KTH RDGWY

It’s been raining now for eleven days. Small Ellen went yesterday to see her uncle, who lives near the west gate. She endured the admonishments he likes to deliver, and returned to us with seven silver coins and a porcelain bowl. We got nearly forty silver coins for the bowl from Hagger. Small Ellen demanded a meal at Stintow, and who were we to argue. She had two deserts. Last night we slept in the hotel by the curved church. The beds were soft and cool and the water we washed with was clean.

Today Flum killed a policeman. It was a mistake. We are running now and have no disguise. All the city’s signals are flashing and we are at the mercy of the wide walls and the narrow gates. Small Ellen has a cough. I fear the worst.

You /aaa/ hideous mouse pointer relocates hard right on my screen ((my screen) my screen) going suddenly instantaneous from my input to an icon I had almost forgotten on the bottom right of my dock which launches a program that isolates drunks from their drunkenness. Aiiiii. Fold. Over.

I didn’t ask for that.

Skull flaps open. Brain flies out, long flanked, ratcheted, tricked up in devices, taking a route round your shoulders and out to sea, with the boats of the urchins in slow pursuit. We are off to attack the island of the dark hood and the goblin fingers. Hit the water and haul the rope. Tie the sullen ones in a corner. Throw up down wind of the baskets. And the calm quiet boys in conversation on the bow are the serious fuckers. Maps in their heads. Cocks in their pockets. Their murmur is the engine. We are off. We will be back in time.

The boats pulled in at the disintegrated dock, and the children jumped and crawled onto the piers and clamoured in the sick dusk for directions and boasts, pushing one forward laughing, all shoulders and rotten teeth, his bloody elbows and his blind eyes looking for trouble. All the crew bayed. Go on go on you white arse coward.

Lord Tether watched them.

They did it this way, relying on their thoughts and the power of their cunning, and the dart of their starving bodies in through cracks and chimneys, up through gaps in the floorboards and cuts in the glass. They can bleed into any fortress. Show them a hole and they’re in it. Around your feet like the smell of a dog, gone before you sniff a thing, on out the back with the hair from your belly. They did it this way.

They poured themselves over evil. Like a clammy pail of water over the sparks of hell. Nothing in the world noticed.

The children battled into darkness and none of them lived and the brain flew bleeding home, low across the cold water under the poke of the moon, whipped like a dog, looking for nothing now but a small distant and unlikely place, where we cannot follow him.

How good for you that your life forms a coherent picture. How good for you. That your life forms an arc that can be comprehended as a single structure, as one thing; the start compatible with the end, the middle making sense to both of them. How good for you that the photograph of you at 12 years of age is recognisable to people who know you at 40. That the sentences you utter at 18 are compatible with the things you say at 64. That your spirit and mood have remained consistent since the day your personality first made itself known to the day that it stopped.

How good for you, these things, how good for you.

Where is Thursday?
Where is my can of coffee.
Where is everything
as

He has one of those bedside lamps activated by touch. A finger on the base or the stem. The brush of a hand. A thumb. He lies there alone with his hands beneath the covers, shivering in the thin cold air, his breath a cloud above him, and he watches the light come on, and go off, and come on, and go off, all night long. He isn’t scared. But he’s tired.

His ghosts do not sleep.

He went to see a priest once, but priests are useless now. He went to see a statistician, who was kind, and who listened carefully and took extensive notes. He promised that he would be in touch. And sure enough, after a couple of weeks a simple card arrived in a simple envelope. On the card was written :

You have 14 ghosts.

Sometimes he tries to talk to them. He doesn’t know what ages they are, whether they are aware of each other, whether they know each other. He doesn’t know what to say. He tells them about his day. About people he knows. About his friends and his work mates. He gossips with them. They do not gossip in return.

He has come to believe that at least three of his ghosts are Gerard Manly Hopkins.

Tonight he muscles into sleep, determined and annoyed, and wrestles for a while, oblivious. Furious. But in his dreams his ghosts line up like mountains.

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I was in bed last night and it must have been the dinner I had with Bryan and Sally, which was this huge pot of spaghetti ragout, full-on, lamb and beef mince mixed, with tomatoes and carrots and onions and garlic and what not, and with a mountain of pasta, and the three - I think - bottles of wine we had, which is a bottle each I admit it, and then followed by a bottle of Port afterwards - which Sally and I finished off after Bryan had gone to bed - but I was in bed last night and the most awful thing happened which has never happened to me before in my life I swear it but I shit the bed, I really did, I shit in my own bed like I don’t know what, like a sick cow, and it was a mountain of shit I have to tell you, a mountain of the most awful smooth pasty shit, which just galloped out of me like I was the farm from which all these stinking brown animals were escaping, and I must have shit about half a ton of this stuff before I even woke up, and by that time it was too late obviously to do anything about it, and it just kept on coming until the entire bed was covered with it, and it kept on coming until there was a hill of shit pushing me off my own bed and then filling up my bedroom floor, covering my shoes and my discarded clothes, covering the feet of the clothes horse and rising up the wardrobe and pressing against the chest of drawers, and steamily piling up against the skirting boards and the walls, and pushing me all the time like it wanted me out, pushing me towards the bedroom door, which doesn’t close properly, which is just as well as I could have suffocated in that room if my own shit had not pushed me out through the bedroom door into the main cavity of the flat, and then that started to fill up with shit, up to the hall table, pulling down the telephone by its cable, up to the lowest picture frames, the photographs I keep, up over the plug sockets and the hall mirror, everything filling with shit, with this endless non-stop vat of black brown viscous shit, this hideous shit, this self made mess of shit, and I frantically tried to swim, claw, grapple my way to the front door of my flat, knowing that I had to somehow open that door or I would be trapped, and I made it along the walls on this tide of shit to the front door of my flat and I managed to reach into the shit and turn the keys and open the locks but I could not for the life of me open the door, it opens inwards, and the weight of the shit was too great now, there was too much shit now, there was too much shit to open the door of my own flat and it kept on coming and I was half floating half drowning, raised up on the unbelieveable volume of shit that had poured out of me and I waited to drown, to die, with my mouth and my nose now the only part of me out of the shit, kissing the ceiling, mouthing at the ceiling, gasping for breath, waiting to die. And then it stopped. It stopped and I thought, there are cracks under doors, there are vents in the walls, there are the rat runs and the roach roads, the natural nooks and crannies of city buildings, and this will subside, if only I can hang in there, for just a while, control my breathing, it will subside, I will survive. Then there was a horrendous creaking and groaning sound. And just before it happened I knew what was going to happen. The front door of my flat cracked and splintered and exploded like a piece of glass and the flat full of shit exploded through it, taking me with it, hurtling me on its rank and fetid bulk down the stairs of my building, to the street door, where it barely hesitated before battering, crashing, bursting through that final obstacle and throwing me out onto the street on a river of my own shit like a seed, like a child in a stampede, my own shit treating me like a piece of shit. I was so covered in it that I was indistinguisable from it. And as people ran towards the scene, and then backed off, clutching their noses, gagging, turning away, I knew that if I did not move I would not be seen, and I would be saved at least the humiliation of indentification with all the heaving rotting shit I had produced. I did not move. I lay there a long time. Eventually some trucks were sent and bulldozers, earth movers, machines for dealing with the muck and the mud, and they scooped me and dumped me and carried me away. And a long time later I was out at sea, jettisoned from a rusting barge by bandaged men, into the cool and cleansing water of the dark deep place I find myself now, able to write this in calm recollection, though my hands are still shaking and there is something wrong with my eye.

I’m back from my journey to Poland and Ecuador, two countries very like Ireland in almost all respects except history, geography and culture. In Poland I fell in love. In Ecuador I fell in love. On the journey between the two I was robbed. Such is life.

In the conduits out of my kitchen I found a sail boat that seemed to wait on me, and so I did climb aboard, and I did clutch the lip of the shallow bowl and I did set my body to the action of sailing, and the sail whipped clacked and filled rising with the blood of a kitchen wind and the hull moved forward on the salty water, and the peppery water, and the water carried hull and hull carried sail and sail carried wind and the boat carried me, out through the sluices of the simple kitchen, out with the garlic paper curls and the spit of mushrooms and the skins of exotic fruits, my sail boat through the kitchen gates, my carrying wooden pouch on the mild stream, in the conduits out of my kitchen.

In the cold outside night I came upon monsters. They howled at the rolling hull, the keel along their veins, the tickle of a tawny human cargo, the stick man upright ducking and looking, rolling through their territory on the stream with the serpent curves that comes to them from the stinking human places, but never like this with a boat upon it. And the monsters were alarmed, and then they were amused, and then they were tired and they tore me apart, quick in the wet moon, their claws all cold and my blood all warm and the boat all smashed like any debris, after a meal or after a storm.

Daringer Butt, who lives in the flat downstairs, knocked on my door this morning to ask about the flume. He wasn’t complaining, that was the first thing he wanted to say. So I invited him in and made him a cup of coffee and he sat at my kitchen table and he wandered a narrowed eye over my plastic bowls and my books. I’m not complaining, Keith, he said again. But I’m curious. Why do you want to gurgle the flume so often? Why do you need to do that? It doesn’t bother me particularly, though sometimes you do it late at night when I’m getting ready for bed, and I worry that it will keep me awake. It hasn’t. It always stops before I actually get into bed. But why so often? I counted yesterday, because I was home, and you gurgled that flume seventeen times. Seventeen is a big number for this sort of neighbourhood Keith. So I wanted to check in and see that everything is okay.

I sipped my coffee and wondered whether I should offer to share the breakfast I had been planning. Yesterday I went next door and picked up some yellow plantain and some mushrooms. I had forgotten about mushrooms for a while.

Well, I explained, it was raining yesterday. There was rain for most of the day. I need to gurgle the flume when the rain backs up in the holdminster.

Seventeen times? In one day?

Well, yeah. I don’t do it unless it needs it. You want to see?

So we took our coffee mugs and I opened the door into the cavour. Mind the steps, I told Daringer Butt. I pulled the light chain and stepped down onto the floor. Daringer followed me along the squam tunnel. It’s cold in here, he said. Weather’s suddenly gone. We turned into the joiture tunnel and after about fifteen minutes of walking in silence we came to the holdminster. You see, I said to him, as I lifted the lantern over the opening, you see how close to backed up this is already? And I gurgled the flume only about, what, an hour ago? Now if I miss a gurgle, this thing can get backed up all the way to the sprouture. In which case I have to demid the axter. And I don’t want to have to do that.

No, said Daringer, I don’t want you to have to do that either. But what you’ve got here, he said, taking the lantern from me and raising it higher, is a miserable holdminster. This must be, what, thirty flakes? My holdminster is at least forty five flakes. You need to talk to Mr Gally.

Really? I said, genuinely surprised. Last place I was, the holdminster was about the same. I thought it was standard.

No, no, said Daringer Butt, this thing is backing up too easy. You need at least a forty flake holdminster in a neighbourhood like this. That way you never have to worry about the sprouture, and you gurgle the flume maybe three or four time a day. Tops. Sometimes you can even get away with leaving it completely. My sister’s place, just around the corner on Hanley Road, they haven’t gurgled their flume in months. She had to do it last weekend just because the kids missed it. You need to talk to Mr Gally. He’ll change that for you. It’s not a big job. I bet he has a spare holdminster. Probably has a few of them.

I looked into the holdminster and at the sprouture. I felt a little foolish. I have been in London for nearly nineteen years. But sometimes I feel that I just got here. I shook my head and sighed. Thanks Daringer. I’m glad you came to ask. It’ll make a difference to me. Maybe I can get more work done. Would you like some breakfast? I have plantain, and mushrooms.

We walked back to my kitchen, sipping our coffee. I have those bigs mugs that seem to last forever.

He came upon a pond of brackish water. When the wind came out of the south east he could smell the sea. He collected these signs but did not let them change him. The ground stayed flat. Still no birds. The sky raced up cold, coming the way he was going, turning sometimes to his left, from due south, colder, and sometimes head on, the temperature of fading summer, more bone than skin. The light grew clotted and hung in bright accumulations under stuttering thunderheads and snagged on the rises behind him. Nothing mattered. His feet stayed warm. His arms were numb. The back of his head bled out a trail of recollections and he abandoned them gladly. And he strode through the marshes and the dusk to the clattering empty sea.