20. Two Flash Fictions

These stories were submitted as an assessed part of the course.

I ♥ The 60s

I most enjoy the montages they begin with: Profumo, Martin Luther King, Lyndon Johnson, The Stones, the Technicolor hippies dancing circularly, Cilla Black. An entire decade condensed into perhaps thirty seconds, without any of the boring bits about geopolitical something or other. In fact, when the talking heads come on, I usually mute the set. UKTV History are the best regular source, repeating docs purloined from the BBC, both overviews and focuses on single subjects: Beatlemania, civil rights, the sexual revolution. I know the lines off by heart now, about the teenagers who “suddenly had money in their pockets”, about the “swaying of the old order”. Then, come the end, I’ll go to bed, and dream.

Once a week, walking back from the office, I stop by Borders, and ask the staff for any relevant new titles. If I’m feeling particularly risqué, I will, after tea, pull on my Biba jacket and floral mini-skirt, flare up my eyelashes, and go to the 60s Jive at the bingo hall down the Old Kent Road. Coming home, amid the vodka-struck barbarians of Peckham, hoots of “Wide Load!” sometimes cut the air. Once, wearing my Marianne Faithfull Girl On A Motorcycle catsuit, a lout in pimpled skin and tracksuit bottoms emerged from the shadows and propositioned me. “I like a girl with a bit of meat on ‘er”, he slurred. Given the relative rarity of such occurrences, I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or offended. Walking past the Goldsmiths University union I find myself spotting girls in the same leather jacket, ankle-boots, kohl eyes. They all have Anita Pallenberg’s hair, and a look of hungry ease I can’t manage. They stand on the pavement swirling their drinks, discussing boys, all twenty years younger than me.

On Saturdays, I take my Vespa (first-run F-reg) to Carnaby Street. These days it’s mostly fancy-soap shops for Guardian types, but a handful of boutiques remain, their frontages redressed in pastel tones. I kill the hours stretching towards evening by going through the same three racks. In the changing room, I was putting off my leaving without, as per usual, buying anything. I flicked around to see a man’s eye peeping in at a curtain-crack. There was something rather dashing about its iris, reminding me of David Hemmings. Creeping out later, I could see him better – he had Freewheelin’-era Dylan’s hair, and an expression stolen from Michael Pitt in The Dreamers.

We sat at an outside café table – something I never do, as it always rains – and I squinted at him through big Twiggy sunglasses, eating my éclair in what I hoped was a carefree way. When he came back to my place (“for a drink” – I felt like Elizabeth Ercy in The Sorcerers), his eyes immediately took in the room. I always felt the mess reflected a ditzy Holly Golightly quality onto me – the kind of girl too much in demand to clean, for whom life is one long game. He looked towards my cupboard, and a momentary shock ran through me that he might find my other DVDs. (Well, a girl in my position needs some assistance in that area of enjoyment.) I interrupted him with the question of what he’d like to drink.

Pause. A Coke?

I felt like I should offer him a tab or something, but had nothing to hand. Even asking that had been hard enough. I sipped my highball across from him on the sofa. I prayed the room might become a time-machine, sucking in the essence of that decade, dissolving the space between us. There would be no effort required: all would fall into place, the very air possessed of luminosity, white heat. So many years of devotion, crowding the place with its spirits, and I, I would be now the initiate. I put on a record. He nodded as The Doors’ ‘Five To One’ came on. A potential future, sealed in vinyl, slipped underneath the needle. He gestured to me to stand up, and held me in his arms. He said, with a laconic look, You know, you have eyes like Patty Hearst.

Pneumatic

People give me a strange look when I tell them I’m mostly silicon. Though I never give any indication of joking, they laugh. When I tell them it’s true, their eyes seem to sink back into their heads, their necks retreat, and they nod, Okay…. When they introduce themselves, people give their most salient fact before proceeding onto more constructive territory. I never get beyond my opening gambit, and hence my conversation now leaves something to be desired.

It was my third husband who encouraged me. One day, as I brought him his tea, he began looking me up and down. I could see him, as I bent to put the tray on the floral table-cloth, making a close and enthusiastic study of my cleavage. All through dinner, he would glance at my lips as I took a sip of water, as if appraising the value of a freshly-caught squid. In one of the many lulls, I asked him, When are we going to that new club? You said you’d take me two weeks ago, and we haven’t gone. You know, he replied, some men don’t like showing off their wives in public. Men prefer women to be, y’know… pneumatic. He shovelled up another forkful of peas and steak, and chewed noisily, as if to say he would speak no more. I was wearing my low-cut polka-dot dress. Looking down at my plate, I could see how it caught the outline of my breasts, a gentle curvature down to my ribcage. I tried to calculate what angle they currently sloped at, what the ideal angle would be, or where, on a scale of 1 to 10, my body was, and should be.

One afternoon, when I came home early from work, I found him fucking Sandra on the iffy-smelling sofa in the front room. Though the hairy back of his neck obscured her face, I recognised the grunts and yelps as belonging to the voice I heard over our fortnightly cocktails. Neither of them noticed me in the doorway, but I could see her breasts generously wobbling as if they were independent of her, the curve of her lips, and his decidedly less-than-clean arse straining with effort. She was, I decided, too good for him, though once the divorce proceedings were underway he no doubt still saw a lot of her.

I spent a few months staying home every evening. The house we had lived in together seemed to grow smaller each hour, the walls, their magnolia floral relief wallpaper colouring and peeling, narrowing until I was forced into my room, wanting the night to be done with. The first time, afterwards, I went to a club, I ended the night keeping a look-out for a taxi while my friend Louise satisfied her new companion in an alcove. The next day I booked my first appointment with the surgeon.

I had my secondary-school reunion a couple of weeks ago. I was stood by the punchbowl, speaking to Matt, who had a crush on me in Year 9, and was apparently now a biochemist. His eyes were hidden behind smeared bottle-thick glasses, patchy two-day stubble and acne scars making him instantly recognisable. As he fell silent for the nth time, I mentioned the implants. Breasts, arse, lips, calves, labia, appendix, several areas of sub-dermal fat. The majority of my paycheque went into a savings account, month after month. A different area each time, sometimes not knowing what I was going to get until I had the menu in front of me, cash to hand. A different surgeon each time, rotating around the city, explaining to them each time, Oh no, these are my own. As I spoke, my tits wobbled over the buffet table. Matt reached for another drink, gulped it down like a cat swallowing a fish. Do you mind if I…?, he said after a pause, and started feeling my arms, working his way up to my cheeks, down to my breasts, as if he were testing a steak. I could see from the way he rolled his eyes as he crouched towards my abdomen that he’d had a few more than I’d thought.

So, what are you doing tonight? Well now, that is a question.

19. David Toop Takes An Afternoon Nap

A 5-minute radio play written to a specific set of sound FX provided by Peter Blegvad. We were given the option of recording it, instead of performing - I did neither, simply because it was simply too rubbish, in comparison to the preceding works. In any case, there wasn't enough time to perform them all...

SOUNDS OF TYPING

DAVID: OK. [groans] God. Why do they send me this shit? Oh, come on, keep it up. Only five more disks to review, and then lunch. Booze. Cat-warmth. Bacon. Mmm. They could at least send me some interesting field recordings, though. Air-conditioning hum, forest clearings, something. Just because I wrote that bloody book, they assume I want to hear their contact-miked farts, or the noises their hard-drives make when they’re asleep. Give me Egyptian Lover any day. Ah, balls to this.

TYPING CEASES

DAVID: I know how the rest of it goes anyway. Let’s see what’s on the wireless.

RADIO STATIC WITH SPOOKY SOUND

DAVID: Hmm, nice. A bit of shape hiding in there somewhere. [Beat] Focusing in on the forms hiding amid amorphousness – picking out the pattern of dust particles in a nebula or whatever Burroughs said. Beats as the manifestation of man’s –

STATIC CUTS OUT

DAVID: – lust for categorisation, maybe… Yeah, that’ll make a chapter by –

CUTS BACK IN

DAVID: – itself, sure. Now, what have we got? Hm. It’s about, as I say – ooh – yes, finding whatever lies out there in here, maybe. And hence, the pleasure of an afternoon drifting the airwaves; the siren lure of signal. Which reminds me, the new Henry Cow boxset, must get. [Beat] Maybe I should head out to the off-licence later. Hmm, the cat needs litter; Albert could do with some air. Ooh, promising. Yes, in this case, it began with the numbers stations, hip-hop broadcasts, jungle pirate radio. The internet, for a while – Napster, streaming audio, Soulseek, the entire audio universe available – but interest soon…

END STATIC & SIGHS; PHONE RINGS

DAVID: Ah, for shit’s sake. Where did I – ? [grunts]

PHONE CEASES RINGING.

DAVID: Hello? [Less than happy] Oh, hi Tony. Yeah, I’m just wrapping up the copy now. Why don’t you email me about this shit? Alright, fine. Bye. [Sighs. Yawns.] Bloody toil. Let’s see what’s we have.

TAP DANCING

RADIO ANNOUNCER: The young Fred Astaire, born in Omaha, Nebraska, 1897, would listen alternately to vaudeville shows on the radio, and the freight trains in the marshalling yard south of their house, marvelling at the sound –

DAVID: [Sleepily] Hmm, interesting…. [Sounds of snoring]

HARP SIGNALLING ENTRANCE TO DREAM. DREAM DRONE

DAVID: Hmm? Oh, Derek, is that you? Was that Will playing? It’s so lovely to see you. And… Hugh? John? Paul?

JOHN STEVENS: Hiya David. God, you’ve let yourself go.

DAVID: What are you all doing here?

DEREK BAILEY: [dry Yorkshire accent] We’re setting up a dream sextet.

PAUL BURWELL: [Yorkshire accent] No limits on instruments. I’ve got the whole shebang – a gamelan orchestra. Bit of a bugger to play, mind.

DAVID: Well… that’s marvellous. Why don’t we get Evan or Eddie, and make it a septet?

SINISTER DRONE

HUGH DAVIES: [Welsh accent] I’m afraid they… can’t play with us. Too lively.

DAVID: You’re one to talk! I never knew anyone livelier than you guys. Well, there was that crack-gang I hung with in NY back in ’82. You remember those days?

DEREK BAILEY: Oh, we remember it all.

JOHN STEVENS: Not so lively these days, Dave. Ears gone, wits going with them. Nothing out there holding the interest, but what they keep behind the bar, and how much they’re planning to pay us. You spend a bloody lifetime trying to get out there, and where does it get you. We’re broken records, dontcha know?

DAVID: [Pause] But… you were all so good with it, we had such good times. [Beat] It… it meant something to me. [Pause] Fucking damnit, I wept for you, you fuckers! And this is what’s fucking left to me?!

JOHN STEVENS: David, would you calm down?! Or am I going to have to administer the Zen slap?

DRONE SLOWLY FADING

DAVID: [starts from sleep] Oh, God! What, where the –

SOUND OF BIRDSONG.

DAVID: [sighs with relief] Jesus… Right, back to work. Has this been on all the time? No, come on, the next disk. Although…

RADIO STATIC, SOON JOINED BY RHYTHMIC CLANGING.

DAVID: Hmm… Einstürzende Neubauten? I always told Blixa they’d make a good ambient listen, as long as he’s on low. See if we can’t get rid of this static…

STATIC CUTS IN AND OUT, WHILST CLANGING AND BIRDSONG CONTINUE

DAVID: Hmm. It was that question – what remains when we remove the input. One hand clapping. And beyond that?

BOINGING NOISE

DAVID: Hugh? [Pause] Hugh? [shouting] Hugh, speak to me! For God’s sake, say something!

BOINGING NOISE ENDS. TWO SECOND SILENCE. RINGTONE

DAVID: Oh, God, I can’t face it. A disk. Anything. Something by Brian.

PIANO

DAVID: Albert. Albert. Albert, my Albert.

CHILD CRYING

DAVID: Sshh, sshh. Come on, calm now. [Beat] We’re still here, aren’t we. Calm, calm.

FADE OUT.

18. Are You Tired of Being Alone?

A story, designed for performance, written for Peter Blegvad's seminar.

After Kenneth Goldsmith and Jarvis Cocker

I had gone into a bar one night, and met him at the counter. He asked me whether I would like a drink, and I replied, Why yes, I would, a Jim Beam double. He duly obliged.

And so I asked him, as you do, Where are you from? What’s your business in town?

And he replied, I make matches. He asked me whether I wanted another drink, and I did, and drank.

That’s an interesting line of work, I said. What kind of matches do you make.

Big ones, small ones, medium, and every intervening degree, he replied. I make fine matches, coarse matches, loving matches, violent matches, even, dare I say it, football matches, Australian rules or otherwise.

Oh, I said, that’s interesting. Are you paid well?

Very well indeed, he replied, and, lighting a cigarette, laid his hand on my leg. And he said, very precisely –

Are you tired of being alone?

And I supposed I was, I supposed we all were, everyone in that bar, or we wouldn’t have been there. I enviously eyed the one couple crowded in a corner, hands all over each other. The sensation of touch had entirely left me – I had no memory of any texture but the outside of cigarettes and dirty bar-glasses, slick with grease. All those others lined along the counter avoided each other’s gazes, looking far-off at some unattainable woman or other. His hand was still on me, groping its way towards my balls.

We went for a walk, and spoke about his profession. He said, The principles of love are incomprehensible to those who believe they have any connection with reality, rationality, ethics or otherwise. It is always and only a question of alchemy, of divination: one finds two suitable beings and bumps them into each other like particles. He said this in a full, operatic voice, somewhat like Billy Mackenzie. It is, in effect, an occult science, he said. One begins with a single movement, a gesture, an observation, a question –

Are you tired of being alone? –

And one carries on from there. These fucking dating shows, where they try and match people based on quantifiables – interests, similar heights, whether one will fuck anything that moves – are absolute Goddamn nonsense. Cilla Black had it almost right – randomise, cut out all knowledge. I get great pleasure from my work, not least because of the need to mop up the (*cough*) overspill. A perk, if you like.

When I met him again a week later, he told me he’d been busy. I kept running into couples fucking in doorways, on car bonnets at midnight, in the corridor outside my flat. The whole city was dripping with perspiration. His business-like appearance had dissolved, his hair splaying like an anemone of sparking wires, his neck reeking of sweat, face streaked with its trails, tie lapping around his neck like a loose dog’s-tongue. He pinned me against the wall – with his enthusiasm – next to a couple necking by a dustbin.

Are you tired of being alone? He whispered it this time, like air escaping from a tire. He isolated each word – Are. You. Tired. Of. Being. Alone?

And I could feel the warmth of his mouth on me, and could sense the sliding spit of the couple and shouted slipping out of me, And what if I am?

He exhorted me with his question, changing the intonation, as if maxing-out the permutations of a mathematical sum. Lighting a cigarette, he slid his hand down my leg. And his voice began to buck and waver and break, as he spoke about what he could do for this city, what energies there were to be released, of the pulses hiding in concrete and the rhythm of buildings and the secret congress of gases and the architecture that held us apart and the terrors of the raging horses in the tall silos smashing themselves in their fury to consumable pieces and –

that was when I left him, among the bodily fluids and the heat. And I was right, you know, and I know, and what would have become of me if I had done otherwise, and what might I have been.
And still I hear sometimes, walking the streets at night, echoing around corners, the question –

Are you tired of being alone?

17. Dregs

Seeing as there has been no new work, I shall attempt to post here a few poems I thought not worth damning.

This Is Hardcore

It started with noise - beat of blood, the grain
of electricity, the pleasure of the riff:
my sole belongings. I gathered arcane
details: the arc of sweat, the gloom of pub
backrooms and dusty jewel-cases, sheer
pushed air. The time I've spent with speakers loud
and louder... think, what living I might have
done instead! But no; with an old
confessor's air, I scratched out the skull-map

of an obsessive. Why this mania
for show-and-tell? What? Shock-taxonomy,
unslaked thirst, lust for discord.
Was it a way of unaccepting all
of circumstance's condemnations; or
is it the lure of the blunt instrument's
connection, dead resentment's solace? This,
indeed, is hardcore. The dialectic
knots; life, that Afanc, whispers and then roars.

On a Bookshelf Containing a Copy of Like A Fiery Elephant

You taught, with slashes, life could be feared. Your
memorial, breezeblock in leaves, began
something else: this. The weevil nests and bores
in pulp. The generation never stops.

One (Mud Rain Snow)

The cold ground mutters to itself, the leaves
crackle with winter's impact. Farther than
this glazed hole slows to land-drift pace. One half-
expects the soil to sprout resurgent hands.
The homes become, without an effort, widows.

Foreign Voices

We spoke, just once, though it escapes me what.
I can't say I'm sorry enough for this:
in memory lives what in life cannot.

Control - in anchored homes, loves lasting not
less than a day - is what I'll always miss.
We spoke. Just once. Now it escapes me what.

Madness has owned me once before; it got
inside, never quite budged. It will hiss:
"in memory lives what in life cannot".

I know it's nothing to boast of: a knot
of scars, zero fucks, (I admit) one kiss;
we spoke, just once, though it escapes me what.

Self-pity's never been attractive, not
while real life stays graspable. Well, I missed.
In memory lives what in life cannot.

Redemption never quite gained form. We got
nothing, then. Blood won't cease its raging hiss.
We spoke; I can't remember about what;
in memory lives what in life cannot.

16. ...in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal

Interview with Brooklyn's Vivian Girls published in Plan B #39, November 2008. Transcript of other Q&As not included in original article below.

There’s a lot to be said for reverb. A veil of mystery, a lacuna in which anything the listener chooses might be written. The cavernous echo of white-hot Sixties pop, the Flying Nun groups, Galaxie 500, My Bloody Valentine – consciously or not, the Vivian Girls follow in this proud heritage. “Our songwriting is pretty straightforward, so shoegazey production is the only tool we have to make our music more of a struggle for the listener”, says singer/guitarist Cassie Ramone. On their early singles, honey-sweet melody and classic girl-group harmonies bleed through the wall of burning-red guitars, like a vengeful spirit. The initial vinyl run of their debut album sold out its edition of 500 in ten days, to be reissued by In The Red, alongside new seven-inches on their own Brooklyn-based Wild World label.

What is it about girl-group and classic pop that affects you?

“We really like the harmonies and what the songs are about. Girl groups sang about dudes in a way that few girl bands do anymore, nowadays it’s all ‘I’m gonna have sex with him’ or ‘Men are scum’. I personally can’t relate to either the sex vixen or the extreme feminist, but girl groups from the Sixties deal with men in a way that makes sense to me. Burt Bacharach is a huge influence on my songwriting, and I listen to oldies radio a lot, which is also a big influence.”

Since I have it on good authority that your songs are about “Ex boyfriends, new boyfriends”, what’s your worst break-up/first meeting anecdote?

“I can tell you what ‘No’ is about. One time I started going out with a guy that I had been good friends with for a little while, and kinda fell in love with him really quickly. Then he broke up with me – a week before my birthday – and later I heard that he went on a date with another girl the night after we broke up. I had a birthday party and he brought her with him. Then before he left he was like ‘Happy birthday Cassie, I love you’, and left with her. So devastating. It took me a while to get over that one.”

The record is extremely short – what is it about that length of songwriting, for you?

“There is nothing worse than listening to a great song and then towards the end it’s just the chorus going on and on forever with nothing else happening. Short songs get straight to the point – it’s harder to get bored of listening to them.”

Punk modernism and mid-century pop nostalgia aren’t incongruous here, they’re two sides of the same coin. In their world, imbued with some of the magic of the Henry Darger Gesamtkunstwerk they take their name from, postmodern exhaustion, breeding such chimeras, is no excuse; fun and wonder are your only options.

***

There's a large amount of 'buzz' (pardon the term) around your first album, the vinyl of which, as I understand it, sold out in 10 days – how do you feel about that kind of reaction? Do you think all the people who bought those records will remain fans of yours?

We hope so! But I think a lot of people who bought the record in its initial pressing were more indifferent - "yeah, I'm record shopping online, might as well" and then realized how much it was going for on eBay and sold it.

Part of the fuss seems to come from the fact that you live in Brooklyn – it's almost becoming a cliché, this business of interesting bands coming from there. What's it like living there? What's your relationship like with the local community of bands and artists?

It is the best place in the world! I would say that, from even before we started Vivian Girls, we were really involved in the music/art community, which has really helped us out by getting us our first bunch of shows and stuff. It's great like that, we all help each other out and respect each others' endeavors and then go get drunk. I couldn't imagine a better place to live right now.

What do your performances tend to be like? Does the fact that the band is (at the moment) composed of women tend to affect your experience of performance?

We just kinda get up there and rock. One thing we want to avoid is being cheesy on stage; a trap which is really easy for an all-girl band to fall into. So you'll never see us putting on special outfits and dancing around or anything. We just wanna have fun.

What are your plans, beyond re-releasing the debut? I understand you have a tour coming up… And is there anything in particular you'd like the band to achieve?

Yes, relentless touring for the next few months. We are also starting up a record label called Wild World and putting out our own 7" - it's gonna be in a package with a t-shirt, 2 postcards, and a button, all art and silkscreening done by ourselves. And we're gonna sell it through mail order. That's what we're really excited about right now.

Also, how do you cope with the differences between live and studio playing? 'Rocking', in the proper sense, is after all difficult with no audience other than a tape machine... Also (also), do you make any attempts to replicate studio effects (reverb, etc.) on-stage?

Yeah, we use Holy Grail reverb pedals at all our shows. When we play live we aim to sound as close to our record as possible, but we're aware that that isn't always doable so we just try to have a good time.

This is probably going to sound really stupid, but - what I meant with the question about women/men and American punk was: obviously, you are women, and punk fans; how do these two things interact? How did punk affect you (and as women)?

I guess, it started for me when I got into listening to bands like Hole and No Doubt in middle school. I thought it was awesome that there were women fronting rock bands, and that first inspired me to pick up a guitar. Obviously bands like Bikini Kill were influential on all three of us too. But overall, I never discriminated. I liked any punk band that I thought was good whether or not it had women in it or not, and I'm sure Katy and Ali would agree.

OK, to fuck with the serious questions: Who had the idea for the name? You're clearly not shambolic enough to be classed as outsider artists!

Frankie, our old drummer, came up with the name. It was the only name we could think of that wasn't totally outrageous and dumb.

How do you negotiate the hazards of there being numerous bands of Vivian Girls (I've counted 2 or 3 besides yrselves)?

It made for some funny show blurbs at first ("Vivian Girls, a dance-y German electro band, play at Cake Shop") but after the first few months it was never an issue.

15. Stereotype

In which we were asked to write the scenario of a stereotype of a person being trapped in a hotel room, and seeing what they get up to. This version is... not quite finished...

It was useless. He had been there, according to his chunky imitation Rolex, at least ten hours. There was enough in the mini-bar to keep him going for another half a day, although whether he wanted to survive on them was another matter (he hankered after a Carlsberg.) He had tried the door and windows, tapped the walls and ceiling for air-ducts or other means of egress, like Jack Bauer in 24. After that, he had spent an hour trying every combination of Fuck, Cunt, Bastard and Arsehole to express his frustration, then fell upon the mini-bar gin. Now he lay on the bed, thinking of what he was absent from: his Merc, Laetitia; his bull terrier, Ronnie, who must have been missing him something awful; his mum, who lived in the front room with the filthy curtains close and the central heating turned to full all the time. Oh, and Trace, of course. He thought it was the done thing in this situation to picture her face, and found himself disconcerted when he couldn’t.

He was surprised to find himself waking up. He checked again; he had been asleep three hours without noticing. He prided himself on being the last out of the club, the final man to stop drinking and head home to bed. He hadn’t had an early night since he was 11, except when satisfying Tracy, after which he would soundly doze. Levering himself off the bed, he kicked the door repeatedly and shouted at it, spit flecking onto his Lacoste polo. After his foot became sore, he sat down again, turned and scrutinised the world outside the window. A road, strangely empty, but for a couple of parked cars. Trees – he didn’t know what kind. Georgian townhouses set back from the pavement. When he was 13 he had broken into a similar abode, snatching a DVD player, a laptop, a bottle of Teachers and a Nokia, all of which went towards his first scraper, a Vauxhall Corsa. He had reformed himself – he now listened to Hed Kandi comps instead of Scarface, and wore a shirt and trousers when phone-selling car insurance – but that spunk remained, or so he thought.

He lay back again on the bed, and considered that he might as well conserve his energy. His Motorola – usually buzzing with calls, left out on the table at lunch to make sure the others knew he was in demand – had disappeared; but surely someone would come for him, if he waited long enough. He just had to hold out.

He sat up, tried to laugh it off, cracked a line – No-one to fuckin’ hold onto yer coat-tails now, eh? – but it sounded strange ringing around the depopulated room. Standing up, pulling on his suit-jacket (Burton, but you wouldn’t know it) and smoothing out the creases, he trotted up and down the room, assuming his typical thrusting hands-in-pocket swagger, eyes fixed front. After a few lengths of the window-wall, he found himself stopping. It was like being told magic charms had no real power. Every tool he had was slipping from his grasp. He sat down on the bed again, had a mouthful of peanuts, and looked around the four white-stippled corners of the ceiling. He wondered when the last time was he had seen them. Whilst fucking that blonde bird, Whats’ername, from Essex, at that conference, she on top. Another on the tally. But these had not been; they had not even entered into his calculations.

14. Science Fiction

In which we were asked to transform the material of an interview with a member of university staff into a science fiction story. Don't ask me why.

It was clear there was a kind of domesticity here: a world whose creatures felt, after however many millennia, somewhat at home with what surrounded them. Cloud like burial shrouds, frozen rivers, somewhere beneath the skin of snow, like a skein of veins, vast piles, beneath, of minerals, here reconstituted, fabricated into everything close at hand: our badly upholstered, chafing seats, the cup in front of me holding cold coffee, the metal walls around us – it was all very familiar to them, even to some of those whose children dashed up and down the aisle, shouting their heads off. Lord alone knows how humans should come to a place like this, or why, when they had left, they would make any kind of homecoming. I squinted out the window, rimmed with ice around the edge – hell, most of the plate – but heated, for convenience, in the centre. Beneath, the undulating crests of snow – mere hillocks in comparison to some of the smaller mountains, and they in turn were mere hillocks to the larger crags – waved onwards, seemingly limitlessly. I had to turn away, as I was warned to, after a few seconds – the sheer expanse of pure, undifferentiated white can make you feel as if falling into a void, pulled out by some awful magnetism. The shipline have had some folk scrabbling at the windows, shrieking to drop through. I looked over the wings – heated, naturally, to some Godforsaken temperature – watching the constant onrush of ice particles blister and burn over the aerofoils, pointillistic designs of sparks popping and vanishing.

We were heading in towards the runway. It was the cold season – if that can be believed – but we knew that the staff were on these things; that, though whipped about by the wind, they had it under control. I pondered idly on how exactly they adapted themselves to their environment. These weren’t just humans with particularly woolly coats; they had been living out here for centuries – no-one, after the loss of their archives, really knew how many – and had acquired bodily accoutrements to suit the place. I had never gotten close enough to see for myself, but I would be forced into doing so pretty soon. Horror stories had reached me, as they are wont to do, about transparent skin-flaps used to shield the eyes from snow-storms, hands grown into the approximate shape of shovels, even extremely thick, downy hair, growing on those parts of the body – the upper throat, the cheeks, around the eyes – where no protection could be afforded. They were hopefully that, just stories. But this turned my mind again to my purpose – scientific, yes, but hardly very important – in coming here. Was I just a freak-show gawker on a planetary scale? How exactly would it matter if I was, given this place’s feeble backwater status? It wasn’t as if it had any dignity to be ruined by my snooping.

I could see, by the GPS on my phone – I didn’t trust the ‘line to be straight on this matter – that we were coming up to the edges of the capital’s airfields. They were located far out on the rim of the vast, low-lying – near-subterranean, in fact – conurbation, an enormous field of metal that differed from the snow only in its colour – gun-metal grey – and the odd jag here and there. Far to the south, literally on the other side of the planet, in what was laughingly referred to as ‘warmer climes’, there were corrugated-iron shanty-towns that tended to get blown away every winter, due to the poverty of their construction, with plenty more jagged edges for the wind to catch. Nothing of that here. My eyes cast about for a sign of the runways’ shimmering grey, the ice constantly being burnt and blown off of it. There was nothing. The plane was banking, but I could discern nothing that it might be heading towards, only more snow. There was a crackle on the tannoy, the sound of the pilot’s wearying voice: Ladies and gentlemen, we are coming towards Ixtlan airport now. Due to inclement weather conditions, our arrival will be subject to a short delay. Please seat yourselves, buckle your harnesses.

I was baffled. I searched the landscape below me, twisting, as the plane banked in slowly-descending circles. After a minute of fraught spying, I spotted a long, straight, shallow depression in the snow, looking, from this height, a mere dog-sled track. Good Lord. How the hell had this happened: the runway hidden so thoroughly in snow? I remembered a scene, borderline-farcical, in an Earth moving-image I had seen in the archives years ago: an old-fashioned ‘plane kept up in the air, seemingly perpetually, by ne’er-do-wells on the ground. We would have to wait until the snow had been cleared, the surface blasted clean. I turned for my coffee, panned my eyes to the others. No-one showed even a trace of panic. Calm, waiting for us to land on a land at that moment trapped under they did not know what depths of snow – 6 feet, 10, 12. We would be sat, I reflected, for some time.