This Darkness Mine Read online

  Bony king keeps on walking. His eyes are beads, flash-frozen cryogenes. Each one a galaxy in abeyance, possibility in checkmate, arctic temperatures keeping the future at bay. Black circles form under his eyes. When he closes those long frosty fingers on his heart, he will be gone.

  We will be gone too.

  The young pretties squirm on glistening ends. Tongues stick out of every place, licking at the air for salt and nourishment. The mouths are beautiful, lush with Botox, eyes clear as wind-screens. A California midsummer glaze. Fall asleep in the grass and wait for the night’s blankets to settle, breathe it in like the Prozac powders they crumble into your milkshakes. Soft warm feeling of the thick dairy buttermilk, chilled to sperm flavour.

  "Can I have some more please, sir?"

  Dreams die at night. Too long begging on the streets wears them out, begging for someone to take them on, give them a home. A dream is nothing without someone to dream it into being, a dream is in danger of becoming a nightmare if it is abandoned, left unnourished. So there they are, clinging to your shoes, fluttering around your feet, mistaken for scraps of paper and discarded plastic bags, we kick them away.

  The nightmares don't beg on the streets. They have so many homes to go to. We readily accept them as old friends, invite them into our loving warm homes in the hope that they'll make them turn cold. Fimbulwinter settles in where the nightmares roam, in the crumbling hollow eyes of destitute housing, in the bloodstained mattresses of immigrant hostels, in hearts that have all the warmth of a calcified black turd. They leave a faecal odour to hang in the air, invisible and heavily breathed in, nightmares get spread around. The vain hope that misery shared relieves itself withers and dies.

  There are too many nightmares.

  I dreamed a dream once. Young and innocent, spun from golden threads. Thinking on it now, I had not realised how long ago I left it behind. How many nightmares and other attendant kinds of unpleasantness had taken its place? How unlike me, I think. But then how am I like me? Who or what is like me if I am not? I realise the notion is ridiculous. I am like me, no-one else in the world is.

  What is gone is gone.

  From such a state, I have moved on.

  For better, for worse.

  Not richer, much poorer.

  Story I heard at the water cooler #1

  The terrorists storm the cockpit of the plane. McDonald's grease-bags over their heads with eyeholes cut in the paper. The eyes in there are as processed as burger meat. The sub-machine guns jab-jab at the ribs of the pilot and co-pilot. The heads fall off, the peg-stumps of store window dummies are revealed, cracked and pock-marked with alabaster paint crumbs, the wooden hands are sellotaped to the joysticks.

  The plane shrieks, starting its dive.

  The terrorists shriek in tune with the engines and the passengers.

  They run back into the plane, spraying bullets into everyone. Men, women, children and hostesses, bodies sag and crumple, tissue-soft, soundless, not a drop of blood is spilled. Wood shavings and sawdust crunch underfoot, they find a reel-to-reel tape-recorder. Stop-start-stop. It is playing a sampled loop of horror movie screams.

  The plane is full of dummies and glass-eyed puppets.

  It was all a lie, not as it should be, not the revenge they wanted to claim.

  Bullet-laden screams to Allah! pierce the fuselage. The plane weaves and tumbles, making contact, it dissolves, blooming into flame, scattering hot pollen of scorched debris and charred torso. A dummy falls to earth, is caught on camera, mistaken for a man, the hunt is on for his remains but nothing remains, nothing is found.

  A burning rain falls on a city, burning the date into memory.

  Nothing will be the same, not ever again.

  Change the channel, there must be something else on.

  I tried to escape the city last night but couldn't do it.

  The motorway is melting down. Liquid essence of chaos emeralds and midnight drives. When the orange sodium glare is a balm to sleeping children, generating a tarmac and asphalt world. Outside of which wriggle and writhe the shadows of the static and the still, life goes by at speed here, as it should. The miles creep away ahead, dissolving into a dulled electric distance, it is an umbra-born of the things that live behind the sun. They came to earth and made the motorways their own, snaking grey acres chewing the arable into wastelands of cracked slab and cigarette butt stains, words crawl over upright shelter walls. Spray-paint smears declaiming incantations of industrial twilight, piss-teeth streaks in blotches of disco purple and terrible green spotted with a bubonic black.

  He has no face or body to recognise, only those gnashing beggar teeth. Brown creases of rot, enamel twists and calcium flakes show through his gnawed lips, behind them lurks Blackbeard's tongue. This is a different breed of pirate, a roadside wayfarer, the hitchhiker you wish you'd left behind, him with his soft cheesy breath fogging up the inside of your car. The heater breaks and the car goes cold, interior frost bites your fingers, his piss-teeth bite you open, eat you raw. He'll be along the way, somewhere, tattered cloth hands, overcoat rape. No, I cannot escape here by road.

  The air smells of Kosovo.

  So many colours in the world and every one of them an ugly sin. Relapse was inevitable, the cure only lasts as long as a woman’s heart. I’ve held one in my hands, for a while, small and hot and pounding so very, very fast. They wither too quickly, leave us behind to turn to stone, granite chrysalis in this cold arbour, vines growing around the feet, burrowing in as the warmer juices run out.

  She’s gone long before the bed has gone cold around you.

  Another day in the office. My mouth tastes of hot ink and burnt plastic. Dizzy sickness lollops its way around my brain, bright spots burst before my eyes as I try and concentrate on the creepy-crawl of the red numbers.

  My eyes flicker, dirty picture arcades, sepia and wet, open their anterior doors, puckering to suck me into their trembling guts. Somewhere, an audience of shudders nudge and giggle amongst themselves. Then, they go quiet, pink twanging chords are plucked out on nervous strings, this death-world pitches and spins around me, making me throw up a yellow dangling string. Catching at it with my fingers, I tug on it, feeling barbs snag inside me. The audience mutters to itself, shifting its dulling posterior, slapping out its many cunts and cocks, nursing them with double-knuckled thumbs to pass the time. Blood wheedles its way out through my grinding lips, I pull again at the yellow string, its raw fibres dragging, back and forth, across the tartar-softened undersides of my teeth.

  This isn’t going well.

  I let the string go.

  With a snap, it flicks back inside me, spitting a little stomach acid into my eye, a mocking gesture, the audience snickers and breaks wind violently.

  Time to go.

  Unformed ... wet yellow ... membrane wings ... dragging over the asphalt grain ... snapping the spinal exhibit ... sneering sadistics with big hands ... black stone ... zonies close in on us ... crowds all left ... look elsewhere ... hide safe and well ... punctures run in the embryo jelly ... gentle syringe ... spiking the body count ... placing y’best bet besty ... shrivel too ... evaporate into plastic smoke ... wash ashore on some other host-forsaken chemical beach ...

  Overflowing landfill site. Dumping ground for baggage, emotional and otherwise. The diggers stand tall, rusted dinosaurs not able to dig down deep no more. The wires hang from uncrowned trees. Autumn’s passed, we’re into winter. Heads down, in burial hoods, the workers march on by, ungloved hands shaking from low temperature bites. Warm home to bed and sex and wife. The ground is still, so desolate. No surprises here to see, except for the car that’s stalled nearby. The overweight man inside can’t take much more. He is crying, knowing no way to stop. He’s heaving on a length of rubber piping. The engine’s not stalled, it’s hot and running. Window glass goes from clear to mist to fog, soon comes a darkness, a carbon shroud for him. Such a pretty place, this desolation, with its diggers, dead land and suicide. There are no trees he
re from which he could go hanging, swinging in a wind that cries and cries.

  Wet ride coasting on the outer limits. Dipping into the cool of the twilight zone. Do in the spectrums of night galleries spinning overhead. Well ready for what comes next. Foam cascades of ashes and ember rabies splatter the vertigo-veins of his shaft. Pumping in and out. Hot and hard. Scar nebulas are rising into horizons. Out of the whirling dim. The burned black eye. Haloed with night-wounds and junkie-dust.

  Shooting gallery punks grease their hair with green spit. Taking aim.

  This gathering of shadows and deliverance is for you. Gunshot blue meat settles in the hole. Charred pieces crumble through. Scattering cooked blood grains to the wind. She’s at your side. Her fingers in there with the bullet. Working it deeper. Making sure you’re well dead. Long gone silver.

  Slower and slower flow the browns and the blues. Suns set, a million vanilla pods rain down and burst. Dry, you could murder a drink – but she murders you too cold before you do.

  The office walls are the colour of pale protein today. Everyone’s in convulsions, well-hidden, wiping brows and tapping fingers. Readjusting collars and tugging at white-light bracelets, soundless systems of stress and grief show themselves, braille pimples nestling in cleavage, protoplasma gathering in custard flecks, edging lips shapely, shapeless and thin. The Redundancy Packages have arrived.

  They’re in Reception.

  Sweaty gelignite, brown-taped shut, awaiting collection. No-one volunteers. No-one wants to go down there and see if their name is on one of them.

  Someone, not one of us, has already been claimed.

  It’s a sad apocryphal tale. He was an agency temp, he didn’t know what he was doing, communication breakdown, too much static, the Greenhouse Effect air stops words carrying, becoming clear.

  He didn’t hear that there is One Rule when it comes to Redundancy Packages.

  You handle your own. No-one else touches it.

  The Package does not care if it gets things wrong so we have to be right.

  Everyone knows the One Rule.

  Except, sadly, for the temps.

  Youth and efficiency are expendable. He’s not the first one to be snacked on by a Package and he won’t be the last to have the marrow corn-holed from his breaking bones. There’ll be more whose cells will scream like decompressing space chambers, dying with the coda of an unceremonious belch. No-one ever sees it happen. It always happens when our backs are turned but, when we look back at where our colleague once sat or stood, there’s nothing left but the open Package. Whatever is in there, it eats everything you are. Heart, body, soul and credit history. No trace is left and the memory soon fades.

  The Packages sit in Reception. Hissing, burping, peeling boxes. Occasionally, rustling, overtaken by jumping fits as evening draws in.

  No-one has been near them and this is pissing them off.

  They are here for a reason, a purpose.

  People are not needed here.

  Need to make them redundant.

  Ex-employees.

  Ex-people.

  Ex-mortis.

  The boxes stutter and bang about, shrieking cardboard zoos. Tantrum fluid trails running down their sides, making the uneven strips of brown tape lose their adhesion, come unstuck.

  The Receptionists run for it, for the sliding doors. The boxes burst, splattering creamy sewage everywhere. It goes slipping down over everything, big teeth eat through what’s left alive, spasm spurts, ejaculation screams. Bleeding bareness melts away, evaporating and the hard white lips of air conditioning slits drink it all in. Reception stands empty but for the blood-soaked shoes of the Receptionists.

  They didn't make it.

  We can all go home now.

  The season we're in is one of dying. The sere leaves hanging out the office window turn brown, yellow and gold. Their edges are curling, vegetable skins wrinkling into resemblances of witches and warlocks. The wind strikes and snatches them away and I feel like crying. Winter is less a season, more a wilderness between autumn and spring. A fallow emptiness peopled by vague impressions of blood loss and arcane patterns painted on glass in the silvers of cold. Autumn is the disillusion before death, the wearing away of hope, that’s why America calls it the Fall. It is in the rhythm of the seasons and winter is where it all will come to an end. And it's only at this time of year that I can sleep well, well, a bit better.

  I’m in a limestone square laid out beneath swirling gasoline streaks of sky. The air is thick with the swamp fever tang of an oncoming storm. I need shelter and I need it now but there are no doors, windows or recessed spaces that I can see, only this agoraphobic desolation that is both utter and complete. Sheer walls that lead to gravity-bending cones of leaden density. Opaque wings rearing from what should be diagrams of architecture but instead are architecture itself. The blandness, the flatness disturbs the blind worm gnawing at the root of my soul. The cluttered warehouse of my consciousness upheaves, tumbling its contents, sending them to scatter and then crawl, wounded, into corrugated corners.

  There, I feel them suckling at the holes that harm done.

  So many years of my life spent seeking the exit, blindly fumbling my way through auditorium space, stumbling on seats, barking my shins, dodging and diving, getting myself away from the ever-vigilant penlights of the usherettes and here I am, wanting to get inside.

  The red numbers, in my head, bleed heavily, scarring the sky, wounding the city. People walk on by with heavy red bursts for eyes, cauterising, rising in scabrous relief, I see the calculations spell themselves out as I walk into work this morning. The sums that I’ve corrected are there. The erroneous financial records I’ve solved. We are long past the age of blood-soiled altars, cowled monk robes and vaulted arcane chambers. The tools are different these days and so much more cosmically hellish they make the streets bubble with cancerous boils that spit and cough like perverted old hags.

  It is called the Exit Interview.

  That is what is happening to me right now.

  You can see the desire to inflict, abuse and dismember crawling about underneath the settled, somnambulant faces of the Panel before me, the way their eyes don’t meet with mine, don’t understand me, not wanting to.

  Outside, sick ecstasy washes through the building as the tannoy announces that I will be going soon. Feet beat out a tattoo under desks, hands rattle fingers and bang soft fists on the wooden surfaces, caught up in the disgusting undercurrent of cruel emotions, I join in even though the frenzy is in my name.

  So many believing the need for gossip, continual bombastic and substanceless chatter and now I know that I am one of them. I have to be. You have to be. We all have to be. That is what stills us in the end, not apathy, not despair, but knowledge of how alone we are. We have dug in so deep that we are choking on our own shit.

  So, we sit and we work as you do, listless and numb.

  Spending holidays in rooms where the curtains remain drawn and the beds hot from consistent hours of unsatisfying sleep, marking time through life’s tedious hours. The vault of the sky is the singular gaol enclosing us and we dwell in our smaller gaols, our homes, our offices, our jobs, to give ourselves the illusion of there being space outside. There are more and more of us, these days. Dark, echoing caskets for the buried wights of our unlived lives - did they not say it would come to this before? Why did our grandparents and our parents not see? Why did they not forewarn and forearm us?

  Because they got to them first.

  We are the empty, waiting to become sculptures of ruin upon which black, winding vines will blossom and grow to choke this heartless world to death.

  Straight shot into the muscle tissue. Steal a grin from a sweet dead girl when the spasmic writhing starts. Like sex but without the rush. Like masturbation but without the melancholy hurt. Sexual functions regress to the unknowing before-birth brands. Where fingers find their way without the glossy lips and tanned over-big breasts as impetus. The sexual asexuality of our lost su
gared childhoods. Busted knees. Nettle stings. Scabs and sticking plasters. All our favourite things.

  The red numbers are like tuberculosis, you see. They come to me in trickles, early in the morning, after which there is a deluge, a scarlet gush, mosaic tsunami. I feel the need to disperse them through torn fabric, the limpid, nestling eyeball in an arsehole that winks through the pussy film of its knotty eyelid. Lex talionis spatters the walls of worship with blood and guts. Intestines droop in sad, silty heaps. Gouge and tear, kick and fight. For a few gold teeth, willingly die. Capillaries burst. Cholesterol veins go into strain. Freezing, starving, so cold on the inside despite this sweaty, feral rutting heat. I am at the heart of a massacre crawling through a dripping, murdered forest. The eyes of which wink at me. Their lipless mouths drawn back over blood-runny gums. Skin is tight on the bone. Tongues loll, sore with death and laughter. The vicar is being raped in the aisle by the boys of the choir. Jesus Christ hangs over it all with gore speckling his brow, his palms and his toes. The bronzed head creaks and rears around to look at me.

  I look back at Christ and smile, for we are brothers insane and loving it.

  It closes in on me, the black fog of the jobless, an envelope of struggling, shrieking things with puckered eyes that tell me I failed. It’s like fighting bees and wasps, they crush and crunch in wet clusters underfoot. My balance goes and so does my breakfast, running down my shirt, milkfish phlegm staining deeper than it should.

  I have to stop, come to a halt.

  My orders have changed.

  There has been a disordering of the day.

  Without a job, what am I to do?

  I count myself lucky that I was not consumed by a Redundancy Package after the Exit Interview. This is no longer the beginning, the morning, the start of it all. This is actually the end, look at that sky, drunken wine pouring out of cut clouds across the rooftops of the darkening buildings. How the shadows move in a different way, going back on themselves, swallowing in great seismic gulps, taking the light back to terrible places where hollow cracked temple bells ring.