Darker.

You stare and stare.
And the page gets no darker and you think back on the week, a brother who had a touch and go experience, a friend traumatised by a breakup, other friends battling cancer. And you try to be there or at least be around as a brother, as a friend, and you're somehow haunted by the possibility that you were never particularly skilled at either.
You think on remembrance. On eleventh hours of eleventh days of eleventh months
and the page gets no darker
and in particular you recall the interview with a 3 RAR soldier who spoke of the terror of the Battle of the Apple Orchard in late 1950. He described with pride how it is now cited as a classical tactical fallback in military manuals across the world. He described adventures that swung wildly between visceral horror and insane hilarity and how he never wanted to hear another chime or whistle or bell again because that was how the northern armies (foolishly) announced every major assault so even in the dark, all you had to do was point and shoot at the clamour, with devastating and senseless effect.
He goes on to describe a successful counterattack on a ridge because the Chinese and North Korean troops had overrun their position in the caves the UN Allies had settled into. The counterattack was not part of any grand strategy, it was simply because the RAR troops were royally fucked off as they'd spent so long setting up their still to make the shit Core 10 (as the Yanks liked to call it because they seemed to have trouble pronouncing the name Corio, where this horror with a whiskey label had been churned out to poison the masses for decades) somehow potable.
And we laughed then as I looked into the man's eyes and he was there in a happy moment in hell.
And I foolishly asked, "So it wasn't all bad then?"
And the laughter vanished in the blink of an eye
and he said, "It was worse."
And for the only time in my life I understood in my own shallow and savage and stupid way how people never come back.

Masters of war.

Saturday 28 October 2017.

They couldn't have measured much over five foot apiece. The dutiful daughter with clear skin and haunted eyes holding the unsteady hands of her mother, well into her seventies.
Stopping every few yards to allow the older woman to catch her breath. They didn't talk, they didn't smile.
The mother sat down a couple of chairs down and swatted feebly at her hair as if to brush the nuisance sunlight away. She indicated to her daughter who knelt on the footpath to rub her mother's calf.
Presently the mother rose and they continued their promenade.
A tall woman in her late 50s ordered a pot of tea further down. Her sunglasses dark so I had no way to determine where or upon whom she was casting her calm gaze.
The young waitress helped me make up my mind because the nuisance sunlight kept driving any clear thoughts out of my head.
A tall man with a cane, his left foot twisted inwards, ushered his large family into the cafe as a couple sat at the table next to mine.
This couple looked handsome, in spite of her lime green coat, in spite of his ornate Tyrolean hat with its ridiculous feather.
A cappuccino for me and ummm. She points to a cake in the window. All of this to the waitress.
The old man gently waves his hand. He's alright, thanks.
I told you, I come here often, Alex. I was here the other day. No, Monday. No. What day is it?
I don't know either in this moment, in this sunshine.
Her sunglasses are enormous and hair is jet black and she looks confident, as does he with the tufts of white hair screaming out from beneath the hat.
I'm not sure what else they have to do with the house but it's looking good, you must admit. I'm starting to feel better about it all.
The waitress brings out a flan, all custard and gelatine and colourful fruit, and coffee.
I realise I'm smiling and I don't know why.
The woman has fast reflexes. Her hand darts out and grabs the waitress's hand.
We're all slightly alarmed, I realise.
These. Such lovely nails.
The young waitress: Are you Italian? It's just that I'm Italian and that's the first thing we say every single time.
Can you tell me how you do these?
They last for about six weeks and then you can peel them off.
What are you laughing at?
This last to me.
I'm not.
I am,
I stammer.
I'm laughing at this -
This very special, very ordinary moment.
The old woman laughs.
The best kinds of moments, she says.
How could I even try to make them understand that I was drunk from it all before the nuisance sun went away again.


This perfect day.

Is the water rising or am I sinking?

There was a man with his kombi and this was in another lifetime,
as with every other laboured and tedious imagining of mine.
The man appeared kind as he stopped and gave me a lift in a snow-littered place called Enfield in a country called England
and I thanked him as I hopped in without paying too much attention to his face (which could have been any face in any country) or anything else about him in the pre-dawn darkness because I was tired and I couldn't sleep in the bus shelter because it let the sleet through and I was hungry but I had tobacco.
As we set off towards Chelmsford, I asked if he minded if I smoked because like everyone back then, we all had to smoke in cars because it was law. Or should have been, according to anyone who smoked and he said no, so I started to roll up, thinking he meant what he didn't mean at all.
And the next no had all the exclamation of a sharp razor blade.
I mumbled an apology because I was tired and so on and so forth as he said, "The tobacco industry is one of the many hands of world Jewry."
And I nodded lamely because a) he was hissing into my deaf ear and, b) I was etc. etc. etc.
"Did you hear what I said?"
"No, sorry. So I can't smoke?"
"I told you you can't. It's the Rothschilds. The bastards are behind it all. American money. How else do you account for Israel?!"
I was about to respond that I couldn't account for myself 6 hours ago let alone a country a thousand miles away that I knew nothing about.
But it was his kombi and I was stupid for warmth and sleetlessness.
He leaned across and flung open the glovebox and this, to be completely honest, scared the shit out of me.
Guns flashed through my mind.
Knives.
Scissors.
Anything that involved my blood or my lost and lifeless corpse.
But it was a tightly bunched clump of folded A4 sheets with what appeared to be badly mimeoed text and pictures.
All of it a trash testimony to antisemitism courtesy of this cockney kombi driver and his desert-headed, cousin-fucking cohorts kicking heads and soup tins back around the estates.
He was smashing sheet after sheet into my chest as I tried to make sure I lost none of the tobacco that I was still trying to push back into my pouch.
Our time'll come and we'll kill and blah blah fucking blah.
Hate, you say? You, you dumb cunt, you don't know what hate means!
Kike this and Jew that and
god
knows
what
else.
That glovebox appeared to be a bottomless pit of tacky pamphlets and his NHS mouth seemed to be an endless spewhole of bone-headed vitriol.
So we settled into a routine - him spouting to his well and truly captive audience and me internalising my newfound mantra of, "Who poisoned you?! Who poisoned you?! Who poisoned you?!"
with the occasional interjection of, "This is my stop up ahead," and "That was my stop back there".
And, "I'LL LET YOU OUT WHEN I'M FUCKING READY!"
And the flat countryside rolled past and this would be my last day on earth and his ugly face would be the last human thing I ever saw and
suddenly he stopped.
Nowhere. Ploughed, sodden fields. No houses.
Just
nowhere.
___

"Get out."
I did. I seemed to have heard him just fine first time around on this final occasion.
He didn't even lean across to shut the door. He just took off trusting impetus to do the job.
And the last thing I saw were the stickers on the tailgate.
I'm a boy scout leader.
St George.
Proud to be English
Ah well, you know this story already. I've told it to you in a million not so subtle variations.
...
But it all brings me to today and the comments on the news reports as the biggest mass shooting in America unfolds for the entire horrified world to see.
Murderous fools wrapped in their unshaken, despotic convictions defending and playing apologist for other murderous fools and we - the normal and the broken alike - go on holding our breath and waiting.
For nothing to happen once again.
With every beat of my fear-filled heart, I wish it weren't so
but the mantra in my head hasn't changed a solitary syllable.

Weeping.

This strange attraction.

  
  Like everyone else, these past few years have seen me acting increasingly wierded out about Ophiocordyceps unilateralis - or as we all love to call it, the zombie fungus. We've pored over the pictures of ants and spiders after this insidious little sweetheart has wended its way through the viscera and nervous system of its unfortunate host. We've all made the right eeeurgh-type sounds and had those little alarm bells going off all over our limbic systems and corpus callosums, sending a macabre frisson to every fiber of our beings.

  And I suspect that for the first time we are starting to appreciate God and how and why he died.  By dint of necessity, we forcibly ripped the veil of anthropomorphism away from our collective face and gingerly placed what was left under the microscope.  Us humans get the toxoplasmosis gondii from our pet cats and everything else down the pyramid gets entomopathogens such as ophiocordyceps unilateralis.  It reminds me of Julian Barrett's performance in Garth Merenghi's Darkplace (see link below).  It's just so absurd to me that we have the posturing of autarchs and demagogues around the world destroying by seemingly fair means or foul all the good that democracy has brought us and I, like most others, appear only to be able to sit around gnashing my teeth and renting my garments.

  But the real threat is not the Scylla of the flag wavers and the fascists, the patriots and jingoists, the zealots and the firebrands, the tinpot would-be world leaders such as Trump and Putin and Kim Jong Un and Netanyahu and May and Assad and Maduro and... The well seems bottomless at the moment, doesn't it?  No. The threat that increasingly gets me thinking, is the Charybdis of Ophy and its entomo family. And lover, I ain't talkin' about what awaits us in the winter years when our infirm bones cannae move so very fast.  

  I'm talking about my personal morbid fear that perhaps we've already been compelled by these microscopic horrors since before we climbed out of the slimy pond. Perhaps, in my whimsical musings, we'll one day discover the answer to the eternal accusation, "Why do you always have to act like a...?!".  For many, a shocking epiphany that we are of the world, not on it. 

  I'm going to start intravenous infusions of spirulina and filtered warm water immediately because I, for one, do not relish the prospect of our fungal overlord invasion, in order to get my symbiotic thrills.


  In any case, I bet you won't look at mushrooms quite the same way anymore.

The Lord moves in mysterious ways...

Sword.

We couldn't have been six or seven and we had to stay awake through scripture lessons with Mister Towel.
I kid you not. That was his name.  Or was it Trowel?  Either way it was a silly name and it matched his bald Ibis-wrinkle pate and neck to perfection.
And none of us could follow his quavering, vehement logic so instead we all copied Greg Quigley's lead and cut our double ended erasers in half and drew the outlines of a sports car along the side of the half-rubbers.
Towel/Trowel was lost in his rapture.  He never much noticed all the kids pushing eraser hotrods all over their desks - the more adventurous ones even making soft, farty exhaust notes through their lips.
Looking back, it may just have been an age thing. If I had to take a stab at it now, I'd say he was approaching seventy and his high, reedy voice was just starting to lose any sonorous command it may have once held.
Now he was just an old scripture teacher who talked about moneylenders ("Is that like the Bank of New South Wales, Sir? Did they need bank books, Mister Towel/Trowel?") or the parting of the Red Sea ("Can we try that next time our parents take us up to Woy Woy, Sir?  Do you need a special tool or weapon like a ray gun?").
Week in, week out he would talk about this desiccated, dusty world, seemingly dreamed up by an individual or individuals in the throes of heat stroke or delirium long since cured by the new sciences, and read a book out loud about the people who inhabited it. But we were a lost cause before it began.
We were the age of plastic, Mattel, Milton Bradley, Mousetrap, Green Ghost (those radium plastic ghosts!), The Herculoids, Action Man, Big Jim, Barbie, Matchbox, Airfix, Hotwheels, Gilligan's Island, The Champions, George Reeves as Superman, Cool McCool (My pop the cop), The Phantom Agents, SSP racers, Get Smart, The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, Friday Night Creature Feature, Scanlens Bubblegum Cards, Columbines and triple bill matinees on Saturday, Tommy Leonetti, White City Saturday Roller Derby, Castlereigh Drag Strip for those with older brothers and sisters, 45s on scratchy portable record players ("Double trouble, I don't know what to do...").
And yes, cigarettes.
I forget who it was but someone suggested you stare at the evenly perforated classroom ceiling until your eyes crossed just a little bit. Et voila! A 3D ceiling would appear as an endless array of small holes started to overlap and swirl around each other. What passed for magic eye pictures in the late nineteen sixties.
And then one day everything changed.
Greg Quigley had somehow managed to separate the chassis from the body on his Red Line Paddy Wagon.  Not only that, he'd somehow acquired a pair of sidecutter pliers and cut the axles on the Hotwheels car with perfect equidistance.
And Towel/Trowel was softly speaking with his maker and hero who always seemed to hover a good two or three feet above his eye line (and Mister Towel/Trowel was nothing, if not very tall) and passionately inveigling us to join in a rousing verse or two of 'Draw your sword!  Raise your sword!  In the name of our great Lord!...".  What person or institution in their right mind would inculcate children of six to sing battle hymns so filled with blood and misery?  We are never so near the Crusades as when we're too young to understand them.
And Towel/Trowel hardly noticed the children barely moving their lips.
All eyes were now on Greg Quigley as, with immense concentration, he gently pressed the red lined Hotwheels axles into what, just yesterday, had been but a poor facsimile of a beautiful rubber sports car.
As the fourth wheel was pressed in with a showman's flourish, Greg smiled a wry smile and nodded, more to himself than anyone in that room.
He set it down for the first cautious test run across the desk and we realised - every last one of us -  with a slow, dawning clarity that a new age of rapture was upon us.

Hot Wheels.

The other woman.

Hello, is this Mr Connell?
Holy hell!  It's YOU!
I'm sorry, sir?
I've been waiting for your call, you glorious, glorious slice of womanhood, you.
(At this stage, I thought the pause - the distance between us - was too dramatic, and don't get me started about the babel in the background, but finally she spoke.)
Yes sir. I'm ringing you about the automobile accident you were involved in last year -
- Oh come on.
What, sir?!
Come on! Let's not pretend.  What are you wearing?
... I'm sorry, sir?!
You must be so beautiful.  Are you wearing silk? I'm not normally a fan but -
- Yes sir. You were in a bad accident last year and you have to pay -
- Oh look. I don't give a good god fuck if you ARE a scam caller. What coloured bra, woman! What coloured undies?! Is there filigree in the -
Sir. You need to send us -
- I need you, babe. (At this point I start breathing overly heavy because a) I'm not sure how good the connection is at their end, and b) I don't want them to think I'm an asthmatic.)
...
I need to know, lover, are you waxed?
JUST GO, SIR!
<click>
And she is gone.
Too easily they waltz in and out of my life, these ones.
Too damned easily, I sigh to myself.

Je t'aime, mais vraiment moi non plus!

To the girl who worked at Franklins.

I used to sing a popular song.
Not well, not badly
but I'd sing it a lot around the house and when I got to the refrain you would join in, slightly out of sync.
Like a poorly rehearsed music hall routine.
But you would sing those eight or nine words with such laughter, such light in your eyes.
And my fucking god it made me smile to see you smile.
Between the substantial clouds
the paranoid silences
the tears welling but never falling
the laconic accusations - questions for which I had no answers, not that you were after any.
We crippled each other;
You with my levity
Me with your clinging philosophies.
But that's what young people do.
And if they survive the ordeal
They grow old and stupid and needlessly proud.
Maybe like you.
Definitely like me.