exponent

one who does, who talks about, who lauds, who represents, who stands for, who…

Walking along his street after a hard day’s work, or a day of doing nothing, or a big day, or a hard day, or a long day, or just another day, or the same day as yesterday, Oscar noticed something different about the street, his street. There’s something different, Oscar thought, Oscar hoped, Oscar smiled, Oscar prayed… and indeed there was. Sitting on the street, there in front of him, not five feet away from him, was the rusty yellow bulk of a rubbish skip.

One of his neighbours had hired a skip, one of his distant neighbours (three houses away is distance enough to qualify as distant, Oscar assured himself) had hired a skip and left it sitting empty on the street.

Of course, there’s nothing else for it, Oscar commented to himself, but to fill it to the brim with anything he might or could possibly do without in his house. His mattress would certainly have to go in, as would anything else large, awkward, voluminous and vaguely useless. Wasn’t it an awful shame, Oscar briefly thought, that he didn’t have a series of mattresses stacked up in his house ready for dragging out into the street as soon as darkness fell to pile up in this skip which has been left open to the world, like a… like a gaping mouth screaming to be filled. (Oscar reminded himself to write that simile down, having changed his mind on the use of similies in writing, or even in general conversation, thinking this particular simile worthy of incorporation into one or other of the sixteen or so novels that he had under development in his collection of scrappy notebooks.)

Standing in the half-light of his bedroom, Oscar had second thoughts. His mattress was still firm in places and he could quite easily sleep on several of its extremities for quite a few more years; the centre of the mattress had long since been rendered uninhabitable, featuring a series of sprung springs and irregular depressions. But an empty skip is, Oscar reminded himself, like a gaping mouth screaming to be filled, so he really had little choice but to tear off the bed sheet and drag his mattress downstairs.

Oscar leant the mattress against the wall in the hallway and, sitting at his front window, sitting in the dark, before a gap in the curtains, watched the street, watched the skip, watched the approach and passing of each person, noted how most people slowed down on passing the skip, and a few, after they passed it, stopped and turned around, and wondered, they wondered, these distant neighbours, and Oscar wondered, himself a distant neighbour, how long he might have, how big might the window be, between the arrival of every distant neighbour home from work, and so the quietening of the street, and the point when the last distant neighbour could hoist in their sagging mattress or other bulky item and walk away with a smile on their face, a peculiar smile borne of taking advantage of another distant neighbour’s stupidity.

Helen arrived home soon after the point when the dusk had become sufficiently impenetrable.

“Don’t turn on the light!” Oscar warned, but to no avail.

Only after she switched on the lights in the hallway and the living room did Helen think of questioning Oscar’s warning.

“Thanks.”

“Writing in the dark now?” Helen had adopted, perhaps she’d worn it all day, the bemused face of the world-weary… it wasn’t an expression which suited her, but as she didn’t have ready access to a mirror, she had not considered adopting another.

“Did you not see it?”

“See it?” Helen raised both eyebrows and cocked her head and spoke slowly as one would to someone who is drunk, retarded or both. “Did I see it?”

Oscar shrugged his shoulders, turned his palms upwards as though petitioning the gods and raised both eyes dramatically to heaven, all the time scanning his brain for a witty comment… but none was available.

“See it?” Helen was now impatient with this drunk or retard or both.

Oscar shook his head. What’s the point? his face asked.

“See what?” Helen felt for a moment that she had missed something, something fundamental, something that she really should be already aware of… but the moment passed.

“It’s an empty skip!”

“A skip?”

“It’s empty!”

“And your going to drag that mattress you have out in the hallway down the street and dump it into someone else’s skip?”

“Yes. Finally. You’ve got it.”

Helen shook her head at what was clearly yet another offering from a world which would weary anybody of Helen’s higher mental abilities and at which she could only shake her head.

“Don’t shake your head at me – this is it. This is it. It’s a law of nature. Law of the jungle… if we were in the jungle. This is it – this is what we’re here on earth for, to hunt, to forage, to scavenge, and to…”

“To fill a neighbour’s skip.”

Oscar turned off the lights and walked Helen over to the gap in the curtains in which the street lights could now be seen to be warming up.

“Look out there. What do you see?”

Helen didn’t see anything; at least, she didn’t say anything.

“That’s the world we live in. That’s it. And that yellow bulk fading into the darkness – that’s the object, the focus of attention, of every gap in the curtains from number fifty-three to number one; that Helen is what we are here to do, the meaning of our lives, the centre of our universe, our culture – what it means to be human. This is what it means.”

Helen’s world-weary gestures were now hidden in the darkness, only an occasional sigh could be heard in the room.

“No don’t get up, don’t go – you’ve got to watch this.”

“It’s an empty street.”

“Never have you been so wrong,” Oscar assured her. “Just wait. You will see before you the very stuff of life.”

And with those words Oscar had gone, he had disappeared into the darkness, though his disappearing took some time and effort: having to hoist the mattress onto his back, then falling down when it snagged on the door (as it must have done, being five feet too wide to go through the door), and then having to manoeuvre its bulk through the door frame, and then hoisting the mattresses up onto his back and shoulders, bent over so that his back was now parallel with the ground – and so he had disappeared. Oscar sprinted in this twisted shape beneath that cumbersome weight into the darkness, and then the half illumination of a yellow street light, and then darkness again, until Helen could see him, lit up bright and almost shining, luminescent, one especially bright yellow street light catching the expression of effort and joy on his face as the mattress’s shadow leapt from him and followed it into the skip.

Oscar had done it.

archipelago

…too many islands

 

 

 

 

Prison suited Smith. He felt at home. He felt persecuted. It was just as he always imagined.

 

Apart from the noise. It was noisy. And the bustle. And the temperature. And the smell. Smith had never imagined that smell. Nor the hunger. But of course he would be hungry. It was a punishment. And he hadn’t eaten since this morning. But Smith’s deeply ingrained sense that he was right was sharper than ever. He was right, and that was his great comfort in these trying times.

 

Not that there was anything particularly trying about sitting still in a concrete walled cell (There were three walls of concrete, the wall he faced was in fact a wall of metal bars, just as you’d expect to find in a police detention cell.). It could have been boring though. It would have been unbearable if you were the kind of person who couldn’t bear it. It could have been awful. It could have been too much. It could have been it. That’s it. No more. But Smith wasn’t unduly perturbed. As always, he had his thoughts to occupy him, so many thoughts: the shape of a fish, the size of a square mile, his mother’s wrists, the capital of Mexico, the colour and rhythmic movement of water in the ship canal, the eyes of a shark, the sound of a gun shot in the movies, the texture of freshly cut wood, the time it takes to walk to the city centre, the number of players on a rugby team, the way a penguin walks, the colour of her hair, the summer solstice, a table and six chairs, the longest river in the world, the number of dogs in the city, the colour yellow, baseball caps, the shape of newspaper articles, illuminated windows, plastic bags, Venetian blinds, the number of prepositions, medium wave signals, glass place mats, four yucca plants, digestive biscuits, magnolia paint, the amount of bubbles in a pint of larger, newspaper print, light bulbs, silver cars and the number forty-four.

 

Also there were his more abstract thoughts, which intermingled with these concrete thoughts: the essence of existence, the soul of a bird, the nature of morality, the good life, beauty, the square root of twenty four, the meaning of a word, truth, free will, fatalism, evil, determinism, survival of the fittest, perfection, time, nature, the universe, life, the beginning, god, zero, the peak of perfection, gravity, heterodoxy, electromagnetism, fundamentalism, longitude, singularity, monotheism, insight, twenty-three degrees, infinity, death, addiction and the ineluctable modality of the visible.

 

Did any of these thoughts, either concrete or abstracts, originate in his sensory experience of the jail cell? No.

 

The following were Smith’s sensory experiences over this time period: The clinking of something, the colour of naked concrete, the feeling of emptiness in his stomach, the indistinct shouting of a number of words, the manner in which the metal bars cut across his view of the fourth concrete wall running along the corridor, a series of loud bangs, the coldness of the air against his face, the sound of a door opening, it clanging shut, the eerie quality of the pale light, the flickering fluorescent light down the hallway, a faint mumbling from one or other of the cells to his right, an indistinct whispering from the left, the almost audible words now being whispered, the word “you”, the words “yes you”, the sight of a thin hand extended out from the where the bars at the front of his cell left a two inch gap with the concrete wall, the hand waving up and down, the sound of the words, harshly whispered: “Hey! What’s your name?” The thin hand turned upward as though lifting an invisible weight. The sound of a door opening and foot steps on the corridor. The hand disappearing. The appearance of a policeman, from the left, in profile. His disappearance, to the right. The sound of his footsteps continuing. Getting quieter. Getting louder. His reappearance, from the right. The sight of a policeman in profile. His disappearance to the right. The sound of his footsteps continuing. Getting quieter. The closing of the metal door with a bang. The appearance of a thin hand – its index finger pointing directly at him.

 

Twenty four metal bars, each two inches apart from the next, formed the furthest extent of his cell. Smith could look another six feet beyond them at the concrete wall at the other side of the corridor. The cell he was in was square, roughly six feet by six feet. There was a concrete shelf attached to the concrete wall opposite the bars. It wasn’t clear, from the distance Smith was looking, six feet, and because of the dim light, where the bars became the door he had been pushed through three hours before. Smith now doubted the existence of this door.

 

Just as Smith’s thoughts were acquiring this level of coherence, the thin hand appeared again and disrupted his thought process. The thin hand was accompanied by the whispered words “Get over here.” When accompanied by the idea of decay, the recollection of his phone number, the image of the back of his father’s neck and a faint feeling of jubilation, these sensory experiences failed to bed down into Smith’s understanding of the world. With the words “Quick.” and “I’ve got something for you.” also whispered, but with a greater sense of urgency, and with much more force, such that the words were no longer really whispered, but spat out exclamations, Smith reacted as though by reflex, stood up and approached the thin hand.

 

It was empty.

 

It was only when Oscar collected him from the police station early the next morning that Smith began to see how all of these seemingly unrelated memories, ideas, sensory impressions and feelings were related.

 

He told Oscar about the empty hand and the pointing finger.

 

“An empty hand, eh?” Oscar nodded. “And a pointing finger as well?”

 

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Smith dared to ask.

 

“Yes,” Oscar dared to reply. “Yes,” he repeated with more certainty. “Yes. Yes I am. I’m thinking just that.”

 

“What?”

 

“What you’re thinking… I’m thinking just what you’re thinking. You’re right. Whatever you’re thinking. Your idea. Your theory. I think you’re right. It couldn’t be anything else.”

 

Buoyed by having such confidence placed in him, at least buoyed to his normal levels of self-confidence, total confidence in his every idea, assumption and theory, his normal state of unconditional self-assurance, complete absence of self-doubt, absolute faith in his perception of the world, an inviolable picture which could never be tainted by misunderstanding or distortions borne of a faulty or incomplete perspective, so essentially buoyed, buoyed up, up high, crest of a wave, top of his game, up high looking down – Smith put into words the theory which had been coalescing in his mind over the last few hours:

 

“It’s him… the man with the… that man… he’s at the heart of this. It was his hand, his pointing finger, his voice whispering to me, trying to get to me, misdirecting me. The man who looks at clouds. The man who locked us in that room. Who escaped. It’s him. Of course it’s him. It has to be.”

 

“Yes,” Oscar almost shouted out. “It’s him.”

automaton

…it’s human nature

 

 

 

 

What else could Helen do?

 

Nothing. Helen could do nothing else but do what Helen would do, should do, could only do, must do, is about to do, is doing right now.

 

There she is, doing what she had to do. This would be a great comfort to her, if her thoughts were to lead this way, towards self-doubt, seeking absolution of blame, seeking relief from the moral quandaries which can and do plague us. But not Helen. To be caught up in her own nature and have no choice but to do what her nature dictated, was a not welcome break from having to think about what she should, might or could possibly do. Helen just did. Helen was. Helen is. Helen must.

 

And what must Helen do?

 

Helen had little choice but to jumble up the newspaper’s central filing system.

 

“Don’t we keep computer records?” Helen had asked earlier that day.

 

“Of course. But we need to know where certain pieces of paper are. Pieces of paper are still what we always go back to. They’re the beginning and end.”

 

Randomly pulling out files from the beginning of the alphabet, Helen restored them to shelves at the other end of the room. As she busied herself with placing files from “c” into “s” and files from “f” into “r”, Helen realised that she was following a recognisable pattern. If she was to continue in this manner for the next ten or twenty years, she would merely reverse the alphabet. So she altered the manner in which she was proceeding, placing some “b” files in “a” and “s” files in “t”. Of course, she changed the labels of the files, so that the files could not be located. There would be no beginning, nor would there be an end.

 

The filing clerk would have to be fired. There was nothing else for it.

 

Helen might be the slave of her own nature, but she was also the master of the fate of someone else.

 

The filing clerk was a fairly nice, harmless, inoffensive young man. The type of young man you could not find it in you to dislike, let alone hate. This bothered Helen. It bothered her to such a degree that she found herself hating the filing clerk – which was convenient, though not essential. Helen didn’t have to persuade herself of the evil inherent in the filing clerk. She didn’t convince herself. She was just convinced.

 

“Do you have anything that needs filing?” he asked every morning, an innocent and polite smile colouring his features.

 

Helen nourished her hatred of him.

 

“I couldn’t find that file on the Murphy story,” he told her one afternoon. “Are you sure it was filed?”

 

Helen relished the control she had of his fate.

 

What would happen to this inoffensive and jolly young man upon being fired was of as much interest to Helen as what happened to him when he left work every evening. It wasn’t that she didn’t care; it was just that she wasn’t aware of his having an existence at either end of her awareness of him.

 

“I had one hell of a crazy night last night,” he stated one morning.

 

Helen could only look at him with a puzzled face. She didn’t understand what he could mean.

 

But Helen was at the same time a keen observer of her fellow man. She spent nearly fifteen minutes watching him go about his business in the office yesterday. He spoke at length to nearly everybody, speaking longer to the young women than to the men, spending longer with the more junior staff, seeming to be a little wary of older and more senior members of staff – as you’d expect. Helen, as a keen observer of her fellow man, expected this.

 

When he wasn’t speaking to anyone, and paused in his work, hovering between one menial task and another, he let his eyes rest on the features of one or two particular young women. He seemed mostly absorbed by their breasts. Helen noted this.

 

Helen prided herself on her awareness of other people, despite the fact that it was almost non-existent. She treasured the fact that she had unearthed about the young filing clerk – he was an admirer of young women’s breasts. And Helen had breasts. A plan slowly formed in her mind.

 

“I can’t find that file,” he said to a reporter from sport yesterday morning. It was becoming his regular refrain. Becoming more and more frustrated with the missing files and with his inability to meet basic requests for files, the filing clerk seemed to be a little on edge – which was duly noted by Helen: he liked young women’s breasts and he was a little on edge.

 

“Perhaps I could help you find that file.” Helen startled him as he sat alone amongst the shelves of the filing room, lost amongst his thoughts. Helen had a good idea of what was occupying those thoughts.

 

He didn’t have the wherewithal to respond, especially as her breasts were almost touching his face.

 

“The file I requested this morning,” Helen added.

 

“The file?”

 

Helen bent down slightly and arched her back. “The Winton file.” Helen couldn’t repress a little titter. She had no choice.

 

He looked flustered. He eventually caught her eye, but wasn’t sure what to make of the manner in which she was looking at him. The look of confusion, stained slightly by fear, was noted by Helen. She had noted so many things about this young man. She now had as full a picture of him in her head as she was ever likely to get. This was the peak of her understanding of him. He was more real to her now than he ever was or would be.

 

“What’s wrong?” Helen adopted the soft tone and troubled appearance of someone who was genuinely concerned, at least she thought she did.

 

The young filing clerk told her everything. However, after half an hour, Helen had forgotten the majority of his everything. But she retained the fact that he had just been spurned in love. Of course, there was also the fact that he was frustrated by his job: files kept going missing and everyone took it out on him. “Who else could be to blame?” Helen had asked him. It was at this point he walked quickly from the room, tears clearly collecting in his eyes.

 

Helen could have acted out of compassion at this point, but that wasn’t in her nature. Not that she even considered it – acting out of compassion. Nor did she, at this point, consider her nature. Nor did she consider any alternative to what she was about to do.

 

When the office had emptied out that evening Helen went from desk to desk, taking files which had been left out for filing the next morning. She was careful to take files at random, making sure that there was no pattern to her actions. Also, she took no files from the desks of the most junior reporters and staff, whose desks ran along a glass wall beneath the sweep of the close circuit cameras. Having collected as many files as she could comfortably carry, Helen made her way to the filing room at the back of the office. Intent on acting quickly, Helen fell over the outstretched legs of the filing clerk as soon as she entered the room. The files she was carrying spread across the floor.

 

Getting quickly to his feet, the young man was almost all apologies, but he couldn’t get out a single word. Helen was about to explain what she was doing, when she noticed that the filing room was in quite a bit of disarray. There were files spilt onto the floor all the way down the main corridor. There was a pile of files thrown into the far corner. The whole of the “r” section was spilled onto the floor.

 

“Don’t say anything,” were the only words the young filing clerk could manage.

 

Helen had no choice.

camaraderie

…fellow feeling in both directions 

 

 

 

Needless to say, but it will be said, it has to be said, here it is being said: Henry Bridgewater was not a lover of his fellow man… it has been said.

 

Standing at the window in the staffroom, looking out onto the green, Henry would smile on seeing his fellow man in an unfortunate situation, indeed, here he is now, smiling, actually smiling, the smile can be seen from the other side of the room (it is reflected in the glass of the window), so he’s not smiling inside, smiling slightly nor smiling wistfully, but fully smiling, the nearest thing to laughing, his teeth actually showing, his lips stretching over the smugness consequent of seeing his fellow man in an unfortunate situation, Bill Simmons, who was himself smiling, almost laughing, sitting on a bench, leaning back on the bench, so almost lying on the bench, practically lying on the bench, talking with his head close to the head, his lips almost brushing her ear, her perched on the edge of the seat, her smiling, her nodding her head, her laughing, a sixth form girl sitting next to him laughing, and Merryweather standing there staring at them both. This was certainly a situation in which Henry would have to accept a complete lack of fellow feeling with his fellow man.

 

But of course there were others. But of course. Of course. Others?

 

How about the full range of humanity sitting around the staffroom muttering nothing to each other again and again…like some kind of mantra. Was it a mantra? Or were they just randomly repeating inane comments? Wasn’t that what a mantra was? But it wasn’t giving them any kind of metaphysical gratification… is there such a thing as metaphysical gratification? But why else have a mantra?

 

With such questions Henry was to be distracted for a moment or two, but when he regained his awareness of the here and now and his place in it, he was again cheered up by the precarious position Bill Simmons, union man, was in. The sixth form girl was by now giggling in response to Bill’s latest witty remark, her long dark hair tickling his cheek, her hand resting on the seat just behind his back and Merryweather was huffing and puffing at a fierce rate on the other side of the green, pretending to listen to some person talking about some thing. From her perspective this must have looked all very inappropriate. She would be able to make out their laughing faces, probably see the mirth on their faces, the way their eyes met over each terribly funny remark, the manner in which her hair softly touched his face, his hands in his pockets, his whole body laid back, her arm finding support behind his back, perhaps on his shoulder, and above them to the right, or to her left, the beaming face of Henry himself…

 

Yes, he too appeared in this scene, an appearance which was to straight away dent his enjoyment of it. For a moment he saw his smiling face, framed by the window, held a couple of feet to the left of the offending couple, his enjoyment clearly evident, his lack of fellow feeling clear for all to see, his shame, his utter shame…

 

The face which replaced the shamelessly beaming face of Henry was a far more dignified face. It was the face of fear, touched by surprise, surprised by his own discovery of himself, the face of shame, the face of a man caught out, proven to be made of rather shoddy material, a face in which no trace of a smile, no enjoyment, malicious or otherwise, was evident. It was a face, if you didn’t know any better, and Henry didn’t, of quiet dignity. As an experiment, Henry adopted a faint look of disapproval. He liked what he saw. He allowed this faint look to become less faint, more evident, a look which defined his view of the world. It was at once proud and sneering. Relaxing his eyes a little he managed to soften the look and appear more conceited than sneering… it was a look he approved of, a look he could just make out in the glass of the window as the light shifted owing to a break in the clouds.

 

And it was as though this break in the clouds announced something in the world outside of the head and personal space of Henry… there could be seen, at first vague shapes disturbing his reflection, then dark bodies passing across and obscuring the reflection of a proud and haughty faced Henry, dark shapes which took on more definition as his eyes focused on the world beyond his reflection, the shape of Bill Simmons and the sixth form girl standing to attention, and the rotund and generous shape of Mrs Merryweather being very generous with her words and proximity, very liberal with her volume and tone, very angular with her movements, her hands cutting into the air, he shoulders jumping up and down, her jaw falling open and snapping shut, her head twisting and turning in jerky movements, nodding in time to some discordant melody.

 

Just as the words of Merryweather were becoming audible to him, one word must have reached the perfect pitch to resonate with the glass in the window frame, which framed Henry’s haughty and proud look, which shattered for a moment the world outside, rendering it opaque, and when the vibrations settled, what was revealed to Henry through the glass was his own reflection, jutting out over the right shoulder of Merryweather and levitating between the heads of Bill Simmons and the sixth form girl, one of whom was being lambasted on the state of their uniform.

 

Bill Simmons’s face, his round glasses, his neatly trimmed beard, at once revealed a man defeated, caught out, or some such thing. It is difficult to deduce what one face meant as opposed to any another. The sixth form girl’s face was hidden by her dark hair which the breeze had plastered across her face. Merryweather’s face was obscured by the fact that it was turned the other way. But in amongst all these half images and obscured meanings was a revelation. The revelation was the face of Henry, the proud and conceited face of Henry, the face as others saw it, how he appeared to the world, how he was seen. There he was in the middle of this scene looking almost regal, certainly above all of this tittle-tattle and bickering and what not. There his image floated, just a little above everything else, just about looking down, not quite sneering, perhaps a little patronising, certainly calm and sober, definitely reserved, most definitely dignified, with just a little, a touch, a spark, a faint gloss of…

 

That is who I am, Henry said to himself. That is who others see before them. That is the person who could walk out of a room and not hear a word, a titter, a sound… they would simply be without his presence. 

 

classification

…to put in a class

 

 

Henry might be completely ignorant of what goes on in the homes of the rich and famous, just as he is wholly ignorant of what goes on in the homes of the poor and uneducated, but he could claim at least some knowledge of what goes on in the hum-drum middle of the road suburban four bedroom semis of the middle-middle-classes. But he doesn’t claim; Henry’s claim to such knowledge has been lost in the whirling of his mind.

 

Henry could say that he is an expert in the area of the behind-closed-doors-middle-middle-classes. Not that he would be at all smug regarding the depth of this knowledge. He would be in fact deeply ashamed of his origins in these middle-middle-classes, so he lives in denial, always lived in denial, and will live there for as long as that state will accept him. This state of denial is the rock on which he built himself – ego, id and superego. Henry is, was and always will be, a self-made man of no particular class.

 

Henry’s middle-middle class upbringing was just as pathetic and embarrassing as any other middle-middle class upbringing. And it was circumscribed by the same hollow values: worship of the self in all its forms; respect for the magnolia furniture covers in the living room; washing your own plate, cutlery and cup; the value inherent in money, cars and bricks and mortar; and the importance of retaining obscure facts through writing them down and filing them carefully… each of which Henry had taken to in turn… not necessarily proving their hollowness, but just taking them for a walk through the shit.

 

At school, where Oscar had watched him from afar, Henry seemed to be quite the middle-middle-class well oiled, well turned out and well-spoken young man in a chunky jumper and sailing shoes. He was full of the jumble of middle-middle-class empty ideas, ideas which he voiced in convoluted sentences which would be dissipated in the thinnest of air. When Oscar made so bold as to approach Henry and accuse him of being an empty headed fool, he got to know the real Henry, the Henry beneath the emptiness and the shirt collars and the squeaky voice, the beating heart of a human being, the raw visceral collection of blood and guts, the breathing, groaning, bag of emotions, the… it is sufficient to say that Oscar closed the lid on all of that as quickly as he could. But this glimpse beneath didn’t fully sate his curiosity.

 

Not wishing to look beneath once again, Oscar satisfied himself with observing Henry’s observables – his violin lessons, his crustless sandwiches and his collection of scarves which were worn year round. Suppressing his only instinct: shouting “you bastard” at Henry every time he saw him, Oscar had to depend on his wits – which usually let him down; should a tiger should pop out of the bushes as he walked across to the cafeteria, and should his instinct not be in working order, Oscar would have been eaten up long before his wits were of any use – perhaps they would be of some comfort to him as he was being digested… but so much for such perhapsings. And as far as sparring with the dull wits of Henry – Oscar’s wits were too scattered and dissolute. Oscar and Henry could do little else but poke fun at everyone else in the hope that they were something else entirely.

 

What they were, or what they thought they were, is less easy to define than what they weren’t, or what they thought they weren’t. Because they were nothing in particular. But they were not, in their opinion, many things in particular. They had no defining characteristics. Though they were, at that point in time anyway, fundamentally the same kind of person – these fundamentals were ineffable. But what they weren’t, or what they thought they weren’t, was of following:

 

Sub-class: the people who lived beneath bridges, in railway tunnels and in foreign countries. Eating squirrels, dogs, cats and their own children, they rarely venture out into even the cheapest supermarkets. Distrustful of other people and of themselves.

 

Lower-lower-class: uneducated, poor and dangerous. Like fighting, drinking and masturbation. Not adept at the art of conversation. Struggle with abstract ideas. Familiar with the sound of their own names, concrete nouns and certain brand names.

 

Lower-class: educated to a very basic level, recognising the shapes of letters and having some understanding of the arbitrary link between these shapes and meaning. Claimants of unemployment benefit. Make up the bulk of the crowds in crowded places.

 

Lower-middle-class: could read and write but struggled with subtle distinctions between words, such as the difference between “sick” and “vomit”,  “ordinary” and “mundane”, “hard” and “difficult”. Metaphors are beyond them.

 

Middle-class: a catch all term for everybody who can hold a pencil, write their name and turn on a television. A term robbed of meaning long ago by its over-application – a danger which should be guarded against in the application of other terms (the terms “wanker”, “bastard” and “writer” are likely to suffer the same fate).

Middle-middle-class: formerly of the afore-mentioned class, this amorphous, straggling mass of easily forgettable individuals is corralled here simply from a lack of interest in their defining features. Drink tea, cup-a-soups and £5 bottles of red wine. Their children eat beans by the bucketful. They have been known to die of apathy. Struggle with long sentences.

 

Upper-middle-class: complete bastards who look down on everyone else, including those above them. Have mastered the arts of reading, writing and watching television. Drink £20 bottles of red wine. Read literature, buy cheap art and fuck each other’s wives.

 

Upper-class: have more money than the preceding class and less money than the succeeding one.

 

Upper-upper-class: own castles, islands, whole countries and bidets. Bathe in asses’ milk. Have sex with close relatives. Don’t know that beans are normally consumed in a watery tomato sauce.

 

Oscar and Henry’s classification of the members of society took up the whole of a double French lesson. They allowed themselves a brief titter when they were done. Henry was the one to suggest that they needed to test their classification system. Oscar was the one to suggest the befriending of certain lower-lower-class, lower-class, lower-middle-class, middle-class, middle-middle-class, upper-middle-class and upper-class individuals. Neither of them knew any people from the sub-class or the upper-upper-class, so those classes were summarily disbanded and wiped from society.

 

Struggling in the application of their classification system to real people, they had given the whole thing up by the end of the school day. However, the exercise did have the advantage of hiding in a fine spray of complete bullshit either’s classification – which would certainly have been that of the middle-middle-class.

springboard

…that which assists one’s springing 

In between bouts of simulated efficiency, hard work, also simulated, and helpfulness poorly simulated, Helen had leisure to consider herself. But she also thought of other people as well. Of course she did. Other people looked at her every day. Other people walked past her every day. Other people spoke to her about this and that, told her to do something or other, asked her questions, offered their assistance, and all sorts of other things. Another person held the elevator for her and smiled too much at her yesterday morning. Another person poked her in the face with an open umbrella this morning. A whole lot of other people filled the bus up with their heat this morning; inhaling their exhaled breaths Helen could feel no bond with these other people. They were other and that was that.

One such other person was speaking to her right now, a man who sat on her desk and told her funny stories about who was who in the office. All these other people who hated each other or fancied Michelle in the post room, or who didn’t like working with that other person, or who couldn’t tell their asses from their elbows, or who were on their final warning for one reason or another… how many there are of those other people, was all Helen could think.

“There are such a lot of you,” Helen said. But the man wasn’t listening to her, his eyes focused on the shadow lurking between her breasts.

Helen liked this shadow as well. She could see why this man’s gaze should dwell there for an instant, a couple of seconds, running on for a dozen seconds before he registered that Helen had said something and nodded his assent.

“There’s a lot of us alright. There’s twenty-six of us in the post room alone. And as for reporters… there must be thirty… and as many secretaries and such like. And then there’s the people in charge… There’s a hundred and ninety four slots in the post room… but all of those slots don’t represent real people and some of them…

Helen was for a moment daunted by this large number of other people. As the words continued to dribble out of this other person sitting on her desk, Helen tried to imagine what a hundred and ninety other people would look like, but her imagination soon faltered. Because all of these people were looking at her, these imaginary other people. The other people at the back of the crowd of other people were straining to look over shoulders and heads. One of the other people in front was blushing. Another of the other people in front was Oscar. How odd she should think of Oscar standing there. But the oddness of it lasted only a moment as she went on to notice other people she knew standing in this crowd of other people. There was Mary, Jane or Susan from her last job. There was her mother and her aunty Linda. There was Smith holding a red file. And there was Henry too. He was staring at her breasts. They were all staring at her breasts.

When the other man who had been sitting on his desk had run out of breath in his inventory of other people working at the paper, Helen smiled up at him and allowed him a generous view of the top of her breasts and the black lace of her bra as she stood up to end the conversation and begin another bout of simulated efficiency, hard work, also simulated, and helpfulness poorly simulated. However, she had nowhere to go but the toilets. So she went to the toilets.

In the toilet Helen dwelt on the difficulty of sitting all day in open view. Her desk was situated at a point where every other person walked past. She wasn’t the general secretary of the building. There were two women and one man who sat downstairs by the door and who dealt with other people who walked in off the street and with phone calls from all of those other people who decided to phone for one reason or another. They always smiled, or at least they always smiled at Helen. But then, everyone always smiled at Helen. At first. At first, Helen was someone at whom other people always smiled. She didn’t question this, so her thoughts soon veered off in another direction. However, after a few seconds her thoughts returned to the problem of always being in view of other people. And what other people saw. Helen stared at her reflection in the mirror.

This is who other people see, Helen realised. This is who Oscar sees. Helen turned to one side and then the other, taking in either profile. Her opinion on the size of her nose changed every day, or at least as often as she thought about it, which was more or less every day. Now it was too big. Yesterday it was prominent. Tomorrow it might have character. However, her opinion on what she now saw in the mirror, and on what Oscar saw this morning, was less difficult to define: she was pleased as well as a little worried.

Helen certainly didn’t love Oscar, and had no intention of loving him. She would have said she liked Oscar if she had to admit to any feeling for him, perhaps out of the guilt of feeling nothing for him, or for anyone else. But the idea of being in love with Oscar was something which she was quite partial to. The idea of Oscar being in love with her was probably the root cause of this partiality. And Helen had decided last week that Oscar should be in love with her, that he would be in love with her by the end of next month and that he would have no choice but to be in love with her when her plans came to fruition.

For it was these “plans” that were behind the recent metamorphosis in Helen. Helen had metamorphosed all of a sudden two weeks ago, metamorphosed not in the sense of becoming something different, someone different, a whole new person. She was still the same person. The metamorphosis was of the nature of a change in Helen’s view of life, but this view did not change her fundamentals. She was still the same Helen.

“I am still the same Helen,” Helen said to the Helen in the mirror.

She stood there for a few minutes more admiring her profile, the manner in which her new suit accentuated the curve of her waist and hips, the bulge of her breasts, the faint shadow lurking between her cleavage, the curve of her breasts, the pale skin of her neck and cleavage, what Oscar saw that morning as she left for work, the way her hair framed her face, her reddened lips, how Oscar attended to her every word on writing for newspapers, how his gaze rested on the shadow lurking between her breasts.

anarchy

…the suburbs are falling apart 

 

 

 

Last Wednesday, in a quiet, well-to-do suburb to the south of the city, anti-social behaviour changed dramatically. No longer the reserve of the variously disaffected and drunken children from the lower socio-economic bracket, smashing phone boxes and urinating in letterboxes have become two of the weapons in the arsenal of a new upper-middle-class intelligentsia.

 

The bored and disenchanted sons and daughters of lawyers, doctors and company directors have acquired a predilection for political intrigue and revolution. Driving flash cars and spending daddy’s money are now so last year; anarchy is the new hobby of the children of affluence.

 

These pampered teens have been enchanted by tales of the anarchists in the Russian Empire and on the Continent over a hundred years ago. For once they have been listening in history lessons, listening to tales of Bakunin et al, who terrorised the ruling classes and social order of the nineteenth century. And this new age of fear is seen as ripe for a return of anarchy as a political ideology, as well as something to do on a Friday night when all the homework has been done.

 

After writing essays on the rise of anarchy in times past, these A-grade students have decided to do some practical work outside of school. In what is now more than a passing trend, these privileged teens have decided to infiltrate groups of “scallies” and “plebs” in order to ferment further dissent and give some direction to anti-social behaviour. What were once random acts of violence and nuisance by drink fuelled hooded youths, have now become something far more insidious. Disparate groups of neighbourhood “corner boys” and trouble causers have been turned into marauding gangs by this new intelligentsia.

 

Dressing in the uniform of the “scallie” – a hooded top, bright trainers and tracksuit bottoms – these neo-anarchists are leading their foot soldiers on to greater and greater acts of anti-social behaviour. On Friday night this nuisance and violence reached new heights with a trail of destruction marked on dented bonnets and smashed in windows of parked cars.

 

Orchestrated by the high-command of the neo-anarchists, this wrecking spree across the southern suburbs of the city was to mark the dawning of a new age for anarchy. Cars are seen as enemy number one – the means by which society has enslaved itself. Driving around in one such “enslavement device”, the driver under aged and uninsured, the car stolen, the gang caused thousands of pounds worth of damage to innocent members of the public.

 

A spokesperson for the neo-anarchists, speaking through an untraceable chat-room web site, declared that all cars should be “neutralised”. However, owing to the very nature of anarchist ideology, it is impossible to tell if this is the voice of the whole organisation. Indeed, the term “organisation” is somewhat of a misnomer. This is a movement in which every voice is the voice of the movement and every random action of violence and destruction has been sanctioned in advance.

 

The fact that the police haven’t realised what is going on is hardly surprising. There is no motivation whatsoever for what is happening. Even the previous label of “mindless violence” does not apply. This is not mindless violence; however, nor does it have a motive, as such. The aim of such violence could be described as the “breakdown of the social hierarchy” or “the collapse of the patronising state” or “the implosion of meritocracy” – all terms bandied about on various chat-rooms and blogs associated with the neo-anarchists. But there is no real personal gain, therefore there is a complete absence of motive and so the complete bafflement of our police forces.

 

Attempts at speaking to these teenaged firebrands have rarely been successful, owing to the nature of their movement, which is little more than a couple of ideas sketched out in cyber-space and a couple of spontaneous meetings in Jeremy’s house after tennis lessons. However, there are some “fighters for the cause” who are willing to speak about their “philosophy” and their intentions.

 

It would seem that the “dissolution of suburbia” and “the subversion of the middle-class value system” are definite goals. However, other goals seem to run contrary to these, such as the declared intentions to “spread suburban mediocrity” and the “infection of the underclass with table-manners”. On speaking to a self-declared “spokesperson for the cause” he first told me that there was no cause, secondly that he wasn’t a spokesperson” and finally that “victory was around the corner”.

 

So is this just a harmless hobby for the bored children of the middle-classes? That is certainly not the stance taken by the residents and business owners of the suburbs, who are right now suffering from the consequences of having “marauding hoards” roaming their high streets and village greens. These consequences range from smashed windows, horribly vandalized mailboxes, obscene graffiti and mutilated hedgerows to defaced murals and disfigured commemorations of the fallen war dead.

 

This so-called “spokesperson” was unrepentant. In fact, he gloated at the chaos which has been spread over the last few months since the movement’s inception in a teenage attic bedroom in a leafy suburb. It seems the garrets of the left bank have been superseded by such attic bedrooms and games rooms of our more affluent areas. And when questioned about the future of the movement and what other actions were planned all he would reply was “Who knows?”

 

But that is the whole thorny issue summed up in two words. Nobody knows. Such is the nature of anarchism.

 

It I unlikely that this incipient movement will lead to the dissolution of our comfortable society. What is cetin though is that it will lead to our society being a whole lot less comfortable over the next few weeks and moths, as the consequences of a series of history lessons on the anarchists of the nineteenth century ferment further unrest in our quiet suburban streets.

 

 

 

verve

…to be fully animated 

 

 

 

Why should Oscar give a damn about orange marmalade and wicker furniture and the people who count and the date of the battle of
Hastings? What of these people who count – who the hell are they? These name makers, place makers, trend setters and benders and enders? Who do they think they are? Who does Oscar think he is? How dare they? How dare Oscar? These people who fill up their trolleys with fair trade tea bags, green bananas, bags of wholemeal flour and exotic fruit and vegetables? Those people? And the others, those people who roll around in their own muck, drinking fizzy pop and getting pregnant? Who are they? Those dirty bastards. Cigarettes and glasses of vodka? Why should Oscar give a shit? How much is a packet of fags? A litre of petrol? Pounds to the dollar?

 

Opening your eyes in the morning, never mind getting up, reveals the same ceiling as the morning before. The same light peeking through the windows. Are they larks or some other fucking bird singing? Close your eyes. And then it starts. Today’s news. Always the news. What’s happening today? What’s the news. Predictions? What happened yesterday? What pile of shit is about to topple down on top of you? Where is the toilet? Why can’t I feel my legs? The pain in the base of my spine. I’d better get up. And the most useless piece of information, well pieces, lots of pieces – the fucking weather. Pieces of weather. Fragments of weather reports. Don’t miss the weather forecast. What’s the forecast? Jesus, look at those clouds. That’s rain, that is. What did the man on the forecast say? The weather forecast? Our very lives, our everything, our pieces of cake… it all hangs in the balance. It’s going to fucking rain. I know it is. What time is it?

 

And then the clock starts. Tick tock it goes. Like I need to tell you. Who doesn’t know the sound of a clock? Tick tock. Who can’t hear it all day? Tick tock. Jesus Christ – will it stop tick tock before I put my foot through the tick tock. Like it matters at all if it’s five past three or quarter to six. Jesus – you’ll miss the weather forecast. Quick. Quick. It’s on. Turn it over to one. Quick. I can feel it in my bones. The rain is coming. The rain. We’ve only got minutes. What’ll we do? Before the rain gets here? Before it stops us in our tracks.

 

Oscar didn’t give a shit if it rained all day and all night. It would only go down the plug hole – flood my ass. And it’s only water, isn’t it? Not like its magma or some such boiling viscous fluid which would stick you to the ground and smother you in nine thousand degree hot orange jam.

 

I count. Oscar was for a moment disgruntled with the manner in which it was decided who counted and who didn’t count. But as soon as he counted, he didn’t give a toss how much anything counted, anyone, what counts? Opening his eyes again, he could only acknowledge the view afforded him – the same cracks in the same ceiling, the same light shining trough the same curtains, give or take a shade or two, the world is seasonal after all. Season’s greetings is all you have to say and every base is covered. Never mind with happy Christmas or sorry for your loss or any of that stuff, because it’s only one thing after another anyway, as if the world ever stops turning and spins the other way. Why should Oscar give a shit if it’s snowing outside or if little icicles are hanging off the eaves or there are dogs hanging out of trees and cats blown across streets and smashed against walls and windows and every bird has fucked off to somewhere else – migration. Let them all go. No point trying to stop them. Those birds don’t count for a brass razoo anyway. They’re only birds. Migratory birds – the fuckers.

 

For the want of something to do Oscar turned over and stared at the opposite wall, having a paragraph or two ago turned towards the window and the light shining through the curtains. For the want of something else to do he closed his eyes and pulled the duvet up over his head and then tucked it under his chin. There was the sound of a gun shot or a car back firing in the streets outside – neither of which Oscar gave a shit about. And he would have got up to make some breakfast but for the fact that he’d have to think about muesli and coffee and how he didn’t give a damn about either of them, though he was partial to the odd cup of black coffee and muesli did fill you up for the day. But really, he didn’t give a shit.

 

The next thing he sees, and this after not turning any other way, is the face and wide eyes and red lips and round tits of Helen hovering five feet off the ground. Most of the rest of her body duly enters his line of sight and he postulates the other bits and pieces – feet, left arm, shoes, spine, back, sinews, pores, follicles, live etc.

 

“You really should get started on another article,” she says.

 

“Is it snowing out?” Oscar asks, for the want of something to ask.

 

“If you could just make it more relevant… and more newsworthy… more…” Helen adopted a disappointed look. “If you could only give a shit.” And left the room, every last bit of her.

 

Give a shit? Care a damn? Be concerned? Worried? Anxious? Wonder? Inquire into? Where’s the soap? When did
Columbus sail the ocean blue? What’s the square root of a hundred and six? Where’s my cigarettes? What time is it? What did the man on the weather say? The forecast? Jesus Christ, the forecast. What is it? What about the starving children in
Africa? And the guns and the knives and the mountains of cocaine and butter and wine – a mountain of wine. Oscar would like to see a mountain of wine, but about the rest he didn’t give a shit. And how could he? How could anyone? Genuinely? How could anyone give a damn about anything?

 

And it was then that it hit him. It hit Oscar in the manner in which an idea can hit anyone – a kind of tickle on the back of the head. A kind of faint buzzing about the head and its environs.

 

“I don’t give a shit.” Oscar called out. And that was the point. That was the rock upon which he would build his church. Not giving a shit. He’d write an article. But no one would read it. A column even. A weekly column ignored by everyone. Because no one does give a shit. Not really. Not about anything. Not about yellow apples, and orange cheese, ten football fields of anything, and salt and pepper shakers, and cows in the countryside, and the canals on mars, and the cost of the space shuttle, the wars in Africa, paedophiles in the city, drug dealing pimps in prison, murderers on the street, the price of pig shit, the volume of water in an Olympic swimming pool, the colour of autumn, the smell of fried eggs, the number of feral cats stalking the countryside, the countryside, the other side, the size of the cardinal’s penis, the number of players on a rugby team, the rise in standards, the fall in standards, the prince of Siam, the duke of Milan, the likelihood of death by drowning, murder, lightning or tripping over your slippers, where’s the dog, when does the sun rise, what’s that about the guy from around the corner, did you see the weather forecast?

 

 

show

…be visible, be manifest, be apparent, be an exhibit, be presented on a stage

 

Helen didn’t see Oscar perform this both ridiculous and miraculous feat; at least, she didn’t see the person who is Oscar perform it. She saw a person, any person, that person could have been her, she saw herself, it was her; Helen was much more comfortable with the idea of being the main act, up on stage, the object of every gap in the curtains from number fifty-three to number one, her face lit up by that yellow street light. She didn’t seem to hear Oscar’s return, didn’t register his stumbling arrival into the hallway, how he must have tripped over something and then fell quite heavily against the door and, tumbling onto the living room floor, his flailing body smashing a glass which must have been left on the floor, and his feet finally crashing down onto the glass top of the coffee table.

Once the lights were on, Helen surveying the damage with a sneer, the show was over. And there was Oscar – newly illuminated as a prostrate figure with a trickle of blood on his forehead, a wince of pain stretching his face, wide eyes registering something he thought he saw on the ceiling, perhaps en explanation, and his lips still half curled into the smile he must have worn since divesting himself of the mattress he had minutes before been weighed down by.

“Where are you going to sleep tonight?” Helen asked by way restoring the usual level of reality to the house.

Oscar’s expression didn’t visibly change. He did not appear to attempt an answer.

“What an exhibition!” Helen went upstairs in order to plan the next scene – the main act.

Briefly considering which item would be best suited to being flung atop the pile of detritus now becoming a mountain with that skip as its base, Helen exits the stage and enters her bedroom into which we cannot see. There was next the sound of Helen tugging her broken television away from the wall and off her chest of drawers. However, it being, as televisions usually are, tied to the wall with an electrical cord, there was next the sound of it snapping out of her grasp and falling to the floor shattering its screen.

There next was the sound of Helen being left momentarily distraught; her television was broken. But Helen decided to defer the drama, the drama of her broken television… I could have been killed, my god you should have heard the bang, there was glass everywhere, it’s was a deafening explosion, it just missed my bare feet, I couldn’t believe it… calmly reminding herself that the television had been broken for at least six months and that another drama had yet to be unfolded on the streets outside.

The sound of Helen picking up the television, the sound of pieces of its glass screen and electronic insides trailing after her, she made her way back into the glare of the story, onto the landing and then to the top of the stairs where she realised that the weight of the television was substantial and that there was some danger to her person occasioned by this weight, and this danger was heightened by the precipitous fall which confronted her. The front door opening, revealing the shadow of someone who could have been anyone, proved to be sufficient stimulation to prompt Helen to drop the television and scream a scream of distress and shock, though modulating it slightly with a shriek of high amusement when she registered Henry’s distraught face at the sharp end of the spectacle she had just unleashed.

The final crash was worthy of another scream, one of surprise, but Helen chose to abstain, choosing instead a look of supreme indifference, in order to round off the perfect performance.

Henry said nothing, just stood there frozen, but his eyes moved to follow the descent of Helen, her arrival at his level, her leaning over to pick up the television which lay surprisingly in one piece at his feet, and then the matter of fact face, the flick of a stray strand of hair from her face, and her polite cough to remind him of the more than obvious fact that he was stood right in her way.

Now it was her turn – not that she was ever waiting for a turn, her turn, it always being her turn, such that she never took a turn, never having to turn around, turn it down, turn it on, or turn it up.

Helen took the briefest of looks up either end of the street, but once she was on the footpath she managed to perform an exaggerated survey of the area, stretching her neck, jerkily turning her head, crouching down then standing up on her tiptoes. And now, filling the role of someone who’s up to no good with great aplomb, she strutted down the street in as graceful a manner as her load would allow.

The street was quiet, but every gap in every curtain from number fifty-three to number one would have been aimed at her, of that she could be certain. Henry would have by now closed the door behind her and assumed a position in the gap of the curtains of number twenty-five calling to Oscar to come and take a look at this. And the danger of getting caught was ever so high. What a risk! What a lark! What a complete and utter drama!

The most frightening thought for Helen would now have been what if no one saw her do it – what if she really was unobserved, no one really looking at her, not under the gaze of, not at the centre of the attention of, not obtaining the displeasure, not the disgust, not the disrespect of strangers, distant neighbours, of Henry and Oscar… if she fell in the forest and no one was there to observe it, would she really have fallen?

Helen shrugged off all doubts, all nagging doubts, what doubts? – here she was, at the centre of the world, revolving around her was the scene, a quite street, winter evening, yellow pools of light which she paused in, as though catching her breath, the rubbish skip ahead of her, its promise, its danger, its calling out, its everything, she’s everything. Her approach, now into another pool of yellow light, she pauses, aware of the dangers all around her, discovery moments away, how dare she, how dare she do something so… it was a disgrace, it was disgraceful behaviour, it was shocking, she was shocking… she slowly walked the last few steps, heaved the television as high as she could so that it would crash down, and there would be the sound of smashing glass filling the empty street as she fled from her transgression, the crash of broken glass, and as the television transcribed the briefest of arcs towards its cataclysmic destruction, Helen knew she would have to run, she pictured herself running and then she was running and she had almost reached the safety and fame of number twenty-five when she finally heard the belated crash of her transgression, which had bounced twice on the mattress which Oscar had thrown in, only to finally miss its mark and end up a tangled crash of glass and metal on the other side of the skip.

Helen had hit the bull’s eye.

cramp

…a sharp pain consequent of over-exertion or over-speculating or over-whelming     

Helen was in control. She rolled the heavy grey ball of the mouse from one side of desk to the other. This was important to her. To feel in control. Because that’s all being in control was – feeling in control. It was a feeling. A sense. Knowing. How you feel about things happening around you. Knowing that you’re in control. And feeling out of control? – well, that would be disastrous. Helen felt a sharp pain in her stomach.

 

The little ball rebounded from her coffee cup into her hand. The very thought of her having no control over what was happening to her, the thought of her control being undermined by all those other people or processes beyond her control, the idea that it didn’t matter what she did, that whatever she did, no matter what, the outcome would be the same, that there was nothing she could do – such a thought was an anathema to Helen. She always caught the little grey mouse ball just as it was about to roll off the desk.

 

Helen had to be in control, so Helen just worked out what was going to happen, what would have happened regardless of her exertions, and accepted it. Not that she just accepted it; she actually sought it out. Not that she sat around and worked things out; she didn’t go through every possible permutation and calculate the odds, the likelihood of Jimmy the Nod tripping over her foot and falling down the emergency stairs, breaking both his legs so badly that he was confined to a wheelchair for six months, the likelihood of The Chief having a fetish for skin tight rubber and studded collars, the likelihood of the two women working at the main reception spreading the most awful rumours about her, the likelihood of her never discovering the specifics of those rumours… there was never any kind of calm and sustained deliberation on any of these subjects. There was no conscious calculation. No consideration of external influences, the impossibility of overestimating the depths to which other people would sink, the grubby meanderings towards one or other sexual perversion… none of this went on. Helen just knew. She knew how the world worked and she cut her expectations according to it. She was neither hopeful nor hopeless. She was neither realistic nor pessimistic. She strove towards the inevitable with a laudable tenacity.

 

Not only did she accept the inevitable, but she christened it as her goal and she worked towards it. Though this wasn’t fatalism. It wasn’t resignation. It was a way of engaging with the world, of dealing with the world, with the chaos of events and people, whilst retaining a modicum of self respect, as well as a raft of other feelings such as self-worth, pride, arrogance, vanity, confidence, smugness, self-centredness and some other-nesses for which there are no names. It wasn’t that. It wasn’t this. It just was. It is.

 

That Oscar’s love for her had dissolved into nothingness had now taken on the appearance of inevitability, the way that things which have happened tend to do. What could be more inevitable than something which had already happened? Surely such things were the most inevitable. More inevitable than all the cars passing by on the street below, or the sun setting, or those people who die everyday on the other side of the world. She had once played with the thought of Oscar falling in love with her. She had been certain. But looking back on it now, considering how things had turned out, Helen felt the warm glow of having done the right thing – pointing Oscar in another direction, dissuading him. So even though she had seduced him, even though she had devised a plan and put that plan into action to get Oscar to fall in love with her, she could now smile at the way things had turned out, nod her head at the inevitability of things, and smile at getting her own way, and smile. Just smile.

 

Considering that Oscar’s efforts, whatever he might be working towards, would come to nothing, just as her seduction of him had come to nothing, that both were a foregone conclusion, each as foregone as the other, each as inevitable as the already-happened, Helen would commit herself to working towards undermining Oscar’s efforts, ensuring that his ultimate goal, whatever that might be, would be unrealised. His seemingly genuine intention to engage with the world as a normal human being would not be realised. That failure would be ably assisted by Helen. Though that failure needed no assistance (it was inevitable), Helen still looked forward to the moment when she could taste success.

 

That taste of success was sharpest when she reported to The Chief over a lunch of thin sandwiches at his desk on the malicious scheme Oscar had been maliciously scheming, to ruin the newspaper by getting grossly inappropriate news articles into print.

 

That evening, the office emptied to a quiet hum, Jimmy the Nod was sat in his wheelchair at the back of the office, next to the stationary cupboard, almost hidden by a metre high stack of files awaiting his attention. On seeing him lurking there, Helen realised that he would be a participant in her demise. Managing to look over his shoulder, hidden behind the open door of the stationary cupboard, Helen saw the file he was holding – the file of Bill Simmons, or Tommy Kilpatrick, or the man she had no choice but to love, or the man who Smith was obsessed with, or the man that Henry was afraid of, or the man that Oscar was writing about, or the man whose picture Jimmy the Nod was chuckling at. As well as chuckling, Jimmy the Nod was making indecipherable notes on a scrap of paper. Other scraps of paper, carefully laid out on his lap on top of other files, were covered with intricate diagrams, tables, graphs, curious sketches and maps. Helen knew that Jimmy the Nod would get his revenge on her.

 

As well as Oscar’s failure being assured, so too was hers. Therefore Helen had to prove to herself her own connivance in it. It would be unthinkable for her to be fired for a reason either beyond her control or outside of her knowledge. Her incompetence must be a studied incompetence. Her failure must be deliberate and carefully thought out. What better way to gain control over the vagaries of the world and the people in it, than to choreograph your own failure. So this is what Helen had decided to do, after a negligible string of if-then-and-therefores, less than a moment’s reflection and little more thought than made up the shape of the conclusion: I will perform the final scene in this tragedy with great assurance.

 

The Chief was stood smiling at his office door when Helen sat back at her desk. She could leave in fifteen minutes. She would have to, she realised at that moment, there was no other choice, it was inevitable, she must devise her own catastrophic failure such that it dragged The Chief down, and Oscar too, and everybody else, whoever she could drag down with her. It would be a catastrophe. It would be worthy of her starring role. And Jimmy the Nod too. A wheelchair would feature in the final scene. A scene in which she was undone. A scene in which she finally met the man she could not stop thinking about. It would be perfect. It would be just what she always wanted, whatever it was that happened. Everything was perfect. But then Helen felt a pang. A pang of conscience perhaps, guilt, remorse, shame… a pang of something. But it passed.