Wildlife

by Joe Stretch

  ‘These videos on the Internet,’ Peter says suddenly.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘It’s good, isn’t it, yes, it’s a good thing, everybody getting a chance to make them and see them. And, of course, TV is terrible.’

  Peter gets up and peers out of the window, away from the lake towards the car park. ‘It’s just . . .’ he says, straining to see. ‘It’s just I saw one the other day that was just . . .’ He turns to Janek. ‘It was just a cat falling off a bookcase over and over again to an electronic beat.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘That’s all it was and I thought, well, I thought, you know . . . it took three days of hard work to shoot the “Sledgehammer” video and, well, you understand. That video. It’s very entertaining, isn’t it?’

  Janek smiles. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And this clumsy cat has been watched millions of times by millions of people and I thought . . . well, I thought . . . so much time. Such a waste of time.’

  ‘I imagine “Sledgehammer” gets its fair share of views.’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But time, Janek, you don’t realise. Look at me. We’re short-lived. What’s that?’

  The grandfather clock begins to chime. Outside, a car horn sounds. Peter leaps away from the window. Janek can hear a heavy vehicle pulling onto the gravel car park.

  ‘They’re here,’ says Peter. ‘It’s been lovely to see you again.’

  ‘You’re not staying?’

  ‘No. No, I’m not. I’m going to pick my boy up from school.’

  Peter Gabriel is at the door, but he’s still looking cautiously towards the window. There are footsteps on the gravel.

  ‘The Wild World has come to Reel World, Janek,’ says Gabriel through a regretful smile. And before Janek can reply the one-time superstar has vanished. He can be heard dashing down the main corridor and making quickly for the manor’s back door.

  ‘Goodbye,’ mutters Janek to himself, lighting another fag.

  Moments later the door to the dining room is opening and a brunette in scruffy jeans and an Aerosmith T-shirt is walking towards Janek with a straight face.

  ‘Janek Freeman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m bossing today.’ They’re shaking hands. ‘I’m going to be making sure we get what we want. I’m sure we will. I’m told you can play anything we put in front of you, right?’

  ‘Right,’ says Janek, quickly deciding that no amount of cash is worth this. Nothing matters. This is going to be another pointless and day-shaped occasion. One of many in my life. My life that repeats and repeats. My life, where nothing matters, where nothing really means it. He immediately decides that the bossing woman is a delightful bitch with bored eyes, a bored nose and a bored mouth. Barely alive. A tired heart. A flirty but dry cunt. Janek stops listening.

  ‘Oh, you smoke,’ the woman is saying. ‘Wow, cool, OK.’

  Over her shoulder the door opens again and Janek watches as a rather grand-looking girl enters slowly, her back slightly bent, peering into the room with enquiring eyes.

  ‘Come on in,’ says the bossbitch. ‘Come on in, Lie. Meet Janek.’

  The rather grand girl straightens up and approaches Janek with an outstretched hand. Bossbitch watches as the two of them, Janek and this girl, shake hands and swap smiles. ‘Wow, cool, OK,’ she says. ‘Janek, this is Life. Once we’ve set up we’re going to plug you into her brain. Your guitar, I mean. We’ll get your guitar plugged into Life’s brain. OK?’

  ‘No problem,’ says Janek, pulling out a seat for Life and taking one himself.

  ‘Wow,’ says Bossbitch, her voice descending on the notes of some predictable major key. ‘Wow. Cool. OK.’ She leaves the room and seconds later Janek can hear her screaming demands across the car park. He and Life sit in silence for five heavy seconds. Janek pulls his beanie hat down so it’s touching his eyebrows.

  ‘You should know,’ he says, ‘I’ve been waiting twenty-five years for this.’

  ‘This is my first week.’

  ‘No, I mean . . .’ Janek checks himself. He offers Life a cigarette and changes the subject clumsily. ‘Your boss seems like a bitch.’

  ‘She is a bitch,’ Life replies, pulling a fag from the packet. ‘So how long have you been involved with the Wild World?’

  ‘Oh, I’m not,’ says Janek, admiring the size of Life’s facial features. Do they matter? Her big mouth. Big eyes. Her big beautiful teeth. Do her big tits matter? ‘I’m here for the money,’ he continues, distracted. ‘They just called up, said the Wild World needed bass lines. So here I am. It’s as pointless as that.’

  ‘Well, I’d just like to say . . .’ Life pauses to exhale the first lungful of smoke into the new year’s light. ‘I’d just like to say now, that . . .’ She pauses again, briefly, before declaring firmly, her voice tinged with Scandinavia, ‘I like your hat, Janek. I do. And I hope you feel the same about my brain.’

  The two of them make a noise together. A breathy, chuckly, shifting-in-your-seat-type noise. It’s nice to hear and nice to see.

  Janek’s had sex. Naturally, he has. He’s done it, had it off, shagged, etc. A girl in California, a talented cellist called Judy. A girl back in Bristol, a Business Studies student. And, much more recently, a group of roadies pressured him into sex with a groupie on the Jay-Z world tour. But he’s not prolific. He’s not Mr Sex. Sex is submerged along with everything else in the grey, meaningless sauce that strips Janek’s existence of all flavour. Nothing matters. Sex doesn’t matter. Tits and arse don’t matter. Love is nothing. But now, quite suddenly, after twenty-five porcelain years, something is starting to crack, to shatter. Janek stares across at Life Moberg, her huge, glorious, curving body reclined on the seat, cigarette in between her fingers and a smile, weightless on her lips. And then her head. Her great big head. Her golden hair. Her large things. Janek feels different. He closes his eyes in time to watch as two words are dragged by ropes from his mind’s deep and pointless sauce. They drip, these words, they shed the thick grey sludge and slowly reveal themselves. Janek smiles. They are rude words! Romance begins and, yes, two rude words are silently imagined. Both words begin with an ‘F’.

  4

  A ROPE OF semen leaps from Roger’s rather pale penis and clings to the television screen.

  ‘Nothing,’ he says, panting, the phone gripped between his shoulder and his ear. ‘Nothing beats there.’

  Roger treats his penis to a few pleasurable touches and then straightens his head, catching his mobile one-handed as it falls. ‘Right. OK . . . Right,’ says Anka Kudolski on the television screen, oblivious to the stream of semen that’s completely obscuring her tit shadow. Roger turns the television off.

  Roger Hart is thirty years old. He has an oversized head and curly black hair. He wears thick, square glasses, the type that would give normal people headaches. He lives in what was once Parker’s Hotel on the corner of Miller Street and Corporation Street, central Manchester. Nowadays the hotel rooms are small flats, cheap to rent.

  Singing one of the songs from the hit musical Les Misérables, Roger Hart goes to his kitchen and tears a few sheets of kitchen paper from a roll. Still singing, he dabs the solitary white tear from the tip of his scarlet bell-end and, returning to the living room, sets to work cleaning the semen off the television screen.

  As a child, growing up in Lancaster, Roger loved the musicals. His parents often took him to London or Manchester to see a show. Phantom of the Opera, 42nd Street, Cats. Those were some of the best nights of his life. His favourite, of course, is Les Misérables, because the tunes are great and so is the storyline. Pop music and rock music were lost on the young Roger Hart. They seemed to come from a different world, one too separated from reality where the people invented their emotions in the absence of anything more pressing to do. With the musicals, the songs matter, thinks Roger, referring specifically to when Javert serenades his own suicide and to the tragic death lament of Epo
nine. Both in Les Mis.

  But the musicals have gone to shit nowadays, Roger believes. There’s no way he’d travel to London to see some half-arsed, shoe-horning spectacle like Mamma Mia! or We Will Rock You. Would I fuck. Pop’s crap. That’s it. Roger thinks pop is crap.

  His television screen is now clean. The wank, over. He flushes the dirty rag down the toilet.

  Besides the bathroom and the kitchen, Roger’s flat comprises one square room. There is a single bed in the corner with a neutral grey cover. There is a two-seater blue sofa in front of the television. There are large posters from West End musicals on every wall. But the room is sparse. Every eye is drawn to one busy corner next to the window. The corner where his computer stands on a desk, surrounded by empty bags of crisps, tissue paper scrunched like flowers, large amounts of notepaper covered in Roger’s scribble. This room, originally a fairly opulent surrounding for human beings in transit, built in 1905, is now dominated by a computer. Roger takes his seat in front of the screen. He opens a bag of pickled onion Monster Munch and stuffs a handful into his mouth. He grips the mouse with a dirty hand. Click-click. Knock-knock. Scratch.

  Allow me. Allow me. I have just had the most cracking wank over this SAD bitch on Channel MANC. Got my mobile out and dialled up. I got thru!! Didn’t even bother to answer the piss-easy question. Don’t need the money. Hahahahaha. Do really. But I was wanking anyway right in front of my television screen. She’s saying all this stuff about how I’m a sad twat and I’m thinking, don’t allow that, bitch. She was trying to be massively cool, banging on about the Wild World. I was like, fuck that ho, El Rogerio doesn’t give a flying donkey fuck about no wanky Wild World. So I was about to put my niggle juice all over the screen when, fuck you, my phone call connects and I’m thinking, allow that. I can hear her talking to me down the phone, asking me the stupid question. What beats beyond your ribs? I was live on TV and I was just like, fuck you, slut duster, and then I fired niggle juice all over her face on the screen. It was bare good. Allow me.

  SUBMIT.

  Roger leans back in his swivel chair which stands on four multidirectional wheels. He finishes the remainder of the crisps. He adjusts his glasses, pressing them back against the bridge of his nose. Next to his keyboard, a newspaper is open on the theatre adverts. Who, wonders Roger, would go and see a musical based on the songs of the Bee Gees?

  He’s aware that, in the past, large consensuses were built around all sorts of things, even politics and Michael Jackson. But a consensus built around a Bee Gees musical? It’s strange. He’s a cynic at heart, Roger, but even he can’t help thinking that such audiences will have little to do with the Wild World. With this in mind, he returns to his blog.

  Allow me. Allow me. I’ve just eaten a bag of pickled onion Monster Munch. And I was thinking about all those SAD fucking twenty-somethings that are like, ooh ooh, I love Monster Munch, remember when we were young and ate Monster Munch after school? Remember the TV programmes that we used to watch? Oooh oooh. Grange Hill. Little lost cunts. Don’t allow them. Losers. Let me tell you one thing, for sure: When the world ends, it won’t be people like me who bring it to an end. Oh no. And it won’t be men in suits either. It’ll be fancy haircutted cuntsealers in Soft Cell T-shirts, munching ironically on Monster Munch and talking total shit.

  SUBMIT.

  Roger is about to tell his readers about a video he’s found online featuring Hillary Clinton blowing the fuck out of a snake. But then a pop-up window pops up on the computer screen.

  ‘. . . hiccup . . .’

  A hiccup. One of those solitary, painful ones. He closes the pop-up window and logs on to the Les Misérables chat forum where his name is, as ever, El Rogerio.

  Anyone see tonight’s show? he writes.

  I did, El Rogerio, comes the reply. It was the best ever!

  Glad to hear it, writes Roger, closing the forum’s window immediately.

  A pop-up pops up.

  ‘. . . hiccup . . .’

  Allow me. Allow me. All this bullshit about the environment. Switch the lights off. Get twenty-four different dustbins. Wash in your own piss. It’s a load of crap. El Rogerio says, let the world end, let the Dickhead come. Let him tell us our future. I’ll be the first to ring his Cheddar bell. Fuck the ongoing world.

  SUBMIT.

  Roger can understand why Les Misérables sells out every night of the year. It makes perfect sense. Victor Hugo’s novel is a great basis for a musical. Cameron Mackintosh’s production is probably the best in modern times. But it still seems bizarre that every night people walk through the streets of London in their best clothes, then file into the Queen’s Theatre until not one seat remains. After thinking about it for a second, Roger Hart concludes that mankind is still capable of assembling an audience, getting into groups. Yeah. He guesses they are. Just.

  Roger shifts in his seat, scratching at his backside.

  Allow me. Allow me. I’ve just had to scratch my arsehole cos I got a really bad itch. You know when you have to scratch with a finger using the gusset of your pants? Yeah, well, that’s what I just did. Then I smelt the finger. Let them have it. I’d rather scratch my arse than go and see that slut Minogue. She’s doing six nights at the Arena next week. She calls it her ‘Showgirl Tour’. Right. It’s fifty quid a ticket. Total bollocks. She only had cancer a year ago. She should be resting up. Oh, but she’s so inspiring! I feel inspired to embark on a career in killing myself. Six nights at the Arena means an audience of ninety thousand losers. El Rogerio says, get the bombs out. Allow me. Allow me.

  SUBMIT.

  Roger Hart leans back in his chair. Then he leans forward.

  Allow me. Allow me. I’ve been leaning back in my chair. Anyone going to the Cradle of Filth gig? It’s gonna be well bare. The government is shit. When Blair sees a child he’s just like, shit, how can I get this tit-toter into bed. He’s a dick sucker. Allow it. I could do with another wank. Allow that. Stick it to them.

  SUBMIT.

  Roger uses all his strength to push himself away from the computer. He goes flying backwards across the room on the wheels of his chair. He hits the wall opposite his PC with a moderate bang and then bends down towards his CD player. He puts in the Les Misérables soundtrack and awaits the opening song. It’s called ‘Look Down’. It’s brilliant. It’s sung by the downtrodden, Parisian poor. They sing about the squalor that has bound them together and made revolutionaries of them. When it begins, Roger leaps from his chair and spins around the room with his arms outstretched. He is dancing with real abandon.

  After a lonely youth in Lancaster, Roger found himself in the late 1990s. He had thought his computer-programming skills would open up worlds of opportunity to him. Web design, he thought, is the future. I’ll master the art and then I’ll master the decades ahead. I’ll rake it in, designing websites for major corporations, massive rock bands, charities, pornographers, governments. Only it didn’t work out like that. He did OK at first, got a few contracts. 2001. 2002. He even did some programming on the Selfridges UK website. He thought he’d cracked it. The cash was rolling in. But things change. Trust things to change. Nowadays, most thirteen-year-olds can build flashier websites than Roger Hart. He has failed to move with the times. There is a dot bullshit generation behind Roger that is better with computers than he is. He speaks a programming language that is already out of date. By 2004, he’d lost all his major contracts. The cash had stopped rolling. He started going from door to door round Manchester offering to build websites for normal individuals. This proved to be a punt up a dark arse. By this time, social networking sites were taking off. Every individual could follow simple programming instructions and build an all-singing all-dancing web page dedicated to the details of their very own life. The door to the market had been slammed in the face of Roger Hart. It bust his nose. That’s when he started blogging.

  Roger is still pirouetting round his room to ‘Do You Hear the People Sing’, track 2. He sweeps by his computer, uploading more w
ords as he does so.

  Allow me. I’m dancing to ‘Death by Design’ by Tit Kill. It’s fucking late but time doesn’t bother me. I might go out. My plan is simple: drill an eye socket. Allow me.

  SUBMIT.

  Blogging, like shopping, is essentially like shitting. Except it’s a little bit more public. I suppose it’s like shitting in a bag and showing it to people who’d rather not see. Everyone is blogging. The problem with everyone blogging is that everyone is too busy to read. Only a few lucky individuals have the pleasure of being read, of having an audience. Roger is becoming one such individual.

  The truth is, Roger hasn’t left his flat in months. It is his apparent ability to blog constantly that has led to a small army of young fans subscribing to his site. He has developed a reputation for telling it like it is. Telling it like it is is a much-loved activity in human civilisations. People love being told it like it is. No nonsense. No flowers. Just reality in all its faded glory.

  Roger lives a virtually sleepless life. He will occasionally doze off at the computer. When he wakes he is quick to describe his dreams to his readers. Research has shown him that most of his fans are aged between twelve and nineteen. They are the teenagers. The same dot bollocks generation that made him redundant. It also seems, judging by their clothing, their eye make-up and the comments they leave beneath his blogs, that they are fans of a genre of music called EMO. EMO is shorthand for emotional. They are the emotional teenagers. EMO is commercial metal with soaring, melodic vocals and sentiments ranging from loss to heartbreak. Its followers hide their heads in haircuts and hoods. A fashion followed by other fragments of British society.