The Unreality of Death

I had long-lived grandparents. And long-lived cats too, one was bought 6 months before my birth and lived to the ripe old age of 23. So I wasn't exposed to death at a premature age. Well, not directly anyway.

Five years before my birth, my parents had a baby girl who died at one month of meningitis. Of course I wasn't witness to this, though its shadow lay over our household, having lit the most slow-burning of fuses of guilt and recrimination that contributed to the eventual dissolution of my parents' marriage. 

I can't remember exactly how old I was when I first encountered death from a distance. Our family were on holiday in one of the Spanish island resorts. A speedboat had ploughed towards two swimmers and the propeller had fatally sliced on of them. We saw the aftermath from our hotel balcony, that is to say we didn't really see anything. So my experience was aural really, all the buzz in the air of rubberneckers staring out to sea and a police recovery boat. One of the popular theories was that the pilot had been recumbent and was steering the boat with his feet. I can't even remember if we saw a covered stretcher or not. If we did, it  certainly wasn't stained red by blood. Nothing to see here, yes absolutely. 

The next occasion was also while on holiday, this time in a city. My parents were friends with a Suffolk County, NY pathologist and he gave us a tour of his workplace, including a small black museum. It was a pretty sanitised tour, I think because 14 year old me was present. However, passing an open door, I did see a man laid out on the slab awaiting autopsy. I wasn't walking right at the boundary of the door, so saw it from mid-distance in the corridor. The man looked plastic, unreal. Maybe it was the muted lighting in the room rather than his death pallor, but it was a death that left no impression on me, because it didn't look like anything corporeally human. No wonder people who come across dead bodies often mistake them first for shop mannequins. I've mused on this in my new novel "The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)" 

When I was 19, my father attempted suicide inside the family home. Again I had the unreal sight framed for me by the disposition of doors. He had attempted the act in the kitchen, which was accessed via a laundry room with washing machine and dryer. So I was looking through two sets of door lintels, that of the laundry room and then that of the kitchen. Added to this sense of the filmic, he was wearing an all-white towelling robe. The whole scene was like a black and white art movie. He had tried to open up veins in his neck and his head had fallen backwards, but the blood must have flowed down the from of the robe, because again, the incontrovertible evidence of blood wasn't visible to me from my angle. However, it became all too present when I was the one deputed to clean up the floor after he'd been taken to hospital. Our kitchen lino was patterned with orange hexagons. The blood when it landed was also hexagonal. I marvelled when a blood hexagon fitted entirely within a floor hexagon, like a kid's colouring book that stays within the lines. It was the way of protecting myself from the awfulness of what it all meant. It was my father's anatomical and medical ignorance that saved his life (plus the speedy response of the emergency services), since he had cut in the wrong, non-fatal location. As speedy as the ambulance crew were, they were beaten to our front door by two plain-clothes detectives who were responding to the 999 call of knife wound, before satisfying themselves it had been self-inflicted. A lot of this made it into my Kindle novel "Not In My Name", comparing the mindset of domestic suicide to that of suicide bombers. 

And after that, my grandparents and pets did start dropping off their perch. I lost a teenage second cousin who had barely made it into teenagehood. I was in no position to process death beyond grief, which is not the same thing. We have the cognitive load capacity to process either grief or Death (as in our own future one), but not simultaneously. I am now 59 years old. My next book, almost complete, will be a consideration of death, as in my own, or anybody else in the first person, rather than the third person death embodied in the form of grief. There are books a plenty on grief, to go along with out personal experiences. There is no personal experience of one's own death and very little literature about it accordingly, because no one ever gets to come back and write up their notes on the subject. 

We are so protected from confronting death head on. My experiences as above, maybe more down to happenstance, but for example I wasn't allowed into the pathology suite with the dead body, and I was forbidden to go closer to my father in the kitchen. But is it just down to circumstances? One of the question the book considers, is how much of our inability to comprehend death, is an existential (emotional) problem, or a linguistic one? 

Watch this space...

In the meantime you can read my latest novel,  "The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)" available from the publishers Corona/Samizdat

Blurb: 

A trine cycle produced by three authors. A Senior Investigating Officer is on his way to a fresh murder. In his crisis of faith, he questions the material nature of evidence and the abstract judicial system they are put towards as proofs. The somatic dead body signposts a crime scene staged with symbols of the divine interred in one of the four elements constituting the material universe. In part 2, a widow and a literary agent are having a heated phone exchange about the fate of her late husband’s unfinished manuscript. In part 3, an author is taking down all his sticky notes, twine and graph paper for the book he has just completed, as he ponders the next steps and tries to anticipate some of the questions that will be thrown at him. Where does he get his ideas from, a paradox when set against the unremarkable act of sitting down at a desk, sticking notes up on the wall, crossing them out again and lighting up forbidden cigarettes and hiding the evidence from his wife. In showing his mundane workings, we are asked to trace the leap into a work of creative imagination. Until his literary future too is threatened. 

For more content on the novel go here

Stay Tuned - Flash Fiction

The Television beamed a white singularity at its dark star epicentre, while broadcasting an emergency peal to extinguish it from its late night oblivion.

The gramophone’s stylus had obtained the run off grooves at the end of the cloverture and each revolution brought it back with a crepitant entreaty to put it out of its Sisyphean agonies. 

The spun bottle for a party of one, had ceased its vorticing having discharged its Dutch Courage truths and dispensed its incontinent dare. Happenstance it had come to a stop with its unsealed orifice supplicating the gap at the bottom of the back door, so that each time the breeze got up, the glass aperture fluted a wheezy invocation. 

The deadweight and gravity had conspired to silence the creaking twirl of the musician’s suspended corpse by comporting it to plumb line stasis. However, the periodic cracking of the distending leather belt syncopated the gouge of the stylus across the vinyl. 

Would the cadaver be discovered by the estranged wife returning their young son from an outing treat, before the reproductive cycle of flies burst bombinating from their pupal husks? 

Stay tuned… 

Dear Teen Me

A few years ago I was invited by the fabulous "Dear Teen Me" website to pen a letter from my contemporary self, addressing the teenage me. Sadly the website no longer functions, but I'm reproducing that letter I Wrote for the site.

Dear Marc from author Marc Nash

Seeing as like the primitive tribesman you have a dislike of having your soul captured by a camera, tracking this shot down from your Gap year back in 1982 was something of a coup. Fortunately even though you have no pictures of your youth, your mother clung on to the few photographic morsels you granted her. This is you sat at the top of a cathedral either in Paris or Italy in the days you used to travel. And yes you are wearing a music T-Shirt, that of Joy Division a band who were to play a very important part in your life, not least because one of your first plays was about them and the fact that their lead singer committed suicide. But here at age eighteen, the sun is shining, you’re underneath the sky on top of the world where anything is possible ... and you’re wearing summery black!

*

1977 aged thirteen and the year of family parties sitting in marquees in back gardens talking about punk rock. Well Marc, you never did master the paltry four strings of a bass guitar and fulfill your dream of being in a band, but you did make it into the arts. You didn’t write any lyrics, but you did still compose words in the form of stage plays and novels. Even though you have still never read a classic novel other than the handful you studied at school. At the age of fourteen, it was a recommendation from one of your cool older cousins to listen to The Cure’s song “Killing An Arab” and then read Albert Camus’ novel “The Outsider” that kindled your love of modern novels, while still burning the fires for music from which you have never looked back.

Teenage years were when you finally turned your head away from the childish world centred around the home and started to think about the wider world. You discovered politics through a concern with the nuclear arms race and mutually assured destruction. That fusion of the political and the fear of death has never left you and permeates all your writing as you now approach the age of 50. Cleaning the blood up off the floor of a parent after a serious suicide attempt in your last year of teenagehood probably saw to that. Though a terrifying and brutal initiation into other people’s misery, it has set you up for not shying away from tackling dark subjects in your writing and probing the extremes of human behaviour. When you wrote about suicide bombers in “Not In My Name”, you could balance the ‘bomber’ aspect with the ‘suicide’ part like few others possibly could.

There were wars a plenty around the world while you were a teenager. On your doorstep there were the charmingly euphemistically named “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland. There was the ongoing conflict in the Middle East which was of grave concern to your family, but which you couldn’t engage with as you held an opposite point of view from them. In your Gap year Britain sailed an army halfway around the world to bafflingly fight over some barely inhabited islands against the Argentinians. That was when you realised you had a love-hate relationship with your own country, another theme you would go on to write about extensively, particularly in your debut novel “A,B&E”. Interestingly you chose to write that from the point of view of exile from Britain, even though after extensive Gap year travel as a teenager, you resolutely decided to stay in London and set your face against further travel. These days you don’t have holidays, you only write in your time off. You travel extensively in your imagination.

Yet it was a another conflict about which little was reported because journalists couldn’t gain access to the closed country, which really caught your attention, perhaps because you could not confront these other wars which were supposed to prompt your allegiances more directly. And that was the rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the subsequent horrors of the Killing Fields and the disastrous famine. That warzone resonated more than any other with you, but you could never find the words to express such a scale of depravity and horror. It would take you 30 years until you were finally able to write a story about it. Before then you had written on Northern Ireland and the Middle East, intricate, complex works making no judgements of the various parties involved. But your story on Cambodia pulled no punches in delivering its searing condemnation of the cult of death.

And where did this passion for writing and particular the novel develop from? Well you got into Britain’s supposed best university to further you hunger for knowledge, But your were appalled by the closed and prejudiced minds of many of your fellow students. You were also disillusioned with your History course as you felt the teachers were not really interested in teaching, only in pursuing their own research. You were on the point of walking out, when a new student theatre stage space was opened and you decided to try your hand at writing stage plays. Even then with no experience, instinctively and temperamentally you opted for some radical staging and the whole play was performed behind a wire mesh fence separating the cast from the audience. And because you had difficulty casting it, you decided to back up your words by stepping in and performing yourself. You even learned to smoke for the part and scaled the fence to confront the audience at the play’s ending. From that short 20 minute piece, you then went up to the Edinburgh fringe Festival with two new plays, which in retrospect was complete madness, but you had no fear. You were hooked by creative writing back and you also completed your degree, as playwriting kept you in college.

You knew an office job wasn’t for you, so playwriting seemed like a good way to avoid that, which of course it wasn’t as there was no money to be made. After four years you secured a job in an independent record store to pay the bills, but the number work there left the word side of your brain free to continue writing in the evenings. You kept pushing the boundaries in what you did, moving away from dialogue and more towards movement and dance. The dancers looked at you like you were mad, what need did they have of the written and spoken word? It was only cut short when your beloved twin boys arrived and you became the main carer for them. No more hanging out networking in theatre bars for you, with bottle feeds and dirty diapers to see to at the double.

So you turned to writing novels through the night, interrupted only by feeds and changes. The books you liked to read weren’t really out there in the market, so you set out to write them. Stories that pushed the narrative form into new places, books of ideas and a rigorous pursuit and examination of language. And once self-published, you started giving live readings, the closest to the dream of performing live in a band. And you put on a show live. You inhabited the characters, you dialogued with the audience through the way you staged your readings. 

So it wasn’t quite how you imagined it might turn out, but looking back a lot of the seeds were in place in the teen you. Here’s to our salute of the old age us, pen in arthritic hand still writing and challenging the status quo.

Love and respect

marc x

I thought I'd try and share an insight into some of the creative decisions that form part of the writing process. So I've reproduced a paragraph from my latest work in progress as it nears its completion and I'm just doing some editing, which in my case, more often that not means consideration of certain word choices. It may be for the sound of the word or the rhythm it brings to the sentence. Or, more often than not, for the echo to other words around it that its various shades of meaning might bring.

This section is from a story which considers all the ways parents try to get their reluctant young children to open their mouths to take in food. The story examines some of the lasting effects of those tactics on the psychology of the grown up child (one of which is an eating disorder).

Here's the text in full:

“Broom broom. The car wants to come into the garage Cassie. Open wide. Beep beep! Let the car in… Broom broom broom”. 

Our garage was overrun by rats. There’s no way on earth I would readily be so accommodating as to open either the back door to gain ingress, or the electronic open sesame for cars to coast in. Even though once I turned seventeen, passed my driving test first time of asking, and had gone and bought my own runaround, still I never parked it inside. That garage is a place of nightmares. In the small hours I could hear them scurrying on its flat roof which lay adjacent to my bedroom wall. Even in my lowest teenage moments, that period of revved up consideration of putting an end to this miserable existence of mine, the garage though it supported the sturdiest ceiling beam of the residence, could never play host to suspending a noose. I could neither bring myself even to enter the demesne of the rodents, let alone offer lifeless carrion me up for a murine meal. And since my oral anxieties closed off any option of overdosing on medicine cabinet mucilaginous tablets, my nascent suicide drive quickly ran out of viable solutions. My parents called in pest control to liberate and restore the garage into human hands, but the rats were back by the next spring. The exterminator shrugged his shoulders and proclaimed we possessed the perfect conditions that rats favoured. He indicated the path of their rat run, which consequently closed off the garden to me as well". 

1) "Broom broom broom". This was a very late edit as I added the third 'broom', partly as a rhythmic thing after 2 "Broom, broom" and 2 "Beep, beeps". But also I decided it offered the sense of a car revving its engine while outside the garage and this idea of revving became important in parts of the paragraph that followed. I think it conveys a sense of impatience.

2) "or the electronic open sesame for cars to coast in" Originally this was clumsily expressed as 'or the electronic doors that open sesamed for the cars to drive in'. The perverting of open sesame into a verb wasn't a problem for me, I do this quite a lot. It was more that the whole sentence just felt a bit clunky, so I streamlined it. I replaced 'drive' with coast, because 'drive' is repeated later and I try and avoid repetition of words as much as possible (except for sound purposes). It was tricky coming on the right word to replace it, I settled on 'coast' because it is the opposite of the impatience elsewhere in the piece (such as with the 3 'brooms' as above). 'Coast' suggests a relief, a cutting of the engine's freneticism, an exhalation of breath as finally the car enters the garage and the food enters the child's mouth.

3)  "That garage is a place of nightmares". In the end I left this unchanged. I thought about other words for 'nightmares', but horrors and dreads just seemed a bit too tinged with the supernatural and I very much wanted this to feel in the real world. I was thinking of changing it, since the next sentence started 'At night' and I didn't like the jangle of 'nightmares./ At night', but in the end I opted to change the 'at night' to 'in the small hours' which sort of echoes the small scurrying sounds of rats. All of this only came about because one of my editing drafts is to read aloud the work, and that's when I noticed the jar of 'nightmare/ At night. Without reading it aloud, I don't think it would have come to light. Rats of course eat anything and everything.

4) "Even in my lowest teenage moments, that period of revved up consideration of putting an end to this miserable existence of mine" The addition here was the word 'revved'. I knew the word had to come into this paragraph, but wasn't quite sure where. The sentence when she describes passing her driving test, getting her own car... was consciously breathless in structure, as the reader has to navigate a long sentence with plenty of commas to get to its end. It was in itself quite revved up in its rhythm, but to use the word 'revved' in there somewhere would have duplicated what the rhythm itself was achieving. So I felt the best place for it was to suggest an acceleration of her thoughts towards suicide, since such thought processes involve a certain tipping point to really become a solution in the mind of a suicide.

5) "though it supported the sturdiest ceiling beam of the residence" a minor change this from 'of the house' to 'residence', since technically the garage as a separate building could be viewed as not being part of the house. You might feel the same could be said that a garage is not strictly part of the living quarters either.

6)"overdosing on medicine cabinet mucilaginous tablets" an example of alliteration for the sound of the sentence, lots of fricative 'c's', plosive 't's', with bilabial 'm's' and the assonance and rhyme of cabinet and tablet.

7) "my nascent suicide drive quickly ran out of viable solutions". Originally I had the word 'practical' solutions. I felt this was a dull word and the beauty of 'viable' is that it has an associative meaning of viability of life, used of early stage foetuses, or just fitness to survive and grow in general, which is the very opposite of the snuffing out of life she is talking about through suicide. I liked the contrast. I did also consider alternatives for 'solutions', but didn't really find anything better. 'Remedy' I rejected because I want to present the character as quite reasonable and normal, not ill or mentally unbalanced in need of a 'remedy'.

8) "My parents called in pest control" quite a simple decision this one, as originally it was 'exterminators' but then I go on to use the word in the next sentence and again wanted to avoid repetition. The word 'control' also sums up what this paragraph and the whole piece itself is about, who controlled the spoon with the food being put into her mouth.


I hope that's been of some interest in some of the things writers think about when they drill down into the detail within sentences and particularly those to do with word choices. So many words have slight differences within the shades of their meaning and I love to try and set up resonances of two or more of those meanings, in this case how 'viable' is sued to cut against its own grain by being used in the context of suicide.

(Don't) Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before - The atrocities in Paris

It saddens me that that in the light of events in Paris I find myself having to post yet another blog post like this (Charlie Hebdo, ISIS, Lee Rigby murder). Social media is in meltdown with two types of reaction. Either that of political opportunism, (Bomb Syria, ban migrants etc), or that of sheer incomprehension and vapid pronouncements of solidarity.

1) These events are not beyond incomprehension
2) These events are not beyond words
3) These events, monstrous as they are, cannot be labelled and thereby dismissed as 'evil'; they are utterly ascribable to the hand of man.

If you want to show solidarity, inform yourself of the ideas and motivations that lead to events like this. Do not wring your hands uselessly and then throw those hands up in the air asking 'how?' Put in some work and you'll have a pretty good picture of how and why. Then and only then might both citizens and their politicians have a better idea for how to cope and deal with this threat.

I have never worked in the armed forces or the intelligence services. I am not an academic. I am not a politician or civil servant. I am just a citizen. For the 30+ years of my adult life, I have looked around me, observed my world and pursued my own study of the state of affairs in certain key areas. After 9/11, the Madrid train bombings and the suicide bombs on the London Underground, the area of Radical Islamic terrorism became one of those key areas for me. I read books (not newspapers). I educated myself. I tried to establish what the different voices and perspectives were saying whether I agreed with them or not. One of the problems with the response of social media is that no one is actually listening to anyone else, rather talking over each other. It absolutely behoves us to try and penetrate all the logics and rationales being advanced by everyone involved in these events. Because until you do, you will never understand what you are confronting.

I wrote a book in 2010 (published in 2011) about these issues. I traced some of the logic behind non-Islamic terrorism of the 60s and 70s, because terrorist logic remains largely the same. (1960s US dissidents/ domestic terrorists The Weather Underground coined the phrase 'bringing the war back home' through their campaign against US domestic targets to make the citizenry experience the same as the Vietnamese during America's military campaign there). I explored at length the depth of emotion behind suicide (domestic as well as ideological) because the theme of death and its ready acceptance is a key factor at work here. I traced the possible journey to radicalisation of your own citizens. And while I didn't predict ISIS and the establishment of the Islamic State, I did probe the notion of a Caliphate as an aspiration within some strands of radical Islam. Again, let me stress, I am not involved in any of the professions who might be involved in analysing such factors. But I did my reading. The book represents many different voices, but not as a mere cacophony, but with each strand untangled.

Read my book or don't read it (I'm not even putting a link to it here, that's not what this piece is about). Read non-fiction treatments as I did in order to end up being able to write a book on the subject. But please, no longer throw your arms up in uncomprehending despair. Arm yourself with knowledge, open up your ears to what the issues are here. Our nations can pull together and show solidarity by putting in the necessary work to inform itself and to help reach informed decisions. Incomprehension is no longer a defence, either in argument or in actuality to meet an armed threat.

Beheadings, suicide bombings, murdering civilians are not evil acts. Because to dismiss something as evil externalises it, makes it appear to originate from some unknowable, irresistible force, when it utterly and inescapably emanates from within men. Such acts are consciously calculated by its perpetrators for their impact. Terror acts are finely calibrated, for inducing fear in civilian populations to both get them to apply pressure to their politicians and to change their way of life; for the PR value in playing to the terrorists' own communities, fostering further recruitment; strategically to extend the war from far away in the Middle East to the cities of Europe, 'so they know what it feels like, so they live in the same state of anxiety'; ergo for revenge as well; to suggest the cause of the terrorists is very much alive and kicking and cannot be defeated... All this is not to say that there were also some impulses as well as ideas and objectives. The guys who shoot people in a concert hall enjoyed it. Guys who use rape as a weapon of war (against the Yazidis for example) enjoy it. Suicide bombers accept death. These are the impulses of serial killers and mass murderers. But unlike serial killers, even those who have some warped logic tying together their actions in their own minds as 'logical', these killers share and are united by their rationales. It is a collective mindset, unlike that of individual psychopaths. So although murderous & violating impulses are at play, they are dwarfed by their ideological motivations.

More Tea Vicar? - Short Story

“May I come in?”

“Good grief, is it time for my Last Rites already? I haven’t finished my cuppa. Or my morphine for that matter”

“I’m an Anglican vicar not a Roman Catholic priest”

“Good, because I’m not one for confessing, death bed or no death bed. Besides, De Quincey has already said it all for me. So, you’re a representative from the church of compromise and sequestration set up by Henry Tudor are you?” 

“Yes, I understand you were a former professor of History”

“Hey less of the ‘former’ if you don’t mind!” 

“My apologies. Do you give lectures from your bed?”

“Tell me vicar why are you here exactly? I mean we’ve never even met one another before. So why now? What’s the occasion I wonder? What could it possibly be about my current plight that draws you here? Could this be a getting to know you session, the first and last of its kind? So you can gather some notes for the eulogy, just to infuse it with enough singular detail to make it sound like we were personally acquainted. Thus further voiding an already empty ritual”

“My my, you have a very dim view of religion”

“Since my cataracts and glaucoma I have a dim view of everything vicar. It’s not enough that your putative god built in such obsolescence into our body’s cell machinery. He had to  supplement our enervation with all these other afflictions. Built in his image? I pity him... if he actually existed”

“The human condition is indubitably a puzzling one. We’ve spent millennia trying to solve these conundrums and yet here we still are. Here I still am, a minister and adumbrator of a religious faith. It must hold some validity, or at least people believe it does”

“Oh yes, very scientific. We historians laboured under similar illusions. Crediting our academic discipline proceeded upon scientific standards of proof, of supporting evidence. But you know what? I lost my faith in it. Turns out history is merely the value judgements of mankind on past events. Kings and Prime Ministers may legislate and act and mass movements may make their moves, but it is only us academics and chroniclers who rule on them. What should be accorded weight and what should be dismissed. I thought I could change the world by reflecting great insights into human behaviour, so that we could learn from the past. But here’s something I comprehended from the scientists across the High Table at dinner. The past may keep repeating itself, but you never know which bit of the past will repeat and when. As with the Butterfly Effect, the starting conditions of each epoch under comparison are different, so the outcomes will be too. Therefore I grasped I couldn’t save mankind and by the end of my career, I knew I couldn’t even save my students either. And now with my failing body I discover I can’t even save my family? There, will you put that crisis of faith into your sermon at my funeral? Might prove instructive to others...”

“No, while we don’t paint paragons of people, we do try and keep the last and lasting impression of them positive”

“Like I say, a meaningless ritual. I suppose I have left it too late to change my will and organise something different to mark my passing. Like a New Orleans Jazz Funeral, though I can’t stand jazz. Or a viking boat pyre, though I suppose smoke alarms and health and safety will put the kyybosh on that. I quite fancy the idea of a sky funeral, but we lack for indigenous vultures in our perishing climate...”

“The Christian funeral ritual is as much for the bereaved left behind as the send off for the corpse wherever it is aheaded. it plays an important function in the mourners coming to terms with the reality of death”

“I admire your self-surety I really do. But then I’m the one with the greater question mark hanging over him over the near future. Tell me, when you confront the realities of the world armed only with your good book of homilies and vague imperatives from which you elicit your answers to the human condition, does it fill you joy or despair? After all even Christ had misgivings while up on the Cross, Thomas was so sceptical they fashioned it into a soubriquet for him. Moses beat the rock with his staff because he had a moment of vacillation in his conviction. See, I may not have the detailed answers, but at least I am released from the bondage of blind faith, of doubt and despair. Because I accord the cruel, cosmic joke of existence. Of coming into life, of making attachments and then having them snatched away from you by death. All because of biochemistry’s drive towards entropy. Mind you there are those proponents who argue that even those precious attachments are only an outcome of biochemistry too, the blind imperative to pass on our DNA”

“You live on in the hearts of those who love you”

“Until they too pass on and no one remains to light the candle for me. All our mouldering hearts full of unrequited love, because there’s no one left to meet it”

“See that sounds like a very bleak worldview that can only lead to despair”

“The despair actually only comes at this particular juncture. I’m sorely testing the love of my wife and children because I am checking out of this world before them and abandoning them”

“You cannot be held responsible for the failings of the mortal body”

“Who then? Only your god could be an alternative candidate. But I can’t descry him, seeing as I don’t believe in his existence. But it’s a particularly cruel twist of fate that means any last days I eke out under my condition, can only be secured by these infusions of morphine to dull the pain from numbing my mind. And I know there will come a point where I slip into a state where I cannot medicate myself, so my poor benighted wife will have to do it. She and she alone will hold the power of my life in her hands. She could determine at any time to supply me the terminal dose so that it’s morphine that shuts me off rather than the disease. What terrible power that is to wreak on a loved one? That’s why perhaps I say my imminent passing is a dereliction of love. To place such an unreasonable burden upon them”

“But the corollary of that is to wish your wife dead before you. That could be misconstrued as selfish thinking”

“Any two historians would give you divergent views on that one. Do you still credit that’s how your god set things up? Or is it more likely to be the result of blind forces?”

“You have your beliefs and I have mine”

“Bad faiths both... I’m sorry where are my manners? More tea vicar? Or would you prefer a touch of the harder stuff?”

“Well I wouldn’t say no”

“Here you go”

“What is it? Scotch? Wow that’s bitter. Hold on a moment, that isn’t... Have you given me your flask of morphine by any chance?”

“I’m sorry vicar, my ailing sight you see. Can’t tell the difference”

“Should you be quaffing alcohol at the same time as morphine?”

“Don’t think either vice is going to make too much difference in the long run do you?” 

*

Postscript: The Funeral

It was a virtual stranger who officiated at the service. Whether this was a deliberate decision undertaken by the ecclesiastical body or not couldn’t be established. But suicide is still regarded as a sin and more so in a man of the cloth who has pledged himself to avoid such mortal sins. He was found dangling from the church rafters, hung by the length of his liturgical stole. The recipient of his last pastoral visit was unable to attend the funeral as he was bedbound. he was insensible of the whole matter, despite the gossip spreading beyond the parochial congregation through making the local news rag.

Terry Pratchett's Richard Dimbleby Lecture

Last night on the BBC, Sir Terry Pratchett was the first novelist to deliver the august Richard Dimbleby Lecture. I say deliver, but due to his condition of early onset Alzheimer's disease, after a short introduction, he passed his written speech over to be delivered by actor and friend Tony Robinson (of Black Adder fame). This had the curious affect not dissimilar to when the IRA could not be shown saying their own words on British TV, but had to have them spoken in voiceover by an actor. Straight away it distances you from the affect of the words, (as was intended with the IRA), you are taken away from the inflection and the expression of the speaker himself, because he is not actually saying them. While the camera lingered on Pratchett at length for his reactions and clearly his face revealed all sorts of emotional responsiveness, it still confers the unfortunate feel of someone laughing at their own jokes and welling up at their own sadness, all the while seeming strangely removed from their own words. I fully appreciate the reason for this decision, that the disease itself makes protracted speaking a titanic feat to pull off. Some people will feel this method underlines such a fact. Others may feel it to have been more powerful if he had tried to deliver the words himself, slurred or tripping up and with the actor coming in as prompt or periodic reliever.

I was also reminded of that other great TV interview on the eve of a fully anticipated death, that of the TV playwright Dennis Potter. He sat there, fingers curled over clawlike by psoriasis, quaffing from liquid morphine such was the pain he was in for the duration of the interview. To me, this remains the most trenchant argument in and of itself. Two fine minds, still evidencing their clarity of thought, all the while their body is failing around them. There could be no clearer representation of mortality, the fate that is due to come to us all. They can speak of the onrush of death with supreme eloquence, but to me the clearest statement is the physical manifestation before our very eyes.

Why might this be important? I believe it is so because we are a society that still won't talk about death in the open. En masse we are no longer able to underpin it reassuring religious credos promising an afterlife. (Some still do possess such facility, but they are in the minority within our society). But instead of turning this void round into a consideration of both what death means and therefore stemming from it an inquiry into the purpose and meaning of life, we just keep both remote from our everyday functioning selves. If for example we truly apprehended the physical pain of unravelling as demonstrated by Potter and Pratchett, then we might not so casually inflict it on others through wars abroad or even drunken fights outside bars. But no, we will continue to shuffle such dark dreads under the carper and slay one another in desultory fashion.

I confess I am terrified of death. Not as Sir Terry mentioned yesterday the moment of dying which according to polls cited by him is the greater fear of the overwhelming majority of us, for me it is the eternal extinction thereafter. Of course the moment of dying can be drawn out, lingering with terrible pain. But for me that can only be increased exponentially by the certain knowledge of what lies beyond, ie nothing. (Sorry, but I just cannot console/delude myself that there is anything other). I was present when my Grandmother died, surrounded by all her family. And she struggled and clung on and could not get comfortable and moved around as he body betrayed her for the last time. And when she finally did settle in the final rest, all the pinched lines of struggle and tension vanished from her face as the muscles relaxed and let go. She had pretty much the 'best' death imaginable given that it was in the bosom of those she loved and supported by reasonably sensitive medical management. And superficially witnesses would remark how serene she looked and offer the nostrum 'she's at peace now' after a long, debilitating illness. I simply don't buy that, for her or for me.

Mortality and its corollary the purpose of life (what some refer to as the human condition) informs every piece of work I write. All the themes beloved of literature, such as redemption (in life), enlightenment, revenge, betrayal et al, are mere fripperies in relation the the puppet master that cuts all their strings at the finale, that being Death. Death is a far greater taboo than incest or pedophilia to my mind, because it affects each and every one of us (not to say of course you can't explore the others, just a polite inquiry why death seems so under-investigated by comparison).

As to the meat of Pratchett's interview and where the media vultures will inevitably gather, his plea for euthanasia to be legalised. Intellectually and morally I agree with him, (though my cynicism runs such that some will exploit any law to 'off' unwanted elderly burdens or gain access to inheritances and be able to get around the checks and balances the law may provide). Personally, with my terror of non-being I could never fly myself headlong towards my death any sooner than was ordained for me. But Pratchett was at pains to try and change the terminology from "Assisted Suicide" to "Assisted Death." Having cleared the blood up after a family member's serious unassisted suicide attempt, I'd just like to suggest that the consent of a terminally ill person to their own foreshortening by human agency, IS a suicide, even if delivered at the hand of another. Now there is nothing wrong with the notion of suicide to my mind. In fact, in a rational society it should form a central part of the debate about life itself. For if we strive to develop a consciousness from the moment of birth, if we labour to establish ourselves within a material existence whereby we can feed and clothe ourselves and form relationships and sire children, only to have it taken away randomly and permanently- the only question might then be why wouldn't we commit suicide? How can you make informed decisions about the right to die, if we don't even know what we mean by the value of human life in the first place?

"Our Song" 3400 word short story

He pelted down the grassy knoll at full tilt. He didn't stop until he ran slap bang into the car door. The sickening slap of flesh stopping up hard against glass reverberated in the still air. Head splayed against the passenger window, legs pinioned against the steel door like a butterfly mounted on a cork. If she didn't know him better, she'd believe him to have had the very life crushed out of him. But she knew him very well indeed. It simply wasn't possible to know another discrete human being better than they knew one another. This was him doing his outsized bug squished against a metal carapace routine. Again.


She herself took more dainty steps down to knoll, since it was icy underfoot. As it unfailingly was at this frozen time. The frore grass crinkled as she tiptoed along, a sound that conferred shivers down her spine that owed nothing to the temperature. Lovers Lane always had that effect.


She arrived at her mate spreadeagled against the unyielding barrier. She canted her neck just enough to see that he had interposed his hands between his temple and the glass. Skillful sleight of hand, consonant with him being a wrestling devotee. Where all along you knew the violence was dexterously implied. The two of them hadn't implied or faked anything however.


Finally he bobbed his head. His hands now serving for blinkers, as he tried to pierce the darkness within. He arched his shoulders back in order to unclamp his pate from the window. Affording his breath some range to wreathe itself against the glass. Then he rubbed at it with the elbow of his puffa jacket. He returned to his scrutiny, moving his hands around the window like a doctor tapping a chest cavity. He shot her a grin, then blew breath out towards her, yet it never arrived. Freezing and petrified in the air before being able to lick her with a burning raw kiss. "It's on the inside alright". She contented herself with a tight nod and concentrated on working her chin deeper into her coat's muffler. "Same as it ever was" as he rapped on the window. His knuckles were covered in rime.


She walked over to the driver's side. She gave it a cursory gaze, before she too blew on the window and then rubbed away at it. Her woolen coat didn't emit the same nerve-shredding friction squelch as had his puffa. She wrapped her hands around her shoulders and tried to hug herself warm. Nothing doing. He shifted over to the side of the bonnet and bevelled both fists down on to it and stared into the space between his arms. As if consulting an imaginary map. Or trying to remember the co-ordinates of some blurred memory. She was burrowing deeper and deeper into herself. He couldn't catch her eyes. He extended his hands across the bonnet's partition out towards her. She didn't break her obtection, the pupa yet to bloom into a butterfly. He wiggled his fingers. He would unthaw her. He always did.


She tried not to break into a smile, but she couldn't steel herself enough. She branched out her arms to meet his hands. Palm to palm, his dwarfing hers. They brought the pads of their fingers together, steepling their hands. He quickly manouevred them into interlocking and before she knew it, he had raised them into a vault over the bonnet. She knew what this was a signal for. They both started sidling along their respective sides of the car, hands joined in a wedding arch, canopying the car beneath them. On reaching the boot, back they turned once again. Picking up the ceilidh's pace, moving into a skip. Wheeling this way and then that, rocking their arms as their exertion trails hung in the air like unspoken sweet nothings. Like confetti frozen in mid-flight.


They collapse across the bonnet. Steam rising from both of their bodies chafed at by the cold air. Great beaming grins on their empty faces. He winks at her. They slide off the bonnet and resume their vaulted arch. Two grooves diverging from the slick ice on the bonnet mark their wakes. As they dance, they bring their arms scything down over the bonnet and boot and raise them back up to clear the bubble roof. This time they do not keep to their side of the car, but carry wildly on round the chassis, Dipping their heads into their respective front seat side windows. Seems they are possessed of enough boundless spirit to keep this reel going for eternity.


*

The hand , pinned between a shoulder and passenger seat, has developed pins and needles. Colloquially termed 'going to sleep', when in fact it is feverishly pounding its pain gong to rouse the rest of the body which is in slumber. The tiny stabs at first are absorbed into a persecutory dream, but somehow the overwrought brain manages to convey the internecine nature of these forces and stirs the boy into consciousness. He can't believe they've fallen asleep, tonight of all nights. He tries to extricate his hand from its press. "Mmm, don't. I'm comfortable" she murmurs. He contents himself using his free hand to pick away a curl that has fallen across her closed eye. She curls up closer into his puffa padded warmth, still in the land of nod. He takes the opportunity to extricate his hand. It feels swollen, though he knows this only to be the interruption of the blood flow yielding untrustworthy impressions for his gray matter. He holds it against the quilted weave of his other sleeve. It is hard to determine which of the two is more inflated right now.


He fumbles with the key in the ignition. The problem is he can't calibrate his movements with a hand that's not only awry, but also shaking. He grabs its wrist with his good hand and steadies himself. he manages to turn the key. "What, so soon?" she inquires dreamily. "No, I'm just trying to warm you up". "Cos I'm not ready-" "No, it's okay. I'm not ready either. Nothing's connected up". "Oww, oww oww it's blowing cold air you wally!" "Sorry. The engine needs to warm up first". "It's not worth it. And I was having a lovely-" She looks up at him, panic in her eyes. He smiles gently and dabs once again at her recalcitrant fringe with reassuring fingers. "No. It doesn't really matter does it?" He entreats his lips to hold their smile, but cannot see that they still betray him by blanching themselves of honest colour. But in the crepuscule she fails to regard this and besides, she is engaged in wiping sleep from her eyes.


"It's okay to feel a little bit scared". Some part of her yearns to raise her head from his shoulder and confront him, but its leaden heaviness only yields torpor. "How can you tell?" His smile widens genuinely into a grin, that crooked grin he knows she is unerringly smitten by. "You're trembling!" "Well I'm freezing aren't I?" "I can feel your heart pounding too!" He mimes the motion of her ticker, breasting his hand against the skin above her heart, then veering it sharply away with the systole. Neither are aware that it more approximates the action of cardiopulmonary resuscitation. She snakes her hand out and rests it on his jacket. "I can't feel your heart through your coat. Shows how thin mine is". He arches his shoulders back and makes as if to shuck them from his coat. We can swap if you like. I'll wear yours". "Don't be daft. It's too small for you. It'll rip at the seams". "So what? What difference will it make?" She tilts her head to look up into his face, pressed back into the headrest since he is still frozen half-in and half-out of his jacket. Her face appears to have dropped ten years of ageing, to a time just before he knew her. To a time when she would most definitely be regarded as a little girl. But now, such part regression back in time, when still planted atop a young woman's body... God she is beautiful, even when drained of her usual sparkle. He wondered what his face revealed of him right now. He decompressed his upper body back into his jacket.


"I'm so tired. I want to get it right you know? Is this what it will be like?" This is an impossible question to answer, but he feels some response is called for. His whole upper body naturally puckers towards a shrug, but he manages to depute his fingers to stroke her cheek. She recoils under his touch. "I'm very scared. Hold me". "I'll never let you go". Finally she lifts her head and lasers her eyes on to his as surely as were she tugging his chin with her fingers into direct alignment. "How do we know? How can you say that for certain?" He has to hold her gaze or the moment, the lifetime will pass for ever. He can't even allow himself to blink. Can he risk holding her shoulders to demonstrate his resolve? "Cos we love one another and nothing can change that. Absolutely nothing". They hold each other's stares, looking for a chink. Praying to be steeled in the forge of their eternal love. To have the impurities of thought burned off. His fingers span her cheeks and he pulls her into a kiss. Searing and unfamiliar in the freezing air, even the sound rasped beyond wonted flesh on flesh. Her lips were quavering. He held steady and soothed her tremors. She blinked her eyes shut. He fancied he could discern what was expressed beneath the closed lids and exhaled softly. The breath should have gently stirred the shutters over her eyes, ruffled them open as was the norm. But it was sideswiped and beaten down by the chill.


"Give me your hand". She blindly gropes a hand to fumble into the open cupped embrace of his. "No, no. You need to open your eyes for this". She complies, more with weariness than either irritation or curiosity. Still holding her hand, he leans away from her towards his driver's side window. He breathes on it and brings her hand up to the fogged patch. He uncurls her index finger and uses it to incise through the condensation. He etches a heart from the opacity. Then he extends a finger of his own and draws a second, interlocking heart on the window. He appends their intials and considers an arrow. But by now the breath has evaporated, returning the window to its single translucency. "Very symbolic" she snorts, dragon vapour trails of breath emitting from her nostrils. "We've disappeared in the blink of an eye." He smiles and leans once again to gently exhale over the area. Their hearts of course rematerialise. He keeps up his conjuration by breath over several waxes and wanings. She stares fixedly at both the empty void and the recurring proclamation of their love. "That's all well and good, but it will only last until they tow the car away, scrub it down for clues and then crush it". "No, they'll give it back to my parents. And don't forget the mix CD. That will have to get them to see". He reaches inside her coat and pulls out a caseless CD. It's silver sheen seems alien in the gloom.


"Shall I put it on?" She bites her lip but doesn't respond. "Heroes" starts palpating the speakers. "I've been thinking about the music-" "Bit late to make any changes now". "No, not the track listing. But how do we know which song will be in prime position?" "What do you mean?" She has turned away from him and now she scrolls breath on to the passenger side window. Her gnawed nail trails its wake, but he notices that her finger is shaking. Is she trying to convince herself, as she executes her own twin hearts to posterity? "I mean, which track will be playing when we finally drop off the charts? Which will be the ferryman's song?" "Who knows? It will be on continuous play. Bit like Russian Roul-" "Until the car battery gives out. Then it will all go dead and they won't know". "Who cares? Just as long as we know which song is the last to ring in our ears?" "But this is all about providing definite answers for them. Making it so unutterably clear to them that they are hopelessly wrong about us. There can't be any loose ends. As sure as eggs are eggs, they're going to turn everything over and look for any inkling." 'Look, it will be obvious. Short of us doing with a samurai sword and daubing a message in our blood on the lounge wall-" "Don't! Just don't. This is hard enough".


He moves in to hug her silent. He dips his head and bevels it into her abdomen. It does seem to take the fight out of her. Or maybe just her breath, tugged and wrenched from her by the wincing cold. "Are we sure this method is going to work? Not the aftermath, I mean the actual journey itself?" "It's foolproof. It's probably the most common method". "Well how come, even with the heater on, it's so damn cold in here? That must mean the air from outside is getting in somehow? That the car's not properly sealed?" "It's fine, I promise you". "Then what about where the hose comes in? It won't be a perfect fit and enough air might get in to spoil things. We could end up vegetables. Alive but cut off from one another". I'm not feeding the hose in through any windows. I'll hook it up so that the warm air blowing through the heater here will deliver us the exhaust fumes". "Exhausted fumes". "What?" "Nothing".


She hits the track button and returns the disc to the beginning. He has a flashback image, normally when she's leaning forward like that, it's to reapply her lipstick using the driver's mirror. He's normally the one tasked with the soundtrack for any stationary passage in the car. He looks at the dashboard's clock. It will be light soon he thinks to himself. "If we don't do it soon, someone might see us" he offered flatly. "It's still too early. Who else would be up at this time?" "Well us for one". "Apart from us?" "I dunno, doggers maybe". "Don't! Always you have to cheapen it don't you?" "I'm sorry babes. I'm sorry. I'm so sorr-"


*

They cease their dance once again facing their respective side windows of the car. He raps his knuckles on the driver's, his fist precisely in the centre of the love hearts. He receives a thumbs up from inside. He drops her hands and walks slowly over to the rear of the car. A rubber hose lies limp and forlorn under the chassis. He sinks to his haunches and has to prop himself up against the car to prevent himself overbalancing. His hand is trembling, but he manages to thread it over the rusty exhaust pipe. Corroded or not, the metal chastises his flesh with an icy touch. He steps awkwardly out of his crouch and trudges back to the driver's door. He knocks on the glass once again, but this time with less percussion. The engine revs once, but then settles back into its contented purr. Evidently it is having no truck with the cold affecting its performance.


She pops her head up over the roof towards him. "Which one is playing now, can you hear?" He places his ear against the glass, but it is shaken free by the car's vibration. "It's hard to tell. It's all a bit fuzzy. That might be the gas dampening everything. See told you there was no problem with it being sealed". "Oh yes, you were so right about everything". She holds out her fingers and waggles them at him. Whether her intent was to mock, he gives no indication of being affronted but merely grasps them. They massage each other's fingers while entwined. "You didn't stay with me!" He yanks both her arms towards him, forcing her chin on to the bonnet. "You went first, leaving me on my own. Looking at you and not being able to have you". He swivels her wrists in his, twisting and contorting her arms, elbows pointing outwards like question marks. "Well you'd already let go of my hand. More concerned with your own throat than us going together". She strains to reverse her upturned hands, but he holds fast. Her wrists exposed from their sleeves appear vulnerable. The veins enticing and goading. "It was an instinct. Nothing I could control. Your throat constricts..." He drags her forwards wholly on to the bonnet. With its slick rime, she slides right up underneath his face. He looks like he could either slap or kiss her. "Yeah well I must have gone first cos of lower body mass or something. The monoxide overpowered me faster". He distended his arms and sent her skidding back across the bonnet away from him. He brings one hand up to his throat, she still fully extended at the end of the other hand. "Things we never thought of. Could never have thought of". Still gripping his hand, she works up on to her haunches and slides back across the bonnet, scissoring her legs a straddle round his hips. "The body puts up a hell of a fight. But our love overcame it all the same". He wheels away so her body whips round away from the car. He starts rotating on the spot, spinning her round the fulcrum of his body. They wheel around ceaselessly, until alerted by the car's engine cutting out "Stop! It's making me dizzy. I feel... light-headed".


He gently levers her back to the ground. She dismounts from him. They each return to their respective sides of the car. He grasps the door handle, but is careful to buttress his body against the panel. He only wants to inch the door open. The door clicks open with a sodden clunk. He slithers his hand in to prop up the boy inside. He gapes the door further open. The boy's body sags towards him but he is able to brace the slump. He repositions the corpse upright. Then he reaches across it to gently cup the girl's head turned away against its window. He gets his hand beneath her cheek and gingers her head away from the window. Her matted hair erases the faint imprint of the interlocked hearts. He places her head so that it is sitting on the boy's shoulder. He leans across, down into the footwell. He fumbles sightlessly around the floor until he is able to grasp the coarse stem. He brings the rose up and interlaces it between her fingers. He slowly extracts his hand as he backs away from the open door. He is outside the car once again. As he places the flat of his hand against the edge of the door, his face is parallel to the driver's window. He realises that the initials within the boys' hearts have not been reversed, in order to broadcast to the outside world. Little matter he shrugs, since the hearts are barely discernible within the glazed smudge condensed by the gas. "I remembered to do mine though" she chastises over his shoulder having come round to his side of the car. She leans her face on his shoulder, her chin nestling on the bone in order to peer beyond. He does not protest the driving pain.


"Ah the afterglow". "They do look pleased with themselves". "Positively radiant." "Angelic cheeks of the innocent". "Of course! What have they got to feel guilty about?" "Don't start that again". "Do you think they're dreaming of each other?" "No, I think their sleep is dreamless". "And eternal". "And eternal, yes. Except for the anniversary. When we turn over to avoid the coffin sores". "We were just two young kids really." "Exhausted kids". "Exhausted kids indeed. Up way past their bedtime". She jabs her chin into him to vacate. She slams the door shut. Unseen inside, the two corpses flop away from another again with the impact of the door wresting them apart. The rose drops into the footwell.

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.