PARADISE REX PRESS, INC.
Love and Death from Deadby to London
II. DEADBY
My grandmother lies dying of cancer, but I've got work to do. I'm twenty years old and back home, paying off my debts, working under a generous guiding love I take for granted that is flawed and perfect in equal measure. I can't go, got to work, got to paint. Priorities, right? I can go next time.
These six things happen:
1. The train pulls away taking my weakened mother to her mother's in Sharrow - her darkest days, neglected by all of us.
2. The water tank in the attic, directly above my drawing board, bursts, dripping through the ceiling onto my artwork.
3. Clouds roll in from nowhere. It grows dark.
4. It starts to hail – but the hail is big and disk-shaped, the size of an old penny. You can see the layers, how they formed – but why are they flat?
5. Lightening strikes the garden, just feet in front of me and all around me, not the highest things at all, but anywhere. And it's straight shafts of lightening in single bolts with no forks.
6. Minutes before my mother returns it stops after a whole day in which I've been unable to draw a thing. I should have gone, I know I should have gone.
She dies, and I never see her alive again. That was the last chance.
Later, in Sharrow, in the house I buy from my grandfather, she visits one night. I awake to a prodding in my side, and by the bed she's standing, shrouded in black – a cliché head to hidden toes. She’s disappointed in me. Angry, but saying nothing.
Gran, I say, it's me! It's me! Don't worry!
And she slides away then – backwards without moving, down some unseen passage, diminishing but somehow not through the same space I was in; sideways out of time.
Slips, slips sliding away…
I'm helpless.
There are six of us, three girls three boys.
We're camping.
And I…
I'm in the woods. I’m pissing away all the beer I’ve drunk into the darkness. Trees I can sense but can’t see. I’m trying to understand the sensation I’m feeling. It’s been a good night, and I
Christ. Shit. Hang on. I’ll be back. Hang on a minute. Just… wait there....
I've left her in a tent, and I'm feeling sick and shaky
What the fuck? Christ…
Then I grin.
This is what it feels like…
Oh
This is what it feels like…
Shit
It feels… it feels…
I never thought… I never knew it would
Who'd have thought it would
be this
be this damn physical?
Bitch
Slips, slipping… oh god, it’s slipping away again…
You spoilt little selfish fucking bitch! It’s always about
Please…
I gave you everything
Have everything! It’s yours! Please!
Not that it was much
God, don’t… Please don’t slip, slide… go now…
She diminished me
I love you. I will always…
Slowly the house falls to ruin, and I go with it
I love her! I know, I’m sorry. Sorry. I just, I just can’t… I’ll… I’ll get her back. No. You don’t… Nobody understands. How could they?
Beers and bad company
Sl… sl… slip… don’t… Please. Don’t.
Sharrow becomes a waiting room, a dead end destination.
I leave it with a back full of knives and a broken heart.
I have pissed away a year.
We're moving to Deadby.
We build tunnels in sand piles, sleep in dens in the old Salt Warehouse.
I'm infatuated with Elizabeth, dark and so pretty.
I'm ten years old.
III. LONDON
They pegged the boy as being cute, a friend. We'll cry on that big soft shoulder about our shit-head boyfriends, with their money and cars and fucking big southern fuck-off houses, and big southern fuck-off attitudes. Who the fuck are you? Yeah, you're so sweet, not like them, you're one of us, one of the girls. Fuck you I am! I want to fuck you all so very badly it's not true. If you only knew… So the boy gets his break, and the breaks keep coming. He drifts through girls like wheat, threshing. Looking for the sunshine that glimmers between the stalks, but you know his sister, she says he aims too high. Well, he says, fuck her. And he carries on looking.
IV. WALLHAMSTOW
Drugs and philosophy.
I miss you both, you bastard.
And here, the Quested Beast raises a distant head in my peripheral awareness, and the quest passes to me. Faltering on ill-made stilts, I lumber after it into the city, the country, into my delusional world-view mindscape of angry self-abuse and wise beyond my years preternatural awareness of death and entropy – I chase, but the beast just builds up steam, laughing. The ghost of Jung informs my arguments, and I glean the myth of symbolism, strengthen my ritual wish fulfilment desires with pseudo-intellectual reasoning, dancing along a bright happening of spirit and racial memory that is most likely a conjuring trick; a mirage. And you tell me you think I'm a genius because you love me, and because just maybe you think I am. We spill into the night, inventing a language for the love of it, as though a night spent making nothings into somethings would lend us unseen, unglimpsed power. Make us new beings of a new age. Achumnabaa! Iqu thias tutu na mombek. Achumnabaa! Achumnabaa! The night is thick and warm, and your face, sloped and old, Neanderthal, reaches me in ways no other did. I sit inside that face, part of it. I embrace your form and dance within your voice. You're my brother, my soul space hope teacher who loved me best that wasn't family. We're broken together.
She roles another joint, and the smoke mixes with her own voice so posh it seems false, so broken it needs my affection. We're crazies, and I relish the boho, the maverick, the fuck you of it. I'm free, now, dull and blunted, afraid, but growing and hearing and loving still. And I miss you crazy fucking bastards together. I miss you. The long warm comfort. Talk, now, and I'll sleep well. Tell me about myself, you bloody lying bastard, and make me whole again. Fool philosopher, patron of a better me than I had been, or ever will be.
The man went quiet. Looked about at the throng of small city dwellers. Sighed. Right, he said, and stood. And slipping into another mode he yelled at some old ladies who were passing: Not even got the brains they were born with! And stumbled off, swaying as if drunk, into a place I once rested briefly, but thankfully escaped twenty years ago.
