Fortunes of the Sea-Sick

Excerpts from Fortunes of the Sea-Sick:









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i knew difficulties.

He checked his deportment first. Then he checked which pocket contained his coins, and which pocket contained his notes. He padded his buttocks, feeling the bulge of his keys in one pocket, mobile phone in the other.

A large neon-coloured sign offered 2 CHICKEN & CHIPS £1,00p. Silver-cobwebs obscured the myriad faces of a group of three youths of child-bearing age pacing about inside. Although he felt intimidated by young men, he composed an expression of distraction, as if pre-occupied with serious thoughts. Feeling assured, he raised his arm to the rattling red door and staggered through towards the counter.

For him: Number 3 meal boss.

He rested both arms on the high formica counter and stared at the contents of the number 3 meal, listed on a lit display above the hot display cabinet. No.3: 2 chicken chips and coke. His eyes scanned across the menu. His jaw dropped and he yawned heavily. A ringed paw rose and wiped his eye-ducts.

For him also: Can I get an apple pie bruv.

For no meal is complete without one. He pays and receives change. And sir saunters off to insert the change of a 5-00 pound note into a fruit machine that has not paid out since August 2003. The young men are themselves distracted in animated conversation. A solace peopled, as silence is burnt with the hot oily blubber of other brothers' blabber.

For the young men: brother! Here is your order!

Brother I have no brother. His brothers glare out of the window at the top decks of passing buses on the other side of the road. The bad boys sit at the back of the bus !

With loathing, his fried fingers reached down into a freezer and dragged out a blue bag of frozen potato fries. With loathing, he emptied the bag into the wire basked seeped in the festering oil of the vicious deep fryer. With loathing, the fryer growled, hissed and belched back as the basket was dropped in. With loathing, dregs of oil drained off, the tongs selected two sweaty sections of chicken flesh. With loathing, an American style! apple pie was picked from the display with the same tongs. With the same loathing, the tongs spat out remarkably inefficient for these times. The same long night yawned. The machine jingled and cooed like a giddy baby poking tiny podgey fingers into mama's ears.

The man: this machine has stolen my money !

Young man: crackhead y'know!

Crackhead: Lord witness this - my deportment is strange. I am a fat pastor. My heart is choked with a black bile which no vapour can correct. But I have been cheated.

Young man: jokehead! Ka ka ka!

Jokehead: Sirs! Please! Do not fear any indiscretion. I carry little change, and what little I had I inserted into this machine of misfortunes! Please do not disturb me. Pardon me, I am a little flustered. I can say with some certainty – am I not among friends – that I am a pastor of Christ Life Ministries. I aim to convert all heathens and sinners to the good news. My god is a wrathful one, and my belly roars like a lion on the eve of the final judgement day. Number 3! Hold on – Number 3 meal boss!

For the man: number 3 boss! Boss! Boss man! Number 3 meal boss!

Boss man: but wha-wabwouwt mwy mwommey! wa wa wa!

For the man: any salt boss?

Boss man: no no no! Not for me thanks, I am a dead man. [exits]

Young man: My heart would fain muster some cod-profound gesture.
But there is nothing inside of me, not even time
Which ever shapes and etches and erodes these bones;
So I say (and I do) nothing, except watch on
As the bedroom lamp flickers and the hours pass,
Days I barely register.

Fruit machine: Oh lord! Lord! Poetry is so gay – you know!

Young man [raises his voice several decibels and octaves]:
I keep the company of fools;
Friends I love, I bleed for. I claim no truth or honesty.
There is no truth or goodness in this age madam,
Only the cocksure blather of a million different yous
Stepping all over each others noses in order to.....
Nah shit! My fucking....my fucking's chips as got a hair in it!

[Curtain fold, as a volley of chips, ketchup sachets, mobile phones, churlish abuse and paper cups barrage against the formica counter and the loathsome man behind it]

6 for 5

I had spent all our money on unlucky numbers and horses. I had been barred from all the best local shops and pubs. Most of my teeth were knocked out: the few remaining black and rotten stubs loitered like cigarette butts outside A & E entrances. I had cataracts on my eyes, ulcers in my belly, stones in my kidneys and piles on my arsehole. I schlepped around town with Morris, a syphilitic wife-abusing bastard from Sligo who shared a room with me at the hostel. Each of his fat red sausage-fingers was adorned with fat gold sovereign rings which he used to smash the walls with. He was your classic tinker, wearing the same sheepskin-jacket and buckled black leather shoes. Each day we'd go out to the pubs and steal money from tourists and students. We were alright, yeah. I was possibly happy.

Like everything that gradually becomes a part of my life, I began to find even the sound of him disgusting. But like shit on a shoe we were stuck together. No-one else in the world would have us. Our children loathed us. We'd ripped off all our friends. Even the police had come to ignore us. I owed Morris a packet. Each week the interest doubled. I was his vassal, his lackey. It was only me and this fat greasey fuck. The desperate and miserable struggle of our companionship was becoming too much to bear.

I had been planning a runner for a long time now. I'd stashed some money aside under the in-sole of my boots. Now all I needed was his cigs. I sank a few jars with him in the William Stanley, waiting for him to piss so I could swipe his fags and phone and disappear. But the fat tinker would not piss. The udder on that man! He had a gut, I tell yer. Well he had a man to meet nearby. As usual I followed without a word. Although I could hide it, the fractured flicker of his eyes showed that his nerves were shot to fuck. As we left the bustle and the battle of the high street, he asked me why.

“Why what?” I said, acting innocent, though preparing myself inside for a vicious familiar blow. My stomach stewed in a self-pity soup.

“Why what! You know what I’m talking about it man, I can see it all over your face”, he kicked back. I swiped a glance at his face, discerning immediately something close to actual sadness. This was no dress rehearsal - this was going to become one of ‘those conversations’, where the polite boundaries of friendship are kicked over and the situation changes into the most barbaric game of chess. I could see that he had already got me by the collar, and as I gaped in paralysis “what should I say? What could I say?”, he took the blade out and directed it straight to my chest.

“Why do you think it’s ok to treat people as you do? You’re a fucking user. You hurt people and lie and make dirty false slanders and fucking false lying excuses…you hurt me man…you're a twisted fuck.”

I groaned and sighed, ostensibly. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard this before.

“….see you don’t give a fuck at all…you never change,…you come clean, you blame yourself, you castrate yourself in the most dramatic performances…you will do anything to get yourself out of a situation. And I am sick of it. You are a very small man, a drunk…I don’t want to see you again. You’re a hypocrite, a total fucking hypocrite bastard fucker I’ve ever met”.

I knew it was coming, but when the blade finally entered my body I still fell to the ground, like you do in films. It slipped in so easy, I looked down and almost laughed, it was mad thing seeing the black plastic handle stuck in my stomach, matching the sight of sudden great pain. I was dazed: I glanced from side to side, anywhere to avoid his piercing eyes, and clutched my queasy stomach. I felt like the bottom had fallen out of the floor. I felt really sick, like I was going to throw up all over him. Then I choked. I tried to take a deep breath but I kept missing my cue. Then I started running out of breath, but I couldn't slow down and concentrate, and as I choked more, the panic heightened. This wasn’t looking good.

Reader, I hope you will empathise with what you’re about to hear if you yourself have known this strange, and quite frankly deathly feeling. If not, I must warn you to condemn it outright. There are situations where either circumstances or something you have said results in the most disastrous piece of cruelty, all of your own making, where you become, without a doubt, nothing more than the most ludicrous lowlife imaginable. It is in moments like this that the true effect that your deplorable circumstances has on your soul is, even for the flash of a second, momentarily revealed. It is in such a moment that you find yourself recalling the lost images of all those countless eyes of persons you said to yourself you would never be, the broken and dead souls of the past, mothers, fathers, men in the street. In such a moment, you can only lie.

Here, simply responding to the accuser with the truth only exacerbates things ten times worse. If I told him that he was right, that I was just a hopeless hypocrite, a seminal bastard, perhaps even a complete gobshite, where would the solace be in that? It would not allow him to simply to spit on me: he would melt, wilt and wither right before my eyes, and disappear for good. No, I had to keep the illusion up. The truth is just another weapon in the right hands.

Truth be told, he publicly abused me and denounced me like this on a daily basis. I had quickly taken on the role of his estranged wife: listening to his moans, making him tea and breakfast, absorbing his drunken blows. He raped me in my bed and made me suck his cock. I was bound to him by a debt I could never repay. The interest grew day by day as my life shrunk less and less. Oh the agony and the ivy. Bla bla bla.

I woke up in hospital a few days later. They had me fucking morphine man, now they're proper painkillers. I looked around. Morris was sitting there. I must add that he did not even bring me grapes, the miserly sod.

an open letter to my enemies

Dear sir or madam,

You may prick my sides with your yards of countless demanding letters, but never shall I yield to your blunt arrows or cowardly entreaties.

We have mapped utopia, for God's sake we have mapped liberty, mind, heaven, hell, love, hate, women's buttocks and men's breasts, the four poles, the seven seas, the five needs and the one human desire; come now, stir, let us map THE IMPOSSIBLE, let us stake a claim to it, this once, we ragged possessors of absence, fridges full of only cheese and beer, empty bellies and blistered anonymity.

Necessity now permits us to steal life in all its bathos and hubris. We corrupt counts with gilt-coined eyes are in bed with obsession and we will donate our spare, spent and unending lives towards nothing, such as the cartography of THE IMPOSSIBLE, or the surveying of the space of one who goes back to sleep after the alarm clock has rung.

But I must first apologise for every single one of my caustic and camphorous crimes, all fifty-one of them (in prison one has time only for mathematics). Having recently discovered that FOREVER was either postponed, forgotten or abandoned, I have been lost, like that pink-arsed baboon on his escaped polar icecap, drifting up to the crest of the Great Wave off Kanagawa. I'm sad that you're here and I'm not and we grew older without realising it but I accept it. I'm happy that I once heard your laugh, whoever you are. It sounded simple and what some would call innocent, though I've always been sceptical of the motives of that word.

Don't speak to me now. Don't add me on TheirSpace or Facebore, or send a text from out of the distant blackness of the blue. Bedecked in tresses of tinsel and swaying hands, we blunder along the stations of this life in what can only be called progress, however absurd such a notion seems.

We ourselves are maps of strange and sinister districts of towns yet to be constructed. We suffer misery willingly as the accomplishment of our priggish cynicism. We witnesses, silent, motionless and only ever reacting in the negative, we suffer the fates of strangers. The one thing I can be sure of is that this is all I have to say.

Yours in wine,

Anon.

from the princess royal university hospital

I have no confessions. I cannot quote any passed or overheard remark. I cannot offer a plot with a coherent struggle or narrative involving the correct number of dramatic scenes, frustrations and resolutions. I am waiting only for the time to pass. What is for some the most valuable commodity, sacred in its scarcity, especially in a place like this, is to me nothing else but a burden right now. Visiting hours do not resume for another hour. So I sit here, pacing out a cold cup of coffee.

I've been willing the minutes to pass, the days to pass even. In my own stupid way I want to die, but only very slowly and gradually, so that it causes no great disturbance to anybody.

This may be symptomatic of the congenital Excessive Politeness Disorder (DA) that runs throughout my family. This disorder was originally diagnosed in an obscure 20^th century French medical encyclopedia by the forgotten eccentric Ramon Descaux (google his description of 'stomach mice' as well, if you can find it). Descaux called it 'Le Désordre Anglais de politesse', or 'Désordre Anglais' for short. As Descaux puts it (and you'll have to forgive my poor French reading here),

“English Disorder: a manner peculiar though not exclusive to the English, where the sufferer is determined not to infringe or cause “bother“ to the others, usually co-workers or the family members. This results in apologising frequently for any request or difficulty during conversation, even when it is justified or necessary in the fact of circumstance.

“e.g. Barrington: I am ever so sorry my dear, but please can you move your feet so that I can clean the spilt lager beer beneath them?

Coralie: Ok.

Barrington: Ooh, excuse me! Oops! Pardon me. Oops! Thank you, thank you. I'm so sorry for bothering your television-viewing.

Coralie: Sacre bleu!

“It results either in a pathetic display of obsesquieousness and servility which only irritates others, or a persecution complex where the sufferer scurries around with the constant paranoiac fear that all despise him. This fear is aggravated by the contempt this deference causes. One sufferer became fixated with images of St. Sebastian. Another found erotic gratification in working as a bell-boy in a decaying city-centre hotel...“

I know that anxious consternation about the impression you make on your peers is generally an adolescent obsession, angst. But I think shit only in this: I am a ghost and I glide through wherever I go like a cold breeze, causing only disturbance in some, indifference in most, and comfort for ther very few who are genuinely and beautifully strange. I am too thin, too quiet and too vague for mortal, fleshy persons; I rarely get the jokes and I'm too gangley and finger-tangled to relax in the company of anyone. Like literary ghosts I am invisible to the world, unable to be heard, and I haunt one or two, obtainable ideals, regret and the like.

public library confessions

We are a chance party of restrained baboons, with hands either holding up our chins or fidgeting in our pockets.

I observe this fact in environs neither clean nor lush, an east london public library where men gather for the warmth, free newspapers and computers. My day was unwanted and I was eager to see it pass through without event, though I was bereft of better alternatives for my life. I know this is best I'll find for now. The fact I do not feel profound despair or anxiety has to be to its credit, though I'm a little sore at this anhedonia.

I want education without the neckache, so I flick throughpages of well-regarded poets who have read far more old books than me. It's a mixture of bad jokes and invocations to dusty public school mythologies. I weep for a dearly-beloved cup of tea I consumed all too greedily earlier that day. (All our loves are snuffed as such, similar giddy rush and bitter aftertaste). I know I'm at war with time, and the more freedom I have the more I'll regret in times ahead what little I did with it.

“I sat stewing, mother. I paid homage to the common saints and grew base by degrees.“

in uxbridge.

Meek and mawkish junior stars

Insipid and Topshop-thin, think

Nothing is,

Except for the win -

The baby blankets

Youthful ambition's wrapped within.

Age is four-score nonsense.

Here, amidst concrete study blocks,

Bamboo garden furniture and papercups

You'll see everything blooms once

And only once

The rent is spent and the dreams are bent

The students loll around outside libraries

And said study blocks,

As beautiful and vague as idle flowers

Daddy's go-getting swine lunging to

Lick the ears of the

Quiet, obtainable ones,

Cider cans find use in urine or ash depositories,

Some man's fingers provide source of olfactory entertainment

Similarly: ideals are expressed solely

In the choice of hair and clothing .:

Furthermore, op. cit. page 94...

“I confess I thought very little round that time“

Lies spluttered splenetically in the new pubs:

In debates over dark matter,

Some bathetic sod reveals

Contemplation of own heart provokes digust.

Ingenious winner had to switch off the depressing news.

Liar! Liar!

Word exploiters dressed in primary colours,

I admire your idleness.

Defy all calls to make the most of it, or

Just get on with it – these are the words

Of just quite-so breathing bores

They live as double-negatives: cash-lit, touchpad faces.

Time without direction makes me anxious.

Myself and a cold cup of coffee

Find ourselves waiting here for precisely nothing.

I have no nails left to eat.

Without pleasure or pain I rip

Rip my failings, arranging the shreds in careful pyramids.

Childlike flaneur pens truth on curdled cream paper:

I admit the modern person is forever moving,

And the modern delusion is that somehow

Every movement can matter,

One step further

From ever-encroaching failure

But I only get Sundays for this pleasure

And I never notice that flowers are forever occupied

With being beautiful, the love with which they bloom and

Expel their seed, and though plucked so easily,

For a moment they are wonderful,

Perhaps, possibly, that's what matters.