5.
Grabs the kitchen knife from the dishwasher drawer; waves it forcefully illustratively vaguely in her direction. She takes a step backwards, watches the blade's lightrush mirror, concentrates deciphers records ten-fathom Scotish murmuring; others inch quietly away, back through the kitchen door. Leather jacket heavy on his lanky round shoulders, knuckle-whitened serrated grasping forward and ahead; she smiles, nods and inches.
"Like a fucking noddy doll, you are, Louise.", he says, "I've had, and you know I've had a shit load of speed, a whole european amphi-eat-amine mountain of the stuff, and so I've been talking, well, nothing but crap to you for just about forever" Sharp rhythm-baton knife jabs skin-crawl close. "And all you do is nod and smile. Like a fucking soviet priest, a bloody Gertrude Eisenstein October noddy priest. Forgive me father for I exist: some kind of statute-toppling marching war torn region of Ngorno Iraq; Viet Cong like some rubber hoolywood villain; Steve fucking Jobs wipe-clean virgin no sharp-corners and up-your-arse syringe virbrate-mode iPod guitar-and-a-stool bed-pan bolemic low-fat organic size zero carbon footprint crap?"
"Put the knife down Alex".
"Just as you pay me attention? Is that it? Fed up with me, are you?". More indistinct waving with OCD triplicate theatrical twists, beloved flourish, closer each time to Lousie's face, cheek, eye. "Though it does seem to have gone...", he turns red-cloaked pantomime villain to the empty kitchen, "PECIULIARLY QUIET AROUND HERE." Tumbleweed. "Woosh. Woooooosh. Thirty six hours of continuous shift. I want to see how far I can go before I crack. Nobody notices: midnight milkos are already whacked and stoned. And then ... then a little new year's party, relaxation. That's all, THAT IS ALL, LOUISE. Pendulum wind-down like grand-daddy clock from eight wraps of the jumpy stuff, a fall down like a hypnotist's counting; each bong of big daddy ben". His free hand jitters, struggles to unscrew a hip-bottle of Stolly on the work-surface, swigs and sighs, groans, growls.
"Alex. Alex, why are you waving a knife at me? At Louise, Alex?. Put the knife down and we'll talk."
Paranoid distrustful pause. "'Put the knife down', and you'll bugger off."
"I won't, Alex. It's me, Alex. I don't leave you, do I? And until you put it down, Alex, I can't prove that to you. Let me prove it to you: dare me, Alex. We can go outside, cool down, and talk about stuff, whatever you want to talk about, talk about nothing, you know, in the dark: cool and open."
Knife challenge-slammed onto kitchen table, they, Louise and Alex, through the kitchen door, he goes screaming off into the darkness of the long-grassy garden, running in circles in the blackness like a four year-old, screaming at the moon, she leaning against the sand-sharp wall as he receeds into the distance.
"Are you okay, Louise?" asks the corner-head-poke magic host, made incarnate by the devil's recession.
"He's just a bit tired, David. He'll be okay." Screaming, swearing, collisions with undergrowth: sound-effects prompt-side (distant). "He'll calm down. He's just had a bad day. That's all."
"We were just thinking, this is all, that it might be best if you, you know, if you took him home: to relax, to sleep it off. Best for all of us, we think".
Looks him in the eye, Louise smiles disappointed, eaten, resigned. The heaven choir chorus-line mob in the distance, talking laughing listening; endless Sisters of Mercy pulsing in perfect hi-fi.
Midnight arguing the toss with the nightbus driver.
David returns the bread knife to the appropriate drawer and, with perfect timing, rolls it soft-close shut.
4.
A Triflic Acid protective-group GS-NMR chemist is sitting on a cute alchemist's lab bench, legs dangling over the floor, listening to him speak. Retorts, uncleansed of herbs, are strewn impurely in unquantified heaps; a crocodile hangs from the ceiling. Aqua regia noxiously fumes beneath a zombie-eyed window.
He strides, the alchemist, strides across the floor in his robes, all calomel, vitriol, and alkahest; all elements of houses; all planets and their empires. The chemist silently listens, hears, and drifts: the transmutations of antimony, the white and the red fuming waters, the heat and nausea of the tiny room, his drink which she drank, too strong, too bitter, now swimming in a cold dry sweat. The ebb and flo of his words on the knotted air of his mouth clutch-snap closes the space between them, and land-slips departures from reason.
He thinks her expert in his craft, but the chemist's back is against the laboratory wall. She thins herself against solid brickwork, feels depressions of plasterwork on her spine: she follows few of his humours, and none of his transmutations, but guards, with jealousy, the drape-between dust-convolved conjouring of the room, as fragile as a bird in slow-motion; could shatter with a sour single gaze. To her left, brass instrumentation hangs from a profane and vicious hook, and to her right lean leather-bound symbols of craft.
"How long can it be until spring?".
She looks up at him, telephone-table hallway radiator leaning; past him to the garden-path window; sees Alex and Louise, skulkily leaving, and attempts a reply. She sat on the stairs for an hour, lulled by the rocking rhythm of computer-draughted fantasy; by his quests and challenges, by films and by novel; by devices and their release. He looks the chemist in the eye, and expects a response.
She had agreed, when it was clear that agreement was in order. When his eyes and mouth required them, she has sympathised, smiled, and frowned. But this question is too open and too broad for a reflex.
Her mind races, in search of fuel for deduction. His field, in truth, is fallow; left barren by Boyle and Lavoisier, centuries before. Her mind, rain-soaked industrial slate; in the midst of a storm she struggles to inscribe alchemical daemons, with impotent, slipping, crumbling chalk, and leaves no mark.
Rates and patterns are unknown.
Seasons pass separate and disjoint: cities, games, lives, stories, elections, ecconomics; independent and strobing. She must recall, beyond mere foggy implicit drift, his most recent invocation: she must slam her mind backward, through walls of time-diminished history, and grab his words, crush them, and find solid ground.
Signals shine unclear, trapped in the low glancing bleach of winter morning sun: the light of necessary pharmacy; the light of spirits first slipped.
She cannot answer.
Mirage waters gliding over our hallway chemist's eyes heave in the rhythm of front-room bass: glisten in imploring thumps, in intervals toward midnight.
3.
A morbid fear of fancy dress: gin-trapped between a twee bourgeois anaemic Gilbert-and-Sullivan marvelous art-of-living death-mask spiral, and some mechanical terror of mechanised militarised vacuum-packed parachutist buckle-strapped sexuality. All the time, the casual and the fashionable, the defiers of ordinance, attending the carnage, cowardly, ironic, and detached.
Mark, on the sofa, eyes leaden, is staring at Sarah's thighs, Sarah dressed as Poison Ivy, her head back and on one side, contemplating the fireplace. Sees him staring, and thinks.
The hard-tamped wheat-chip airbag packaging between Mark and the world; the woodshop fog of sawdust which separates his smarting eyes from the objects he envices; is this perhaps all that keeps him from reaching out and taking? Is he good, or anaesthetic? If he were connected, as a record-needle, as a seismograph, as a house-of-cards is connected, if he grabbed his feelings firmly by the throat, tannoyed them to the world; even in the noon of reason, could a taste, a simple taste, balance-tip and ship-scuttle his life: is this why he criples himself with whisky?
Sarah receeds.
As she diminishes, loneliness drips, streams, rivers from above. Loneliness stains the ceiling yellow, bloats the artex and bends it lethargicly. Loneliness demarkates patches of plaster which chip, slide, reveal a sore dermis of desicated gyproc. Loneliness runs through the maggot-hole of light-fittings, wrings around flex like maypole ribbons, hangs pendulous from bulbs, and then falls through warm frank air. Loneliness (the perfect solvent) stains a white rabbit bobtail yellow; drips Clepoatra's impermanently black hair to her neck and shoulders; soaks a pirate's cardboard hat into a sodden amorphous crown.
A dozen pickled friends, lego-men and explorers, bunnies and comic-book villains, sit, quietly fighting sherry schnapps whisky sauce nausea. Mortally wounded conversations limp slowly onward, shift their lumbering weight, from one foot to the other, waiting for the victor's bullet.
Mark's head falls forwards, and a yellow torrent bursts, shatters, explodes through a glorious bay-window, staves the window into kindling and aerial knives; cold ninety-six octane nausea floods the room; knocks them all unconscious in an instant, glistens with a migraine cresting, floats over heavy pooled loneliness like petrol over water, and carries the detritus of civility to its grave.
The battlefield next dawn, a cold, syncopated thudding of drums.
2.
I'm gonna take this car crash confetti, and put it in a jar.
He climbs over the barrier, and grabs a cut-glass muck-hand full of red and orange indicator shards and slivers of lamps; shows them to the girls. This stuff eclipse-corona encircles the roundabout, and he talks about gathering it up, and collecting it in a jar.
The girls sit on the bank: him uninstructable; try gentle persuasion. "The pizza will go cold, Markus". "We'll miss midnight, Markus, spend new year on the edge of a roundabout". "It's raining".
Three wise revellers caught, mid-transfer, at a city-edge interchange, and Markus losing his grip on the dotted-red line of travel. The road unnervingly devoid of traffic, Amy and Hannah admit defeat, open pizzas on the verge, and wait for his collecting to end. Cut into the embankment, right to the top with ziggurat pauses, is a staircase with a grey electric pillar at its summit. They sit, and watch him from the staircase. Mud begins to puddle through his hunting ground. Their corrogated boxes are scattered with sagging tuppences of rain, but manage to shield pizza from the gathering storm.
As the next piece is teased from the whole, rain splashes their food impallatably cold. White and yellow cheese, running like sores, is peppered into a palette of disparate flesh: brown, pink, red, black. In accidental moments, indistinguishable from lightning, Amy thinks of the corpse-flower, stinking on a hot-house floor, the ulcerous Raflessia carrion-luring collage; she sees worms, their offspring, crawling across the surface of her food; she sees the carnage of combat captured in a small green box.
Hannah eats voraciously beside her. But Amy eats well, too. Her mind is so flat, and her disgust so thin and so sharp, that it slides along her tongue like the springing of a Yale lock with a credit card, and so she inhales, savours, loves the smell, the taste of the meat; still squirming, disgusted, but fearless of retching.
The nightbus appears through the rain-sheets. Markus steps out of the road, his right hand filled with white orange red glass, raised in a victorious fist which is bleeding from its purchase: pink running stains dispersed along his arm by rain; he's ready to grab something to eat, to continue his way to the party.
1.
Eyes closed. Develop in a Dark Room, to the sound of Overbombing; washing line photos hang from hooks, as carcasses in abattoirs. They say that this song is far too long, and that things unimpailed by photography are consequently unfixed, and so they will diminish with time.
These things I have: my parents in front of the old gas fireplace; a christmas hoard of old orange, brown, and green plastic toys; nights on the town with teenage friends. Recorded and pickled in jars, though also grown alien with time.
A fox is caught at night, raiding bins for scraps; with two discs of reflected flashlight, suspended in darkness. A ray of light travels between two worlds: to the moon, and safely home. I stare: the fox stares. I hook it on a barb. A scene from long ago: from childhood?
Good music disrupts the rhythms of time. A film: it imparts a quality to your travel; movement differs; the sound of space crispens; utility architecture is elevated and enthroned; the colours of shadows intensify. But a song, a good song, has a tactic for eternity, or else it has nothing.
An accident at the interchange. Heaps of metal removed, detritis remains. A traffic light booted twenty yards toward Ely; snapped cable spine reaching, like Adam to God, God to Adam, toward its novel disconnection, bright stiff-stamened stub flowering from the verge, as a weed in spring. Prayer flag incident tape blows along the sliproad; unspooled like studio-discarded sound, caught on unlikely anchors: trees, fences, signs.
The bell rings and I answer. Hannah, Amy, and Markus arrive, with seconds to spare, soaked and matted; smiling and giggling. Markus has something precious cupped into his hands. I thought it might be a frog or a mouse, but it seems to be some kind of crystal, or jewel. He cannot show this prize to Alex, because he is gone.
An oblique friend sits on the staircase, entranced by the stranger leaning before her, delivering intense lectures without means of access. The three leave for the front room, where six dishevelled acquaintances sit in some heady irritated haze, infrequently talking in geriatric anger. Markus' tail falls; he heads for the kitchen and finds a discarded bottle, half-full of Stolly. He swigs.
Hannah dyed her hair cherry red, and tied herself into alluring shapes. She stands in the corner of the room, her weight awkwardly distributed over her feet, leaning against the wall, and smiling distantly, nervously.
Superimposed over her form -- like the reflection of a sinking woman on the underside of the surface of water -- the shape of someone without makeup or costume, dressed for the practice of everyday life. Then, standing before the mirror, and with the aid of a beauty of bottles and cloth, properties of mind cause a determined assembly of her realised form: photographs; music; things caught in traps.
Amy turns, and Hannah grabs her with a gaze. Dyadic gossip rescues them both from the party, and they pass out of view.
Is there some order to the flow of events: does substance flow from frame to frame?
Verses and choruses subside into vainishing-point rivers of outro pulsing; breath zoetrope syncopates with downbeats and snares, as the planets continue revolving unscathed.
Midnight draws near. Disparate lives converge for an hour or two, and then rapidly drift apart. The music is lowered; we gather around the radio; await the discharge of the year.
I sigh without conviction because winter has its own rewards.