This Is Memorial Device

by David Keenan

  When I first saw it, I wrote it off, convinced myself it was nothing, that it was something to do with the angle and that I just hadn’t caught it properly, he was fucking her under her arm, I told myself, weird, not that sexy but I guess she had to pull something out of the bag. But I couldn’t live in denial any longer. I rewound the tape and watched it again. He had clearly inserted his penis into the hole in the side of her breast. I couldn’t bear it. I got dressed and walked to her house in the dark. She had dropped the video off without a word at the weekend, told me that she would be interested in what I thought, sealed it inside a jiffy bag, as if the contents might have leaked all over the floor, and when I got to her house the curtains were closed and it seemed like no one was at home so I climbed the fence and stood in the back garden, looking up at the storage room, the same window I thought I had heard the song come from. I could make out nothing but the sound of the wind in the gutters and a straining, constricting noise, coming from somewhere inside my chest, that I eventually realised was the sound of my heart being used as a cock ring.

  Vanity went on to star in a bunch more movies, all of which involved tit-fucking, even double tit-fucking, I’m told, but the thought of it makes me want to kill someone, the idea of those tits being torn apart, and the eyes, watching from a distance now, no longer connected to the tits but like ghosts come back to the scene of their own murder, even now it feels personal. Later she became a fairly successful pop star and of course some newspaper brought up the tapes and she laughed them off, in fact it only added to her credibility, then she died in a car crash in the Hollywood Hills on her way back from a video shoot. I read about it in the newspaper. It said that the airbags had failed to inflate. That’s the one consolation I take from any of this.

  9. He Had Tried to Have His Testicles Removed on the NHS: Johnny McLaughlin explains the situation with Remy’s father that it has something to do with ideas of fate predestination and genital mutilation as the keys to the kingdom or as a secret path to a holiday on a black beach in your mind somewhere, either way having something to do with how we all felt back then every one of us in a way.

  Big Remy’s father had walked away from family life when Remy was in his teens. He was a fairly well-known scientist and philosopher (though there were just as many people that thought of him as a crackpot and an occultist). There was a story that he had become a eunuch in a backstreet operation (though really it was more like an S&M torture session) where he had hooked up with a group of subterranean gays that practised cock and ball torture. He had tried to have his testicles removed on the NHS (the story ran) but when he was laughed out of his GP’s (who suggested psychiatric counselling instead) he placed a personal ad in a gay magazine offering his genitals up for use and abuse in return for their skilful removal. Of course the story only went to prove that Big Remy came from a long line of homos. But the most interesting aspect of his father’s story (one which I only found out many years later) was the papers he had written during his short career as an academic (at Coatbridge College), in particular a semi-autobiographical tract that had been suppressed by the college entitled ‘Fate is Only Once’, where he elucidated his theory of space and time (and their relationship to thoughts and deeds). The theory ran something like this (and inevitably I’m paraphrasing and simplifying and maybe even misunderstanding) but the essence of his argument was that there was some kind of disjunction between actions and thoughts. It wasn’t that they were parallel occurrences, in his view actions were eternal and forever but thought was something that happened in time and that came to pass only once. He used a really mundane example (which made it all the more convincing).

  He talked about a time where he was on holiday with his wife (his ex-wife, obviously). It isn’t clear where he was holidaying but we can presume it’s somewhere on the coast (not at the seaside, we’re not talking Blackpool or Burntisland here), somewhere exotic and eccentric (New Zealand, perhaps, or even Sausalito, the scene of his future castration), but maybe that’s just the poet in me. They pull up at a picnic spot (we can imagine that in the distance there are mountains, I see them as being snow-capped, for some reason) and in front of them there’s a crystal-clear sea that could even be a lake, a body of water that somehow has the feeling of revelation, of clarity (which may or may not be the same thing), and dark sand, black sand (if you can imagine such a thing). It’s lunchtime and they’re both hungry from the drive. He rustles something up on the gas stove in the camper van (eggs and salsa is my guess) while she sets up some foldaway chairs and a table on the black-sand beach at the edge of the sparkling waters. At this point he goes into obsessive detail (which is important in terms of his argument). He mentions the transparency of the sea, which he says completely refused to hold their reflections, even though the sun was behind them, and in the distance a group of adventure-sports enthusiasts parachuting out of the sky cast a series of perfect silhouettes across the surface (and at this point he interrupts the text with an odd piece of ornamental syntax, a set of square brackets [[[]]] that also weirdly looks like the view from a prison cell where, of course, it is difficult to cast a shadow, as the sun doesn’t have much to go on), and then he describes the preparation of the meal in some detail, he talks of chopping, grating, folding, frying, stirring, melting, he talks about the cutlery, the blunt knife, the silver fork that had already become tarnished and he talks about taking the two plates down to the beach (to this black beach I have in my mind) and of seeing his wife sitting there (disconcerted, as anyone would be, by the lack of her shadow) and of course nowhere does he mention what they actually eat (which seems significant), he talks about the whole process, the preparation, the transfer, the devouring, but not at one point does he mention what it is he has actually prepared. All the while he talks about feeling like he’s in a play, following some kind of script that has been written specifically for him (a dream role, in other words), and the whole thing culminates when his wife returns to the camper van and he starts to clear off the plates (plates of who knows what) and he goes to kneel down on the grass (something he would never normally have done, after all he has a nice pair of slacks on and the label says dry-clean only) and just as he does so he notices two small indentations in the grass (just the shape of his kneecaps) and he slots his knees into them, they fit perfectly, so much so that he becomes convinced that he has created the holes himself and that he isn’t so much living forward in time as re-living.

  He kneels down and settles into the pose (a moment of humility is what he calls it – all the time he maintained his Christian faith, despite the testicles and the philosophy, which either makes it more confusing or elucidates it completely) and as the moment extends, as he lives through it (his wife in the camper van in the distance, the parachutists falling from the sky, the pure clear water, the remains of their lunch on the plates, the precise patterns of rust on the cutlery), it comes to seem as if it was written in eternity, as though his secret self (his guardian angel, he called it) had constructed this total artwork that had lain in wait for him (or more properly that had always existed and that was now somehow revealing itself to thought).

  It was right at the moment that he found himself kneeling in the grass and scraping food from the plates (exactly what we’ll never know) that he says that he felt like he caught up with himself (briefly, it’s true), that he drew neck and neck (let’s say). As he saw the red waste liquid streaming down the inside of the white bag (I imagine a tomato salsa in a bin liner as much as a close-up on a tubercular lung) he extrapolated the experience into a Christian outlook. He redefined thought as judgement. You are given this life, he writes, this precise set of occurrences: and you are asked to judge it.

  (But think about this.) If everything is already fixed, if we have been here before and set up the whole deal behind our own backs (or if an angel has done it for us in heaven), right down to the patterns on the forks and the shape that our knees make on the (black) sand of a dream holiday that happened long ago and tha
t will live on in eternity, then what thought demands of us is nothing less than that we weigh the will of God itself.

  It’s a heavy concept (but here’s another one). What if the very idea of the will of God exists as some kind of tissue tiger? (What if you trash the great gift?) What if you refuse it altogether? What if this insult, this seeing through of a ruse, this act of rebellion (whatever you want to call it) affords you access to the next level, like a series of interconnecting dungeons whose walls it is possible to think down and for which you are rewarded by a less puzzling interaction (and then another) until the whole thing comes full circle and finally you are able to live your life as written (in history and in time over again), but this time outside of mind, without judgement and beyond understanding? It may mean nothing (maybe there’s no way to be done with judgement, maybe it’s a problem with our brains or maybe it’s just the ravings of a lunatic) but back then, when we were young, once, forever, it seemed like a genuine possibility.

  10. The Golden Light Coming From the Window and Spilling Over the Pavement Like a Perfect Dream: the saga of Chinese Moon as recalled by David Kilpatrick.

  Hardly anyone ever leaves Airdrie: Airdrie Savings Bank is the only surviving independent savings bank in the UK. That’s because it has the least mobile population of any town in Britain. Plus there are six degrees of separation between everyone that lives there and no one is happy until they have established themselves in a complex network of friends, families and distant relations; it’s like the Jews, in a way.

  Everyone else thinks it’s a dump; a horror show; an asylum. That just serves to keep out the curious. Behind closed doors at the back ends of estates, in crumbling mansions in Clarkston and modern flats on the main street, in solitary bedsits and grim flats above chip shops there are hidden some of the most eccentric characters ever to escape from a novel; some of the greatest book collections ever thrown in skips; some of the most overgrown gardens never weeded by a salt-of-the-earth type from the East End; some of the greatest musicians; the most heartbreaking chanters; the heaviest drinkers; the least responsible workers; the slackest teachers; the most committed intellectuals; the oddest astronomers; the most obsessive collectors; the most serious amateurs; and of course the greatest failures. I knew them all in my time. I knew Memorial Device; I went to the shows. I was into all the Airdrie groups. We had a team, we grew up together and we went to all the shows: Findlay, Alan, Duncan and myself.

  Findlay and Alan were brothers and they lived with their parents, who were teachers, in Kenilworth Drive, just up from the old Kenilworth Hotel. They were eccentric kids. At the age of fourteen Findlay subscribed to Newsweek and Alan was a practising magician who, he claimed, had been initiated into a coven of witches that practised out of Katherine Park at night. Plus they both wore tracksuits with the bottoms pulled right up to their nipples. We were into comics; science fiction; war gaming; role playing; stuff like that. But then we started getting into music. It was Duncan who turned us on. His brother had some albums by The Ramones as well as the most amazing collection of heavy metal albums I have ever seen. Back then he must have had at least thirty LPs. When we would go round to hang out with Duncan, whose parents lived in the flats behind The Kings Cafe on the main street, we would sit in his brother’s room, which was completely wallpapered with pages from Sounds and NME and which had a snooker table in the middle and a permanently unmade bed with socks everywhere and cigarette stubs and which was always dark and creepy and grown up and we would play records and have games of snooker and paint lead figures or plan our next trip into Glasgow, which might as well have been the end of the world.

  Duncan’s dad was unfortunately an alcoholic. Although he had a good job as the manager of a department store in Shettleston he refused to spend good money on anything except booze so the house was always in a state. There were bare bulbs in every room. I always remember the living room, which had a row of birthday cards on the window ledge from three years previous. His dad would drink at The Tavern, just across from Katherine Park – it’s long gone now, don’t try to look for it – and he would cycle there and back and once when I was doing my paper round I saw him cycle right into a hedge when he was half-cut. He would come home while we were playing records in the evening and we would hear him coming up the stairs shouting and cursing and Duncan would act embarrassed and say that his dad was pretending to be drunk again. He would pretend that he was just having a laugh and that it was all a big joke on his mother. I felt sorry for him. Duncan’s mother was Jewish and they had a combative relationship. Duncan bought a PLO T-shirt and when he put it in the laundry his mum said that she wouldn’t wash any of his clothes until he removed it, which he refused to do, so it was a constant stalemate and it meant that Duncan always stank as he had to keep taking the same dirty clothes out of the basket and wearing them all over again, which were normally skintight Adidas T-shirts and drainpipe denims.