by Morrissey
“I generally can’t stand young people … taking drugs for the good of the country … how does that help? Taking chemicals to experience natural happiness? Everyone has something to hide, of course, and power is all very well, but nobody’s powerful enough to leave this world alive, haha. Do the rich go to a richer heaven? Do kings and queens go to a special royal heaven? Haha, I don’t think so. But why not, if they’re as royal as they say they are? But if a cop places his hands on me I will do my level best to kill him, I really will. I am nothing and I have nothing but I hate the cops because I know them and I know what they are. There is no safety and nobody cares about you, make no mistake about that. The cops, even, yes, my very country-men, are my biggest enemy – only schoolyard shitheads join the police machine, you’ve noticed, I’m sure. Shake your head as you will, but while I still have my senses … I’ve seen some beautiful houses, not far, quite near, and they look like what you’d call success … y’know, that senseless trance of absolute boredom … but is it success? I don’t know because I’m not the one living inside those houses and I’m not the one who pays for them, so I don’t know if the word ‘success’ is even applicable because it could be sheer hell inside those dark-hearted walls for all I know, and I must tell you that the people down there don’t look too happy to me … all them frozen postures and changeless actions … impossibly restricted by their own wealth. Their tax money funds atomic testing grounds in Nevada. They blow up live pigs imagining them to be Muslims. Affecting, isn’t it? And through it all they talk of God, as all war-mongerers do. I see the sun shining on the water and a shock of joy rips through me like it’s the most true and pure pleasure that life can ever give you. Shake your head as you will, but while I still have my senses. Most things end and you don’t even remember them. Most people end and you don’t even remember them, like my wife, if you want an instance. I’ll give you an instance. She lost her mind and was gently led away to die – don’t ask me where to because I didn’t care enough to ask. I’d had no education, no proper job, and being on state aid was just a blatant way of doing nothing – I knew that. My wife just sat there. I didn’t even know her and I was expected to feed and clothe her for the rest of her life, and all because … of what? Because she allowed me access. I couldn’t even feed and clothe myself! And I asked for nothing! She just sat there, anyway, in her bed-chamber of horrors, exiled, as if she’d been in a fire or something, as if she’d lost her lower body in the war and as if nothing could possibly be expected of her because she was the woman. Proceed carefully because marriage is just a … suffocation … your life doesn’t belong to you. Shake your head as you will, but while I still have my senses. Well, I lost and that’s that. Not that I wish to press the point. I was four years too young, I really was, and my mind keeps wandering back to that desolate time, it really does. Well, the dead are dead. You can’t go through life knowing who you’ll fall in love with, and I want no god judging me for whatever I … think, never mind do! When I was first married I didn’t realize that you couldn’t do the intimate physical bit unless you felt confident about it, otherwise it just couldn’t work. I didn’t like that fact, but it was a fact nonetheless. Anyway, I discovered I was useless and then I didn’t have a choice, and once you’ve faced the mocking nature of making love badly then you can never get free of it. But if I hadn’t been so afraid I would have found out more about it, and wouldn’t I have been happier so? A girl laughed at me when we were both thirteen years old, and that widening mouth of laughter, as dumb and sterile as it was, the vicious disdain because I couldn’t measure up … but it was the way she laughed … the way she laughed … the way she laughed … with all that hair like something pulled out of a microwave … like something you’d twirl on a stick … it stayed with me forever, and it triggered my dislike of all women, or, my embarrassment at women. I’d known a boy from over the back, and I’d stand on tip-toe to watch him every day at four o’clock [now his eyes became greedy], not knowing why at first. I’d wait to the point of excited tears. The patience I gave! And I was thirteen to his sixteen! You’d laugh or cry! I’d shake his arm off – but, ah, the demands of other people, other people, other people, other people, other people … but what about me, and what I felt? What makes my feelings so … impossible to satisfy? And if they’re impossible to satisfy then … why are they there … in God’s image! Who says I’m faulty? No one dies any differently to anyone else. It’s all the same passage. Which of us doesn’t die? And if someone soothes my hurts, what does it matter to those who aren’t involved? Sexual morality is just an unpleasant excuse to snoop into other people’s lives – bored as you must be with your own. They said my emotions were unusual, but they weren’t unusual enough for there not to be laws against them, so they must have been quite common, in fact, and not unusual at all. He was a good whistler, and that’s a sign of a very contented mind, isn’t it? I know people don’t walk along and whistle any more, but they did then, you see, each hand in each pocket. I knew I need only wait, because it roared out of me – louder than any roar I’d roared! And we’re meant to be whatever we are, otherwise we wouldn’t have been made to be whatever we are. I can’t be entirely wrong. My wife, you see, was just a mouth … just a mouth and nothing else … she was just about better than nothing … although, on reflection … She yawned from morning till night even though she wasn’t tired. I never knew love – equal love – and I thought the consolation of physical contact would … well, lust has nothing to do with all of the other emotions … it’s a separate emotion in itself. I found that, anyway. Bless me, yes. In any case, my wife rambled like a martyr and we’d only been two months married, but she wasn’t happy and I told her she was contaminated and I now don’t think she was, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and neither of us could imagine living and not being unhappy, but we were too shy to talk to doctors or anything like that because we couldn’t imagine anyone being interested in our problems. It wasn’t a settled home … padlocks, fifty sets of keys, and we only had four rooms in total. I had full cause to grieve, and there were no possibilities to make progress, because you were kept where you were – by the state – shoved further and further and further down by a mass of laws that I’d never consented to in the first place. Once it had all ended and the homeless shelter had told me to go away, then the welfare kitchen reported me to the police. I mean, what do the police know? They don’t live in the slums … Judges don’t live in the ghetto … they are exclusively verbal beings. What can they understand about the way life moves? They have no precise meaning. What makes them royal? What makes anyone royal? Being in possession of a squad of tanks? Would judges even recognize dog shit if ever they saw it? Their interests are not the same as ours, so what gives them the right to judge us? They don’t understand the houses we live in, or why we persist. They’re scared to death of the underprivileged … whose powerlessness gives them an almighty power. Judges live in secrecy, don’t they, because they’ve done so much harm to society … they have to hide like criminals on the run. I’ve never seen the Chief of Police breaking bread with the bag people, no, no, no. The police think it’s OK to shoot anyone as long as control is the outcome, which is just like saying it’s OK to bomb foreign countries if it means we get to control them. How did that ever become constitutional? The game is rigged! Like there’s nothing on earth but control! And control can never be wrong! And the cops! They know very well what they do to innocent people, and they don’t want it done back to them! Anyway, you’re all next. The military! … dreaming up new ways to wipe out entire populations. How evil could any human mind possibly be? Shake your head as you will. Do you think I was always seventy-five years old? Bless me, no. Being this old is new to me. This is why I can’t take to young people. They think the elderly have been elderly for years and years, but we haven’t, we’ve just turned old from being young – and all we know about is being young! You’d laugh if I said I was no different to you – but it’s true. My mind is tw
enty-one. I can’t recognize the body I have now … because it isn’t mine … I’m new at being old. I ran like a frightened gazelle, and I’d spring like a poked cobra, but you can’t stay that way forever, and I can’t talk about it enough. Yet what am I left with? My wife and I had nothing in common, and that’s what brought us together! We were meant for one another ’cos we were both useless! She said she was dying from sexual neglect – but she was lucky because I didn’t even know there was any other way to feel. Well, I knew it as a marketing ploy, or from the television … as profitable as war. Did you know that every government needs a war in order to balance the books? Did you know that every government loves a war? Woo-hoo! ‘Our hearts go out to the families of the heroes’ … well, stop sending them out to futile death, then. Those boys are so heroic that no one can be bothered to mention their names. Woo-hoo! You chase it every single day of your life until its mocking nature all but destroys you, and I can’t talk about it enough, yet we laugh at small children who still believe in the Tooth Fairy – but we do, too! Until the day we die! I can’t talk about it enough. I said, I can’t talk about it enough. Have you seen much action yourself?” He now, suddenly, moves too close to Ezra, as if heaving into place.
“Have you? Have you seen much action? Come before me and know me, Tommy …”
The punching-bag face is now stiff with dirt, and the oily hands wring with pulpy sweat as his eyes melt into Ezra, who is now standing astride – as if balanced for attack, or ready to be swabbed down by hand. Trouble comes unexpectedly by a lightning-fast pinch between Ezra’s legs as the wretch leaps over the psychological and physical line only to be met by a ferocious neat-as-a-pin side-swipe to the right cheek bone, too tear-ass fast for the eye to track, and the anchor-weight school ring of Ezra’s third finger left hand clips the temple of the wretch with such a knee-pumping dead-shot that the morgue-bound leper obediently slumped backwards on to a knoll of deadly nightshade, where the hard root of a knotted oak spiked through scalp and skull-bone with deadly thrust, smashing the cerebrum and bursting out blood from the sensory organs. Amongst the dead wood and the dead nettle, the cave-dweller was out of play; a lumpenprole dead weight within less than an instant, seventy-five years to reach such a jell-brained release … but to where, to where? And why must we believe that there is a next stage? Does our sanity depend upon it?
Harri placed the back of his right palm onto the man’s exposed chest, kneeling before an outcast now fully cast out.
“I think this is his way of telling us he’s dead.” He looks up to the standing three of frozen postures, to whom that final word had no logically given reality. As if blind to the present, all stood together in sour recognition, yielding to their own silence whilst glumly understanding the correct reasoning of Harri’s words. It could only be Ezra who spoke first, with his proclamation of “Dead!” as both hands clasped each side of his face in shock at being just barely able to say that one word alone. The diagnosis was by now obvious enough not to need repeating. Little brown babblers darted in and around surrounding bushes, their movements announcing the luck of new life still moving on. Instinctively the three dragged the body inches further into wrap-around heather and warm fawn, and there it would be hidden with very little undergrowth required to snuggle around what barely passed as human form. The sorry hayseed clump had worried its last, and now, oh so very quickly, its ordeal of insanity had ended, the woodhick sucked in by encircling and coddling blackness shaded by weeping willow, weeping ash, weeping beech and weeping life.
“Why did we do that?” asked Nails, struggling for breath and belief.
“Why nothing, let’s tear-ass as fast as we can away from this … whatever it is, whatever it was,” came Justy, suddenly the scoutmaster that he had never been. In times of strife, any leading voice will do; off-key though it might be, it belongs to a star of the first magnitude if it speaks the common aim of strong confidence. As if a starting-pistol had fired they scampered like scared rabbits taking off in a cloud, further into the woodland masterminding a birdlike swing to left and then right in unified swerve through the woebegone sticks like migratory geese following ancient winds; large chestnut and horse chestnut looked down laughing … through an old grotto rock garden fenced in by overgrown box hedges – loved by someone in 1920, now a mess of silver birch and cypress. With their natural speed it did not take long before a sharp westerly bend found them out of the woods and home-free into the clear coast of the safe-and-sound edge of a town where suddenly they were no different from those they walked amongst, and they methodically wondered if they had even been there at all, with the wretch, in hollow’s hell. Ezra’s steely clip had indeed ended a life. How we endure our own feelings having done such an act is beyond our powers to reason, and perhaps all answers are in the particles of brain unused, yet once the hammer has fallen it is not a new reality at all, even if yesterday now feels like a lifetime ago; and even if moral action is not entirely well thought out it is powerfully instinctive nonetheless. The only shock for Ezra was the ease by which the wretch became vegetation, evolved from nothing and now returned – and by such a simple shot. There then came a troubling inner glow, one which sad-sack soldiers in combat must enjoy as they lovingly assist history books with their abysmal confidence game, motivated by their own faith yet beyond the power of their own awareness. The wretch had been unknown to Ezra and had, after all, instigated the provocation and outcome, so therefore any broad view of the situation might consider the solution with a certain moral certainty that would favor Ezra. Every moment in life takes its little place, and Ezra – so full of heart and soft to the eye against the subterranean dogface of our sickly fleshed goner – held a certain unsophistication if ever to be judged as a cold-blooded killer. The wretch, too, was a man, but had positioned himself so far away from obedient society that no one who mattered was close to him, or even knew him. Worm-chow for the crops, he was dead, dead, dead. The internal infrastructure was still closing down even though the unlovable heart had pumped its final tick, or possibly tock. For what earthly reason would anyone care? Why should anyone care now if they hadn’t whilst his machinery continued to pump air within? Would there be a solitary fly-bait throughout the entire woodland that could fare any worse? The wretch was now cold meat with the thing he most loved: nothing. Had life continued he might have starved to death or been beaten up by the local rookies – both fair outcomes in the eyes of the yawningly law-bending law. His time had been called in mid-sentence and without one full second allowed for him to understand whatever it was that had befallen him, and time crowds in even if we think we have it under control.
Nails, Ezra, Justy and Harri felt off-center, but nothing more. All assumed joint responsibility, or at least equal understanding, and there would be no instinctive rush to isolate Ezra since all would have acted in precisely the same way had they, and not Ezra, been zeroed in upon, because most people come to the same moral conclusions when faced with awkward moral conundrums. The syphilis-itch of the hobo’s grope would be enough to repulse the softest composure, and Ezra had no doubt that his automatic slug had been provoked, and no one who had not been present at the scene of the senicide could have any right to another view. Yes, there is judicial law, and, yes, there is natural law. Equally with the four their impulse was to acknowledge a death and to leave it alone. Something happens to the body and the corpse is whisked out of view, and your dignity urges you to move your thoughts onwards and elsewhere, knowing that the foul-smelling human corrosion had ventured too far. Urine-soaked, he could not possibly have imagined the intoxicated rash of his lips stuck to Ezra’s face. We cradle each wish in preparation of it being fulfilled, and our feelings might be so bullishly strong that we cannot imagine the object of our lust being unimpressed by the sheer voltage and force of our needs (since it obviously impresses us). But life tends to be a cold-storage schlep of mediocrity at best, and amongst the snowed-under years our theories of love and lust are almost never
practiced with the vim and vigor haven so brutally immovable from our stuck imaginations, even if their demand irrationally urges its force ahead of basic hunger and intelligence. This makes the human being a pitiful creature eternally occupied with longing, longing, longing – yet animals, at least (at most?), leap as large as life when ready to cloy in ecstasy. Humans, on the other hand, require novels, films, food, labor, plays, magazines, pornography and castles in Spain in order to substitute for the urgings of the loins – and, alarmingly, they accept those substitutes. Well, what choice?
By 8 p.m. the four boys were adequately distanced from the ever-stiffening stiff who was now lying in possibly his first ever repose of gentleness. Where he was now could not be worse than where he had been a few hours ago. You can’t let go of everything, of course, and his shattered shell remained under bush, the mouth now fallen open as if attempting one last futile call for a mercy that had never previously been on offer. Every imaginable sign of desolation slid him away. A ghastly almost-eaten face, he had gone to such excessive lengths to survive, but this did not matter very much after all. He was dead and he simply must stay dead, flitting about in time and space, with perhaps only a few random photographs (of the tortured-family variety) somewhere to guarantee that he once was. No prayer or fireworks could undo his fate, and any lyric poetry in passing on or passing away was not reserved for his exit. Those random photographs, not treasured but stuffed away somewhere, gave conclusive testimony to his existence, when nothing else now could. Tomorrow will happen without him and tonight will not miss him, as storms gathered as they ought to under such circumstances. How he had lived had not been deemed difficult enough, and the God to whom he occasionally pleaded was, even now, no doubt still judging him, as if death could not be thought sufficient final pain and mockery in itself.