, a press, or a company of any kind. It has no moral or legal rights to any intellectual property generated by its authors.
http://www.yearzerowriters.wordpress.com
The YEAR ZERØ Manifesto
The problem
The Factory: agents, editors, media arbiters of taste, publishers. A chain of filters that takes raw fiction, cuts it, sells it on, cuts it again until the street product peddled to readers is weak, toxic, and addictive.
YEAR ZERØ exists to eliminate the impurities and deliver prose in the pure and raw.
Pushing the boundaries of substance through new technologies, YEAR ZERØ provides prose just as addictive, in many cases just as toxic, but with a powerful, instant high that will stay with you for life.
YEAR ZERØ is not an industry. YEAR ZERØ is not a group of writers. YEAR ZERØ is not a set of beliefs. YEAR ZERØ is an approach to culture.
• Culture is the breath we suck from each others’ lips.
• Culture is not alive. Culture is life.
• Readers and writers, like all producers and consumers of culture, cannot exist apart from each other. They exist only insomuch as literature flows between them. Inasmuch as The Factory exists to separate readers from writers it exists only to bring death, to create ghosts and hollow men.
• Culture speculates; culture takes risks; culture hijacks every human artifice and structure in the name of life.
YEAR ZERØ exists as a conduit for this process.
We are not YEAR ZERØ. We are some of its voices. You are its heart.
Forthcoming
From
YEAR ZERØ WRITERS
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Three novels by Year Zerø Writers will be available from 1 September 2009. To order print copies from that date, see the Year Zerø Writers website (www.yearzerowriters.wordpress.com) You can read extracts from the opening chapters of two of these novels here, as well as Oli Johns’ poetic companion-piece to his novel Benny Platonov. The three novels are:
Benny Platonov by Oli Johns
A refugee from the former East Germany believes he can save the homeless of Hong Kong. If only he didn’t have writer's block.
Glimpses of a Floating World by Larry Harrison
Police corruption, heroin addiction, and an elegy to the lost underbelly of Sixties London. You can download or sample more of this novel here: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/3275
Songs from the Other Side of the Wall by Dan Holloway
A teenage girl growing up in Post-Communist Hungary faces a heartbreaking choice between past and future.
You can download or sample more of Songs from the Other Side of the Wall here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/3308
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Knowing Gupter Puncher
Oli Johns
Gupter Puncher, little known writer of the seventies and child (and later an exile) of the East German-Soviet State, disappeared from this world on January 16th, 1980. On a beach near Yokohama was the last place he was seen. Some commented that winter had always been difficult for him to endure and for that reason he had killed himself, while others suggested that his compatriots from behind the Iron Curtain had finally caught up with him. Whatever happened that day, his stories remain.
I was in Mexico again. There had been a tip off telling me that Gupter had been seen up near the Sonora desert.
“Why would he be-…are you sure about this?”
“Yes, yes. Him here, I sure.”
What was that accent? Sonoran? I asked him what was so attractive about a desert.
“Dog fighting, it big thing here. The Sun big, big, hot, hot. It cook like oven for dogs. Every man want see this, so come, come.”
I checked into the hotel and went to my room and put the suitcase on the bed then took out the notes and placed them carefully on the desk.
They were fading at the edges. Soon the decay would reach one of the letters and then it’d be over.
“Are you really here then, Gupter?” I asked the room. “Because we haven’t got long left…”
I sat down by the desk and re-read the notes.
‘…I told this to Miho today, in bed where she was least expecting it…Miho, I said, at seventeen I was forced into the military academy up near Dresden. My parents were told to send me there as ‘it was the only way left to turn me onto a “comrade’s” way of thinking’. It was one of my instructors at school, I think. He was the one who told them. So, I left without making a sound and got on the bus to Dresden…and I told her what they had taught me, the killing instructions and the different types of Germans and all that, but there was something else I thought when telling it to her, something I thought I should write down. I remember, on the bus, some of the city was still being rebuilt when I entered, and –… this was the strange thing, wasn’t it? A soldier on his way to learn how to re-destroy a city…even now I remember wondering if Dresden would fall again, and if it would be me that helped to knock it down…’
“Why did you even go, Gupter?” I asked the notes. “Would I have gone if it had been me?”
I went to the place the tipper had told me to go and got a ticket and sat down in the oven to watch one of the fights. It was brutal; one dog was scared as soon as it was pushed into the circle, and the other dog stalked it round the edges, clearly aware that it would be the only one leaving. And the heat…krist, even the dogs’ eyes were sweating.
I looked around me between fights. The crowd was all Mexican. There may have been a couple of Belizeans or Guatemalans or one of the other satellites but there were definitely no East Germans.
Gupter wasn’t there. He had probably never been there.
I checked out of the hotel and headed to Mexico City, sure that there would be another tip off waiting.
‘…you didn’t know what you were doing, did you? Ha, of course I didn’t. It wasn’t something they’d forgive me for, and I knew that, but I think I surprised myself with the scale of what I did. I mean, every doorstop covering over half of Berlin…Krist, you knew they’d come for you. And it had to be me…who else would do such a thing? Only my Jurgen…yeah, that’s an irony right there, isn’t it? Little Jurgen would’ve lied about it afterwards though…wouldn’t he? I have to write that story for him…have to fit what I did into what he’s gonna do. If I ever write him into existence…no, it won’t happen now. Not in this kind of place. Oh Jurgen, if we could go back and hide and lurk in Berlin like we used to, and put our work onto those doorsteps while everyone was sleeping…everything seemed possible then.’
A small tear in the paper at the bottom edge stopped me reading.
The notes were not only decaying, they were being ripped apart. What was happening here? There was something I could-…what was it? Formaldehyde? Was that the stuff they used to keep paper fresh? No, that wasn’t it, it was something else. I’d have to go somewhere and find out. A pharmacy?
I carefully picked up the notes and put them back in the suitcase. As I closed it up I noticed that the strap had broken off again.
It had been with me from the start, back in Japan with Miho. I forgot when that was. Four years ago, perhaps.
I took the strap and attached it back onto the suitcase.
Gupter had been seen near the train terminus in Rome.
I had been in Gaza when I heard and it had taken me only half a day to get from there to here. I was staying in a hostel two streets down from the terminus, but this tip wasn’t encouraging as the place was too hectic. Gupter could never be singled out in such a place, especially with so many other Germans around. Not forgetting the other similar looking types, the Balkans, the Czechs, the Bulgarians. They all had a fair shot at convincing me that they could be Gupter.
And what had I been doing in Gaza?
There was a theory I had, taken from my reading of his notes, that he was attracted to war-zones and Disaster States.
‘there’s something about those other countries I passed through. About Japan too. I feel it when I walk on the streets during the day – what is this feeling? I couldn’t figure it out for the longest time. There was just something strange about feeling safe and…what was it…the faces I saw. They were too pleasant, they weren’t hiding anything from me, at least nothing important. Just personal things, of course, but that feeling…the safety. I don’t question people anymore. I don’t look at them and wonder if they’d be the type to give me up. I think, there’s something in this…I think I know what it is, but how to admit it? Not even in words…Krist, not even in these words I’m writing. When was the last time I felt like writing? I mean, really writing…not these reflections, but real writing. I don’t know. When? I only remember the last time I felt uncomfortable, on that train…with the guards in India…’
India, where him and Rudy Wurlitzer had drugged the Soviet guards with opium and snake venom. They had been taking him to Omsk to put a bullet in his head, but he had escaped. How many people in the world knew about that, Gupter? You, Rudy, the guards, the Soviets, who were now probably dead, Miho perhaps, and me.
But those others, they didn’t know your thoughts. I did, only me. And I knew that when I did find you it’d be in a country gone to hell.
I sat on the top bunk in the four bed dorm room and lit a cigarette. I didn’t know if I could smoke in the room but I didn’t really care.
Did Gupter smoke?
It wasn’t in any of his notes, and I had read them all. No, he didn’t smoke.
But then, why would he mention it? It was just a thing, it wasn’t an idea.
I wanted him to smoke. I wanted him to write down that he smoked. I wanted him to write down what he looked like and what kind of clothes he wore and whether or not he liked other writers. He had never mentioned any of this to me.
The door opened and a couple came in. They ignored me and sat down on one of the other beds and started talking in…what was it…Krist, it wasn’t German, was it?
I listened closely and realized it was.
I put out the cigarette and arranged the notes in a pile and then asked them if they were from Germany.
“Stuttgart,” they said not even smiling.
“Ah, the West.”
They didn’t say anymore so I brought myself closer to them and told them that they probably wouldn’t have a clue what I was talking about but did they know of the writer from the old East German State called Gupter Puncher.
“No. It is sure East Germany you want?”
“I don’t want it, I want Gupter Puncher.”
The man, tall and with broad shoulders like Gupter, shook his head.
They didn’t know him and they would probably never know him. I was the only one who had his notes…but that meant nothing, really; Gupter was the only one who could write them into stories.
There was a hotel in Hong Kong where Gupter had stayed for two nights. That’s what the tipper had told me; he was tall and had broad shoulders and was the spit of him.
“Are you from East Germany?” I asked. “Did you know him?”
“East Germany? No, no. This is gone, you know?”
“Yes, it has, I know.” But how did he know Gupter? “But how-…”
He had hung up and I had gone to Hong Kong anyway and was now sitting on a bed in the same hotel that Gupter had stayed at. I had been down all the floors and listened in at each door, but there had been no German spoken.
He wasn’t there.
“Ha! In Hong Kong…of all places. How could he stand it?”
I got his notes out of the suitcase and laid them out carefully on the bed. I stood over them for a minute and stared down on them as a whole.
One hundred and twenty seven pieces of decaying paper.
Outlines for ‘Jurgen Platonov’, his novel about the poor.
Notes and ideas for a novel about responsibility and the intervention of the author with two characters being Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty, and a female poet who is raped but isn’t really as it all happens in her head.
These notes had been difficult, but Gupter had explained them to me:
‘And what do I know about a female poet? Exactly. What do I know of rape? Nothing. This is my point, isn’t it?’
Yes, I understood with his help. But the thought of writing such a thing…Gupter, I can’t do it, I’m not good enough.
What else?
There was the first draft for his novel on Mao.
The account of his exile, in his words and thoughts.
The reflections on his life, the biography that he seemed to be working on before he-...
I stood for almost an hour remembering each page and the words and the ideas that were on it. I had read it all more than once.
In fact, in the last six years, there hadn’t been anything else.
I sat down on the bed and picked out the page about Jurgen. Before I even recognized the words, I could see which part it was. I could tell from the layout, the system of the words. Jurgen was about to betray his friend and sleep with the Polish whore.
“Krist, but I need something else…I need the whole story, Gupter.”
I walked through the streets around the hotel in Hong Kong and after a while I got on the train and chose an area at random and went there. I couldn’t remember the name of the place as I left its station but I knew straight away it was poor and the people who lived there were at the bottom of the pit. There was a park near one of the buildings, which had washing hanging outside almost every window, and I walked in and sat on one of the benches. I didn’t move for over an hour and then an old woman came up to the bin nearest to me and stuck her arm inside.
There’s a park in ‘Jurgen Platonov’ with an old woman like that, I thought. Gupter had her sticking her arm into a bin at night. It was in East Germany, not Hong Kong, but the poverty of the place, the woman, the bin-...
I gripped the arm of the bench I was sitting on, sweating under my arms and on my face. This is what Gupter did, isn’t it? For the briefest moment I thought about writing his story myself.
‘…there’s a sadness in me now I know they’ll never be written. There are these notes, I suppose, but they’re not works, they’re scribblings. They’re nothing anyone could read. So who will know Gupter Puncher after all this?’
I sat on the plane looking at the notes again and trying to draw a picture of what Gupter might look like. I couldn’t really draw so when I finished and inspected it I realized that I had drawn something stuck halfway between the Latin writer, Cortazar, and an alien.
There’s no way Gupter could resemble either one. Cortazar looked like a Spanish bullfrog, and an alien had nothing Germanic in its features, surely. Perhaps a Scandinavian could pass as an Uchu-Jin, but not a German. Not Gupter.
The plane continued on through the sky or Space or the rocks of Saturn for all I knew, and I fell asleep and when I woke up we were one hour away from Alexandria.
Would Gupter be in a place like this? A Western holiday resort, a place of comfort?
Krist, not a chance. I knew him better than that. It was probably even a waste to come here, but the tip had been given and apparently Gupter had been standing between two cannons on top of the white fortress by the sea in Alexandria.
‘I suppose I’m trying not to write too much of my anxieties down here…there’s no point in diaries or journals, only novels. Only the characters I make. They’d still try to connect me to them though, wouldn’t they? Not that anyone will ever know my work, but if they did, they’d think it…the author is also the creation, that old aphorism. Am I anything of Jurgen? Ha! Even now I’m ridiculous. Stop it, Gupter, stop thinking like this…you are gone. No one knows you, no one cares. Yes, that’s right, there’s no place in literature for me…and didn’t I want this all along? Something close to the hard way, the long route, running away from it, not chasing-... No, Gupter, no anxieties, focus…the novels, write about the novels.’
“Be more precise, Gupter.” I brought the notes closer, shaking them, changing the angle. “Running away from what? What did you want? Tell me, please.”
I checked out of the hotel and headed back to the airport. On the way I counted as many of the people that the taxi passed as I could. At the airport I had the number: seven hundred and twenty seven. This was just in Alexandria, on a certain route taking certain roads to a certain place in the space of thirty minutes. How was I ever gonna find him?
On the plane I took the notes out and laid some of them on my lap as the hostess brought the coffee down the aisle.
I thought again about what he looked like. What he wore every day. Whether or not he liked other writers.
If he really has gone, should I try to write them?
The plane accelerated and hit an air pocket. The hostess stumbled and the coffee threw itself over the notes.
“Gupter…” I mumbled down at the growing stain.
Oli Johns
I live in Lam Tin, a busy area of Hong Kong, which has a highway and a hill nearby which I run up and down sometimes. I wander the city, eating in Cafe de Coral, drinking in Tsim Sha Tsui, writing in Starbucks, and no, i won’t apologise for it…it’s peaceful, but there’s still noise, so that’s why.
I edit and write stuff for GUPTER PUNCHER magazine, a free satire rag that some people pick up from cafes, bars, and other shitholes across the city…I’m not sure if people are actually reading, but I’m gonna assume they are. If they’re not, it doesn’t really matter, I enjoy writing it.
I printed a book of short stories and I’m still trying to sell the 900+ copies still sitting in my bedroom – I made the mistake of putting negative quotes on the first few pages, so when people look at it for a taste they don’t really understand why they should buy it. I have sold a few though, not a total write off …
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(from) Beautiful Things that Happen to Ugly People
Sarah E Melville
Trouble Sleeping
It hath often been said that it is not death but dying that is terrible.
Henry Fielding
The night passes quickly. Os shuffles at the end of the bed. There are no dreams to be had. She shifts, stretching out. Her soft skin glows in the early morning. The shades are closed and the sun is not up. Os runs a hand through his hair and it sticks up. Her hair is worse and her make up is smudged. He is struggling to put on his socks with frozen fingers. There are purple shadows under their eyes like bruises, but there are no beatings. They wear these half moons like prizes under their eyes. Like adopted children. No, we do not know where they came from, but they are ours.
Os is gone now and she hugs the pillow to her chest. His side of the bed is already cold. She can hear crickets and the back of her throat is dry from the cold air. She shudders to think of the dewy morning world. How beautiful, how cold.
The phone rings and she squeezes her eyes shut. It goes off again and again but she will not touch it. Os picks it up in the other room and speaks just loud enough for her to barely hear. These liminal minutes of dawn can shape so many things. It can make them angry or sad or quiet.
She turns again and can feel the cold of the bed frame against the small of her back. Os hangs up the phone and turns on the shower. She can feel the warm water running through her hair and on the soft skin of her throat. It makes her shudder, alone in bed. Through the pouring she can hear that the telephone set has not been hung up correctly, the dial tone pursuing. You forgot to hang up, she wants to say, but she rubs her eyes instead. You forgot to hang it up.
The pipes in the ceiling stretch as hot water surges through them. They do not creak, but bang like trash can lids. The dial tone is burrowing into her skull behind her left ear, in the soft spot behind her jaw. Upwards towards her closed eye. The crickets pulse. She lifts herself up and looks for the sounds. Outside the sun is rising golden. All of the frost and all of the night wisps away. The thin ice on the succulents drips off. Os washes off. There will be nothing left by the time the sun rises. By the time they hold hot, bitter coffee in their hands, sliding over unbrushed teeth and tongues.
Os turns off the shower. He has probably used up all the hot water again. Will he be angry because she is still in bed? These are liminal minutes, even with the sun on the rise.
The full moon was out last night. It is still out now, in the sky by the wall with no windows. It will be out all day and she will look for it, pale in the pale sky. Even the sun cannot wash out the night. Sleeplessness looms overhead, smothering like a wet blanket.
Orange bottle silos clutter the night table. Their words are angry. Are we going to die today? The instructions are shouted in black capitals, and the warnings are symbols from pastel children's books, telling about awful things with silly pictures. Morals of flattery and gluttony and greed.
TWO (2) PILLS TWICE (2) A DAY.
TAKE ONE (1) PILL PER SIX (6) HOURS AS PAIN PERSISTS. DO NOT TAKE MORE THAN FOUR (4) IN A TWENTY-FOUR (24) HOUR PERIOD.
Os comes in to dress, towelling his hair. He says something about the phone call and she turns over, mumbling something back.
Call a healthcare provider right away if you or your family member has any of the following symptoms, especially if they are new, worse, or worrying you:
-thoughts of suicide or dying
-attempts to commit suicide
-new or worse depression
-new or worse anxiety
-panic attacks
-trouble sleeping (insomnia)
-acting on dangerous impulses
-an extreme increase in activity and talking (mania)
She wants to tell him he forgot to hang up the phone. Os ties his shoes and kisses her forehead, stroking the hair at her temple. He won't be angry, will he? He won't be angry –
I love you, he says, and she nods, squeezing her eyes shut. She asks for a glass of water and he brings it to her. She took five yesterday, and she will take five today. One now, before the pain can soak its way deep into her, down into each finger and fibre. One after breakfast. One after lunch. One in the afternoon and one in the evening before bed. She might take six today. One after dinner with a cup of tea.
Os leaves while she is asleep, her water glass half empty in her hand. He sets it on the night stand, hoping she’s not angry because he woke her up. He’ll be back in the late morning to make her breakfast.
The sun wakes her up an hour later, fully risen and fiery in the sky. Shadows of the slatted blinds cover her arms and face and she shades her eyes. Time for another pill before the pain can break through her half-sleeping mind. Today she will take six, and tomorrow she will take seven.
South of the Euphrates
I wrote a note and it reminded me of all the sad things you used to say about your life. I threw it out the window and watched it fly away. It went into the clouds and into a thunderstorm. The ink ran from all the rain, across the lines, making shapes. It landed somewhere South of the Euphrates River where no-one has looked for Eden. When it was opened all my sad words were gone, replaced by a picture of you.
You had never looked so happy
Completely
Over You
©
copyright Sarah E Melville, 2009
Autonomy
we danced last night and our shoes made patterns like dominoes. Four, two, three, five. The lamp shades were a champagne pink and your dress was covered in glass beads shaped like little hollow burrows. I thought that it would have been high time to give you a kiss, but your shoes made different patterns than mine sometimes. Your cat woke up in the corner and was jealous of our autonomy. You do not let him outside. Your soul glittered like a candlelit chandelier and I wanted to hold it. Instead I held your waist and your hands, and they felt like silk. I fancied that you liked me, four, two, three, five.
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(from) Glimpses of a Floating World
Larry Harrison
Ronnie cut through into Charing Cross Road, but she was still behind him. Who would tail him, he wondered. Guido? That was absurd, Guido couldn’t afford a private eye. It must be the Old Bill. Was it because of the one-armed man? Or had Spear put the word out, told the law to go after him? No, if it was the law they would pull him over, give him some hassle. Just relax, stay cool. Easy to get paranoid.
Halfway up Charing Cross Road, Ronnie stopped and looked at his reflection in a music publisher’s window, waiting for the image of her face to appear behind his shoulder. From the shop doorway came the smell of London dust: old mortar, soot, crumbling bones, dog-ends. His own pale face stared back from the dark glass, his pupils so small they were like two pinholes. The cut inflicted by the ex-serviceman had left a smear of blood across his forehead. He couldn’t see any sign of the woman. He walked on slowly until he reached the public toilets at the junction with Tottenham Court Road, and stood surveying the cross-roads, as though she might appear from any direction. Time for another fix. His mission to sell opium could wait for a few minutes, while he straightened himself out. And if she was still on his tail, she couldn’t follow him into the bogs.
He let himself into a karzi, found a vein on the first attempt, and shot up. There was too much coke in the mix and, as the minutes ticked by, he sat looking at the toilet door, disinclined to move. His works remained lodged in his vein, and a thin trickle of blood reached down to his wrist.
Someone had carved a life-sized female nude in the paintwork, with a disembodied dick pointing towards her pubic hair, like a guided missile. The artist had added drops of dark-coloured blood, and the title, ‘I shagged my brother’s wife when she had the rags up.’
The artist’s bold, angular strokes, and fury of execution, reminded him of an illustration he’d seen in National Geographic, a magazine he sometimes pinched from his doctor’s waiting room. It was a carving called The Sacrifice of Blood, made in a country called Axtec, or Aztec, or something. One of the ancient Aztec gods extracted blood from a wound in his dick, and used it to give life to humanity. Maybe that’s what this drawing was really about? There was the heavenly dick, and there was the sacred blood.
What would some future archaeologist make of it all, if London was overtaken by a catastrophe, as Pompeii had been? He imagined archaeologists digging out this underground cell, his own body perfectly preserved in volcanic ash, sat upright on the toilet seat, facing the artwork. A man ritually letting his own blood, contemplating the sacrifice of God.
He heard an avalanche of sound, and his heart beat faster in his chest. He wondered if the catastrophe had begun, but it was just someone hammering on a toilet door.
‘Come on out. Now!’
A drunken baritone launched into song, and the words Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam rang out across the public convenience. The singer had locked himself in the next cubicle. As Ronnie looked up, a boot came over the top of his toilet door, and there was the Old Bill gazing down on him.
‘What’s this then, lad? Get this door open!’
‘It’s okay, I’m registered. It’s all legit.’
They dragged Ronnie out and went through his pockets. The opium was found, squashed into a Swan Vestas matchbox. Plod’s face lit up. He held the matchbox under Ronnie’s nose, forcing his head back.
‘What’s this then, lad? This is Hemp!’
Indian Hemp. They’re as thick as pig shit. Going to get away with it. They haven’t seen opium or cannabis before. Make out it’s a lump of toffee. It’s brown and chewy, it’s toffee. I’m saving it for later, my toffee. They’re looking unsure. Going to walk away from this.
‘Better take him down the nick for questioning,’ said the second cop.
One cop held onto the drunk and marched him across the road, with Ronnie’s syringe held aloft like a trophy; the other dragged Ronnie along. The drunk wrestled the cop to a halt in the middle of Charing Cross Road, extending his free arm towards the street crowd, like Sinatra singing an encore.
A sunbeam, a sunbeam,
I’ll be a sunbeam for Him.
The crowd stared back accusingly. They thought the old guy was a junky. Ronnie had an odd feeling, as if he was acting in a film in which the script had been abandoned, and every scene improvised. Any outcome was possible.
At West End Central, Ronnie was led into an interview room by a young Detective Constable. The DC, whose name was Andrews, had a lumpy face, which meant he found it difficult to shave without nicking himself. There were several recent cuts, and from the powdery deposit on his cheeks they’d been treated with an alum pencil. Ronnie stared at the lumps and bumps on Andrews’ neck and chin. Maybe they were cysts, or maybe it was a skin disease.
The detective’s auburn hair swept straight back from his forehead, but because it was naturally wavy it had been flattened with Brylcream, to form a stiff, corrugated sheet. This gave him a dated, pre-war appearance, like the young Jerry Lee Lewis. It was out of keeping with his modern Italian suit, with its bum freezer jacket, as though a country boy had come down to London and been kitted out by fashion-following cousins. They hadn’t been able to persuade him to style his hair, so he still looked like a hick from the Midlands.
‘What were you doing with Indian Hemp in your pocket?’ Andrews asked, in a broad Black Country accent. Ronnie repeated the story about toffee, and for a long time things seemed to be going his way. He was led from his cell towards the street door and was convinced, from the disappointed faces around him, that they were about to let him go. Then Andrews came down the corridor from the opposite direction, carrying a sheaf of papers. He reached the charge desk ahead of them and called out, ‘It’s okay—you can charge him! Opium prepared for smoking.’
Ronnie could hardly believe what he was hearing. He was going to be charged with possession; he was going to be banged up. The bastards looked jubilant. The thick Brummy had managed to identify opium. Sent it to a forensic lab or something. Ronnie wondered how Samantha would know what had happened. She might be standing at Archway station, waiting for him to arrive on the last Tube. He had to be there; he couldn’t afford to spend a night in the cells.
‘Tell us who’s giving you this stuff, Ronald,’ Andrews said. ‘We’re not interested in people like you. We’re after Mr Big. If you help us out …’
Everyone on the scene knew there was no Mr Big. There were just a few junkies doing small deals to keep themselves going. But Ronnie knew the Old Bill would never believe that. They were convinced that the rise in drug use was due to organised crime. Then he thought of a Greek café near the Middlesex Hospital. He’d asked for a Turkish coffee, but this waiter started shouting something about only selling Greek coffee. When Ronnie made a little joke about Cyprus they threw him out. So he gave DC Andrews a detailed description of the waiter. In a moment of improvisation, he described him as Maltese. Wore a little pork pie hat. Scar on his boat. It was if an alarm had gone off in West End Central. Two more detectives joined them.
‘This Maltese geezer who sold you the drugs, what was he called?’ Andrews asked. ‘What do you know about the Mejlak brothers? Are the Mejlak firm dealing in drugs now?’
‘Are they? Everyone knows the Mejlaks are behind all the dope in the West End.’
DC Andrews consulted the others in the corridor. Ronnie could hear an older guy saying ‘Well done,’ and ‘It’s worth a punt’. Andrews came back looking pleased with himself.
‘You can give yourself an injection out of your own prescription tonight. We just have to wait for the police surgeon to arrive, to supervise it.’
When the police surgeon arrived, they handed Ronnie his shit and allowed him to make up his own fix. He couldn’t believe his luck, and shot up a really big fix of H&C, to last as long as possible. He almost floated back to the Flowery Dell, and decided he was going to walk straight out of court, once they realised he was a registered addict. And he’d helped the police; that must count in his favour.
In the morning there were no more smiles. DC Andrews was nowhere to be seen. The police surgeon said, ‘I’ll give you the injection this time.’ It wasn’t heroin. Some kind of sedative. Intra-muscular. By the time he got to Marlborough Street Magistrates’ Court, he could hardly stand up in the dock. This made a bad impression, as the stipendiary magistrate assumed he was intoxicated.
‘How do you plead?’
‘Technically guilty, like, but not really, because I’m registered on heroin and cocaine. I’m a registered addict, you see, so it’s all legit.’
‘Three drugs!’ The beak stared accusingly at the arresting officer, as though this was evidence that should have been presented in court. ‘Remanded to Ashford for medical reports.’
And that was how it all began. They had him, bang to rights.
Larry Harrison started life as a cowman and yak keeper for the Tibetan Buddhist community at Karma Kagyu Samye Ling, in Dumfriesshire. After working his way up to the post of assistant dairyman on a commercial Ayrshire herd, he left Scotland in 1975 to work with disadvantaged children at London's Clapham Junction.
Larry became surprisingly good at persuading children not to stand on the railway tracks at Earlsfield Station. And he was able to talk them down from rooftops in Battersea, without them bombarding passers-by with slates. To this day, Larry is relieved that he was able to negotiate the release of everyone held hostage by Barry in the school unit. The Parks Department should not have left an axe unattended within sight of the building, and had Barry not been so amenable, the outcome could have been a good deal worse. (Thanks, Baz. What fun we had! Sorry to hear you were done last year for kidnapping that Assistant Governor on D Wing.)
During Larry's subsequent career, as a university researcher on alcohol and drug problems, he wrote Tobacco Battered, a BBC Radio 4 feature, and over fifty journal articles, academic books and book chapters. He was appointed Reader in Addiction Studies at Hull, long a centre of excellence in problem drinking, before retiring to the East Yorkshire countryside to make cider and write fiction. Glimpses of a Floating World is his first novel. You can sample more of this novel, or purchase it here: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/3275
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(from) Songs from the Other Side of the Wall
Dan Holloway
December 12 2007
“You’ve gotta come see it, Szandi,” says Yang. I slam the phone down but it misses the base. I hit the clock instead, which flashes 03.00.
I put the handset on the pillow and turn over so I’m looking at it. The white plastic appears faintly red in the clock’s LCD glow. “Szandi?” I hear. The black dots of the speaker seem to wink in the dark as she talks.
“Yeah?”
“My sculpture. It’s finished. You’ve gotta come see!”
“I will. I’ll come over first thing in the morning.”
“It is first thing in the morning, you daft bitch.” I hear her laugh, but it’s distant. I bet she thinks she’s put her hand over the mouthpiece; but she’s too stoned to get it right.
“Are you gonna make me come get you, Szandi?”
“Just try.”
“Pleeaase,” she says.
“OK.” I’m too tired to argue. I’ll be back in bed quicker if I just go.
I pull on a jumper, thick woollen leggings, and a pair of pumps, and head out of the flat into the cold city. The mist coming off the Danube wraps itself around me like the breath of a thousand ghosts.
I make my way through Víziváros. The streets get narrower with every turn until I reach a passage that’s little more than a crack, where one building has slipped down the hill with age and worked loose of its partner. There are no lights, but I know every chip and layer of orange and blue and green and brown paint on the door that opens onto a thin, concrete staircase. I climb to the top and ring the bell.
Yang opens her studio door a few centimetres, and looks me up and down as though she can’t figure out why I’m here. All I can see are her eyes. Her pupils are huge, like she’s sucked in two black moons. I was right. She’s stoned. She fumbles to free the safety chain, opens the door fully and reaches out a hand to drag me inside.
We stand on the paint-splattered floorboards just inside the door, our hands still locked together. She grins but her muscle control’s gone, and the smile teeters on her lips. She’s wearing the long T-shirt I printed for her that says slut slit a few centimetres above the hem. The black letters are spaced out and I can see enough between them to know the T-shirt’s all she’s wearing.
She steps to one side and pushes me forward. I’m standing in front of a glass tank about a metre high, the same deep and twice as long. Inside are loads of little red balloons. They’re just hovering in space, refusing to fall to earth or float off into the sky. Some of them are clustered together so it looks like they’re supporting each other, but I walk all the way around the tank and there’s clear air surrounding every one of them.
“Gelatine,” she says. “Cool, huh? Chemicals suspended in extract of cow!” She giggles, wobbles, and nearly topples through the glass.
“Like a negative of Damien Hirst,” I say, but it’s more beautiful than that; and more old fashioned, like the millefiori paperweights in Dad’s study. The concept’s modern and kind of cool, but there’s something in the execution – the smoothness of the red; the flat, crisp angles of the glass; the clarity of the gelatine – that belongs to another time.
“It’s called One Hundred Balloons Without String,” she says.
“At least that’s descriptive.”
She sits down on the floor beside a little pile of screwed-up and sticky papers, and starts rummaging through them. “Wanna hear the text?” she asks, grabbing at my leg with one hand and shaking a pair of chopsticks off a piece of A4 with the other.
“Text?” I say, sitting down next to her.
“Yeah, the words that go with the sculpture.”
“I know what a text is. Isn’t it a bit out of date, though? People don’t really do that kind of thing any more.”
“I know,” she says. She’s sitting with her legs crossed and the T-shirt’s riding up. My eyes follow the long, pale olive line of the inside of her thigh. She puts the sheet of paper in her lap. “It’s part of the whole retro thing, like you said about Damien Hirst.” She picks it up and moves it closer to her eyes, then away, then back again. “Ah, fuck it,” she says. “You read it. I’m knackered.”
She hands me the paper. The edge is covered in a thick, sticky gloop that I hope is gelatine. I’ve forgotten how exquisite her handwriting is, even when she’s scribbling. My eyes trace the narrow, inverted curves of her ns and her ms, and the almost shorthand ripples of her vowels. Her letters have the elegance and tightness of her body, the perfect proportion of its angles and curves.
“As newborns,” I begin, “we announce ourselves to the world utterly without fear. We take in a gigantic lungful of air that fills our shrivelled skin like a balloon and, for the last time in decades, without embarrassment, expectation – or fear – we let out an almighty scream. Although, and precisely because, we are ignorant of them, there is nothing in our future or our past (not the slap of the mother’s hand nor the reward of her breast) that tells us what we must do.”
“Yeah,” she says. Her eyelids are starting to fall. The skin on them is smooth, like cream-coloured suede. I watch as they move slowly up and down, trying to decide whether she’s more beautiful with her eyes open or closed.
“Hey, don’t stop,” she says, staring straight at me. Her brow’s creased like she’s cross, but her spaced-out pupils stay big and glistening and distant.
“No.” I put the paper down. “You tell me.”
“Tired, Szandi.”
“Yeah, but you’re not too tired to call me over here. So tell me about your metaphorical balloons!”
“Fuck, you know, Szandi. You’re born and you open your eyes and all around you see this cat’s cradle of ropes and cords and strings. Family, rules, race, sex. Like a balloon tied to the vendor’s hand, on the verge of floating into a limitless sky with nothing to direct us but the breeze of chance. Life feels, what?”
“Precarious,” I offer.
“Yeah, that’s it. Precarious.”
“Only,” I say, looking at the sculpture, “if you look at life from every angle you see there isn’t a cat’s cradle at all. There’s nothing touching anything else.”
“Yeah. But who can see their life from every angle? Only God could do that. Do you believe in God, Szandi?”
I shake my head.
“Me neither.”
“Maybe when we die,” I say. “Maybe we can see it then. When we’re really old, and lying in our beds with our eyes closed and all we can hear is our breathing. Maybe we get so far from the world we can see our life from every side.”
“That’d be sad,” says Yang. “You go your whole life knowing exactly where you are, then just before you die ping, someone cuts the rope.”
“Better to die young.”
“Like Claire,” she says, without sympathy, without any feeling at all. Just a statement of fact.
“Like Claire,” I repeat, and pick up her text. My hand’s shaking. The paper makes a sound like rain falling on glass.
“What did I write about dying?” she asks.
“You don’t remember?”
“I’m tired, Szandi. Tired and a bit stoned. Read it to me.”
I turn the page, reading as I go, and let my eyes find their way to the last paragraph.
“…we walk towards death in ignorance,” I read, “fearless once again of punishment and reward. We take a gulp of air with what’s left of our lungs; and announce our presence, without embarrassment, expectation – or fear – not with a scream but a gurgle, a dribble, and last a rattle. Finally the balloon has reached space, beyond hope, fear, past, present, horizon; beyond air, beyond weather.”
It’s beautiful. Her words are like poetry in the same effortless way as the sculpture. They slide off the tongue and float weightlessly away without making a ripple.
“It’s overwritten,” I say quietly. “Is that part of the retro irony?”
“Yeah,” she says, opening her eyes. “I took the style from your blog.”
Touché.
“Fuck you,” I say, and start to laugh.
She screws up her forehead and leans towards me. Her head falls onto my shoulder, and a spike of hair jolts out of place and flops over one eye. She juts out her bottom lip and blows, making her hair dance. The combination of the gesture and her utter seriousness is comical and I feel the corners of my mouth twitching.
“Hey, you,” she says. “Let me be serious for a minute.”
“Uh-huh?”
“Yeah.” She frowns harder, scrunching up her nose. “I was going to tell you I made this for you.”
“For me?”
“For you. Because you’re not like any normal balloon.”
“Right.”
“You see all these balloons?” she asks. She tries lifting her head but she’s too tired and it slides from my shoulder to my chest. She puts a hand there as a pillow, letting it mould itself to my breast.
“Yeah.”
“Look at one of them. Any one. Pick a balloon,” she says, like she’s a magician doing a card trick. “What do you see?”
“You tell me.”
“You see that the only thing making it any different from all the other balloons is its position. The only thing that makes your balloon different is how it relates to every other balloon. It’s only when they’ve all floated off into space that you can look at a balloon and see it on its own.” She sighs and shrugs her shoulder gently against me. “Poor balloon.”
“Poor balloon?”
“Yeah,” she says, but now her eyes are firmly closed and her words are getting blurred. “Poor balloon. Think…need to change…in the morning.” Now her voice is hardly there at all, and it’s starting to merge with shallow, ragged breaths that will soon become a snore. “Ninety-nine Balloons Without String…One With.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask. “You’re the one floating off into space.”
It’s too late. Underneath the T-shirt her chest is rising and falling in the slow rhythm of a torch song. I kiss her head, ease it gently down onto my lap, lean back, and look up at the ceiling. The flaking eau de nil paint is textured with pits and splashes and craters. I look at the patterns they make, joining the dots in a hundred different ways. I try seeing each one separately, cut off from the scratches and marks around it; but I can’t.
*
It’s midday when I come back from the shops, and Yang’s in the shower, back in our flat for the first time in a week. The water rinses the sleep off her like a layer of fine powder and leaves her shining like the stone of a fresh-peeled lychee. I step in and we kiss and let our fingers flow with the water down the contours of our flesh. She takes me, still wet, to bed and we make love for an hour, tongues and hands and skin blurring in moist heat. As our bodies move, the water slowly dries, and when we’re spent we lie on the bed, glinting with the sticky sheen of sweat and sex.
For a while, I watch her and listen to her breathe. Her eyes are shut but the rasps from her lips come too quickly for sleep. I want to tell her I love her. I put my arm around her shoulder and nuzzle the thick, black hair. I press my breast against hers, watch her lips open and sigh as my hard pink nipple brushes the soft brown of hers. The thin layers of sweat and skin that separate us melt together. I push down on her a little harder. I want the boundary to disappear altogether. I want my heart to leap out of my chest and start beating in hers. But it won’t. Not yet, not until the morning I wake up, feel a body next to me, and don’t think of Claire.
*
By mid afternoon and slivers of silk surround me on the sofa. I pull pieces off at random and throw them on the floor together, trying to make the colours and shapes talk to each other. Instead they just flop down in heaps and look a mess.
“What the fuck?” asks Yang, standing in the door.
“I’m playing,” I lie.
“No you’re fucking not, you’re messing with your sculpture.”
“OK. I thought I could maybe do something with the lining, or put some coloured stitching in. It’s not right.”
“It’s finished,” she says. She starts picking the bits up from the floor. Then the ones on the sofa, till she stands in front of me brandishing a thick, multicoloured weapon. “It’s been finished for over a week.”
*
Now it’s night, and she’ll sleep through till I bring coffee, and shake her till she remembers she has to set up for the exhibition. I’m glad she’s asleep. Often I’ll wake, and over the nape of her neck I’ll see Yang’s face reflected in the glass of the clock, her eyes open. She’s not sleeping, but she’s not awake. Deep behind the black of her pupils there’s an intense concentration I can’t penetrate.
I go to the kitchen, pour a beer, and sit down with the letter I’ve been avoiding all day. I tap the edge against the wood for a minute or so. The postmark says Tokaj. I don’t recognise the ballpoint handwriting that’s pressing unevenly into the cheap envelope, but that doesn’t matter. I know it’s about Dad.
I push the beer across the table, slide my finger under the flap, tearing it clumsily like I’m gutting a fish with a blunt knife, and lay the sheet of shiny lined paper on the table.
Dear Szandrine,
Your father doesn’t know I’m writing. He’d just tell me not to interfere. But isn’t that what friends do, eh? I would’ve called but there was no way of getting your number without him suspecting, so it’s a letter. Sorry it’s not a very good one – you a student and all, but the only things I’m used to writing are invoices.
I know you’ll be here in a week anyway but it would mean the world if you came home early. Even if it’s only a day. To show your Dad you care. Sometimes when I go over he’s so grey and quiet I wonder just how ill he is. But he won’t see the doctor. Maybe you could make him.
One more thing, and you mustn’t let him know I said anything. You already know what would make him happy, even if it’s too late to make him well. Tell him you’ll look after the vineyard. Tell him you’ll take over Szant Gabor when he’s gone.
I know it’s all too much to ask but what am I supposed to do? Marko’s my oldest friend in the world.
Gyorgy
I go to the bathroom and open the door of the big mirror-cabinet above the sink. There’s the cutthroat Dad gave me when I was ten, its blue enamel handle shining amongst the tampons and pill bottles. I open it out and watch as a droplet of moisture appears and glistens on it like dew on grass. I hold the blade up to my lips. The edge is so fine I only know I’ve cut myself from the red that’s swirling in the centre of my tear.
“Oh, Dad,” I whisper, wiping the carbon-steel on the letter, leaving a smudge of salt and blood and rust.
Half of me wants to run home and hold him for as long as he has left. And half of me wants to go back into the other room and lose myself forever in the warmth of Yang’s sleeping body. At this moment I have two lives in front of me, but I know the moment I choose one, the other will die.
It’s long past midnight and even though it’s winter the sun will come soon. The darkness outside is already loosening. It melts in front of me, and I realise it’s no longer the orange yellow dark of streetlamps and neon signs. It’s the sleazy light of a bar, the Grey Wolf in Bucharest. It’s New Year’s Eve. 2006 is about to become 2007. The future is full of possibility. I have a place come the autumn to study languages at the Sorbonne. I am about to sing in public for the first time. Somewhere, waiting for me, in the West, Claire is alive.
Dan Holloway has trained as a theologian, a powerlifter, and a bridge player. Unable to find a job to combine his ersatz and eclectic knacks, he spends his days administrating.
Dan is writing his current novel, The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes, live and interactively on the Facebook group of the same name.
When not writing fiction about modern Europe, Dan writes academic papers about the cracks and crevices of the world’s cities. Whilst his love for The City knows few bounds, he is rumoured to spend his days in a remote barn, inhabiting the cracks and crevices of the Interweb. If you want to hang out with him, there’s a list of his regular haunts at: www.danholloway.wordpress.com
You can download or sample more of Songs from the Other Side of the Wall here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/3308
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(from) Red Tide
Mary Banks
The cliffs near St Davids are painted with a palette of many colours.
To the west they are steeply-angled beds of slate, pointing to the sky in subtle strata of pink, blue and grey, until a winter storm breaks the topmost pinnacles and dashes them to the ground, to shatter and fragment and lie in sharp mosaics amongst the pebbles.
To the south rise Cathedral Slabs, where, long ago, huge rocks were quarried to build the sacred monument. Today its ghost, in mirror image, remains to face the waves, looking out across the water with imprint of tower and architrave. Stately walls of sculpted ledges and finely chiselled arêtes, sanctified stone blushing cream in the sunlight.
And the rest, the moon-like bays and rugged headlands; an explosion of brightness, decided long ago when volcanoes spewed lava and the earth was fired like a pot in a kiln. Purples and reds, folded this way and that, fiery stripes buckled and bent as tectonic plates ground together, squeezing the land into a concertina of hills and valleys.
At Porthclais, the cliffs are red and gold, rough as rusty iron. At their base waves shatter over rocks, sucking hungrily at stone before being dragged back to sea in the undertow. At their peak, bushes of bright gorse quiver and chatter with goldcrests. Whilst here and there a climber, small as an ant, crawls slowly upwards, weaving ropes of luminous colours, like lace against the rock face.
In the middle of this vertical desert is Hugo. He clings like a kittiwake, surveying the ledges for a nest site, exploring cracks and crevices with chalky fingers. Balancing between luck and friction, he lets go his right hand and, reaching behind his back, unclips a clatter of metalwork from his harness. The shiny wedges hang in different sizes, sparkling their challenge in the sunlight. He offers each to the rock in turn, a thief with skeleton keys, going where he doesn’t belong. At last one fits tightly into the crack. He tugs; jamming it in further, then attaches a loop of tape to its tail. Finally he lifts the rope that trails beneath him and clips it into the tether.
‘Slack on green!’ His shout is automatic.
Lizzie squats on her heels, her back against the cliff; a snake charmer, teasing the long sleek body from its coiled sleep to pass through the shiny plate in her fingers and creep silently up the stone wall. With brown fingers she combs browner hair away from her eyes and peers short-sightedly out to sea. The skin is peeling on her reddened nose, revealing a scatter of freckles teased out by the sun.
Further along the rocky pavement, Stuart, reclining on a bed of jackets, pops a dried apricot into his mouth and reaches into the packet for another. His words are punctuated by the chewing of fruit and the rustling of wrappers, ‘Three more days before we go home, let’s hope the weather holds.’
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