by Andy Bailey
“I don’t know. I’ve spent two days in Paddington Green being grilled by that bloody Fallon and his mates. And that’s what’s brought me round by the way. Sitting on my own in that cell for hours. It was like Truro Crown Court all over again. Bloody shocked me right back out of it again, I can tell you. It’s like I’ve been buried alive for years but I’ve come out to the surface again. Only to find they’re going to bury me again . . .”
“Well, how will they if you don’t know anything?”
“Well, p’raps so. Michael certainly thinks that’s right anyway.”
Susan wriggled herself upright, “Yes, now we’re on the subject, how does Michael Green – or Broad – come into all this? How come he suddenly appears on the scene?”
“Total coincidence that we ran into Michael when we did” – Susan mentally cocked an eye and she wasn’t sure that Martin didn’t clock that – “but he’s been brilliant, he really has.”
“What is his bloody story, Martin?”
Martin took another deep drag from his cigarette and exhaled slowly before kneeling forward to flick it over the ashtray.
“I told you that me and Michael always had a rather intense relationship, a bit love and hate.”
“Same as with Megan . . ?!”
“Hmm” – arch look – “Well, having said all that, we did grow up together, like brothers really. And brothers do fight, don’t they? But they can still have a strong relationship, can’t they?”
“Even if they haven’t seen each other for ten years?”
“Even then, as it appears. He’s been great these last few days – got me the best criminal defence team in the country.”
“Sparkes Mael; yes, I heard. That doesn’t come cheap.”
“True. But it appears that Michael has done rather well for himself over the years.”
“Yes, I was looking into all that. Where exactly does he get his money from, Martin?”
Martin put his hands up – “Hey, I think he’s just done very well out of the investments he’s made, worked his way up. He’s now got assets all over the place and you know how it works – money begets money? So don’t begrudge him what he’s built. Anyway, more’s to the point, he’s on my side. So let’s not knock it !” Martin smirked.
Susan shook her head “Jesus Martin. What are you? Michael said you’ve got a few faces yourself . . .”
“Oh, did he?” Martin wondered what else Michael had said but smiled nevertheless.
“So your team is optimistic is it?” she said with only the slightest edge of mockery.
“Well, to a degree. But friend Barry’s the ticking bomb. He was held at another station at the same time and we don’t know what the hell he’s been saying. The police kept telling me he’s said this and that and my guys said to ignore it but I don’t know. If those Syrians are half as bad as they’re made out and they get the idea that Barry’s giving everybody up to save his own skin, then the shit will hit the fan.”
“Says who?”
“Says Michael, for one.”
Susan’s expression made the point / asked the question.
Martin, feigning some exasperation, explained patiently: “Michael has been around, Susan. He knows things, people; he knows what’s what – OK? I don’t know what’s going to happen. We’ll just have to see what the day brings won’t we?” and with that he got to his feet and stretched.
“Talking of which, I need to get some shuteye before I have to face it all again. I’m getting back under for a couple of hours.” His face said: “How about you?”
Susan was tempted but she looked at the book lying on the coffee table and decided that what she’d most like now was another beer, another fag, and a bit of a read.
27.
4:50 a.m. and Martin was asleep in his bedroom now – if she was very quiet, Susan could just about hear his steady breathing, wheezing softly in and out. What was in his mind now, she wondered? Maybe the book would offer up clues.
After rereading the poetic preface, she launched into the first pages and what followed, it soon became clear, was basically a conversation Martin was having with an imaginary reader or, rather, a transcribed summary, in prose, of a conversation he’d been having with himself – in his head – for some time. Or even, a lecture based on those thoughts. But, in any event, it didn’t talk about the traumatic events that had preceded the book and it didn’t reveal anything of the personal circumstances of the author at the time of writing. It was, however, organised into general groupings of subject matters with headings such as: ‘GREED / CELEBRITY / EGO’; ‘PERSONAL / PUBLIC / ARTIST'; and ‘CONSCIOUSNESS / GOD / TIME’.
Susan dived in, greedily, and soon became aware that this was a distinctive voice, the like of which she had never really encountered before and, more than once, she involuntarily looked up from the book and across to the half-open bedroom door, beyond which slumbered the tortured author. As she read, she was struck forcibly by the stark dichotomy in the apparent dumbness of the Martin Dash that had presented to herself and her colleagues masking another . . . being entirely; and by the thought that, behind that mask, all of this was going on – apparently, all of the time. It was unbelievable.
Or had it, in fact, all driven him, ultimately, to the blind alley that had become the Martin Dash automaton? Had he finally thought himself to a standstill where it had started to become repetitive; when there was nothing left to think? Like Nietzsche finally gone mad when he could no longer cope with the horror that his mind had laid bare for him?
There was a line in the book quoted from James Kelman: 'The widest, biggest, deepest mind. That could countenance anything and everything . . .'
She ploughed on into a passage in the ‘CONSCIOUSNESS / GOD / TIME’ section:
'This is the point really: I believe I’m right in saying that – whether it’s a stool, the air, or a politician we’re talking about – when you break the components of all matter down to its smallest parts, you reach common denominators: electrons and quarks, i.e. everything is made of the same basic things, the difference being in the way those things are stuck together: their density, speed, etc.
To my mind, this means that, at a certain sub-atomic level, the barriers between things that we perceive – e.g. the border between the back of your hand and the air around it – are not really there. It’s in this sense that I feel that everything is as one and I sometimes get a sense of this oneness, as though I’m moving underwater, in a thick soup of stuff.
I also get a funny feeling sometimes walking along the streets of the city: that I’m walking along the floors of concrete angular canyons and I see around me blobby sorts of things that are shuffling around too, that have sort-of risen up out of the ground, and that we’re all part of the one thing. Try to imagine that you’ve landed on this planet from elsewhere; that it’s all totally unfamiliar to you (you were familiar with a different form of existence); and the sort of impression this alien life would have on you – that’s how I often feel.
Sitting talking to someone – often at work this happens, in the middle of a meeting or something – I suddenly get the realisation of the mechanics of what is happening; that we’re using a pattern of noises – movements of the air particles between us – that’s been developed over centuries to communicate. Two swirling storms of atoms, eyeball to eyeball, trying to communicate; to comprehend each other.
Or . . . imagine that your mind has been infiltrated and taken over by the will of another being; that the voice that you commonly hear in your head, that which you take to be 'you' – that which, at this moment is thinking: 'this bloke’s a wanker' – is not ‘you’ but . . . another’s voice. That little start, or jump, you may have just felt (if, you were, indeed, thinking: 'this bloke’s a wanker') was a recognition (perhaps the first) that all might not be as it previously seemed. That may be a first real look at the reflection in the mirror – your ‘self'; the first viewing of that self as something objective.
Just one mo
re trick to persuade you of the strangeness of your life and to get that feeling of alienation from your own body: imagine that 'you' – the person – actually sit (as a small sort of thing) at a concealed vantage point inside the eyes of you, the body – which is actually many, many times bigger than 'you', as is everything around. You’re hitching a ride on a huge giant and you look across a great chasm to the person standing closest to your body. And along the street – which is a massive ravine – there are other of these giants lolloping along. Look down at your hands . . . they’re 60 feet away, at the foot of the hill of your torso.
This can give you an insight into what it is to start casting off your ego, to really start thinking about yourself (and what your life is) objectively.
The ultimate achievement: to lose your ego. 'Self-revelation is annihilation of self' – the vampire film by Abel Ferrara. Which has one of the most frightening scenes in it; or, at least, the most immediate or intense portrayal of fear and horror, when the vampires attack the guests at the party. (It gives me an inward shudder to think about it as I write.) You get a real frisson of dread which recalls those occasions you may have experienced when the violence of life comes right up to your face; everything seems to slow down; and you realise that the ordinary rules governing us have fallen away; the animal is unleashed again and there is nothing to stop it doing what it is going to do to you. You are exposed.
The problem with what’s at the end of this, of course, is that you start disengaging from what is commonly known as 'life' so that you start to see other people’s concerns and agendas and view of themselves as rather petty and uninteresting. Because, once you’ve started looking at things like that, the modes of behaviour, the emotions, the quirks, the scams, the routines, the angles, and the games are all demystified and you see them as mechanical, clunking processes.
Just harking back to the idea of our physical selves as towering columns of atoms: that image brings to mind the photographs of nebulae produced by telescopes such as the Hubble (e.g. in the Serpens constellation, p68 Serge Brunier’s ‘Majestic Universe’) and leads on to another preoccupation of mine: that is, the question of scale. Those nebulae are, by the power of the telescopic equipment, brought into vision as almost distinct, concrete shapes or beings but they’re millions of miles across. This, to me, is suggestive of 'smaller forms' that we’re more familiar with on our 'small' planet.
If we take it as a given that we live in an infinite universe (and it clearly can’t be anything else) – that is to say infinitely large and infinitely small – then why should we imagine that our world represents the standard scale by which everything else is compared or measured? Obviously, we measure everything against the scale of our own physical bodies (so that an ocean is big and a pinhead is tiny) but out there in the wider cosmos we are not the be-all and end-all; far from it. It must be conceived that, in the universes of far greater scale, our world is, quite literally, as an atom is to a galaxy. Surely, we are, on a greater scale, simply a very small part of 'something else', e.g. the forearm of some huge creature, swinging through the vastness of a wider universe. And even when that forearm brushes up against something – a doorjamb – or smashes into the face of an adversary, we don’t know any different because we’re at atomic level in that scale and set into the cushioned whirl of the astronomical ballet.
And why should it be any different when we start looking at the atoms that make up ourselves and our earthly environment? – infinitely small as well as infinitely large, remember. The fact that our microscopes can only produce definition at a certain scale means nothing; we are as nebulae to our atoms as the Serpens nebulae are to us. So in my forearm is a vast universe of sub-atomic life, that I can’t make out but which is infinitely varied and dainty (and, again, cushioned in its own balletic whirl . . .)
As far as my (admittedly limited) reading and comprehension of the state of scientific advancement goes, it’s my understanding that the most up-to-the-minute research backs this up – there does not appear to be a solid basic unit of matter.
So, what I’m conceiving here is true infinity in the three dimensions: take your own body as the (arbitrary . . .) starting point and first send your mind outwards through the clouds, the atmosphere, and into the stars; then swing back into a dizzying trajectory straight into your body, down to subatomic level and beyond.
Then we add another ingredient . . . time.
What the hell is that all about? Another dimension that we do experience but which retains considerable mystery for us.
An image of time once took shape in my mind: a long row of square metal plates, each plate the same size, not very thick and all aligned, flat against each other so the effect was of a long accordion, without beginning or end, snaking and twisting its way through black space. Actually, the space it occupied was more like a deep sea space, with grey, ethereal, ghost-like sprays floating around it, and this better fitted the texture and colours of the plates, which were as if made of copper that had long corroded with varying shades of cobalt blue and pistachio green. And it was as if each of these plates was a slice of time, so that each successive plate was the next moment of time, like those old packs of cards you could flick through your fingers, their images creating the illusion of movement, like stop-motion animation.
And this, I reckon, would fit with our actual experience of time: I saw a TV programme which was describing how we see the world – how our eyes and brains interact – and it said that our vision sees individual pictures, thousands a second, like a film reel. And when you think about it this does seem to ring true. Because it does seem to me rather difficult for us to imagine (or experience) seamless movement, or time. I do, however, reckon that the seamlessness is actually there, it’s just difficult for us to experience it. It’s like what I was saying earlier about the smallest constituent parts of the physical world (the electrons and quarks): as humans we are limited to seeing the 'integral' bits, which we imagine have space – or something – in between them; we have difficulty (for the present?) in imagining, or seeing, seamless matter.
Anyway, this image meant that each of these points in time were fixed, in slices, so that each slice stood still, unmoving . . . always. So that all things in the future as well as the past have already happened; it’s all actually stationary. So that it is only the progressive movement of ‘us’ passing through it that creates the experience – or illusion – of time.
Had a recollection of me playing my electric guitar in my bedroom back at home and my mum shouting at me to not make so much noise – just like the troublesome teenager I once was – and I had a sudden feeling of sadness and my heart swelling, and my feelings cast themselves across the span of the years of my life like a washing-line strung with various dyed garments, some still dripping on the floor of the yard below, some now dried, with a variety of coloured sediment on the tiles below being the only sign of the juice that had once moved through them.
By analogy, what I was saying earlier about there being no standard scale might also apply here. So that there’s no fixed starting or middle or end point to this platesnake – it just wreathes around and around so that, from one perspective at least, all time – 'past, present and future' – exists at once and always has done.
Everything that is going to happen has already happened and everything that has happened is going to happen. And it is all sitting suspended in space. Waiting.
Further refinements or aspects of this image that came to me: the platesnake does, I grant you, sound rather linear, one-dimensional; in fact, I also conceived it in infinite dimensions so that for each section of accordion there was – on another plane, only slightly tilted from the first – another section of the same stretch of time but from a slightly different (adjacent) perspective. And then another. And another. And so on. Each lying on top of and through each. Until what you have is a dense (infinitely dense) mass . . . of time and space.
Everyone still with me?! And no – I’m not on my second
tab of acid. But I think that your life – my life – is one red line, meandering and weaving; passing through an infinite mass of other possible lines, like a thread of red nylon running through a mass of white cotton wool which expands away, infinitely, all around.
Also, the plates did seem to me like a long row of electroplates. And, being a human, I saw each as distinct from the next. So that there was something between them – what the hell could that be? And I imagined that, every now and again it was possible for there to be a 'short', like an electrical short, between plates. So that whatever the current was – that usually sat stable in the plates – every now and again shorted along a section of plates and suddenly two distant plates were – with a crackle – connected, when they oughtn’t to be. (Deja-vu?)
Saw a photo in The Guardian of a black child with AIDS looking at the camera – at me – but at infinity, miles away, and I thought back to the point at which the photo was taken . . . a contact between me and the boy; I was taken to the time when the photo was taken. Did he intend that he was looking, at that point, at the person who would, in due course, look at his photo? A meeting in eternity.'
Susan looked up from the book to the window. The orange of the blind was glowing brighter now that the sun was up and pressing the full weight of its rays upon it. She realised that a tear was running down her cheek and that more might follow if she wasn’t careful. She bit her corner lip as if to stem the flow, ran the back of her hand across her eyes and snorted hard through her nostrils.
She tipped her head back onto the soft leather upright of the chair, scrutinised the ceiling and blew a swhoosh of air through her lips. She knew then that she loved Martin; that he wasn’t like anyone she had been with before – not easy and not safe but that, amid all the sound and fury of his ravaged mind and soul, there lay a true human heart.