The headland

You never wanted
to be the type
to be immobilised.

Now they ask you
why you always
seem to let
yourself wash away.

I think, like me,
you find it hard
to hear the sea
keep knocking
so you let it in.
You know that, while it's great,
to say
"I will be strong"
you know you're only there
to be engulfed
so why
not play along?

You know that you're supposed to hate
that sensation of letting yourself rot
but
there's something so sexy
about being stripped
to the bone.
Something so thrilling 
about self-destruction
as you tumble down
bit by bit.

I think the world was never made
with us in mind
so, still, we sit.
And gorge ourselves on vertigo
and tumble down
bit by bit.

Harvey Fucking Slade

The Interloper

Gary had awoken with an insatiable thirst for the velvety serenity of a cup of milky tea. Often one awakes with an unaccomplishable set of desiderata in mind, but sitting hulking and inanimate upon the kitchen work surface was a box containing seventy-thousand bags of Tesco’s Own Brand tea, acquired for a price so fractional that, as Gary fumblingly jammed coppers into the self-service checkout, he looked like a triumphant victor collecting his prize from the world’s least challenging slot machine; albeit an image that would be greatly enhanced were the teabags sculpted into the shape of a gargantuan stuffed bear.

                He drifted out of bed and towards the kitchen with tea on his mind, wearing his house as if it were a comfortable old shoe. At the stairway, he turned instinctively; bleary-eyed without his contact lenses, he could hardly see – and certainly had no reason to think about – the route he was taking and the place he was at. He navigated like a speedy vehicle on auto-pilot, mechanically avoiding the creaking steps not out of a conscious concern for the sanctity of the quiet, but because something in him told him the sound was irritating, and because when you’re waiting on a steaming cup, it’s unsettlingly easy to take for granted that you’ve got somewhere to drink it.

                The caffeinated monstrosity reared up through the kitchen door, its cardboard lid hanging open from the previous night, which dissolved into a heavy session on the tea. The kettle sat by the jumble of plates and, lo and behold, there was water left in it. As they do in the business world, Gary conducted a “time and motion study” and concluded that time would be saved were he to not bother refilling. He hit the switch and the kettle – which he had left plugged in; more evidence, he considered, that he was almost predestined to have this cup of tea – flashed orange and began to boil. Gary opened the fridge and–

Fuck! It had all lined up perfectly – the water in the kettle, the plug in the wall, the teabags in their Goliathan receptacle – until now. Gary’s heart skipped a thousand beats as it dawned upon him that he had no milk. He would have to walk for at least five minutes were he to shop at Eastern Bloc, its shop front lovingly adjourned by a promise to provide its customers with the best “Eastern Europe Foods” and, although two grammatical errors in three words is an impressive feat, he regretted the necessity of leaving the semi-detached world he’d built for himself.

***

Milk in plastic bag in hand, Gary sidled up the familiar street. He felt angst-ridden, uneasy; so libidinously was he clucking a mug that he began to sweat, the perspiratory drip clamming up his face and causing him to grimace alarmingly at somebody presumably in the employ of the Auto Repair Garage.  He swung the bag accliviously by its handles and clutched onto the milk, stroking the bottle through the bag’s flimsy skin. Approaching his front door from the opposite side of the pavement, Gary relaxed and let it hang, walking towards it in such an insistent straight line that it was as if he wished he would simply pass through his door like a translucent spectre. Unfortunately, as he emerged upon his side of the pavement, his gaze was broken. His eyes darting upwards diagonally, it became evident to him that there was somebody upstairs and, what’s more, they were having a damn good time.

I mean, Christ, the window was open. See, sound had a spooky way of travelling through Gary’s abode – toasting some toast or brewing a brew, one could seek to improve the overall experience with music, but would hear it better from the stairway. These architectural quirks lead him to make a point of closing his windows in order to really listen to music in the bedroom that faced the street, lest the neighbours be provided with a constant, and some might say unpalatable, DJ set. The current occupant(s), it seemed, had no such qualms about serenading the neighbourhood with the gangsta rap stylings of A$AP Ferg’s Trap Lord.

As Ferg helpfully contemplated whether a semi-automatic or a TEC-9 might best kill an unfortunate “motherfucker”, Gary felt a surge of emotion in which fury was tempered by confusion. He jiggled the keys around in his pocket, but he was extremely reticent about venturing into an unknown that had, about twenty minutes prior to these events, been his stomping ground. Call the police! you will say, but you must understand that that was not a possibility. Gary had left certain sensitive items around the house, and he could by no means justify handing the law enforcement a conclusive piece of self-incriminating evidence; a smoking bong, so to speak. He knocked on the door.

Before he saw anybody, a whale-moan could be heard coming from the stairway, or perhaps the kitchen;

“Yooooooooo…”

Gary stood as a guest outside his own front door. The man who answered was no doppelganger – no sick Dostoyevskian double, come to steal his life, his home, his image – nor was it a cop and, for the latter at least, he was grateful. The intruder – all Heffner smoking jacket and full-moon spectacles – lackadaisically stroked the subtly ginger follicular appendages that had engorged his face, their colour the only distraction from their burgeoning Hasidic dimensionsHasH.

“You here for the meeting?” he asked. The accent he spoke with had travelled one way or another between England and the US, seemingly settling smack bang in the middle on some rock west of Ireland.

“What meeting?”

“Well, I hope it’ll be a meeting of the minds, baby.”

Gary spluttered and stared. The intruder tipped his chin upwards and titled his head. His eyes narrowed as he examined this new specimen. Gary thought he saw something behind them too; a crazily efficient clockwork mechanism spun inside that beardy head, and right now it was analysing him, sussing out just what his whole raison d'etre was in this kerfuffle. The usurper stopped stroking his beard for a second, and this broke his concentration; he abandoned the eye contact and immediately returned to the beard for another round of fidgeting.

“Are you…like…squatters?” Gary asked.

“Nah, we don’t need to squat. We got seats!”

“…and wh-”

“Let me break it down for you. Come in, come in…”

He welcomed Gary into his own home.

“I’m with an organisation called Junkies for Jesus.”

Dumbfounded, Gary could only hazard “is that… some kind of recovery group?”

“Oh no, I have absolutely no interest in kicking the smack. I have a lot of resolve in my belief that there are no two things more compatible than the Zen of heroin addiction and the theological guidelines of evangelical Christianity.” Gary was in a daze, but the current occupant guided him into his kitchen. Where was the tea? “You want anything to drink? Anything to smoke? I can hook you up with a radical bowl…”

“Tea?”

“We don’t have that. I’d give you a hit of my heroin but, ahhh…then I wouldn’t have as much heroin. SALLY! SALLY! SALLY!” he rose to his feet and began screaming at the ceiling, lobbing projectiles against it – although nothing more likely to crack their skulls in their subsequent descent than a box of Coco Pops. “SALLY! HEY, SALLY! YO!” Upon that last “yo” he seemed to have a change of heart, stopping dead in his tracks and reaching into his pocket for something. He pulled out a beat-up iPhone and began to text with a dead-eyed look of total focus and concentration, and then he jerked back to life;

“Ok, Sally’s not going to bring the bong down. Not to worry-” he began to thumb a crumpled Zig-Zag rolling paper, winking at Gary “Bun big zoots, keep smilin’. Whaddya wanna know? I got a whole life to talk about, and a whole life to talk about it in. I can tell my origin story – growing up in the Deep South lonely, ostracised, not knowing the love of Jesus. The only Jew in the whole of Savannah – how about that?! Even my family, they were gentiles! I still don’t know how that worked, but I can tell you I poured my despair, my woe, into the world of drugs. Taking drugs. Selling drugs. Manufacturing drugs.  Drugs were the best goddamn thing Judaism ever did for me. Met Sally at a crackhouse in Minneapolis. Passed out by a river and wound up gettin’ baptised…”

Gary was in no mood for this invasive raconteur. He snapped, grabbing a pint of water off the kitchen table and lobbing the contents in his face.

“How’s that for a baptism, you mad prick? What the fuck are you doing in my house?!”

The proselyte did nothing but smirk. He finished up the joint he was rolling, lit it as he puffed upon it, and sedately looked Gary dead in the eye;

“This is my place now.”

“Tell me…” Gary seethed with clenched fists “…what you did to the tea?”

“I drink coffee.”

“It was a bargain!”

“I know it was. I like to shop at Tesco too. I’m aware of their reasonable prices.”

“And if you were to get milk?” Gary was incensed, but the truth was all coming out. First this hustler had taken his house, now the extraneous parts of his everyday environment?

“There’s a place round the block that sells some real good Eastern Europe Foods.”

Gary began to throw things around the room, recklessly decimating dishware until the settler peacefully restrained him, holding his flailing arms.

“Why don’t you stay for this joint? It’s hella fat. You haven’t even met Sally yet.”

But Gary had hung his head in despair and was walking towards the door.

“I haven’t kicked you out! Stay for a while.”

Gary stopped by the door and turned to face his adversary.

“Can’t.”

“Why not? I got some weed, I got some hip-hop, I got coffee, hell, I’ll even crack into my Henry the Horse if it’ll wipe that frown off your face.”

“The place,” said Gary with a great sense of resignation, “doesn’t feel the same as it did.”

“Places erode – even the stuff humans built. If the bricks don’t crumble, the spirit will. Time changes everything.”

“Yeah,” sighed Gary, and he let himself out.

Time, indeed, had changed everything.

Swan Shenanigans (Swananigans)

The canal and I have got history. When I first moved to the city, so distracted was I by it actually being such a thing, that I dwelled little upon the reality that, for me, Leicester was little more than a surrogate London. Whereas the Thames predates its milieu, the waterway that cuts through the motor city infrastructure of Leicester was crafted not by your Gods, but by man. If the city – a forest of concrete erections that, if you excuse the self-indulgent punnery, inspire Freudian envy in men of a certain age – is humankind’s greatest achievement, then the canal is surely a fractional one, an accomplishment within an accomplishment; a containment of perhaps the most immovable of the classical elements within a manmade paradigm. These counterfeit rivers do for that profulence of H2O what reservoirs do for lakes, and what McDonalds meals do for the good, natural name of beef.

The last irresistible crack aside, I place little weight in bucolia. Don’t misread that; I’m certainly an environmentalist, but urbania can be as beautiful a landscape as a blank-slate field, and what particularly interests me is the ramifications of environment on the human psyche. What applies to nature too applies to humanity; contraception, abortion, euthanasia, and then incarceration, militarism, murder are manners of regulating our sentience just as we do the water. The course your life, and mine, takes will be determined ultimately by where we stand in the hierarchy of capitalism, although to use the word “regulation” bears a bitter irony in this context. These thoughts become increasingly fractured; I try to grasp the fragile strings of ideas I devised forty years ago, to articulate them as I would have then, to compliment them with subsequent cognizance, subsequent wisdom; yet they slip from my grips, lubricated by distraction and eroded by time. Of course, it was wondering this grey-stone shore that I first devised the theory of Prognostic Sentience Measurement, but I must regain my personal equilibrium before I brief the uninitiated, for I am in the throes of a great malaise, and it is the fault of the swans.

I have always had a complicated relationship with the swans of the Leicester. Is it not unthinkable to be incapable of abstract thought? To me, it would once have been, but I have since fulfilled the role of a guest speaker at my nephew’s secondary school, and I can attest; it’s extremely thinkable. But, to my knowledge, swans have never had education budgets slashed by the apparently employability-centric scimitar of Michael Gove – their innate capabilities are only for the most basic of instincts; to reproduce, to feed, and survive. So, in this unthinking utopia, do they only know happiness? Or is that extreme contrasted by another – an inherent proclivity to shit the proverbial pants? Do swans know only happiness…and fear?  Primal instinct has a delirious joy; we would all like to fuck like a swan – not fuck a swan – but the reckless abandon they are presumably imbued with as they frolic in the canal is antithetically answered by, when danger rears its ugly head, by a justified fear of death.

To a human, what is more terrifying than death, other than life? How could a swan even know of death? I imagine they are more familiar with a loose sense of imminent danger, but who’s to say their conception of mortality isn’t more concrete? Does the swan know what’s unknowable? Is it possible to know the unknowable only when faced with the great unknown, the seeming unknowable perversely the last thing you’ll ever know? Those four decades ago, suffering from a rampant cold, I needed to blow my nose.

I have passed the swans, and now I can tell you about the Theory of Prognostic Sentience Measurement. It is what I have been building to; in an ascension of words that mirrors the way my own trajectory has sloped downward in the years since the heyday of the theory. Images of subjacent collisions colour my brain; dashed on concrete or dropping to a waterbed with a voluminous gloop. I have always found this tract of the canal to be extremely vertiginous, on account of a the first night I ever went drinking with the group who would prove my closest friends for the next few years, and one of these friends stumbled precariously along the very edge of the Grand Union Canal. Assuming he was, like a swan, aware of his imminent plight, I neglected to question him on the issue. Of course, he fell into the canal. Hesitantly, three of us dragged him out, and after a week of debating as to whether he had succumbed to a ravaging case of pneumonia, he reemerged. It took him, however, a year to replace the pair of glasses that he had, you could say, bequeathed to the swans.

5% of pneumonia victims die. A similar figure, perhaps, for other bacteria that might be in the water system. The Theory of Prognostic Sentience Measurement may sound like a mouthful to you, but I am a writer, and not a mathematician or a scientist or a sociologist – and I am certainly qualified at none of these things – and I am getting to be an old man, and the percentages are harder for me than they once were, when I was a young man, when I had just left school, and the basic mathematical principles were relatively fresh in my mind, not rusted, not buried, not submerged among the detritus of forty further years of severely impractical thinking. Prognostic was my get-out clause, my admission that by its very nature the theory was predicated on guesswork, prognostication; soothsaying for the modern day. And, of course, contemporary soothsaying is best conveyed by percentages. That is what it was; a percentile division of the things that might – just might – kill you.

“Yes, I’m a charlatan! But in the 1970s, ours was a permissive society.” I said to the man on the bike. He looked at me like I were a leper, and sped towards his own private sunset on his skeletal steel steed.

At times I get nostalgic and Google death percentages. Sometimes they relate to that formative incident - 3.2% of deaths in the last year have been caused by alcohol, so I can factor that into my friend’s chances, at the time, of surviving it. Drowning, I have no idea, but a night when one falls into a canal is perhaps a night on which one is particularly susceptible to it. And then one has to look at the percentage, if there is one, of actually getting pneumonia or some other ailment. I take a look up at the flight of stairs leading to the motorised haven of Leicester’s high streets. The bank of the conduit is redolent of the highly pedestrianized air possessed by grand European cities; Amsterdam, Brussels, Venice - they too with a penchant for canals. If I walk steadily, the percentage for drowning will be low. But if I affect a hobble – and at this point I do just this, stutteringly stepping ever-closer towards the edge like a crab on ketamine. But before I take the tumble, an epiphany spreads its light upon the breadth of my person. One day – perhaps as soon as 30 years’ time – the big fire will come (not Biblical rapture, dummy; global warming) and the earth, the universe will no longer be inhabitable. Humanity will certainly be extinct.  But who drove it to this state? Which force in the world, which dominant species is especially gifted with an aptitude for killing and maiming, and creating great beasts of arms and technology, finance and private property that they can be subordinate to, which too can choke life from just about anything that’s got it?

I race up the stairway. “Out of my way!” I say, pushing a hardened bruiser in a manner that ought to add a few fucking per cent to my own Prognostic Sentience Measurement.

“You fucking what, you fucking muggleshitcunt?” he bellows in a manner that, whilst deep, sonorous and extremely authoritative, is not exactly Churchillian; more like Winstonian, as in Ray Winstone. “Where the fuck you going?”

“Come and get me, Ray!” I squeal with delight.

“I’ll fucking kill your slag shit cunt family!” His meaty slabs of leg pulverise the steps as he pursues me.

But if he can find my slag shit cunt family, good luck to him, for the real point of his ire is gone. The traffic halts, lining up into an informal motorcade, as I leap jauntily into the centre of the road and, screaming “ONE HUNDRED PER CENT!” quite literally launch myself upon the muscular bonnet of one of those superfluous military-style trucks beloved of the quintessential suburban bourgeois family. Something’s odd here, I ponder, as my blood spools around my crooked ground-level profile. I try to communicate my query to my inadvertent killer, but they are breathily protesting that “I didn’t have time to brake!” and other banalities. But I’ve seen the jeep, and suspicions are high. It belongs to the old friends of my parents. Maybe they’ve come to take me back – eternity in Surrey must be my destiny, farmed off by these C-of-E berry-growers in their bomb-squad ride. What else, I ask you, could they be doing in Leicester?