Glassworks

She came from nowhere. Mud stained her elegant evening dress; her stockings ripped along the sides of her legs, she carried her shoes in one hand and a black and gold purse in the other. From the purse a lipstick dropped into the mud. He picked it up and called after her. He stood waiting for her in a long coat and a homburg, black silhouette in the twilight, his white shirt glinting through the open bowtie and the gloom. She stopped and turned, ankledeep in mud, hair lank over her face and threads of the hem of her dress sticking to her knees.
    “You came out of nowhere,” she said.
    “I've been following you all this time,” he said. “You left so abruptly.”
    “You're a fool,” she said.
    “I was concerned,” he said.
    “Was,” she said.
    “I am,” he said.
    He handed her the lipstick. She jammed it in her purse and snapped the clasp.
    “Leave me alone,” she said.
    “It's not safe,” he said.
    “I can take care of myself,” she said.
    “I can take care of you too,” he said.
    “I don't need you to,” she said.
    “But you want me to,” he said.
    “I don't want you to,” she said.
    “I will,” he said.
    “Don't,” she said, and walked on.
    He started to follow her, tripped, and fell in the mud.
    “You're drunk,” she said over her shoulder, without breaking her stride, “and I don't need you.”
    He rolled over and sat up, watching her walk down the road: as graceful in three inches of mud as she is in a foxtrot.


They arrived at the party at the appropriate time: not too early as to appear too eager, but not too late as to miss anything important. The band was playing a flowing waltz as they checked their coats. He went to the bar and ordered champagne. When he brought her her glass, she was was checking herself in her compact. She took the champagne and they touched glasses, the clink echoing in the ballroom in the moment between music and applause.
    “You're beautiful,” he said, “like this champagne. Look at how the glass curves, and the angles catch the light so perfectly.”
    “Don't start that sentimental nonsense now,” she said, “we should go and talk to people. We're at a party.”
    “You're right,” he said, and stood up. The band started a tango. “Would you care to dance?” His hand politely extended.
    “A tango? That's even worse. Look, there's Virginia. Let's go say hello.”
    “I’ve always liked Virginia,” he said. “She seems to have such a nice life.”
    “I’m sure she does.”
    “So have we.”
    “Do we?”
    “Of course,” he said. “We go to these parties, we dress well, we drink well. And we’re in love.”
    “If that’s your definition of a good life.”
    “Isn’t it yours?”
    “Of course, but it’s not our life, Raymond.”
    “What do you mean? Look at us.”
    “You look at us,” she said. “This is a sham. It’s empty, all of it.”
    “This isn’t empty, so long as we have each other.”
    “If we have each other, why do we have to do things like this? I hate it here,” she said.
    “But this is the life you deserve.”
    “This is my own personal hell. I don’t fit in.”
    “I only want what’s best for you, Alice.”
    “What’s best for me is for you to stop this charade of the high life and be who you really are: be who I fell in love with.”
    “I haven’t changed, Alice. I’m still the same old Ray.”
    “You’re not. Not at all. You were never into this stupid posing and talking above your station and all that high class crap.”
    “But it’s what you deserve,” he said.
    She put down her glass. “You don’t get what I’m talking about at all, Raymond,” she said.
    “What do you mean? We have this beautiful thing, this glittering life together.”
    “No, we really don’t. We’re just normal people with a failing relationship. You always do this. You always make something out of nothing. These delusions, these fantasies of yours, of this life that we have. Someday it’ll all come crashing down around you and you’ll realise---you’ll have to realise---that nothing is the way that you see it, and that you’re hurting everyone who cares about you by putting them all on ridiculous pedestals.”
    “I love you, Alice.”
    “You think you do. You think you do because you want to so badly, but I don’t think it’s real. I just don’t know any more, Raymond. I don’t know what’s real to you and what’s in your drunken fantasies.”
    “It’s real. I can feel it.”
    “Nothing’s really real to you, though, is it? Your mind is like a glass factory. You create these beautiful crystals out of your life, such incredible and breathtaking works of art, but you can only look at them. If you touch them or pick them up or try to use them, they shatter.”
    She walked away, and out of the ballroom. He yelled something after her, but she did not hear.


Alice stumbled along the road, mud sticking between her toes. One of her heels had broken and she had to carry her shoes. A lipstick fell out of her bag, but she didn’t notice. Raymond had followed her out of the ballroom and along the road. He picked up her lipstick and called out to her. She turned to see him standing there in the gloom, his long coat stained with mud, his battered old hat lying crooked on his head, his cheap white shirt crumpled and grey in the dim twilight.
    “Go to hell,” she said.
    “I've been following you all this time,” he said. “You left so abruptly.”
    “You're damaged,” she said.
    “I was concerned,” he said.
    “You dreamed you were,” she said.
    “I am,” he said.
    He handed her the lipstick. She jammed it in her purse and snapped the clasp.
    “Don’t speak to me again,” she said.
    “It's not safe,” he said.
    “You’re right: it’s not safe for me to be with you,” she said.
    “I can take care of you,” he said.
    “I don't need you to,” she said. “I need you to get away from me.”
    “But you want me,” he said.
    “I don't want you,” she said. “You’ll do nothing but hurt me.”
    “I won’t,” he said.
    “I know you won’t,” she said, and walked on.
    He started to follow her, tripped, and fell in the mud.
    “You're a drunk,” she said over her shoulder, stumbling in the mud, “and I don't need that.”
    He tried to get up, slipped again and landed face first in the ditch. He rolled over and sat up, watching her walk down the road: the mud seeped into her nylons and between her toes. Her feet were freezing but she forced herself to keep walking.

The Last Night of the Snow

A band plays the blues in a bar nearby while the snow falls over the park. A train rumbles across the bridge over the river. An old man stops to see it pass, and looks at his watch. He digs his cane into the snow and pushes himself off, limping into the night. A young woman in an apartment by the river throws a blanket over her shoulders and lights a cigarette as she watches the snow drift down over the rooftops. Two teenagers huddle on a couch watching television, his arm around her shoulder, her fingers entwined in his, the high Georgian ceilings of his parents' townhouse drawing any heat away from them. The guitarist takes a mouthful of beer while the singer banters with the uninterested bar patrons, introducing their closing number. The old man trudges through the snow, stopping to pet a stray dog. The young woman extinguishes the butt of her cigarette in a pewter ashtray on the windowsill and draws her blanket closer around her, but does not move from the window, even when the power goes out and the only lights are the moon blue on the snow and the thin orange of her dying cigarette. The boy swears and gets up to fumble in the dark for a candle. The girl takes his hand in hers, her face soft in the dancing shadows of the virgin flame. They look out the window at the white world washed blue, its bustling colours overwritten now by the purity of the snowdrift. Nothing moves except a stray dog here or a hobbling old man there. The world has stopped, frozen over. She looks in his moonlit eyes, and says:
    ---What if this was all there was? Forever and ever?
    And he says:
    ---If this was all there was, then we'd be all there is.
    There is silence for a moment.
    ---What?

*

    ---Do you think the end of the world is coming?
    ---That’s what it looks like through the window.
    ---How many people will die out there tonight?
    ---Enough.
    ---Enough?
    ---Enough to make a difference.
    ---Make a difference to what?
    ---You know, last night when the storm happened, when the lightning lit up my room with a blinding flash, I woke. A second later the thunder rattled my windows. I thought a nuclear bomb had fallen. I thought a war had started.

*

The old man moves slowly across the bridge, stopping once in a while to check his footing on the ice. The band’s last song was cut short when the power died, and now they pack up their gear. The guitarist drains his glass and picks up his pay from the barman, minus the cost of his drinks. The patrons are filing out into the dim night, and the barman is closing up in the dark. The young couple kiss in the candlelight. He takes off his shirt and fumbles with her bra. The woman moves away from her window and pours herself a glass of red wine. The old man stops in an all-night garage and fumbles his fingerless gloves in his pockets to find the change to pay for a plastic cup of tea. The young couple make love on the boy’s parents’ couch. The band stand outside the bar while the drummer loads his kit into his car. The woman watches the lights of a helicopter over the city fade in and out of the clouds. She looks at her watch, then remembers it’s stopped. The old man brushes the snow off his hat as he sits on a high stool at the window under the fluorescent lights, the garage’s backup generator humming quietly outside. He watches his town vanish under a white cloud. The singer lights a cigarette and exhales like a dragon.
    ---You shouldn’t smoke, you know, the guitarist says. It’s bad for your voice.
    ---It think it makes it better. Makes me sound like Bob Dylan.
    ---No, a stroke would make you sound like Bob Dylan.
    ---Yeah. See you next week, then?
    ---See you next week. And take care of your voice, it’s the only one we’ve got.
    With his guitar slung across his back, he disappears into the snow.

*

    ---I saw someone tonight in that house across the river, looking out the window at the snow. Two kids. I thought I should wave.
    ---Didn’t you?
    ---No, I felt silly.
    ---We might have made friends.
    ---We might have made enemies.
    ---You can make enemies every day. Friends are hard to come by.
    ---Harder and harder. When I left the house this morning, there was a helicopter hovering nearby, and people protesting and shouting in the streets. It really felt like the beginning of the end.
    ---And you sound like the beginning of the end of a bad movie.
    ---I was scared. Really scared.

*

The young couple slump, exhausted, on the couch. His fingers are entwined in her hair. Her fingers make small circles on his stomach. The guitarist lopes along the backstreets, avoiding patches of ice, enjoying the crunch of the snow beneath his feet. The old man slips a little and spills what’s left of his tea on the ground, melting the snow. The woman’s glass of wine shakes in her hand. She feels the urge to cry come on, but stops herself before it takes hold. The young couple stumble from the couch to the kitchen without thinking of putting on clothes. They try to order pizza, but their phones have no signal. He makes them both sandwiches instead. The old man can feel his stick sliding on the ground beneath him. He stops to regain his composure, to fix his gloves and his grip on his stick. The woman puts her wineglass on the windowsill because it has started to spill a little. She can’t stop shaking, and she’s not sure if it’s because of the cold or not. She moves from the window and sits in her armchair. The young couple curl on the couch under a blanket after he found a set of battery-operated speakers to plug his iPod into. They knock over a candle. The old man crosses the river again, looking for somewhere warm. The snow blinds him. He loses his footing and falls. His cane skitters across the white. The guitarist tramps towards the river. He is curious about the huddled black shape on the bridge. He looks up to his apartment window on the other bank. It is black, like the rest. The shape on the bridge moans a little and the guitarist can see that it’s an old man who has fallen. He rushes to help him up, handing the old man his cane and taking him by the elbow, lifting him to his feet.
    ---Thank you, the old man says to him.
    ---It’s no problem, the guitarist replies. Are you all right? I can call an ambulance?
    ---No, son, I’m fine, thank you. It just hurts a lot more in the cold.

*

    ---I woke up this morning and my watch had stopped. Do you think that means anything?
    ---I think it means that you read too much into things. It’s an old watch.
    ---But why today? Why the day of the heaviest snow? Why the day of the protests?
    ---Because it’s also the day its battery died. It’s a coincidence.
    ---Is there such a thing?
    ---Of course there is.
    ---Days like these make me wonder.
    ---Put that out, will you? You know I hate it when you smoke.

*

The young couple smell something burning. They jump when they see smoke. Their blanket has caught fire. They try to stamp it out, but remember they’re barefoot. He runs to the kitchen for some water to throw on it, but the tap splutters and dies. The pipes have frozen. She throws another blanket on top, but this too catches fire. He dials the fire brigade on his phone, but there’s still no signal. They grab some clothes and run outside. The old man is limping along the quays, going slowly and carefully now to make sure that he has footing. Two teenagers crash out the door of a house, almost running the old man down. The boy’s shirt and belt are open, the girl is wearing leggings and a bra, with a coat around her shoulders. Both are barefoot. They stamp around in the snow trying to accustom their feet to the cold. The old man asks them what they’re doing half naked on a night like this.
    ---Do you have a phone? the boy asks him.
    ---Do I look like I have a phone, son?
    ---Our house is on fire, and our phones don’t work. Where’s the nearest fire station?
    ---About half a mile that way. The old man points east along the river.
    ---Right, the boy turns to the girl. Let’s go.
They run off, barefoot through the snow.

*

    ---On my way home tonight, I found an old man who’d fallen. It was sad. He was just lying there, in the middle of the bridge outside, like he was waiting to die.
    ---Maybe he was.
    ---Maybe. His stick had fallen too far away from him to reach, and he couldn’t get up without it. He was just lying there…
    ---Well, what did you do?
    ---What could I do? I brought him his stick and helped him up. I offered to call an ambulance, but he said he was OK. He looked like he was homeless.
    ---Did you give him some money?
    ---No. I didn’t realise until later. Besides, I have no money to give him. I can barely afford to live as it is.
    ---You could have bought him tea or a sandwich or something.
    ---I suppose I could have. But I didn’t know.

*

The snow sweeps quietly across the city, burying its landmarks and its streets, reflecting the purple sky back upwards. Streetlights flicker on as power slowly crawls back over the town. Neon signs shudder into life. Windows cast squares on the snow. The guitarist crosses the street into his apartment block. A car passes him, the first he’s seen all night. His key rattles in the icy lock and he takes the stairs two at a time. He drops his guitar inside the door and hangs his coat on the hook. In the living room he finds his girlfriend slumped on the armchair, a glass of wine half-spilled on the floor, an ashtray full of butts on the windowsill.
    ---It’s damn cold outside, he says.
    ---Hasn’t stopped snowing in a week.
    ---The weatherman says tonight’s the last.
    ---I hope so, she says. It feels like an apocalypse.
    ---Do you think the end of the world is coming?

Dead Writers’ Society

“When you realise you’re in a dream, what’s the first thing you do?”


“I dunno, try and wake yourself?”


“No. Haven’t you ever had a lucid dream?”


“I don’t think so. What’s the first thing you do?”


“You fly.”


“Fly?”


“Yeah, fly. When you wake up in a dream you start to fly. It’s the best feeling in the world. You feel freer than you’ve ever felt in your life.”


“I dunno, this lucid dreaming stuff seems like nonsense to me.”


“It’s not nonsense. I’ve done it. More than once.”


“Really? Is there a way of doing it or does it just happen?”


“Mostly it just happens when it wants to, but sometimes you can make it happen with guided meditation and stuff like that.”


“Now, see, that definitely sounds like nonsense.”


“It works, I swear.”


“I’ll believe it when it happens to me.”


“But you’ll never try it, will you?”


“No.”


“So how can it happen to you, then? You need to open your mind. You’ll never be able to write a novel when you’re so set in your ways.”


“You leave my novel out of this.”


“You do want to finish it, don’t you?”


“Of course. And I will. Eventually.”


“Not if you keep putting it off by drinking in bars like this.”


“What’s wrong with this place?”


“Well, besides being an artists’ graveyard, nothing. I’m saying nothing bad about the bar. I’m saying that you need to stay out of here for a while and finish what you started.”


“I will. Look, I’m well on the way to getting a short story published.”


“That’s great, but stories will only get you so far. You need to finish that novel. Look what happened me when I got my book published.”


“I know. And I’m still insanely jealous.”


“Don’t be jealous, be prolific.”


“I’m trying. It just doesn’t come as easily to me as it does to you. I’m not a born writer.”


“If you write, you were born to write. Think about it: you didn’t wake up one morning--or in the case of people like us, one afternoon--and decide ‘I want to be a writer’, did you? No, you woke up one day and said ‘I have a story to tell’. You didn’t choose to write that story: that story chose you to write it.”


“That’s all very poetic, but I still don’t think I’m cut out for this sort of thing. I don’t have the discipline to sit down and write two thousand words every day.”


“It’s not about discipline, my friend, it’s about heart. And I know you’ve got heart.”


“You know I’ve got heart.”


“I do. Look at that wall up there. Look at those pictures of all those dead writers. Do you think all of them sat at a desk every day and forced themselves to write? Do you think Joyce wrote nine to five? Do you think Behan kept a schedule? No! They wrote what came to them, when it came to them. And you know what? They wrote the truth. They wrote more truth than anyone who sits in an office banging out novels like it’s their fucking day job. Genius--and I mean real genius, someone who forces you to look at things differently--comes from the heart, from the soul.”


“O Captain, my Captain.”


“Shut up. You know I’m right.”


“You might be right, but I’m no genius.”


“You haven’t given yourself a chance to find out yet. Someday you might be a pencil drawing on that wall.”


“We both might.”


“You know, I can see us coming back here in twenty years, after we’ve both written our masterpieces and made our names. And you know what? We’ll talk the same old shit then as we do now.”


“To the end of our days.”


“To the end of our days.”


“I didn’t mean that as a toast.”


“But it might as well be.”


“True. This is a good bar to grow old in.”


“If we make it that far.”


“Speak for yourself. Same again?”


“No, thanks. I should go.”


“Alright. See you in twenty years, I suppose.”


“How about next Thursday? Same place?”


“Same bat-time, same bat-channel.”


“And on and on to the end of our days.”


“To the end of our days.”


“You should try out that thing. And don’t forget: what’s the first thing you do when you wake up in a dream?”


“You fly.”

Circles in Time

Thaumaptilon crawls in the dark seas; echoing whalesong throbs in the ocean currents; a man falls on the beaches above.


I'm falling into something dark; I can't stop myself and it scares me.


It reminds me of old love that hangs around and taps you on the shoulder every now and then asking if you want to get a drink and catch up.


If this bridge is struck by a vehicle please call ...


I have nothing in the eye of the sun but my own point blank indiscretion.


If the whales can do it, then you should check out his eyes: I can't finish a simple apogee.


I am not prepared for my upgrade, but I can tell you that it's a damn long way to Mars from here.


We'll be nothing but gas in the end anyway.


There'll be no more gods when he's underground and can't see the sun.


Still the brightly-lit corridors.


I can test my eyes against the fabric of the light; one, two.


Seeing the fireflies orbit the night isn't what she had in mind when she first picked them up.


Good.


What a piece of work is a star? Nobody knows, really.


I think I broke myself.


It curls and it curls and it curls and it curls and it curls and it curls and it curls. Curls, Twists Around God.


Made us gods, they did.


“Hello, my children are mental.”


Go fuck yourself, you have nothing left here.


You really shouldn't mess with that sort of stuff: it's dangerous.


Oh.


Oh my.

Green Light Flashing, One Coin Missing

He can’t find the slot. His shoes smell of his own piss. He raps the coin against the machine. Come on, you bastard. He can’t decide which of the three slots is the right one. He finds one that is real and puts all his coins into it. He pulls the lever. Nothing. He punches the machine and falls to the floor into a puddle of piss. The machine blinks stoically: “Green Light Flashing, One Coin Missing.”

Is There Anybody Alive Out There?

My body aches. The world’s gone bad. Every morning there’s more blood. The future looks less and less certain as the seasons go by. The winters are harsher, and the summers are like Hell itself. The buildings are all empty. Empty frames of cars burn on the streets. All I can think of is an album I heard once in a dark basement. But that basement is gone now, buried under a pile of rubble where a house used to be. Like rain, it fell from the sky. I can’t see anybody around. I can’t see anybody alive. Only corpses. They didn’t even have time to lie down to die. They all just fell. All of them, falling one by one. The pavements are slimy with rotting bodies. I can’t see if anybody is alive out here, but it smells like nobody is. All I can hear is the ringing in my ears. All I can see is the cloud and the shells of the city. I can see no future here.

It fell from the sky. Like rain, it fell from the sky. At first, it was joy. Pure joy. Everyone felt it. They were all kissing and hugging and it felt like everything was going to be alright. I felt like I’d woken up for the first time in years.

After that, it was nothing. Only darkness. Now there’s nobody there.

I can’t see anybody.

I can’t hear anybody.

I can only smell them rotting.

I can’t see anything.

I can’t see a future.

Is there anybody alive out there?

All gone bad…

Body aches…

No future…

No future…

No future.

The City Came Down

He walks west along the quays, past Merchant's Arch, the lights over the Ha'penny Bridge striking every iconic image of Dublin into his mind. Music drifts from the Workman's Club. Businessmen smoke outside the door of the Clarence. Crossing Parliament Street, he looks up toward City Hall framed by autumn trees, and settles into nostalgia for a time he never lived in. He glances to his landmark, the George Frederick Handel on Fishamble Street, and his reverie is broken by the pseudofuturistic nightmare of the council chambers on Wood Quay. Looking up Winetavern Street, he imagines a city of centuries ago: the Viking settlements, the cathedral under construction, rebellion after rebellion spilling onto the rolling streets, blood running into the wild river.


He stops on Bridge Street for a drink in the Brazen Head. Nobody knows him there: he can sit in peace for a while. He thinks back through the history of the bar, living the lives of all the people who drank there: the poets, the artists, the bums, the businessmen, the rich and the poor, the known and the nobodies, the popular and the lonely. A band starts up, playing the music of the past, the music he knows but does not remember. He drains his glass and leaves. The tower in Smithfield looms across the river, and the Spire scrapes the sky far off east. He can see now the unbridled river, the medieval streets, the stone bridges, water lapping against the banks of unclaimed land. A city lives and breathes before him.


He turns to Thomas Street, to the cathedral and the city walls, the fortifications that once stood sentry over the bounds of the guarded settlement. He rushes them, sword and shield in hand, screaming his battlecry. A shower of arrows and a waterfall of scalding oil, and he is dead.


He wakes and follows a tram down Dame Street, watching a carriage parade into the castle. At College Green, he watches Lords in brilliant robes emerge from Parliament. Walking by the railings of Trinity College gets him caught in a crowd of young men with books tied in string and belts. On Grafton Street a man plays a guitar under the white lights of Christmas. He stops into Bewley’s and pays a shilling for a cup of tea. He steps out into traffic, car horns singing in the air. Down Duke Street he goes to Davy Byrne’s for a cheese sandwich and a glass of Burgundy, because that’s what one does. There is a blind man trying to cross Dawson Street. From Stephen’s Green echo the firecrackers of gunshots. The Shelbourne Hotel is pockmarked with bullets and in the park there is a woman giving orders to men behind barricades. He turns down Kildare Street into a crowd waving placards. A thin man in waistcoat and glasses emerges from the Library clutching a manuscript. He follows the man to Nassau Street, watches him meet and kiss a young woman coming out of Finn’s Hotel. Moving around Lincoln Place, he sees banners advertising the grand opening of Westland Row Station. He continues down Lombard Street and crosses the Seán O’Casey Bridge, the smell of paint in his nostrils. Great ships sail down the Liffey, some are docked and unloading cargo. The noise and the smells of coal and livestock overpower him and he runs to the Custom House. He stops from the heat. The building is on fire. He passes a cabman’s shelter on Beresford Place, on his way to O’Connell Bridge, where a battleship is loading her guns. He turns to witness the construction of the Sackville Street Post Office before being herded by the crowds to the opening of the Cinematograph Volta, then on to the Araby Bazaar, where nurses smoke outside the doors of the Jervis Street Hospital and shoppers smoke outside the doors of the Jervis Shopping Centre. He takes his lunch in KFC and walks up Abbey Street to the King’s Inns. Coming down Chancery Place, he finds himself in the middle of television cameras and reporters shouting names at the gates. He crosses the river back towards Wood Quay and sees the wooden huts and plumes of smoke, and men in furs chopping down trees in the snow. Moving east along the riverbank, the headlamps of cars rush towards him like an army and the road forms beneath his feet and he leaps onto Fishamble Street, the strains of choral music wafting to his ears. In Temple Bar he finds a garden bounding a house, then rundown old buildings in narrow shit-smeared alleys. He takes a quick left through Merchant’s Arch and stumbles on the steps. He falls. Wiping blood from his palms, he looks up at the Ha’penny Bridge, its lights still burning in the autumn night, still the postcard of the city that it has always been to him.


Somewhere in the past, he crossed that bridge. A long time ago he saw the city breathe. He saw the city live, he saw the city born and he saw the city die. He looked to the sky and he laughed, and the city came down in flames.

Children of the Abyss

Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine, the song goes. I hope it's right, ‘cos right now I want my sins more than ever. I’m nothing without my sins. I’m nothing anyway, but I’m less than nothing without my sins. My sins make me who I am. They define me in a way nothing else does. If I didn’t have my sins, I’d be an empty face.


We join our hero on his way home from a night in the pub with his girl, hungry as fuck. Can’t go home on an empty stomach: I’ll puke all the drink up over my bed.


G-L-O-R-I-A!


Gloooria!


I have to sing it at her all the time when I’m pissed. I think she’s tired of it by now, but she always says nothing.


Is that a penny on the ground? No, a button. Probably good luck anyway. I pick it up and put it in my empty pocket. She looks at me sideways. For luck, I tell her. No such thing as luck, she says. I know that, but I don’t give a shit now.


G-L-O-R-I-A!


Fuck off, she says.


Gloooooria!


She walks on ahead. I dance down the street after her and stand in a puddle of piss. Shit.


I catch up with her, scraping my shoe on the ground to get off the piss.


Where we going to eat, then? Kebab?


Sick, she says. Chips.


Chips it is.


Some bloke puking in a doorway. Put it away, man. He looks at us as we pass, drops of sick on his chin. His shoes splattered. Mess.


Come on, she says, leave him.


I finger the knife in my pocket. Could probably stab him and run away and nobody would give a fuck. Just once in the kidneys. Or across the belly, Jap-style. Spill his guts into his own pool of sick. I shiver. Could get away with it and all. Nobody around, street’s empty. Nothing to pin it on me. Wouldn’t find DNA or nothing in that mess. My own gut growls. It doesn’t like that.


The street’s suddenly very long and very empty. His sick groans follow us. We don’t talk for a while.


G-L-O-R-I-A!


Stop it, she says. I hate it when you do that.


You have the same name as the song, though. Nothing I can do about that.


Just stop.


Right.


Chips.


I light a fag to make me forget there’s nothing in my stomach but Guinness and bacon fries. The night’s so cold the smoke makes little crystals in the air. I feel like a dragon, blowing my smoke all over the place. Protecting my treasure, my Gloria.


I trip and fall onto the street covered in piss and shit and puke. I roll onto my back. Her head comes over me upsidedown.


Get up, will you?


Out of the way. Come, look. It’s a shooting star.


It was and all. She looked up and gasped.


After it burned out, she grabbed my hand and pulled me up.


Look at that, she says. Big lump of rock out there in space.


Flying through nothing.


G-L-O-R-I-A!


She sighs and laughs this time. She pulls me to her and kisses me.


Something stirs downstairs. Hello, friend.


Chip shop. At fucking last.


We stand outside while I finish my fag. Some fucking junky stumbles over the railings of an empty building across the road down the street a bit, carrying three litres of cider. He disappears into the basement, probably looking for somewhere warm for the night.


I could go in there after him with my knife and slice him up tidy. Wouldn’t fucking see what’s coming. Nothing in a junky’s head but fucking junk. His body on the floor. I roll him over. Gasping for breath. Knife in his ribs. Drop trou, one leg either side. Squeeze them out. One, two, fucking three. Shit on his head. Empty myself right over his fucking junky face. Nothing the cunt can do about it.


Chips, she says.


Glooooooria!


We order our chips and step outside for another fag. There’s some smoke coming from that house the junky was in. Bit of flame creeping out the window. The fucker’s set the place on fire.


We go back in to get our chips and tell the chipper bloke to call the fire brigade.


Back outside, some burly middleaged wanker is trying to break down the door nextdoor. There’s a face in an upstairs window. An old man looking out. He doesn’t understand what’s going on. The middleaged friends start shouting Fire! Fire! at him. Old bastard hasn’t a clue. The poor fucker’s gonna burn.


The fire brigade arrive in a fanfare of fucking sirens. Lights everywhere. Axes and hoses. A hero’s fucking weapons. They break all the windows. Now I remember wanting to be a fireman as a kid. You get to smash windows for a fucking laugh.


There’s a crowd gathering now. Nothing like an emergency to bring city folk together. They forget for a minute that they’re all supposed to be shitheads to each other.


A pack of scumbag kids is in front of us, laughing and joking. I want to tell them it’s not a fucking laughing matter. There’s an old man up there, you fuckers. Fucking kids.


Gloria and I stand outside the crowd watching, eating our chips like popcorn at a fucking film.


She grabs my hand and squeezes. Some skaghead rolling towards us, eyeing us up. Probably the same one as lit up that house. Probably not, though. Can’t mug us anyway, mate, we’ve nothing worth taking.


He rams my shoulder and slurs something that sounds like someone shoved a bag of pebbles up his arse.


Gvs fyg ll?


Sorry, man, I don’t smoke.


He pulls a knife.


Ghvs fkhn fwn thn.


Fuck off, you’re not getting my phone.


Fkhn ryd fkhn brd gvs wn byb ll?


Stay away from her.


She squeezes my hand tighter. I drop my bag of chips. I put my other hand in my pocket for my knife. Nothing. Fuck, that’s the one with the button, but the button’s gone. There’s a bloody hole in my pocket. There goes my good luck.


Fkhn fwn brd ryd y?


Fuck off.


I break from Gloria’s grip and pull the knife. Into his neck like a shot. Blood everywhere. Emptying his veins.


Kkkhhhghjkhyghk.


Cunt.


He drops.


Self-defence. Can’t do anything. Only a fucking junky anyway. Nobody cares.


Funny how nobody will notice a junky getting killed when there’s a fire and flashy things to look at.


Gloria screams.


G-L-O-R-I-A!


C’mon, I say, let’s do the watusi.


I boogie down the street, dancing to the rhythm of the flames and the fire engines’ flashing lights.


Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.

The Rules of the Machine

If a man were to sit—say, at a sidewalk café—and, in watching the myriad people passing him by, were to, for each one of them, construct a story, or a history or perhaps a mythology in which he detailed and examined every trivium, every minute turn of their lives and every single inconsequential moment of every single inconsequential day in that person's entire existence from the day he was born to the day he dies, and all this based on the most perfunctory of glances from across the street, would he, in this almost godlike act of creation of a character, become so suffused with this semifictional person that he himself might begin to adopt their attributes; or would he rather find himself so hopelessly enamoured with the almost romantic pathos of a life lived with neither import nor influence that he might begin to find the most mundane of trivia to be among the most important facets of all human existence? These are not questions I ask myself on a regular basis, I assure you. Today, however, I am bored, and I am sitting at a sidewalk café watching people pass me by, and I cannot help but wonder about these things, about if a man really could become infatuated with his own creation, and about the lives of the people on the street: could I become infatuated with one—or perhaps more—of them; are they themselves preoccupied with a certain person, fictional or not; or is it far more likely that they are each simply forming a part of a larger organism that winds it way, antlike, through the stream of time, within which I am nothing but a single ant who has paused for a moment to take his breath? I would think it to be somewhat presumptuous of me to assume that I am not a part of the human mechanism, to assume that I am but an external observer, and thus not a cogtooth in clockwork. Although, it is an attractive position to be in, this external observer: as one would not have to obey the rules of the machine, one could perceive everything with perfect amorality, lending to his observations a truth and clarity that would otherwise be obscured by the twin subjectivities of empathy and ethic. I would indeed prefer to read the time from the clockface than to be inside the mechanism toiling to turn the hands.
    In smoothing out my frayed corduroy slacks over my legs (I always like to be well-dressed and present the appearance of a gentleman, but I never can quite shake my natural predisposition towards a certain roughness around the edges), I notice a small, sun-shaped stain on my left thigh. I lick my thumb and try to rub it off, but it persists. I must have spilled a drop of my coffee on it without noticing: such things have been known to happen, given my tendency to overlook the smaller things in favour of contemplating the so-called bigger picture. I rub the stain again, but it does not fade. I decide that such things are not worth worrying about. Perhaps someone will see me, and see the stain on my leg, and for the rest of the day—perhaps for the rest of their lives—I will be “that man with the coffee stain on his trousers” to that one person. Perhaps they will become obsessed with me, wondering why I have a coffee stain on my trousers, wondering if I am too poor to afford to clean my trousers, or if I am careless, or if I simply did not notice. I could become a source of fascination to a single person, as indeed a single person could become a source of fascination to me. I wonder if people who are like me—ponderous men who sit in coffee shops and watch the world go by—have ever taken my image and constructed a character around me, and if so, how close were they to my true character, how close to my true history was their invented one? That leads me to wonder how close my inventions are to the truth. Of course, there is always an element of truth to even the most fantastical of fictions: if there weren't, they wouldn't be worth reading. Sometimes I would like to know the real story of a person I see, but sometimes I think that my stories are the real stories. My stories are at least more real to me than anyone else's real stories, since my stories are the only ones I know.
    There is a woman across the street: a tall woman, almost good-looking, except for a haggardness, a fraying round the face that makes her look older than I believe she is, more worn-out than she should be. She carries a bag of groceries, and a pack of disposable diapers  under her arm. I believe she may have a child, a young child. Maybe this child is the source of her roughness. She hasn't slept a full night in weeks, and it shows in her face and around her eyes. The child's father is absent. He left her shortly before the child was born, unable to deal with the responsibility. The woman is waiting to cross the street. She is almost out of view. I decide to follow her. I stand from my table, forgetting to pay for my coffee. It does not matter: I do not intend to return here anyway, their coffee being so harsh and unpalatable. The woman crosses the street. I turn the corner and come into view of her once more. I see a small bald patch on the crown of her head. She limps almost imperceptibly. She had complications in her child's birth, you see, which left her slightly lame. She passes a beggar on the street, and drops a coin into his cup. She is a compassionate woman, then. This instinct is no doubt borne from her motherhood, that innate need to look after the helpless and less fortunate. This poor woman! How she must suffer, how she must struggle to keep her child warm and fed, and yet she has time to help those in need. Such magnanimity of spirit is unprecedented. This woman should be rewarded for her philanthropy, for her love of all life and for her unselfish acts. This woman stands as an example of the paragon of human virtue. She rounds a corner into an alleyway, and climbs the steps of a townhouse, her townhouse, in which her down-and-out sister—whom she has taken in out of the kindness of her heart—is looking after the child. She turns her key in the lock and enters the building, the door closing with a thud behind her. She climbs the staircase to the flat on the top floor of the tall, redbricked building and enters her humble home. The child is asleep, and the sister sits at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette and thumbing through a magazine. The woman asks after the baby's wellbeing, and the sister assures her that all is well. A short row ensues, over the fact that the sister is still unemployed, but the woman relents and agrees that it is difficult to find a job at the moment, and that she attained her position in a bakery by sheer luck. She agrees that her sister can stay with her for a while longer. She goes to check on her sleeping child. From the street below, I see her draw the curtains in the front window.
    A short time later, a man in a hat calls to the door of the house. The woman opens it and lets him in. The father of her child, come to see his offspring? Perhaps I was wrong: perhaps he has not shied away from the responsibilities of fatherhood, but simply chooses not to live with the mother of his child. A short time later, after they have spoken of the child, and briefly of their own lives, and after they have taken tea and biscuits, and after the terse exchange of pleasantries between the father and the sister—who do not get along so well—the father leaves. The woman does not accompany him to the front door. He almost trips down the stairs as he fixes his hat, missing a step in the twilight gloom.
    The woman emerges shortly afterward and sits on the stoop smoking a cigarette. It is a cold night, and she is not dressed very warmly. Her skirt is short, and her legs uncovered. Perhaps she is going out tonight? She will meet up with some friends and they will sit in a dirty bar drinking pints of cheap beer, talking about their lives. It is her rare chance to escape the bonds of motherhood. It is her reward for her unsparing philanthropy; her opportunity to do something for herself for once. She's been sitting there for a while now. Perhaps she is waiting for a lift that has been delayed. Her friends telephoned not long ago to say that they would collect her and bring her into the town, but they have been unavoidably detained and now she must wait for them on the stoop of her townhouse. The poor woman. I approach her and offer her my jacket. I do not mind that we may strike up a conversation and that I may discover details of her life that are not concurrent with my details of her life. I do not mind that maybe she is not as philanthropic and selfless as I had believed. I do not mind if maybe that man was not her child's father. I do mind the sight of a woman sitting in a short dress on a cold step in spring. She accepts my jacket and thanks me. She asks me if I would like to accompany her upstairs. I accept.
    We enter her small, draughty flat. She hangs my coat on a rack, directs me to the bathroom and—curiously—the bedroom. She leaves the room. I look around: there is no sign of a child. So I was wrong on that count. But why then would she have bought those diapers? I see the pack on the kitchen floor, opened and with several missing from it. I am puzzled. She asks me if fifty pounds is alright and I understand immediately that I was wrong about everything. It occurs to me now that it is entirely possible to replace somebody's life almost completely with a fabrication of one's own: and in those circumstances the fiction can be truer and certainly more easily palatable than the reality. My own fictions present only my view of the world, and my view of the world is the only truth I can in good conscience subscribe to, given that every man has his own subjective truth, and none of them can—nor should be expected to—fit neatly, to tesselate with my life and my experiences. I realise that only I could have invented this particular life for this woman, only I with my peculiar outlook shaped by my particular life and my unique set of experiences and circumstances could have built this particular world around this particular individual, while ignoring or—in fact—misinterpreting all the physical evidence and obvious clues to point out the reality. Perhaps now I have in truth achieved that separation from humanity that I so desired, perhaps now I am indeed outside the clockwork, outside the fabric of society. It seems to me that only a man who is perfectly detached from everything around him can conceive of an entire life for a person, for those within the clockwork would see how a person fits, but one outside the clock, looking at the face, has no idea what each cog does, only that they all work in unison and in harmony.
    Now: an experiment. Would a clock still run if it were missing one of its more insignificant cogs? What if the person outside the clock were to replace one of its cogs with one of his own design? Would the clock still run? And what if I were to replace an entire person in reality with one of my own design? What if this woman's life were not the life she had, but the one I prescribed for her? I decide that I shall test this out. She shall cease to exist as she is, and be recreated in my image. Her life in reality shall end, and the only life she shall have will be the one written in these pages. It is true, then: it is possible to become obsessed with the invented life of a person one sees on the street. However, I decide to break my obsession with her now, at this moment, at the end of her story, and at the beginning of mine. I decide that the details of her life are too inconsequential for me to trouble myself with, and I do away with them. I leave her flat and as I exit through the front door and descend the steps to the street, I wonder if I have gone too far, if I have grown too far outside of human society to even understand it anymore; I have lost track of the details, and so the bigger picture has grown fuzzy. I no longer have to obey the rules of the machine, and so I have forgotten what the rules of the machine are. I have become the perfect external observer, the perfect amoral witness. I am above, and I am outside. I wonder if anyone today knows me simply as “that man with the coffee stain on his trousers”.

The Unwritten Man

In the silence of his own dining room, a typewriter sitting on the table amidst a pile of books, the man's hands hover over the keys. His cup of coffee steams, fogging up his glasses. His cigarette burns out slowly in the ashtray. He takes a deep breath and strikes the keys. A paragraph appears on the paper. He takes a smoke and taps the ash. He pulls the paper out of the drum and crumples it into a ball, tossing it over his shoulder in what he hopes is a suitably dramatic motion. He takes a mouthful of coffee, draining his mug. He stands up to refill it, suddenly dizzy from the blood rushing away from his brain. He steadies himself on the table. He sighs heavily, wishing there was someone around to hear him. He fills his cup, takes another cigarette out of the pack and lights it. He decides to stretch his legs for a while before he writes. He walks around the table, paces up and down the kitchen, heads for the sitting room, but changes his mind and instead goes out the back door into his garden. There is no moon and he cannot see very well, the only light coming from the kitchen window. He exhales a cloud of smoke into the night. He looks to the sky, notes the constellations he knows and takes some small comfort in the fact that they are still there, still the same since he first learned their names as a young man. He finishes his cigarette and drops it on the ground, doing the twist with one heel to extinguish it. A cat mewls into the darkness. The man shudders a little and goes back inside out of the cold. Again, he sits at his typewriter. His fresh coffee steams and fogs up his glasses. His fingers hover over the keys. He takes a deep breath and strikes a key, and another and another. A page of text appears before him. This isn't so hard, he thinks, as his fingers spider over the keyboard. A chapter erupts from him in no time at all. He sits back in his chair and reads over his words, taking a drag of a cigarette with each paragraph. His brow furrows. He grunts and crumples the pages one by one, playing basketball with his waste paper basket. He leans back in his chair and chains another cigarette. The story he wants to write isn't at all the story he is writing, not at all the story he has in his head, the story he has been formulating in his mind all these years, the story that was to be his legacy, his enduring scathing insight into the human condition. He was hoping all his life that someday everything that he had read and everything that he had learned and believed would all suddenly synthesize into some crazy work of genius, some materpiece that has been lying dormant for so many years and that someday all the things he had read and all the things he had learned and believed all these years would finally become useful. Today should be that day, but he seems unable to paint his intellectual syzygy to his satisfaction (his words).
    He places his hands over the keys and wiggles them, trying to summon the words. The cigarette clutched between his fingers drops some ash onto the keyboard. He swears and starts to blow between the keys, before seeing a sentence laid out within them. He forgets the ash and types furiously, another paragraph marching its way into existence across the page. He stops and reads it. This is it: this is the one, this is his story. The opening words to his masterpiece resonate in him like no words he has written before. He is not constructing them consciously; rather, they are coming from something beyond him that has finally assimilated, combined and synthesized everything he has ever read, learned and believed. At last, the sum of all human knowledge within him has come pouring out onto this page in the opening paragraph of a novel so perfect he never would have dared believe he was capable of producing it. Now he cannot stop writing. He sees each word laid out in the keys before him, and can do nothing to stop his hands from striking them. His fingers build a world even before he is aware of it himself. He feels like he is sleepwalking through piles of bricks, and building a house even while he dreams he is awake. Each moment, each keystroke, brings a new stroke of genius, a new monumental act of creation which he is unable to control. The telephone rings but he ignores it, not wanting to stop, to stem the flow of prose—of poetry—eruptng from his subconscious mind. In him there once was a mess of ideas, of beliefs, of facts and figures and styles and characters and situations, but now all those things exist separately from him: language has grown sentient and intelligent, and has begun guiding his hand to bring about its own creation, its own very existence onto the pages rolling through his typewriter. What once was inside now is outside, where it belongs, where it can breathe and grow and live by itself and where it will join all the other words in existence: where it will one day form part of what someone else has read and learned and believed, one day become a drop in the ocean of literature, become subsumed and be consumed by the monster of words written since words began. It will fall, and it will drown. Its voice will not be heard over the cacophony of all the other voices. It will disappear, it will vanish. It will be eaten but never digested, seen but never heard, read but never remembered.
    He stops typing. He has no more words, nothing of value left to say, had nothing to say even in the first place. More ash falls on the keyboard. He stubs out his cigarette. The telephone rings and he answers it.