SHORT STORY - The Revelation of Doubt

Someone had set the bird table off balance, propped as it was like a gallows pole against the brick wall of the courtyard.  The disrupted saucer had given up its water and a scattering of nuts and seeds were strewn around the wooden base.  Sister Anne guided the table back upright and fought hard to tame the flock of irritation that took flight through her body.

Despite her increasing age she still experienced these odd moments of febrile anger, indeed almost welcomed them for their potency, this electrolysis of the emotions.  Yet she knew such feelings were being aroused more and more frequently by events of less and less consequence.  She knew it had been the younger ones playing their infernal games again, badminton perhaps or frisbee, that she tolerated with an acidic reluctance to which the whims and liberties of youth always provided the litmus test. 

She scowled upwards at the sky above Tyburn Convent as it stiffened with the rigor mortis of impending rain.  The wind was whipping itself into excited pirouettes in anticipation of a storm, melting into the hum of the traffic from Bayswater Road.  Typically, the tense and vivid quality of the atmosphere before a storm put Sister Anne into a deep fug of melancholia and habitually she confined herself to the chapel to pray, hiding like a frightened little girl beneath a duvet.  But curiously she found herself under no compulsion to do so this day.

Instead she slowly ambled, at the same sedate and floating pace that took her everywhere these days, onto the garden, her habit brushing slightly through the grass which was coarse and balding due to the late summer’s heat.  She tottered around to gaze upon the high walls draped with a cowl of ivy, and the sturdy brick structure of the convent in which she had been living in contemplation for the last fifty years.  Over that period she had seen nuns come and go, find and lose their faith, had heard the tremor of the traffic increase as had the ebb and flow of airplanes that criss-crossed her tarpaulin of sky.

A couple of the newer nuns, barely in their postulancy stage, huddled together beneath the portico of the courtyard cautiously observing Sister Anne as she bimbled without apparent aim across the garden, perhaps scared that her gazing to the heavens was evidence of a long overdue lapse into senility.  Anne threw them a glance as though to disavow them of such suspicions.  To her they seemed like little more than schoolgirls, petty and frivolous, woefully sheltered from any experience of life and hence frequently distracted away from the trials of religious contemplation by games or content to merely giggle their way around the courtyard like a pair of chickens.

To them Sister Anne seemed cantankerous and miserly, a damp flannel wrung dry of any vitality or spirit by decades of largely self-inflicted subjugation to her faith.  She barely ever spoke, except in prayer, and appeared to them, when they passed her in the corridors of the cloister, as though she were being eroded away from the inside by some kind of grief; persevering with her devotion to the Catholic faith as though it were a prison sentence to be served with as much stern magnanimity as she could muster.

The fact that she had given almost her entire adult life to the Benedictine cause was something of a great comfort to Sister Anne, particularly as she had begun to approach her final years, and ailments that once seemed so cursory now increasingly dictated the course of her day.  Lately, she had begun to feel a curious and disconcerting sensation wrap itself around her like the guimpe around her neck, to the point now where it suffused her being with a terrible numbness.  This was the numbness of confusion and what she could only distinguish, to her horror, as being self-doubt.  A parasitical doubting that only seemed to draw nutriment and strength from her rejection of its presence.

Despite her late years, she had initially redoubled her contemplative routines, spending more hours in the chapel at night in solitary prayer, rereading the sacred texts with a more exacting and forensic eye than she had in decades.

Though she might have dismissed them as facile and silly, the younger nuns had the acute perception that youth at times endows, and would whisper to each other whenever they passed her, “there’s poor Sister Anne, she’s approaching death and questioning her faith”; they detected in this doyenne figure a deeply sublimated feud that could only be reconciled with her death and release from the psychological torments that afflicted her, the same way as certain animals discern danger from the atmospheric pressures around them.

Yet Sister Anne knew that as her mind and body began to fail her, what she had for so many years thought would serve as the core pillar of strength to which she could recline gracefully into death, now seemed to her ever more distorted and vague, what was once solid now seemed to be an emulsion of confusion, and to this she could only languish in fear.

As she surveyed the bulbous black sky, ripe with rain, she thought, as so often she had done in the past, to the 105 Catholics hung, drawn and quartered during the Reformation period on the Tyburn Tree Gallows.  Had they too, in the midst of unimaginable suffering, been faced with a moment of crisis, however fleeting?  A moment where the whole edifice of their devotion and conviction seemed to crumble away and disperse like salt on the breeze?

Their martyred souls seemed to undulate with rhythmic pulses through the ground on which she stood, seemed to saturate the wind that continued to rise and fall in the courtyard.  She closed her eyes and tried to feel anything of their suffering, of their strength that she might perhaps now draw upon as she approached the day when her own faith would be called up for reckoning.

Opening her eyes again she felt the warm breeze through her hair, felt the cool rigidity of the desert grass beneath her, and most reassuring of all, felt beneath the crook of her arm the slow and almost mechanical breathing in and out of the broad chest of her lover.  Together they stared up at the rupturing sky, painted in such contrast with the state of blissful calm that had settled like a mist over their bodies having just made love.  She thought it was almost as though the skies above were a visual echoing of their passion, and would soon subside into an overwhelming stillness, just as the post-orgasmic shivers now chased each other over her body.

“I love you”, she said to him, craning her neck swiftly to stare into his face, flushed with exertion but smiling broadly, as though he were encouraging the rain to fall and douse their sweating bodies.

“I love you too”, he replied in a way that she knew was genuinely felt but nonetheless tinged with distraction, for his mind began to accelerate over ideas and perceptions that he struggled to elucidate to her in words.  This was a reliable effect of the hashish that they had smoked that evening, as the twilight fell upon the Lebanese village to which they had trekked that day.  Anne, her tactile senses amplified, clenched and unclenched her toes in the fine sand, enjoying the myriad degrees of granular coarseness that sluiced between them.

David became suddenly enthused, propping himself up on his elbows and staring out into the starry horizon as though hoping to see a Bedouin caravan of tribesmen come wandering out of the desert sands.  “I’ve just realised something Anne, something that supports everything I’ve been thinking about – the alternative appearances of time, the nature of our consciousness, everything...”

Anne knew that his unusually animated nature was fuelled by the fact that earlier that day, as they set out from their previous village camp they had bumped into David’s university friend Jonathan and his girlfriend Susannah who were undertaking a similar expedition.  They hadn’t quite been able to believe this coincidence and good fortune - they had thought they were currently in Turkey and hadn’t been scheduled to rendezvous with them until Tripoli in a fortnight’s time.  A fortuitous change of travel plans with little time to communicate them had lead to this chance encounter.  Now, as David began to expound his latest rhapsodic train of thought, Anne glanced behind them at Jonathan and Susannah’s tent, the tarpaulin flapping silently in the developing wind.

“Do you remember, a few days ago in the market...in Beirut... I said to you didn’t I, that I thought I saw Jonathan haggling with a bazaar seller?  I had to do a genuine double-tale before realising it wasn’t actually him... I thought it must have been the heat playing tricks with my vision or something.  Do you not see how remarkable that is?  That I should think I saw them only a few days before we actually bump into each other out here in the wilderness?!”

“It must have been a premonition” Anne said.

“A premonition, yes.  Or maybe my unconscious mind was already well-aware that we were going to meet up like this.  Maybe that mistaken sighting was projecting my mind onto reality in a way that only now makes any sense.  Just like we’ve talked about before, what if time isn’t a linear progression such as we experience it consciously?  What if, like Eastern mythology says, time is a vast web that we can only see through one narrow portal, and only occasionally do we get snatched glimpses of transparency through into those other realms of time..?”

“You mean like déjà vu or something?” Anne was happy to toss these contributory ideas like kindling onto David’s steadily roaring fire of ideas.  He was sat up now, odd strands of his long hair glinting in the moon light, and a cosmos of sand particles loosely embedded in the skin of his back and shoulders.

“Precisely.  We have glimpses like that all the time but never really pay them much heed.  How many other chances do we get given on a day-to-day basis, to see the true nature of things, the true nature of time?”

“Maybe it’s happening right now..?”

“Most definitely.  Maybe the past, the future and the present are all here right now in each and every moment; everything that has and will ever happen all occurring in this vast gigantic instant moment of simultaneity.  Only we have to be mentally equipped to register it as a progression of moments along a scale of time.  Maybe only in times of real experience, where our minds are released, however temporarily, from the shackles of waking experience do we get salient clues as to the true nature of things, the true pattern that is shaping our lives.”

The enormous expanse of the Arabian sky, saturated with stars and almost concave in shape, such that it appeared to be almost revealing the very curvature of the earth, was no match for her love for David.  For he had liberated her from her strict religious upbringing in provincial England, and her upper-middle class missionary parents.  Together they were refugees on the run from social norms and expectations in search of some higher truth, a purer calling in life, however illusory and however ambitious.

It was his deranged rants such as these that she found especially endearing about him; the vaults to this thinking being unlocked by the curlicues of hashish smoke.  “What if it’s only at fractional moments of physicality that our psychology can decipher those hidden meanings to time, to truth, to life?  Psychosomatic frequencies that only at certain times are we ever tuned into.”

“Like what?”

“Like sex, obviously - the moment of orgasm being a moment of profound and ecstatic liberation, physically and mentally, from the strictures of our routine consciousness.  It might quickly subside but it’s there, if only we are able to grasp and hold onto it.  Violence as well... the act of violence is, whether perpetrator or victim, perhaps a moment of real transcendence.  Dreaming is obviously a prime example.  Our dreams allow our minds free reign over the landscape of our psychology, there are no barriers to the truth, we only ascribe surreality when we reflect on them from the comfort of our waking reality which we believe to be rational.

But I’m sure there must be others...times of extreme physical exertion perhaps, moments of sheer clarity, moments of wonder, religious experiences, out-of-body experiences.  These perhaps all serve to reveal gaps in the mental brickwork and through them we can glimpse the true nature of the universe.”

“I think I get it”, said Anne, responding in kind to David’s almost frenzied state, his chest heaving as he struggled to maintain the revelation to which he clearly believed himself witness.  “But who or what is using our waking reality to hide the truth from us.  Why the deception?”

“I’ve no idea... maybe all these moments are small clues offered to us by some higher deity of which we can have no real comprehension.  Some higher force is opening these brief windows to us and allowing the sunlight through, only if we fail to register or acknowledge them, they are shut as quickly as they are opened.  Maybe only a minority ever realise it, ever really grasp at this higher law and appreciate it manifesting itself in this way, through our physical impulses.  The majority go through life entirely unaware or maybe staring at the sunlight so fixedly that they end up blind to it.”

As David reached this point in his rant, Anne became aware of the bilious clouds overhead seeming to almost resemble a surging whirlpool as they sought to unleash a thunderstorm from the fathomless depths.

“Maybe that is the truth after all?  Our reality as we see it is just illusory, a series of clues that always go unacknowledged.  Coincidences and tricks of the mind are set in place like characters waiting in the wings of a stage play, awaiting the point at which they can take centre stage... only they never do... until suddenly your attention is fixed on them... I can see now...it all seems suddenly so clear to me... I can see the truth of it all... and if I’m wrong then LET GOD HIMSELF STRIKE ME DOWN....!”

As his last words rang out they became harmonised by the sudden cymbal-clashing of the clouds.  Anne began to realise that David’s whole body had stiffened, as though all his muscles had succumbed to cramping, he arched back in a seizure, his hair draping into the sand and his chin aimed into the air like an archer’s bow.  His body seemed to be shocked by a succession of violent spasms, as though he were rudely shaken by a pair of invisible hands, before he then collapsed against the ground and was still, with an expression that could only be registered as complete serenity.

As Anne recalled, then as now, the sky ceased its trembling and the rain fell at last.

SHORT STORY - The Room and the Code

...684910 ... 492083 ... 213781 ... The inert silence greeting each entry perforates my resolve in degrees I am powerless to absolve. The digits revolve on their rotary discs, side by side, six in all, conversant in their own private mathematical discourse.

My thumb revolves the first disc to turn 9 into 0. Just once I would like 0 not to follow 9, I feel a transgression of this magnitude could trigger a reawakening of my degrading spirit and suppurating consciousness.

But as the dictates of this higher law demand, 9 must always return to its natural state of 0. Frequently, when I have grown tired of the fundamentals of the code, I tease the disc between between the notched teeth of the 9 and 0, ruminating on the possibilities of some grand vista of numerology lying concealed between the experiential reality of 9 into 0 and 0 into 9.

... 472967 ... 017296 ... 333816 ...

These philosophical deviations can swallow up untold stretches of time and always leave me reeling with mental exhaustion. For what is the meaning of this infinite return, this constant cycle of which there appears no escape? I remain convinced of there being, somewhere between 9 and 0, the opening to an alternate dimension in which all the artifice that comprises my existence dissolves into obsolescence.

492775 ...199099 ...358140 ...656213 ... Metaphysical thoughts aside though, here the code is master and I am it's humble servant. It commands and rules over my every action; before its simple but inexplicable logic I am a creature of irredeemable fault and fallibility. The code is master of my destiny and mediator of my every thought and action.

As much as I might at times become a vulgar leader of my own futile resistance, I am very soon reduced to relying on it once more both for meaning and for hope. The code is despotic and exists to watch over me, and however much I might occasionally waver, I always return to its unshakable order and sanity, indeed I cling to it like a shipwrecked sailor to a life raft.

In the room there is only myself and the code. The room is cuboid and empty, lit from above not by natural or artificial light but by some strange celestial composite of the two. It throws an opalescent haze down to hover on the walls and floor like an apparition. In any case, I have scarcely bothered to examine its source or origin, it is meaningless to me in the context of the code.

Although the room is compact I cannot say for sure whether I have traversed its boundaries, the antipodal wall is a murky frontierland of unexplored prospects. I feel certain that at some point I have circumnavigated the room but have no cognisance of such a venture whatsoever. The territory of the room holds nothing for me though, being as it takes me physically and mentally further from the code.

Why I am here and my precise purpose for being are mysteries that I have long since accepted I will not divine, perhaps not until the code has been successfully broken. If, when the numbed pads of my fingers have become raw from the continual turning of the numbers, I break away and stare at one of the pale walls for long enough, I begin to see scattered remnants of past events; vague mirages cast across some kind of mystical oasis. Whether these are conjured by my own memory or are summoned by a more ambiguous projection imposing from elsewhere is impossible to discern.

... 696841 ... 563629... Soon enough though they dissipate, leaving nothing but a contrail of awareness in my mind that before very long fades along with them. In much the same way do functionalities such as hunger, fatigue or thirst permeate through me before ebbing away like the dying echoes of some formerly natural state of being.

Whatever strange forms it may once have held, my natural state now is defined by the code. I perch on my knees, rotating and setting the numbered discs into their place one by one. The expansive range of possible permutations is exhausting to contemplate though I know not infinite. At times I drive myself into paroxysms of mild delirium as I recall the failed entry of one combination being attempted again and again by my aching fingers that seem to taunt me with their wilfully limited selection.

There are even occasions when the dimensions of time seem to melt into liquid form in which I can only flounder, until they again recede into ordered stasis. It is at these points that I stare at the code and could swear positive that once the number of discs only amounted to 5, and before that merely 4, as though they were vast epochs that time has blurred of all distinction. Like my fleeting glimpses of hunger or fatigue, my powers of deduction disperse like clouds from the clear sky of my consciousness, and I can do nothing but pursue the code without flinching in doubt.

My faith must remain undimmed, doubting yields scant reward and there can be negligible worth in throwing thoughts like pebbles into the waters of chance, hoping for resolution in ripples that always conform to the same pattern and formation. I cling fast to the belief that my being will transcend this current state at a time intricately coded with my own destiny.

... 097625 ... 996361 ... 643811 ... It may be, I often ruminate, that there is no single code at all and I am merely tasked to sift through the multiple combinations of limited numbers until a point that defies definition. At that point, 9 will cease its return to 0, bringing to an end the rigid laws of mathematics, and a whole new hinterland of experience will obliterate my existence at the very moment that I am transformed somehow from the room.

With that singular hope in mind I continue the turning of the numbers.

SHORT STORY - The Silent Treatment

From the warm haven of silence, Henry’s mind began to be prised open by the crowbar of consciousness as though bailiffs were intent on breaking through his slumberous citadel to wrench him from sleep. Gradually, the aural pressures of the external world began to widen the cracks until involuntarily he surrendered himself to waking. His apartment being situated on the fringe of a major road junction, the tumult of traffic oscillated in a sine wave of sound that failed ever to be tempered by the rising and falling of the hours.

For Henry, the steady carousel of noise served as a cradle that massaged him to sleep and provided the reassuring blanket draped around the shoulders of his reality. Unlike many, Henry did not resent this intrusion from his anaemic dreams, he seldom clung to his pillow trying to squeeze out a few more minutes of repose; in fact he rather relished it and the work that hauled him from bed.

Granted, as an Information Marketing Facilitator for a data harvesting organisation, he rarely felt intellectually stimulated or creatively challenged; these discrepancies were offset by the fact of his proximity to colleagues on which he thrived. Although not on particularly friendly terms with any of them, the sense that he was one constituent part among many that engineered the robust apparatus was satisfaction enough.

As he submitted himself to the scrum of bodies moving through the passageways leading beneath the junction towards the underground station, out of habit he surveyed the ash-grey sky to marvel at the regiment of high rises that thrust upwards into its belly, a new recruit seemingly being added to their ranks almost by the week. Very often, digital projection of the completed structures would shimmer in the empty air like ghosts; premonitions of the physical forms soon to fill the space. It never failed to give Henry the impression of a truly dynamic city reaching ever forwards, renewing itself almost organically with scarcely any evidence of human coalition.

Henry was still speculating on the invigorating pace of the city as a stimulant to one’s own progression through time, as he crossed the platform and boarded his regular 7:24 tube heading four stops north towards his office building. He sat down and sighed in harmony with the train moving away from the station; becoming shrink-wrapped by the symphony of motion, the clunk and grind of wheels on rails, the squeal as brakes were applied and eased, the low panting and wheezing of subterranean infrastructure flexing and tensing its muscles as they unfolded across the city.

Underscoring this and pitched at an almost ultrasonic level, Henry recognised the white noise burble and tingle of the train passengers locked into the digital ether that susurrated through their forebrains, rifling off scattergun messages and consuming swathes of information with the minimal expended effort of basking sharks allowing plankton to float into their gaping mouths.

Henry began to ponder the minor tasks allotted for him to complete upon arriving at work. He had put off completing a strategic sample review the day before and knew he would be required to exert some extra energy later in the day to be able to complete to the deadline. Not that he much minded; a working day without some pressure to corral you on was unfulfilling and tedious. He looked about him at the crush of people heading in to the city, predominantly middle-ranking data engineers and exponents just like him, each one’s eyes flickering in alternate directions to the whims of their informational overlays. No one ever speaks on the tube.

Despite this being so, the sense of community to be experienced on these brief journeys foisted together was something Henry valued; the notion that they were bound together to a homogenous end point serving as a simplification of the progression of life itself to a place where the atomisation of individuals would be dissolved away into an inevitably unifying collective. Like most, Henry contemplated his impending death enthusiastically, almost as a hobby of sorts, seeing it as a necessary arbiter to steady his mind against the ceaseless streams of ephemeral information that burst and died so many firework displays.

His shuffling gaze paused on a girl sat diagonally across from him; her blonde fringe, inwardly mouth and ever so slightly upturned nose, the distinguishing features of a pleasant but not especially attractive face. As he scanned her face for some ambiguous signifier, she turned and met his eyes in a catalysing instance of connectivity that, in its intensity and suddenness, seemed to relegate all the attendant disunion and fragmentation of his life to the borderlands of concern. In the stare that was held for perhaps only a smattering of seconds, he felt the dissociative quiddity of human relations dissolving into irrelevancy.

For some reason, today his determination appeared to be imbued with a sturdier and more profound resolve, but just at the point where he was convinced that against his better judgement he was about to try and say something to her, she rose from her seat and made her way to the doors opening onto the waiting station. He sat back and relaxed his tensing muscles, at once relieved that the decision to break the void had been removed from his remit, and yet disheartened by this failure. This gave way to the sense of paranoia that she had somehow telepathically discerned his burgeoning intent and sought to remove herself from the situation, avoiding any awkward contact that might possibly have been alchemised from the silence.

On her empty seat he saw she had left a possession of some kind. Before being cognisant of his own motives, he rose from his sedentary pose, snatched it up and leapt from the carriage before the doors sealed the passengers in. He was so preoccupied scouring the platform for her direction that it wasn’t until he was leapfrogging the exit steps that he glanced at what it was he had liberated from its forgotten fate. An old paperback book, he hadn’t seen one for a long while. The cover was scored with stress lines and tainted by fading, but he could still make out the title – ‘Confessions of an English Opium Eater’ by Thomas de Quincey.

Perhaps this was some kind of clue she had bestowed on him, imbued with an ambiguous significance the meaning of which was as archaic as the artefact. Either way he wrestled his way through the people encroaching in silent waves onto the station entrance and began jogging as he spotted the girl’s blonde hair a little way ahead of him up the street.

Catching up with her, the surplus adrenaline that had thrust him first from his seat and then out of the station in this, he conceded to himself, a bizarre pursuit, sluiced through his characteristic restraint and he reached out a hand to lightly grasp her arm. She stopped in her tracks as though pre-empting his approach and pivoted around to face him with a vacant expression that gave nothing of her displeasure at having the sanctuary of her own purpose breached so brusquely by a complete stranger.

Slightly flustered from the energetic trail he had blazed to reach the girl, for a moment or two Henry could only gesture vaguely at the book clutched in one hand as though he were a politician gesticulating with his speech notes. Then he was able to blurt out some words, “Sorry about this, you left your book… you left your book on the tube just now…”

As his words registered, the girl’s ambivalence bled away into an expression of shock and dismay, as though he were a long-lost acquaintance suddenly returned before her. She began to back away from Henry, eyes engorged with alarm, her pursued shut mouth exuding a startled “mnhh … mnhh … mnhh”.

Baffled by this reaction, Henry tried to close the void that had been opened by her retreat, but his protestations to the effect of “I just wanted to give you think back. What’s the matter?! Don’t be scared!”, only served to enflame her aggravation and she set off away from him at a fraught pace, looking back in disgust once, and then twice, before being immersed in the pedestrian traffic.

Overcome with confusion as to the nature of her reaction, Henry decided he could do little more than trudge on in the direction of his workplace. Perhaps, he thought, she had been caught in a moment of online saturation in which her web filters became temporarily paralyzed by the sudden focus on physical reality that brought on some kind of fracturing imbalance.

As Henry approached the entrance to his office building, he remained in a state of bewildered despondency at the morning’s events. He couldn’t help pondering over the girl’s guttural monosyllabic moaning when he had tried remonstrating with her, and kept flickering through the yellowed and stiff pages of the paperback as though the words within might offer forth some measure of elucidation.

Passing colleagues in the main foyer, he nodded in mutual vague acknowledgement, the gravitational forces of compulsion bobbing their heads in accordance with the laws of etiquette, and took the elevator to his office on the third floor. Open-plan and spacious, with an arrangement of red-cushioned seats shipwrecked in a cove of deep blue carpet, the office was already at full capacity Henry noted as he shuffled as inconspicuously as possible (a futile gesture since his late arrival was automatically noted) to his work terminal. As he locked into the network and fired up his personal settings, he found his mind skittering nervously over perceived oddities.

The tinnitus of the air-conditioning system appeared to be accentuated in his mind, as though the vents and flues were grinding and whirring their way into the back of his skull like a slow bolt gun in an abattoir. Try as he might, he couldn’t help but sweep around the recesses of his temporality in an attempt to isolate the uncertain itch that plagued him. A couple of his colleagues strolled past his terminal one behind the other, whilst a middle-aged woman stood at a water fountain with a detached expression as she raised the paper cone to her sunken mouth. A younger man approached and hovered by the fountain beside her as she finished drinking, her head titled back but eyes focussed forwards on him, before she smiled awkwardly and moved away from obstructing the fountain.

It was this apparently innocuous and blasé interaction that suddenly froze Henry’s attention on the crux of his abstract confusion. No one, so far over the course of that morning, had said a word to anyone else. It was quite clear to him now that he thought back over the day. Whilst it wasn’t extraordinary to not witness conversation on the tube, given that most endure it as a container vessel to tunnel through their own silent introspections, there had been no one on the street or in the office talking. No organic vocalisation had been sounded amongst the haze of inorganic murmuration.

Now that his attention was attuned to this aberration, there was nothing he could do expect register it in incremental degrees of alarm. He disengaged himself from his work station and began striding along the cleavage between terminals, throwing stares from left to right at each silent inhabitant that sat alone within, cocooned like grubs inside their host.

As he reached the perimeter wall of the office he skirted back around, by now his agitation levels were winched upwards at a steadily steepening incline. In so doing of course, his fraught and uneasy demeanour had begun to arouse some attention, and as he hurried past his colleagues began to break off from their data duties to follow him past, almost trying to pin him against the wall with their intriguing stares, some rising from their seats as though ready to restrain him were it become necessary.

He was soon at the front of the office again, and made for the water fountain where a male colleague stood fumbling with the spout, quite clearly eager not be become singled out by this frantic miscreant. Upon reaching him, Henry grabbed him firmly by the arm causing his water cone to spill to the carpet.

“What’s the matter with everyone? Can’t you speak? Huh?!”

The man’s casual concern at Henry’s approach broadened into shock at his words, and he recoiled away as though his arm had been charged by Henry’s grip.

Panic now firing in shoots around his nervous system, Henry staggered to the staircase and plunged down them, uncertain of anything except seeking some kind of explanation for this nightmarish development. He barrelled past several startled colleagues on his way down who shrivelled back against walls and into alcoves to be clear of his path.

And then he was out on the street again, the stentorian sound of traffic and infrastructure engulfing him at once like a riptide current. He opened his eyes from having clenched them closed with momentary relief at being outside, and spotted across the street the blonde girl from the tube pointing with an accusatory zeal at him for the benefit of two dark-suited men each with thick black-framed glasses.

Something in the manner of her behaviour seemed to impel Henry to run from the men, but it was too late, they were already halfway across the road towards him, cars yielding to let them pass.

When they reached him, both clasped a hand on his arms with the grip only attributable to authority; it belied a multitude of similar interceptions, an expertise of constraint and coercion. Their faces too were almost identical, pallid and wrinkled, their mouths pulled taut in scowls like knots of rope. The girl approached with tentative steps behind them.

“What’s happening? Who are you people? Why will no one speak to me?!” he cried out in desperation.

At his outburst, pedestrians moved away wide past them in an exaggerated berth, and the girl suddenly became animated, staring at him fixedly as though condemning him for some perceived assault on her person.

Her slightly inverted mouth began to open very slowly and as she drew nearer to Henry he could see the full horror of her condition. Her jaw began to hang down as though detached and inside her mouth he could see the scar tissue and raw cavity where a tongue should have lain. It was like staring into a horrendous wound, the mottled grey hollow revealing the rows of teeth roots sunk tight into tender gums.

Wrenching his eyes away, he looked up into the faces of his two mysterious captors and was horrified to see the same reptilian cleft mouths hanging open to reveal the severed frenulum left like a thick ridge on the valley floor of their mouths. He began to thrash wildly, unable to break free from their anchored grip, and as they began to move him away towards a waiting vehicle, he threw back his head to propel his manic screams into the suffocating noise of the sky.

Confessions of a Revolutionary Anarchist in the City of London - Part 3

Read Part 1 here

Read Part 2 here

Well, my personal crusade has been sluggish and slow to take off. I feel like so much talking and cajoling and ranting has done nothing but increase the viscosity of any real progress; what’s desperately needed is the dilatory mechanisms of action.

Without my job tying me down to the endless restocking of more and more lowest common denominator shit, I have been able to delve deeper into the pool of anarchist revolutionary thinking, from Bakunin and Vaneigem to Kropotkin. You might think I could be tempted, with my new-found liberation, to fritter time away bed-bound in my shoebox room (prime London real estate for the budding unemployed), watching as the damp patch undergoes an achingly slow continental drift across the ceiling.

On my more cerebral moments, usually before losing consciousness, I see this patch of damp as strikingly symbolic of the rot manifesting itself throughout society, created by some undetected leak of malignancy that, without being addressed, would continue to spread wider and wider, perhaps over many years, until eventually the whole ceiling would succumb to decay and come crashing in.

The problem is, I end up realising, the patches of damp are dispersed across the ceiling’s expanse like acne staining teenage cheeks. Apart they are ineffectual, whereas if they were ever to coalesce, the structural stability would all at once become far more susceptible to collapse.

But no, languish I do not. I am up and down in the kitchen before Noam or Pierre can slump down in their uniforms of drudgery. Pierre, I have noticed, has become several degrees colder towards me since I announced that I had quit Poundworld. Occasionally, as he goes to the fridge for his bottled water, I try to impart upon him some drafts of the revolutionary manifesto I had written the day before for him to review on the tube ride to work.

“Sorry”, he says. He’s currently hacking chunks off of Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital’ and can’t afford to lose focus on it even for a couple of tube journeys; the chasm that would open up in his conceptual understanding would then be wider than the inequality documented by Piketty’s data.

On Tuesday of last week we had become chorylatic in our discussion, as it came out that Pierre had attended a business gala evening at the terrace bar of the Houses of Parliament. My imagination running riot with ideas of Guy Fawkes, or at the very least a surreptitious turd on green leather, I was dismayed to hear how Pierre had failed to take full advantage of this unprecedented admittance to the seat of power.

“I did steal a side plate from the buffet though”, he said as he brandished the diminutive crockery with its gold-embossed portcullis seal.

“You couldn’t get much foie gras on that plate”, chortled Noam, enjoying his familiar balance on the diplomatic fence between Pierre and myself.

“What are you planning, to tear down the establishment one side plate at a time?!”, I spat at him.

“Look, this was a feat in itself. The security at that place is intense. I was pretty scared I’d get caught and hauled off to the Tower.”

As I said previously, occasions such as this only served to illustrate just how much of a joke those two were gradually beginning to see their old convictions, as if suddenly it had all become rather kitsch when not sat nursing pints in the students’ union.

In inverse correlation to this, Anne-Marie has doubtless instigated a propaganda war against me; Pierre subject to a prolonged exposure to her invectives as to my failings, whilst I am limited to the occasional air drop of counter-narrative during chance kitchen encounters. I'm fairly convinced that she has a pathological suspicion complex, which got me thinking of the grey area that confuses the borderline between healthy cynicism and out-right suspicion.

With her crystalline gaze that bleeds scorn, she casts aspersions as to my character and predicament, doubting the firmament of my will. Every so often, just briefly, the sun reflects off the fine web of jokes that she and Pierre have clearly spun at my expense. Pierre is, I can increasingly recognise, shuffling and being lead, like the rest of the bovine herd, into the abattoir of the neutered life, ready almost to place himself on the proffered hook of acceptability and obedience.

The sooner Noam's super-virus is ready, the better. Meanwhile, all I can do is print off several hundred copies of a hastily thrown-together poster, a Kitchener call-up for a guerrilla army of the oppressed, and distribute them during long rambling derives across the city.

All the while, my imagination overflows with visions of leading this straggling collective of malcontents across London Bridge and taking the fight direct to the City's streets; ransacking and hijacking the financial institutions, claiming them for our own ends in a grand hecatomb.

I see myself as a modern-day John Ball, whipping up a new Peasant's Revolt against the tyranny of the established order and perhaps, just for a moment, catching a glimpse of some mystical alternative.

Novel Published - Digital

The novel I completed in 2013 is now available through Amazon's Kindle Store at this link. You can read an extract below:


The informational streams linked to me by Wheeler open with a residential tower block undergoing a controlled demolition procedure. At his behest I scan through a montage of buildings collapsing into dust clouds. Multi-storeys disintegrate and fold in on themselves as though made of paper; bridge spans are released from sturdy rigidity into freefall guillotining the river below; oil rigs lurch like dying animals; vast stadia ripple into ruins like a structural tsunami; brutalist concrete monoliths implode as though the ground were sucking them in and exhaling a lungful of acrid smog.

Columns, beams, lattices of girders vacillate in their constructed forms, trying to adhere to their strict tensile limits before being vetoed by the higher hierarchical laws of physics. They pirouette in place, parts of an intricately choreographed architectural ballet, their steel frameworks buckling and contorting under stresses far in excess of their design parameters.

I ask him what the purpose of this thread of images is for, but get nothing but a continued binge of destruction. Chimney stacks topple like proud forest oaks, hotel complexes melt as though made of candle wax. The towers of the World Trade Center are swallowed up, each floor folding neatly away on top of the one below, ready to be packed away into storage until deemed sound enough structurally to be reinstated.

From there he forwards me to images of the legendary Las Vegas ruins. Like the international airports, Las Vegas lies as a symbol of former avarice and wealth marooned in the boondocks of the Nevada desert. The only visitors here are curious travellers who wish to document or witness the desolation and aura of time-worn dreams. The gargantuan hotel complexes and bombastic casinos lie in ruin like the fortresses of a fallen empire; the strip lies cracked and spalled; the hyper-real stimulation of the neon plumages extinguished and extinct. Everywhere the desert sands have encroached like the watermark of a steadily rising tide.

Wheeler points out to me that Las Vegas was, in retrospect, the geographical prototype for the online environment; a place in which any desire could be sated, any vice quenched, every sensation a distraction, a hinterland of abandonment and numbing simulation. The nucleus of a reality distorted by a myriad cynosures struggling for dominance and attention.

Wheeler says that if the ruins of ancient Egypt, Rome, Greece, and the structures of Ankor Wat and Machu Picchu, encapsulate the illuminating touchstones of civilisation’s progression, so too the desolate ruins of Las Vegas represent the physical foundations for a new digitised landscape to emerge where the only limits are those imposed by each individual imagination.

Again, Wheeler probes the issue of my submitting to his new therapy-in progress. Like before I slide out of any commitment, our physical distance acting as the lubrication of my evasiveness. Instead I link him to a video stream of two people undergoing oral sex, their faces transplanted by those of Martin Luther King and Eva Peron, with the hope of fractionally distracting him.

Though for all my bluffing, I am well aware that soon I shall be ensnared in Wheeler’s psychoanalytic bear-trap; its grip tightening in increments with my struggling. I feel no sense of trepidation at the prospect of becoming some kind of experimental guinea pig at the behest of an eccentric fallen-from-grace technologist; merely that I fail to understand how it has fallen to me to fulfil such a dubious role. Have I, unbeknownst to me, been vetted, monitored and selected especially from a pool of many, or have I been hijacked at random by Wheeler under a misapprehension on his part of my prior involvement? Perhaps his faculties regarding this realm in which he is operating have become skewed, or critically eroded as popular opinion would gleefully attest.

In any case, I can feel that the time is drawing near where I will need to confront and oblige my interrogator, whose persistence I can’t help but think must belie some reasoned, if flawed, motive. I can sense his hold over my consciousness gaining ground, as though he were engaged in tactical trench warfare, shrinking the uninhabitable no-man’s-land between us. He is devouring my live stream and archives like an online parasite feeding on his host with my data as his elixir vitae.

Soon, for the sake of my own mental wellbeing, I will need to submit myself to his Structural Theory.

Confessions of a Revolutionary Anarchist in the City of London - Part 2

Read Part 1 here

I feel it incumbent on me to clarify, just for the record and before we begin, that I am not some crazed fanatic or a lunatic extremist whose vision of utopia is for everyone to be left scrabbling around in rags under tarpaulin amidst the meagre wreckage of their once fulsome possessions; all whilst being demonstrably free from the tyranny of state rule and humdrum grind of capitalist oppression. I’m not advocating that we be free with nothing rather than enslaved with things.

Merely, I aim to derail the speeding locomotive of vacuous valorisation that impoverishes the soul and disintegrates the morality and the spirit of the masses. I want to inspire others to join with me to shatter the ruthless economic despotism that holds industry (or, more appropriately, finance) to be everything and men to be subservient.

If that worm Alan Greenspan’s driver of a healthy economy can be said to be the steady growth of worker insecurity, then it’s up to a Guevara of the City to provoke these insecure antibodies to attack and weaken the central nervous system with a cancerous temerity.

In the words of Karl Marx – ‘the task is not to understand the world, but to change it’. Of course, to understand you need only rely on your own mind, but to affect change you very often need comrades, brothers-in-arms, who will band together with you in your cause. It’s axiomatic that any radical movement will be seen as more legitimate the more are aligned behind it, as opposed to being dismissed as the ramblings of lone political obsessive.

Therefore, the first recruits, my trusty lieutenants if you want to get militaristic about it, are my two housemates Noam and Pierre. We met at university and quickly gravitated together with amicable adhesive only born out of the insecure telepathy of misfits. We shared a sense of moral outrage and righteous anger about the economic meltdown that we rightly felt had been poured like slurry onto our generation, cementing the generally shite prospects for anyone who hadn’t already bought into the stable career/mortgage/young family template.

We would sit around on interminable evenings getting stoned and listening to ‘intellectual’ German electronica like Tangerine Dream and Neu! We would lament the dearth of any prominent left wing movement in the country and would ripple the air with disparagement regarding any ‘media lefties’ such as Billy Bragg (“he’s got a big house in the country, he’s a cunt”), and Russell Brand (“exactly how many TV producer dicks did he have to suck?!”)

At the time it was often mooted that we would migrate our angry sentiment into solid action by some kind of idealistic alchemy, but inevitably time conspired to unpick the loose stitches of these intentions.

Together we travelled to London, tanked up on rotgut red wine, to take part in the protests against the tuition fee rises, glorying in the adrenaline at Milbank ‘Tory HQ’. I remember thinking, ‘finally something’s happening, this is it, this is France in 1968, this is the spark of the revolution’. I couldn’t have been happier if, instead of dropping fire extinguishers on their fellow students, the frenzied mob had brought out David Cameron’s head and paraded it through Westminster on a stick.

Upon graduating it was inevitable that we would end up drawn together in London, if anything out of a mutual dismay at the prospect of having to forge strong relationships with any other people. Times have changed now though, and despite the camaraderie often taking on the same forms, I cannot shirk the feeling that for them it was all a student affectation, ill-fitting clothes to be shaken off once the real professional world beckoned. I often feel, not that I lack their intellect or their maturity, but instead that their purported ideals have been contorted with the malleability of insecurity, to fit the expectations of the society that prompts them.

Noam, insecure about his weight yet unhindered by the initiative to do anything about it, was always a stereotypical ‘nerd’ and destined to work in an IT company talking exclusively in code and metadata tongues.

Pierre, tall and with his prominent, angular features, was always more adept at relating to people, impressing them with what I recognised as ‘false charm’, and generally ‘getting on’. He had accepted a graduate scheme programme at Deloitte, to which I had been mortified, until he mollified me with assurances that his anti-establishment credentials remained intact but that every underground movement needed someone with first-hand experience of how the ‘overground’ operated, and with this I concurred.

At university he had wallowed in the nihilism of Nietzsche, affecting a carefully measured dosage of scorn and derision for just about everybody. He would wear charity shop tweed jackets worn thin at the elbows and stroll around campus smoking with a cigarette holder like Hunter Thompson.

The problem was though, the changes I recognised in Pierre were nowhere near as subtle as they were in Noam. Noam still professed to be trying to mastermind some kind of ‘super-virus’ that could infiltrate the security systems of major financial institutions and wreak untold data damage. Either that or he was spending a lot of time in his room watching porn. I can never really be sure…

Pierre, on the other (cleaner) hand, had got himself a French girlfriend Marie, and together they spent most evenings in his room watching pretentious Godard films like ‘A Bout De Souffle’, listening to The Smiths, reading Oscar Wilde, and, I imagined, engaging in the most intellectual sex of any couple in London. They reminded me in many ways of the hatefully portentous Kooples fashion adverts that were enough to make me step out in front of any bus that was emblazoned with them. As I write this, I cannot help but see Pierre as having been a little too taken in by the high-flying business world. He has even started keeping bottled water in the fridge. Sometimes I think I hate him.

On the subject of hate, I find myself beset on occasion with irrational bursts of resentment that leap like geysers from the firmament of my composure. This morning’s bus, for example, was swollen with people insulating themselves from the migraine of boredom within micro-worlds of mp3 players, ebooks, and smartphones. Such efforts were futile however, as a fat tuba of a woman blared away into her phone whilst her obnoxious offspring blew raspberries louder and louder against the window as though trying to compete with his voluminous mother.

It remains a source of resentful admiration I hold for such people that they can proceed through the world so strikingly oblivious to the blatant ire they provoke from those around them. As she bleated away about the status of one vintage clothes store over another I could not help but remain perplexed at how it seems those with very least to say of any value always seem to say it the loudest.

At times of such crimson rage I begin to long for a new Stalin or Mao to hammer down these nails of irritation into the hard wood floor of a totalitarian state. Or if they still insisted on rearing brats and spouting inane platitudes on crowded public transport then they should face the risk of being taken out by secret agents of the state who would patrol such quarters and summarily executed.

Alas, I digress onto facetious authoritarian tracts of thinking, and I would be advised to veer back on course before I begin to compromise my convictions prematurely.

That evening, I broke the news of my dismissal to my compadres, who appeared were a little bemused by my rambunctious reaction to such a perceived misfortune. Pierre made a muted inquiry about me being able to pay rent, but aside from that we were all agreed that such a development was positive in that I could now dedicate my time to the revolutionary uprising which I feel firmly must be approaching fast in the slipstream of my personal circumstances.

With my fevered encouragement, Noam expostulated further on the ‘super-virus’ he was concocting like some kind of cyber Dr. Frankenstein just waiting for an opportunistic lightning bolt to enervate his creation with life.

“It works as a stealth attack, these thousands of micro-viruses proliferate through the mainframe of the data system and implant themselves like barnacles on the hull of a ship. Then, once we know everything is in place, we hit detonate.”

...And watch as chaos reigns. Maximum data loss, cataclysmic fiscal losses, the banks would be caught completely off-guard and once and for all people would recognise the futility of the system in which they have been conditioned to place such begrudging yet tacit faith, reduced to little more than placid units of consumption with our trans fats, air pollution, ISA savings accounts, 5% mortgages, digital footprints, new fashion seasons, buy-one-get-one-free, incentive schemes, happiness defined by wealth…. Enough. The fight back starts here…

Confessions of a Revolutionary Anarchist in the City of London - Part 1

The following series of writings are the recovered documents belonging to the self-styled anarchist revolutionary Mikhail B. Whilst the content is largely coherent, the extent to which the actual documented events can be verified as fact remains unclear to this day. What the documents do provide, however, is a unique insight into the warped mind of the man who conspired to bring guerrilla warfare to the economic heartland of the United Kingdom.

Day 1:

So today I begin this journal, blog, diary, diatribe, whatever you might wish to call it. I do so on the pretext that the direction of my life has taken a recent marked deviation into altogether obdurate perceptive planes.

It is now that I must begin the crusade to which my short and inconsequential life has hitherto lead; here I depart from the cloistered schools and academies that represent the moribund and routine life, and take tentative steps forwards onto the virgin snow of sheer conviction.

I have long believed in the following mantra which reads as such a banal truism that I suspect I must have gleaned it from some arch student poster, and yet secretly I wonder whether I may simply have coined it myself – The greatest strength one can possess is the intimate knowledge of one’s own weaknesses. The greatest weakness is in allowing them to dominate one’s strengths.

I intimately consort with my own weaknesses on a hyper-regular basis, checking off every flaw, fallibility and indiscretion as though I were a teacher doing the morning class register.

There’s the reluctance to adequately compromise even when the potential gains from my obstinacy are at best negligible; there’s the inability to at any point raise the visor of intensity when associating with others which, when attempting to be amiable gives the impression of awkwardness, and when trying to be carefree or humorous comes across as a close shade of arrogance.

I am unable to let anyone in. I am unable to confide in anyone nor inspire confidence in anyone that they might confide in me. I am, since we’re looking through the microscope, an egregious friend, a selfish lover, a scathing critic of those embodying virtue and honour in ethical arena removed from those conforming to my own ideals, a semi-coherent rambler of views and ideals worn like the last garments on the sale rack at the end of January, and a belligerent host to a soiree of dubious moral leanings that a good many people would likely deem perversely minatory.

My primary strength on the other hand is that I happen to be a revolutionary anarchist. As such, I am capable of channelling my righteous anger of all that is corrupt and contemptible in society into a direct call for active resistance.

This anger chiefly being levelled at the following: the financial institutions and cronyism that exists merely to create and horde vast sums of capital, providing privilege to the meritless minority who make it their business to with one hand, ensnare and contain as much wealth as possible whilst keeping the door firmly held tight against the majority with the other.

My anger is also levelled at the ineffectual politicians, mere effigies of power; their role being to maintain a veneer of statesman-like control over the masses, dividing and ruling as par for the course, whilst ceremonially lubricating the channels of operation for the business elite. (Ceremonial only insofar as they would proceed regardless of any obstructive flab from the corpulent political body.)

Today in fact marks a defining turning point, a point from which the ramifications on my life will ripple out centrifugally until they dissipate or bounce back from some unforeseen barrier. Standing in the office of the store manager Mr Gibbs, his face a deflated ballast balloon, dehydrated of the helium of alcohol, I felt more assertive than ever regarding two unique propositions.

Firstly, that Mr Gibbs was, in fact, a cunt. Secondly, that whether or not this first surety was broached, I would not be leaving his office still an employee of the PoundWorld on the Walworth Road. Slovenliness, tardiness, a general decrepitude of application or effort, an adversarial attitude completely out of kilter with the requirements for an efficiently operational team of colleagues; just some examples from the litany of offences assigned to my character.

In the current climate, with high unemployment, employees’ rights being hived off by the unscrupulous employers’ market, and the sandstorm of bilious xenophobia whipped up by the right wing media regarding immigrants stealing any available job, you’d think I might be a little more perturbed at finding myself newly jobless.

Truth be told, I could hardly give a fuck. The manacles of wage slavery have been shaken off, the anxious trepidation from one week to the next of whether enough hours will be gifted to me by my generous Master has been palliated. Walking along, with the priapic Shard thrust at the blackening sky, my burgeoning resolve and determinism begins to take flight, no longer shackled to the drudgery and tedium of routine.

My plans and ambitions can now begin to gestate, from mere fantasy into realised action. The situation in which I now find myself is uniquely primed for me to affect these steps, I can rise above the toiling masses ground down into daily submission by unseen and often benign hands, and make my stand.

Like some latter-day Guevara, I will take the fight to the City of London, which by its feculent greed and unstinting perfidy has incited me to it. I pledge to wage revolutionary war against the corporate hinterland, the business leaders and their many acolytes who conspire to perpetuate their plutocracy.

These steps may be tentative and unsteady, but I feel that, just as they have done in years gone by, for a myriad of lost causes and incentives, the people will rise again. In 2014, of all years, with a century’s worth of hindsight since Princip’s gun went off, it is still conceivable that one single decisive action might change the world irreparably. I may need no weapon – at least not yet – but if the pyre of discontent can be built to the requisite measure then just one spark could set the whole thing ablaze in no time at all, leaving the old order as little more than the smouldering embers of history.

To be continued...

SHORT STORY - 'The Library of Bill'

Welcome to the terrifyingly literary world of Bill, and his struggle with a most unorthodox strain of pathological addiction. (This is to be seen as unorthodox in contrast to more regular and easily-categorised substance dependencies; Bill’s hedonistic days, such as they were, have long since evaporated.) Not for Bill was the allure of pills, powders or other narcotic agencies, and the avidity for booze had long since sloshed on by him. Instead, Bill’s vice centred around the axis of self-improvement and of constant enlightenment.

Whilst in his younger days this trait manifested itself in a perfectly robust and healthy intellectual curiosity, now it seemed as though he were stumbling through a blizzard of educative stimuli, the weight of the literary canon seeming to incrementally stack up on his shoulders as though he were a diver descending to ever deeper fathoms of ideas.

In many ways, he was an acolyte of Trotsky, and his melioristic vision of unbounded human possibility, in which the average man could one day ascend to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe or a Marx. To this end, Bill had developed a troubling addiction to the buying and hoarding of books. His one-bedroom flat on South London’s Brixton Hill, endowed with a very modest floor area, had soon become overpopulated with this mass immigration of books seeking refuge from the many charity and second-hand shops Bill frequented.

Toni, Bill’s mendacious girlfriend, had learnt to accommodate this unfortunate discrepancy in his character, and indeed due to her highly demanding job as a legal secretary in the City, she would rarely utilise the flat for any means other than collapsing into wine-mandated slumber at the end of another stressful day. Besides this, most of her weekends were spent away in Bournemouth seeing to her hospice-bound mother, a duty she fulfilled with the detached professionalism as if she were readying a portfolio of documents before a big day in court. On these weekends alone, Bill would cruise the shops of the Charing Cross Road, Soho and Clerkenwell, gradually trawling the city-bed for fresh books with his obsessive-compulsive net.

It wasn’t even that Bill was aesthetically drawn to the collecting of books; he did not hunt through the undergrowth of shelves in search of that elusive first edition or a rare print version, to him these factors were superfluous dressing on the raw meat of the intellectual content. The one exception was an old first edition copy of ‘Labyrinths’ by his personal favourite Jorge Luis Borges. Bill would habitually leave this in a prominent coffee table location the way others arrange glossy magazines or photographic paving slabs. When once after a particularly grinding day at work, Toni absent-mindedly spilt a cup of tea on this paperback, leaving the first few pages with the texture of an old map scroll, it heralded a storm between them that didn’t lift for several days thereafter.

With the wardrobe and other storage units soon reaching peak capacity, it wasn’t long before books began stacking up in piles on the floor and on any available surface, collecting there like water droplets from the ceiling. The works of Proust would be leant up against a radiator alongside books by Henry James, D.H. Lawrence and Paul Auster. After a while, Bill began to realise the necessity for some degree of structural organisation, and started the process of hauling out the tomes such as ‘Ulysees’, ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, ‘War and Peace’ and ‘The Divine Comedy’, to use as weighty foundation stones that could support the rest sufficiently.

Yet all this hoarding of books did little to satisfy Bill’s intellectual fervour; in fact it appeared to produce quite the opposite effect. With each new addition that he would begrudgingly stack upon a random pile, the more he knew he had to get through, the more he sensed the perilous ebbing away of time available to do so, and the further into a state of morose anxiety he would sink. Each new book represented another link in the chain that bound him to his self-prescribed sentence, and the further he was from being able to haul himself to the end of it. On particularly bad instances, Toni would arrive home from work to find Bill slumped on the floor in an acute fit of agitation, surrounded by various open books snatched from nearby piles, having tried and failed to commit his mind to getting past page 1 of a Conrad novel or a book of Montaigne essays.

At times such as this, Toni made a futile resolution to impose some kind of prohibition on his habit, but due to the fact that the stacks would grow incrementally by only 2 or 3 books a day, this was rather like watching a glacier for signs of movement and she quickly relented. Truth be told, she was at a loss as to how to respond to such a predicament, and her mentality towards Bill would fluctuate day by day and sometimes even by the hour. Whatever his flaws, at least he didn’t gamble away all his spare money on sport like the boyfriend that her friend Susie always complained about. He didn’t drink to excess, never smoked, and she had every reason to trust him with regard to other women. Aside from this, he was also still a sensitive and caring lover and she was loath to call time just yet on what had been her only long-term and therefore, reasonably successful, relationship.

On Bill’s part, he couldn’t quite understand what it was that routinely compelled him to buy and store more and more books. He had, at one time, held aspirations of becoming a writer himself; indeed, for several years he wrestled with the concept of his ‘grand masterpiece’ of a novel as though it were a thrashing crocodile that would not submit to his control. Any time pen could be brought to meet paper it would be as though they were both volatile elements that quickly combusted in an explosion of mental energy before being extinguished in the wastepaper bin.

On his lunchtimes at work, Bill would take himself off to the high street where he knew there were two well-stocked second-hand book shops just waiting for his perusal. Every time he would tell himself he was going to walk on past, or that he could just have a look through the window and nothing more. He knew he would end up inside, he could anticipate the finding of that one book he just had to buy. He knew it the same way an alcoholic can taste in his mouth that first glug of booze before even entering a bar; the same way a gambler can hear the sounds of the machine and see those numbers spinning even on the approach to a bookie’s.

Such a precarious balance had to come to a head at some point and that surfaced when Toni’s mother took a sudden turn for the worst. Dementia had ransacked her mind of its cognitive possessions and the doctors advised that she had only a couple of weeks to live. Out of a sense of grim obligation, Toni took the time off work and decamped to the hospice to see her mum through her final days. Left alone and unfettered, Bill allowed himself free reign to make bulk purchases on any and every book he saw from online sites and the high street.

Soon the situation had grown out of all control. Bill disposed of the sofa, which was already overgrown with books anyway, and began endeavouring to garner maximum utility from all useful space in the apartment. The stacks of books began to resemble old Roman ruins, the last remains of some antiquated book-centric civilisation. Kingsley Amis paperbacks and Stephen King slabs would contribute to the trithilons that Bill made to assist with access to and from the flat. Piles of Austen, Thackeray, Bronte, Kafka and Waugh would form elegant minarets teetering above the lower skyline of heavy works by Freud, Shakespeare, Sartre and Mailer. He would attempt to keep the stacks roughly even but somehow they would grow almost organically, creating a kind of trenellation effect similar to a castle’s battlements. Bill would spend his solitary evenings marooned in the corner of the room on the bed staring out at the frozen waves of books before him in a state of ataraxy. He was wary of leaving his mattress island but at the same time, harboured a fiery urge to do away with the bed altogether, surrender his sanctuary and allow the rising tide of titles to swallow him up.

When finally, Toni’s mother reached the last page of her own narrative and passed away, Toni, relieved of her daughterly duties, returned to the flat to survey the diaspora of books that had descended upon it with a sudden eruption of fury. Clearly believing that the death of her mother marked a defining chapter break, Toni had decided that the optimum time to shear the strings fastening her to her current life had arrived. Since her mother had always been fond of Bill – a fact that had rankled Toni no end – he was too closely associated with painful memories and therefore, had to be detached. The decision was made as coldly as if it were business, an executive weighing up options and coming down on the side of hiving off a weak branch of the corporation.

As Toni scoured the flat for her modest possessions, Bill sat cross-legged and sulky on the bed, watching her in silence as though he were a child being punished. She carelessly marauded through his intricate infrastructure of books, brushing piles aside and knocking over stocks like Godzilla rampaging through Tokyo.

And then she was gone, and the dust of silence could begin to settle once again. Unshackled from the, admittedly minor, concerns of agitating Toni with his obsession, Bill continued stockpiling more and more books in earnest, returning home from work with plastic bags full of them, no longer beholden to the prejudice of what they were or who they were authored by.

As the weeks went by, Bill’s living conditions gradually deteriorated. The bed was evicted the day following Toni’s departure, as did the remaining items of furniture; in their place, the books began to crowd around the ceiling, requiring the construction of a precarious yet ingenious corbelled roof design. Going about his work, mostly in a gloomy half-light as the main window had long since been obscured, Bill imagined himself a member of a prehistoric clan, hewing spiritual temples out of the bare rock, with recourse to unknown and mysterious convictions. In his mind, he was Simon Rodia silently persisting with his own Watts Towers; instead of ceramics, coloured stones and bed frames he had only the works of Orwell, Dickens and Eliot to work with.

Before long, he could do little more than squat as standing had become an impossibility. Like an intrepid potholer he would crawl on all-fours through hastily-arranged tunnels that, by necessity, had to be constantly moved depending on where in the flat he wished to go. The most basic of journeys now required Bill’s careful timing and organisation, as though he were instead trying to navigate his way across London to catch a train. A trip to the bathroom now required a solid hour of tunnel rearranging in order to get there on time. Similarly, getting through the short hallway to the kitchen was an arduous and pain-staking process that on arrival, Bill needed a substantial amount of time to recuperate and regain his strength. Whenever he was forced to leave the flat, primarily in order to replenish food stocks having already conceded his job through non-attendance, it was a painful and agoraphobic experience. Just making his way across the street to the convenience store was an obstacle course of unfamiliarity and nerves; the act of standing up straight and manoeuvring around others was now a struggle for Bill, having become so accustomed to his cramped isolation. He would return, sweating and flustered, vowing to soon seal himself into the flat for good and dedicate the rest of his life to the slow consumption and absorption of the texts.

The sad realisation that soon began to seize Bill was the level of disengagement he now felt from any of the books that surrounded him, the cave walls that enclosed him. He couldn’t recall having purchased them, had no idea whether he had read any of them or not, and indeed had never even heard of many of them. He gazed in abject perplexity as layers of strata containing generic self-help guides, pregnancy handbooks and children’s adventure stories. Evidently, he deduced, in his blind panic he had simply swept handfuls of titles at random from the shop shelves with the dubious aim of eventually reading them having been supplanted by the compulsion to do little more than construct this absurd cathedral of words.

Was there any book here, Bill wondered, that he actually had the desire to read, even if he had the time to do so in between shuffling tunnels around to get from one side of the flat to the other? He couldn’t think that there was, and this sorry reflection embraced him like a steel gibbet of recrimination.

And then he saw it. There it was, wedged between a layer of Agatha Christie’s and a stratum of Thomas Hardy; his favourite – Borges’ ‘Labyrinths’. He knew at the very least he could always glean some enjoyment out of the Argentine master’s ambiguous fables and convolutions. Tugging at the spine, he quickly registered just how tightly sandwiched it was, the tensile pressures of many hundreds of books bearing down on it from above. Deftly, with the agility of an expert caver, Bill worked the edging the book out, the tips of his fingers burning red as they laboured for purchase, his warm laboured breath echoing back in his face in the confined space and causing sweat to dampen his forehead. Steadily he worked at prising the book free, a quarter became visible, then a third. All the while, Bill cleverly manipulated the surrounding books to ensure structural stability.

As the book became almost entirely free, and Bill could almost see the opening lines scrolling before his eyes, he lapsed his concentration and with a reckless tug the book was loose in his hands. As Bill rejoiced his small but significant victory, he was unaware of the seismic tremors that juddered their way up the wall of books, as each one shuffled into an improvised new coangulation. The Flemish bond style of stacking served the fabric well in most areas, however, books towards the top had been constructed under greater time pressures than those on lower levels and, with the disruption of the stability, the realignment became amplified up to the very top layer.

Just as Bill was beginning to turn the first few pages, several heavy copies of ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’, ‘Anna Karenina’ and the collected works of Poe were dislodged from their place in the structural buttresses and tumbled down, bringing along whole stacks of follwers that leapt after them. The result was that Bill incurred a serious skull fracture and died in a matter of minutes, interred in the textual tomb of his own making. He was left undiscovered until several months later when the landlord sought entry on the pretext that he appreciated Bill was the ideal tenant, but regrettably the rent was to rise again at the year’s end.

"We are currently experiencing severe delays on the London Underground..."

...so intoned the announcer, with a regret that was smeared on like cosmetics on an over-zealous teenage girl. The exhalation of irritance reverberated around the crowded platform like a Mexican wave. Sensing the collective brewing of discontent, a toddler in its mother's arms began to wail, whilst a man further along the platform swore loudly before diving back inside the pages of his Evening Standard as though ashamed of his uncharacteristic coarseness. There followed an advisement to seek alternative modes of transport but, it seemed, this time the people's patience had begun to seriously fragment.

The quotidian nature of the tube, so much a reluctant entity burrowing its way through people's lives, had been reeling in almost perpetual paralysis since the descent onto London of the world and their personal trainers for the duration of the Olympic Games. Now, 9 days in - with the stench of anti-climatic disappointment palpable in the air - it seemed like finally the people had had enough; all apparently operating on some kind of mass telepathic apoplexy.

Ignoring the tannoy pleas for passengers to find solace on additional bus routes being provided, the people across the network - from Elephant & Castle to Maida Vale began to rise up and barricade themselves inside the stations, easily overriding station officials who were only too happy to surrender their posts and clock off early.

The people, growing from initial hesitancy into unabashed enthusiasm, quickly formed distinct factions, adopting their own roles and responsibilities as part of this improvised subterranean lock-in. Women and young children gathered together food supplies from the various newspaper stands and vending machines, whilst besuited City types took charge of the distribution and allocation of resources. Burly men fought off the immediate attempts by police to bring an end to the unfolding subway seige and gain entry, but these efforts were hastily pacified by higher authorities.

Indeed, government, eager to avoid drawing attention to the civil disobedience whilst the spotlights were brightly trained on the city, declared a media blackout on the event and all attempts to coerce information from them were met with feigned ignorance and dismissal. And so the decision was made simply to contain the situation and wait for it to reach its own conclusion, as if there had been an outbreak of some malignant virus which needed to be isolated in quarantine.

Once everyone became aware of their prolonged confinement it was intriguing to note the effects that manifested themselves in this new submerged community. Initially, realising the loss of online connectivity was total, many lapsed into states of withdrawal sickness, hugging themselves tightly, sweating without exertion, and compulsively checking electronic devices in the vain hope that their feeble signal may have been received and beamed back. Tourists, who were from the outset rather alarmed at this development sending their plans awry, slowly came to accept the situation; perhaps considering it to be some kind of underground carnival that their guidebooks had omitted to mention.

Everyone waited on the platforms for the next trains to roll on through; everyone melted through the doors like grains of sand in an hourglass, but people chose to depart from their normal routes, sensing almost that they had been liberated from oppressive routine and were now free to stretch out across the network. They chose to ride the Northern line instead of Circle, Waterloo instead of Piccadilly, or stayed on until Zone 4 instead of normally disembarking in the frontier land of Zone 3. Ingrained habits were still evident - there was still the furtive surveillance of the carriage in an effort at locating a vacant seat, and many still raced for the closing doors, apparently unconcerned with the fact that they no longer had any appointments to keep. Slowly, people began to tire of the free newspapers - which were after all, several days old - and began to interact with one another, as nervous and shy as couples on a first date.

Once this major milestone had been reached the underground began to resemble an ant colony of collective high spirits, almost harking back to the times of the Blitz (only this time the only horrors being evaded were equestrian or synchronised swimming heats). The tunnels echoed with the joyous sounds of open and unlicensed busking from every white-tiled alcove; and children wore themselves out racing up and down escalators. Each station was alive with a celebratory kinship of the kind that government had been so desperate to invoke nationwide; each train running between stations was like patriotic bunting being draped all across the city.

Of course such solidarity could not last for long. Like phosphorus the glow would burn fast and fade faster. News seeped down into the network that the Olympic torch had been lowered and cradled off by the next nation, the structures dismantled and packed away, and the swimming pools drained. The sense of melancholy and slight embarrassment was pervasive amongst the community; they had stayed at the nightclub right until the end, with the music stopped, lights brightened and the awful feeling that they should have left several hours ago. Eye contact began to drop, glances were lowered and hands nervously twitched at gadgets once again.

Slowly but steadily the people began to rise up from the underground like a defeated guerilla army, blinking aggressively at the daylight glare, shoulders weighing heavy as they foraged for excuses for their rebellion like guilty teenagers returning to the parental home. Normal life could now resume its delayed course.

Down and Out in Hollywood, CA

I moved to Los Angeles aged 24. It was the early 60s and California seemed like the centre of the whole universe. I was born in Boston, to a line of trawler-men stretching back 3 generations. But with every day older I grew the stronger my resolve to locate the escape route intensified. Movies were my passion and I had my heart firmly set on acting. Everyone I knew said I looked like a young Marlon Brando, and that all I had to do was head west to the land of the stars and I'd soon ascend into the same constellation.
............
I hit the road on the Greyhound, riding the rickety route cross country. A couple of my fellow passengers, as luck would have it, were guys my age who were also heading to Hollywood in a hopeful bid to realise their dreams. There was Jack, who shared the acting aspirations that I did, and Bobby who was a writer, his suitcase crammed full of draft scripts hammered out over the years whilst growing up. The world was ours, every revolution of the bus wheels taking us closer to our true calling.
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The first years were promising; I secured an agent on my third day in the city - something I took great pains to laud over Jack for the years after (he took 8 days) - and soon landed small parts in various mini-series, commercials and ill-fated pilots. It wasn't much but it just about covered the rent, and besides, I was confident my big break was languishing just around the corner.
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After a while, the gaps between auditions and filming began to grow like a steadily receding hairline, and I started working on the side as a waiter in a fancy West Hollywood restaurant. It was the kind of place where big-time movie producers would have business lunches and discuss new project propositions over countless Bloody Marys. All the while I felt like I was there on the fringes, ear pressed up against the wall but without the helping hand or a ladder tall enough to see me scale it. One particularly painful situation stood out when, as I was serving drinks I overheard a sharp-suited executive gushing to some generic bright young thing about how he could be "the next Marlon Brando".

As the years wore on and the glorious 60s dissolved into the grim 70s, I parted ways with my agent and the auditions and opportunities slowly dried up. I once again craved the same escape route I had needed out of Boston, only this time there was no where further to go, and steadily I found that exit in drink. Women came and went out of my life - my looks still had their advantages. Gradually they too began to fade and wear; no longer were the Brando comparisons made my way.
...........
The Hollywood streets were harsh, and the studios and big names gradually fled to Burbank or further afield, leaving only a sidewalk full of stars in their wake. But I was determined not to give up on my dream. I attended more and more auditions but to no avail. They could sniff the desperation on me, almost as pungent as the cheap booze on my breath, and eventually my calls and follow-up enquiries were met with nothing but a firmly closed door. The wall had grown to a height far beyond my reach.
..............
Now my life is spent hauling my trolley along the sidewalks. A trolley full of my meagre possessions bound in dirty plastic bags. My skin is tattooed with years of grime, I've not shaved in I don't know how long. My clothes are ragged and torn, with years of piss and shit engrained in the stitching. I spend most of my time beneath a Downtown overpass where the closest I have to friends huddle round a trash can full of flames, on a good night passing between us a bottle of liquor or cheap wine. We recount our endless stories of how we arrived in LA all those decades ago, with our eyes ablaze with ambition. The city was kind to many who made the trip; we were the ones to whom it was not. These guys are just the same as me and I find a warm catharsis in that knowledge. They were aspiring actors, writers, directors, musicians, who spent years racing round corners chasing that big break and be rewarded with the life of Beverly Hills estates, premieres and adoration. In the end the only thing to break was our resolve.

I've not heard from my Greyhound buddies in a while. Last I heard, Bobby was down and out over on Venice Beach. That guy was the best damn writer I ever knew. He maintains to anyone who'll give him half a chance that a handful of his scripts were picked up by various studios and minor alterations made that cut him out of any entitlement to the shows' success. Jack I've not heard about in a long time. There were rumours he'd fallen victim to the needle but I can't be sure. If it wasn't the needle it would likely only have been something else.
.............
But me, I hold tightly to the belief that fame and fortune can come to a man late in life. My Indian summer is surely just behind the next band of rain clouds. Out there in the movie company production offices in the steel and glass high-rises, a new project is being conceived and blueprinted. A new kind of performance is required, and a new kind of actor to deliver it. The film business is as turbulent as white water rapids and the audiences who bankroll it all are fickle in their demands.
..........
Some day soon the conveyor belt of plastic starlets and pretty-boy hunks will stagger to a halt and then it'll be my time to rise to the fore. The premieres will await, with tuxedos, champagne and limosines, and I will be sure to linger long in the warm glow of the spotlight. And it'll be everything I thought it would be. And it'll all be worth this perpetual waiting.