How it's done II: The Revenge
I came across Taaz.com this Saturday. It's a rather wonderful Flash application which allows you to perform virtual makeovers on celeb faces or your own, fellow trannies, via upload. There's loads of these types of things around, but this is by far the best I've come across. And not just in terms of results, ease of use, and features either. The simulated costmetics are based on real world products and shades, so once you've put your look together you can actually go and purchase the slap you used on your mannequin version. Neat. I'd actually have to get a loan to buy all the makeup used above though. Sigh.
Sequel
This is really a rather poor sequel to my, er, "famous" make-up tips article, "How it's Done", the 2005 September blockbuster from the previous version of this site. Like a lot of summer sequels, this one is glossier, has a higher budget and uses a lot of unnecessary CGI to liven up a substanceless, empty mess of an idea. Brilliant!
The original sequence is below, including the final shot which was made-over above. You can click each individual image to go and read the original instructions, which I've copied into the photo descriptions in flickr and describe how to get that patented Miss K "smoky eyes" look...
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Transformer, part 5
I woke up and, as usual, glanced to my right to check the time on my DVD player. But it was covered by some discarded item of clothing so I couldn't read it. Outside, the street was quiet, only the noises of a few cars and the occasional footstep. Birds were singing. It must have been quite early, though the sunshine looked bright already. Weekend, of course, so always a bit quieter.
Some rays spilled through the gaps at the top of my curtain rails, casting flickering shadows of the trees outside onto my white ceiling. I just lay there looking up at the play of light and dark. I felt no compulsion to move. No urgency to pee or eat. I just lay there quietly, looking at the patterns moving gently on the white plaster, feeling peace and restedness suffusing my body.
More and more, my history of disturbed sleep, the paralysis and visits and terrors that I'd suffered since I was a child seemed, themselves, to have become like fading dreams, dissolving in the brightening sunlight of a summer Saturday morning. Magically, my recurrent sleep problems had disappeared over the long summer. For a while it had seemed like a precariously grasped peace - the gap between bouts of a chronic attack of hiccups. But more and more, I was sure that something had changed. I'd somehow entered a new phase of my life over the summer holidays.
I hardly even dreamt any more.
I stretched, luxuriating in the sensation of my muscles and bones meshing and sliding under my skin. I scratched an itch under my right nipple then let my arm fall to my side, palm up and fingers slightly curled. I lay breathing shallowly, losing myself in the shadowplay above, making out forms and shapes, conflicts and struggles in the rippling shapes on my ceiling, like a hidden story being played out just beyond the boundaries of this world, only grasped in fleeting shadows, out of the corners of your eyes, or in the depths of sleep.
Gently, I drifted off and back into that place, which I could now visit and return from without harm.
I woke an hour or so later and rose. I felt utterly refreshed. A light breeze was blowing through the kitchen of my flat. My housemates Lorna and James seemed to have gone out already so I was alone as I padded semi-naked through the empty flat, wiping surfaces, straightening piles of magazines, eating crumbly toast with damson preserve and drinking lotus green tea. My mobile rang once: Mocha, no doubt wanting to know about how we were getting to the club tonight. I let it go to voicemail. Later for all that. James' tacky pink mosque-shaped clock on the mantelpiece read 9:48. He'd bought it on Brick Lane last year just after we'd moved in for the new term at college.
I watched a blackbird perched in a tree outside the kitchen window. He seemed to be looking back at me with his beady eyes. Soon it became a question of who would blink first. I sipped my citrus scented tea, not wanting to be the first to weaken. We stared into each others' eyes for what must have been a minute. Then he broke off. I felt an absurd feeling of triumph. He turned on his branch, lifted his tail and let out a small poo that dropped quickly out of sight, glanced back at me, then flew off, quicker than I could see.
Well.
That told me.
I finished my tea, took the mug and my plate to the sink and went to have a shower.
As I patted my long, bleached blonde hair dry, I looked at myself in the large mirror in the bathroom, critically analysing the figure looking palely back at me through the steam and condensation.
Skinny, tall, undoubtedly boyish, made doubly (and paradoxically) so by the hairlessness that I maintained carefully, shaving on average every other day, all over, even down there. It's a full time job, this. But why? What difference was I making to anything?
Would the world care that here was another tranny working hard to evoke the lost girl, my shadow twin? Born together in the darkness, one (me), expressed outside, the other, her (also me), hidden inside and pushing gently outwards to fill the cavities that my body didn't manage to inhabit on its own.
I raised my skinny arms, examining my hands critically in the mirror. You could imagine these were a girl's forearms, certainly. There was no masculine heft to the musculature. The wrists slender and bony, like those of my cousin Akiko whose brown, slim upper arms I remember feeling a pang of jealousy for when visiting home one long ago Japanese summer. She'd used to cycle over from her house to play. She was a tomboy, always covered in scuffs and mud, more boisterous than me; slightly older too and starting to show signs of puberty.
I was doubly trapped even then, between girl need and boy reality, between West and East, uncomfortable with the Japanese language I'd only learnt sketchily before moving to England, uncomfortable in my skin and body which was slowly and surely developing away from the girlish ideal held close to the other body inside my head. I found Akiko's games rough and I cringed when she laughed at my clumsy Japanese, but I idolised her. She looked like me. A girl me, close enough to see how I might be if I found the girl inside. Akiko was dead now. She'd developed a severe psychotic mental illness in her early twenties and hung herself in the mental hospital to which she'd been committed.
I lowered my slender arms with the painted nails (Rocker by MAC). Yes, they'd do. But what about the rest? Well, I guess the face was fine. We Oriental types do seem to have a bit of a genetic advantage when it comes to trannying. Looked at from most angles, my face and head, though on the large side, could easily pass for either gender. Brush a little rose on my high cheekbones, dab a shade of metal and paint some lines of definition on my almond eyes under my thinly arched brows and wipe an artful moistness onto my rather plump lips, angle the chin just so, throw back the shoulders, and ah, there she was again. Hello you. The lost girl.
But look down now and you'd see the fakeness of the illusion. Oh, the legs were fine. A little too bony, and knobbly on the knee maybe, but slender and long and lustrous under a short skirt with a little sweet smelling baby lotion rubbed in to make them glow. But the skinny, long torso of a young man was what spoiled things. The too-long ribcage that contained the small heart of the girl-me that I had slowly killed as I'd grown into manhood, the incriminating flatness of my chest, the small, hairless cock which I could hide and tuck and eliminate, like a Stalinist photo-retouching purge on my anatomy. But the incriminating negatives were always filed away between my thighs and ready to be released.
I wondered what it would be like to have the light heft of budding flesh pulling on my chest. I tucked my balls and cock away and squinted and posed, just imagining seeing the change happen in the mirror I faced; imagining I'd see my body shrink and grow and bud and swell like the oceans shaped by the moon's tidal pull. Mutable. In flux. Inchoate. Fearful but resolute.
It was almost too late to change.
No.
It was never too late.
The BBC News channel was full of the usual humdrum quarter hour cycle of modern life (is rubbish). Credit crunch, celebrity big-hair drunkenness, fatalities home and abroad, comings and goings in the football transfer market, fuel panic, the obligatory weekend animal story.
I was sitting half dressed and smoking, waiting for my friend Amy to call - we were supposed to be meeting up for brunch. I couldn't decide whether to be a boy or a girl and so I was hedging my bets in my skinny jeans which worked both ways. A curious story began to unfold as I watched disinterestedly. The blonde news anchorwoman, all concerned eyes and serious mouth, overlaid with the headline "MYSTERY DEATH IN WILTSHIRE". We now hand over to our reporter on the scene.
Cue professionally windswept looking man in a light grey jacket and blue shirt who was standing in a field somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Behind him a bustle of activity, striped tape demarking crime scenes and police lines, white suited figures and fingertip searches, the visual fetishes of the media's idea of violent death. He was explaining how a farmer had discovered a dead body in a new corn circle that had appeared the night before in the middle of one of his fields. A young Asian man. No sign of a struggle, no apparent cause of death. To all intents and purposes, it seemed he'd laid down in the middle of the field early that morning and just died of natural causes.
The weirdest thing, explained the reporter, was that it looked like the corn circle had formed around the dead body, somehow. Apparently there was something in the way the plants around him had been crushed that showed that the elaborate pattern could only have formed after the body had found its final resting place.
The irate farmer being interviewed didn't care about the death of a dark-skinned man on his land of course. His interview was full of glowering resentment against the supposed pranksters who'd finally arrived on his property after years of despoiling other farmers' crops with their impossible, intricate geometric earthworks.
My phone bleeped and I broke away. It was a text from Amy about where and when to meet. I got up and continued to dress, leaving the rolling news to roll ever onwards in the background.
"People can't take their eyes off your nails," Amy said, forking a mouthful of huevos rancheros into her mouth, "can they?"
We were sitting at the tables outside a cafe in Highgate Village. Amy had come up from her new flat in Bethnal Green and we were to go for a walk in Kenwood afterwards.
i laughed, fluttering my carmine claws round in mock menace. "I guess they expect a boy to have black nails if they're painted at all," she observed.
It was true. Waitresses, passers by, young diners on nearby tables; people seemed mesmerised and confused by my nails in particular. Not by my faint eye makeup, or the eyebrows. It was the nails that sent the duplicate signals, got the mystified looks. I'd decided to go "boy" but hadn't been arsed to remove the nail polish. Besides, I enjoyed the visual terrorism, which was never that dangerous to indulge in during daytime.
I listened as Amy burbled on in her pretty South Welsh lilt about all and sundry. I was a good listener, not too voluble myself and I was attracted to those who could dominate a conversation with half a person like me. Mocha too. She was a talker. Fuck yes.
I wondered one day if I'd find someone with whom to share conversations like that. You know, someone permanent. A nice boy who'd love someone like me.
I'd never been that successful in matters of love.
I guess I attracted people with fevered desires, rather than people who'd desire me for who I was.
It was worst at the club of course, the admirers who came to leer and paw. We had a weird symbiosis with them, girls like us. Not quite dependent, not quite contemptuous. Members of different species who'd somehow become intertwined in the food chain without realising it. The bottom feeders and the open swimmers, joined by a subtle web of want. Even the cab drivers who took us there and back. You could tell that some of them were in it for that - a quick blow job for the fare. We were often hard up, or after a thrill, or, after all, just wanted some human company, however brief.
I remembered that one mini cab driver, from a few months ago. He'd told me his name as I'd left his car, leaning out with a lopsided smile. I couldn't remember now what it had been, but I remembered that smile, and his nice hair. Part of me wished I'd done something with him, but I guess that there's so much danger there. It's just not worth the thrill. Is it?
But what if he'd been the 'one', that cute, tall, Asian boy? Too late now. I'd seen him a couple of times after that but then he'd stopped coming to get fares at the club, with his long hair and his big eyes. So I guess he wasn't the one. Pfft. A mini cab driver. Thank god. Can you imagine?
"Oh my god did you see this?" interjected Amy, oblivious to my reverie, pointing out a story in the paper in front of her. I took another sip of coffee and munched on my blueberry pancake, craning my neck to make out the story in The Guardian that she was reading. "It's sooo spooky, like."
"Oh yes," I said. "I was watching a report about that on the news when you texted me, actually."
"Says here that his car was found three fields away from where his body was, upside down, it was like it had crashed through a hedge. Except that the field was miles away from any road! It's gotta be a prank. But he's dead!" She shivered. "That's so sick!"
I nodded. "It does sound like a bad joke somehow." I looked up suddenly as a screaming child ran randomly by us, heading down Highgate Hill, chased by an irate looking adult. Amy and I smiled at each other.
She read on, in a dramatic voice: "More mysterious still are the indications that someone else had been severely injured in the apparent crash of the abandoned car. Large quantities of reportedly human blood were found on the passenger side and a seat belt seems to have been hastily cut on that side as if to release an injured passenger. However no traces of injury or struggle have otherwise been found and there is no sign of a body. There have been no admissions to local hospitals or mortuaries that seem consistent with the gruesome discoveries, and of course, the body of the unidentified Asian man in the field itself is completely injury free. Police are urging anyone who might have further information to contact the incident room at Devizes. The Asian man's body was removed earlier and a post mortem is expected later today."
Amy's favourite blood dot earrings glinted in the sunlight as she leaned over, with a mischievous smile on her pixy face, "do you think it's aliens?" She got a cigarette out and started rummaging around in her bag.
"I'm sure it's got absolutely nothing to do with immigration," I joked, watching her light her fag with a lurid pink matchbook from the club. "Hey, where did you get that?" I asked suddenly. "You've never been down to the club have you?"
She shook her head, smiling up as our rather dishy waiter cleared our plates and left the bill. "You must have left it at my flat," she explained. "I found it by the side of the sofa."
She looked at the logo on the front of the matchbook, which showed a pair of open, fishnet clad legs, with the club's name printed vertically in-between. "Well classy, it looks like," she said, giggling, "your workplace."
I laughed. "Only the highest class establishments for me," I said, putting a ten pound note down on top of hers.
We had a wonderful walk in Kenwood's grounds and on the Heath. It was a precariously beautiful autumn day. The kind that masquerades as summer, still, with the hint of a fresher breeze, dry, on the cusp of too hot. Amy said it was the sort of day that was made for walking in the country. Even this deep into September, there were people swimming in the ponds.
Back home, I had a whole afternoon and evening to kill before I had to worry about Mocha picking me up in the cab for work. I was freshly shaved everywhere so all I'd have to do was get made up and dressed.
I sat down on the sofa and put the telly on. Within five minutes I'd drifted off to sleep.
I'm not sure if I dreamt. If I did, I didn't remember it.
Much, much later, I was alone in the back of a minicab on the way home from the club, making our way up the deserted orange-lit hinterland of the Holloway Road, like I did almost every Sunday morning.
I'd just poured Mocha back into her flat. I'd been quiet all night. Ever since getting up this morning I'd felt a sense of calm very different from the agitation I'd been used to all my life, and which worked against me in the high energy environment of the club. Mocha had tutted as I'd sat silently at the bar, smiling faintly, after we'd arrived, sipping my Margarita. "What's the matter with you LADY?" she'd huffed, striding off towards the dancefloor towards a group of admirers watching, tongues-out, chins on the floor.
She'd turned and looked back at me, as if beckoning, but I hadn't joined her. She didn't talk to me all night after that. But I still took her home. She was my friend.
Now I sat quietly in the back seat of the minicab, looking out at the quiet, dark street as it went past.
The driver, a middle aged black man with an African accent I couldn't identify, watched me in the mirror. I smiled and he looked away.
Then my eye was caught by an ornament hanging down on a piece of string from his rearview mirror. It was the strangest thing. I could barely make it out, let alone work out what it was meant to be.
Attached to the string was a fuzzy pom-pom, pale blue, the sort you learn to make when you're little using two discs of card and lots of wool. Hanging down from one side of the pompom was a square of rough looking fabric, like hessian, from beneath which projected what looked like a bunch of black pipe cleaners. It seemed so chaotic a thing that I couldn't believe someone has made it or put it there intentionally. And yet somewhere within myself, I had the strangest feeling that it was something vitally important. I couldn't take my eyes off it.
After a while the driver noticed me looking. I looked into his eyes again. "What is it? Do you mind me asking?" indicating the strange thing under the rearview. "A spider?"
He smiled at that. "Ah, my grand-daughter make it. In school." He poked it with his finger and it swung gently under the mirror. "I have no idea what it is, in truth," he went on, "but my wife say I should keep it in here." He chuckled, "for luck."
I was filled with foreboding, watching the thing swing in the semi-dark.
"That thing's not lucky." I said, shivering though it wasn't cold at all. "Not for me, anyway."
I became slowly aware that someone was sitting on the end of my bed. The glowing turquoise digits on my DVD player read 04:21.
I struggled to keep my eyes open, grasped by a huge weight of lethargy. For a while I couldn't focus. There seemed to be a slight mist down there by my feet, concealing a shadowy figure.
"You look beautiful, I just wanted you to know that," said a soft voice that emanated form the dark figure's head.
"You don't know me any more," the voice continued, filled with sadness. "No..." it said, as though correcting itself. "You never did... know me, did you?" The voice was so soft that it was almost a whisper. I struggled to take it in.
The figure raised a faint blur of darkness in front of itself. It's arm. No, his arm. From the fingers hung the ornament from the taxi. The pom-pom head emanated a weak blue glow and its pipe cleaner legs waggled feebly in the gloom under its canvas body. I sensed that, whatever it was, it was dying. It had lived long, seen so much in its time, but these were its final moments.
The shadowy man continued. "You defeated them... Stopped them coming through you into the... the world of men... I wanted you to know that-" He paused, as though it was a tremendous effort to get the faint words out. "You won't remember. But I just wanted you to know, my love, before I'm gone for good... Back to their world..." His voice was becoming so faint that I could no longer hear it, except like an itch in some part of my brain. I realised then that tears were streaming down my face.
I wanted to say something to this strange man on my bed. I tried to move my mouth and the words eventually came, just a vague croak, but just about intelligible. I had to tell him, it was vital that he knew, for some reason, that I'd made the most important decision I'd ever make, just today:
"I.. I.. decided... I'm going to become a woman..." I said slowly and hesitantly, "I decided... today.. to stop... messing about... to become.. who... I really am..." I tailed off, exhausted by the effort of expressing this idea to my visitor, crying silently.
The figure at the end of my bed whispered in my head as I drifted gently back into a deeper slumber. He leaned forward but I was almost oblivious as he kissed me softly on my mouth. "I know, love. I know," he whispered as he departed, voice fading like a drift of snow melting into the spring, "and... you'll be... magnificent..."
But I was already asleep, stepping silently into my future, which would start tomorrow and lead into all the other tomorrows that would follow, and follow, as tomorrows do.
THE END
Notes:
The novella, 'Transformer' is part of the Transformer series, a loose cycle of semi-autobiographical, semi-connected short stories.
'Transformer' is now complete. Enjoy.
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Fashion: Hypergeekette II
Notes:
Hair by Isis Lumiere at SiSi; make-up by Santana Lumiere for Nevermore Studios; eyewear by Barnesworth Anubis; Leather punk belt; handbag and lingerie by *PREEN*; Corsage by Kimmera Madison; Earring by FlipperPA Peregrine; Kilt miniskirt by Emma Thorn; Tartan boots by Jinny Fonzarelli; Choker by Pahoa Jade; Goth cuff by "Cyan Linden"; "Iggy" top by Kei Mars at Bunker Boutique; snotty attitude: model's own
Originally created 30 June 2006 on draGnet 4.0.
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The Lost Girl
I was woken up in the wee hours by a group of young women walking home after a night out. They were talking animatedly - not too drunk, but drunk enough to not care about volume in a residential area of town at the hour of 4am. They sounded happy - whatever they'd done together had been good, I think and there was plenty of laughter.
I lay awake listening to them outside my window as their bright chatter receded into the night's renewed silence and was gripped by a sense of desperation, loss and regret for the young woman I never was.
I do wonder sometimes what my life might have been like had I been born female. Sometimes I have a desperate yearning to be a woman which I find almost overpowering and I'm in one of those moments now where my life as a genetically male individual seems desolate and full of regret.
Regret's an emotion I hardly ever feel as I'm an in the moment kind of person, and it's only really in phases of gender anxiety like the one I was plunged into this night by the happy chat outside my window that I really feel it.
Of course, the "what if I'd been born female?" question is an inponderable one. It's quite literally in the category of the fantastic.
But "what if I'd actually transitioned when I was young?" is one that's closer to reality and it's one that tortures me sometimes. Is my later life since I backed away from that decision - my band, my photos, this whole "Miss K" persona, somehow a shrine to the lost girl who died when I made that decision?
The answer is "of course not". That's the maudlin imaginings of someone who's been woken up by chatter in the night. And let's not forget regret in this case can go both ways with devastating consequences.
Probably this is just some kind of mid-life crisis.
Fuck, that is depressing.
Notes:
Originally written 14 October 2006 on draGnet 4.0.
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Transformer, part 4
"Oh thank goodness. I thought you were following me!" earring girl said with a sigh of relief, in a broad South Wales accent. Then she frowned at me through the crack afforded by the chain that was holding J's door half open. "Wait a minute. Maybe you are following me. Who are you anyway?"
"Never mind that," I said, "who are you? And what are you doing in my boyfriend's flat?"
"That's what I been trying to tell you. He doesn't live here anymore. This flat became available a couple of days ago. I been on the list ages, see? I came down and saw it yesterday and took it straight away. Well, you know how hard it is to find a good cheap one bedroom flat-"
"Please," I interrupted quietly, insistently, "let me in. I just need to see." She looked for a moment into my red rimmed eyes, then looked down, nodding. She pushed the door to and I heard the chain rattling as she unfastened it. The door swung open and she stepped aside to allow me through.
J had been a bit of a hoarder. The flat had been cluttered, bordering on the messy; piles of books, magazines, newspaper supplements, comic books, DVDs, CDs and LPs, clothes and shoes scattered about and of course, stacks of boxes of the ubiquitous mosque clocks which he sold from his website. I once complained that sleeping with him was an occupational hazard, prone as we were to being crushed under the piles of media and stock looming over us that might become dislodged by our urgent fucking. He'd laughed his small laugh then and said he'd sign any release or waiver that I'd put in front of him.
I was shocked at how empty the flat felt now in comparison. All the junk that marked J's existence had been spirited away, leaving only the drab yellow and green curtains, the three-seater sofa with the frayed cushions and the collapsed springs on one side, a dying spider plant that no one clearly had felt solicitous enough to remove or revive. The shelves, once groaning with information and stuff, were bare.
I stood in the middle of the empty room and started to cry.
"Here you are," said earring girl, whose name was Amy, handing me a polystyrene cup of black coffee with a gentle hand on my shoulder.
I nodded my thanks and took a sip through the hole in the lid. I was sat at the good end of J's sofa in the empty room. Amy had kindly gone out to the cafe opposite and got me a coffee when I'd broken down. She leant on the window sill and quietly watched me drink, her face in shadow. She was looking me up and down. I knew that look. Trying to work out what exactly I was. She still had her coat on.
After while, she gently said, "so he never told you anything about moving on?"
I shook my head, taking another sip.
She tutted. "I'm so sorry. According to the Trust who manage this property, he paid up the balance of two months' rent last week and had people in to clean up and move stuff out the day before yesterday. It was all very sudden apparently."
I sat quietly, not knowing what to say. I put the coffee down on the bare boards and looked at my hands. Outside, two police cars sped past, sirens blaring, casting a rippling blue light into the bare room where we sat quietly.
I took a breath and got up, picking up my coffee and shouldering my bag. "Thank you, and sorry for disturbing you like this so early." She smiled wanly and shrugged, as if to say it's OK.
I walked to the door with a briskness I didn't feel inside and turned. "Oh. I don't suppose he left a forwarding address or anything?"
She shook her head. "The people at the Peabody Trust might be able to help you though. Do you want me to get the number for you? They're ever so helpful." I nodded my thanks and she went into the kitchen. I heard her rummaging in her bag.
Another police car approached, siren wailing, and stopped momentarily outside, perhaps obstructed by traffic. Shimmering blue light once again suffused the room. I closed my eyes and yawned. I was so tired that I felt I could lie down and sleep forever, right here in J's... no... in Amy's front room.
The blue light flicked across my closed eyelids as the siren momentarily cut out then restarted.
Suddenly something registered with me. I opened my eyes, straining to catch sight again of something I'd glimpsed in the rippling blue before the great weariness had closed my eyes. The light faded as the police car sped away but I'd already spied the small, bright spot of colour.
I walked quickly to the crack in the wall by the badly sprung end of the sofa and scrabbled to reach the small, bright pink object nestled inside.
It was a folded up piece of card. The lurid pink cover of a matchbook from the club where Mocha and I worked, and where J and I had first met. I unfolded it with shaking hands.
On the reverse of the blue on pink print of a pair of fishnet clad legs that was the club's logo was a sequence of numbers scrawled in scratchy blue ballpoint, followed by a single letter:
150908-2359 J.
The spidery writing was unmistakably his.
And the message was, to me at least, unmistakable too: One minute before midnight, tonight, the 15th of September. J.
My heart was thudding with excitement and pent up joy. I had to go. Try and rest and get myself ready and beautiful for him.
Amy emerged from the kitchenette shaking her head. "I'm really sorry, I thought I had the Peabody Trust card with me. You'll be able to find the details on the web tho-"
I was already making for the door. "Never mind," I said quickly, "and thanks for your help." I gave the surprised Amy an abrupt hug and left the flat, hurrying out into the bright and sunny morning that suddenly seemed a whole lot brighter and sunnier than it had been ten minutes earlier.
Big knickers are the key.
I have several pairs from M&S with a reinforced girdly panel at the front that are excellent at both holding your tummy in check and making sure that your willy and balls stay tucked away for that all important "flat front bottom" effect. Honestly, a 500 pound mountain gorilla couldn't break through these superpants. Unless I let him...
I squeezed myself into a pair of powdery blue high-waisted skinny stretch jeans and checked my front in the mirror. Not a bulge in sight. The final touch was a pair of electric blue kitten heeled pumps. With my side flipped blonde hair and off the shoulder batwingy top, I was 80s electro trash incarnate.
It all starts with the big knickers though. Without them everything else would fall apart. And that just wouldn't do. Not on a night like this. Everything was precariously poised as it was.
I checked myself in the mirror, made sure I had all I needed in my turquoise bag and left the flat. In the warm evening outside, Mocha was waiting for me in a minicab that would take us to the club where, later on my most fervent hope, the one I'd been guarding jealously against the odds these last five weeks, would surely some to pass.
The club was heavy with people, sweat and desire, and by 11pm I was getting thoroughly sick of the constant groping and leering but I put a brave face on things and let the action wash over me.
I nursed the drinks that were bought for me and watched Mocha, dressed like my photographic, pornographic negative, deteriorate in her all too predictable fashion. Mel wandered by occasionally, tutting and rolling her eyes as she took in Mocha's condition. I popped upstairs a couple of times to have a smoke and a flirt with big Pierre, the jovial Senegalese security man. Meanwhile the music pounded on and I was dragged now and then by faceless suitors of all gender configurations to grind and gyrate on the dancefloor.
But of course my mind was elsewhere, away from the pulse of lights and the thudding of the beat. Every now and then, I retrieved the precious matchbook cover from my purse and looked at the scrawl on the reverse. It had to be a message from him, somehow; perhaps left at the flat while the removers were in. I was dying to know what had been going on. I wondered why I wasn't angry at him, but really the possibility of seeing him again filled me with such relief and happiness that angry thoughts didn't even begin to contemplate crossing my mind. I guess there would be time for that later. After all the fucking and talking and everything...
Of course it was possible I'd completely misread that clue on the matchbook cover, but if J didn't show up tonight, there was always the Peabody Trust, not to mention the police to contact on Monday. After all, someone had made arrangements to have his stuff moved out. That was a lead, surely.
But first things first... I glanced anxiously at my phone. 11.35pm. Almost time. I brushed off the pawing attentions of an admirer with a flash of a smile and swayed to the ladies' to tidy myself up.
Three hours later, I think I'd finally given up hope. I no longer looked hopefully towards the stairs to the street every time the shadow of a figure appeared at the doorway. I no longer bothered to sneak upstairs for a cigarette to scan the road anxiously for his approaching car, or the familiar long-haired figure sauntering up the road from Aldgate. No more. I was sitting at the bar finishing a dark rum and coke as the dregs of the night were kicking out. Usually they'd have a bit of a lock-in after all the punters had left and sometimes Mocha and I would stay for a few whiskys, but I really didn't feel like it. I'd finish this drink and make a move. Mocha was slumped on the bar next to me, her elegant arms cradling her head in a puddle of something alcoholic.
Unsteadily, I rose, tipping back my head to drain my drink, crunching ice in my mouth. So that was that then. Mocha stirred, glancing up at me through slitted eyes. Whether in sympathy or through some other fuddled impulse, she made a cartoon sorry face at me, lips downturned, and patted me on the arm with her booze-damp hand before slumping back onto the bar. She started snoring, gently.
I shook my head in wonder at the imperviousness of the species known as trannyus alcoholicus and wondered what it would be like to truly be able to lose myself like that. Mocha seemed to have a decidedly good time whatever she was doing. Me, I never seemed to be able to abandon myself like her; doubts, thoughts and ugly self-consciousness always got in the way. I looked down at her beautiful insensible face on the counter top. A small bubble of dribble was pooling at the corner of her mouth but somehow she still looked fabulous. I loved and admired Mocha still, I realised, despite her many flaws, her unstable temper, her boozing, her unpredictability. No, actually because of those flaws. Because despite her foibles, she was fiercely loyal, a true friend who'd stand by me till the end. It was like finding a diamond in the sewer. She was special. I slipped to the cloakroom and fetched her fake fur jacket and draped it over her slim shoulders, kissing her gently on the forehead. She muttered and stirred in her doze. I'd go to the ladies to freshen up then come back to take her home.
I emerged from the cubicle and looked at myself in the mirror as I washed my hands. In the flickering fluorescent lights that they never seemed to bother to replace, I looked quite ghastly. My jeans had slipped down off my hips and everything looked a little bit messy down there. No need to let standards slip. I made sure no punter was about to barge in and unzipped the jeans and rearranged my willy, tucking my balls back up inside me and pulling my big, tight knickers up to smooth everything out. Rezipping the jeans, I had another look.
Much better. I quickly began touching up my makeup, repairing my sweaty face with practised skill.
Outside, the music seemed to have stopped, and thankfully, the fluorescent light seemed to have recovered, no longer flickering spastically.
In fact, everything seemed to have stopped...
The club was silent. The extractor fan in the ladies where I was touching up my face no longer whined its whine. Even the distant rumble of traffic, the noises of the city slipping into the deepest cycle of its slumber as the clocks approached 3am, had dwindled to nothing. I was surrounded by an utter, subterranean hush.
I began to feel a sensation in my stomach that I remembered from the attacks of sleep paralysis I'd suffered of late. I screwed the top back onto my lipgloss and put it carefully away. In front of my incredulous eyes, I could see a small fly, suspended in mid air. Almost imperceptibly, the fluorescents above me and the pearlescent tungsten globes around the washroom mirrors began to dim. It wasn't like they were being somehow dimmed electrically. It was like a series of increasingly opaque filters were being slid slowly into position over my mental viewport into the world of people. The light in the washroom changed state, becoming thick, green and viscous like oil. A heavy dead weight began to overtake my limbs as the familiar dread began to press in on my head.
Something thumped softly in one of the cubicles behind me, and the soft noise was accompanied by the emission of four rapid, soundless flashes of blue light from behind the closed door of a cubicle like a row of old-fashioned flashbulbs going off. My muscles had died. All I could do was stand there and look into the mirror. The thumping sounded again and the blue light flashed repeatedly again, this time staying illuminated, a shimmering blue ripple that I remembered so well, The blue light began to pierce the wooden door behind me, spilling out across the ceiling and floor like a gravity-defying pool of mercury, inching towards me.
I was still mired in the green murk but the blue shimmer began to push through the oily green darkness. I remember thinking, this is how it sees. As I watched, the cubicle door behind me began to warp and flutter like the surface of a still pond under a light breeze as something started to push its way through, transforming the brittle wood into a substance akin to toffee as it did so.
The warped wooden surface began to resolve into a humanoid shape. A tallish, skinny male frame, naked, with big eyes, crooked nose and long hair. I couldn't believe my eyes. J was pushing himself through the toilet door towards me, in a halo of blueish, rippling light that seemed to frame him from behind. His arms were outstretched and his mouth open in a silent shout.
With a judder, he managed to push completely through and the blue light gathered around him, forming fine tendrils. Something was trying to follow him through the door. J was shouting noiselessly at me, while holding back the bulk of the creature behind him, back braced against the increasingly liquid doorway. He fixed me with a look from his eyes and inclined his head upwards urgently. Get upstairs, he seemed to be saying.
He concentrated again and began to push back through the door. The glow began to fade as J began to press the entity back where it was coming from. He started to disappear back through the door. Once again he made desperate eye contact. GET! UPSTAIRS!!!
With a wobble like a piece of sheet metal being shaken, the door reformed fully. J was gone. the blue light slowly faded and I began to be able to move through the green gloom that still surrounded me. My first impulse was to go to the cubicle, to try and retrieve J but then I remembered the pleading look in his eye and I turned on my heel and left the ladies' room.
Outside, an eerie hush still reigned. Figures were frozen where they stood. The bar staff cashing up, notes crisp and still in their immobile hands. Mel was caught in the act of sweeping up. Pierre's big frame was frozen half way down the stairs, his braided locks suspended in mid bounce, making towards a couple of guests in the corner who were obviously outstaying their welcome. Mocha was the only one who looked the same, slumped serenely at the bar.
I sidled quietly past the frozen tableau of the dregs of the night and made for the stairs, scrabbling for a cigarette.
Outside, the air was dead and still. The silence was utter. The same, eerie green fog seemed to be settling low on the streets of London. Cars were stopped in mid turn, a few stragglers frozen making their way to night bus stops. The orange streetlamps struggled to be seen through the murk. Nothing was moving. Time had stopped. Not a breath of air on my skin, not a flicker from the fluorescent lights, the neon, the streetlights, no honking of car horns or the subterranean rumble of tube trains returning beneath us to depot, no birdsong. None of the quiet signs of a living world.
Being an art student who pays attention in lectures, I had the sensation of having fallen into a photograph by Gregory Crewdson.
It's like this: it felt like my world was being eclipsed or perhaps, overlaid by another world, visually identical to ours but devoid of the joys and the pains of existence. Not dead, neither alive.
How dull would that be? I had to stop it. But how? I lit a cigarette with a shaky hand. At least my lighter afforded some welcome light and animation to my local environment. I waved the lighter around, trying to banish the green shadow that enveloped me, but it just closed in again when I turned it off.
I was cold. The green murk was cold. I ignited my lighter again and gathered some flyers that had fallen to the ground by the doorway. I started scrunching them up to make a fire. Perhaps I could keep the other world at bay for a while using a small bonfire made from the rubbish of my world.
The flyers went up easily but wouldn't stay alight. As soon as I removed my attention from lighting them, the green dusk would close in and the flame would gutter and die. Perhaps if I got some vodka from the bar to act as an accelerant.
I stepped into the club's stairwell and recoiled in shock. The greenish dark was now so thick in there that I could hardly see two feet in front of myself.
I instinctively felt that if I went down there again, I would never come back. I stepped back out into the relative relief of the street. I lit my lighter again. The flame seemed to struggle to stay alight now. I watched it chase itself back down into the gas nozzle. It sputtered and died. I flicked the mechanism again. The flint sparked fitfully in the gathering gloom but no flame came. Soon, all I could see was the burning coals at the end of my cigarette as I slowly smoked it down. I sat down on the street. It was over.
I felt hollow. I should be wondering whether I'd somehow fallen asleep and was dreaming. Or I'd had a brain haemorrhage and was lying unconscious in the toilet. Or that I'd been hit by a car and was dying in the street. But I didn't ask myself those questions. This was happening. There was no logic to any of this. That's why it had to be happening. Because the universe was a massive and senseless place where anything might happen. There was no meaning. No truth. Just observation and interpretation.
And when we stop observing and interpreting, and something of an entirely different order of intelligence starts to observe and interpret the material universe, the laws of physics might cease to be, or be changed irrevocably.
"Boltzmann brains," said a quiet voice behind me. I became aware that the familiar blue light was shimmering onto me from behind. I didn't dare turn my head, but could hear footsteps approaching. The blue light helped me to see. It pushed away the confines of the green darkness as it rippled to envelop me. I began to see my feet, then the kerb on which I sat, the double yellow lines on the tarmac, the other side of the street. How it sees. Well, it was now how I saw.
I felt a hand on my shoulder and J came to sit next to me. "What you're thinking of is an esoteric cosmological conundrum called the Boltzmann brain paradox." His voice sounded simultaneously like it was very close and a very long way away.
I looked at him. He was the source of the blue light. His skin was glowing, his eyes pale and luminous. Even his hair was fluorescing and sparking, rippling like the fur of the ball-headed creature I'd been visited by. He put his arms around me, surrounded me with his glow.
"I missed you so much," he whispered quietly into my ear, "I'm so sorry. Do you forgive me?"
I kissed him on the mouth, closing my eyes to stop the tears from coming too fast. "Stupid," I said. "Course I do."
As we kissed, the world slipped gradually back into focus. I felt the whisper of a breeze on my cheek and heard the wail of a police siren in the distance. Music started to drift up from the club's stairwell. I heard drunken shouting from a few blocks away.
I wanted to look, but we just carried on kissing anyway.
After a while he broke off. I opened my eyes. His big brown eyes were staring sadly into mine. His black hair ruffled by the warm breeze. "We have to stop them coming through for good," he said, taking my hand.
I held him back, with a sly smile on my face. "Maybe they can wait a few minutes," I said softly, getting up and pulling him into the alley by the side of the club. He smiled too as I pushed him against the brick wall and started to undo his trousers.
We left London behind in the orange lit hours before dawn, driving West past dormitory suburbs and into open country as the sun began to take over the duty of illuminating the fragile world of men and women.
We didn't talk much. There was little to say. He was a good driver and I just watched him drive on, one arm on the window sill, one relaxed on the wheel. Now and then he'd glance over with a faint smile and I felt fulfilled. It was a beautiful day.
Somewhere in Wiltshire, we left the motorway and main roads behind, heading deeper into a countryside of rolling fields, with corn yellowing under the blue sky. I was starting to doze off, when I noticed a great chalk horse inscribed on a hill in the distance. I pointed it out to J who nodded.
By degrees, sleep began to overwhelm me as we wound along country lanes. J knew where to go. I slept a dreamless sleep.
I was jolted awake by J taking a corner too fast. He was driving fast along a winding back-road next to a cornfield. There seemed to be no sign of habitation for miles.
He glanced in my direction, smiling.
"Almost there."
Then, a dark shape detached itself from a hedge ahead of the car and scuttled onto the road. J spun the wheel and the car swerved.
I screamed.
The car turned over, punching its way through the verge, a hedge and into the field beyond. A group of crows clapped into the air in fright.
The car had come to a halt about twenty yards into the field. It was still on its roof.
I couldn't move. My hands seemed to be trapped and I couldn't reach to undo my seat belt. I became aware of a strong smell of petrol all around me. The blood had run to my head, upside down as I was, and I began to feel sick.
J stirred next to me. I tried to look over but I found it painful to move my head. Something wet and warm was dripping onto my chin from above.
I heard him scrabbling in the glove compartment for something, then I heard him undo his seatbelt.
He dropped onto the floor. I mean the roof. You know what I mean. I heard him crawling out of the open window.
After a while he came round to my side of the car. After a struggle, he managed to open my door. He seemed completely unhurt. I smiled. Thank God.
I was starting to hurt quite a lot now and I realised that I probably hadn't come out of the accident quite as well as J.
"I think one of your legs might be broken," he said quietly. "There's quite a lot of blood."
There was a slight pause. "Oh god."
He'd gone quite white.
"What's the matter?" I asked light-headedly. But it just came out like a gurgle.
And then I died.
to be concluded...
Notes:
The novella, 'Transformer' is part of the Transformer series, a loose cycle of semi-autobiographical, semi-connected short stories.
'Transformer' was incomplete in the previous version of my site, with only the first two instalments of the novella completed. Having finished all five parts of the story now, I'm very happy to be able to publish it in its entirety. Enjoy.
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Trip to Mars (3): Windmills
Early Earth colonists were quick to exploit the severe winds, one of Mars' most bountiful natural resources, to generate electricity for irrigation pumps. The Northern Plains have a huge network of wind-powered irrigation channels, now fallen into disrepair.
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Trip to Mars (2): Salt pools
Inhospitably salty pools are left by the retreating Equatorial Ocean. Mars' extinct bodies of water were replenished by terraforming in the previous century, but following the abandonment of the colony, the planet's natural aridity is slowly returning.
The liminal areas of the pools are often shaped by erosion into beautifully sculptural forms.
View "detail of Salt Pool" decluttrd
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Transformer, part 3
I step off the air-conditioned train along with five or six other passengers.
The midday, midsummer heat envelops me in a suffocating embrace as I walk the few steps to the street exit of the sleepy provincial station. The small, white-shirted inspector looks askance at me as I hand him the stub of my one-way ticket. Probably my height (just shy of five foot eleven) was rather unusual for a Japanese woman, as I'd noticed several similarly curious glances cast my way during the two hour journey from Osaka via Saidaiji where I'd changed onto the two carriage Kintetsu line local train.
I stop outside the station among the messily parked bicycles to buy a Pocari Sweat from the row of gleaming vending machines there. There's not much to it - a few shabby looking shops, one stand up red lantern diner serving udon and curry rice and yakitori, one narrow road leading east to the town centre, and one north to the countryside, the two roads intersecting at a small and run down-looking bus station at the corner of the parade of shops.
I need desperately to change out of my skinny black jeans into a skirt. It's so hot that my body's already soaking wet from sweat. I look around and find the sign for the station's ladies room and slip inside, emerging soon afterwards in a more practical short yellow skirt that I'd bought from American Apparel in Tokyo a week or so before. I bend down to tie a loose lace on one of my Converse (and to retrieve an errant sneaker sock that had been sucked down into the shoe to bunch painfully under my left arch), shoulder my bright turquoise canvas bag and head for the bus stop at the north end of the station parade.
As I walk along the baked dry pavement slurping my icy canned drink, I have a sudden atavistic recall of the perpetual dustiness of the hot summer roads of this, my childhood home town, a far cry from the mucky damp streets of Archway where I now live. I put The Royal Society by 80's Matchbox B-Line Disaster on my iPod and sit down on the peeling green bench next to a middle-aged man with a pochi dog who's chainsmoking Mild Sevens (the man, not the dog).
And so I wait patiently for the hourly bus to the local Shinto shrine.
I'm not at all keen to reacquaint myself with my family or their friends, some of whom I know still live in this quiet little backwater, looking as I do now: like some skinny, trendy girl from America Town, and with the mounds of my newish, small breasts visible under my boat neck top's low chest. That would be too hard to explain for those expecting the too-tall-for-his-skin awkward, slightly overweight boy of their past. So I keep my big sunglasses on and hide my face under a huge, orange sun hat and my bush of curly bottle blonde hair. I get plenty of stares (I look understandably rather too exotic and ponyish for such a small, unchanging town) but no recognition.
I notice that the trees that line the road leading north of the bus stop have grown as I gulp down the rest of my slightly salty sports drink. During my youth, they'd been a distinct and pretty avenue of foliage leading off into the middle distance (well, to the county town, eventually, actually) but these had now grown and intertwined above to become a long and shady green tunnel, impossibly inviting in the heat.
I look down the tunnel of trees, squinting, expecting to see an approaching car, or a girl on a bicycle, or a bus returning from the shrine but nothing comes. The tunnel just stretches off into a peaceful green darkness. I turn away, then back again, drawn by the promise of the cool, peaceful green.
My mobile rings, startling me from my reverie.
I retrieve it from the interior pocket of my bag and look at the display. It reads "MOCHA". Stupid cow! I feel a powerful and quiet fury that my so called 'best friend' from London seems already to have forgotten that I'm abroad and I told her not to call me for any reason. I thumb the busy tone button and replace my phone in my holdall. She probably just wants to discuss sharing cabs to the club on Saturday or some such. As I'm fuming, a bus pulls into the rotunda that houses the bus stop with a diesel rumble. I look up in anticipation, but it's just the town centre shuttle. The five or so passengers waiting with me all mount the bus, my companion on the bench stubbing out the latest of his cigarettes and ascending the step last. His dog follows him aboard, looking back at me with mournful eyes and a slight whine. The double cantilevered doors hiss shut and the bus pulls away leaving a cloud of the omnipresent dust. I watch it go as the cloud settles. I'm now quite alone.
I turn back again to the tunnel of trees. It might be an illusion but the far end seems even more distant now, swallowed up in unfathomable darkness. I fight a strong urge to get up and walk off into the darkness and instead retrieve my phone again to check the time just as it shudders to alert me that a message has arrived.
I flip the little pink thing open. It's from Mocha:
Call me when u get 2 shrine urgent!
I close the message then open it again, read it again.
Mocha neither knows I'm in my home town going to visit the shrine, nor has any inkling of just how urgent any of this is.
I'm trying to work this one out when I notice that the shadows are lengthening around me. I must have been sitting waiting longer than I realised as it's now early evening. I look around to see if there's anyone I can ask about the bus. But the station and the shops around it are all deserted.
I shake my head. I feel as though I've been asleep. I feel a powerful sense of drowsiness. But I've been awake since I got here. The town centre bus only just left. I'm sure of it. Yet it feels simultaneously like hours have passed.
I look again to the tree-lined road that leads to the shrine. My phone rattles again in my palm.
1 new text message from: MOCHA
We r waiting pls hurry!!!!
I close my phone and put it away, shouldering my bag. I look again at the dim extent of the green tunnel of trees. I can almost imagine that there are shapes moving at the far end. Dusk is falling far quicker than I'm used to back home in London and I'm aware that, somehow, somewhere time is running out for me, or for J, so I get up and abandon my wait for the bus. I'll deal with Mocha's baffling texts later.
I slip into the tunnel of trees and walk onwards into the gathering darkness.
As little as fifty steps into the cool darkness of the tunnel of trees, I feel as though I'm a million miles away from the railway station at its entrance. The trees up above have closed into a vertiginous, tangled canopy that lets only a murky, seabed light through. Shivering in the sudden damp chill, I pull a stripy cardigan from my big bag and shrug it on.
Looking back, I notice that the dusk of the town that I left behind has dwindled to a distant, indistinct smudge of orangish light that is soon swallowed up by the pervasive gloom. I glance back a couple more times, but have the uneasy feeling that I shouldn't look back any more so I fix my eyes ahead and continue.
At intervals on the eastern verge of the silent road (to my right) sit small, moss-covered Jizo statues, looking impassively at me from the gloom with their eroded eyes. Remains of ancient offerings sit decaying at their feet, but it's clear that no fresh flowers or pieces of food have been placed for these tiny stone spirits for many months, even years. Nothing sits on the overgrown western verge of the road. Instinctively I keep to the right, closer to the statues. It feels safer,
The road is impossibly quiet now. Even my footsteps sound muffled. Ahead is impenetrable darkness but I know I have to carry on. So I do.
I'm not sure when I first notice it. I suppose that it's just a sensation of being observed to begin with.
By now the darkness is so suffocating that all I'm aware of is the movement of my joints as I walk, the tug of my bag on my shoulder. Sight, sound, even smell have long since been lost to me. I can feel hardly any sensation save a vague sense of forwards-ness.
Anyway, I start to have a slightly uneasy feeling that there are others watching me in the dark, At first I think it might be because of the little stone spirits on the road verge. I know they're there so I must subconsciously be projecting an observational role on them.
But slowly, I begin to realise there are others walking in the dark with me. At first it's just a faint sound of a scuffed footfall in the darkness to my left. Then something brushes my right arm and I hear faint breaths of exertion behind me. Somewhere ahead is a faint light as someone lights a cigarette and I smell the smoke as it drifts back to me on the faint air current.
Gradually I become aware that I'm surrounded by a dense crowd of shuffling figures, all treading the tarmac as I do, all heading in the same direction. Forwards...
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. The mass of humanity shuffling like automata around me reminds me of the mental image that quotation always puts in my head, of a throng of faceless people pushing forwards in an absurd impulse to get somewhere, somehow, not knowing why, where or how it will help.
By degrees, I realise that I'm beginning to be able to see. There's a milky, rippling, bluish light that's beginning to suffuse the road from ahead. I begin to see the figures around me, hunched over, formless, shuffling forwards. There must be hundreds of us on the suddenly much wider road, all about two or three feet apart. Strangely, each individual figure seems strangely shapeless until I look directly at them, at which point they resolve into sharp reality. I know them all, in some vague way. I focus on two friends from college a few feet away, walking together in the blue light, Hugo and Sasha. I make to go over to them, but suddenly realise they're kissing and hang back. Damn. I thought they were over each other.
Twenty feet ahead, my focusing gaze brings another group of people into relief. Mocha! And a few others from the club. What the hell are they doing here? I shout out her name, but she doesn't hear me.
Or rather she can't hear me. My voice makes no sound in the strange, attenuated vacuum that surrounds us. I pick up my pace, trying to work my way through the crowd to them, pushing the other people aside in my haste.
As I pass others in the shuffling crowd I realise that they're fading away. I'm reasonably certain that any of those that I've already pushed behind me no longer exist, as though only my attention is keeping them anchored to the reality of the path. As I move forward I'm erasing the people who fall behind me out of my line of sight.
But I don't care because I've just seen who's at the front of the crowd making his way along the road in the uncanny blue, rippling light ahead.
I'd recognise that outline, that tilt of the head, that long black hair, anywhere. J!!
I redouble my pace and barge my way through the crowd, past Mocha and Mel and Pierre who fade noiselessly as I push past. Past hundreds more insubstantial ghosts, erasing them even as I brush past and ignore them. I only want to get to J, to hold him and kiss him, to talk, to laugh and eat and drink and just to be with him to banish this permadusk that I've endured since he disappeared.
But J is still leaving me behind. The faster I try to advance the more I feel stuck. Invisible hands hold me back and J is disappearing into the distance. I've struggled to a complete halt. The mass of the ignored won't let me have him if I won't acknowledge them. Insubstantial though they are they hold me imprisoned in the gloom. I'm running but I'm perfectly still. Shouting myself hoarse but unable to hear myself or be heard.
Ahead, J stops. Cocking his head as though he's heard something, he looks around. I jerk my neck trying to push aside the invisible, cold hand of one of the ignored that's covering my mouth and manage to utter one, desperate shout: "PLEASE!!!!"
J turns.
The blue light is coming from him and grows to envelop me as he steps slowly back towards me, a sad little smile on his face.
Tears are pouring down my face. I want to reach up and hug him but I'm still completely unable to move.
J reaches out a glowing blue hand and touches my tear-wet cheek.
Then he shrinks into a tiny blue point of light which vanishes off into the distance of the still forest.
As he goes, the darkness falls down on me like a shroud. I lie utterly immobile, entombed in icy stillness.
I no longer exist. I've become one of the ignored.
I woke up with a huge, tearing cry. My pillow was soaking wet with sweat and tears.
I looked at my phone. It was five am on Saturday morning.
J had been missing exactly five weeks now and I missed him more every day. The only contact I'd had since he'd gone to Paris had been that weird click- ridden and impossibly distant-sounding phone message. I counted that as when he went missing, though technically you could say that he wasn't really missing as he'd been able to call me. I just don't think whoever or whatever rang me that night was actually J.
He's been due back the third week of August but it was now September 15th, the leaves were beginning to turn, and his flat lay empty. I'd asked the cab drivers at the club every Saturday but they said he wasn't back yet, that they hadn't seen him. Now they just shrugged.
No-one really knew J, it seemed. He didn't seem to have family. No one missed him. Except me. I missed him fiercely. I missed his funny askew smile, his big soulful eyes and the fine curls of black hair that adorned his flat brown chest.
I reported him missing at Shoreditch police station. I tried his mobile once in a while, left voicemail, sent him email, filled out the contact form on his Mosque clock site and left messages on his Facebook.
The man I had been appalled to realise I loved was slowly fading from my life.
Meanwhile, my sleep problems had got worse. Since that phone message, I'd barely been able to sleep more than an hour or so at night. Every few days I'd be gripped by sleep paralysis and I'd become so terrified of a repeat of my nocturnal visitor that I actually set up a camcorder on Long Play record and night mode at the end of my bed and recorded, Britain's Most Haunted style, my sleeping self every night.
But I didn't receive any more visitations, though sometimes I'd lie awake imagining that I could sense the strange blue glow of that ball-headed entity approaching my bedroom up the stairs. The green, grainy camcorder footage revealed just what the tape captured night upon night. A strung-out looking tranny on the constant edge of a cliff of sleep.
I sat up in bed smoking, thinking about the vivid dream I'd just had. Dawn was starting to creep over the Archway skyline. I'd fallen asleep in my makeup and lingerie from the night before and I looked an absolute fright in the mirror next to my bed.
The more I contemplated that dream, the more I became convinced that J had been trying to contact me through it. It was as though he'd taken me to a familiar place from my childhood then was trying to draw me into some nether place where he was trapped.
Trapped. Why else would his message sound so desperate? He had to be lost, or marooned, or imprisoned somewhere. It was exactly five weeks since that weird phone call. I didn't dare think about terrorism, because it was clearly so absurd a notion.
Besides, I felt a sensation akin to a conviction that whatever J was mixed up in was a lot weirder than that.
Stubbing out my cigarette, I picked up my phone and dialled J's mobile. No answer. Not that I'd been expecting any. The phone had gone straight to voicemail every time since.
The girl had a small bead of blood glistening on her pale earlobe.
Well, that's what it looked like. The cheap resin earring that studded her earlobe was glinting wetly in the bright early morning sunlight in front of me and I couldn't keep my eyes off it in my fuddled condition.
I was on the top deck of the 271 bus travelling south towards Shoreditch.
Since waking up from the dream of J leaving me in the tunnel, I'd become obsessed with the idea that something was about to happen, so I'd quickly thrown on some jeans and just about the only clean top I could find, touched up my lippy and my puffy eyes, stuffed my purse, makeup, a bottle of water and a cardy into my turquoise bag and pelted out of the house. I reckoned his flat in Bethnal Green was a good place to start so I'd grabbed a doughnut and a coffee at McDonalds by the Whittington Hospital and hopped onto this bus.
Now I was bumping down New North Road. It was a beautiful morning, clear and warm. But all I could do was stare at this woman's cheap earring. I was about to reach out and pull it out of her ear, or ask her where she'd got it, or do something equally foolish, when my mobile rang.
It was Mocha. I tucked my newly blonde hair behind my ear and pressed the answer button.
"What you wearing tonight, LADY?" she said. She sounded drunk.
I'd completely forgotten it was Saturday. I was working tonight. "Mocha, it's seven fucking am. What are you doing up this early?"
There was a confused pause at the other end. I could hear keys being dropped and picked up; then rattling in a lock.
"Ohhhh, I just got IN girl! You'll never guess who I was OUT with. You'll just DIE!! Anyway what you WEARIN', lady? Cos I thought we could go like MEGA-80s? You know that new pink BAT THING you got down at Utopia in Chapel Market? I got a black and GOLD one that matches it. We'll be AMAZIN' whadyafink BIA- TCH??"
The bus was pulling up at the Old Street stop. Earring girl was getting off and I had to too. I shouldered my bag and followed her downstairs, cradling my mobile with my chin and shoulder. "Yeah, sounds good love, but listen, I have to go right now. Sorry. In the middle of something sticky. Call you later. Mwah!" I hung up before I could hear any of Mocha's protests. She rang once again but I ignored it. That was quickly followed by a text that simply said "BIATCH XX".
I walked up Old Street and around the corner onto Shoreditch High Street to wait for an 8 to Bethnal Green, wondering who Mocha'd been out with. Probably one of those microcelebs that she liked to pretend were actually famous.
To my slight surprise, 'Earrings' was sat on the red plastic bench at the bus stop, reading a folded over copy of Time Out. I sat down next to her and smoked a fag squinting up at the sun glinting off the windows at the front of the Tea Building. I studied her askance. She was small, birdlike and pretty, in a tweedy green peacoat and bright yellow tights, purple Mary Janes on her feet that I'd seen in Office shoes. Her brown bob was tucked into a red beret. She wore delicate, red-framed glasses that matched the earrings and moved her lips slightly as she read.
She glanced up at me and I pretended to be surreptitiously reading her magazine. She smiled faintly and I smiled back. She started to rise and I realised that my bus was pulling up to the stop. I hopped on after her and sat down by the baby-carriage bit. She went upstairs.
As the bus trundled along Bethnal Green Road towards J's Peabody Housing block, my face was bathed in the early autumn sunlight. I drifted up into my thoughts like a cloud in the blue sky above.
The corners of the drab buildings idled past my grubby bus window. Halal meat shops, convenience stores, video rental places, kebab and fish and chip shops, curry restaurants, internet cafes, money transfer, dry cleaning, the odd letting agent and dilapidated pub; behind them the ever looming grey and red- brick tenement blocks and estates. All the services the city needs to keep ticking over. The bottom rung of the urban hierarchy of needs; a far remove from the luxury that one might find just a few miles west. The mass of men, women and the undecided, living their lives of quiet desperation, one day at a time, hoping for the phone call, the letter, the email, the chance encounter that would let light into their twilight of the ignored.
J had been that light for me. I harboured hopes and fears like anyone else in this massive, cruel city. It had been a happy release from the day to day tedium of urban life to have been able to share my life, however briefly, with the man who'd driven me home that night. I was under no illusions that being the person I was, I'd find it harder to find companionship of a genuine nature. I'd had plenty of one-or-more night stands, but many of my so-called boyfriends fetishised me rather than truly saw me as a partner in time. It gets fucking painful standing up on that pedestal in stillettoes, believe me.
Not J. He and I genuinely had something indescribable. Shit... We did... I brushed some moistness from my eyes with a MacDonalds napkin and blew my nose. Shit.
The bell to stop the bus rang as I was reaching for it. I head footsteps descending the steps from the top deck and smiled as Earring Girl emerged from the stairwell. It seemed like our journeys were inextricable. I got up and joined her at the exit door as the bus pulled up at the stop for J's street.
I paused at the bus stop to rummage in my bag for my cigarettes, and lit one, removing my cardigan in the increasing warmth and stuffing it in the turquoise bag's roomy canvas confines. I noticed that Earrings was heading up the side street towards J's block of flats. I suddenly felt a bit self conscious, like I was stalking her. God knows why, but I tried to keep a surreptitious distance as I followed her up the familiar street lined with London Planes. She was probably just heading home after a night out or something. She turned right and left. Bemused, I followed. She was heading straight towards J's Peabody block.
I came to a halt by the street corner greasy spoon cafe on J's street as I realised she was actually going into the street door that led to J's flat.
There were only five flats to every entrance. Surely coincidence couldn't stretch that far. Had she been following me somehow? Was she mixed up in whatever scheme had wrenched my lover from me? No. It didn't make sense. I'd been following her. No. I mean, she'd been ahead of me, so she couldn't have been following me, unless she was somehow following me from in front of me... wait, no, wait...
No. Stupid. It was just a stupid coincidence. I was tired and upset and was seeing menace where there was none. Crossing the street, I walked up to the door and tried J's doorbell.
Silence.
Of course there would be no reply. Why on Earth would there be? I'd tried often enough the last five weeks. Why would he be back now?
The intercom crackled. "Hello?"
After I'd poured myself back into my skin and got my thudding heart back on a regular beat again, I leaned into the microphone grille. "Ummm.... hi. I'm looking for J, the Asian guy who lives here... I'm a friend of his?"
There was a pause.
"Oh..." said a woman's voice from the intercom. There was another pause.
"You'd better come up."
The entry buzzer sounded. I pushed the door open and went inside.
to be continued...
Notes:
The novella, 'Transformer' is part of the Transformer series, a loose cycle of semi-autobiographical, semi-connected short stories.
'Transformer' was incomplete in the previous version of my site, with only the first two instalments of the novella completed. Having finished all five parts of the story now, I'm very happy to be able to publish it in its entirety. Enjoy.
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My bands #1: Deathline (2006 - ?)
- #1: Deathline
- #2: Six Inch Killaz
- #3: Electric Shocks
Deathline is my current band. We're playing gigs pretty regularly in and around London. Come and say hello.
Glance over to the right sidebar for various links to Deathline related stuff scattered round the web.
From Deathline's last.fm wiki page:
Deathline is a duo from London, UK. Members Jennie (bass guitar, vocals) and Kaoru (guitar, vocals and programming) formed the group after quitting garage / post-punk band Electric Shocks.
Deathline play a lo-fi blend of electronic backing and harsh, garage rock style overdriven instrumentation, that was labelled "rock noir" by their supporters due to its dark and atmospheric nature with elements of disco and old school rap and electro backing entering the mix, especially noticeable in their use of samples from classic Roland drum machines in their backing tracks.
Swedish-born Jennie's vocal style has been likened to "a punk rock Nico", while the group's mixture of electronic textures and beats, harsh guitar sounds, feedback and repetitive lyrics have drawn comparisons with the likes of The Fall, The Jesus and Mary Chain, LCD Soundsystem, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Raveonettes.
Deathline first played live in late October 2006 and have been seen regularly in the London independent venue and club circuit since then, as well as making a brief tour of the East Coast and Midwestern USA in Summer 2007, which coincided with the limited edition release of their EP "Rock Noir" (now available as a free download).
They released their first full-length collection "SixtyNine", in autumn 2008 and embarked on a short Autumn 2008 tour of Scandinavia and Germany as the first stage in its promotion. Subsequent dates in the UK since have included a high profile support with Electric Six at Barfly Camden. (buy SixtyNine on Bandcamp)
Deathline are known for their dark, glamorous and androgynous image, which Kaoru perhaps draws on from his time as lead guitarist with notorious late 90's drag queen punks, Six Inch Killaz.
The band took a break from touring after summer 2009 to write, rehearse and record their second collection, which they will begin to showcase live in December 2009. The material promises to be darker and heavier than that heard on SixtyNine. They continue to tour through 2010, with new releases planned soon.
Official MySpace: www.myspace.com/thedeathline
Press and reviews
Dave Taylor reviews SixtyNine for Artrocker.com
"You should definitely check out Deathline's brilliant debut album SixtyNine.
Let's try and describe the Deathline sound... Imagine a generic gothic castle, on a jagged hill. It's the kind of castle you see in old Dracula movies. Lightning is flashing in the night sky, it's raining. The Raveonettes and The Jesus and Mary Chain are touring together. They're on their way to a gig at Transylvannia's foremost nightclub, but their van breaks down. Somewhat apprehensively, they wind their way up the castle drive and knock on the door.
It's opened by a malprogrammed robot with the brain of Suicide's Alan Vega wired into it. He kidnaps them and locks them in a dungeon full of musical equipment, knackered fuzz boxes and crates of champagne. Part of the wall slides away, revealing sound proof glass and The Vegatron at the controls of a mixing desk.
"Drink all of the champagne and record me an album or I will kill you" he buzzes, in a Stephen Hawkings kind of voice.
SixtyNine sounds like that album."
The Letter - on SixtyNine
"The combination of Jennie's singing style, which they say sounds a bit like "a punk rock Nico", and I can add that there's also a bit of Nicola Kuperus from Adult. in there too, the catchy garage-rock riffs and the various electronic elements (drums, background noises, squelchy bits) at once gives their sound the retro aspect while remaining firmly in 2009. A winning combo that leaves you feeling dirty, liberated and wholly satisfied. Sixtynine is an uncompromising debut, choc-full of melody, energy and promise."
The Devil Has The Best Tuna
"Deathline are a female lead duo with a fine line in post artrock rumble that purrs like a new born kitten and shreds your skin like a tiger on speed. Kinda like a 21st century Sonny & Cher having lunch with The Raveonettes served by The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' at Joy Division's greasy spoon cafe."
On and Offstage
"Seriously unworldly electronica new wave, this is glamour at it's darkest."
Artrocker - Paul Cox"
It was a sad day when London lost original 100mph piked artrockers The Electric Shocks. Kaoru and Jennie pulled together their guitar and bass duties and drafted in a ferocious drum machine to complete the rock'n'roll economy of a power duo. Kaoru's distinctive fuzz-tone guitars now complemented by Jennie's dead-pan noir vocal deliver a garage-punk pop with shades of Jesus and MaryChain, Ravonettes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Abrasive energy and tunes, a winning combination."
Lee Puddefoot (Artrocker mag / Spoon of Music)
"Noir Rock with grinding drums that spit out short sharp burst of venom and a broody as hell bass give this duo a minimal Jesus and Marychain like vibe. The sultry and cool as you like vocals from front woman Jennie come across like a punk-rock Nico. An amazing combination."
London Particular
"Female fronted two piece... Yeah Yeah Yeahs territory but darker... Blondie's in there too... simple riffing tunes but with a lot of A1 attitude... some Sonic Youth buzzing artschlock about proceedings too."
Dan Scratch, Camden New Journal
"Imagine Leonard Cohen singing a Billy Corgan ballad while J Mascis turns up the distortion."
Nemesis to Go, issue 9
"There's a certain noir-ish punker-glamour about this two-piece. Deathline deal in fuzz-o-rama guitar slapped unceremoniously over splat-and-blatter drum machinery, like Metal Urbain remade for twenty-first century London.
Out of those fragments they've conjured up their own grubby, glammy, bump 'n' grind. 'Tesko Disko' is a gonzoid tekno-rocker with a splendidly dirty bass and an equally splendid offhand vocal, but it's on '17' that Deathline crank up the real punk rock disco. This one actually has syndrums, for that 1979 Donna Summer feel. 'Region Hack' is a large and fearsome slo-mo distortion fest - Deathline do like to keep their gears low and their speed down. Only 'C'mon C'mon' and '7/1 Regime' pick up the pace a bit. Deathline are cruisers, not racers, piloting their jalopy at sinister speed round the rock 'n' roll ring road, giving passers-by hard stares from behind darkened windows to a soundtrack of rasping exhaust and clattering tappets. It's a noisy old ride, but I like it."
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Trip to Mars (1): Abandoned
The abandoned shells of aboriginal Martian dwellings litter the plains to the north of the Valles Marineris. Earth settlers gradually drove the natives out of this temperate and habitable area of the planet.
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Deathline news 140708
Fri 18 / Sat 19 July weekend of gigs and more!
Something of a South / North London weekender for you this month as Deathline kick off a two night tour-ette at JAMM in Brixton playing the Spoon of Music Friday night with a superb array of bands including Thee Vicars, followed by a hop skip jump north of the river on Saturday to The Constitution in Camden for The Cosh Club. It's a night run by awesome newer wave artdiscorock power trio Attack / Switch / Attack who will also be playing among others including Plastic Passion. Come to both and multiply the fun! Flyers and details follow:
Spoon of Music @ JAMM
w. Thee Vicars / Deathline / Violet Violet / Billy Trivial and the Penny Dreadfuls
Friday 18th July 008, doors 8pm - 11pm.
Entry £5.
261 Brixton Road, SW9 6LH (map)
» Add this event on Facebook
COSH CLUB @ The Constitution
w. Plastic Passion / Deathline / Attack / Switch / Attack / Sonic Dragolgo
Saturday 19th July 008, doors 8pm - late.
Entry £1.99.
42 St. Pancras Way, London, NW1 0QT (map)
» Add this event on Facebook
Guestival is here
We've been invited to participate in Artrocker's mysterious "online festival" Guestival, alongside the likes of Primal Scream, Futureheads, Blood Red Shoes, XX Teens, Untitled Musical Project, Neon Neon, Jon Jones and the Beatniks Movement and more... It starts on Monday 14th July on artrocker.com. Be there...
New songs
We've posted the first few of a whole bunch of new songs on our MySpace. Check them out and let us know what you think. Meanwhile...
Old songs now free!
Last year's limited edition Rock Noir EP is now totally free to download from last.fm: Click here to get it. Why not print this cover and give a burned copy to your loved ones as a present! Feel free to share the MP3s round, and tell people to come and see us play if they like what they hear.
Where to find Deathline
» MySpace
» last.fm
» Facebook
» Rock Noir EP (FREE download)
» Original lo-fi version of "I Cannot See" at Artrocker.com (FREE download)
» XFM uploaded
» Deathline's home in Second Life
Bang! You're dead.
DLxxx
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Transformer, part 2
So I started seeing J a few weeks after he first drove me home that night.
The week after he'd first driven us home, I saw him among the gaggle of drivers outside the club again, but pointedly steered a protesting Mocha away from his car and into another. I mean, a fucking cab driver! It didn't bear thinking about. As our car pulled away, I saw him glance over at us and we made eye contact; that lopsided grin I remembered from the week before lurched my heart again. He broke eye contact and I saw him laughing with a couple of other Asian drivers as we turned off up past Aldgate station.
The following week, he wasn't there when I left the club alone, and then the week after, a friend offered Mocha and I a lift, so it wasn't until the fourth week, that I found myself in J's car again.
It had been a testing evening. Fucking Mocha had disappeared into the bog with Smiles, our dealer, at about eleven, and not reappeared. I later found out she'd got off with one of his friends in a cubicle and they'd left to go to some party in Marylebone while I was chatting to some ferrety bloke about Big Brother at the bar.
I left the club at chucking out time in a furious mood. It had been talent night and one of the acts, some fucking god awful noise of a tranny rock band managed to nick the one cab that was waiting. I lit a ciggy and stood there fuming, watching the dark blue of the summer night lightening into dawn over the city.
Mel and Pierre, one of the bouncers, came up the stairs behind me and started locking up. After a while, Mel came and stood next to me, lighting one of her long cigarettes.
"S'going to be a nice day today," she said. I nodded. We looked up at the pinkening sky together in silence for a while. Pierre was on his mobile talking in French to someone. He hung up then asked, "you two OK?"
We nodded. He smiled and strode off down the street. I watched his huge black frame recede into the distance.
"Well, I better be off too luv," said Mel. She parked her Mondeo round the corner, usually. But she never offered me a lift. Which is good, really, as I know that a ride with her would involve uncomfortable silences and awkward rejoinders. She lived down in Kent somewhere anyway. completely the opposite direction.
"Will you be OK?" she asked as she turned to walk off, noticing a noisy, boozed up bunch of blokes crossing the street a hundred yards up the road in the blue and orange light.
"Yeah. I'll be fine, I'll start walking and get a black cab when it comes."
She nodded and I watched her scurry off round the corner.
I took a last couple of puffs of my fag, looking up the road to make sure the drunk young men were safely gone, then started off, fumbling in my gold ho bag for my iPod and my phone. I stuck the buds in my ears and scrolled up the Klaxons album. I quickly checked my phone for any texts or voicemails but there were none.
It was only after about two hundred yards that I noticed J's car keeping pace with me, the music was so loud. I stopped the music and pulled out the earbuds. He was grinning, leaning out of the window in an open-necked burgundy shirt and mirrored aviators.
"Hi," he said.
I folded my arms across my fake chest. "Don't you know it's illegal to pick up fares in the street?" I asked, deliberately not making eye contact. Not that I could, through his shades.
"Ah," he said, "but i'm not picking up a fare." He had one of those nice rounded Asian accents. Quite posh. Pakistani, I think.
"What exactly are you doing if you're not picking up a fare then?" I rebuffed, making to move on.
He smiled that melty smile again. I saw my reflection in his glasses and hated myself for the meltyness.
"i was actually just going to ask if you wanted a lift home." He tipped his glasses down his nose and looked up at me, adding, "don't worry. I'm not going going to try anything unsavoury."
He kept glancing at me in the rearview as we drove home.
"What?" I said after a while.
"Nothing. You're very beautiful. I can't help looking. Sorry." He looked away.
We drove on in silence for a while.
"Do you mind me asking what you do apart from work at that club," he suddenly asked.
I lit a fag. "I'm an art student," i replied, winding down the window. The streets were still quite empty, the orange streetlights still lit, but not really needed any more.
"Oh really," he said. "What sort of stuff do you make?"
I looked at him in the rear view mirror. He was looking back at me. He was right. Nothing unsavoury. He seemed genuinely interested.
I shrugged. "Video art, mainly. Performance, installation too." My mobile pinged. Low battery. "Mainly video art though-"
We pulled into my street. "Sorry - I forget," he cut in," which is your house again?"
"A little bit further", I said, leaning forward, "about here is fine, by the yellow van." He pulled into the gap by the Transit van and I got out.
"Thank you," I said smiling at him as I turned and walked up the steps to my door.
I realised my heart was pounding as I fumbled for my keys. I turned and looked back. He was still sitting there in his car, the engine idling, looking at me with his lovely lopsided smile and his eyes. In the trees, birds were singing.
"Oh for fuck's sake," I muttered under my breath, rolling my eyes, as I found myself supermodelling back down the steps towards him.
I got in the passenger seat next to him and said, in a shaky voice, "if you go a little bit up the street and turn right, there's a sports ground car park. It'll be deserted now..." I touched his bare arm. "Let's go up there and park for a bit."
He nodded, looking suddenly serious, which made me regret what I was doing. Just for a moment. Then I saw his eyes again, and nose and lips and chest. And it was OK. We drove up the empty road in silence and he swung right into the car park opposite the little parade of shops. The newsagent would be opening soon. i could see lights on inside already.
He parked in the corner nearest one of the goals of the football pitch and switched off the engine.
He turned again, and just looked at me.
He wasn't about to say anything, but I said, "shut up", anyway and pushed him back with the soft palm of my hand on his chest. Then I leaned over and kissed him.
It was like his looking was like a loud voice in my head, and I had to stop the voice talking so loud. It was a good kiss. He closed his eyes, and after a while, so did I, and we kissed.
He was caressing the back of my head with one of his hands, his fingers twining in my long black hair. I slid one of my hands down his chest onto his lap, fiddling with his belt and fly, trying to unzip him while keeping his lips and his eyes locked shut.
I freed his cock and broke off the kiss, giving him one last nibble on the lower lip as I moved down, tucking my hair behind my ears, and took him in my mouth, wetting him and angling my head slowly up and down, making those yummy sounding noises that I know men like.
He was moaning too now as I looked up, his eyes tight closed, one hand clamping the back of my head, one hand gripping the handle tight above the driver side door.
It didn't take long. To be honest it wasn't the best blowjob in the world. But it was just that - a job. We needed to get it out of the way.
After I redid my lipstick, I turned to him and smiled.
"Take me home now please, J."
After that J and I started seeing each other. He'd drive over and pick me up from college sometimes. He didn't seem to mind if I was dressed up or not, which was nice. We went out to bars around Bethnal Green where he lived, or around Archway where I came from and he'd treat me the same if I looked like a scruffy gay art fag or a dolled up trash goddess. Gigs and plays, comedy and clubs in Shoreditch, art openings of course. We fucked an awful lot.
Of course he was mad.
He sold Mosque clocks from his flat just off Bethnal Green Road. He had a website and apparently he made quite a tidy sum every month from selling the funny Mosque shaped clocks he imported from Pakistan.
"I'm a lapsed Muslim," he'd say (which explained his freeness to booze), enigmatically adding that he lost his faith after reading The Day of the Triffids as a child, "but the Mosque clock is a sound business venture in this area. And the website is very secure." And that grin. He made me laugh a lot. He was a nutter. I cared for him very much, his physical beauty and his bizarre imagination and skewed outlook.
That summer I was very happy.
I saw less of Mocha and more of J, whom Mocha loathed with an unspecific and childlike hatred and jealousy.
We drove to Norfolk and watched birds. Another of his interests. Yes, I felt that strongly about him.
When he did nights, I'd fall securely asleep in his bed dressed in my most beautiful lingerie and he'd delight in coming in and waking me up in the morning with a kiss and a firm hand on my crotch. He said my cock in black lace panties was one of the finest sights he could imagine.
Of course in hindsight I realise now that I become too dependent on people. My relationships end up being clingy, not to say obsessive, and it did of course all end very badly with me and J when it all fell apart so spectacularly.
But for a few short months it was good.
Even my sleep problems abated for a while.
For the June and July that I started seeing J, I didn't have a single episode of insomnia, sleep paralysis or anything. I'd entered a state of serenity that I'd hardly experienced before, and with a minicab driver, no less.
Then towards the middle of August I had another bad episode.
J was away on a "business trip" to France. I'd been on a 48 hour gigs and clubs bender with a couple of girlfriends from college. The amount of coke and cheap vodka sloshing around my system, I guess it's no wonder that my sleep would be a little bit disturbed, but this was a humdinger. Probably the worst I'd had since the one just before I left my parents' house to come to London.
I was at home. It was probably about four in the morning when I awoke. I was lying naked in bed, having thrown off my duvet when I woke up. My eyelids were gummed together with mascara and my mouth tasted horribly and predictably awful. I reached for the pint glass of water that I always kept by my bedside.
Or rather I tried. As I realised with dread that my limbs were once again not obeying my brain's commands, I began to hear the footsteps in the landing outside.
Footsteps is perhaps the wrong word. These were more like soft, muffled thumps, as though something heavy and covered in cloth were being repeatedly dropped onto the carpeted floor of the landing from about two feet in the air.
The thumps came nearer the open door. Through the corner of my eye I could see a misshapen shadow approaching the threshold of my bedroom.
Then the... thing came into my room. I couldn't scream, I couldn't move a single muscle. A great deadness had fallen over my body, like a heavy, dull sack of potatoes, peeled and greying from age.
I realised that whatever it was that was poking into my room was a "head".
It was perfectly spherical, about the size of a beachball. Pale blue like cornflowers, and covered with a soft, undulating fur about half an inch in length, that looked like it would be givingly soft to the touch. It glowed softly from the inside, and the glow undulated with the fur, casting an aquarium ripple on my bedroom walls.
About half way down what I took to be its front - though the sphere was otherwise completely featureless - was a small mouth, with blue, cherubic lips fringed by slightly longer fur that rippled slowly in the direction of the mouth, like the fronds of an anemone. The lips had a pronounced underbite, so that a set of pointy, conical white teeth jutted out in front.
The mouth looked horribly wet and was working soundlessly, the lips forming bizarre shapes as though it was trying to speak.
There were no eyes. No other features.
As the "head" poked further into the room, it was followed by what looked initially like a strange collection of jointed sticks covered roughly in a misshapen piece of tarpaulin. I soon realised this was the creature's "body".
It was hard to make out, as the organisation seemed chaotic, but there seemed to be seven dry-looking sticks, or "legs", about six inches in diameter and six feet long, that reminded me queasily of stick insects from school Biology lab. Each leg terminated in a soft, pompom shaped clump of brown fur that caused the soft thumping noise on the carpeted floor.
The legs disappeared under a loose, leathery sheet of green, tarpaulin looking material that appeared to contain no other organs or material inside, except whatever mechanism the legs attached to and articulated with. It looked almost like a walking tent. With a furry beachball head on top.
Once the "creature" had fully entered the room. It stopped for a while by the door, casting its silent rippling blue light over me. I suddenly realised that the light was how it "saw".
Gradually, the blue light passed over me, then passed back to focus on my face. It was looking straight at me.
The thumping started again as it gathered up its loose tent of a body and flowed slowly towards me. I couldn't even close my eyes.
The tent engulfed my bed and body, and the last thing I remember is the furry face looming right up to mine, inspecting me with a teriifying curiosity, the mouth working inarticulately on the verge of vocalisation.
Far away, I could hear my mobile phone ringing as I once again lost consciousness.
I woke up. It was bright daylight outside. Hot again.
I felt sick, and I managed to gulp down a few mouthfuls of tepid water from my bedside glass before running to the bathroom and puking up my guts into the toilet bowl.
I stayed knelt on the floor of the bathroom for a while, just trying to breathe, before having a perfunctory wash and trudging back to my room.
On my bedside, the mobile beeped. There was a message. I picked it up and looked at the time. It was gone 11am.
The missed call was from a withheld number. I dialled my voicemail:
"You have one new message, received at 4am on Thursday 16th August. Press '1' to listen to your message"
I pressed the key on my handset.
There was a pause, then a rush of static in my ear which resolved into a hollow, distant echoing noise punctuated by loud clicks, as though someone was turning a light on and off in a huge, empty warehouse.
Then I heard J's voice, faint and disconnected, as though it was being played on an old tape machine in the same warehouse. The clicking intensified, seeminly coming after each hesitant word that J spoke, rendering his voice weird and mechanical.
"I CLICK need CLICK to CLICK need CLICK to CLICK see CLICK you CLICK straight CLICK away CLICK the CLICK CLICK CLICK it's CLICK started CLICK it's CLICK started CLICK I CLICK need CLICK I CLICK need CLICK I CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK..."
to be continued...
Notes:
Originally published 11 February 2007 on draGnet 4.0, this is the second part of the novella, 'Transformer', which is itself part of the Transformer series, a loose cycle of semi-autobiographical, semi-connected short stories, which I am presenting again in its entirety.
This part (2 of 5) is unchanged except for a few small grammatical and style changes, and the removal of an original framing intro passage which now appears in a more relevant context in the upcoming part 4.
'Transformer' was incomplete in the previous version of my site, with only the first two instalments of the novella completed. Having finished the story now, I'm very happy to be able to publish it in its entirety over the next few days. Enjoy.
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Transformer, part 1
"TRY GROWING A DICK FIRST, ARSEHOLE!!"
Mocha was drunk again.
It was becoming a bit of a problem really and practically every week I would have to take her home. I mean it's not like I was stone cold sober either, but unlike Mocha, I'd not been downing every double dark rum and coke that the blokes at the club had been buying for me, smiling sweetly, and breathing, "mmm, that was nice. Can I have another one?"
Mocha was so pretty that she never had any trouble having drinks bought for her. In fact, that was our job, really. The club paid us both a bit of money every week to loll about looking tall and leggy, smiling at the guys and making them part with their cash at the bar. We were there to be beautiful, and to enhance the "class" of what was basically a fairly ordinary tranny club in the City, but it just meant we got pissed for free. Mocha quite a bit pissed...
And as usual, Mocha's beautiful night had turned a bit ugly as she drunkenly tried to beat off the imagined advances of some timid looking mouse of a bloke by the back bar. Perhaps he'd accidentally brushed her sequinned bottom as he tried to order himself a pint. It didn't take a lot to ignite her ire when she was like this. He certainly didn't look like the harassing type as he stood bewildered and blinking in the torrent of abuse, clearly audible above the pounding pop on the PA, that flowed from Mocha's perfectly made up lips. A crowd of gawpers, girls and boys, were gathering. I felt a hand on my shoulder.
I looked up at Mel, the club's matronly promoter and nodded. Time to go. Together, we marched up to Mocha and, with much "c'mon love,"s and general pacifying cooing, managed to extricate her from her one lady melee. Mel stayed to buy the baffled admirer a drink while I scooped up Mocha's left slingback, which had slipped off during the scuffle and manhandled her up the leopard carpeted stairwell that led up to the street from the dingy basement bar that housed the club. As we neared the top, I heard heavy footsteps clomping up the steps behind us.
"She can forget about coming back next week and all!" shouted Mel as she intercepted us. "I've had it with her! Up to here! All right?" Mocha was whispering something under her breath while grinning rather evilly at Mel's flushed and over made-up face. It was probably a good thing she was whispering, whatever she was saying. She reeked of the booze she'd spilt down her short dress and one of her fishnet stockings had ripped down the inner thigh.
"I'll have a word with her, Mel," I said, holding out my hand. She huffed and pressed five rolled up twenty pound notes into my palm. I smiled sweetly and said, "I'll call you about next week", pecked her on her sweaty cheek and hauled Mocha out into the relief of the cool street outside.
As usual there was a gathering of cab drivers outside and I managed to get Mocha back to her flat quite quickly. The driver waited while I dragged her inside, up the piss soaked stairwell and along the landing as she fumbled inside her little clutch purse for keys, still muttering to herself.
Once inside, I laid her out on the sofa in the living room, helped myself to a glass of water from the kitchenette, then left her snoring quietly in the gloom.
"Long night?" the cab driver enquired as I let out another massive yawn in the back seat. I nodded as I got my Silk Cut out of my bag.
I held them up so he could see them in the rear view. "Is it all right?" He nodded and I lit one up. There was bhangra or something playing softly on the stereo as we cruised up New North Road. We passed pockets of people staggering down, on their way home or to the next club. I got my mobile out. It was 4.20 in the morning. Two texts had popped in unnoticed. Both from Mel. I put the pink, flat phone away without reading them.
Winding the window down, I tipped out some ash, enjoying the breeze. At the red lights crossing Essex Road, a black cab full of boozed up young city types pulled up next to us. The blond boy in the window nearest me looked up and we made eye contact. I gave him my best smouldering look. Slowly the other three noticed me and soon I had their entire attention. I let a strap of my black dress fall off my shoulder and a lick of my straight jet black hair fall across my eyes as I exhaled smoke from my parted red lips.
The lights changed. As their cab turned up towards Canonbury, I stuck my tongue out and flicked them the V-sign, chucking out the spent fagbutt in their direction.
The minicab driver was looking at me with an amused look in his eyes. Suddenly self conscious, I pulled the dress strap up again and smiled back at him.
"They're fascinated because you're so beautiful," the driver suddenly said, "but they can't quite work out what's exactly wrong with the picture they're seeing."
"Yeah? Well, they should get a new telly then," I replied. I'm not quite sure what that meant, but he seemed satisfied. We drove up the Holloway Road in silence.
Some shops were open, most were closed.
I paid him with one of Mocha's twenties from the club. She'd be like "where's me fucking money" sometime over the weekend, but hey, "who got you home?" would be my retort.
The driver was rather cute. I'd only really noticed his big brown eyes in the rearview and spied his longish, straight black hair from the back seat, but as I paid him, I took a longer look.
Asian, in his mid twenties, probably, tall and lean, with a slightly hooked nose and slender hands. He was dressed in a black shirt, buttoned low, showing a taut, lightly haired chest, and dark jeans. Beautiful eyes and a full, amused looking mouth surrounded by some great stubble. He noticed me looking and smiled as he wrote me a receipt.
I brushed his hand lightly with my fingertips as he handed me the card receipt and I got out of the cab. As I walked up the steps, he shouted, "hey!"
I stopped and turned slowly. He was leaning out of the driver window, lighting a cigarette. "My name's J," he said, before smiling lopsidedly, starting the car and driving away.
Throughout my life I've suffered from various parasomnias. I just don't sleep well and haven't since my teens back in the country. But I'm not just a run of the mill insomniac. Back then it was active stuff - sleepwalking, tooth grinding and violent shakes and twitches that would hurl me awake.
Where I grew up was hideously dark and quiet at night. Well into secondary school, I used to prefer to sleep with a nightlight on but I'd still find the silence unsettling, probably because I was born and spent my early years in a very bright and noisy city.
My nightbird habits probably stemmed from back then. I'd often stay awake at night in my teens long after my parents were asleep, experimenting with make- up, reading or writing.
My sleep disorders took a turn for the bizarre when I moved up to London to go to college. I stopped sleepwalking but became a regular sufferer of sleep paralysis.
When it first happened, it was the most terrifying experience I'd ever had. Interestingly, it was the only episode I ever suffered while still at my parents' house and it happened about a week before I moved up to London, almost as though prefiguring the change I was about to undergo.
My parents were away for the weekend and I'd taken the opportunity to dress up and go for one of my dead of night wanders around the village, the little park by the station, or breaking into the grounds of the deserted sanatorium with a bottle of whisky or whatever. Silly stuff.
After I got back in, I must have fallen asleep with the little night light on. Sometime later I remember waking up. But as I came to, I began to have this vague realisation that things were not quite right in my bedroom.
For a start it was far too gloomy. The little nightlight usually lit the walls with a cheery yellowish light, but now it seemed frightened to cast its glow too far, and it flickered dimly in the corner, unable to help me as I lay, terrified, realising I was unable to move a muscle.
The rest of the room was swathed in a thick, greenish darkness. If I had been able to move my arms, I felt sure that the darkness would be tangible, like a thick mist, or like webs of dark green sticky silk.
I was terribly cold, though it was the height of a very warm summer.
Then the footsteps started.
Footsteps is probably a bit of a misnomer. These were muffled, dragging sounds, like someone with a limp was pulling a very heavy, damp canvas sack full of bricks up the landing towards my bedroom. Still frozen to the spot and only able to move my eyeballs, I waited in utter terror as the dragging footfalls got nearer to my door, which was slightly ajar.
As the shambling sounds reached the other side of the door, I started to feel a dead pressure on my chest, as though someone had put a pile of heavy leatherbound books on me. I was struggling to breathe. I thought I was dying. At the same time, I heard a ragged breathing on the other side of my door. Whoever was there was taking my breath away for themselves.
The breathing got louder as the green darkness coalesced into a thick curtain of mist by the door, which began to glow from inside; a dead, green glow. And a figure began to appear inside the glow. As I watched, the tall, gaunt shape of a man appeared, dressed in a spidery frock coat and spindly pinstripe trousers, a bowler hat jammed on his wispy, long white hair. Burning eyes, bloodshot, green and alien, gazed without blinking at me and a hideous rictus grin revealed broken, yellowing teeth.
Slowly, the figure raised its left arm to point at me. The weight on my chest became unbearable and I was pushed slowly down into a pitch black, dreamless sleep.
I woke with a start. It was bright daylight and the birds were singing in the bushes outside my window. I sat up and felt my chest, and looked over to my door. There was no sign that it had been anything more than a dream, yet I knew I'd been awake.
After I moved to London, I suffered occasional bouts of the sleep paralysis; the hallucinations are never as potent or as terrifying as the first, but nevertheless, they've always been deeply unsettling.
After I got in, I spent a while getting my outfit and make up off, then drank a couple of glasses of water and took some Valerian tablets. I unfolded my sofa bed and climbed in, turning out the light. The sun was making its way up, but I never have any trouble sleeping during the daytime.
I lay a while thinking about Mocha and Mel. Mel would have Mocha back next week, I knew it and she knew it too. Mocha was the reason a lot of men came to the club. And I certainly wasn't going to the club without Mocha. She'd introduced me to the whole scene and I felt loyal to her, fucked up alky though she was. I loved being with her as we arrived and sashayed down the stairs of the place. Eyes would light on us like laser sights. I'd grown in confidence over my looks since first stepping timidly into the bar - Mel wouldn't after all pay me to decorate her place unless I was very pretty - but Mocha was stunningly beautiful. Tall, Amazonesque, with flawless, dark milky coffee skin and the face of an angel and the most astonishing set of legs. Yeah, and a filthy mouth. Men loved that. Mel would have her back.
I drifted gently off, thinking about that gentle touch of J's fingers, that cheeky grin as he drove off. Fucking hell, I fancied a mini cab driver.
And I was asleep.
to be continued...
Notes:
Originally published 3 August 2006 on draGnet 4.0, this is the first part of the novella, 'Transformer', which is itself part of the Transformer series, a loose cycle of semi-autobiographical, semi-connected short stories, which I am presenting again in its entirety over the next few weeks.
This part (1 of 5) is unchanged except for a few small grammatical and style changes.
'Transformer' was incomplete in the previous version of my site, with only the first two instalments of the novella completed. Having finished the story now, I'm very happy to be able to publish it in its entirety over the next few days. Enjoy.
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I remember two years or so ago, beginning an ongoing discussion with my good friend Siobhan Curran over the merits of the exceptional hacked together hand rolled blogging software that enables her website, Tranniefesto. Meeting her last night, as we occasionally do when she's down in London, reminded me of that conversation.
I continue to be particularly enthused by the way that the commenting system was designed in such a way as to create a natural flow of "conversation", which would play out daily then be quietly rolled over onto the next day, just like we live our lives. This struck me as not just rather clever but exactly how blogging should be. Very little I've seen before or since has come close to matching the elegance of the experience that Siobhan managed to create there.
SInce we started talking about the mechanics of blogging, audiences, conversations, all centred round the excellence of the Tranniefesto engine, blogs have come and gone. Tranniefesto itself is on indefinite hiatus while Siobhan waits to discover the next paradigm, and write that all important final post which will close one door and open the next. This very website closed down for a few hundred days before reopening recently. Other excellent sites from our community have similarly waned and waxed.
So I'm back, but you'll notice there is no commenting system on the new draGnet.
This cuts to the core of the conversations I had with Siobhan. Her website was all about dialogue. Hers was a community of readers with whom she was having an endless 24/7/365 conversation. In very real terms, the audience was part of the creative team behind tranniefesto. If that sounds exhausting, well, it bloody is. Collaboration is a difficult discipline and can lead to wonderful results, but managing chaos (or the potential for chaos) is long winded and tiresome. Really, that's one of the reasons why I admired Tranniefesto so much. It provided a UI and an information architecture that channeled the almost certain chaos of an indefinite number of contributors all talking at once, into a user experience that was intelligible at first signt and could be administered by just one (albeit often very stressed) person.
Siobhan was often somewhat frustrated by that way that her community would misinterpret, hijack or otherwise derail conversations she initiated. But I'd say that on the whole the effort was more than worthwhile and made Tranniefesto into a fascinating place to visit and revisit. Yes, even when she was blogging about code.
So, why no comments and conversations here? I thought long and hard about this when I redesigned my website. I contemplated going away from the journalling format entirely and having a site that didn't use blogging software as the content management system. See, my needs are very different to those of Siobhan and Tranniefesto. I realised that (apart from plugging the band) I was very much using draGnet as a creative outliner. Somewhere to commit the products of my various creative impulses so that they were done and out and I could forget about them and move on.
So while the comments of my readers were valuable, I began to realise that the feedback and the sense of audience that it gave me were distracting me from the impulse to create and get my creations out there. So this is why I've organised my new site along the lines you see here. It's stil using the blogging (or rather journaling) paradigm as I want it to be a sequential record of my creative output. But really all I'm doing is having a conversation with myself. If that sounds solipsistic, I'm sorry. I of course continue to value highly the participation of each and everyone who comes and reads my words, looks at my pictures and listens to my noises. It's just that I don't need the artifacts of audience participation to be available to me at all times.
(Notwithstanding, I'd value individual contact from anyone who has things to say to me about what they read here. The contact link's at the bottom.)
Intrestingly, a couple of Siobhan's other personae are now regularly blogging elsewhere. Guess what? No comments.
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Brain not working
On the i-sight. At work. Help!
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I come from Samurai stock
On my dad's side, go back far enough and my family were Samurai. Until the Meiji Restoration when the caste of military nobles was abolished in favour of a more Western professional army, my family would follow the order's code of conduct, Bushido, wear swords in public, and be allowed to summarily execute anyone who showed them or the Emperor disrespect. Talk about perks of the job!
After the Restoration, they were wealthy landowners in the Nara area and pioneered the goldfish trade. During the Edo period, we were the first to import ornamental fish from China and breed them for commercial export to the rest of the world. Even today, my dad's home town is known for the goldfish farms which are scattered all over the town's extent. The municipal symbol is the goldfish.
Scandal and ruin hit my family somewhere down the line and one of my ancestors lost everything, selling off the business, the landholdings. We became "normal" citizens of the new Japan. Many of my family became workers in the new industry that came to the area - textiles became extablished in the late 19th Century alongside the goldfish business as one of the area's main income generators.
Now, just two of my dad's siblings remain in the suburbs of Yamato-Koriyama, the old family town, living in small houses opposite each other on a residential street that leads from the local railway station to the commercial centre.
When I was small the street was a single, dusty thoroughfare flanked by deep storm drains, with paddy fields extending as far as you could see on one side, hills rolling away on the other. Every time I went back, more fields and open spaces would disappear, as houses and streets started to claim their place. Now our once single street is just one in a large residential sprawl.
Other progress has come to the town. Modern sewerage was installed in the 80s. Until then, everyone used to pee and shit in cespits. The vacuum truck would vist on a Monday to suck away the waste from the septic tanks. When I was tiny I lost my favourite pink teddy bear in the cesspit. I remember looking down the hole, crying at the bear looking up at me.
I enjoy visiting my home town. Despite its growth over the years, it remains a small town, with a remote, parochial outlook and branch line mentality.
It's almost hard to believe it was once the centre of local power, though the castle on the hill at the centre of the town stands high and proud as testament to that. However, it's now just a small, bustling town that seems a little crystallised in its historic past. But I like that. My mother's family are from right in the middle of Tokyo, so this is a nice contrast to that madness.
i must visit again soon. The uncles and aunts are becoming elderly. Many of their children have moved away to the cities and soon the opportunity to visit as a resident might be gone forever.
Notes:
Originally written 12 December 2006 on draGnet 4.0.
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David and the Birds
I'd completely forgotten about the human-faced birds.
It started this morning when I found myself by chance in the neighbourhood where David lived. It was unexpected. I wasn't thinking about David, nor was I particularly intending to be in that particular part of South London. It just happened.
I was on my way between meetings, walking quickly on this sweltering July day, when the sky lowered suddenly and dark clouds flew in from the East, parting to unleash a torrential downpour. I was soaked to the skin already, when to add insult to injury, a number 21 bus careened past and tipped the entire contents of a pot-hole puddle right over me. I stopped walking and sighed.
I looked up, dripping, to see the insulting red silhouette of the double decker disappearing over the crest of the steep hill ahead of me. The hill upon which, to my utter astonishment (and slightly to my left) stood David's house. The sudden cloudburst was already breaking up; shafts of mid-morning sun silhouetting the familiar outline of the house where I'd lived for three and a half months, so long ago.
Tucking my soaking hair behind one soaking ear, hoisting my soaking bag over my soaking shoulder, I trudged up the hill towards the house.
The house looked identical after all this time. It stood on its own like a reproach; it was an old terrace-end house, dark and huge, Victorian, with five floors. The rest of the terrace had long since been demolished but for some reason, they'd forgotten about this one. It was the sort of house that it was easy to forget about. Windows looking out like baleful eyes set deep in a dark, brick-crusted skull at the top of its old hill. The roof partially caved in, top floor windows broken and dark. The ground fell sharply away on two sides of the house, towards a deep railway cutting on the Sidcup line on one side, and a deserted municipal square on the other, a dried out fountain and ornate wrought iron benches a decaying testament to happier (or at the very least more prosperous) times in a previous century.
The house had been boarded up, its owner an absentee. David and a few other misfits from art school had opened it up and taken possession. The house had filled up with students and countercultural dropouts, the smell of joss sticks and grass mingling with mildew and cheap cider. Music was always loud and either rocking or rocksteady. Having established squatter's rights, the new tenants fell to redecorating the house in their own image, garish colours and dayglo posters replacing the muted finery of the long-departed previous inhabitants. Only the top floor was uninhabitable, the roof having fallen in during that hurricane of 1987. Perhaps that and the subsidence had broken the owner's heart. Whoever they were, they never came back. Never tried to repossess the old corpse of a house.
This had been ten or eleven years ago. I don't remember correctly. That summer was one of those that no one would really recall correctly.
I stood, soaking, on the pavement outside. Looking up at the dark mass now, it looked no different despite the extra years. Even the sky seemed to have darkened in respect to the old place. Behind me the sun was again blazing in a cloudless blue sky but beyond the house, the thunderheads still massed, sullen like an unruly mob of demonstrators reluctant to disperse despite repeated warnings.
Peering up, I could see through one murky window a series of canvases on stretchers piled up against a paint-splattered wall; a couple of battered guitars leaning against a black, huge amplifier emblazoned with the Marshall logo through another. The roof was still at a haphazard angle and the house still looked like it would tip over down the embankment at any moment.
Without knowing why the fuck, I walked up the cracked front path and knocked on the door.
For a while, nothing happened.
My heart was pounding and I was about to turn away when I saw shadows moving through the grimy frosted glass of the dark green, paint-peeling front door.
Then footsteps approached and the door was flung open.
"Blimey. Been for a swim 'ave we?" The dishevelled figure of a tall, thin man in his forties, dressed only in a ripped pair of faded drainpipe jeans (the flies were unzipped) looked me up and down with blood-shot eyes, drawing on a roll-up. "Ello. Who are ya then? Wha d'ya want?"
I looked past him into the hallway. It looked exactly the same as I remembered, a forest of rusted bicycles and paint cans.
"I..." I began, before realising I didn't know what I wanted. I looked up at him again, but didn't recognise him from my time here. Not surprising given the turnaround of people in the house tended to be rapid.
I coughed. "I'm a friend of David's. An old friend. I just got soaked in the downpour and wondered if he was around, if I could just dry off..." It sounded lame even to me.
He looked me up and down again, a sly smile on his gnarled face. "Friend of Dave's eh? Nice." Annoyingly, I found myself blushing. He turned his head and shouted back into the inviting darkness of the house. "DAVE! GIRL HERE TO SEE YA! DAVID!! GET YER FAT ARSE OUT OF BED!!"
We stood there for a moment in silence, both looking at some indeterminate point somewhere behind and above him.
He turned back. "Nahh. 'e must be out. Wanna come in and wait? He's not usually gone long." He looked me up and down once more then stood aside. I picked my way through the copse of rusted bicycles and made to go up the stairs. He followed me in, closing the door.
"Dave's room's-" He stopped when he saw me with my hand on the banister. "Oh. You know. OK luv, let us know if there's anything I can help yer with." He winked. "I'm Martin by the way." He pronounced it 'Marr Inn', without the 't' and with a West Country roll to the letter 'R'. "Nice to meet yer." He reached out and we shook hands. His were dry and cool.
"Thanks Martin," I said. He bustled past me up the stairs and I heard him disappear into a room on the third floor. After a second, some loud dub music started pounding through the house. I breathed in the smell of mildew, dope and incense and smiled, trudging wetly upwards to the first floor landing I remembered so well.
Pausing for a moment, I pushed open the door and peered inside.
It was like I'd only been away for a few hours. David always kept a sparse room. He'd painted the floorboards white when he'd moved in. The coat of gloss was a little more scuffed than I recalled, but of course, over a decade had passed. The chair in the corner was still covered in clothes, almost all neatly folded. The old steel clothes rail by the window was still there. I smiled as I noticed his one old grey green suit, hanging there still. I'd only seen him in it once, going to an interview for a job he never intended to get. He was mortified when they hired him. He lasted one morning and never went back. I remember him bursting back in pissed and laughing, with a pocketful of stationery. We left a lot of post-it notes round the house after that. The pile of CDs had grown noticeably though the vinyl record pile looked exactly the same. I noticed he had a DVD player now. The sleeve of Fellini's Amarcord lay open on top of the shiny silver machine which looked out of place above the old black VCR on which we'd watched episodes of Blackadder, stoned out of our heads, chortling like idiots.
All along one wall was the pile of books. David was a voracious reader. There was no attempt to order or classify the books. The regular sized paperbacks, he'd started standing in a tight line from one corner right along the wall to be bookended by a pile of horizontally piled larger books and mags on the opposite corner. Once a row had been filled, he'd started again, a second row of books on top of the first, all the way across. He'd got to two and three quarter rows of books one on top of each other when I'd left. Now the book pile had run on, eight rows high. There was no way he'd ever again get to read anything from the lowest row of books, which I noticed were buckling from the cumulative weight of words upon words piled densely above them. I looked across the lowest rows, seeing some familiar titles. Short Cuts by Carver had been a particular favourite of his. It had taken me ages to get through. I remembered him ranting about Altman's film version. He hated it for the contrived order that it tried to impose on the original.
I noticed he still had the alarm clock I'd given him. Time Cube, it was called. A plain white cube of time. We liked the abstractness of the idea even though in reality it was just a cheap alarm clock from some crappy shop in Lewisham. It was on the floor next to the futon mattress, right where I remembered it. A half drunk mug of coffee sat next to it and the old Winnie-the-Pooh plate he used as an ashtray.
I shivered. A draft was blowing in from the landing and I noticed I was making a puddle on the white-painted floorboards.
I got my mobile out of my handbag and checked the time. I still had an hour and a bit. I'd dry off my clothes then call a cab to take me to my meeting. I pushed the door to with my bum and walked over to the plain white chest of drawers, stepping out of my heels while unbuttoning my black shirt and unzipping my short blue pinstripe skirt. The top drawer contained some towels. I found a hanger on the clothes rail and draped my wet clothes on it, opening the window and letting the sun start its work on them. My bra felt a bit damp too so I unhooked that and looped one of the straps around the hanger to let it dry a bit.
I reached in to the drawer and pulled out one of David's towels, the green one with the yellow leaf pattern that I remembered. I dried off my arms and chest and back and legs then started to briskly towel down my shoulder length blonde hair when I caught sight of myself in the oval mirror above the chest of drawers and paused.
I looked at myself in the scratchy surface of the mirror and was struck by how I felt so wrong and so utterly right at the same time in here.
I felt right because David hadn't moved on at all since I'd last seen him, however many years ago that had been; I felt at home in his room, surrounded by his things. We'd parted amicably enough; we'd drifted apart but he'd stayed anchored to the solid mundaneity of this room while I'd flown off and become something new and strange. A foreign body; a new woman, quite literally - soft, rounded flesh where there'd been a hard boyish flatness. The skirts hung better off my now fuller hips and thighs than they had off the angular rear end of the teenage crossdresser who'd once shared this room. I cupped my right breast and raised it up, watching a pretty girl in the mirror who didn't need to stuff her bra with socks; a girl who no longer needed to create an illusion.
I'd spent a lot of time back then looking in this mirror, imagining who I'd be this time.
The mirror was well placed. It had the room's biggest window behind it and to the left. On a long, bright summer day like this, you were perfectly lit to do your make-up and dress yourself all nice. I wrapped the towel round my hair and struck one of the old, vampish poses. I laughed silently to myself, then looked up as I noticed a dark flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye.
I turned from the mirror, face burning red, half expecting to see him behind me with that toothy grin, the window-light reflecting off his pebble thick glasses.
But there was no one behind me.
I turned back then, knowing of course that the movement had come from the window and realising, with a shiver, that I'd forgotten, unbelievably, completely forgotten about the human-faced birds.
Yes. The human-faced birds. And no, I don't mean that these birds somehow reflected some form of anthropomorphic humanity in their otherwise birdy faces. Not a knowing, human glint in the beady eye of a dunnock, or a sardonic world-weariness in the tilted head of a blackbird. This is not something like the cat in my local pub in Archway that me and my girlfriends call the "cat with the face of a man" because its squashy Persian face and fractious demeanour are so hilariously like those of a grumpy old man.
No. Let me explain what I mean when I say 'human-faced birds':
The view from the window next to the oval mirror looks out from the side of the house that overhangs the old, deserted town park square. It's clear that at one time this was an important local amenity, but a combination of the development of the surrounding railway land into sidings, and some subsidence-related damage had cut it off from the rest of the area. It's now an unreachable place, overgrown with weeds and cracked with neglect. At its centre, a dried out fountain looks over a wasteland of empty crisp packets and crushed Lilt cans. Ever ten minutes or so, the passing of the Charing Cross to Sidcup fast train shakes it. The ornamental borders are choked with bindweed, the park benches warped and rotting.
The streets that used to lead to it are transsected by railway now, made impassable by sturdy fencing and yellow and black signage with high voltage warnings. It was possible to get down the steep ivy and nettle-bound bank from the rear of the house, but after Angus the gay barman got stuck down there one night when it rained and had to be rescued by smirking firemen, no one from the house really wanted to try again. It wasn't like there was anything worthwhile down there.
Instead the square had become a meeting place for birds. The old square was an ideal spot for birds to convene and do what they do, and birds of many species gathered there on a daily basis to talk bird business. The noisy chatter would float up sometimes to our window and I used to pad over barefoot to look down at the pigeons, the starlings, the magpies and jays, the tits and carrion crows, even the occasional seagull, picking their noisy way amidst the rubble and rubbish of a place that people had forgotten about and returned to them.
It was down there, one early morning, that I'd first seen the human-faced birds.
It was early summer. David was out somewhere. Maybe with a woman. I don't know but I was alone, fast asleep on the futon when I was awoken by an unbelievably weird sound. It started with an astonishingly loud, chirruping birdcall that all of a sudden seemed to melt into a sound like the braying laughter of a drunken woman. I thought at first that it was a car alarm, when it came again. It was such an alien noise that I couldn't for the life of me work out what it was at all. Think about it and you'll realise how scary that is.
I opened my eyes and I saw that the sky was already quite bright through the curtains. The glowing Time Cube read '04:21'. The sound came again, accompanied this time by a loud hubbub of many birds, who seemed to be singing in response. I lay in bed, petrified with fear.
After a while, the sound came again, this time joined by a second, almost identical sound in a slightly lower key. Once again, there was an answering chorus of normal birdsong. I reached across and found a cigarette, lighting it with shaking hands.
The cigarette and my growing wakefulness gave me a bit of courage, so after the sound came again, I sat up and got out of bed. I was only wearing David's red Che Guevarra t-shirt. I felt weird going to investigate with my willy and balls hanging out so I rummaged in my discarded skirt from last night and found the black satin and lace knickers that he'd bought me for my birthday, pulling them on quickly.
I tiptoed over to the window next to the oval mirror, carrying the Winnie-the-Pooh ashtray with me. I began gingerly twitching aside one black curtain when the sound came again, almost making me leap out of my skin. I peered through and down at the square.
In the misty morning light, at first I couldn't see anything unusual in the space laid out one hundred and fifty feet below me; just the usual gathering of birds, having their morning meeting. A bunch of pigeons, blackbirds and starlings, some magpies, some crows, a couple of particularly big, fat black ones over to my right facing away from me...
Then one of the big, fat crows turned and I realised it wasn't a crow at all.
It was like no bird I'd ever seen.
It was big and muscular, black and sleek. Its compact sinew and shiny plumage reminded me of a black panther. The shape was similar to a crow or raven, though with a strange, drooping, two-pronged tail, but it was very much bigger, perhaps as large as a medium-sized dog. A magnificent fan-like crest of jet-black feathers with midnight blue tips surmounted its bulky round head.
But it was only when it raised its face to utter its strange laugh-like call again that I saw its human face. Pitch black wrinkled skin set in amongst the feathers, with a small, fleshy black, parted beak inside which I could make out horribly human-looking teeth and tongue; above that, a perfectly human ball of a nose, human ears to one side and, most revolting, a pair of eyes burning with intelligence, white balls with round irises and pupils and pale yellow eyebrows arched above.
It lifted its face up, the human-faced bird and shrilled its mocking laugh. The other, the male, slightly smaller, soon joined it with its deeper guffaw and both were followed by noisy assent from the gathered flock.
As it laughed, the human-faced bird was looking at me.
With a soundless scream, I remember falling back from the window. Maybe I hit my head. Maybe I fainted. But I remember David's smiling, bespectacled face waking me up with a wet, hungover kiss to my forehead. The sun was up and blazing and the human-faced birds had already adopted the texture of a dream. We made love and then we went out to the pub.
Two weeks later I'd moved out forever, the human-faced birds forgotten. Until now.
Now I realised that the flicker of dark movement while I'd been admiring my reflection must surely have been one of those creatures flying past the window. My heart pounded as I padded across to peer out of the window down at the brightly lit square.
There were three of them this time.
The old decrepit square was deserted except for three of the human-faced birds. Perhaps two of them were the ones I'd seen before. They were all gazing fixedly at me, standing in a tight semicircle. The big one, the big female with the hideous laugh nodded slowly as I looked down at her. The new one seemed to smile, to beckon me with a flick of his crested head. I knew more than anything else that I had to now go down there and talk to them.
I reached over onto the pile of clothes on the chair and pulled over a t-shirt. Without surprise I noted it was the red Che shirt. I pulled my pinstripe miniskirt down off the clothes hanger. The stretchy rayon had dried already. I stepped into the skirt and pulled on the t-shirt. I looked down at the waiting birds and the treacherously steep bank that led down to them and pulled off my high heels as soon as I'd put them back on. Under the clothes rail was a pair of old paint-splattered Doc Marten boots of David's. I still had my tights on and they slipped on well over them.
I went to the oval mirror and fixed my face. Some black eyeliner and shadow, mascara and clear gloss. My hair didn't feel right. Pulling it back off my face, I twisted and looped it into a tight knot that sprayed out behind my head in a blonde approximation of the human-faced birds' crests. Finally, I applied a horizontal double fingerful of black eyeshadow in two parallel horizontal stripes, cheek to cheek, across the bridge of my nose. I unpinned one of my earrings, the right, and let it clatter to the floor. It vanished between two of the warped white-painted floorboards. I was ready.
I switched off my mobile and stuffed it into my handbag, shoving the bag under the wooden slats of the futon base and left the room after one more look at the waiting trio of human-faced birds.
The sun was slanting low on the horizon by the time I stepped out onto the cracked flagstones of the derelict park square. It had taken an eternity scrambling down the bank and my tights and skin had been ripped by brambles, my legs and arms covered in red raw nettle rash. My eyes had run black rivers of sweat and tears down my cheeks and I was physically shaking with exhaustion and hunger.
And the human-faced birds weren't there. Not a feather, not a claw mark in the dirty ground. Nothing.
I ran desperately round the dusty square, looking in all directions. The silence was utterly deafening. No birdcall, not the merest whisper of noise from cars or trains. Not even the gentlest of breezes to bring respite from the stillness. I felt like I'd somehow fallen to the bottom of a deep, dry well. I looked up the bank but even the house had vanished, obliterated by the blinding light of the low sun as it dipped towards orange dusk.
When I could run no more, I collapsed on the bench nearest the dried out fountain and dissolved into a racking fit of tears.
I was woken by the sound of movement. Clicking footfalls approaching me, and the slow, gentle rasp of living breath. I opened my eyes.
In the dim light of a pale blue dawn, I woke and saw the third human-faced bird standing, looking at me with a sad smile on its beaky lips.
I sat up abruptly. The nettle stings had abated a bit but I felt hungry and thirsty.
The human-faced bird opened its mouth and a croaky chirrup emerged. It frowned its blue, unsettlingly human eyes and tried again.
"Kreeesh-Kroooo-Tooshree-Kroo!"
All I could do was stare back at it. This time it actually looked frustrated and shook its head, ruffling its crest. It glanced skywards as if trying to collect itself.
It looked back into my eyes again, with another smile, as if willing me to try a little harder. Again it opened its mouth.
"EE-Tschhh KhoooTooo Shee Yuuuuhh!"
It coughed, and spoke again. More confident this time.
"Itssshh GOOOdh Twooo SeeeeYuuuu!"
I must have been staring with such a look of open-mouthed astonishment that it actually let out a little chuckle before it spoke again.
"It's so good to see you!" It shifted on its claws. "How long has it been? Your hair suits you a little darker."
I looked down at my hands and then back into the human-faced bird's face. I stared into his face even though I found it hard to focus for the tears in my eyes.
Beyond him in the misty morning, I could now see hundreds of the creatures, some looking at us, some talking amongst themselves, or flying, eating. Getting on with things. And beyond them, almost hidden in the undergrowth at the bottom of the bank, I could see the broken body of a bespectacled man who'd fallen down the steep slope outside his home one bright summer morning.
"I'm really glad you came down here. Really," the human-faced bird went on, nodding earnestly, as I tried to smile back at him through my tears. "I'm happy to have met you just this once, now you've become who you wanted to become." Still smiling and nodding, he'd begun backing away with his curious bird steps. Slowly, his words became an unintelligible birdlike burble again.
And then with a great clap of wings, his colleagues took off as one into the brightening sky, becoming slowly translucent as they faded away in the rising morning light.
Soon, only my friend was left. He stood for a while by David's body, then lowered his head, unfolding his wings. He was already starting to fade from sight.
I watched him take off and rise up in bigger and bigger circles until he too became a tiny dot of black that I lost in the cloudless blue far above me.
Notes:
Originally published 8 July 2005 on draGnet 4.0, this is part of the Transformer series, a loose cycle of semi-autobiographical, semi-connected short stories, which I am presenting again in its entirety over the next few weeks.
The piece is unchanged except for a few small grammatical and style changes
Coming up next is "Transformer", the novella that frames these shorter stories. Those who read these parts of my older site will recall that I'd only partially completed it - two of the five instalments. I'll be rectifying that now, by completing the rest of that piece.
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Mictlán
Wherein I bring glamour to rolls of flab...
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I'm a Musician, writer, photographer, designer, transgendered z-list celebrity. Insomniac's boyfriend. Tragic glamour and sleepless nights are my fellow travellers. Skinny jeans and pointy shoes are my mode-us operandi. I like cats. Especially the ones who talk. Oh, and David Lynch.
