by Greg James
You need a room with a view where masks and puppets pirouette on dazzling winter strings.
Part Two: Play
The city is rotten. A decomposite thing, like me, separating into component pieces that bitch and argue and complain. There are bright spots, ebola worms of homosexual pink and syphilitic green and these hang over the door-free entrances of the Soho Ghetto where cum runs as clotted cream from the keg-taps behind the bars. Burnt-out haloes frame the turnip eyes that hang over gnawing cold turkey teeth. Tongues loll, in wait, torn from the spectrum catching the black rain that falls here. I don’t know what the year is and none of this lot care. Needle holes glimmer, set into the dead veins under their cocks. They watch the ceaseless pacing-pacing of the military guard, shrunken heads bobbing, useless, on invertebrate necks, sucking on the ropes of their own drool.
These ones we call the bottom-feeders. Anal vampires with no bones to speak of. Their gums show, black rancid slices with cheese-coloured splits. Get too out of it, too down with it and they’re on you. Those broken lips puckering onto the ripe brown lime hole of your rectum, swallowing what you got, all you got, getting their high kicks off excreta and semi-digested process. They lie in wait, wiggling and coarse, draught excluders of the sewer streets. Everyone done by a bottom-feeder dies with a hard-on and wet rictus smile on his stricken face.
You’re all worn rubber and wilting foetus cack.
It’s pissing it down.
Hope dissolves in rainstorms.
I duck inside for some shelter, shaking hair that should have been cut a month ago. A sodden dog hunching my way through, paying a quid at the kiosk. Momentarily blinded by the brilliance of chipped nail varnish, ignoring transsexual purrs, nothing’s so sweet, I go into the cinema, smirking to myself in the shuddering dark. Single man in a long, water-soaked overcoat, in a seedy cinema that smells of old spilt seed. Heads, I assume, dip in and out of view. The lukewarm screen is masturbating and flagellating itself with a vinegary vigour. I feel a faint stirring in my loins but it soon leaves me alone. If only I was here for the usual clichéd reasons. No, sadly, I’m here because I have nowhere else to go, nowhere but the places where no-one alone goes.
I smile a little. Nearby, I hear a motley sigh, followed by a wet fart. A stark litany of swearing mutes the crackling bacon of the film. The sound of blows being dealt out, sobbing, effete, tender and meek. A male couple leave me behind, one leading the other, hand in hand.
Ah, love.
I watch the hazy unfoldings onscreen. Feeling disinfected and sterile in this place, limbs and seashell openings thrash and dance in quickening frenzy before my eyes. There’s anxiety, desperation and terror running through their blood. Wild sudden escape bursting across faces that betray them.
It’s what it’s all about really, isn’t it?
The moment when the illusion breaks, the crack in the glass, the draught tickling your ear’s lobe. The silence in eyes that meet and do not move on when the dense struggling coils of this world loosen on us. Then we sink back down again. Readjust, straighten up, act as though nothing happened.
The morning comes and the bedding I have rented is cold and silent. Emptied hours ago whilst you were snoring, dreaming dreams of a future that’s no more than an echoing hall reverberating with the teasing calls of childhood fantasy-fare. Sweetness and light will soon enough fade. Faces will line, knuckles will become raw, muscles will waste, you will sit alone and see yourself as you sit alone. See where all that time went, what it was all spent on, being spent, being used. And, by this time, something else has crawled from the wreckage, handless, legless and sexless, a coarse tissue spectre that talks with a voice composed of your late-night ejaculations, declarations of love made to vanishing space, bitter swallows that left a hurt, which weighed heavy in your throat for years afterwards.
Yes, this is the point where things change when we see what’s not meant to be. Grubby, unloved feelings take on new meanings. The emperor sheds his skin for the clothes of a long-buried liche - such strength in deformity.
Such power is held in the fastenings of repression.
The world is mine enemy, I shall not want. I shall make them lie down in desecrated pastures. Strangle their children in the night. The last song is playing. The last song ever made. Exit music for the world, the people in it.
Lights go up.
No angels, no rapture.
No hell and damnation.
The film ends.
With it, so do my fantasies.
I leave later and go for a wander and watch the streets coupling in the rain under colourful memories of rape.
The sky over Soho Ghetto is bruised to the colour of a dead man’s cock. I don’t like looking at it. It hides the stars, hanging down, so ripe and pregnant.
I wonder if that smell comes from it.
Welcome to the Meat Market proclaims the morgue-sheet sign done in jokeshop smears, dangling over the gaping dental mortar of tenement space. Butchershop collages of faces and limbs drape the upholstery in here dripping beads of fatty blood onto a squeaking wipe-clean floor. Chopping boards are made old as the choicest cuts are cut up and served. A slice of liver. A tasty little rump. Chewy jerky strips of smoke-cured cunt. In the far, far corner, unlit, a few leathery patrons snack on soft popping bones, sucking tendersweet brains out through the rubber of eye sockets, their plate congeals with the licked-clean leavings of freshly-boiled baby.
I gag and hold my breath.
So many scents colliding, intermingling in the rich underground air. Regulars see me, smirk and laugh. They were once like me once; curious students, mere voyeurs.
Their eyes betray the state of their souls as I look from carcass to carcass. From meat that walks to meat that lies and bleeds - it’s all served up here to the pounding copper beat of industry, a sub-genre of suffering where you are what you eat and what you eat, you fuck hard first. Imported jars of Charlie Manson eyes clutter the shelves, their gluey contents guzzled down by suicidal girls who live-feed their orgasms to runaways sucking in their daily cathode-ray diet of state-sanctioned rape, beamed in from Kosovo and Guantanamo, beamed in straight to their youthful, well-salty cortices. The television they gather around is a burnt-out hole, crackling and sparking.
I pass amongst them like Peter Sutcliffe’s ghost.
A Yorkshire Ripper in Olde London Towne.
Unsterilized, dirty needles plucked from sewer gratings are the best; well-used, well-loved, dirty brown, cracked and shitty. I use them to lance and drain my boils, my budding collection of abscesses. The habit-forming mode has always been strong in me, one with so little strength and control over the world about him, the puckered irises of arseholes contract like a junkie’s infected eyes.
Tonight's whore went to the bathroom with a syringe in her hand. It was antique with rust, the needle broken, inside, whatever it was, was squirming with a limpid life of its own. The bathwater is tepid and scummed with pipe-silt, beneath its surface, she lies. An urban mermaid, her eyes are cum-pearls, her teeth and nails are crumbling street-coral. The red marks under her arms are trailing wispy blood-tentacles.
I wished her no harm so I spank her soggy arse goodbye.
Lifting her out from the bath, I feel her crumple. Treacled viscid deposits plop out of her body, sinking into discolouring bathwater. Whatever was inside that syringe did this. Inside, she is melted, gone to mush. I lay her down, cut her open, wash her inside and out, scrubbing hard. The clean skin is then cut some more with hot scissors. By evening, I have curtains for my conspicuous windows. A belt of nipples, tongue-steak and toe pads. In the corner, a well-scarred lampshade mottles the room sepia, scarlet and brown. There was a little meat left of her but it was famished, stringy stuff. Best smoke it until it’s jerky. I hang it out in strips to dry.
Feeling brittle and wild, I go outside to take the night air.
We are the photographs of our disguises; suits concealing astronauts, train drivers, fire women and exotic dancers. We talk an
d type in a language that masks itself in a scrambled verse of tedious objective transience. The worlds we saw as children are failing. Give them room. Undo their priestly starched collars. Give them some air. The ambulance will be here soon.
Outside, the world is not burning.
Not just yet.
My room is invaded by dreams denied. Orphan imaginings leave their tacky footprints over me, slipping me spoiled sweet meats, cavorting from one end of the spectrum of fucking to the other making me feel under-aged and obscene. Marbled wounds break out, swine-flu snorts and whines grabbing for the lining of my nostrils and stomach. Wet dream tattoos trace themselves out in blood, shit and soft ejaculate. Anointed and shattered, I count the bruises left on me, one crowning my cock where the foreskin is cracked and weeping. A thousand cunts assail me, puckering and suckling, growing teeth so they can bite me. Re-open old hurts. They sprout tongues for the somnambulant tradition of after-sex conversation. I find penis after penis slithering through my palms. Their empty Japanese eyes begging for masturbation; I oblige, I tickle them, twist, twist them, beat them hard and stroke them soft. Hot white marble rains down on me stinging my eyes, salting my tongue. Overheated, overdone, my brain cums until empty then crumbles.
What a way to go.
Outside, Soho Ghetto hums herself to sleep, a hive of agitating wasps, a dying whore, naked and beaten on a pimp’s piss-stained floor.
The garden was nothing special but to me it was a small earthbound paradise. Things grew there. They don’t grow here, not in the same way, that is. Buildings are built on the concrete, they don’t grow out of it, I think. It makes me wonder as you always see buildings as materials then half-done then finished.
I’ve never seen a single worker working on them.
I’m told they exist. They must do. But what if they don’t? The bricks, the mortar and the concrete – conscious? Could that be?
I wonder, I do.
Could they put themselves together? Is that why building takes so long? Why we do not see the workers? Perhaps it is.
But yes, the garden, my garden. It was not mine but it felt that way. A small open space in which I could be outside, breathe open air, see open sky, feel open inside.
I had not felt that way in years.
Years and years...
In the garden, she watched him, sitting and thinking. Her little denim soldier, by his side was the stack of newspapers he asked her to keep for him. Now, he was going through them, slow and methodical, too carefully for a child his age. Tearing off tiny pieces then putting them to his mouth, licking them until they were spitballs, affixing them to the ground. He spent all morning doing that whilst she finished the spring-cleaning.
After she was done, she went outside, to see what he was making.
There was no other reason for the way he was behaving, repetitive habit and motions always signal a creative pulse at work. It was a circle of spitballs sitting in the grass. All packed together, making a firm, damp ring of grey in the soil. She looked at him quizzically and he looked back at her calmly.
She’d leave him to it until it got dark.
At least, he was enjoying himself, staying out of trouble.
The circles of spitballs had become a short cylinder by the end of the week. She watched him at work, eating normally, sleeping normally, not changing in any way but there was just this sudden fixation on the task he was about.
Grey days came and went by.
Nothing much in life changed.
The same tedious progressions of seconds into minutes into hours into days into nights playing over and over again. A bad song on a failing radio-set, interference clouding the channel, voices hissing through the pauses and gaps that could be the sound of a child’s laughter. She went on being herself. There’s not much else for a person to do.
She was a wife, a mother and a daughter all inside one skin. Too much really for one mind to bear, all that. She made dinners, wiped dishes and hoovered carpets. All this time, her son sat quietly in the garden making his spit-and-paper sculpture.
It was raining and he was outside.
Standing by his sculpture screaming at the sky, wailing over the pounding of the storm, waving his arms through the falling water, making motions for it go away, be banished, not destroy all of his hard work. She rushed outside with a coat, wrapping him in it, taking him indoors, the safe and warm. He fought her, how violently and bitterly, with tears in his eyes, he fought her and he kept on fighting her, every day, until the day he died.
It’s carnival night in Soho Ghetto.
The people are out there in force - every stinking, screaming, joy-snatching one of them. A menstrual flood flowing through the shrieking loins of the dying whore, a colour parade of disease and festered feelings, rags and tatters glued onto unsunned skin, flip-flapping flags that were once rainbows, now faded to meaningless stripes of brownish whites and beige. They jigga-bop and whoop-de-do-whoop as they go by my window.
I watch them go.
I’ve got nothing to celebrate.
I don’t care.
I’ve found another way to distract myself. Out of the dustbins and penny stores, magazines have accrued across the scabby floor of my room. With a Stanley knife, I slit the throats of men and women who died long ago. The pages are crumpled, stained and seamed, no colour of a bright or arresting hue stands out. With a pot of glue, I’m making a collage of the walls, dissecting glossy faces and tan bodies, slashing out their wedding dress guts and morning suit stiffness, replacing the beautiful with those forgotten and unsightly. Within these four walls, I am making a better world.
One that I can understand.
One of chaos, where nothing fits, where order is amok.
Times and places criss-cross and interlock here; Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, Eighties and beyond in both temporal directions. Faces from the future wear the bodies of the past. Papercuts cover my hands and little red numbers dapple the collage, here and there.
The sight of these minute squiggles make my pulse pick up its pace.
It’s racing, it’s pacing, I stand then I sit, because those numbers, in my blood, could make this collage into something else, resurrect its many dead, give to it a kind of life. A life none of it could possibly want. There are better things to be than alive. A preserved image, diminishing under the heartbeat of sunlight, to browns, sepia and then white blank space. A slow and temperate death that most of us are denied. A quiet, unbothersome fading of all shape, definition and form. How good that would be. How great that would feel, to simply waste away, become nothing.
By candlelight, I sit at the heart of the room. Glue spatters and smudged article sticking to my weighty black clothes, legs crossed, trance position, watching the walls. The carnival outside dissolves into the usual gaudy abuse of my silence, I shut it out as best I can though the effort makes me cry. A few fragments loosen from their placing on the walls, butterfly to my feet. I think to reach for them but I do not. I can smell the copper of cooking blood in the air. The numbers are working their algebraic magic.
So I watch and I wait.
Images in dismemberment fall. Butcher’s geiger counter. Ectoplasmic nuclear cells. Held aloft by inflated lungs as ballast tanks. Fibrous tissue tears, slow bursting. Ruddy-red-red goblins, flat and painted, loom and grin. Simians wear them, shaved, oiled, duck-pink and plucked. They could almost be human. They sing hideously and laugh like little girls. This is the backwoods of my brain. We’re in the bushes behind. At the root of the cerebellum tree where everything is female and sweet like sex with no gravity. A coffin, a corpse and a bursting wound. I wipe you from me.
Ichor and all.
Hysterical, the dummy in the burial box talks back to me. Letmeout-letmeout-letmeout-out-out. His long-johns soiled with salty piss. He shits wood shavings and angry pulp. The riot claimed casualties, which were eaten by hungry ambulances and ferried away to the night-hospital where needles are flukeworms and blood dies unstill.
Yes, my so
n, there is no getting out of this.
The hole is in your head.
In Soho Ghetto, I feel that I am near the heart of the city. The heart of the mystery, of what’s been going on with me.The live jellies, the black cancers, are back behind me frolicking through the tunnel-holes and interzones that are their birthright. This is not a place meant for me. It is a machine of sorts without working parts to see, without noise, commotion to hear. This does make one wonder how the thing runs; what is its fuel, function and purpose?
The answers are around the corner.
They were. They will be.
I can’t be sure.
They tell me that happens before a moment of clarity strikes.
The riot starts when we see all the picture and Soho Ghetto goes to hell.
Because the rest of the world is doing it too, burning bright in the cauldron of the night. So we, the freaks, gotta go better, burn better than they burn, die better than they die, go up in fuckin’ bes’ fuh-lames you ever did see. I’m not so interested but the heat gets to me, laconic, making me feela slight golden tingle, I go down to the streets.
It’s carnival time and there’s blood on the ice.
I’m a ghost at midnight, dark coagulant clogging raw vein street. The crowd is hissing tramps and tripping over day dreams. I hand out a few nightmares, tame in their thin glass-jars but waiting for them to crack open. I sniff something sweet and swallow, some soured rage. The people moving as crowds feel better this way, degraded like old teevee pictures, simplified to broad brushstrokes and wax crayon streaks. Gaudy and vile. Rotten oils spreading over cold water dissociate black rainbows that pollute, soak and choke those that soar and cry.
The crowd, the mob, the herd is not a symbiotic radiator of love. I’ve cut the gas. Cold, you see it for what it is; droning great parasite, dumb and chirruping, clattering its wire-haired back legs together, seeking a mate. The other half, the lost segment, the one that got away. It trails through the streets, dragging its excretal misery and visceral pain between its legs, unsightly mauve ditches. Its forlorn call is a wicked virus, gets into you, under your skin. You’ll start to itch, develop the hot red rash by the numbers. Cook you like meat on a grill. Then the bugs come, you see them pop out, eggy popcorn kernels sticking to you, nappy-shit wet. Then you stick to them, to us, become one of the crowd, go with the flow, hear the white music, the right music, sing the song of peace without love.