Political Animals

So there's a General Election campaign upon us in Britain for the next month. Whoop de doo. Our quinquennial opportunity to allow politicians to pay lip service to us as they beseech our votes. Then we can each return to the status quo and studiously ignore one another. Each Party produces a manifesto of 100 or so pages with all sorts of pledges and policies. You know 95% of those pledges will not be honoured by the winning party. One also asks why the Government, which in this particular case have been in power for 13 years, haven't put these pledges into practice all the while they've been in power already? Why have they only just thought of them now?

You may detect from the slightly cynical tone of the above that I am not overly taken with Party Politics. And yet I would paint myself as an utterly political person, especially in my writing. In some ways, any deed in our daily life is a political one. If it has consequences for other people, if there are alternative options with different possible outcomes, then your choice is likely to be a political one, whether you actively sift through the alternatives or not. Even the everyday language we use is chock full of political assumptions. Love it or hate it, political correctness started out with language as its target. Those who opposed any politically determined meddling with language, overlooked that the language that has come into being is itself far from neutral.

By these definitions, anything to do with power or status in relationships, is political. Of course there is no mandate that demands we each consider every aspect of our daily lives in this light, just as we manage not to have to think about our mortality that inevitably awaits us. But humans who live within communities and societies, act politically whether they are conscious of it or not.

So in the rest of this post, I just want to offer some moments of how I acted politically, whether in a public arena or privately during my life. The forging of me as a political animal. Most of it was done completely ignorant of any political aspect of the action. It's mainly in retrospect now that I can offer them up as thus.

1) VOTING WITH MY FEET
When I was seven and starting proper school, my parents put me down to do violin lessons. I had never even seen a real violin, but instinctively I knew I didn't want to play it. I simply failed to show up to my lessons. I bluffed my progress back home to my parents. When challenged in the playground by a school Prefect dispatched by the music department, I misdirected him to that other boy in the school with my surname (was there one, I didn't actually know). Quite a deft piece of thinking on the feet for a seven year old. I got away with this pretense for some 18 months. When busted, my parents accepted my act of abstension, though my father was aggrieved at having to pay for 5 terms worth of music lessons I never had. So someone else picked up the bill for my resistance.

2) SHOWING SOLIDARITY WITH BLACK SABBATH
From aged 7-11, music was taught in chronological order, starting from Plainsong and ending at 1920's jazz. That was it. Stockhausen aside, apparently there was no other music after 1920. I was livid that we couldn't get to our contemporary bands at the time. When we had the end of year exam, I faithfully answered the questions, but took advantage of the delay between each piece of audio that formed the questions, to set out probability tables for the multiple choice test. Now I know I would have come near top of the class in that test, because I was such a non-rebel at school that I adhered faithfully to the work ethic (in contradistinction to the cool kids who eschewed being seen to make any effort at all with their studies, so maybe I was a rebel in comparison to them?). But my music teacher pulled me up and inquired what the number table doodles signified. I replied that they represented probability, (even though I hadn't actually employed it to answer the questions). He went ballistic and set me a punishment essay on "Why Music?" Well that was just the opportunity I needed to get on my soapbox and challenge his manipulation of the curriculum. I spent a long time composing my argument. I handed it in and readied myself to do battle with him. He merely screwed it up and threw it in the bin unread, saying I had discharged my punishment. He maintained the authority and status all throughout our clash. Salutary lesson.

3) AN OFFER THE FORCES OF OPPRESSION COULDN'T REFUSE
School dinners were very, well school dinner like. They lived down to their reputation. I used to surrender so much of my lunch break to waiting for the supervisory teacher to vacate the hall for their own lunch, at which point I could stuff the offending victuals behind the radiator and present a cleared plate for washing (I know, there were and still are countless children round the world who are starving and would have been so grateful for what I so casually discarded). The whole process eventually struck me as ridiculous so I came up with a political strategy-cum-campaign. I challenged my parents that unless they permitted me to take in home-made meals, I would bring home samples of the pigswill in my handkerchief as proof of its inedibility (of course any additional alchemy with the scuzziness of my hanky would only embellish the proof). Eventually I wore down their resistance, but they countered that I would have to make my own sandwiches to take to school, since they would not be doing it. A compromise that both sides found acceptable. I still make sandwiches to take to work with me to this day.

4) HOW TO FORM A POLITICAL PARTY
I attended a College that had no Left grouping among the students, so Right-Wing was it. Mrs Thatcher's favourite cleric resided there, a man who dismissed Christianity's bent towards helping the poor. A major Conservative theorist was there as was an architect Don who led the fight back against modernism. So the College atmosphere was quite oppressive to me (I should have done my research on the place better before applying). I couldn't understand how a supposed place of learning wasn't interested in any kind of intellectual debate and it just felt wrong that there was only one viewpoint represented (although a cursory study of the demographics of the students would have told me they were virtually all public school educated). I'd already clocked one English student who dressed a bit outre and engaged him in conversation and gleaned his Far Left leanings. When I espied a "Vote Labour" poster up in another First Year window, I went to pay him a visit. Turned out he played water polo for England and if you know anything about that sport you'll appreciate we now had our muscle in place. The Left group was a goer and I invited more people to join our ranks. We were so few in the College we opened it up to all liberal ideas, and had about 25 members out of a college population of 210. Oh how we stirred up some shit, revelling in our persecuted minority status to behave really rather provocatively. I remember because of the Miners' Strike, our college had repealed its membership of the Union Of Students who were actively supporting the strike. We called a meeting, ostensibly to debate issues such as the food and other minor irritants. As the meeting dragged on inconsequentially, gradually our opponents drifted away to dinner and so in the resultant rump, we introduced the notion of rejoining the Union in Any Other Business, which we carried by a vote, with all our members showing admirable socialist discipline of their stomachs and staying put. Oh the stink that caused, our property was attacked, messages and cartoons scrawled on the toilet walls (this was after a guerilla raid two of us mounted during the small hours of one night to secretly paint over all the homophobic and sexist graffiti there, which caused endless speculation as to who had actually done it). Even the Dons woke up to the fact that the college was split right down the middle and urged for some sort of reconciliation. Of course exams came around and focused everyone's minds and the tension levels eventually dropped. The problem with the likes of all this excitement, was when I left College, I was still looking around for such aggravation on issues, when of course no one in the real world actually gave a damn as they were all too busy earning a living. It took me two years to get with the programme of reality on that one.

5) AN INTRODUCTION TO DEMOS
One of our number in the Left Group had an Aunt who lived in the town and was about to lose her job as a hospital cleaner. This was when Mrs Thatcher was hell bent on saving public money by privatising every public service possible and offering contracts out to competitive bidding. If this guy hadn't have happened to have such an auntie, we probably never would have known about the issue. So our little group decided to undertake its first demonstration. Unlike most of the demos in the town, this was not a student-oriented one trying to engage the interest of the the residents. This was the residents reaching out to a rather small it has to be said representation of students. Did we stop the policy of redundancies and privatisation? Of course not. Little did we know it would lead to the filthy, MRSA loving conditions in hospitals today. What we did learn was that if you make a banner out of bedsheets, you really need to cut holes in it to allow the wind to blow through, otherwise it becomes impossible to wield. FAIL.

6) DIRECT ACTION - I'VE GOT A SICKNOTE
I was very active in CND (the campaign for nuclear disarmament), though I never actually joined up. Of all the issues, it was the imminent threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction that really politicised me and turned my thoughts away from football and the domestic world of my parents, out towards the larger events of the real world. Our College was near a US Air Force base and at the time security was so lax, periodically students would break through the wire and dance up and down on the wings of the planes to underline just how easy it would be for terrorists to do the same. I was advised of another trip to do this, but at the time I had broken my collarbone playing football. Now the collarbone is a funny thing. It is such a thin bone, it isn't all that painful when you break it. They can't strap you up or immobilise it because of its position on the body. If you had to break a bone in the human body, I'd say go clavicle every time. It's no big deal. But when asked if I wanted to come along for a plane dancing mission, I used the feeble excuse of my arm, even though they tried to persuade me that someone with eyesight worse than Mole's in "Wind And The Willows" had managed to squeeze through the fence. I think I was motivated by not wanting a criminal record. FAIL

7) THE LONG MARCH TO ENLIGHTENMENT
In my student days I'd been on quite a few demos. Same faces, same schtick at each one. Back in London I'd been on the odd one here and there. One I did attend was a march to protest new legislation designed to penalise homosexuals and ensuring no gay rights initiatives could receive local government funding. By some improbable chain of acquaintance, I found myself marching under the "AARGH" banner - great name, great bunch of people. The acronym stood for "Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia" and consisted of graphic novel artists and writers and I seem to remember Alan Moore contributed to the comic book they produced on the issue. Anyway, however pertinent the demo and rally and bands playing to the protestors was, I had a fantastic social time among the "AARGH" lot. This was politics as sociability rather than merely just social action. Political demonstration could actually be a lifestyle choice. Of course the poll tax marches that erupted into rioting changed all that as from then all all marches had chains of police lining the route, filming us with those newfangled hand-held video-cameras. Every subsequent demo was more about whether the police could be provoked into a fight and very little to do with the issue at hand. From the authorities' point of view, they used is as a means of gathering information on the malcontents, the enemy within as their paranoia began to build on that of the miners' strike. I stopped going on marches and demonstrations. They change nothing. Goodness knows how many people marched in protest up and down the length of Britain against the second Iraq war, yet it made not a jot of difference. Instead, I wrote a whole section of my book on home-grown suicide bombers, about the lack of outlets for legitimate and peaceful opposition within our democracy. Now I'll readily admit that writing a novel is far more of a back-room step than active militancy. It could even be called cowardly, sniping there from the sidelines while people get their heads battered by Police truncheons. And such arguments are probably correct. But I'll still try and push my arguments into the public consciousness through the form of a novel, since my presence on a demonstration registers absolutely zero effect.

8) PARTY ON CLASS ENEMIES
Every last day of term, a swanky champagne black tie breakfast was hosted in the best suite of rooms in the College. In my final year, that room was next to the suite shared by me and my room-mate. Which means we had the second nicest set of rooms in the whole place. We had snaffled these after being at the bottom of the ballot in our second year and consigned to the smallest and dingiest set of rooms and determined to do something to avoid a similar fate in Year 3. He got elected as College Union Treasurer (he was studying economics) and I got elected as College Union Sports Administrator. Entryism! Eat your heart out Derek Hatton. Even now I can't recall what my duties were. But it did the trick and elevated us up to second place on the ballot. We were however fed up with the champagne breakfast and debauchery that always emanated from next door. So I resolved to hold a beer and sandwiches breakfast to rival it. Come dressed as a revolutionary or a prole. We bought 50 bottles of brown ale and made marmite and chocolate spread sandwiches. Drinking started at 8am and we cranked up my boombox to play lots of punk very loud to them next door. Well the inevitable happened and they started drifting away from their party and coming over to ours. The two groups mixed quite cordially, if a bit incongruously given the divergence of attire. (The photos are great). Our party was deemed the superior of the two (and the cheaper since there was no £50 ticket admission). But I couldn't help feeling we'd been blunted. I actually hurried off for my last supervision of term to be asked by the tutor who I'd come as. I explained the event and he announced himself approving of our symbolic staging. Oh well, if you can't beat the powers that be, you may as well let them join you.

9) BINGE THE WORLD
At my University, you fell out of bed and there would be a drama society, a budding theatre director, would-be thespos and a free theatre ready to stage your fall. There were 17 Colleges and about 23 theatre groups. In my second year, I was so disillusioned with my academic discipline of history - not because of its political teaching ironically, but because I felt the disinterested Dons were only concerned with their own researches and had nothing to offer our hungry minds that was a new insight into our subject - I was seriously considering dropping out altogether. Instead I plunged my disaffected energies into writing plays, as my College had just opened its own new theatre space. My first play was about football hooligans, my second was about the Brixton Riots. On the basis of this deep grounding in the art form, I wrote 2 new plays in about 6 weeks for taking up to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (nothing like a bit of ambition, I'd been a playwright for all of about 4 months). Anyway, just so happened the day of the Live Aid concerts, I was writing the programme notes for our plays. As the anodyne music and self-righteousness oozed from the stage, my text became more and more um critical of all aspects of our consumptive culture and the pleasure industries in particular. I opined that there was a certain irony to having the most bloated and well rewarded cultural icons, that of rock and rollers, leading us by example. Assuredly there would be a green room of massive excess backstage. If not a secret cocaine tent just to underscore the notion of imbalance of resources. I went on to dissect the Hillsborough football disaster when 98 people lost their lives just in trying to follow their football team. It was a very radical diatribe. I took it up to Scotland's first city with me, but on reading it my cast forbade me from giving the programme out. Even though one of our plays was about the ongoing miners' strike and the mass unemployment that had changed the nature of our society. I bowed to their wishes, since they probably would have pushed it to the ultimate threat of withdrawing their own actorly labour. They were probably right on the issue. But this is the febrile state Dire Straits can drive me into. I had it even worse for the Nelson Mandela concert, since I was actually there at Wembley. Feeling vindicated that I had surrendered my ticket admission fee to the cause, and then suffering the agonisising torture of having to sit through detestable pap music after pap music act and then leaping to my feet to applaud some rousing speech from a worthy on the stage. Benefit concerts? Don't get me started....

10) THE LAW IS AN ASS
The homosexuality legislation I mentioned above, had been introduced as a MP's private Bill , ie done as an individual initiative, not through the auspices of the Party. I wrote to the shithead MP who'd raised it and he wrote back to me saying if I had any concerns I ought to address them to my own MP and not bother him as he had his own constituents to attend to. This is despite the fact he had introduced a law that affected people outside his constituency, couldn't quite follow the logic of that. But in the end none of us need have worried, since despite Parliament being full of ex-lawyers, they can't actually draft any legislation to save their lives and like so many Acts that pass into law, his had so many holes in it that it became unworkable to try and actually penalise homosexuals and it just drifted into disuse until a new Labour government repealed the bill. I had another encounter with unworkable law when my father was up in court for profiting on insider trading knowledge by buying shares in a company he knew was about to be bought out, as the information had come ti him from a client who wanted to sue one of the parties in the deal as they had squeezed this guy out of the action. So I attended the public gallery of Knightsbridge Court (my Dad resplendent in his bow tie, among the drug dealers of the All Saints Road who were the normal defendants at this courthouse. I had previously done jury duty and pronounced myself content with the buttressing of an individual's rights, so impressed was I with the whole jury process and the seriousness with which one's peers adhere to their civic duty. My father's trial offered a whole differing set of responses. In one of the trials I sat on as a juror, it was a drug case and the language bandied about were 'eighths' and 'quarters' and the street value of such amounts. Here were stockbrokers and lawyers talking telephone numbers. It didn't matter if it was a witness for the prosecution or the defence, all seemed to come from another world entirely. You could see the jury's eyes roll at the way these people casually talked of deals of hundreds of thousands of pounds. I would have convicted every person there testifying. My father was found guilty (rightly or wrongly I still can't say for sure to this day, so wooly was the wording of the legislation he was being tried under). The Judge agreed for he said he ought to have a custodial sentence, but since the offence had taken place in the early days of the legislation, when no one really quite knew how it was supposed to work, he would just fine him. Of course the fine was a fraction of the amount the legal bills my father was charged and thereby lay the real punishment. It's a cliche, but the justice system is only as good as the amount you can afford to spend on your defence.

So does this all strike you as the CV of a politico and agitator? Someone hell bent on changing the world? No, me neither. In early middle age, I am now content to conduct and wage such battles on an intellectual level, through a more considered treatment as a novelist. I do still hold it to be a very important act to cast one's vote, seeing the history of resistance and protest that won that right to vote from the exclusive possession of a landed aristocracy. In 1994 there were 3 elections within a period of about five weeks. They fell just before my wedding and a deadline on a collaborative piece of work I was doing in the theatre. Unfortunately we no longer lived where we were registered to vote. Twice I dragged myself back across London in order to honour the hard won right to put my cross in a box, but by the time of the European Elections, just three days before my wedding, I conceded defeat and failed to make that third and final ballot. It remains the only time I have never cast my vote. But now, all I do is enter the polling booth and write "None Of The Above" thereby spoiling my ballot paper, but at least registering my disillusion with what is on offer within our political system. The ultimate in symbolic and probably also futile acts.

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.

Meta-Fiction considered in 1512 words (or 1510 if you don't include the title)

Bertolt Brecht and other playwrights aimed to break down the fourth wall of theatre that was the audience's perspective of events on stage. He didn't want them to suspend their disbelief and get sucked into the drama as 'real'. Rather he wanted them to retain their critical faculties at all time and be fully aware that what they were watching was a representation and to be able to reflect on its issues accordingly, remaining detached and analytical.

Rene Magritte's painting "The Treachery Of Images" depicting a smoker's pipe with the caption "This isn't a pipe" also challenged the viewer's way of seeing. Not only was this not the object we call a pipe, given that it was a painting of it, but the concept of 'pipe' is a lexigraphical unit applied to signify the symbol of what we understand to stand for all pipes (the word itself could also stand for some plumbing or a blow-dart delivery system). For Magritte, any symbolisation be it in paint or word, could neither approach nor appropriate the essence of a material object.

Literature's take on trying to change its audience's way of seeing it, is meta-fiction. Of course like any label, it does not represent a homogeneous group of authors all typing away with the theory tucked into their belts, but more the various and diverse outpourings of writers ploughing their individual furrows, banded together as a group by external commentators.

I think there is great value in exploring the nature of fiction itself, just what it the nature of the interaction between reader and author foisting a made up story them. On a personal level, I'm less struck by books about books, or revealing the process by which authors write those books, or that they appear in them as one of the characters or a commentator, or even writing about someone reading a book. These do not seem to me to get to the heart of the issue of fiction. These are little more than a hall of reflecting (and distorting) mirrors. Rather than stripping the veil of what fiction is doing, they seem to me to add a further level of obfuscation.

To me, an inquiry into fiction much stem from literature's primary tool: language. As with Magritte, the illusional nature of all literature starts with language purporting to be able to carry meaning. Story is structured through words. Character is fleshed out in words. It is these words that more directly should be held up to reflective scrutiny, rather than the secondary armatures of story and character.

Clearly on one level words do convey meaning, else how would an author be able to communicate and be understood by a reader? "That fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude" as Proust describes reading. But words are approximations. As above, the word 'pipe' has several meanings for different material objects lumped together through the single word label. Individual words further have several shades of meaning tincturing the interpretation. "Fast" can have two contradictory readings, being either swiftness, or held fast and therefore immobile. This is exacerbated when you put words together, sometimes in unexpected ways. I recently peer reviewed a piece which had the phrase "leering ugly host of reasons", all the words individually being correctly utilised and yet together, the effect takes an unintended direction, as once you employ 'leering', it pushes the sense of the word 'host' away from a multitude or army and more towards a person acting hospitably.

Words are slippery, imprecise. It amazes me that they ever manage to convey meaning at all, but accounts for why there are a myriad of misreadings and misunderstandings in any conversation between two people, unless they are blessed by a sort of telepathy born from long practice and exposure to one other. (The old married couple). Nor are words neutral, since any reader brings their preconceptions with them to any book. Neither are they random. They have origins, they stem from etymological roots. Some words have stayed true to these origins, others have diverged wildly from them, yet still they may retain a faint echo of their original meaning. "Presently" formerly meant immediately, now it means in a little while or soon. But the undertow still sounds the word 'present' in our heads. This is the resonance I want to tap into in my interrogation of just what fiction is.

To me, as with Brecht, I want the book to interact with the reader. By this I don't just mean for them to trace the plot, or have various emotional responses and even catharsis by the novel's end. I want my book to engage in a dialogue with the reader while they progress through it. I write in a conversational tone, chatty even. However, the words I use may not be conversational themselves. It is merely how direct is the voice of the book in addressing the reader, seeking to engage them as if the narrator was in the room (or more pertinently whispering inside their head). The voice at different stages of the narrative wheedles, browbeats, bats its lashes, apologises, reasons, negotiates in a whole gamut of entreaties. But the conscious choice of language, of heightened metaphor, (which is not how anyone 'speaks' in reality) plunging between high language and low vernacular sometimes within the same sentence, all of this is intended to pull the reader up to the fact that this is fiction. I'm addressing the reader, I may even be telling them a story, but what I'm telling them and how, demands constant reflection and assessment by the reader as to what level it is pitched at. What level of reality is the book operating on? A fictional one of course. Buttressed by words that don't do quite what they claim - they are unable to bear up 'reality' to any decent scrutiny and I aim to show them up in their false claims, within a fiction I openly acknowledge as fictitious. The words may bear my story up in that it communicates itself to the reader, but my story is a self-confessed fiction and tugs on the reader's sleeve constantly to remember this. From such a reflexive position, then the reader may go on to weigh up how my fictional world bears in relationship to the world he takes as 'real'.

In my novel "A,B&E" a woman is sat at various beach bars, spinning tales in return for free drinks from her audience. She is a Scheherazade figure, in that she has opened up with her life being in danger from her gangster husband; telling tales to eke out a subsistence in this hiding place where she has no other means. ("1001 Nights" might even be considered a very early meta-fictional work in its narrative structure of passing on the baton of story-tellers within it). But is this framing fact of her life being under threat even true? What impact does that have on each and every one of her tales? What is fact and what is fantasy, in her mind (and be osmosis in the reader's mind?) Yet this is more than just an issue of whether she is an unreliable narrator or not. This is about how all knowledge is transmitted to us in our contemporary culture, trying to separate out fact from fiction, the culturally produced from the individually experienced. Our personal relationship to the language we employ and how much of that is pre-structured for us. Ultimately it is about how we construct our own identity.

She is ostensibly recounting her life story in pint size gobbets (cocktails actually) and her audience isn't specified, so she is ultimately addressing the reader. She has a highfalutin vocabulary, she is a Classics scholar, she uses Greek myths to allude to her own situation. She uses them archly. She is essaying to manipulate the audience. As much as she uses high end words, she also dives down into the vulgate, especially when remarking on her fellow British tourists around her in this holiday resort on Corfu. But as seemingly confident about language as she appears, she also butchers it and misuses it. Just like Shakespeare's yeoman characters who are mastered by language rather than mastering it, she too is tripped up because language will not be pinned down to exactitude. No matter her proficiencies with words, she too will come a cropper at some unseen juncture. The same could possibly be said about the author who gives her these words? Is he 100% in control of the meaning of his material? I'm going to let the readers adjudge that for themselves, because that is part of the fictional game. Did the author intend that? Is my reading of this correct?

Why am I telling you a tale in the form of a novel? I want to humbly entreat you with some insights on the world. By constantly reminding you that this is fiction, I would hope to also underscore that this is only my opinion on these matters. I'd love to hear yours.

The End Of The Line - Friday Flash

Dwelling at the end of the line bestowed me a brace of boons. Firstly that I always secured myself a seat, much to the spreading satisfaction of my gluteus maximus. And second, that usually I'm able to wade into my current reading book to good effect.

Now I grant that reading on a train and in public, is not the same as reading in the splendid isolation of home. When one feasts on words, one cannot but help take a mental pause for digestion and paying silent compliment to the literary chef. On a train, when hoisting the eyes up from the page thus, one has no recourse other than to scan the carnival of humanity, which also happens to be in transit between one worldly carousel and another.

Within my little cloister of four seats, there is usually some permutation of persons cutting themselves adrift. Be it through earphones; hiding behind a freesheet newspaper; slumped asleep; women applying make-up gathered into a compact; and innumerable folks predictably having words chiseled for them on their mobile phones and grinning inanely to themselves. Occasionally, just occasionally, I am abutted or adjacent to a fellow bibliophile. My heart cannot but help skip in such circumstance. Our eyes craning to read, not the face, but the title of their book which will enlighten us one to the other, into an instant familiarity.

So imagine my unalloyed delight when today all three other berths were filled by men with volumes held out in front of them, supplicants like myself. My eyes were pinging about in their sockets, unsure quite where to alight first. Etiquette determines that it is unseemly to swivel your head to the left towards the man seated beside you, so I was faced with the two diametric, either of whom could be engaged with minimal canting.

I plumped for the man directly opposite me. I snaked my eyes above the paper periphery of my book. To be confronted directly by his, staring straight at me, with his book lowered into his lap. In point of fact he was staring straight through me. As if he was trying to burn through to the Virgin Trains' logoed antimacassar behind my head.

I saw that his lips were moving. Possibly a student reeling off his rote learning for the ordeal of a test. Though he seemed a touch on the old side for a student, even an eternal one. Also the rhythm of his recitation seemed to be so rapid as to preclude an itemisation of facts.

People who read not only moving their lips, but actually vocalising their words had always struck me as rather limited readers, yet this chap was belting through his text of choice with compelling fluency. Though cupped in his lap, he wasn't actually reading it per se, unless it was written in braille...

I ducked my eyes down to squint at his print. It wasn't pointillist, but neither could I apprehend its alphabet. Of course, this man was praying! Intoning words not only taken into his heart, but inscribed there.

Does one have to be reading a text for the first time in order to fulfil the prerequisite to be a member of our impromptu book club? He wasn't even strictly reading his damned book anyway! I'm not sure therefore we could count him as a fellow traveller through the printed word. Our full house might just have become a busted flush. Oh sweet fraternity, I had imagined today to be so very special, what with these portents lined up this way.

Still, that left two other kindred souls. I veered my glance slightly to the left. The features were partially obscured behind the cover of his book, but I could deduce that he wore spectacles. Time to see what was being reflected in his lenses.

"Sociolinguistics". Well now, I knew what 'linguistics' meant and I had a fair idea what 'socio' presaged in the main, but I'll own putting the two together left me floundering a tad. Patently an academic text of sorts. To wring all the life out of language and literature no doubt. The burst blood vessels in his hand seemed quite appropriate somehow.

Then he lowered his book and I chanced look at his face, but only saw myself dimly outlined in his reflectors. Clearly he wasn't looking through the glass and seeing me. His eyes never left his text as they dipped downwards. Socio-gymnastics, seeing as his hand was fumbling in the pocket of his corduroy jacket. It resurfaced, brandishing a dayglo fluorescent pen.

Still adhered to his reading, he inserted the pen between his lips and levered the lid off with his one free hand. And then the great desecration descended as he proceeded to underline , or possibly block-fill sections of the page. This man had no respect for the holy sacrament of print. I drummed him straight out of our honorary members club and in my mind sliced off his corduroy shoulder pads with - no, no I am a man moved by things of the mind, not violence.

As to the third, well I will not even bring myself to utter.... It had pictures in it. An art book of some kind ? No lush plates of photographic reproductions, but line drawings if you please. Of a man, with a beard and a woman. And this bookworm too was imbibing the text with his vermicular tongue stuck out at the corner of his mouth. But it wasn't any sounds it was keeping time with...

Oh woe to be compartmentalised with a breviary, one textbook and singular manual. Fickle fate has mocked me with a mirage of monographs.

As the train pulled in towards the buffers, it was then that I realised I hadn't even progressed to the end of even a single line in my own book. Today, I couldn't even call myself a reader.

Pelvic Floored - FridayFlash

I cuddled up in the marital bed with a ciggy and my new book for some warmth and understanding. Just trying to reclaim some time for myself. To stretch out a little piece of night and smooth out the wrinkles of day. But my corporeal gristle has long since lost its elasticity ...

I was awakened by the familiar aubade from the room next door. But a yet more pressing stimulation, was the driving ache just beneath my shoulder blade. “I’ll be in in a minute Amy”. Valueless to a pre-lingual. “Mummy’s coming” Just perverse.

I groped for the novel that had become furled in the bedsheets. I bent an arm beneath my spine arched for access. Pain spasm. The throb of my shoulder now swamped by the mushrooming cloud of electro-chemical payload, radiating from the ground zero of my canted back. Click-click went the pain geiger counter in my head. Ack-ack came the less than transcendent neuronal response. And all the while, I seemed insensate to the stream of refugee signals emanating from that numbed tributary of the pinned arm, propping up my entire lumpy weight into the contortion. I don’t seem very connected up this morning. Except through a network of pain knitting me together. Oh, and my alarm-clock only reads five-seventeen am. Morning has broken me ...

Sure enough, there it was, my late-night abscondee. With several pages fed back at the edge into an earlier part of the story, shredding narrative flow. The contents less imprinted on my mind, rather now informing the sinew of my back. A feedback loop. Book-suffering-book-pain-book. Silently screaming, ‘Leave this nightmarish scenario! Get yourself out!’ “Coming Darling. Mummy’s coming in right now”. There’s your loop for you. A perfectly enclosed system. A vicious/virtuous circle. With the creased pages, the book no longer sat flush when closed. Feedback becomes distortion, when you’re plugged into someone else’s amplified instincts.

Feedback as the principle of engagement. Each child’s cry, a blip on the radarscope of parenting. The calculus of neglect. How many blips before targeting your response exactly right? Too few or too many, either proffers a lifetime of depth charged unforgiveness. But first, there is a mewling infant to attend to.

*

Thus does literature go the same way as needlepoint, am-dram and cycling. Replaced in my hormonal biochemistry by caffeine, nicotine and TV daydream.

My body shape has altered too. The mesomorphic legs of that cyclist peddling for all she’s worth, now distended to those of an endomorph.

On the plus side, having either to hoick about an exponentially growing child (or her exponentially regressing sister) in both arms; or performing a balancing act, bracing baby in one, while conducting some suddenly minutely calibrated task with the other, has toned my upper body.

However, my overall post-labour, stretched flesh-rather-than-muscle disposition, delineates a phenotype for me which could only be described as that of a fat blob. Regaled at the convenience store with “When’s it due?”, “Boy or girl?", until my blazing red eyes laser-guides their gaze down through the glass counter at Amy in the buggy.

I’m paunching above my weight.

White Elephant's Graveyard - Fridayflash

Bit different this week, I have steered clear of the usual word acuity and just gone for a story. A weird one, inspired by the pictures.







The Coyote trickster turned to whisper in the ear of Geronimo.

"They have taken our name in vain and given it to one of their birds who spit death".

"So? This is not new to my ears. Black Hawk of the Sauk tribe has been personally cursed forever in this vein".

"But now they have set these silver birds to roost on our sacred ancestral lands. They lay claim to it yet again, but this time they mock us in doing so".

"How so?"

"They bury their dead on top of our own".

The Coyote sunk to its haunches and offered its back to Geronimo. Still uncertain, he climbed on and threaded his arms round the beast's throat and held on to the creature's dewlap. The beast sprang back up and they set off on their journey.

Geronimo was agog at what he saw. Every type of metal bird it was possible to conceive of, laid out along the desert like the pebbles of a sand painting. Some had spilled their guts on to the sand, silver droppings too dull to catch the sun's rays.

"What is this place?"

"The soldiers call it the Bone Yard".

"But bones are not made of iron. Guns, rifles they are cut from metal".

The coyote brushed at its ear with its paw. It might have been take for the gesture of a shrug, only he proceeded to then tap the ground. Geronimo understood and lay with his ear pressed to the ground. There he could hear the true bones, of his people and the prey they hunted asleep in the desert sand. But beneath that even, the cries of older spirits. The bactrians and bison, wapiti and sloths lying so far down, no sandstorm could ever reveal them. They were protesting the weight pressing down on them. Talons and claws around their throats and gullets.

"They say they are Tomcats, Eagles, Hornets and Nightingales, but they are no creatures we recognise. They profane our resting place and they challenge your naming of things. They seek to usurp us all. To take our land once again. To strip us of our landmarks so we no longer know where we are".

And Geronimo was struck by a vestigial rage. The old warrior spirit was rising in him once again, in this desiccated land.

He rode on the ghost of his war steed and consulted Cochise. The latter told him of his time in captivity when the pale faces tried to instill in him the myths of their mortal god. He related a tale they told him of a tribe who marched around a city wall seven times playing their pipes of war and shouting, so that on the seventh tour the walls shattered and fell away to the ground.

"This is what we must strive for Goyaale".

"But metal is harder than flesh, bone and adobe walls".

"Indeed. We have to summon beyond the Apache world. I call for a global pow wow".

So medicine men communed with shamans. Shamans conjured necromancers. The voodoo men couldn't quite conceive that it was metal birds rather than dolls of men that were required. Smoke signals billowed around the underworld where their message could not be seen above ground. Cold corpses packed sweat lodges, while the drums sounded their sonorous call. Animal familiars and totems pricked up their ears. The spirit plane was alive with hubbub and intent. From Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq and Afghanistan came the dead. From Somalia, Grenada, a great host of spirits churned and writhed.

They beat their bloodied hands, their ectoplasmic stumps, against the soft earth, the arid desert sands, the stone-sowed plains. They pumped their upturned palms, shook balled fists and waved magic sticks. Their pent up energies bored through the foundations of mountains and hitched rides along river beds, so that no ordinary mortal had any sense of their uprising. They were whispering their incantations into the very rock as they sought to move at the pace of a grain of sand. Linking arms, fusing with the web of the rock, gradually they formed the most perfect of circular chains around the earth's belly pregnant with their fury.

And a great crackle of energy surged and charged around the veins of Mother earth. Electrifying her, she shuddered and held out her wrists, like a penitent or a suicide. But she kept drawing her arms up towards her own surface, disinterring her own resting place. As she broke clear into the daylight, it was clear that the Spider Grandmother actually had eight limbs and each was raking up the ground of the desert. The metal birds were shaking and quaking before her terrible grip, pulling up the desert floor like a rug that need beating for dust. The ground was shaking with just such a resonance, that the birds' own bodies started humming and cracking. She had set their song inside their own skeletons and they snapped and collapsed in on their own metal bones.

And when it was over, the air was still and silent once again. A gentle wind blew the sand to cover up the tracks, though the birds had their wings and guts plucked irreversibly from them. The man from Hollywood had encountered no trouble in journeying to keep his appointment. But as he surveyed the rental wares that were beyond repair, he just shook his head. "It ain't that kinda movie" he said, stubbing a cheroot out under his leather boot. "It's a patriotic one where we win". And he climbed back into his Jeep Cherokee.

Death Masking Love - Friday Flash

She brought the ends of her fingers to her mouth and moistened them in her warm saliva. The whorls of her prints glistened in the harsh light of the room, but it wasn't her own outlines she was interested in raising.

His hand lay outstretched in his sleep, palm exposed. She splayed out her fingers so as to graze each pad with his. To seal her contours with his and have his sear into hers. She would not allow that we are each born with our unique mark woven into our fingertips. The perfect match, seamless superimposition of one upon the other, must exist. Unfortunately, even in his sleep, his was too broad for her to span with her dainty little hand.

Undaunted, she caressed her index finger downwards and began to trail the creases and wrinkles across his palm. She wasn't a trained chiromanist, but maintained her own superstitious credo of the significance of the lines. The heart, the head, the life and the fate were all crucial concepts to her, just they didn't give up their runic braille quite as easily as the digital phrenologists claimed. Instead the lines were tiny windows into how sensitively a man used his fingers. Whether the ridges and folds suggested a tendency to a closed fist, a restlessly flexing tension; or a more open handed receptivity. The portents on this one were good.

Having criss-crossed his hand enough times to make him flinch it reflexively, she carried on down the exposed wrist. Veins and arteries picked out against his pale skin. The hair there so fine and blonde as to efface itself, unlike on the reverse side of the forearm where it flourished like jungle vines. But here, the red and blue lines stood out like a road map. The major trunk roads of pulsing blood and the minor tracks back to the heart. She knew that a wedding band was always worn on the fourth finger, because people believed it used to have a vein leading from there all the way to the love muscle. With this mish-mash of venous vermicelli in the wrist, she couldn't be sure how they could have traced it so limpidly.

There was always something too fragile suggested by the upturned wrist, too vulnerable, so she moved quickly on. She found herself at the elbow, and wondered at the change of topography. The permanent fold there raised a livid red scale. Yet here was the most symmetrical set of feature on the skin. Here you could witness the cellular architecture of the human body in all its intricacy. Tiny parallelograms, each with a facility to shrivel or stretch, to concertina and overlap their neighbour. The shuffling orchestration was simply divine. She licked the elbow with her tongue in appreciation. It tasted of interrelatedness.


*

When she woke up, he was gone. He hadn't even extinguished the overhead light, though it was morning and ribbons of light were streaming in through the blinds. Lashing her to the sheets. Seems like they weren't a good fit after all.

She stared at the indentation left in his pillow. The case rucked where it had cradled his head, bearing the sunken contours from the downward pressure. More wrinkles and creases, only this time turned inside out. Lacking for the supporting body they served. The vacated lines, the abandoned seams, having opened the quarry of her own body up the night before. The death mask of another potential relationship, pressed down with airless finality. Once, just once she yearned to wake up and find the smooth impression of a fully-drawn face still lying on the pillow next to hers. Not having to commit the features to her wistful memory, but to be able to revisit them afresh everyday, in the flesh.