There’s a calm here. There are pro-Trump posters, Stars of David, bibles, trophy pictures of smiling FBI agents. Twenty-six British people were in the compound before the siege. Two survived.
Melissa Morrison from Manchester was six years old. A few weeks before, Melissa had pleaded on the phone with FBI agents to help her escape. A couple of minutes later she phoned back to say she’d changed her mind.
You discover this:
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
Graceland. Take in the wisdom of a child who learned from absence and the derole unmodels he was presented with. Add whiskey.
There are ducks and blondes and ironies in the lobby of the Peabody and we skip back and forth through time.
Stax. They were lost and weary. They left here for Britain. They came back energised, made whole again for a while. The magic of Finsbury Park. Or Croydon.
You look up at the balcony. You wonder why MLK stayed in such a crap place. And then you decide it’s time to start to stop thinking like a white man.
We read in order to take the other(s) into ourselves, to change and to not-change. We read to trip.
I read that James Robertson Justice died broken and penniless. His booming voice and beard was my childhood: warm sometimes, cold others: scary.
I read a letter in which a proud commuter talks about tying the straps of annoying tourists’ annoying backpacks to the hand straps on the tube.
I read an article that says in the late 1930s there was a whole load of Jewish people here (and the Bloomsbury group) all stocking up on cyanide in case of invasion. This presented an ethical dilemma for doctors. Judith Kerr’s dad asked for the Nazi-defying poison and his doctor gave him chalk.
There are memories here. The candle burns briefly. A Whiter Shade Of Pale turns to grey, motel-room silence. We flicker and flow and flicker again. It’s what we do.
There are places here - beyond memory - where you can see baby gators. There are ‘adult supermarkets’, where, you imagine, you can browse aisles of men and women to put in your trolley and then queue with at the eight items or less/fewer till. Unless you’re particularly greedy.
There are churches here which look like 1937’s prediction of a 1977 building.
I don’t want to feel what I feel. I want - more here than anywhere - to overcome me.
Across the state line into Georgia. We listen to the GodisGodisn’t passions of Nick Cave. In the past, people stir. Our sons and daughters love the we’s we were but we still feel like imposters.
It’s cooler and rainier here than in London. Our air conditioned hearts begin to icen. I’m told I’m too negative and it’s true. When you realise you’ve always been like this but learned to hide it, you want to run. Of course.
Watch the dismissal of the waitress by the assistant manager. He has dreads and the arrogance of the comfortably dim. You decide not to tip and feel Chinese-burned with guilt.
Did you know? I went to two of Wilko’s absolutely final gigs and one of Mott’s. There’s a sadness to the prolonging of death, to adding too many verses. No-one can sing Hallelujah all the way through because no-one can remember that many words.
The chorus is what really counts.
What if we’re both wrong?
What if every time you and I speak there are actually four of us in the room?
What if we carry our mothers on our backs like coal? Or like a marine’s backpack? Mittens, goggles, survival knife, snowshoes, rations, helmet, tarpaulin, first aid kit, sleeping bag, water bottle, canteen...
This hostage wants to stay still. This hostage is not Patty Hearst.
(It’s a road trip, fucktard, she says: a road trip.)
We set off from childhood and reached maturity: just in time to see the truth before we fell back into the pain of being: not quite old enough.
This hostage wants to stay still. This hostage is not Patty Hearst.
(It’s a road trip, fucktard, she says: a road trip.)
There are times my rage belongs to you. There are more times it belongs to me, to all the swallowed emotion and all the loss and all the frustration and all the guilt and the typos and the disappointing takeaways.
This hostage wants to stay still. This hostage is not Patty Hearst.
(It’s a road trip, fucktard, she says: a road trip.)
“Life is very strange, isn’t it? The self, sitting behind a locked door, watches itself, passes its time in not willing to be itself and yet is self enough to love itself.”
A few years ago, Kingston University bought hundreds of Iris Murdoch’s letters. I was working there at the time and when I heard about it, I emailed The Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies, arranged a time to go down there, underwent a rigorous examination of my motives that included waterboarding and being forced to listen to Level 42’s entire back catalogue, put on special Kev-proof gloves made from swan’s feathers, swore I’d be really, really, really, really careful, and then sat there for hours, immersed in Iris’ thoughts and dreams and anxieties, all the time being glared at by the scarily-bespectacled Keeper Of The Letters.
All the letters were from Iris – she apparently destroyed every single one she ever received. And, while The Guardian had been full of the ‘sensational’ discovery of her long-term gay relationship with Philippa Foot, the fascination for me lay in her letters to Raymond Queneau, the French writer who wrote one of my favourite books, ‘Exercises in Style’. I sat there trying to piece together what he must have said to her: her responses were loving, tantalising, exquisite and sad.
The whole process felt magical, poignant, incredibly intimate, and a huge, oddly guilty privilege. I quickly wrote down some of the phrases that particularly struck me – and the next day lost the bits of paper I’d scrounged off a reluctant KOTL…
I found my scribbles again a while later, which felt so nice, and decided I’d try and write something based on those shared, tight, stolen moments. But I soon realised that I didn’t have the skill or energy or inclination to come up with a poem or a short-story or anything too imaginative: so this is a sort of brief, ‘found’ letter that – hopefully – offers a glimpse into Iris Murdoch’s correspondence with Raymond Queneau.
Every word is hers:
——————————————————
4 Eastbourne Road,
Chiswick
Sweet, gentle Queneau
Will you be in Paris? Are Simone de Beauvoir and Merleen Ponty likely to be there? That would be a lovely unbirthday present for me.
I am not writing. My novel has an airy, witty, flashy perfection in my head which I should undoubtedly spoil by putting pen to paper. Sometimes I suspect I haven’t enough imagination to be a good writer nor enough hard logic to be a good philosopher.
Yet there is so much life here - quite mysterious still, like fishes in a dark aquarium, but very moving. Van Eyckish light on white wimples and jewelled crosses, the beautiful unwearying plain-song, speaking through a grille…
Life is very strange, isn’t it? The self, sitting behind a locked door, watches itself, passes its time in not willing to be itself and yet is self enough to love itself. And I can’t live without giving and receiving affection, my sweet man. I’m sorry about the scene on the bridge, or rather I’m sorry in the sense that I ought to have said nothing or to have said something sooner.
Yes. Yes. I love you in the most absolute sense possible. I would do anything for you, be anything you wished me, come to you at any time or place if you wished it, even for a moment.
Iris
PS My surname ends with an H not a K.
For Paul
I cried.
When I first heard about Chas Hodges, on Saturday, I was being all poncey and wine-drinking and middle-class at an art exhibition I'd contributed to. I didn't cry then, I just added 'Ain't No Pleasing You' to our playlist, told a couple of people who I thought might be interested that Chas had died, and then pushed it away, to be dealt with later.
I cried.
I cried on Sunday. I cried just as I'd started one of my rambles, being all clever and analytical about The Meaning Of Chas and Dave.
I cried. And I'm writing this because I'm trying to make sense of doing that and of the flood of thoughts and feelings I've been experiencing the last couple of days. I'm trying to clear the crowded, pissed-up Friday night public bar of my head (I'd quite like my head to be more of a quiet, Wednesday afternoon saloon bar, but to be fair, it never really has been).
I never knew Chas, never met him, though people I know did. I loved - as anyone who's ever heard it should - some of C&D's stuff, particularly 'Ain't No Pleasing You' and 'Edmonton Green' and 'Punchy and the Willar Warbler', each of them transcendent folk music that's so London and so Everywhere. Their - often unsung - contribution to popular music was immense. I was proud to share Enfield and Spurs with them. I've always thought rhyming 'trembly' with 'Wembley' was the single greatest poetic act in our history. And I've always felt their music was proud and clever and unrepentant and in love with the strange towns of our strange city and with our pasts and our need to live the small things, the things of our parents, the things of their parents, the rhythms and melodies that can lift and haunt us out of the times and places we find ourselves.
I cried.
I've always felt a bit outside, partial, semi-detached - not working-class or middle-class, not one thing or another. I've never been sure if Enfield is in London, really. I may not be a proper Londoner. There are people in London who aren't sure where Enfield is, just as I’ve never really known where Spike Island - Dave's old neighbourhood - is.
I went to a poshish school. I didn't really belong there - there were lots of people from nicer bits of the borough than mine and there were lots of people from Chas and Dave's bits. I could speak both cultural languages (and still sometimes can) pretty fluently, but with an accent and an awkwardness that betrays me as a foreigner to both. I wanted to belong and I didn't want to belong and it's too late now anyway.
My grandparents on both sides of the family came from South London originally, and all crossed to the right side of the river between the wars, ending up in Freezywater and the poor bit of Southgate. I realised this morning it's my grief for them that's a big part of what's going on for me at the moment - thinking about my grandfathers and the awful burns one of them got fighting fires in the Blitz, the malaria the other caught in Salonika fighting the Bulgarians, thinking about the losses and fears my grandmothers experienced, thinking about how much I want to tell them, how much I need to ask them.
This isn't just the rekindling of adolescent grief for my grandparents, of course: it's also a kind of grief for their lives, their culture, the parts of their lives that were part of ours too; it’s a grief for all the pubs that are now carpet shops and Thai restaurants and student flats, for turning up at White Hart Lane or the Valley on the day and standing on the heaving, flowing terraces, for a half-truth myth of England that held them together and valued decency and respect and doing the right thing. In many ways, Chas and Dave had more to do with my grandparents' lives than mine or my parents' - they were a joyous conduit to a time that was shot-through with the trauma of war and with the energy of community, a working-class culture that (sort of) knew what it was and (often) suffered and (sometimes) sang together. As my own parents moved 'up in the world', they became increasingly self-conscious about that culture, neither of them ever quite fitting either into their new mortgaged lives or back in their old, too-rough and too-ready ones.
And then, with folk-turned-to-country and blues-turned-to-rock-and-roll and gospel-turned-to-soul and rock-and-roll-turned-to-rock and rock-turned-to-punk and punk-turned-to-it's-like-punk-never-happened and music-turned-to-X Factor, they died, Mum and Dad. They died. I've tried to avoid thinking about that while writing this but I know I can't if I'm going to understand what's going on.
Mum loved Abba. Dad loved Gilbert and Sullivan. They both loved The Seekers and hated pubs. Both were awkward socially; neither felt comfortable in their own skin; my Dad had left his Norf London accent behind in Chester when he was evacuated, coming back posh and disgracing the family, while my Mum still clung to hers despite herself, despite her valiant attempts to be middle-class, or, rather, not working-class (I remember my sister once describing the area we grew up in as 'a bit working-class' and Mum was appalled...)
I cried.
I cried in part, of course, because every loss reminds me of Mum and Dad, even the loss of someone I don't know. The warmth and grace of the responses this weekend to Chas dying, the sense of a sudden rebuilding of old communities (however online and however shaky) has felt lovely and painful and a little bewildering. I don't know if Mum and Dad would have cared that much. But they'd have cared about the loss of the familiar and they'd have cared that I care and that makes me feel sad.
I cried.
I cried, I think, because the one person I really want to talk to about this died last year. The one person more ambivalent about our upbringing than me, the one person who I know - despite him being The Anti-Chas in so many ways - would have helped make sense of all this stuff, who would have helped me place it all in context, who would have offered insights no-one I've ever met or ever will could match, who would have felt the loss of this old beardy friend/stranger just as deeply: that one person is no longer with me. I miss him and I'll always miss him and we'd have had such a laugh about all this and he'd have listened to me in the way only people who really love you listen.
So. Right now I'm picturing that person - the person who was key witness to my life - playing piano in The Wonder while Chas and Dave stand, leaning, singing 'Gertcha' with him. And I want to buy them all a pint.
The five scariest words in the English language are, without doubt, ‘Misha's flying the plane now'...
This afternoon I sat in the back of the aeronautical equivalent of a Reliant Robin and was flown from Tel Aviv to Haifa by a twenty-year-old. And Misha. Who has never, ever, flown a plane before.
We clambered in. We took off. I clung on to the seat in front of me. I mumbled. I swore. I giggled. About five rattly, shakey, hyperventilating minutes had gone when the pilot first spoke. It took me thirty seconds or so to realise he had just said, 'you've got control now Misha.' I gripped the back of the seat in front of me even harder. I tried CBT, DBT, EMDR, self-hypnosis, mindfulness and slapping myself in the face. Which was never going to work because I now found I was completely unable to let go of the seat. And I was no longer breathing. My heart was about to explode. I was more frozen-with-fear frightened than I've ever been in my life.
And then God joined me in the back of the plane. I hadn’t spoken to him for many years but I felt he was probably the only person that could help. He didn't, but we did make a couple of deals he might one day hold me to (particularly the one we made when I saw the pilot was - at Misha's instruction - taking a video of her flying. Which meant he wasn't actually concentrating. At all.)
Meanwhile, our call sign, it turned out, was 'Charlie Whisky Hotel.' Misha, as soon as she realised this, said she fancied some whiskey. I said I really fancied a hotel. And some charlie.
Eventually, we landed. I think it may have been Syria. It might have been Lebanon. Either way, we staggered out, wandered across the tarmac, walked through the front door of a little hut, watched the exchange of some small packages between the pilot and a moustachioed security man, showed our passports, and then walked out the back of the little hut to a bit of wasteground our plane had mysteriously - and remarkably quickly - been moved to.
I swore even more on the flight back. Misha was now - distressingly - even more confident, saying things like 'I've got the hang of this' and singing 'Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines'. At one point she used the word 'kamikaze', at another, the term 'loop the loop'. About ten minutes in, with no apparent response from the pilot, she was bouncing up and down dancing, whilst pulling the joystick back - hard.
An eternity later, we were back in Tel Aviv. We paid (oh yes, we had to pay for this trauma), said our goodbyes and got in the car. As Misha drove the rental Kia towards an electric fence and a big red 'Danger! No Entry!' sign, I spotted two peacocks. The sky had turned a strange shade of green. She braked suddenly. She revved and revved again. Then she slammed her foot down on the accelerator and we took off again towards the fence. At that moment, I knew. We weren't back safely: we must have crashed somewhere over Beirut. And the ghost of Crouch End's own Amy Johnson was now driving us towards another oblivion.
A new short story is published today at Storgy!
Crack
Malik sits there, the day after his seventeenth birthday, staring at the clock, waiting for the bell. Every weekday at this time he feels the punch of his heart, the push-pull of his breath, the trembling in his legs. Every weekday at this time he knows he’s a couple of hours away from talking to the walrus. Today, though, is different: today he’s also a couple of hours from learning The Secret. Oh yes, yes: he’s old enough now, finally, old enough to be trusted with the words – and then the merging. What he’s feeling right now – knowing that, at dusk, he and the walrus are to melt, fully, finally, into one – isn’t just the usual sharp, childish thrill. No, this is a warm flood of absolute joy, joy beyond scoring that hat-trick last year, joy beyond Ivaana giving him that handjob round the back of Pissifik, joy beyond glue and beyond gin, joy beyond the understanding of any of the adults in this sweet, stupid land, joy harder and stronger than – as Mum would say – even the oceans could bring.
‘Oi, Jensen!’ The joy dissolves as abruptly as it arrived. The teacher – bald, tired, resigned Mr Lehman – is asking him something. Again. Malik shrugs, Lehman stares, starts to say something, and then shrugs himself. He turns to his next victim and Malik steps back into his own mind.
The walrus told him last week that it’s ‘probably’ thirty-four: seventeen years older than Malik, exactly double his age (and about a hundred years younger than Lehman…) But there’s something so… ancient about the walrus – something pure and wise, like… Dumbledore?… that tells you that, actually, it’s aged beyond hurt and fear and horniness, that it’s older even than the whales and the mountains and the sky.
Hmm. Malik dreamed last night that the walrus was laughing at him. And he knows that dreams foretell opposites, always. The walrus will be there by the lake, he has no doubt – and what has to happen will happen.
He watches the clock click round to 2.57 and takes a long, deep, slow breath in, just as Lyberth showed him. He holds the breath for a count of three, then lets it go, gently. She’d be impressed. Nothing should be rushed today. The walrus will want him calm. The book Ivaana gave him before… before she went, said the same: if you want to merge, you have to make sure you don’t try too hard.
He feels a little jab of anger when he remembers Ivaana telling him that the walrus isn’t real. But she’s – was – a girl and a European and scared of dogs and ice and helicopters. Nice tits and hair but, like most of them, separate from and mistrusting of our ways. Losing her is probably the best thing that could have happened.
It’s 2.58. His mind takes him back to his very first day at school. Old Lyberth -‘you must do everything she tells you, Malik,’ Mum had said – had hair the colour of a satsuma. Like all the old ones, her face was weather-aged, brown, leathery, folds wrapped into each other. Her cardigan was beige and prickly, prickly when she grabbed him and doubly prickly when she picked him up, held him to her bosom, whisked him off toward the horrible brown building and away from Mum. She was thin, Mrs Lyberth – it looked like you could snap her arms with your finger and thumb. Her skin was chalky. Like all the old ones, like Mum, she smelled of seal and soap and restrooms and the church hall. After she grabbed him, he’d caught her looking unsure for a second – a little frightened? – so he squirmed, tried to break free from her boney hug. He kicked her and she yelped in pain and surprise, squeezed him hard, whispered, ‘Don’t you ever do that again, young man.’ He can feel the redness in his face again now, can hear the snap and spit in her voice. And he can see her grin: that afternoon she gave him the tupilaq and told him the first of her stories, told him about the walrus.
Lyberth liked him, he was sure of that from the beginning. She was kind to him when none of the others – kids or teachers – were. She would magically appear whenever the others were taking the piss out of his limp or his lisp or Mum. Kindness. How come kindness always seemed to demand so much in return? It’s sad, he thinks, that, soon, Lyberth would know the trouble she caused by introducing him to the old ways. And yet it can’t be helped. He can’t worry about the old people. Their flesh would soon be gone. Only their words would last.
He fiddles with the tupilaq in his right trouser-pocket, feels its bumps and ripples and sharp edges. It’s a couple of inches high, it’s white, a carved, silly, snarling, grotesque doll that looks a bit like old Lehman. The tupilaq can damn, damn to death. But it can also backfire on the one who uses it. Never use it on someone more powerful than you, Lyberth once said. He stops touching it.
The ulu is in his other pocket, but he definitely doesn’t want to touch that. Not yet. Sometimes he forgets Ivaana’s no longer here. It’s two weeks now. Two weeks without her. He looks out of the classroom window. The snow is edging back from the college building. Since the weekend, the day has started to hold its own in its battles with the night. Summer will be here soon, the time when the night shrinks and Dad gets angrier and cries more. Malik takes a swig from his water-bottle, looks over at half-dead, droning Lehman. He sighs. He thinks, then: two hours. There’s less than two hours – hopefully – till they can merge and the world can change. In the meantime there’s Burgermania.
It opened yesterday. All the adults have been talking about it for months, especially Dad. Another bloody thing from Denmark. It’ll just cause trouble. They’ll all get even fatter than they are now. What’s wrong with traditional food? ‘Jobs? Jobs?!’ Oh yes, it’ll bring jobs. For Europeans. And all the profit will go back there. ‘Jobs’, can you believe it? Blah blah blah.
Jesus. Malik doesn’t care about all that shit. He just knows that right now he needs a double cheeseburger. And fries. And a banana milk shake. Whatever anyone thinks. Whatever the walrus thinks, or Ivaana thinks, or Dad, or Lyberth, or stupid, old Lehman.
The bell rings and he leaps to his feet and runs. He runs out the classroom, straight down the corridor, into the playground, through the old gate, past the bus stop, round the corner, down towards the harbour, up again, round the hill, past the RockHouse with its peeling-paint, rust-red plyboard Stratocaster balancing precariously on the roof, past the hotel and up to Burgermania’s front door. He bursts through the door.
Brigid, of all people, is standing behind the counter. Brigid, who’s moving to Copenhagen next month. Brigid – who never misses a chance to tell everyone this town’s a shithole, to tell Malik he’s a waster – is here. He creeps up towards her. Don’t look in her eyes. Whatever you do.
‘Um… a burger, please. And fries. And a milk shake.’
‘No fries today. Or milk shakes.’
‘Oh. Can I have a quarter pounder then?’
‘No quarter pounders. Just Big Ones.’
‘I’ll have a Big One then, please.’
She holds out her hand. He passes her a fifty krone note.
‘It’s fifty-two.’ He checks in his pocket but he knows he doesn’t have anything else – he stole the fifty from Dad’s wallet this morning but couldn’t get anything else.
‘Fifty-two’, she says again.
‘Can I… pay you later?’.
’Fifty. Two.’
‘OK. Um… how about just a normal burger?’
‘We haven’t got any.’
‘OK.’
Malik closes his eyes, takes a breath, opens his eyes again, looks around, picks up a plastic tomato ketchup container – sauce-smeared, dented, in the shape of a tomato – and flings it at Brigid. It misses her spectacularly, splats against the advert on the wall for Free Toys With Every SupaMeal!, most of it splashing onto the kindly polar bear who’s sitting there, laminated and smiling, drawing kindly attention to the special offers. Brigid stares at him. He stares back. He knows full well the tupilaq in his pocket can kill, which is why he so rarely uses it and, as he turns and walks as slowly as he can towards the door, he tries to breathe some peace into the place, into his heart. No good, though: he turns back, his breath roaring, takes the wooden figure from his pocket, holds it up towards Brigid in the way he saw the priest do to his Mum with a cross once. He watches Brigid grin, grimace and then cringe away from him, watches her look hard to the floor. He feels a little sad. And scared. He turns again, slings the door open and the sharp afternoon air smacks him in the face. He runs and runs and runs, down through the town and up the hill, past the new stadium. He’s crying, like a girl. He keeps running until he stops, until the road starts getting rockier, twistier, colder.
Around here, the Mountain Ash start thinning and the air changes. He turns the corner and, as he sees Tasersuaq, he feels his breath start to slow. Dad always called the lake ‘She’. She’s still covered in ice, winking at him as always, summoning him to slip, slide, skate across Her. Into her. He edges his way through the dark-purple heather to Her side. He puts his right foot out onto the ice. Then the left. He can hear the little cracks She always makes. He puts his right foot forward again, then the left. In five minutes, he’s standing there, at Her centre, ice all round him, a darkening sky above, deep, deep water waiting for him below. He starts to sing Mum’s favourite: Fernando.
We were young and full of life and none of us prepared to die
He sings louder, louder, louder until his voice is echoing over the lake, into the trees and mountains, into the heavens. The lake seems to crack Herself louder in response. A heron flies over him. He can hear a jet-ski from way up the other end. He finishes the song, stands for a minute or two and then starts to creep his way back to shore. The cracking beneath him seems even louder now, more threatening. She sounds a bit angry. He slips, feels himself falling back, slides onto his arse, his wrist twisting a little underneath him. Ouch. He struggles to his feet, a redness back in his face. Eventually, he gets back to the shore, scrambles up onto the path. He’s really bloody cold now. His wrist hurts. At least half an hour or so still before dusk and the walrus. The late-afternoon mist is starting to steam down. He should go back, that’s what the rest of those wimps would do. He turns instead away from town, starts striding, swatting away the trudge of the slope and the pain in his wrist, up past the old shepherd’s hut, past the strange mound of stones that looks like Shrek, past the old abandoned motorbike. The path ends then. There’s a hundred-metre stretch of snow between him and the pylon on the grass that sits tucked beneath the mountain. He steps into the snow; it leaps up at him, swallows his feet, his legs. After a few steps, it’s just above his waist. He takes a breath, hauls himself slowly through, drags himself onto the wet grass. He pauses, takes a breath, walks up to the pylon, leans on it, looks up at the wire running into the mist, wonders what would happen if he climbed up, swung from the wire. He’s hungry. The mist is becoming thicker, colder. He looks back towards the town but the big block of flats – Ivaana’s flats – that overlooks the lake is nearly invisible now. Ahead of him, there’s the boulder-dashed slopes and the mountains.
He and Dad would climb these easily in the old days, make their way comfortably to the other side. But Malik knows he doesn’t have Dad’s power, turns to his left to take the gentler, longer path. He’s apprehensive, can feel damp inside his boots now. He heads across toward the fjord, tripping a couple of times on small rocks. He puts the hood of his parka up, pulling the toggles tight. He zips it up, wishes he had gloves with him, wonders where he left them. He walks for a few minutes more. The mist is fog now – it’s making it impossible to see more than a few yards in front of him now. And then snow starts tapping his cheeks. Shit. He keeps walking. The fjord isn’t far from here. Can’t be. Soon, he can’t see anything at all. He trips again on a rock. He can feel his heart beating. He hears a yelp – a fox? Or worse? Shit shit shit. Keep walking. Keep walking. It’s so cold. Keep walking.
Another – what? Ten minutes? Fifteen?- shuffles past. He wonders when – whether – anyone will bother looking for him if doesn’t get back for the fair. Death feels, suddenly, a little closer. He can hear Ivaana’s laugh, see Lyberth’s sad, disappointed look. And then, suddenly, there it is! The bothy. The coldharbour. Funny how sometimes Dad uses those weird European words. It’s a wooden, six by ten hut, asymmetric, off-brown, neglected. His heart is beating; he pushes the door open. There she is. Ivaana is sitting in the worn, mauve armchair, in the same position as last time. And the time before. He closes the door, the wind sighing as he does so. He remembers her saying there’s no such thing as an accident, at the party a couple of weeks ago. Too European, Iv is. Was. And sometimes too Kalaallit. As usual, he says hello to her and as usual she says nothing. He sits down on the hard, splintered floor, next to her. He looks up. Not a sound. He wonders what he would do if she spoke. She always scared him, even when she was alive. She scares him more now, in frozen silence. He’s hungrier than he’s ever been: and so, so cold. If only she were… He stands up again, goes over to the table, opens the drawer. It’s gone. He left a Pepperoni here last week and now it’s gone. He glances over at her, back down at the drawer, closes it.
Ivaana’s eyelashes are a fierce white. Her skin seems whiter too. He stares at her chest, waiting for a rise and fall. He wonders what her tits would look like now, then shivers. Her cardigan is mottled, worn. Her eyes are half-closed, her face waxy and grey.
He’s a little surprised no-one’s found her yet. But the fishermen are up North at this time of year; the tourists won’t come until next month at the earliest. The first time he came here, to the bothy, was the happiest he’d ever been. It was Triple Danish afternoon, so he’d left at lunchtime, met Iv outside her flats. Birds were squawking; the sun was shining; a tractor rumbled somewhere down near town, still trying to extract something – anything – from the raw evening fields. When they got here, they found someone had left a bottle of Johnnie Walker on the table, and a tin of pears, and a musk-ox bone cup. No tin-opener, though. And no whisky in the bottle. But the place felt like home. Because Ivaana was here with him. Because her hair seemed even redder than usual, her dancer’s walk even prouder. He knew she might well have rather been anywhere else with anyone else, but it was OK. She sang some old song of her grandmother’s and they talked about ancestors and the age of the shark that had washed up last week and the poison of its meat, and they fucked till morning.
The second time he came here, on his own, the walrus came, spoke to him, told him to bring a sacrifice next time.
The third time he came here, he saw what could be if he let the walrus merge with him. Ivaana had decided she couldn’t be with him anymore and the walrus had to have its sacrifice, so…
He waits now. And he talks to Ivaana. Sometimes he thinks he should apologise. She probably didn’t want an ulu between the ribs, an ulu of all things. He knows, if he’s honest, why he used that, why he stole it from the never-visited museum in town. Because he’s not supposed to, as a man. An ulu must only ever be used by a woman. Fuck them. Fuck Lyberth and her kindness. Fuck the old ones. They gave this land away years ago. It belongs to us now, the not-European/not-Kalaallit. The Nothings.
He sits, waits, notices his foot tapping on the wooden floor. Ivaana’s presence, her absent presence, feels reassuring, warming. And soon he hears the rumbling, scratching scrape of the walrus.
You never see the walrus.
You never see the walrus. That was the first sign for Malik that there was real magic here. Back when he was a kid and Dad used to come home from the bar, the front door slamming open and slamming shut again… it sounded just like the walrus does. Scrape-slam-creak-slam. Rumble. Shake. He feels a little of the same fear he felt back then now, as the door of his bothy bursts open. The walrus’ head is poking in. He knows it is.
You couldn’t see the walrus, you could only hear him. Her. He/she had a voice like the man in that chocolate ad. Like a thousand deep men. Except Malik doubted whether The Chocolate Man spat sticky phlegm every time he spoke.
‘How. Are. You. Malik?’ The stuff goes on his cheek, his chin, his forehead. One wet, snotty globule spatters into his right eye. He knows he can’t recoil. He knows he needs to be strong, firm, hard. Otherwise…
‘How are you?’ The walrus sounds impatient, a little weary.
‘I’m fine. I’m… ready.’
‘You’re ready? And yet you hate, you throw things, you hurt women. Women… other than her.’ He heard the huge, creased head of the walrus creak round, knew it was nodding at poor, cold Ivaana.
Malik feels himself redden. ‘I didn’t want to do it, you know that. She… she just kept taking the piss. About you. About the ulu. About coming from this place. About staying in this place. And you said…’
The walrus snorts. Malik can’t tell if it’s a sneer or a laugh or a shnuffle of resignation. ‘And you respond to truth with violence? Yet you want the Secret. You’re too young.’
He knows he shouldn’t let the walrus see how angry he was. ‘I know I’m ready. The soul of this place is in me.’
There’s a sniff then – of contempt, this time? Of sadness? ‘’Soul’. Alright. Promise me: you’ll rest when you’ve done it. You’ll accept – just accept – and not try to change. Have you brought the woman-knife?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then say the words I give you, kill me with it. It will be hard work. But you know that.’
Malik feels Ivaana’s eyes on him. What if…? She’s a tourist. They’re all tourists.
He feels tears come again. He sees a flickering image of Christmas back before Mum went and Dad started drinking. Fish, whisky, potatoes, seal. Songs from before the Europeans came. Songs that made no sense to him but made him feel good. Because they all sang them. Because they belonged to the songs.
‘Do it.’ The walrus has moved closer to him, he senses its vibrations, its tough skin, its ivory ferocity; its voice iss, now, a thunderous whisper.
‘What are the words?’
‘You know them already, boy.’
But he doesn’t. He doesn’t.
‘Tell me the words. How can I merge without the words? You told me…’
‘I told you many things. You already know them all.’
The rage returns. He feels in his pocket, feels the tupilaq and the ulu. He’s absolutely sure he could kill the walrus with the doll. But that’s not what the earth wants, what history demands of him. That’s not the way they will merge. Old Lyberth – who had once lived without the New God, had lived with all the people, family upon family, in the Big Houses, in the time before they were told it was immoral and they were diced-up into ‘families’ – said that, told him change happened through words, and words only.
The walrus’ breath clangs and clunks. It stinks even worse now: sweet and sour. Malik reaches up, touches it for the first time. Its whiskers are soaked with drool. He withdraws his hand quickly, the damp turning instantly to ice. What must it be like to live in a warm place, a place with day and night all year round? He’d know soon…
He shoves his hands into his trouser pockets, feels again the cold ivory of the tupilaq and the knife, its rough sharpness. He wonders how many seals his grandmother had skinned with it. He takes it out. It looks… innocent. A small, rough triangle of faded slate, no threat to anyone. To anything. He pictures Brigid and her fear and her silly boasting. He pictures Ivaana’s sad smile.
He realises he hasn’t considered how to use it to kill the walrus. You dig with an ulu. You scrape, slice, chivvy, chop. You don’t really stab. It’s a woman’s weapon.
He tastes the walrus’ amusement, knows it’s staring – harder this time – and he knows its great eyes are glistening, knows it’s shaking its head gently, taking a step towards him.
‘Time to be a man, Malik’.
He feels his heart leap. He isn’t sure this time who’s spoken. The voice came from the chair by the fireplace. And it sounds like Ivaana’s. He thrusts forward with the ulu, feels it touch harsh, wrinkled flesh, slip off.
‘Harder’. It is Ivaana’s voice. ‘You could kill me, easy, that was no problem at all, was it? You could kill a girl. But you’re scared of merging, Malik, aren’t you? Scared of moving away from this place? Scared of using the words, scared of taking on something bigger than you?’ Fuck you, Ivaana. He spits, thrusts again, chopping sideways and inwards and he feels the walrus’ skin split. He pushes, soft, warm, liquid pouring onto his hand. He pushes again, pulls, slices, feels tears fall, hears the small groans of his walrus’s pain, hears them grow louder as he keeps up his onslaught, punching and lashing and digging deep into the thing with all the power and tears of his life, as he hears the song – ‘every hour, every minute seemed to last eternally’ – and the voice of Lyberth, as he hears Ivaana telling him to do it, DO IT, be a fucking man, as he hears the cracks of ice on the Autumn lake and the squawk of gulls returned from the South and the lap of water on the bottle-strewn beach and the beating of his own heart and the soil falling onto Mum’s casket and the song of the helicopters and the ferries and the chatter of Dad’s radio.
One final up-and-in thrust and he steps back; he knows. He hears the walrus slump down, its head hitting the floor with an umph of final breath. For a moment, a moment that flickers in, holds him tight, then moves away like one of those parasites that blind the sharks, his eyes are opened, there’s a firework-flash and he sees the walrus in all its glory, hears it give him the words. He turns and sees Ivaana smiling, turns back and sees the walrus wink one big eye. The bothy goes black, a deep, hellish black. Malik feels a hand – a paw? – at his throat, feels it squeeze, feels it push, feels himself grow tired, feels himself smile, feels himself fall towards the bothy floor, feels his own head hit the side of the bed, knows The Merging is coming.
^^^
The policeman kneels down, lifts Malik gently up. He looks once more around the bothy, walks back through the door and out into the blizzard, nudging the creaky slab of wood shut behind him. A tupilaq – one of those crappy little things they sold to tourists – falls out of the kid’s pocket. The policeman kicks it away, looks down at the boy for a moment, then walks carefully back to the helicopter.
After a brief afternoon appearance as The... um... Poet In The Phonebox, I'll be doing this on Saturday night:
It’s the end of a week in which I’d said goodbye to another fine, wild man at his funeral and held hands there with long-gone riches. It's the end of a week in which I’d sat at the Inquiry and watched videos of a five-year-old boy in an Arsenal shirt who knew in his strong, bright heart he had life and a thousand years of play ahead of him, and had then hugged the dad who still saw every minute of every day that same boy’s death, a death five floors down from the place they both called home. It's the end of a week in which I’d felt old and in pain and impatient, with the hallucinating man on the 41, with the world, with my indecisions and rage and sadnesses. It’s the end of a week in which I’ve realised the need to find a way to open myself up fully to the good stuff that keeps running across no-man’s land towards me and being ruthlessly cut down.
At the end of this particular week, we walk through Victoria Park, along its Homerton edge: calm enough, content enough for now. The lazy, ugly, corporate, corrugated fence thinks it’s keeping us outside the circus and the young, happy, special people safely inside. For an abrupt moment, I want to see if I can climb it, want to see if I can knock it down, want to be the tank, herd, explosion - whatever - that bursts through its silly attempts at demarcating and containing and reducing and solidifying. And then we hear the rhythmic Jersey bang of her voice and the jazz-anger of Ginsberg’s Howl starts doing a little dissolving for me. This was the first poetry I ever heard and felt with all of me; one lonely, alien adolescent day I bought a crumpled old anthology of Beat poems and prose in a charity shop and it was the first time I’d come across words that made me want to write and sing and simultaneously told me I would never write this well, never completely sing. Stumbling into that book was the first time I ever wanted to be American and the first time I knew I couldn’t be. Remembering that 1975 kid now, trying to hold him tight, I feel the tight, wet, heartandthroatandeyes shiver of poignancy that usually belongs just to music - sweet saudade, sweet hiraeth, sweet melancholy, sweet self-indulgence, sweet victimhood - and I make a joke because I’m too tearful too often these days and I need a distraction from that and from the strange thrill of this invisible woman reading that man’s words.
We walk round to the entrance, wrongly, absurdly away with each step from the stage and the voice of kind, righteous anger. We shuffle our way through the barriers, get searched, walk through some more barriers, get searched again, buy comically expensive wine, head towards the voice and the stage, buy some more comically expensive wine, walk back towards the voice and the stage.
I think about the truth. I think about the fact that I was never actually a great fan of Patti Smith. I could pretend I was, just like I could pretend I saw The Ramones when they first came here, which, despite my mate’s protestations, I never actually did. I did like Gloria and Because The Night and Pissing In A River and I liked being annoyed by and knocked flat by some of her poems. But in 1976 and 1977 and 1978, when she became real to us, she was far too much for me, she was too female, too unfeminine, too angry, too clever, too intense. Patti Smith’s always been a little too much for me, a little too shadowed and harsh. And not just in the 70s - all my life, I’ve tried to spend time with the comfortingly romantic, the uplifting, the poppy-vigorous and hopeful, in art and in music and in poetry. Death scares me. Drugs scare me. The Gothic scares me. New York scares me. Revolution scares me. Though - of course - all of them draw me to them as I draw them to me and the time a couple of yeards back I realised I now loved Leonard Cohen was the time I realised I should finally give up resisting what’s real.
But... but there was always that line. You know the one: Jesus died... With each new sign from the universe that it’s not 1976 and I’m not 14 anymore, I’ve been finding my relationship with Him becoming more difficult. He was easier to dismiss a few years ago. But now He keeps creeping in like a sly, sepia memory, like an unwanted lodger, like next-door’s cat. My sins are my sins.
She does 'Land'. It's joyous and furious and tremulous in all its mad, silly, knowing, fuck-you nods to rocks past, present and future. I can't stop staring at her. She’s so old. I’m so old. She is absolutely sure about us both. And then, in the middle of it all, she starts flirting with London and taunting our mind-forged manacles and mentions Bunhill Fields and Blake and Plath and the glory of only feeling and only seeing and of our shot, knifed city, and I suddenly remember going to see her small, old photos in an exhibition somewhere or other a few years ago with one of my fine, wild friends and being intrigued and unmoved and a bit disappointed and then Patti smiles and I cry.
Patti smiles and I cry. I cry because, I think - I’ve no idea really - because in that moment it all comes together, it all connects. Feet come off brakes, masks are removed, eyes are opened to all the loss and regret and sense of time slipping and all the contradictions of idealism and pragmatism, to all the hope and joy that the words and rhythms of the good people - the sort-of flawed, sort-of holy people like Patti Smith - can deliver, to the magics they conjure with ancient, eternal beauty and passion, magics that offer daylight and redemptions and resurrections whilst dragging us through the nights and struggles and inevitabilities we all share.
Dusk lurks. The music stops. The sky darkens and it looks like it might rain. The moment’s gone, the quick tears with it. We applaud. She leaves us. The old East End is out there, past the fence, and there Blake and his wife are sunbathing in the nude to shock their sexless visitors and Sylvia's running rings round Ted. Because of them, I think - desperate to stay now and desperate to get home - because of them and because of Patti and because of all the years of this city. It's the end of a week when something changed.
Tonight we watched YouTube. We watched Lionel Blair. We watched some moustaches. We watched a slowed-down Carpenters song (yes, it's possible). We watched a Sony Walkman sit proudly on its plinth, The Star Prize. And then we played table tennis and listened to Earth, Wind And Fire.
We imagine ourselves in that hell. We imagine ourselves trapped. We imagine our children trapped. We imagine the decisions we would have to make. We imagine the bureaucrats and the wasters and the politicians and the profiteers. We imagine our revenge.
Today I was introduced as un poète. Which was nice. Though untrue. Today I was also introduced as un docteur de la tête. Which was also nice. Though even more untrue. I'm not sure, of course, what I am. Never have been. Intruder Syndrome's a powerful thing, but sometimes it stems from several grains of truth, not merely self-effacement or a lack of self-worth. I've always avoided wrapping myself in any of the cloaks I might have done - nurse, teacher, lecturer, writer, astronaut, whatever - because I don't feel I fit them and they don't really fit me. In the last six months of not working (or at least not doing real work...) I've stumbled even more when people have asked me what I do. I've been tempted to make something up, but I'm never convinced I can convincingly carry off the whole 'defensive midfielder for Spurs' or 'designer of the G-Wiz' things for very long.
I can choose though - and I can choose to describe myself as a father, a friend, a partner, a man, a human being, a woolly liberal. But I'm not going to. Instead, tomorrow I'm going to be un philosophe. And, at the weekend, I'll get them to introduce me as un mime.
We have a fear of silence: that was agreed. We would prefer twenty-four hours of daylight to twenty-four hours of night: that, too, was agreed. We would make rubbish Inuits; we could understand the absurd fears of the woman who hid her missing teeth with her hand when she spoke to you; we had no opinion (unlike our new friends) about whether we preferred very short grass or slightly longer grass; we heard nightingales for the first time: each of these was agreed. What wasn't quite agreed was whether we would ever have moved towards the horizon, to Bugarach, to the upside-down mountain, to avoid the apocalypse that the New Agers said would come in 2012. And we couldn't agree whether we would have then willingly gone with the aliens (oh yes) to their planet, their time.
There's something about the air here that's thick with craziness and something about the land that grows hope. (France has, apparently, a cult watchdog - The Interministerial Mission for Monitoring and Combating Cultic Deviances - to keep an eye on the vulnerable, the hopeful, the unleashed. If I learn nothing more this month, I'm pleased I've learned that.)
This time? You're off to France. Ryanair. You don't have Priority Boarding. You glare at those in the Priority Boarding queue. You should have got Priority Boarding.
Soon, you're above Carcassonne, circling. Circling. Circling. The pilot speaks: 'Sorry for the delay, ladies and gentlemen. There appears to be a hole in the runway. The French tell us they should have it fixed in about fifteen minutes.' You smile with the others. As the plane jerks to a punchy, paroxysmal halt on the holey runway, the stewardess lets out a gasp of shock and fear. You smile with the others.
Later, you sit and watch as a bat collides with a branch of the almond tree. There's a date inscribed high up on the front of the house. You try to remember if it was Napoleon who changed the calendar or if it was one of those Central Asian dictators. Or both. You wonder if you'd change the names of the months, of the days of the week, of every single person, if you had the power.
The rabbit hutches are worn, neglected, locked. Histories murmur from within the stone walls. At seven, the Angelus tolls. You think about Skibbereen and famine pits and colder, simpler days. You miss the heart of your life. The light here is sharp yellow, the heat hard and strong. You're glad to be here and so, so glad for the wit and wisdom that's here with you. And you want to be at home.
You know that moment when you look at the little plastic tray of airline food and you've no idea what it is? And then you eat it and you still don't know what it is? I think this blog might be a bit like that.
Imagine Van Morrison singing Tupelo Honey to you as you read this - he's singing it to me as I write it:
Anyway. Greenland. They say to expect beauty. They say to expect cold - cold more savage than a libertarian's heart. I'm never prepared for either beauty or cold, yet both bite me frequently, even in London: they shouldn't be a problem...
Hmm. I think I may be 'in search of something chance would never bring'. Yeah, I just surprised myself by reading Edward Thomas, despite the rawness of emotions of loss and sadness connected to his stuff at the moment. I give my imaginary God thanks for the friend who helped confirm my love for old ET. And - yes, yes - I need, as He pointed out, to trust myself more.
So. I have excitement and I have hope and I have fear and I have a sensible warm jacket and a kind of agitated acceptance. I have one pair of trousers for a whole month, due to an organisational malfunction caused by free wine and desire. At the airport I was tempted to buy a jaunty hat. I have no idea why.
I'm leaving behind, of course, love and loss and guilt. I'm bringing love and loss and guilt with me. She's worried I'll disappear. In the sudden switchings-off of the adult light I worry that - given time and space - she may see me too clearly. There, you see? That's what I want from The Ungreenland: I want to learn to celebrate my visibility. I want to let the doubts and self-stabbings fade into the ice and stay in blurred childhood where they belong. I want to hug the truth. She sees me already and it's good. Something sweeter and deeper than love.
Full stop. Four hours before we land. The Shetland Islands are 36,000 feet below. The oughtism (I stole that) is disappearing. I'm hurting with greed for those first moments.
Heart's cameras at the ready? They'll be round to collect the plastic tray soon.
Did you know Greenland sharks have been known to live to more than 500 years old?
PS As we drifted out of the clouds just now and the island came into view - vast and white and broken and whole - every single passenger craned his or her neck to kiss a piece of its slow wonder.
#Greenland #Greenlandpioneer #Qaqortoq