The Oeuvre

by Greg James

  Mortuaries stand on the outer limits, circulating the turgid sewer canals on which our black barges ride. Hooded accomplices, cut from twilight and song, steer the great canoes. Caucasian junkie hands check the cargo for valuables; watches, wallets and purses end up underwater. We want the keepsakes. Those tattered family photos. Love stains, degrading pride. We peel you off and set you on the conveyor belt, sliding you in through the black meat dimensions that have such sharp teeth. Purge your blood with formaldehyde cocktails then flavour it with Beta Blockers and Xanax. Catatonic gestures brought on plaintive summers. Bright and artificial was orange juice. Hope’s a shabby thing. Past abuse-by-date. The tongueless lie down in dark corners and let the shadows sweat it out for them. The rust holes spit you back into the city. Walking on two legs. Feeling with three. You’re ours, always have been, will be, was and always. Now, back to work, there’s death to be done.

  This morning, the black fog tastes so sweet.

  I drift under city street lamps; detached and photocopied, running with slime and overspent inks. The Ghetto is lost. Where am I to go now?

  Stale patter of small talk. Leeches sprout legs, arms and faces. Squirm out from there. Spare a quid. Give some change. Stubble hairs grate hydrogen from oxygen making the air ignite a little. White and sparks. Dead weight weighs me down. The streets are paved with the gold picked from screaming Jewish teeth by Kris knives and SS smiles. The altar of the twenty-first century boils over, glowing with the intense humming of evil. I cross Mengele’s necrotised palm with silvered Zyklon-B pellets, keeping one back for emergencies, one for me.

  Everyone has to burn sometime.

  The city is guttering. Going out. A swallowing mouth, choking on us. One piece at a time. It pauses to exhale dirty smoke rings. Burn off the ozone and the carbonised. We’ll get through it.

  There’s always tomorrow. Those dead-bound days of the near-past haunt me more than five years ago, ten, twenty. I’m almost at thirty. Time for an appraisal. Dirty job review. Intricate, worn structures creak and shift. The city and its world teetering on them, hanging on, tilting towards precipice. Peak oil strike and it’ll be gone, snuffed out like an untaxed cigarette.

  Watch the boats come in from distant lands and see the millions on them, heaving sinister. Sit back and watch them burn. The old guns from the WWI cupboards have been raided. Sinking the dirty immigrant bastards. Welcome Home. Enjoy your drowning. Human torches plummet overboard in shameless remakes of the falling man.

  Tell the people it’s a Belgrano tribute.

  Not that they care much.

  Guantanamo Bay has re-opened. Obama was shot dead this morning. You can hear the pimps in City Hall. Laughing teeth showing like boiled marblestone pieces in the warm black of rain puddles. Strike it right. Strike it rich. Strike it lucky. Tin planes hang from their ceilings. They practice their voodoo in filing cabinet voices. Taking Ouija hits from locrian syringes cast in the shapes of bronze scorpions.

  Lack-lustre hippies squat on the steps, muttering to passing ghosts, buy-consume-conform, waving scraps of wet cardboard made wordless by the driving rain. Weather-beaten smears of falafel and other meatless substitutes stain their sacking jackets. One shaves his beard, dons a suit and aftershaves, pisses in the midnight wind onto his beanburger friends, laughing to himself in the voice of City Hall.

  If you can’t beat ‘em, well, you can’t, can you, canyou......canyou......

  There are three Parties in the city, or there were. No-one can tell the difference. It might be the grey shading of their suits, the spit-polish shine of their shoes, the pasty vacancy of their unstuck, overly-lined faces. Difficult, very difficult to tell. There is a factory that makes them, some say. If you get close, you can smell it on them. The protein is in a constant process of drying out, molecules that don’t want to be together are held together by Hansard and black magick.

  Dogs will snarl at them on sight.

  They rarely stray outside of the Interior. This is their secret place of communion where they use smoke and mirrors to speak with forces outside of the Electorate’s ken.

  There’s so much gets by us.

  Rights are not eroded before your eyes but behind your back.

  The Echomen are after me, worse than Policemen. Sinuous strangers who tap into the unspoken ideas that reverberate in the unlit attic of a 3am skull. Another long, low path of paranoia, lined with red weeds, offers momentary escape. They snatch and cling and sting with wretched needles, not drawing blood but pushing it back in. Don’t want me damaged. Want me in good shape. The bad shapes come later.

  “Down that way madness cries.”

  I take a left and do not pray to god.

  Acute perception ... heart monitor jags ... sick green on solid plastic black ... depression of the anxiety ... psychosis of happiness and gingivitis bliss ... fingering the sordid holes ... barbiturates of fear, emptiness-despair ... pastilles offer withdrawal symptoms ... frontal lobe sedation ... down the escalator ... into-inside the howl-white ambulance hell to hospital, chemical burial ... four months of missed appointments ... concern and disconnection ... violent, more violent, a hand grasps old chairs ... move, lose reaction, slump, catch at cold hair ... drowning in a flux tide of spastic, white eidola ... trampled petals washing down the scabbed-over gutters of night towns and dead, wind-blown twilight cities ... buds and seedlings crushed into foody pulp. Gnawed on by teeth that chatter, piss blood and scream ...

  ... genitals soaped and ready ... the white foam tasting of clean things ... grease from the uncut hair of angels ... gagging on you, I eat the vinegar flowing through the soft, folded remnants of your shower ... drawing a hot, sour curtain over the day and the logical feelings it impregnates into the unceasing passage of moment-after-moment ... the living, unforgiving, animating blackness that sleeps within everything comes alive in us, here, right now ... let’s retire to the bedroom ... see what other blacknesses are hiding there ...

  Death is not a smell that penetrates our jellied straitjacket forms. It doesn’t have the maths, we can’t accept its equation, we deride it, rewrite it and claim insolubility. Get away from us with your inevitability. You, the thermodynamic that gnashes teeth the colour of dawn and draws the breath out from our tar-inflected lungs. We are too tired to fight so we close our eyes and ignore you.

  We cannot smell you, therefore you do not exist.

  The food falls from my mouth, going down, crossing so many spans of abyss, before striking the pavement. The city smells of dried breast-milk and ammonia this morning as I rifle through overturned bins. Coal gas texturises the low, heavy pollution-clouds into shades of grubby orange and unwashed grey. I am at the bottom of a mineshaft, many levels down, looking up to see the burning. Men are screaming. Wheezing shadows flutter and flap their arms in suffocating canary spasm. I hear vomit and blood hitting the floor. Down here am I and there are things with me.

  The black cancers that crawl over the universe’s sick, dying face, benighted spawn of its unknowable insides. The way they bulge and writhe, one wonders if they are the necro-galactic equivalent of tarred pulmonary alveoli, somehow conscious, brought to life. To be honest, who gives a shit?

  These fucking things want to tear me apart.

  Yes, I’m running again like a mad blind bastard who’s lost his guide-dog. My inner compass is dead silent. I have no map in my head, no light to lead my eyes to safety, soot and ash settle on me and scald my sight, goring my vision with the clear relentless slaughter of tears. The lumps and ossifying tentacles of the black cancers shuffle and slap against the tunnel rocks behind me.

  I feel like I have been running and running, running all my life.

  Exhaustion screams, the individual tadpole souls of my every cell. Telling me to fall, to let go, to not begrudge the collision with calamity that is rushing to meet me, fight no longer a pathetic, meaningless battle, weep no more over what’s long, long lost.

  You get nothing back.

  Life takes and that’s that
.

  So much for pathos and redemption.

  Avalanching thunder buries the demands of my failing self.

  I crash through a boundary, tripping over consequence, skidding through the mucky leavings of someone else’s life-disaster, cartilage gunshots in my knees.

  I am throwing up in a public rubbish bin, wiping the beige trail from my chin, I hiccup and pull a face, my bus-stop reflection, smeared, shows me an ugly mask.

  Unwanted.

  This timeless state cannot go on and this knowledge makes me mourn a little. This anti-emotional purgatory is better than nothing and nothing is what I will return to. A world full of nothing for me. A century leaving me behind. I hear the hordes at the gates. The barbed wire rending at the big-high-tall fortifications. I am my own mason. I built myself in here. All the while telling myself that one day I would climb out, one day, one time, to look at a bright summer’s day.

  Such a lie.

  I left holes here and there, for a time, hoping someone might pass by. Look in, not see me, part of me, a length of carved-down plywood, a bloodied marionette string, strangled things that twitch out to death’s lonesome black signature tune. I fashion a ladder from the masochistic parts I tore off and discarded. The ladder descends into a darkness that I know, that is familiar, that is mine.

  Time to go deeper.

  I don’t want you to know me. I don’t want you to see me naked. I don’t want you to see what I write, what I think, what I paint, what I am. It’s all so messy. It’s all without order, angles or lines. There’s no sense even when it’s in alphabetical order. I can’t see my way through and I stumble on what’s there. Battered books, wilting boxes and dying clutters of cluster-comb furniture. I sit in the midst of it all, cross-legged, a child at school assembly, at prayer. I watch the dust gather. Ashes of time, settled. Mice, rats and other vermin come out to play. Chew holes and leave their doings in soft, warm nests.

  So, I clean. So, I tidy. So, I rearrange. And it does no good, serves no purpose.

  Merely puts everything back in place to rot.

  Torn apart again.

  Epileptic convulsions take hold and go through the roof. Shatter-glass convexes push out into concave, buckle and twist, suck on your piss-teeth and shit out the cortexial-hot pain. Liquid burns the soles and the soul. Minute syringe holes hide the quantities imbibed, so settle down and sleep, it’ll be better tomorrow. Your muscles will stop speaking to you through the lacerated lips of dead schizoid children. Give us death, not the cortisone pump. Drag out my serotonin dose, make me strung out. I’d sooner be thin and listless than vital, alive and vile. Concrete floors crash and strike about our skulls and we see the cracks spreading through everything, leaving the preserve that is in us, in you, in him. It is the reanimator. The Giver of Strife. Makes us stagger and fall. Fools at perches over our uneven stalls. Buy from us. Take it away. Generous distribution of your life’s worth. Car boot sale of the soul, wrapped in plastic and antique newspapers. Sticking to fingers. Stenching up noses. Making eyes waterfalls. Use something else or different. The important thing is not to cure but to create the addict and tell him what to take. The point is not to kill god but to make him an absence that must be filled. Something’s missing. Idols required. Apply within. All fakers, no takers. Bestial army boys and football hooligans parade arm-in-arm down the streets. Let me take you by the hand. Not much to be done then but sit back, relax and shoot me up some dirt until I get the gut scratchings.

  So near, yet so far.

  So much is sadder than it should be. The axis upon which the world sits is not perfect - so does it tilt itself towards sadness? Does it favour grief and misery over the softer things? If you say no to this, is there a pause in your voice? Do you avert your eyes, even though there is no-one to avert them from? Do you think back to a private time that made you turn away from someone you should have held a hand out to, reached earnestly for?

  I think so.

  Because I do too.

  So much is sadder than it should be and so much is unanswered.

  Do you think so too?

  I have nothing left to give.

  You have used me up.

  Dried me out.

  As I walk my way into the upper depths of atmosphere, piercing the coal black with tears of light and ash, I see the mask that sits atop the stairs; ancient, wilted, dead and dry. Grey sundered flesh pouring from a patchwork clown interior, I can feel how it will not hurt or pinch me but form a special, silent union, knitting itself over my skin until my skin is no more. A tear issues, wet, from my left duct as I hear the marble crack of my skull’s bone breaking, reshaping, pushing into the hollows of the mask. The living part of me left being my eyes as my brain softens into a papier-mâché ball, which rots and rolls in the misshapen cave system of my reformed skull's interium. My mouth distorts following the lines of a leer, flesh and muscle creak under the unnatural, permanent stress. Nothing tears, nothing bleeds, nothing falls away.

  I sit, shoulders aching under the unsteady weight and I rest the knobby chin into my hands and stare down the stair, waiting for someone to come, someone to whom I can give this burden. It’s so quiet up here I can hear the dismal, chanting engines of the universe running down.

  I kick the mask and its visions down the stairs into the rotting darkness. It makes wet, mushy, hard sounds that are too human for me to take. I open the door to my room and pass on inside. Here is sanctuary.

  Here is my window, my route out of here.

  This be it then.

  An end to my time in the city.

  Where to next?

  The window is open and I can hear what’s muttering to itself outside, shining with the midnight light of a thousand broken beetle shells. Soft-mouthed teeth stand in unburied rows stinking of sweet grave-meat and the things that crawl, listless, in such soggy stuff.

  I go to the sill and lean over it, peering out to see what I knew I would. Colour, light and life swallowed up by the shifting shadow-mass that slithers underneath, grazing raw the skin of our dimensions, I cannot touch it anymore than I can see it but I can feel it.

  It is waiting for me.

  I mount the sill, holding myself steady with the rattling wattle of the frame.

  Endings, if we have them, should be dramatic, so I let go. Pushing myself out, into the seamless night and it catches me, worm-soft, and it hurls me, a pale streak of disintegration, I travel fast and light through the walls of reality.

  Into another place, another time, another space.

  I walk the empty miles to a point in the wilderness where I can expire. The world has worn itself out around me. Leaving shadow-meats clinging to my fragile cage of hypothermic bones. I can taste boiled worms in my mouth and smell the rot of all things in all the air here. This dead sphere and its hungry creations can have me, collapsing, my head goes clear and all my consciousness spreads soiled wings of slithering butcher’s paper in which to wrap me tight. What comes to the surface will survive in the conditions we have made. Peeling skin absorbing anoxic moistures. Soft nugget eyes, white as white, unsensitive to the caustic veil of the shadowed rainstorms.

  He sits on the front pew, by the far aisle, in a church that lies abandoned on the backstreets that lead away from deserted boulevards and dragon-adorned courtyards. He sits in a crumpled grey suit and washed-out baby-blue shirt. The church is an empty space but for him. The sleeves are too short on his jacket and the trousers are too tight at the knees. You can see the stitching has frayed, becoming somewhat shabby and loose in places. He tugs at the cuffs with delicately manicured fingertips. A breath of exasperation escapes him and he crosses then re-crosses his legs. He is tired of all this waiting. You cannot see his face, not because the church interior is a dim gloaming of sepulchral stone, and not because the light filtering through the windows is an obscuring schizophrenia of tainted colours.

  The reason you cannot see his face is because he is wearing a mask.

  It has two politely curving horns a
nd you can see where the red paint has thinned out over the years, newspaper print showing through here and there. You can also see the smile, the way the papier-mâché lips curve, ever so slightly and ever so politely. He’s a gentleman at a soiree, sharing a sly, underhanded joke with you. He sits where he sits, by the aisle, in the pews, not saying a word, simply waiting. The eyes of the face under the mask are old, wise and bright. He checks his watch, a second-hand purchase telling him a time that is not the time. Whoever he is waiting for, this man, they are late, very late. He tugs at his cuffs with those delicately manicured fingertips and a breath of exasperation escapes him once more. The eyes in the mask catch the light of a memorial candle. Those eyes, those old bright eyes.

  You had better not keep him waiting long.

  Not this Fallen Angel.

  This place is a quiet place. An empty place. Empty of people but not of life. Perhaps, you will pass through it one night, walking your dog or returning home, drunk. Maybe, arm in arm with a woman. Beautiful and young, perhaps.

  If you do, spare me a glance.

  I’m always here.

  In that gutted hollow excuse for structure, last on the left, around which torn yellow tongues of danger tape snap, whisper and lie. Soot stains scurry across the foundations when the wind blows hard. You’ll see a light inside, dim and low, and a figure flickering as if on fire. He sits at his desk, never moving from it, he is working hard through the night.

  Every night.

  Ever diligent to that purpose which he serves.

  This darkness mine.

  London Ghost Story

  Dedication

  For T.M. Wright,

  a master of the modern ghost story.

  Those who treasure their sadness, and keep it close,

  understand poignancy, and the company of ghosts.

  Chapter One

  Winter branches stood out like black veins against the pale flesh of London’s early morning sky, and John Greyerson thought about the bitter taste of sleep in his mouth, despite having brushed his teeth. The front door closed behind him after some persuasion, and he began to make his way to the bus stop. The day’s awakening light drew the dull, hunched shapes of fellow commuters on the rusted metal and vandalised glass as the sound of an approaching bus reached his ears. John turned his head enough to glimpse it from the corner of his eye, estimating a jog would allow him to catch it in time. He didn’t like exercise, but the early morning commute made it an occasional necessity. Picking up his pace into a half-run, half-walk, with coat flicking out behind, snatched by unseen hands, John closed in on the Number 32 bus that would take him to Burnt Wood tube station, where he would catch his usual train and be in the Westminster office by quarter past nine. The bus idled, shuddering at the stop, as the unclear silhouettes of the commuters boarded and blended into the darkness within. The last few were edging towards the open door. He would be the final one aboard.