Squirm

I arrived home late. I was drunk and had managed to lose one of my gloves - the left glove. I'd been using my hat to keep my left hand warm. It wasn't working too well. It was bitterly cold outside, the middle of december.

I stumbled into the kitchen and leaned against the radiator. It was turned off and presented the side of my leg with cold metal. I could feel it through my trousers. It was 2am. What did I expect? The heating was off. I was tiredness. Hunger. Drunkeness. My head lolled.

Summoning strength from somewhere I opened some cupboards and investigated:
bananas: 2,
brazil nuts: eight,
rice: five hundred grams,
cornflakes: nearly finished.

Stuffing a brazil nut into my mouth, I opened a banana. The brazil nut tasted of vodka. So did the banana. The skin inside my mouth was infused, it was scorched, with the taste of vodka. It was like how a bright light lingers in your vision, how the filament of a bulb stays on after you've looked away. Thats how it was. This strong Russian drink stayed in my mouth. I didn't have the energy to complain.

I sat down on the chair and noticed that the kitchen was unusually tidy. All the surfaces were clear and even the hob had been scrubbed to perfection. The plates and mugs, all the cutlery, put away neatly; even the tiles around the sink, it was all clean. It sparkled like a show-kitchen.

I threw my banana skin and missed the bin.

I put my head down on the table and rested, trying to collect myself. "Collect yourself" I said aloud. At least I tried to say it aloud. The croak that surfaced would not have passed for communication had there been anyone to hear it. It sounded more like a burp.

I burped. A real one. It tasted of sausage-meat. It came from deep within.

"Collect yourself" I said again, after clearing my throat with a raspy cough. How to collect, how to collect? I thought. What an odd way to put it: collect. Collect is a what you do with postage stamps or rare coins, not drunk, banana-skin lobbing failures. But, enough!

You know what I mean, I thought, I know what I mean. I know what I mean. You and I are both I. Oh shut up.

Stand up. Stand up and go bed.

I lifted my head from the table, making to stand. A scrap of paper was stuck to my forehead. It obscured my vision. I stood motionless, staring at the white paper too close to my eyes to focus.

Gravity applied itself and the paper came unstuck, fluttering down from my face to the floor by my feet. I must have leant my head on it unawares. It had been on the table and my greasy forehead had...

I stared down at the scrap of paper. It said nothing. It was blank. It looked as though there might be writing on the other side: some ink had bled through.

It's not mine, I thought. I didn't put it there. I glanced about the kitchen again. It was pretty much the only thing out of place in the whole room, aside from the banana skin. I leant forward and tried to pick up the paper with my gloved hand. Breathing heavily like an overworked horse. I fumbled.

What do I know of horses? I was breathing like a drunk.

I could have taken off the glove. I should have taken it off, or used my left hand (which, you will remember, was without glove). But I was too proud. I've started so I'll finish, I thought, and vaguely felt that this was a truly noble credo. I saw the mastermind chair in my minds eye: special subject: picking up scraps of paper from linoleum floors with gloves on, drunk.

Got it. Finally got it.

I turned it over in my hand, the paper. It had a message written in felt tip. It said "We are not a house that writes notes to each other so I won't leave you guys a note saying how angry I am that you never clean up after yourselves." It was scrawled in messy, angry, handwriting. It was Harriet's handwriting.

The felt tip pen is an inappropriate tool for writing, I thought to myself, it was designed for children, it was designed for colouring-in. Not for note writing.

I read the note through a couple of times. I scrumpled it up. I wasn't angry. I wasn't anything much. I just needed to pee. I threw the ball of paper at the bin. It missed and rolled off out into the hallway.

The toilet seemed like a far too obvious choice as the recipient of my urine. An unspeakable urge led me to the balcony. It was close by. The door opened out directly from the kitchen.

Suddenly out in the cold again I silently cursed my lost glove, waving my cold bare hand about pointlessly. Wherever you are, I thought, I hope you're suffering as I am. I imagined the singular glove impaled upon a railing, waving slightly in the wind. Waving at nobody, who was nearby.

But the bladder's urgent demands put a stop to my mute curses. Out came my penis, out into the biting cold it pointed, out off the balcony. The steaming urine hurled itself down to the carpark below, like liquid lemmings. And I grinned.

The steam was happifying.

Going back inside, I stepped over the banana skin and kicked the little scrumbled ball of paper. It rolled off downstairs, bouncing out of sight. I made my way upstairs in search of slumber. But before I made it anywhere near slumber I was confronted by a horse.

Outside my bedroom door stood the heavily over laden clothes horse, valiantly serving as the drying rack for the everyone's damp clothes. Everyone in the house that is. Four people, me included.

The horse was blocking my bedroom door because there was nowhere else to put it. It was dark and quiet on the landing and the jumble of haphazardly hung clothes loomed at me. I nudged it to the side so as to squeeze past.

The tiny nudge I attempted was not tiny. Alcohol amplifies. It was more of a rough shove. The horse teetered for a moment on one leg and then toppled over. In the darkness I heard glass smashing. I had no idea what it could be.

I stood still and sighed at the mess I had created. A door opened upstairs. I had clearly woken somebody. It was Harriet. She plodded down the stairs to where I was standing and hissed "What was that noise? What are you doing?"
"I don't know" I said, not bothering to whisper.
"Shhhhh!" she grimaced, gesturing at Anne's bedroom door, indicating that I might wake her.
I leaned against the wall and emptied my lungs with a sigh, staring straight ahead. I let my head loll a little.
"You're drunk aren't you." she whispered, a condemnation rather than a question.
I nodded and said "very". My nodding carried on, becoming continuous with a more drunken head lollery which had no implications of assent. Who could say at which point exactly I stopped nodding and began lolling?

"Help me with this then" she spat, whisperingly, lifting the horse back onto its legs.
I watched her do it but stood motionless myself. Help her with what? I thought, she's done it already.

Where the horse had fallen we could just make out the smashed remnants of what looked like it had been a milk bottle.
"Go and get the dust pan and brush," she ordered.
I attempted a shrug but gave up half way due to lack of effort. I remained still and glared at her. Or was it just staring? No, glare is right, it wasn't a stare. It was more glum than a stare. It was a dumb glum glare.

How different things would have been if she'd asked "Why the dumb glum glare?" We would have laughed. But she didn't say that.

I was breathing heavily in that way drunk people do. So confounded by alcohol is the body that it must expend great effort just to keep ticking over. A blazing fire in the firebox, so to speak, just to keep the engine running idle.

Some time passed in which nothing can really be said to have happened. I don't know how much time it was.

Harriet had disappeared when I next became aware of myself. I was still standing in the same place, still giving the dumb glum glare, only now it had no object: it struck the wall behind where she had been standing. I switched off the glare, collected myself, and carefully manoevered round the clothes horse into my room. I had forgotten about the milk bottle.

As I wrestled free of my clothes, which clung to me with undue stubbornness, I heard a sharp knock at my door. Ratatat tat is how it sounded. Harriet barged in moments later without awaiting my response. I had one leg still in my trousers, and one leg out. Glancing at my bare leg for a moment she walked over to the chair by my desk and sat down.
"You better have some water" she said, softly, as though I were too drunk to detect how patronising she was being, "otherwise you're going to regret it in the morning".
I grunted, nodding slightly, and continued unwrapping myself.
She raised her eyebrows disdainfully. "Shall I get you some water?" she asked.
I shrugged, but it may have passed for part of my disrobing as I was at that moment also trying to remove my jacket.
She gave a loud, holier-than-thou sigh and walked out of the room briskly. She had, it appeared, taken it upon herself to save me from vice, which I was clearly drowning in. As soon as she left I forgot she existed and continued slowly, clumsily, undressing.
I did so with my eyes closed and a faint smile on my lips.
I was warm in the syrupy-slow glow and tingle of somnolent inebriation. I tried to say something like that to myself. I wanted to verbally acknowledge the glowing and the tingling so as to make a landmark in time, so as to make the feeling a more conspicuous event. I didn't want it to pass me by. I tried to mumble "this is syrupy" but little came of the attempt.
I became distracted in the act of trying to remove both my socks simultaneously using the adjacent foot to remove the adjacent sock. This failed also. I still dont know if it is possible.
"This is a good feeling", I managed to say eventually, as I witnessed my arms reaching to remove my socks in a more conventional manner. It really felt as though these things were being done for me, as though my limbs were being awkwardly thrown about their business by an amateur puppeteer. I observed it all from a drowsy remove, hiding "aside" on stage in my own play.
At some point Harriet found her way back into my room with a large glass of water, a bucket, and various other things which she dumped onto my desk. I took as little notice of it as I could. I squirmed about on the bed wearing only my pants. I did so with vague aim of squirming myself under the duvet, but mostly just to be squirming.
Looking up momentarily I caught Harriet's unctous glower and decided to squirm more vigourously, provoking her. It seems I had, in her eyes, reduced myself to a wallowing beast. Her eyes, if they saw this, saw true.
She began talking at me and fussing about beside the bed. She tried to get me properly under the duvet, where I half-was already, and tuck me in. I kept squirming.
She spoke to me as though I were a child. Perhaps I was a child. But I felt there was no need for her fussing. I had made it to bed hadn't I?
The squirming simmered down to stillness and I began, very swiftly, to drop off to sleep. But still she was there surrounding me with stern words, with cajoling words; thrusting a glass of water in my face, or trying to plump the pillow beneath my head. A constant stream of words flowed out of her mouth. They were loud words that struck my ears relentlessly. I caught nothing of their meaning. I had no wish to.

The fussing continued and seemed like it would never stop. I had to do something. The syrup that I had been squirming in earlier had now cooled and solidified, forming a hard case around me. I felt unable to move a muscle. But I had to, she was driving me mad.

As anger welled up in me I opened my eyes. Then suddenly I burst our of bed and stood up. I stood perfectly balanced, as though I were sober, and held my hands up as one does to a fast approaching car. "Stop making sense" I said, "just stop". She stared back at me with her mouth open, frozen half way through an admonishing sentence. Then her mouth shut with an inaudible pop, like one mimicing a fish.

I climbed back into bed and fell asleep immediately.

Poem

The words that are supposed to feature
Here have not arrived
Or maybe they were here before and
Now they've gone away.

I don't know the which one is true
and neither do you.

March 30th 2008

My friend Kurt was hosting a braai*. I went along and as the evening became colder and colder I huddled closer to the hot coals, ate more meat, and drank more beer. It was a sunday night and, at about 11pm, I suddenly realised that all the other guests had left. They all had work the next day. Being blissfully unemployed myself I hadn't given a second thought to staying late and getting drunk. Kurt had work the next day too so I thought it best to leave. He saw me out and I slowly, drunkenly, found my way to the bus stop.

Finding my seat on the bus I rifled through my bag to see what might occupy my mind for the journey. Selecting The Guardian Great 20th Century Poets T.S. Eliot booklet I slumped forward into a solipsistic bodily scrunch. The bus terminated at my destination so I had no worry of missing my stop. With dogged focus, then, I willingly dove into the booklet and became utterly engrossed. My poem of choice was The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. It was the first one in the booklet. I read it slowly, mouthing the words and perhaps whispering to myself. Never have I enjoyed a poem so much. I read lines again and again, dwelling on couplets, tasting rhyme, licking and flicking every word with my serpentine tongue. When my understanding failed me I enjoyed the rythmes and the rhymes. Sometimes I grasped Eliot's message (or thought I had) and cast my eyes sideways out of the window to mull it over. What a brilliant poem, what a wholesome meal, a perfect kebab to my drunkeness. Dubious meat and underfried chips didn't come into it. I forgot my cheap urges, Prufrock had me dazed and sated.

I had just finished the poem when, looking up, I saw the giant billboard that announces Elephant and Castle's tired commerciality. Clutching my little poetry pamphlet I tottered down stairs to alight. I had got off the bus at Newington Butts, one stop before the station where it terminates. This suited me well. Looking about me I caught sight of the London Eye Ferris Wheel looming over the skyline to the West. Each pod was brightly lit with purple lights and I considered taking a photo. These thoughts were interrupted by the smell of dog shit. Looking down I noticed I was standing in a large deposit. My photographic ambitions gave up the ghost and, cursing, I wandered over to step in a puddle. Walking to and from a puddle and scraping the sole of my shoe on the curb I managed to remove most of the offending substance. I started my tramp home.

The pooey misfortune that my shoe befell soon made its exit from the theatre of my thoughts and I noticed the poetry that remained in my hand. I opened the booklet and, recapturing some of the thrill of the bus journey, returned to the beginning - to The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. As my legs beat out the necessary rhythmes of travel on the pavement I found I could not read the poem on its own terms. Prufrock was going to have to submit to my beat. Narrowly missing a face-smack collision with a lamp post I glanced ahead for any forthcoming obstacles of like danger. Nothing: the pavement was clear for my ambulatory reading. Almost without volition I started to beatbox, something I often do carelessly while peeing, or walking. As the beats got going, in time with my steps, I leant a keener focus to the poetry. "Let us go then, you and I", came the first line, attempting a female RnB style vocal song that, I thought, was fitting to the area. No doubt it would have sounded awful but, as far as I'm aware, no one heard it. I barely heard it myself. The pavements were deserted but the road was busy and the loud traffic fortuitously drowned me out. I could sing out my fullest lungs, for better or for worse, with social impunity. And I did. The whole poem found a new life blaring from my lips. Interspersed with beatbox, I warbled and whined every last line of Eliot's poem vaguely noticing, at times, the presence of fellow pedestrians; but there were so few and so unobtrusive that I rarely noted them enough to check my extravagances.

My feet had carried me home and I extinguished the noisy fire in my throat. My brother could be asleep, it was midnight and he had work the next day. Still reeling slightly from my self-absorbed extacy, I crept up to my room and undressed. Moments later I found myself curled up in bed and a haphazard sleep overtook me. I felt at once log-heavy and restless. Half-dreaming, half awake, I began to sweat uncomfortably. I needed to urinate too. After some time I heaved my log of a body up and felt my way to the toilet, eyes half closed. As my bladder gradually lost weight I had a premonition. I saw my next act in my minds eye; it would be the final flourish of my wild evening, an act worthy of a poem, a ritual offering to Prufrock and Eliot, and poetry itself. Suddenly wide awake I shook the last lingering liquids from me and scurried upstairs to my room, where the magic was to take place.

For six months I had been collecting copper coins on the window sill outide my bedroom window. There, upon flaking paint and years of caked bird shit, I had cast my coppers whenever they began to burden my wallet with a weight incongruous to their value. Green with oxidation, and grey with London's various grimes, the collection of copper coins were in the slow process of blending into their new shit-caked home. I opened the window and began plucking up the coins from their bed of filth. When I had them all they filled my hand. A ball of coins ready to throw! I leaned out of the window and waited for the perfect moment. There was no one on the pavement as far as I could see in either direction but a few cars were passing. I waited until the cars had disappeared. Heaving a sigh of exertion I threw the coins up as high as I could out into the middle of the road. Spinning through the air they twinkled in the street lamp light and for a moment there was quiet as the coins seemed to stop in thick air. Then a roar as they fell in a wondrous clinking mess. It sounded like a thousand mice beating tiny tin drums in jarring confusion. The vast clinking died down to a single tinkle as all but one coin found rest. I watched this last surviving coin roll a long way from the centre of this central scatter reigon. The fugitive coin rolled on for a few seconds, in perfect parrallel to the pavement, just as a car would drive, following the road. In a moment the last coin gave up and fell.

In quiet awe I surveyed the patternless shapes of the dull glitter I had sprinkled in the street. Biting me out of my awe the cold gave me a shiver and the approaching growl of a car plunged the scene back into movement. I caught a final glance of the coins lying inert beneath the wheels and I ducked back into my room.

In the morning all the coins were gone.

*The South African term for a barbeque. Braai is short for braaivleis (pronounced "bry-flays") which is Afrikaans for "roasted meat".

Blob

On our own we stand, not part of all but lone and full of fright. In a kind of night our souls are out as boats that float in need of wind, as moats that go in speed at spin, as goats that mow the lawn just like the moats as round and round they go (the flat sphere would serve here well in what I tell were it not that it has two of what I must use one).

But back to the point: do not you find that kin and kind, both near and far, yes: all that are, do scrape their sides with one and each but to no end; at least not to the end they bend: the one they want?

No, in truth, there can be none of what we seek at heart, the core, the pith, the more, the most, oh yes: the boast of man of time in all. Of what do I speak? Of Love. The bit of life in which we fuse and join and come to one from two who were not glue, who were not stuck, no not as such, but struck by fuck is all. I pall. I gall. And if in this I fail: I fall, I wrong, I do you bad, then leave me be for that is what you can’t but do, that’s your soul choice to chew.