Peckham and an acute feeling of repulsion and pity

We went to go see a good 'ol holiday season blockbuster on Saturday night. It seems like an appropriate thing to do when feeling gritty on the inside from a fairly debauched evening the night before. We drove to the Peckham multiplex because once inside it is a nice, spacious cinema and, above all, it is cheap and convenient. I don't like Peckham, or at least the bits I've seen. This is not snobbish. The level(s) on which I find Peckham offensive are purely down to the basic senses; smell, taste and most of all sight. On previous ill-conceived journeys through Peckham, I have consistently felt the urge to be sick all over its greasy pavements, littered with the oily bones of fried chickens. There are many, many butchers stalls in Peckham, which seem to be unrefrigerated. The stench of slowly deteriorating meat is choking, and in the summer, the air is thick with insects thriving off the rot. There are fish markets and fried chicken shops in between the meat markets, and these varying odours come together in a terrific cacophony of stench.

Anyway, on this occasion, we had heard about free parking at the back of the cinema. Having on our last trip gotten a 50 quid parking fine, we decided that to investigate free parking would be a safer option. We drove round to find a five storey car park glowing in the dark with the shadow-swallowing light of a hundred flourescent tubes. A sign beside the entrance said that free parking for the cinema was available on floor five. Being cautious we decided to do what the sign says and circled through the deserted car park up to the fifth floor. It felt like we were driving through the weathered remains of the skeleton of a massive, prehistoric beast. We parked our car next to the only other car there and headed for the lifts. There were three elevators, and we waited patiently for one to admit us. Having pressed a scuffed looking button we heard much groaning and mechanical misfiring before the middle elevators grim mouth gaped open before us, as though silently screaming. Inside it was gloomy (most of the lights were out) and cold. The walls looked as though they had been attacked with keys. The doors shut, and in the darkness I felt I had been swallowed. The doors shut and nothing happened. Pj tried pressing buttons and seeing him press the buttons repeatedly without anything happening immediately made me panic and I leapt at the "open doors" button. Thankfully the doors complied and groaned open. I was out of there like a cat out of a bag. I headed straight for the stairwell overwhelmed by a false sense of relief. Pj laughed behind me.

The stairwell like the rest of that ruined building, was bare concrete and strip lighting. We descended one floor and could see shadows pooling around the corner. The light was out on that floor. On the convex mirror on the wall ahead I noticed a shape on the stair. As I turned the corner I found its living reflection, slumped against the concrete, in the dark. It was a junkie who had obviously sought out the most lonely dark place in the world, this bare, bitterly cold stairwell. His trousers were pulled down to his knees, revealing blueish white thighs. There was a small needle sticking straight out of his fleshless inner thigh. His face was covered in a red beard. somewhere between the hat and the beard were a pair of blue watery eyes atop gaunt cheekbones. The eyes looked like they were fixed on a distant point behind us. Just watching back at us, like we were characters on a movie screen. I stopped on the second stair and Pj stood behind me. "Let's not go this way."

I walked straight passed Pj still stood on the landing and walked briskly back to the car. Very briskly and purposefully. Pj followed me and as we got back to the car, Pj giggled and I whined "Please can we get out of here." We got back in the car and circled back down. We parked outside.
We laughed as if to shake off the image of that bare thigh. We grimaced and laughed. All the way through that family blockbuster I felt those fish-like eyes staring back. It was sick.

Gerald the Half Fish.

Gerald is only half a fish
with a three second memory
on a serving dish.
he has no tail
but he has got a face
so he knows he's Gerald
he's Gerald the plaice.
He's got a modest fish brain
with which to ponder
why he persists
in living longer.
he feels an absence
where his tail used to be
filled with organs and bones
and arteries.
every three seconds
Gerald reaches a conclusion
for being half a fish
he can have no illusions;
for him -
is not to reason why!
for him -
is just to do and die.

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I'm going to illustrate this and give it to kids at christmas.

Dogs in Hats and Something Fictitious.

Walking up out of the ground from the Tube station today, I saw a woman in front of me put up her umbrella. The wind immediately whipped it upside down and it smacked to the floor, and drove the wind almost maliciously into her face. The squat fat woman fretted and two large hulking builders laughed loudly as they walked by. The woman glanced back at them peevishly as she righted her umbrella, but just as they passed they said "did you see that dog?" and as their laddish hollering faded I looked up and realised that I had a picture of a dog wearing a hat on my umbrella.

Also -
"The cat dashed across the dirt road and leapt the fence.I screamed at Tom to get the cat, to get the fucking cat, as shots misfired behind me and the car squealed and stalled. He looked back over his shoulder briefly and then turned to run. The rifle looked heavy by his side and he ran, lumbering close to the ground round the corner and out of sight. Left and right of me stood rusted cars and rusted houses, all tumbling earthwards with the steady downward draw of decay. I sensed a presence behind the windows, but nothing moved, like a parade of comatose faces. I staggered and then stopped running and bent close to the dirt, so I could smell it as it baked in the noonday heat. I felt the sweat on my neck and thought I might die here. Crouched close to the ground I looked back over my shoulder at my father-in-law behind the wheel of the battered VW at the end of the street. The rifle poked up next to him and the pieces of the dog I loved bound up in plastic bags on the back seat. He gripped the wheel tightly and he looked at one moment confused, and the next angry. I saw Tom's back as he vaulted onto a shambolic patio where a table was set with ruined, week-old dinners. Flies hummed and hung like clouds, while stringy looking birds pecked at the road where insects writhed through the dust, aiding and thriving off the pervasive decay. He disappeared through the patio doors and emerged again a second later with the frantic cat clawing at his grip. Rifle in one hand he ran behind the house and a second later appeared across the street. I ran to him and he pushed the cat towards me and we both ran as fast as we could down the street away from the car and the volatile madness it could barely contain. He held the rifle and I gripped the squirming fur and claws close to my chest and we ran away filled with fear and rage."

Word of the Day

FROTTEURISM.
Main Entry: frot·teur·ism
Pronunciation: -"iz-&m
Function: noun
: the paraphiliac practice of achieving sexual stimulation or orgasm by touching and rubbing against a person without the person's consent and usually in a public place called also frottage

Thank you Candice, I love you kitten!

Car-Wrecked Poem

Her face is bruised, she keeps touching her nose because it feels strange, it is in the wrong place.
A tooth is untethered and she spits it to the ground.
She looks at it on the hot asphalt and thinks it looks aborted.
The sun is hot as she shambles onwards towards the shade of an overpass.
The asphalt burns through her plimsoles.
She's on the shoulder of a highway that reaches from her to the horizon in each direction, and is dissected by other highways and overpasses,
like blood vessels of a greater organism.

She feels small.

There is no room here for anything other than asphalt and concrete, nowhere to get away from the threat of engines.
Among so much metal and speed and rough concrete
she feels vulnerable in her fleshy soft pink body.
Traffic booms around her in every direction, and out of the drone she discerns a pulse.
It starts in her chest.
A broad man lumbers toward her along the shoulder of the highway, he's sweaty and covered in grease
like a mechanic.
He's wearing a peak cap with a Ferrari symbol on the front and a louche smile. She thinks
I've seen that fucking cap before.
Behind him in the shade of the overpass is a pile of limbs and a pile of car crash fuselage.
There is a sign post next to each displaying prices for every item; legs are worth five, steering columns are worth 10, arms are worth only two and so on. Gear sticks, feet, exhausts, fenders.
She thinks the car parts are worth more.
She hears a screech as a Volvo slides past her colliding with the concrete barrier almost instantaneously, carrying with it a gust of wind that touches her face and spits up dirt that stings.
She rubs her eyes. The air is thick and choking,
it burns when she draws it into her lungs, as if the pain and terror of the wrecking was sublimated by the intense heat of collision, now filling her atmosphere.
The mechanic ambles past her towards the crash scene, glass crunching underfoot.
He begins working, efficiently dismantling the wreck as though it were stage scenery. He's making two piles. He's like a spider in a web;

There's nothing left under that cap but instinct.

She feels sick. He smiles and sweats. The traffic flows on. Her nose bleeds.

Square Holes

I like this little digression in the beginning of Brave New World

(Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and to infect others with their discontents.)

The whole sentences is a parentheses. I like that. When I got home last night my cat came running through the cat flap after me, out of the veil of rain and gothic gloom outside. She ran up to me with tail upright and face upturned, beads of water clinging to her kitty fur. Feed me. I did and after she ate she sat on the floor and licked and watched me. I often think she seems part owl, part snake and to a lesser degree, part cat. I went to pick her up and her little face looked stricken. In my arms I could feel her small body tense up. She gripped me with her pin-cushion paws and her jaw dropped open in a rictus of feline rage, her ears went back and her eyes yellowed and soured and she lunged at my arm like a viper. She is an insolent little thing. She is a round peg.

Natalie the Mute

A childhood friend found me on facebook today. We were friends during the pre-school years, when we were left to run and play and finger paint and make cards for old people out of macaroni and pipe cleaners. Old people and children are two sides of the same coin. Natalie was a profoundly neurotic child. She couldn't speak to strangers, and was thus surrounded by strangers. She had gotten to know me because our fathers were involved in business together and our mothers got along ok, so we were thrown together a lot, both relegated to the children's table at dinner parties, our legs swinging under the table-top where food lay scattered amongst crayons. When she was not cowed into silence by the dreadful presence of strangers, she would rage against her family. She would insist I stay over, when I wanted to go home, she would kick and scream and wail and hide until my mother and her mother agreed. When we started "big" school she would speak to me in my ear and I would have to translate for whoever she was vicariously addressing while her saucer eyes stared and her little fingers twisted together. This included teachers. Even being 5 years old I felt embarrassed. One day Natalie had the misfortune of falling foul of a particularly disgruntled teacher who was notorious for beating bad children with a little child-sized cricket bat, or at least threatening to. Her name was Miss Truter, an old, obese spinster and a grotesque Dahl-esque sort of character. Miss Truter insisted that Natalie answer back. She kept insisting until her voice boomed in her 40-a-day drawl and her massive bosom trembled. Her face turned crimson which offset her purple-shadowed eyes in a terribly menacing way. Natalie stared back mutely and pissed herself.

Shortly after that incident Natalie disappeared. She was reportedly transferred to a school for kids with learning disabilities and thus was set off on a divergent path that would cause her to be much maligned and ostracized right into beginnings of adulthood. Shortly after she left school her father made off with money from my fathers business which sent our family into a financial shit storm the details of which are hazy to me.When she showed up at high school for orientation many years later I barely recognized her from the pretty blond blue-eyed girl who whispered in public and screamed in private. She was fat; thick all over, thick limbed, thick necked, thick lipped. She still lisped and spoke almost inaudibly. We said hello on that first awkward day and avoided one another for the next five years, partly due to a tacit understanding between us and partly due to the her being grouped as a "special requirements" pupil and thus bundled in with the slow witted, socially dysfunctional kids with muddy backgrounds. There were rumours I'm not sure how I came by that she was abused by her father who was a terrible drunk. If it wasn't outright abuse there was certainly something psychologically amiss in that family. Natalie had a little sister called Jessica, who could just about speak enough swear words to curse her father. "Fuck you" has never sounded quite so terrifying as when spoken by a four year old to her father with all the withering hate of a fully-fledged, scorned woman. Poor Natalie and her fiery little sister, I wonder if they still rage, privately. They seemed so muted and hunched when I last saw them, I couldn't imagine them having anything more to say.