Author Archive

Beneath countdowns and gate numbers we,

Steal trolleys from stacks and,

Race around the polished empty floor,

Awaiting delays and,

Drinking starbucks,

Past the people laid out, horizontal, on seats

Morguelike, or how tv has told us morgues look.

And these desks could be mountains,

And the strip lighting sky.

And after we ride around,

Like children.

Like younger brothers.

We lie on the ground.

Hoping for it to turn to grass.

Trying to forget where we are going

Concentrating

On Waiting.

For nothing at all.

Like we used to be able to do.

There seems solace in sheer volume. In white noise. In being comforted by a roaring totality that is so absolute it becomes a void. You add enough of something it becomes nothing by the fact that it loses all form and shape and meaning. A canvas stretched in all directions, covering all degrees and angles of observation, being so saturated in all colours at once it ceases. As a child I slept through storms and was comforted by tv static and the noise of the washing machine. It seems I still seek out those same sensory experiences, of being so surrounded and assaulted that I am powerless, like sand picked off a beach by the wind, no longer being thrown around against it’s will, but carried and swathed and nurtured. Womblike and all encompassing. Stick my head in a jet engine, fire compressed air into my skull, anything to make me sleep. All speakers and all sounds distort if you turn them up loud enough, all paper obliterates if you cover it with enough paint, all things deafen, all eyes burn out if you show them something bright enough. I find it strange, especially considering what will occur, that I found peace in these experiences, though it may explain some of the things I have done, I doubt it would give answers to some of the people involved, or serve as adequate apology to the people I met who deserve one the most.

3/3

I head away from the beach, my shadow a bad limping monster in moonlight struggling to keep pace. I stumble up cooled dunes not knowing where I’m going. I want to continue, to run, to journey away and away until I have no fear of turning back and seeing something I recognize, or something new I am ashamed of.

I want to stay out all night, to punish myself possibly, I’m not sure. I keep replaying moments in my head as I walk aimlessly and trace holding patterns in the stones underfoot. I want to stay out longer than him, I want to endure. I want to contract pneumonia and see you all through the breathing apparatus of an intensive care ward. I will be held down in white and made to work through machines, I want to feel that sympathy and love, feel that you finally understand, feel that you forgive all I have done, for there is so much.

Walking, shaking, crying, I feel like all the toxins from the past week have waited until this precise moment to attack my body from the inside. A list of complaints: I’m sweating, nauseous, listless, aching, my joints feel like they’re seizing up, my head stings, I cannot focus in the dark.

I keep limping away from the house. The sound of the breakers is my anchor as I walk a parallel path to the shore, clambering over groynes and rocks. I see decay everywhere, in wooden huts slowly imploding over time and pieces of boats left like bone on the beach waiting to fossilize. In a mind’s eye I see oil rigs standing solid and sturdy like stilt walkers. Like the war of some world’s monsters, which world I am not sure, for I am no longer sure I am part, no longer sure I am connect. No longer sure I want or deserve to be. Is that the north or the Irish sea? I think about shipwrecks and ships and nuclear waste left to drift and rot beneath a sheen surface, awaiting treasure hunters and riptides to surface them.

The dark is blue grey and surrounds like elusive gas. It is unconstant and shifting, revealing glimpses and shapes and memories of things before recoiling and whisking them away, wrapping them up in some half remembered embrace.

The hot steam of embarrassment I felt rising up beneath my skin on the beach, crimson and claustrophobic like drunkenness, is beginning to fade as I feel the cold beginning to penetrate me. Seeping in viscous and conscious, seeking out the gaps, the weaker parts of me; the back of my knees, my hip, the arm I broke when I was fourteen. Through all of my scars.

What would it say about me if I turned back now? I have abandoned him, cowardly and shamefully, but now I return. Not out of a sense of regret and that I have done wrong and have returned to apologise and make right, but because I’m cold and lost and feel I have twisted an ankle. The moment plays back like a stuck dvd, I shake my head and change my angle across the beach, trying to shake it off, but it remains, like a hangover or a fly buzzing around something it knows is soon to be carrion. With this amount of self hatred and loathing for my own actions I should feel regret, yet I do not. I am a mould, a spore living and sucking off others, but I had no other choice. I know, that within me there was no option of joining him in that primal howl, that strange stand, joining him bent double and screaming at lights overhead like an untransformed werewolf. I felt neutered, unable, transparent. His moment of final power and self control, of actualizing some deep and sudden realized resentment into action and word, merely stripped that same power and ability from me. His willingness, his final and total sublimination to his fate are what gave him the impetus to finally challenge that fate, me? I am pristine and golden and umblemished. I know that there is nothing destined to happen to me, my own careful sense of self preservation and control has seen to that no end. I have been careful to never give too much away, never remove or lend out any sense of me, for fear that what I need to subsist could somehow be lost. But now, stumbling across a Norfolk beach in the middle of the night, how far has that really got me? I have shed layers like a snake does skin, and allowed others to think they have reached some kind of core, whether they think they have found it, pierced it, tamed it or understood it is immaterial, the fact that I – always needing to be one step ahead, secretive and with that extra knowledge – knew the truth was enough. I feel like a poker player with extra aces tucked within my sleeve, yet as I watch the game go on around me, whilst I never give anything away, I will never win the big hand, never clean up like others do, because despite the advantage I know only I possess, I will never risk putting anything down on the table to test it. My own carefully cultured fragility is not the lie I have crafted, but reality, and I am as transparent as I fear. Maybe everyone else knew that all along, and the only one I fooled was myself? I thought I could create myself impervious and stronger, but in that moment on the shore I saw myself cast in glass rather than stone, fragile, decorative and mute.

Out on the water there are lights of distant boats and rocks. The hovering lanterns of night fishermen far out to sea. The spots of light move like the water is solid ice, and they are drifting, frictionless, from some push a million years previous.

Sitting down, I crane my neck up and try to see the outlines of clouds in silhouette above me. Black on black. Cast against a slippery mercury moon they appear a huge omniscient mountain range originating from the other side of the world. Watching them, I wonder what he is doing now. Whether he is angry, disappointed or more likely bemused. Is he sitting in front of the fire with a bottle of Laphroaig? Or still there, knee deep in salt water, screaming and yelling and punching triumphant fists out. Is he walking slowly after me, following my haphazard trail through the stones? Is he calling search and rescue, the coastguard and the police, finding me with flashing lights.

I realize that even now I have turned this, like the whole weekend, into something about me, I have twisted it, turned it, and pointed it in on itself. I am the snake eating itself from the tail.

Desperate for something else to do, to think about, I trace overlapping lines on the shore, stooping and picking up stones in the dark, looking to find ones that will skim.

Wanting to stay out all night, I last probably two hours before I am beaten and return back to the house. It sits dormant and dark, with no sign of life. Even now, I cannot go inside. Fear of what awaits me; rage, indignation, indifference, all hold my steps outside. For the first time, I wish I had one of his cigarettes to smoke. I pace a while, quiet, and then decide to sleep in the car. I curl myself up into abstract shapes, trying to find a position where all my limbs can come to rest, coiling my jumper into a spare pillow and sucking on mints found in the glove compartment. I try to sleep, but my mind moves in circles, and all I can hear is the sea through glass, and I try to focus on that, if nothing else, as the beginnings of rain gently land on the car’s metal shell.

- - -

There is a knock at the window. I wind it down and try to think when it was I finally slept. My body is twisted, stuck and complaining. He stands in an ancient overcoat, – probably found from somewhere deep within the house- a dressing gown and sunglasses, clutching two mugs of coffee and a cigarette. He passes the coffee through the open window like a drive in meal.

“Cheers” I croke.

“Clement today” he says, as the wind lifts up corners of his coat and gown to reveal pale hairy legs.

He is the only living thing I can see, the wind is pulling the waves sideways and maybe the gulls have sought shelter. The coffee goes down hot and bitter and burns tastebuds and removes skin on its way.

“You want to get in?” I say.

We sit and drink coffee together in silence. We let the wind blow in through the car’s open windows, our hair flapping and rushing air in our ears like we are standing atop high buildings.

With each moment grows the weight of the unsaid again. A crushing and claustrophobic balloon growing out of the dashboard.

“Sorry about last night” I say

“S’alright” he says.

“I didn’t mean to leave you there”

He takes a long drag. “I must’ve looked a bit strange” and shrugs “I don’t blame you”

“sorry” I say. Again.

“Nah”

“It needed to happen” I say

“It did” he nods.

“I’m not sure what though.”

“Huh?”

“Not sure what needed to happen”

He takes an age. “Well. Something did. Maybe we should take that, stop worrying what it was.”

“I suppose” I say.

He doesn’t reply this time. I don’t feel a piercing relief of pressure, but still, somewhere, air is being released, vented, let out slowly. I finish my coffee.

“I didn’t want you to be alone” I say.

“We’ve both got to start getting used to it.” He says, winding the window up and down now, fiddling like a bored pupil in class.

“But still, I wanted-“

I never get any further. I can’t dredge out the words. Somewhere I know that whatever has just happened, the whole weekend, in there is as much truth as I am going to glean. There is no more and nothing left to give. Finally I give in and sigh, “What are we going to do now?”

“I don’t know” he says, “I half feel like going home”

“Me too”

“Is that really sad” he says, “that we could only make it a night?”

“What I really want to do” I say “What I really would like to do. I’d like to get an axe and cut down that house. I’d smash it up and hack it into pieces. I’d cut it and rip it and turn it into driftwood and matchsticks, then I’d pile the whole lot up on the beach.”

I drain my cup and taste coffee grit between my teeth. I am on a roll.

“And in the pile would be wood and bits of furniture and photographs and blankets and all that crap. And I’d cover the whole lot in petrol and burn it all. Just to have the biggest bonfire on the beach. Then I’d watch. I’d sit and watch it all burn down, until the tide came in and took it all away and washed everything back to being clean. That’s what I’d do really. If I could.”

“If we had some petrol” he says

“And if we had some petrol” I say

“Or an axe” he adds.

“Or an axe”

I can see it in my eye, I think he can too. And we contemplate the thought of it for a moment, the chopping, piling, burning thought of it. Because we both know we will never do it, and the thought is the closest we’ll get.

We go back inside and finish off the last of the bacon for breakfast. We drain our few remaining beers as we gather our things and pack the car. I see all the stuff I’ve brought to remind me, to remind us, of the past, being stuffed away into the bottom of bags and rucksacks. I see, being shoved into his bag, bottles of pills and medicines.

Just before we set off, he asks if he can drive. I pause, is he too weak? Could he fall asleep at the wheel? Is his eyesight what it was? Can he drive on all that medication? I consider saying no, but I hand him the keys.

“Something else” I say, and I fish in my pocket, and give him one of the stones I picked up in the night.

I settle back down in the passenger side and unfurl the various maps we have scrimped together. All out of date and with pages missing they are barely a help, still listing places and features long since torn down, or failing to list roads and towns that have rose up since their creation.

I imagine the key turning in the ignition and him leading us off under my unsteady direction. I trace imaginary routes on the paper maps, and think of everywhere we could go. I imagine a future laid out horizontal like a road, of funerals and eulogies and solicitors and suit hire. We drive away from the house for the final time, it remains, itself an achievement. I wonder how many more things for him will become final, as the days get closer how the mundane will become all the more extraordinary, and I wonder if this is the last time he’ll see the sea. As the tracks and verges turn alphabetical, B roads to A roads, my mapreading is less required and I put my head against the window and let pale sun rest on my cheeks.

Ahead are parties and and solicitors and finally a funeral. I look back across the car; he squints into the incoming low sun with determination, his hands grip the wheel and he shifts gear as if it is he and his force of will that moves the car rather than petrol and hydraulics and pistons and pressure.

I do not profess to know him best, or speak with any such authority to create a eulogy for him, but It is how I would like to present him, in overcoat and pyjamas, cigarette clamped in mouth like Clint, window open and music blaring, dragging a Peugeot and a too tired friend across England, all possibilities open in his mind.

It is how I see him now when I think of him.

“Don’t you worry” he says, “I’ll get us home”

I allow my eyes to close against the glass of the window, feeling the vibration of the engine and the road beneath gently work through my skull like a massage. A bonfire on a beach burns imaginary behind my eyes.

I will let him take me this far, let him drive the pair of us because regardless of how long or how far we go, soon he will not be able and then I know, finally, and with such dread it dissolves holes within me, it shall be my turn to be strong.

Authors Note:

‘Wrecking’ is the ancient and once commonplace activity of looting the valuables that drift to the shore from nearby shipwrecks. Today, beachcombers still like to refer to themselves as ‘Wreckers’.

2/3

The house is different from memory, I guess things normally are. It was too much to expect parity with memories that owed more, to some cinematic ideal of what you feel somewhere from your childhood should be, than reality itself. I thought it would be exotic and evocative, that it would bring long suppressed memories leaking back through freshly poked holes. That’s what they say about this kind of place don’t they; long forgotten, remote, an abandoned family home the site of sepia tinged memories of holidays and growing up and the sea. Sometimes, I guess, some things from our own pasts we think to be important, are merely mundane, and for that we have to settle.

It was my Grandfather’s originally, I think, or my Great Grandfather’s. Either way it had been in the family for as long as I could remember, a battered sea stripped thing, perched precariously on a spit of land, guarding the dunes. As with so many things last seen as a child, it seems smaller somehow than from my recollection, not just in size but in grandness. It has sagged. Gone from an exotic distant shelter smelling of ozone and salt, the scene of so many mock battles and children’s games, to what it is. What it always was; just an old house.

It stands, worn and protruding outward, the harsh air has razor bladed the once uniform coat of paint into torn jagged paper, like a tusk in an elephants graveyard in the sand being picked clean by flies.

We bring in our bags and things from the car, he struggles with his.

“I’ll get your bag mate” I say.

He ignores me.

Inside lurk spiders and bare wood, we look around and begin switching on lightbulbs to see which ones still work.

It’s a bit like setting up camp, tenants, as we are, in this old space; both empty yet tainted with personality and smell. Like most things abandoned instead of vacated it has retained something within it, it feels like it still belongs to someone else, an owner who will come lolloping over the dunes at any moment to reclaim it, someone with a beard and torn clothes and amnesia, the survivor from a shipwreck or a plane crash. It drips with history; it lacks a sense of empty, we are barely footnotes to it, so lacking as we are, in permanence and impact.

Laying out our provisions and possessions like this, alongside sleeping bags and rucksacks on bare floors, we are safe and ensconced. We are Antarctic scientists, lost and cut off in a research station. Surrounded by ice, blizzards, and polar bears, but kept by thick concrete walls, the only bright burning points of life in a continent.

We both sit down on the floor and make lists and plans of things we need to do. Provisions we need to buy, things to put right and correct and cross through. Baked beans and politics.

““First thing’s first, survey the beach” I say.

“Skim some stones” he says

“Yes!” I say. He is so right. He is brilliant.

“So” he says “Today: Beach, Stones, Provisions, back here for food”

“Then, get a fire going and drink whisky til dawn”

“I’ll need some more cigarettes” he says

The beach that constantly threatens to encroach the house, that longs to come in through the front door in a wave of animated pebbles, is one of those rock strewn beaches devoid of sand that you hate as a child. Like Brighton or Bognor, it’s a real foot shredder of stones and rocks and bits of glass that wait to stub a toe or plunge into the soft fleshy arches of feet brave, foolish, or unknowing enough to forgo shoes. We stumble toward the waves into crosswinds wearing loose battered converse and hoodies.

“This is a bit of Withnail moment” I say, “The city boys faffing about, undone by weather”

“We’ve gone on holiday by mistake!” he says, quoting.

“We wouldn’t be the hardiest of survivors” I say, “Say, in a plane crash”

“What, like, in those guys lost in the Peruvian rainforest?” he asks

“Sure it was peru?” I say

“One of those south American ones anyway”

“We would be rubbish. Society has trained us for many things, but not dealing with plane crashes”
“It’s not the disease, the starvation, the lack of fresh water or any kind of maps, we would be defeated by lack of designer cofee” he says

“Indeed, no journey can be made without clinging to a medium-grande-cappucino” I say

“We’d end up eating eachother’s legs or something” he says, plunging hands further into pockets “I’d be a crap cannibal I think.”

The gulls rock back and forth against a patchwork grey of clouds and sky. The air picks up spray and dusts us with it. We stumble on, shakily, like old men.

“In retrospect” I say, “maybe April wasn’t the best time to do this”

“I like it.” He says, “It’s dramatic, ‘windswept’, is that the right term? As if we were in a novel… ‘they walked across the windswept rugged coastline together’…”

“Yeah, in a mills and boon novel” I say

“Anyway” He says, “It’s gotta be April. Doc said if I waited until the summer it might be too late” He scratches the beginnings of a beard and looks up at the gulls.

There are fireworks, explosions of connectivity in my thinking. This is the opening. This is a good trip, and a good idea. We will be cleansed.

I pause and try to remember to keep walking. “Ah well then, April… April, it was obviously meant to be”

This is the first time he has mentioned it out loud, and it’s so bare and bald, delivered like a joke. Should I laugh? What is the suitable reaction and response to somebody casually mentioning their impending death and fragile state of mortality as if it were a eye exam or some other mildly inconvenient date in their diary. I have to decide what to say.

I suddenly think, how long am I taking to go through this thought process? Am I standing open mouthed and gawping, like some Tex Avery cartoon character who’s jaw has literally just hit the floor. Think. Respond.

“I didn’t realize they had told you dates.”

What the hell was that? Lame. So appallingly lame.

“Yeah” he says, unperturbed. “Aha, here’s a beauty”

He stands up brandishing a smooth rock.

”Look at that” He says “lovely”

It’s a proper skimmer, one side rubbed flat like burnt glass and obsidian, the right size to slot in between thumb and forefinger, enough heft to feel the weight in the palm. He takes two steps onto the shoreline and whips it out to sea, where it bounces once, twice, before vanishing like an actor falling through a trapdoor.

He throws in that orthodox Frisbee technique, where the throwing arm comes across the body and then, backhand style, launches the stone with a violent flick of the wrist. I throw backwards, like a forehand, my right arm coming from way outside my body, standing almost side on to the waves, looping my arm back round before the release.

We talk between throws.

“Your technique’s all wrong” he says,

Two bounces

“It’s how I’ve always done it” I say,

Two bounces

“You’ll never become a professional with an action like that” ,

Three bounces.

“So how did you feel?” I ask, tentatively.

One bounce

“What’s the most you’ve ever got?” he says

No bounce. He swears.

“I dunno” I say, “Five or six bounces?”

Three bounces

“I felt strange” he says “I kind of felt ok. I felt like…

He thinks, leans back and throws.

Four bounces

“Yes!” he says “Get in”

“Shot.” I say.

“I felt like relieved, I think.” He says “I felt relieved that finally I had something solid, something I could work with. Now at least, I can make lists”

There’s a long pause. I look for stones. Wooden struts of a long gone jetty intermittently appear amongst the waves. Long dead fingers grasping and retreating.

“I saw some guy on Youtube once,” I say

No bounces

“The skimming stone record holder” I say

Splash.

“How many did he get?” he says

Something hits water.

“I can’t remember. Lots. He had some special technique.”

Nobody throws. When I turn around, he’s sitting on the stones looking out.

“You think you’d have regrets” he says, “But…”

“I’m not sure I’d want to know” I say. “The date”

Why I’m trying to imagine a situation I can’t begin to imagine, I’m not sure, but I try anyway. I think in order to take control, to somehow make the situation accessible and thus turn it to something I can affect. Because the realisation and truth that reaches up, grasping like a nagging child, is that I have none. I have planned this weekend, it was my idea, and I have taken every step thus far to ensure my stamp is burned into it’s side. From the music to the in-jokes to even the location, all is mine, or in some way connected to me. We are coming to a place from my past full of my ghosts, to confront the fears and worries that apparently he has already come to terms with, with yet remain inside me. What did I honestly expect him to get out of this? Some kind of goodbye? Is that really what he needs right now?

I kick shingle into the sea and say “I think we should get back now”

Coward.

Reality, I think, is what I’m after. Some kind of trial run. If I can get to grips with the concept now, then, when it happens, or more precisely, before it happens – for the moment I dread is not the act itself, not ‘dying’ as in the moment, the end of someone. I’m terrified of the handholding and the awful hours, days and weeks before, like a film that doesn’t know when to end. I don’t want to see that, don’t want to see him become a facsimile of something once great, now faded and half remembered at the end. I know how much that’ll take, how much he’ll need, am I’m not sure I have that much to give. I’m not sure I’m capable.

—

Later on, after trips to shops and long searches for firewood we are finally prepared for the night that has dropped, like mist, outside. Inside, the house smells of meths and whisky and draw. The camping stove hisses and spits blue around a burnt metal pot. Into it we throw strips of bacon and toast bread in the fire he has finally got going – despite my protestations – with a liberal dose of meths.

“What do you think about this one?” he says, flicking through cds.

I scratch my chin, move bacon around pointlessly in the pan, and try not to make eye contact. We are talking about music for funerals, which I suppose is progress from being unable to even mention his condition in the car. He passes me the half smoked joint and sips at his plastic cup of whiskey.

He shifts position. Outside one of the shutters is loose, it bangs on the walls like a drunk locked out of his own empty house. The rain outside is like a curtain, wrapping us, enveloping us, causing us to seek warmth in whichever ways we can. I take a long drag myself and think about tumours and blackened flesh and photographs from medical journals.

“It’s like planning a really kick-ass party you’re not invited to” he says. “the more I think about it, the more I think ‘I wanna go!’”

The drunk, tired, loses vigor in dying wind, and the shutter finally comes to rest against the frame.

“I can’t believe you’re thinking about this now. That you can think about this now”

What I mean, what I really mean is, ‘How are you dealing with this better than me?’ I’m jealous and small. But I need to know, give me answers and give me solace.

“What’s the alternative?” he says

“Fuck. I dunno. Anger? Why aren’t you so cross, why aren’t you out there naked on the beach screaming protestations at the world into the rain and the wind and at god at everyone and everything who isn’t… who doesn’t have to go through what you’re…” my words, my speech, dies.

He looks back down at the CD’s. Lip bitten, his shoulders are a bowed line once straight. I realize I’ve been shouting.

“Fuck man” I say “Sorry”

“No” he says “I like the sentiment.”

I hand him a bacon sandwich.

“Let’s do it together” I say, not believing my own words.

The shutter bangs on the window as if the whole house is in agreement.

With warmth and fuzzy throats we stumble outside into the dark, momentarily hit by the wind which rushes sideways and devilish. We run as best we can over the stones, lit by moon and maglite, towards the sea, which to us looks black, the breaking waves are white swirls in a wall of moving rock.

There are so many stars overhead, to my untrained, unused, city boy eyes, that it makes me dizzy if I try to look up and see all at once. I feel something stab through my thin shoes and break the skin of my feet as I run. I stumble, feel burning course like liquid through the joints as I go over on my ankle. I go down, sprawled over the stones.

“Are you ok dude?” he says.

“Just my ankle” I say.

I will not let this weak body pause this moment. This breakthrough. I think of the pain he has had to suffer already. I look at him, deerstalker atop regrowing hair, and pull myself to my feet.

“It’s nothing” I say, and add liar to my list of sins.

We continue toward the sea, the two of us unconvincing and haphazard like bad movie monsters. We are whooping and shrieking with childlike realisation that we are doing something abnormal and against the rules and against what is expected. Fire burns, inside my ankle is a thousand broken sharp edges rubbing against eachother.

We reach the shore line, breath short and hearts beating,

“What now?” he shouts.

I can feel warm blood inside my shoe. I grit teeth.

“I have no idea” I say “we should shout something”

“What?” he says, and he turns to me, spotlighting my face with his torch.

“I have no idea” I say again.

We stand against the sea, thinking. The wind whispers out of earshot. The rain drives on.

“It was your plan” he says

“I can’t think of anything” I say. I am paralysed, “I want to say a thousand things but I can’t turn it into words”

“Fuck you” he says.

“Fuck you” he says again, a little louder.

Like winding up to skim a stone he takes a deep breath and bellows it out, extending the syllables like elastic.

“Fuuuuu-ccckk, You!” he screams it, bellows it, gives it so much that he runs out of breath and the end tails off into nothing. He ends it bent double and panting.

He walks forward so the water is up to his knees and screams it again and again and again, ecstatically and ludicrously swearing into the night, his torch waving like a searchlight. Watching him I feel tears hot on my face being obliterated by rain, I feel throbbing coming from my foot. He looks at me expectantly. I can’t move, I can’t speak. I imagine those wooden struts emerging from the water somewhere in front of me, constantly coming up for air and then being dragged under.

“Come on” he says.

I want to shout. I want to scream so hard I bring up a lung and spit blood across the stones. I want to.

“Don’t chicken out on me” he says.

“I can’t” I say. I am suddenly aware of the cold, the rain and the wind pinching my skin. I feel like a drunk suddenly made sober in a party. I am exposed.

“Come on!” he shouts, insistent. He reaches out his hand, reaching to pull me into the water. I think about drowning.

I feel myself involuntarily stepping back. I don’t want to take his hand. I don’t want to be pulled in. What I think will happen to me; should I walk into that black water, should I bellow out curses, is unclear, but something instinctive and deep prevents me. I am blocked.

I shake my head. “Sorry mate”

I can’t.

I can’t endure what you do. I cannot go where you go. I can’t pretend that for you.

I wipe water from my face and hair, taste salt from tears and ocean stinging my eyes and pricking my tongue. My ankle throbs. I turn to go away, pulling my hood over my head to shut out his calls, I head away, away from the sea, away from the beach, away from him. I half run, half crawl up the incline of shingle towards the dunes, away from the breathing rolling rhythm of the waves and the sleeping, snoring, restless thing lying down underneath.

1/3

“We can do some wrecking here. And find something to love in this broken place”

– Laura Veirs

We’re in the hospital car park, me leading and him following somewhat unsteadily behind. He hasn’t even got a proper coat so he’s wrapped some kind of shawl, useless and thin, around his neck and shoulders.

I should have brought him a coat.

It’s April and it’s freezing, and the wind rushes around us with both insistence and vengeance. We shouldn’t be here, this place where April brings arctic winds into car parks, we should have been born elsewhere, lived elsewhere, nearer the equator somewhere. This would never had happened, I think, if we had been warm.

“You got a cigarette?” he says, the words catching on rasped tongues and furry teeth, vibrating and hungover.

“Should you even be smoking?”

He shrugs.

So formal, Cigarette, never Fag.

“In the car” I say. We need to be in the car.

The car park feels theme-park large, why did I park so far away? Making him walk across, in the cold, without a coat. I am basically inflicting torture on him.

We reach the car, my battered Peugeot, and I open the door and jam the seat forward so he can get in the back. Holding the frame of the door, he sort of swings himself back and forth a few times to build up momentum, then pulls himself inside and onto the backseat.

I lined the back with blankets before I left, has he seen too much of blankets in the hospital already? Jesus Christ does he think I think he’s going to mess up the seats? Does he think that I think he’s going to cover the sheets with blood, or mucus, or piss like some kind of dog?

“Sorry about the blankets” I say

“S’alright” he says. “Comfy”

“I thought maybe you were sick of blankets”

“Got that cigarette?”

Why did I even bring the packet with me? I should lie and say I don’t have one. I should deny him it. I should protect. I should not supply poison and smoke when this is all about clean, about purity and salt and rendering old lines and marks new.

I give him the cigarette.

“We just gotta pay” I say, “then we can get out of here”

I roll the Peugeot round to the exit and pay the bored looking guy two quid for parking, before the battered metal barrier judders unsteadily into the air, like a drunk rising himself off the floor at closing time.

“You think that’s a good job?” he says
”What?” I say.

The open road. Got to get to the road. It is what I have seen and read in movies and books. I pull out into traffic.

“The parking guy.”
”Him?”

“Spending all day just taking people’s money and pushing that button to raise the barrier”

“Doesn’t sound it”

”But he’s got time to think hasn’t he”

“I suppose”

“I think- I hope, he’s sitting in there writing novels or composing symphonies”

“More likely taking naps, reading The Sun and wanking” I say, craning my neck to see out of the mirror.

“Put some music on” he says, leaning against the window.

We curl out of the suburbs and towards the north circular. It is, almost, like our college days, busily working our way through a pile of cds, driving somewhere, anywhere, just an excuse to talk and listen to music and smoke with a moving, rolling backdrop. We listen to bands and talk about gigs and records and things that we both know and that we have shared. Disposable things. He looks tired.

“You can sleep you know” I say “If you want”

“I’m ok” he says, blowing smoke out the window “I’ll keep you company”

“Must be tiring”
”What must?” he says

Dying. Is dying tiring? I need to know. I have so many questions. Like falling asleep awake, slowly, for months, rotting and falling apart and with bits and pieces old and falling off. Dying is something I only know in movies and tv shows and songs, not something sitting with me in the back of my car.
”I dunno… “ I say.
”Check the bag” I say again. Wanting to kill the silence. I need to fill this car with music and talk.

“I got all kind of good shit for us both”

He rummages through my canvas record bag and pulls out items I have specifically chosen to save us both. He’s humouring me. He knows the stuff - and it’s just stuff - I’ve brought isn’t for him, it’s for me. Inside –

DVDs; an eighth of draw (see my hypocrisy about his cigarette, I bring more poisions); a harmonica; a pair of binoculars; music deep with in-jokes and old club nights, even a battered copy of Lord of the Flies from an English class seven years ago.

The truth is I’ve packed all this, retrieved anything with a hook between us, because the thought of this weekend, filling this weekend, terrifies me. What will we do with the time? Will he be able to drink? Will that make it worse? Will he get tired in the middle of the day? What will all the tablets and pills do to him. I have so many questions.

Out the window, London is finally unravelling its furthest tendrils, along the streets and concrete dual carriageways, I imagine the colourful tentacles of the tube map flowing underneath the streets like blood in veins. All those exotic names, Rickmansworth, Chorleywood, and Morden, the possibility of the unexplored. We had a plan, years ago, of visiting every place at the end of the tube map. Taking a camera or something and filming ourselves there.

I don’t recall what we planned to do when we got there.

What were we thinking. Theydon Bois, Beckton, and Cockfosters. Our horizons limited by travelcards and ambition

“We’re getting out of London, soon” I say “I might need you to map read”

Is that ok? Has all the medication affected his eyesight?

“Sure thing”

I throw the AA into the backseat, as we finally slip into the junction, like a vaccine off a needle, flowing into the main bloodstream, shooting off on higher purpose.

Outside the window England dribbles past like rolls of stapled together sheets. There is no drama, no cinema, to this country, and for the two of us raised on DVDs and filmic dreams, no satisfaction remains out there. But motion, the force of moving is good for us, as we drive we live, the imitation of life is maintained as long as we both appear to move. But remove those forces, those centrifuges and moments, and I fear we both will drop down lifeless to the floor. If only we could keep driving, just repeat this time trading jokes across headrests, changing cds and talking about half-remembered songs. But soon, despite our best map-reading efforts, we’re nearer to where we’re going than from where we came, and I know if we were merely to continue, all that would happen is we’d reach the end of England and plunge into the sea.

I think of ‘if onlys’. If only we were American. If only this were America. We could continue forever, we would go south at first, to Mexico, to Macchu Picchu and Chile and places we had only seen on packets of coffee beans and in old westerns. Central America and the pacific coast, that scene from the Shawshank Redemption with all it’s mock sentimentality. South America, jungles and Amazon and motorbikes and that shot of Jesus over Rio De Janeiro. Scenes from movies, false memories that I have adopted as my own. Football in Chile and Tangoes in Argentina and being obliterated by the spray and the roar and the nothingness of the Igazu Falls, further further further. Right down to the end, the tip of the continent stabbing out like a needle, and then at least when reached those waters, and standing upon the tips of lighthouses we could shout things to antartica and all those fucking penguins.

If only we could stay on the road.

Then I think of his ‘if onlys’, and how, in the cosmic scale of bigger problems, he outranks me by a few notches. His ‘if onlys’ beat mine every time, it’s the hand he’s been dealt.

Every few miles he takes a picture, “gotta keep records” he says. He says he has a video camera and a Dictaphone too in his bag. I wonder if we are trying to create a kind of permanence, as he films me, messing about with accents and strange voices and all the same jokes we used to share at school, committing life to tape. We had this joke, this skit, at school, of replacing key lines from films with ‘pants’, I remember doing most of the Star Wars trilogy on the way to our GCSE exams, “The pants are strong in this one” and the like. And for some reason, for some stupid reason, this is coming back to us big time.
“Here’s looking at pants, kid” he says.

And this is hilarious now, like some jokes have times and moments where they are particularly funny, above and beyond their ordinary threshold, whether it’s a mixture of time and audience and teller or something, like the bad comic having the show of his life.

”You want the pants? You can’t handle the pants!” I say.

We’re laughing over and over again, and it’s so funny that we’ve stopped laughing at the joke, or at the lines one another is saying, and just laughing at eachother laughing, at the act of it, the inane biological evolutionary uselessness of it. And at least, we’re talking, and we have something to talk about that can sustain us for the rest of our journey, as our mouths and jaws are aching from the laughing, and tears building up in the corner of our eyes like we were chopping too many onions.

1. Departure Lounge

A series of stops and starts and queues. Of waiting in simple lines, by checkout desks and metal detectors. In time I’m given to kill I think about snowstorms and gas bills and books leant but never returned. A decision: beer in green bottles or coffee from paper cups? Oh you always could be relied on to provide a solid decision. Sharing a stage with the lost and the grounded and the stricken and the lonely. Details: Irrelevant, for you discounted all vital information. I look at the uniformed employees. Static witnesses surrounded by all else that moves. Tell me where did our sitcom dreams go? Of sitting around a shared table with alcohol and endlessly trading stories. Of a place where we never felt the need to fill time or silence or an awkward pause. Of pool and jukeboxes and ‘ok, I’ll have one more’ when rain comes down outside.

Having finished crosswords and drinks, I orbit around the travelators and the trolleys. Complete my seventeenth complete circuit, still waiting to leave. Think about the last time I took a flight alone. Coming Home. For funerals or holidays. Awkward social situations and seeing those long lost friends that you never wished to see. Never who you imagine, in a movie scene you’ve scripted, in a strangely apt location.

You’re at home now. With the paint stripper and the bugspray. Commencing home improvements in my stead, whilst I’m away. Buy a notebook and try to write lists of lists I need to make.

Why I cannot seem to focus,

Books I own but have not read,

A series of minor terrors that paralyze me when I lie in bed.

Taking the opportunity to buy supplies. A map, some drawing pins, a bottle of foul tasting local liqueur. Write postcards to all my small regrets, send them off with novelty stamps and a heartfelt desire to never return.

Departure boards flash fresh delays with macabre glee, and nobody can provide any new information. I take the opportunity, provided by isobars and high pressure, a lack of instant ready meals and industrial action. List all the ways, to provide delays, keep me here forever.

I head for the roof, for the observation platform, borne from a desire to see planes that aren’t even there. Stand upon the concrete, shifting feet, as the occasional workman crosses a horizon. Wishing I took up smoking when I was a kid, I switch off my cell.

I hear your reasons not to be here as I try to identify airlines from insignia sticking out of hangars. And sit down on the step, watching runways being covered by snow, wait until I cannot feel my fingers, wait until things start again.

INT. SAFF’S FLAT. DAY

Saff drinks coffee and looks through the job section of the newspaper. Alex is rummaging through cupboards. Pulling out boxes of cereal.

ALEX

You want any of this?

SAFF

I don’t eat breakfast.

ALEX

(pouring himself a bowl)

No?

SAFF

Breakfast is a meal that only rich people have time for. If I want breakfast I want the whole works, I want an old etonians breakfast buffet cart. Wild smoked salmon and bagels, I want sausages and bacon and black pudding, any edible part of a pig actually, grilled and fried to crispy perfection. I want free range eggs laid by the kings own hens, I want wild mushrooms scoured from forest floors, and vine ripened tomatoes. There would be tea hand picked by the softest, delicatest asian princesses, and fresh coffee ground between a Sumatran elephants’ buttocks. I want to sit and gorge myself, making business deals over the financial times, before going upstairs to the board room, and shagging my nubile young secretary. Whereas, in reality, what are you offering?

ALEX

(holding up the box)

Crunchy Nutty Cornflakes.

SAFF

The prosecution rests.

ALEX

(Through a mouthful of cornflakes)

When’s your interview?

SAFF

Half ten. I’m shitting myself. It’s in Farringdon for fucks sake. Land of the Lattes.

ALEX

You know what the secret to success in an interview is?

SAFF
What?

Alex pushes the box of Crunchy Nutty Cornflakes across the table.

ALEX

Good breakfast.

SAFF

Oh fuck off.

Like Hamell on trial, Eds not Dead.

Apologies for the lack of fresh meat, stories and blood, on the site in recent months. I’ve currently been working on the screenplay to a short film to be shot in January/February time called (provisionally) ‘Home’, which I might put a few snippets of up just to give a taster and a flavour.

Also resurrected a few once dead projects, including what was once called ‘Positive Tension’ but hopefully shall now be known as ‘Running’, and is a half hour drama/comedy series about education, office blocks, the media, terrorism, london, bicycles and guitars, amongst other things. Think ‘This Life’ meets Coupland, and you’re somewhat approaching the terrain.

I still haven’t quite worked out how to showcase scripts and screenplay work up on the site, whether posting extracts in word files, or simply cutting and pasting them with all the technical formatting as a post. If anyone has any ideas let me know.

Book Update: Hit a technical snag with the books, so apologies to everyone who requested one, I’ve hopefully found a suitable source to use to print them, so I’ll try and rattle a test copy off before christmas, and put up some photos and scans of it.

Best of 2006: It’s approaching the inevitable time of list making and categorising. If there’s any records, movies, or books that people think deserve inclusion in the Holding Patterns ‘Best of’ list that should be up in a week or two, let me know and I’ll try to seek them out before the deadline for judging passes.

You can see the 2005 list here.

Cheers!

Tom

Looking at the date on the last story I posted, I realised yesterday that -whilst not always apparent by the more than erratic rate of submissions- Holding Patterns as a website has been in existence for over a year now. Somehow, like friends and siblings being remembered as always a certain age, i had imagined it always frozen and ageless as something new and recently started.

So, like a husband who has forgotten his wife’s birthday buying flowers from a motorway service station, I’m attempting to make up for my own memory lapse with another gesture, namely a present.

Partly because I want to give something to those who’ve supported and read and commented on this site, partly because I see it I suppose, in some way, as evolution, and partly because it’s something I’ve always wanted to do and there is nothing better than the feel of having created something physically - that you can hold and look at and give to people - I’m creating a book collecting some of the best stories here, with a treat or two thrown in.

You can think of it, I suppose, like a band putting out an EP from their bedroom, a hastily scrawled CD-R handed out free at gigs, really you can think anything you like.

I’m making these at home, and each book is both unique and totally free to whoever happens to want one, I’m hoping to put some of the following in each one.

• Anything from five, up to ten, stories, with requests taken for each copy.
• A mixture of typed and handwritten pages.
• Original photography and cover artwork by some smart artist types
• Unique contents and sequencing; each copy having an individual order and sequence of pictures and stories.
• Rewritten and edited versions of stories
• Unpublished stories not yet included on the website
• Script excerpts and other bits and pieces and rareities I can dig out.

Should anybody want one of these; then all you have to do is let me know your postal address. I’ll take care of any and all delivery and postage charges, and the book, once again, is free, as a thankyou for taking the time to find the site and keep me writing. Whilst I do this stuff for me, ultimately I think we all want to find an audience or someone who likes what we do.
Simply comment with your address, or email your details in if you fancy getting your hands on one.

Thanks again for reading, and giving me people to write for.

Howling Bells

We are both in the desert; I rest my feet on the dash and look up at the sky. He is outside the car pissing into a nearby bush. The sky is burned streaks and stuttering lines, and everything is made into cardboard cutouts and outlines in the gloom. There are few sounds, the engine still vibrates with heat, crickets chirp in two tone, he pisses and I try to focus on the moment and ignore the sound. I am in a movie, I am made new, I cannot hear you piss.

As he zips up his jeans, he looks over his shoulder and says

“The difference between you and me girl, is that you run away from things, and I run to them”

Prick.

We’ve been travelling for months now, we have broken up three times, crossed four state borders, and shared many things. This is our second car, our first having broken down in the path of an oncoming hurricane which chased us, from town to town, sleeping with it far away and awaking to find ourselves once again in it’s path.

“Oh really?” I say

“Yeah” he says, with a grin that’s supposed to be charming, and then he hops into the driver’s seat.

“That’s why you’re having second thoughts” he says.

“I am not” I say.

“You are. You have doubt. I can see it on your face” he says.

“One day” I say “You will realise you don’t know me at all as well as you think you do”

“Oh I know you” he says, and he leans over and kisses my ear.

“Fuck you” I say. He runs his hand down my side and begins feeling his way up my skirt.

“Fuck off” I say again. And push him away. He leans back and laughs and smacks his lips.

“No?” he says, like someone who has offered you a forkful of their food in a restaurant and been rejected.

“You’ve just been pissing” I say. “I’m not doing it after that.

We are looking for a spot for the fire. It’s been two years now since her funeral, and in the boot of the car is a bag containing the few last things I’ve been unable to throw away or get rid of. He was sceptical at first, and told me about the Joshua tree and about the crime of unoriginality, the crime of seen to be “copying fucking U2”, but when I woke him up in the middle of the night he needed no persuasion.

After another hour, in the gloom, he stops the car and I agree. Then he pops open the boot and takes out a can of petrol and a plastic bag that’s already full.

We don’t make it back to the motel in time, in the late and the dark and that critical stage where to continue further on takes you away from tonight and into tomorrow morning. It takes him half an hour to persuade me to camp rather than drive on, ostensibly to get back to our old motel or find a new one, in reality, I’m not sure I want to stop. Giving in, I pull the car over and off the road and we pitch the tent in feuding silence; experts by now, it takes minutes. Jostling for space in two sleeping bags, I make sure to elbow him slightly too hard in the ribs, in the soft places.

“I never had to help you, you know” he says.

“I never asked you to” I say

“This was your idea. Don’t turn your guilt into anger for me”

“Who said I was feeling fucking guilty?” I spit.

Nothing.

Prick. PrickPrick.

“Are you making a dig?” I say.

I feel his spine against mine.

“If you want to say something, just say something. You think it’s my fault then say so. Don’t just throw half a comment out there and then retreat” I say.

These are not my words.

A week later we sit drinking coffee in a new town. It’s a new diner, with new coffee, and new seats, and a new different view of the same road. Or what seems to be the same road, I have long since stopped trying to follow maps. Earlier today we bought our usual provisions, whiskey and cookies and cigarettes. Later we will drink and have sex. We will not talk about parents or dreams or how well eachother slept during the night. We know where is out of bounds and where is safe. It’s a routine that has evolved, organically and unspoken, that I once found so comforting.

When we started out together, we were both so scattered, both felt so unreal, that we were liable to be dragged, like an untethered boat, whichever way the tides or the winds dictated. Alone, with roads and pasts and homes far-away, we were see-through. We were road signs with holes in them. Then we realised together that was the strength, we would take our lack of grounding and lack of ties and use it. We could go anywhere, be anyone, see everything and remember everybody.

And, I give you that we have done so much and seen more than I thought. And that he and I have been through more than I expected, gone deeper and scrubbed at wounds and places neither knew that either possessed or still hurt.

Now we both look different directions out the same window, and I am hit, like a punch, by the nagging creeping feeling of static. That we are drawn to the same places, the same routines and the same ways of living. The same bars and diners and highways and motels. The same all night supermarkets with the same Mexican clerks. We seem to seek them out, the pair of us, like moths stubbornly throwing themselves into lightbulbs. Like these small facsimiles of humanity will somehow allow us to be healed, to be swallowed up and re-integrated, like fish returning to the sea.

The waitress scythes through the booths in the diner, twisting and poking her ass or her breasts out at the truckers and at us. He watches her swivelling, hips thrust out, like so many other girls trading a part some guys morning jerk-off fantasy for a few bucks extra in tips.

It wasn’t this waitress who he was with when he vanished for a week, back in that town with the two barbershops and the guy who played sat on his porch all day playing banjo with a metal hook in place of a hand. It wasn’t this particular girl, with her brown hair in tight curls and her gold earrings bouncing with every catwalk step, but it might as well have been. I stayed in the motel for a few days, and, in the bar on my last night in town, having paid up and packed up, he sat down next to me and said “what’s up”. As if nothing had happened. As if he had just popped out to make a phonecall or go for a piss. The next day we got in the car and drove wordlessly all day, smoking and looking for radio stations, until it got dark or we ran out of petrol, whatever happened first.

Even these casual disappearances, these temporary abductions, became normal in the end. And the rage and the fear and the anger became replaced with quiet resentment and disappointment. Disappointment, I suppose, in being proved correct. But he would always return, somehow knowing like a homing pigeon where I would be or when I was planning to leave. The months have been spent like this, not now, I realise, like orbiting bodies circling some immense thing, some centre with so much gravity to keep us from hurtling off into space, but like beads on an abacus. Forever being pulled apart and smashing back into one another, separating and colliding but never breaking away.

We planned never to plan, never to stop, or never to worry. But constant change and constant motion became as monotonous as never going anywhere at all. We have refused to believe that for a while, heads in the sand of our own fiercely constructed pain. We ran so fast, and drove so far, and watched the world revolve around us for a while, but returned to the same standing stop. He remains my constant, and whilst we sustain eachother it is a weak, sickly, cancerous symbiosis.

“How’s your coffee?” he says

”Better than that other place” I say

“Isn’t she amazing” he says. Referring to the waitress.

“Mmm” I say.

He has a glint in his eye. I stir my coffee.

We have both gone wrong somewhere, and like two vampires, our blood is tainted and will not sustain, will not soothe or provide anything to either as we, too busy to notice, slowly devour the other piece by piece.

Cut me open. Watch me spill, slick like water, over the cracked highways and streets and then evaporate.

The one thing I have in my favour is that I know him. I know you. I know what will happen next. I know everything.

We finish our coffee and you leave too large a tip, and in the car on the way home I stroke your crotch and wonder whether your half erection is from me or the waitress.

Tonight tommorow or somewhere. we are in a bar or a restaurant or a coffee house or a mechanics workshop. I will be like this and then, when you go to the bathroom or to the store, I will get in the car, put it into first, and I will go.

The road spreads out like paper unfolded and airwaves taunt and pull me, each radio station an invisible thread pulling me spiderlike into it’s own individual