Deadheading - Friday Flash

This is one of the pieces I'll be reading next Wednesday at the OCADA gallery in Oxford. It's quite intense but is ideal for performance.

He depressed the rocker switch. The purring susurration started up. The hair clippers weren't in his hand though. It was too soon for that.

Apprehension of the incipient thrum always set his mind a throb. So he was customarily compelled to leave them on the floor, while he modulated his own quickening pulse.

Yet the welter of tension was perennially italicised for him.

The metal tines were palpating the slip-on plastic ones of the number 1 cut. Like a humming bird's wings, the metal couldn't be seen moving. Only the clumsy lurches of the thicker prongs cresting them.

The electric cable was twitching with pent up flux.

The body of the clippers, where the electric motor was housed, was percussing the pile of the carpet like a bull pawing the ground before a charge. And in turn the carpet was revving up the undercarriage, bearing it atop the tips of its fibres, like worker ants.

The tipping point, when friction’s stranglehold is overcome, sees the cable snake and flare like a cracked bullwhip and wrenches the clippers on to their side. The timbre of the tines changes, more like an angry hive now. He picks up the trimmed shears.

His breathing hastens. No matter how much he composes and prepares, he cannot override the electrical trigger in his brain. Something to do with the resonance of physical memory. It remembers amplitudes of current. Any electrical device serves for jump leads to accelerate his heart.

He crouches there, holding the clippers in the palm of his hand, unbuttressed by any curled over fingers. He has to stay as even as possible, until he brings down the stroke of his respiration once again. The clippers oscillating against the skin of his hand. Bench pressing his flesh. He's aligning for their periodicity, so he can fall in behind their metronomic beat. The problem being his touch centres are calibrating one frequency, while his ears are secondary reporting with a fractional lag.

Finally he takes the plunge and brings the snapping piranha teeth to the sheath of his head. He has no need for a mirror, since his free hand pats down for the braille glyphs beneath. The sunken foundations of Inca temples buried beneath hair vines and knotted canopy.

The clippers carry on the deforestation apace. Threshing a bristly stubble over the entirety of his furrowed brow. Harvesting secrets.

The hand runs over the contours of his cranium. Phrenology of the self. His fingers came away smeared with the follicle cull.

Phase one complete, he extinguishes the clippers and rips the plastic gradation accessory from its prow. He rubs the tips of his fingers over the bared steel serrations. He stares at the flesh as it puffs itself back up to reclaim the pressure indentations from the blades. He rubs his thumb against the callused pad of the index finger. The blistered vesicle there never once yielded before the press of the steel. He exhales.

Laying the clippers back on the floor, once again he summons their power by tripping the seesaw switch. The surge came anew. The coiled current crescendoing, plucking at the cable like a piano hammer.

His hand hovering above the vibrato as if conducting it, he was transported back to Summer memories on the streets. With thimbleriggers, professional beggars and suitcases full of somersaulting toy dogs. Those that yapped and yapped as they built up the momentum towards a forward roll. He had always imagined it was cats that were supposed to land on their feet. That damn yapping, reverberating in his ears. Building the pressure up, tightening his pulses like a garrote. A fluffy candyfloss white Son of Sam, but a devil dog all the same. Until he took a carving knife to it, silencing it for once and for all. Heartening to report dogs don't possess nine lives. At his hearing - now there's an apt word - they conceded his argument that all human creativity stems from using objects in new ways, ways that they were not intended for originally. But where he came a cropper, where they snagged him, was when he couldn't remember whether it was blood or hair stuffing that came out of the dog that he ran metal through. That was the bone of contention, how he couldn't quite place the interiority of another of God's creatures. So much so, apparently it made him a potential danger to all bodies.

He scooped up the clippers and began once again to range over his cropped head. With so little pappus to intercede between steel and flesh, the snarling blades bit time and again. He didn't flinch.

The livid veins were welted to the skin from their buffeting. Red and blue like a road map. But the terrain of his skull had been a scorched earth once before. Threaded with desiccated worm casts and that was the point.

The clippers had harrowed their acreage and he swiftly shut the current off to end phase two. His hand was still vibrating a full seventeen seconds after the power had died.

When his hands stopped shaking, he grabbed hold of the legs of the full-length mirror and dragged it through the pile of the carpet so as to face himself. He pressed his face right into the meniscus of the glass, and his bloodshot eyes started surveying the cuts and nicks. The scabs and the scars.

Some were freshly minted, most were older vestiges. The exterior of his skull resembled a brain scan signalling hot areas of neural activity. He was turned all inside out. Which was exactly the point.

He brought his fingers up to each of the clotted mounds. Distending the curdled skin at the foothills, trying to determine the precise aspect. The newer ones leached viscous blood onto his fingers. The older magma chambers threatened recrudescence under the seismic tremors of his manipulations.

But each blood red cameo was carved in relief. None offered the worm hole of intaglio, that which he was chasing after. Those nodes where they had affixed the electrodes. The inlets for the cabling, the electrical conduits, through which they had convulsed electric charge into his resistant brain. To drive away the stormy black clouds they claimed resided there, forecasting his gloomy outlook.

They had wanted to let the sunshine back in, even if it was an artificial source of illumination. A wan light which just leaves him numb and huddled around himself.

Of course, now they deny having ever done anything to him at all. No invasive treatment perpetrated. But he will keep sweeping the brush clear and he will pinpoint the evidence. Of the turned-in wound. Tell-tale concavity. The needle in the coagulated haystacks pockmarking his barren head.

He will bring them to account. He knows - and they must come to know - every time he flicks a switch, his whole nervous system resonates to the flow it engenders.

He moves to pick up the can of shaving foam and the triple bladed razor. At least they didn’t have a pulse other than that imparted by his hand. Commencing phase three.

Not In My Name (2)

Then they were all gone, as if in puff of enchanted smoke, though of course it were only Mushi’s jerky exhalation of reefer as he flew out laughing his head off. I slammed door behind them and partition walls shook. Mi world were caving in. I sunk into sofa and pressed temples hard gainst mi knuckles. I knew that no matter how brutally I bevelled and no matter the pain, I wouldn’t be able to forestall onslaught. I had kept it at bay fer so long now. But then no one had been callous enough to throw it i’mi face like it were ammonia. Bi time I’d finished sobbing, my eyes would feel like they’d been burned wi’ caustic agents fer real. I prostrated ma’sen before what happy memories I could interpose. Mi sister. My beautiful, bright, sensitive sister. Too sensitive for her own good. Too sensitive for this world that’s fer sure.


There were no sign of trouble in her childhood. She would indulge me, her little ankle-biting, infant brother trailing after her all time, wanting to be part of her wonderfully expanded childhood world of wonder. How she would hoick me up on to her own undersized lap and patiently meet all of my inquiries as to physical world’s workings. It were magical, as she seemed to have all answers I could possibly muster up questions for. Even more than that boardgame, one where model robot would miraculously point at correct answers to quiz questions wi’its wobbling metal pointer, which we could never seem to get to work properly. But there were no faults with Sis. If she weren’t drawing on actual knowledge, she used her free flowing imagination to stitch together seamless universe fer me. Endlessly forebearing, she even saw good in our Father, who never seemed to be around house, as he were off all hours little empire building.


It were only when she reached that developmental stage, of turning out to face wider world beyond domestic one, that things started to unravel. Then lurid expanse of her imagination rounded on her like ebola virus. And devoured her. She would watch TV news and internalise all its horrors. She would replay them endlessly on projector of her memory. Images of the bereaved and the bereft. People in shock, hands clutching sides of their heads, or clamped across their mouths, or clasped over their eyes, as they confront devestation of a bomb blast or military strike. She’d always viewed proverb of three wise monkeys as a quaint, whimsical homily. Now here were this humanity, unwittingly aping them, yet only evil had befallen. They didn’t have first idea what it were all for and neither did she. No longer could she explain these horrors away, to me or to herself. I would just move on elsewhere in house to potter, but she stayed rooted in place, trying to feed her endless craving fer understanding. Much less could she plot her place and future role of assistance in these events. She cracked, whereupon each detonation, each salvo, widened fissure and made her jump out of her skin as if she were experiencing shelling at first hand. All wind knocked out of her, lungs compressed by a grievous weight, barely able to raise themselves and muster breath. No one can tek that amount of punishment and anguish and so she capitulated. Took to her bed, not like John and Yoko fer Peace, but because it were sole safe haven from conflict all around. A rest from all the unrest in world. No lulls, truces, cease-fires or peace accords fer her though. More like hibernation wi’out end. Her firing neurons were decommissioned. Resonating tinnitus coopted her brainwaves. A permanent twilight colonised her grey matter.


Mam tended her. To best a’ her ability, initially lacking diagnosis, then experience from which to operate. When she couldn’t rouse her from bed, she would occasionally lose it big style and yell and scream. Try and lug her out but she were a dead weight, wi’Mam being too tiny to lift much of anything at all. Sis were carted off to psychiatrists. She were put on drug regimes. An external sovereign thrown into ferment, when already subjected to whole host of private tyrannies and feeble insurgencies. Her beautiful dark hair which she had taken to beading before her collapse, turned grey-white i’her twenties. Like she’d seen ghost. Or rather she had become one. Immured. I’d witnessed her turn turtle and her world shrink to diameter a’ her bed. Plain as mi nose that she were ill. But being ill, I told ma’sen, then she could also get better one day soon. Stayed blinkered right to bitter end, some ten year or so down line. Convenient, easy option that let me tek my shot at same developmental stage. Turned out ter face world, nobbut bi’ turning mi back on ‘em all in domestic realm. Like I said, got away from whole house bi burning it down. But only after we’d already interred Sis.


Wi’all mi comings and goings, I were fortunate in only ever once having misfortune of encountering sight of her ultimate zombification. Not outcome of a particularly high dosage of sedatives, rather more blunt form of voodoo. They administered ECT. Imagine that ! Attached electrodes to her temple and fried her brains. Elective torture on NHS. Like neuroscience had acquired no more sophisticated level of analysis, than positing that depression were caused by little black clouds inside her head, which they could blast into oblivion bi'lectrical charge. Her internal fuse box had overloaded and just needed some jump leads to reset her. Yeah, that’ll work. Further bombard someone already under constant siege. Her skin were positively grey when she came round from session. Sympathetically complementing her hair. Both colour a’ ashes.


None of us foresaw end when it came. How could we have anticipated surge of energy and supreme act of will it entailed of her ? In retrospect, maybe we could have gleaned summat were up, that Sunday afternoon before. I had just surfaced ma’sen, after an all-nighter in field near Hebden Bridge. Mam were trying to rouse her as normal, chivvying her that Dad were due back from a weekender himself, albeit of business trip kind. Couldn’t she see her way clear at least to getting up and having bath ? Make herself all spruce for Father’s return. Mam entreated my help to drag her from bed. I had hold a’ shoulders, while Mam tugged at her ankles. Being as she were still lying prone, my sister couldn’t see me behind crown of her head, unless she deliberately flicked her eyes upwards. But from where I were standing poised, I could see they had wholly receded back inside their sockets. They were cowering, as were her whole tremulous body. Expression of a six year old child, a terrified one at that, were firmly furrowed across her features. Her whole body were burrowing down into mattress. She were trying not only to shrink, but wholly to disappear. Mam, who were only filled by love and concern, somehow had taken on semblance of a fierce monster, so far had my sister dissociated into a land of persecutions and living nightmares. Multi-headed, horned, taloned, fire-breathing, we’ll never know. But that’s what were etched all over tension lines in her face. All you, or anyone, can do fer someone who has retreated so far from threshold of reality, is station yourself at that line, hold it still in place and put out your arms to embrace them once they cross back over it. You can’t even help nudge them over the verge, cos there simply is no connection their side of pale. Her Shrink had made me and my mother recognise this truth. We didn’t know it that Sunday afternoon, but she had no intention of converging with that line ever again.


We all took to our beds that night, save my father who had been inexplicably delayed and held up, or holed up overnight. And of course my sister, who had never vacated hers in first place. First we knew anything were up, when Mam took a phone call from Shrink just returned from his holiday, asking why she had not brought my sister in for her first thing Monday morning session. Mam cursed herself for oversleeping, presumably laid at door of emotional drain from previous afternoon’s exertions. She went to rouse my sister but were perplexed to find her bed empty. I were woken by scream from downstairs and hurdled stairs brace at a time, only to run into my mother’s arm outstretched across lintel of hallway that led on to doorless utilities room and kitchen beyond. I rebounded like a pinball. The phone were cordless one and she still had it clutched to her nightdress, when a tiny, but insistent canvassing dragged her out of her low-level maundering. Evidently Shrink were still on line and instructed her to hang up and call ambulance. She told me I were to remain exactly in place and under no circumstances were I to set foot across portal a’ utility room, let alone kitchen it’sen. She lurched off past me, unsteady on her legs and careening into walls. Still fuzzy-headed from not exiting sleep state on mi own terms, I hadn’t really apprehended what had occurred. Think I rather innocently raised my heavy head to stare through the two sets of door frames, just ter fix point in space to clear mi fog. I came to sharpish alreet.


Kitchen chair being out of place were what registered first. Since we never congregated together as family anymore, all four chairs ought to be housed flush at table. I tracked upwards and saw this figure clothed all in white, slumped back against kitchen chair that had been fetched apart from customary cradling. Head were bowed against top one a’ shoulders and just at the confluence here, dull hue had intruded upon scorching whiteness of cloth. I don’t know if it were distancing effect of observing from two rooms away, but whole scene looked unreal. Double doorframe perspective endowed it wi’filmic quality. Nowt colours seemed quite right. The skin, what little was exposed at margins a’ fabric seemed synthetic. Whole arrangement looked like life-sized doll or waxwork, certainly not mi sister. Why had Mam told me to stay here and bear witness to this ? Her white kameez gave me impression I were waiting for ghost to fully emerge. I looked down and saw discarded tie-dyed dupatta rucked up on floor. Wi’its intensity of colours and sinuous contours alternately breasting and arching above dull floor lino, in my teeming mind it took on form of a snake about to devour figure in white perched above it. Fuck, yer really don’t want to be confronting this sort of pother on a come down.


Fortunately Mam returned to barge me out way and back into some lucidity. “The ambulance is coming. I have to ring the good Doctor back to tell him what hospital they’re taking her to.” She looked at her watch. “Oh my God, your Father will be home any time. I’m going in the ambulance. You’ll have to clean the blood up off the floor. He doesn’t know yet ... Don’t look like that at me. Just for once do something to contribute to this family will you ?” I weren’t aware of frowning, even at prospect of pressing mi nose to blood. I were just bemused why she wanted to keep appearances normal for him. How were she planning to disguise fact that their daughter’d seriously lacerated herself ? Maybe she were right and dad wouldn’t notice.


Doorbell rang and though neither of us were exactly thinking straight at this point, we both factored that as dad had keys, it were likely to be ambulance. Mam indicated she were going upstairs to dress and scuttled off. So I went to open up. Two men stood there in civvies, one reaching in to his jacket pocket and flipping agape his warrant card. “We had a report that an ambulance has been called for a knife wound.” Knife wound ? Knife wound ? How had they construed Mam’s faltering words to be that ? Did they imagine Sis to be streetwalker having been slashed by her pimp ? Or casualty of squabble between two addicts over their fix perhaps ? Had she been caught up in affray spilling over from terraces, between Leeds Whites and Sheffield Blade Runners ? 9.00 am, Monday morn, in a residential road ? Nor were it a mere bloody domestic. This weren’t a wound, it were a virtual self-decapitation. A beheading. Wait a tick, how had they got here before bleeding WYMAS ? Where were big white taxi anyroad ? All this, in the smotheringly cacophonous interstice, of a blinking away of his warrant card. “Um what ? Sorry. Yes. Yes, my sister’s tried to top hersen, by cutting her throat. We’re waiting for ambulance now”. They seemed satisfied wi’this and murmured something about “if there were anything further” before trooping off. At that moment, I hated Police more than I’ve hated anything since. How could they have got things so awry ? Why didn’t they seem to care about situation that were confronting them, if they only bothered to put their noses round door ? I closed house on them as Mam came beetling down stairs. I shook my head and she motioned me towards cupboard under stairs, where cleaning gear were kept. “Wait til they’ve moved the body before you start”. “Body ?” It were first material confirmation she’d let slip. My sister had apparently been successful in excising her tortured existence.


In what fashion too. Not far removed from ritual slaughter of animal fer meat. How steady and unflinching must her hand have been ? She tried to fully sever that head so troubled by excruciating tribulation. To snap antennae of impailing broadcasts. No by your leave as she took hers. No suicide note or any message of farewell. No elucidation, from she who used to tek utmost pains to find it fer me. No words at all, hurtful or otherwise. Self-explanatory why she had to snuff out sen. When her Shrink later called round house to offer us his professional condolences, he had temerity to advance angle that since deed took place in home, it could be interpreted as explosive rejection of her family. I didn’t think of it at time, but mere fact she chose to wait til his return from holiday and were due for an appointment, might equally have been repudiation of his methods. Words carelessly cast out, by a so-called bleedin’ clinical word specialist. Hurtful words. Words that could bring you to yer knees, as images had felled the stout cypress that were my sister. Now it’s all been stirred up again by those three cocks also dabbling cheaply wi’words, ignorant of their true magnitude. Have they ever scrubbed family member’s blood off kitchen lino ? Have they fuck ! Only way I could manage it, were to dissociate reality of what it were, plasma and pith of my sister. Same stuff as I’m made from. Now doused in a gritty rag that were once shirt off dad’s back. Then wrung back out, into plastic bucket smeared wi’god knows what household dregs, shade and consistency of factory chimney. Wha’ever grimey shit were in it and no matter how diluted bi’bilge water, couldn’t disguise carmine hue a’ her blood. Lustrous, but no longer vibrant.


Once I’d scoured away main pool, I had to peer awfully hard to detect stray drops. Fer lino were a geometric pattern, constructed of thousands of small hexagonals of reds, browns and oranges. Beads of blood, once they’d been impacted pon floor, also resembled hexagons, wi’in that same spectrum of colour. I could only spur ma’sen on, by looking for the perfect superimposition of a blood speckle wholly contained wi’in a lino hexagon. I wouldn’t purge it clean, but rather let it be, so it might serve as a talismanic protection. Analgous to finding a four leaf clover, or apotropaic Hand of Fatima. But needless to say I didn’t locate one. All speckles overlay hexagonal boundaries. Six is more a Jewish significance than the five in Islam.

And I’ve had it wi’words.

A, B & E (2)

Present company excepted of course, but I find revenge is a dish best served flush across the bloke’s cranium. Well, the Greeks are all for cracking the crockery. So when in Rome and all that. Besides, they were the first ones to craft an art form from vengeance. No wait a tick, it was my second husband Damon, who really elevated it to Olympian heights. The final word in retribution. Where they look in his unblinking, guillotine eyes and heed there’s no coming back at him. Nipping any escalation in the bud. A la thalidomide.


See ordinarily, revenge is the furthest thing from my mind. You can sail into my island sound and behold any of the Wonders of the World, ancient and modern. Hanging gardens laden with fruit; all the mystery of the Sphinx; even the Temple of Artemis, virgin goddess, if that’s your package. Let my clitoral Pharos Lighthouse guide you in. I’ll take you there. I am anything you want me to be. Except a victim. Attempt to gain any other method of docking and vengeance is mine saith this lady. For, though propelled by all things anal as he undoubtedly was, Damon never, ever brought his work back home with him into our bedroom. (A change is as good as a rest as they say). Yet the same could not be said for that bloke George, from this so-called cradle of European civilisation. I don’t know if he was trying to get his revenge in first, or he was just missing his goats back out on the hills. But that final night together I was not having it. Any of it. The restored me, blackballed from myself, was to be the only one disposed to fuck like a man, and I was highly capable of fighting like one to keep it that way. A revenant from my long-abandoned past. To Damon, revenge was a vindication of his rule of law. Mine is just vindictive. A sudden, spontaneous surge from the seething cauldron. A kicking out against the pricks. A hen party with my witchy friends Nora Pinephrine and sisters Mel and Sarah Tonin. Modern day Graeae.


Alright, with George trying to cast a new intagliated relic, henceforth to be called the Corfu shroud, by drilling my face into a pillow, I’ll own that the notion of revenge didn’t spontaneously leap, surge or combust. I mean our consubstantial faculties were otherwised engaged. What with the trial of sequestering oxygen from already inundated muscles, which explained Nora’s dereliction of dragon-slaying duty and Sarah’s noble yielding, while Mel bless her, just raised the drawbridge. And lowered the portcullis. ‘Vagina dentata’ ? Oh please, not you as well ? What is it with you men - Oh really ? Do I look like I’m smiling on the other side of my gritted labia ?


Damon with his daemonic energy was a marathon man. Fortunately George, despite being native, was no Spartan. Silly sod just collapsed on top of me and passed out. A deadweight pinning me to the bed. Sowing our once lush field with slabs of stone. Like some smooth deathmask being pressed down over the gnarled cortex of our relationship. Thus interred, with my face chafing to bits on the stubble of the floral mattress, the cicatrix of revenge began to sprout. By dawn that next morning, I had what you could term, an almost fully-fledged, scion of a notion. And I ain’t talking about no olive branch either. (See how easily I morph in and out of the various cultures ?) I was most definitely going in for a spot of haughty culture on Mr Fetid Cheese, lying there bombed out on Ouzo. There’s graft that takes and then there’s graft that don’t, as my Damon was fond of saying.


The piggy little smile on George's bovine face didn’t exactly mitigate his cause, but I was already half-way through my husbandry. Still, I did pause momentarily, to wonder which little love ewe had parted George’s lips. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And thus another percolation of garden soil described its path from my fingers, like a grated (dead-)stock cube. This goose is cooking George’s gander. Let him soil his own bed for once. I say garden soil, but of course all I had recourse to, were the potted plants in his third floor apartment. A thin, powdery loam, like all the earth in this scorched land. I recollect scanning my cull of cracked and upturned earthenware, back through the bedroom, along the hall and past the living room, all the way back to the bathroom. Some still cupped their blooms bereft of plot. Others had already lost the will to live, limply prostrate on the carpeted desert. The dessicated marrow of life trodden into the pile beneath my frenzied perambulations. My very own slug trail. I got out the dustpan and brush, but was able to cull very little, so deeply was the soil piledriven into the warp. Reverse mining. Lead-lined, radioactive revenge. An aptitude that had lain as an untrodden seam, until I’d met a quarrier like Damon. Just can’t deduce, if it was tapped through the shared aspiration of the good times, or the lonesome desperation of the bad.


No time for recriminations, I hurtled pell-mell around the apartment in search of fresh supplies. Yet even now I cannot recall the precise moment of epiphany, when I stood stock still in awe at my own prowess, before fouettéing into the kitchen. (Ballet, another throwback from my nice little girl incarnation). Flinging open the cupboard and there she stood, in all her shiny reflective glory. Entrée, an industrial size, catering tin of coffee, or what passes for coffee in these parts, but which I believe to be the slag collected from inside the walls of all the pottery kilns in this clotted country. The dimensions were appropriate, given the magnitude and frequency of hangovers the coffee was intended to countervail. He’d obviously pilfered it from his internet café. Well now my friend, let’s put it back to work. Slag to slag, cull to cull. Skull to skull.


I can’t even remember going back into the bedroom, I must have glissaded there. Back to gorgeous, glabrous George and the sleep of the dead. Glance over to the bedside table. The digital figures on the alarm clock, indelible bright red, burn into my mind like the eyes of a salivating Cerberus. Soon, soon my lovelies. I picked up another of the long-stemmed roses from on top of the clock and carefully laid it on the surface of the soil mound, so that the flowerhead almost corniced his chin. Three others intertwined on the pillow, skullcapping his valerianed pate. He looked so peaceful. Without a care in the world. A slight adjustment, and I gently prodded the stem back down into the earth, until only the flower was visible. Yes, just so. As I turned for the coffee cache, my arse must have clipped the table, as the cackling flibbertigibbetry of two empty bottles seared through my whole being. (Did I not mention, I was jetéd headlong from the ballet for being too tall, too plump and too clumsy, once my distending twin orbs ineluctably realigned my gravitational pull ?). I shot George a frantic look, but he was in a parallel universe, where the only report delivered by two empty bottles of ouzo was a ‘must try harder’. I steeled myself back into the present and gathered up my whole body in order to regain it. The clock blinked a bloodhsot eye as it outlined a new digit, licking its lips in anticipation. I carefully knelt down to the coffee tin and began to lever off the lid with my nail working the groove. Keratin versus cheap metal, a patent mismatch of impatience. The lid took a dive as I frisbeed it away. I hurriedly gnawed the sundered frangible, scarcely noticing the sensation of blood welling up beneath the denuded cuticle. And then it struck me.


Saying it with flowers by all means, after all I had bought the roses two days ago in a foolish, one-sided proclamation of love. Yet while the garland and the one under his chin were spot on, the composition would have looked just ridiculous with flowers popping out all over the earthen mound itself. For this jarred horrendously with revenge’s nihilist nub. Instead, such iconography rather lent itself to George being laid out in state, before his big send off. It bestowed on him a fecundity that went against the grain. Other than the chin strap, I deadheaded the other eleven roses. Thus wreath became a crown of thorns. No, that doesn’t count you see. Not my symbology. I don’t believe in god. But a yet higher power.


Almost time to spill the beans, but hey George, you’re a really lucky guy. Damon would have had you spilling your guts. Sans aesthetical tableau too. A ripple of coffee granules slid down my palm and on to the burgeoning barrow. (I’ve sinced discovered, that ‘barrow’ has an additional arcane meaning of a castrated pig, what more need I say ?). Ersatz coffee made for an ersatz topsoil, ironically of thicker substance than the real thing below. The idea of brewing the kettle briefly flittered behind my eyes, but one of the heads of the chronological Cerebrus flicked out its tongue and haltered my attention. I’m lacking the element of time. Another ripple and gentle cascade in response by the mound. Then another. And another. Til the receptacle was drained. George was just about sufficiently shrouded, up to his neck in it you might say. I patted the coffee into the configurations I required, before gently threading each trepanned rose stalk into some strategic salient, thorns primed to press the flesh. Dug in, and out of sight. Cameo-flaged, in order to carve my relief on his body. The siege is about to be lifted. All eyes on Chronos now, I didn’t want to make a mess ... Of my delivery. This was the big one, when all three LED digits would absail down the clock face and usher in the coup turning twilight into a new dawn. Here it comes. George, oh Georgie-boy ... Wake up and smell the ro- uh, er coff -


Coda. The unchained melody of quavering voice and rasping alarm. Calling forth a minutely tremorous upthrust in his torso, enchaining a pas de deux sur la pointe for thorns and skin. The downdraught, a pas de chat, a cat’s cradle clawing criss-cross over a man’s membrane. A hundred tiny ploughs foraging furious furrows, in his to be hopefully forever, fallow flesh. Fashioned in an iron maiden of my own devising. Soft spun of tissue, but hard of heart and spine within. The balled fist inside the velvet glove, with just one broken fingernail casualty. The imprint of a good hiding. Some flower re-arranging of his features. I planted one on ‘im. Delicious ! George you old fraud, you never were an oil painting. But now I’ve applied some craquelure to attribute you some authenticity. One great big desquamation mark ! There’s some punctu(r)ation for you. Hey sieve face, riddle me this. The only thing you are going to be able to pull from now on, is your own perforated sprinkler ! Fizzog lit up like a Belisha Beacon’s gonna warn all the little girlies to stop, look, listen and then look again. And then safely cross to the other side of the road. Mourning glory ! After my night of the long knives. Or tiny stabs. One slug of ouzo too many, led me to slug that slug of a boyfriend. Well not slug him so much as pour salt in his wounds. Shrivel his manhood. His night of the short, sharp surgical scalpel. This blow-up doll, puffed herself up and stuck it to him. Psss. Down he went. Chronic deflation and devaluation of the drachma. Damon taught me all about rates of exchange. No tete-a-tete-anus, just a straight right jab for lockjaw. Where’s your vagina dentata now, my Ionic man? Self-impaled, hoist on your own petard. You were the one armoured up to the hilt. Torso dentata, chained male. I’ve extirpated you from the tyranny of invulnerability. You’ll have to wear it on your skin from now on. I’ve planted a little canker and it’s taken root. So now you know what it feels like. What it fucking feels like George. Shit ! My cup so runneth over that it’s completely drained. The price you pay, for a bit of idle divertissement.


Of course the seamless gloss of it all only comes from considerable contemplation, long after the event. Sat at bars like this, devising cocktail-fuelled mnemonics. A reconstruction purely in words, a reportage, since the pictures had flashed by far too quickly for me to even catch a glimpse. (In fact, having sown the wind, I didn’t hang around to reap the tornado. As appears to be my wont). I can recall almost everything about the preparations, but the eruption was so rapid, so explosive, that recollection slips through my synapses, my own colander head. Damn. Let me at least dine out on it a little while longer. A liquid lunch.


I wish I had choreographed it all out in advance. Then all the witty barbs I’ve since projected, could have perpetuated the onslaught. A sort of unfolding radioactive poisoning, after the initial mushroom cloud type of deployment. Maybe a treasure hunt of little ditties placed throughout his apartment, just to keep pricking the scabs, tipping the heaped scales, for that bit longer. Closet conference to have read: ‘Love lies bleeding, love lies limp. Forehead’s receding, you dress like a pimp.’ Bathroom meditation: ‘Roses are red, violets are blue. Always said you were anal, now flushed you down the loo’. Kitchen corkboard, affixed with pins: ‘Love lies bleeding, love lies limp. Get some other scrubber, dirtying her hands in your sink’. Bedtime reading: ‘Roses are red, violence black and blue. To the pisshole in your prick, figured to add just a few’. You simply never think of it at the time do you ? Just as well really. Doesn’t even scan properly. All this is purely embellishment anyway. After all, in the final execution, I mixed my bleeding metaphors didn’t I ? ‘Wake up and smell the-’, oh never mind. All that remains now is the perhaps misguided notion that in extremes of weather, be it hot or cold, the little red scars will angrily rear their heads all over George’s flesh and remind him. Just remind him. Of what I don’t actually know. Of some woman’s empty handed revenge. Or empty-headed. There again, you don’t really get variegation of temperature, or anything much, down here in Corfu.