A collaboration with Paul Pinn
Published 'The Edge' 1996
Flash of gantry, flash of panty; the slow blur of London suburbs. A woman with post-mortem skin, dressed in sea-hues, sits opposite a man with toxic psychosis. When viewed directly, her eyes are the colour of dirty traffic lights, but opaque and decidedly odd when viewed obliquely. The man views obliquely, and as the train leaves Euston for Birmingham, the sun momentarily escapes from Victorian clouds and the woman says:
“Now it chooses to shine.”
And she rubs her foot against the man’s leg, smiling dysfunctionally rather than suggestively.
Flash of gantry, flash of gallantry; the man lets the latter pass, smiles, says nothing. The woman puts on yellow headphones, closes her eyes, tilts her head sideways, drifts into the realm of other people’s creations.
Flash of gantry, flash of caution; she looks more attractive when asleep, or pretending to be. Her lids hide the suspicious elements of squinty emptiness and translucent madness.
The slow blur of London suburbs is never-ending, and within its dreary rain-splashed conformity there are dark hints of an eternity to come, a never-endingness of London suburbs merging with other suburbs all the way to Birmingham and beyond, not a green or brown field to be seen, right up to the border with Scotland, and perhaps later, into the sea, and who knows, maybe all the way across the big puddle to Birmingham, Alabama; or east and south to Oslo and Rome.
Flash of gantry, the man absorbs: the slow trawl of a Tesco Superstore sprawled between the flash of anonymous stations. Its car park is full of cars but devoid of people. The stations are devoid of both.
The woman stirs, smiles at a point midway between the man and herself, and looks out the window. Her eyes appear divergent in their posturing, their focus, their proportions. Alien eyes, they catch the man writing in a notebook.
“Can I read what you’ve written?” the woman inexplicably asks.
“No,” replies the man, playing the same game.
“Why?” she snaps back, now too late to retract.
With a sharkish smile, he replies: “Because it’s about you.”
“Really?” She’s as incredulous about his answer as her question.
“Yes,” he confirms, in the full swing of the unexpected conversation. “It describes how I commit unspeakable acts on your chained body over the course of three days, then chop you up, bit by bit, until you die.”
The woman’s eyes narrow, part viper, part scorned. She watches him produce a book from a pocket. It’s called The Serial Killers by Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman. He holds it up high as he reads it, to make sure she sees the unavoidable title. A city-slicker with ashen hair and a complexion to match, sitting next to him, says:
“Do you like scaring young women?”
“Yes. But only when they invade thc silent eternity within me.”
“What do you mean - the silent eternity?”
“What I mean,” says the man impatiently, wishing the city-slicker had missed the train, “is what’s it to you?”
The woman opposite swallows her headphones and laughs like a wounded hyena.
It’s his turn to turn the conversation.
“Now it chooses to shine.”
She smiles, having healed her wounds with the dead hyena’s laughter. She’s no longer afraid of him, a fear that originated upon touching his leg with her foot - as if fear was something that could only be transmitted socket to socket. Now, she realises he’s simply a chauvinist, one who can only express his hatred of the opposite sex obliquely - even if all mouth and trousers.
She sinks back into her re-gathered head-set and expands into the wide-split sound of Eno. Yes, she’ll call the man Eno. A name as good as any. Nobody has a monopoly on a name. Eno. One backwards. Like Red Rum. Or Blue, she wants to scream.
Eno knows he’s being thought about. Her closing of the eyes doesn’t fool him. Still, plenty of opportunity for daydreaming later. Here and now, today, the suburbs temporarily slip into slide-away construction works - in tune with cities like Houston and Detroit. “Cities like” - because he’d never been to America. He lives a “life like” - and flinches a cross between a cringe and a shudder at a sudden flash of country.
A flash of cuntry. A flash of a flash. A flashback. A flushforward. Then again watching the lids of squinty emptiness flirt with her own upper cheeks. He senses the music from the “it is, it is. it is, it is,” of her tinkling ear-pieces. No longer Eno, but disco dancing.
The real One, him, he, resumes his self-conscious writing. He’s copying page upon page of The Serial Killers into his own notebook, believing he’s writing it for the first time. He has memorised whole chunks and doesn’t need to check with the book’s pages proper. Colin Wilson and that other guy, whose name he can never remember without the spine’s help, are imposters.
His life in the bush of ghosts, he knows, is ethereal, without the substance of touch. He will take Tiger Mountain and reduce them all to dust for laughing behind his back, before his face, in his fitful nocturnal interludes. He is a toxic psychotic. He has eaten bread, partaken of wheat, poisoned himself. Already the inner workings of his brain are trembling under the onslaught of bacterially produccd chemicals. Already his thoughts arc growing as dark as the dark side of the moon. Already he can feel the shift. Now it is only a matter of time before he is truly ready. The moon-train to a foreign Earth.
Country; cuntry: both now as threatening as each other. He’s never had the latter, and doesn’t like the former, imagining both to be equally spacious, equally suffocating. To destroy both would be comforting.
The woman stands, slips her bottom over the knees of the geriatric passenger beside her, and heads down the aisle to the toilets. Eno stares covetously at her walkman, the wire and headphones curled on the seat like a yellow snake he once met in a book. He wants to steal - no, possess - the music of his mentor. Instead, he rises, stuffs the Colin Wilson book and his own notebook in the wide, deep pockets of his oversized overcoat, and follows the woman. The city-slicker turns from ash to ermine as he stares disapprovingly at Eno’s back shrinking down the aisle.
By the time he reaches the malleable gristle at the interface of two carriages, the woman has gone, leaving him with a nagging doubt that perhaps Eno is not the One after all. He bites his lower lip, stares at a toilet door, then another, and wonders what Hannibal Lector would do. There are only two toilets here. Sniff her out, he decides, but his own imagination has never extended that far. Angrily he wishes he’d ate more bread, gathered a greater harvest of chemical dysfunction. He puts an ear to one toilet door and then the other, hears the ancient music of closet water and smiles.
Neither says engaged.
Yet she’s surely in at least one of them, he thinks, knowing, as he does, that the law of averages is not an average law.
He smells a rat.
Why has she kept both locks on vacant? Is this an invitation to him - or a paradoxical warning which she knows he’ll understand better than making it impossible for him? And, indeed, without warning, the city-slicker pushes past and enters one cubicle - snapping the slide-bolt to engaged behind him. Evidently on a slick kick, thought Eno.
Eno laughs, for perhaps the first time in his life.
So, the woman is in the crypt with the door still saying vacant. No need for laws to tell him that. He laughs again. A communal dysfunction is stirring every set of bowels by dint of simply belonging to travellers on the late fare express. The last rack track for Brum Bum. Hence, the lower belch squelch from the slicker behind the locked door.
But surely a squelch too loud for one person, even for somebody with the biggest load to shed. Without preamble, Eno ram-raids - bouncing off like a squashed medicine-ball.
From a whore of a law that opens its legals wide to anybody who cares to plunge real deep, Eno ratchets knowledge to the top of the mind. And, yes, that slick kicker does have a paperback face. He pulls the dog-eared book from his overcoat to check. Not Colin Wilson. But that other guy? Surely not.
A flash of gantry, cuntry - lavatory. A slash of thought.
He tugs the cord neatly slotted in the swaying stretched-stomach wall, knowing, indeed, that he is not, nor ever will be, the One.
The train screeches to a halt like a serpent dragster. He sighs with relief, because ... well, because the cubicles aren’t allowed in use when stationary. And, with the side of his foot, he tries to tidy back the silting stew of blue-veined curds that inches out from under the engaged door.
Eventually, however, he screams. One short blast on the tunnel vision. Blue murder. A sanitary flush.
