Across the universe

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Book Excerpts

Across the universe
fiction by solomon brendan

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"I was thinking about how, when you look at things, are you seeing the
actual world, or a picture in your head? Sometimes I feel like the world is
just a big Polaroid of somewhere else, and if I squint hard enough I can
see through it to what is underneath."
Everyone was used to Albert saying philosophical things like this, and
lately they had tolerated him a bit more, and laughed at him a bit less.
Albert, Lucy, Cache and Stephanie had been back from New Zealand two days.
They would agree that they were all shell-shocked and jet-lagged, and the
city seemed cold and closed to them, like it had been inconsiderately left
there by some thoughtless person, with nothing to cater for happy lives.
Instead this person had left off licenses and police stations; a huge
teaching hospital and clubs that stayed open until you were due in work the
next morning. These and many other things kept people's sadness under
control and made them forget that something deep in their belly once wanted
more than this.
They had brought something back with them from their time away, and it was
almost tangible. The morning Albert had opened his suitcases he had sensed
the way he felt in New Zealand spreading out around the house like smoke
from a flare. The evening Lucy had got her photos developed and brought
them home and looked at them she felt like the stories they told were being
lightly whispered in her ear. Since they had come back the humour between
them had become a bit restrained, there wasn't the same in-joking or
sarcasm, and what jokes they made always felt guilty.
Albert was sat with his back against Lucy's wardrobe. Him and Lucy had had
a lazy day spent in coffee shops, first in Starbucks with it's fake jazz
kidult cliché décor, and then at the opposite end of the spectrum, The Egg
café where all the people were intelligent fucks ups with dyed hair, torn
jeans, torn dyed hair and dyed torn jeans. No one went to The Egg for a
break, they went and sat there all day and spoke to everyone else there,
whether they knew them or not. Everyone there was in band, writing a novel,
and designing a collection that would be too fucked up to ever get shown in
Paris or Milan. It had been fun to sit around like that; Albert had half
forgot how well they got on with each other. Stuff had gone on between them
in New Zealand, and it had coloured how they saw each other, but today they
had laughed and told each other the truth and it felt okay to be fallible
again. Albert had looked at Lucy's smooth, statuesque face, and her
sculpted blonde hair and saw a little of what he liked in her all the years
they had went to school together. Lucy only had two faces but they were
wonderful, happy, and a sort of cheekily intrigued (there must be a
language somewhere with a word that means cheekily intrigued). They had
talked about what happened in New Zealand as if it was ancient history,
Albert had loved and lost there, he had been deprived of a special
opportunity, and her name was Julie.
Stephanie lay back, her shoulders cradled in Cache's fall-scarred brown
arms. Stephanie was mixing paint colours in her head, and Cache was
wondering what was in his pocket that was sticking into his leg.
"When I got off the plane, and you were there, I was so happy," she said to
him.
Cache equally, was happy she said this. Although she had said that she
wanted him to come to New Zealand, in the back of his mind he thought that
maybe she was glad to be having a break from him. Stephanie had been to
India and Malaysia first, so Cache, Lucy and Albert had already been in
Auckland for a week and a half when she came. A lifetime of stuff went on
before she got there.
Lucy's room was the most popular room for them all to hang out in; because
she danced, her floor was always clear. At least that's what the real
reason was, Albert had decided that it was because she was a Catholic; she
had a compulsive, Calvinistic streak and couldn't cope with untidiness or
unnecessary clutter. He analysed things too deeply. The sound of 'Ana's
song' by Silverchair was drifting in from Kate's room. A potential
bombshell dropped.
"I'm going out with Stephen."
Albert turned and looked at Lucy. She was looking out the window at the
early evening sun.
"Stephen Stephen?" he asked.
"Yeah, that's where I went last night."
Lucy looked proud. Albert felt a bit betrayed. Not that she was going out
with Stephen but that she had been with him all day and not told him.
Stephanie ran her hand through her raven coloured hair.
"That's fine babe, really. I hope things go well for you."
Stephen was Stephanie's older brother. They had never got on, they had
physically fought with each other from the cot to when he moved out when
she was 16 and since then they hadn't really spoken to each other. They had
always planned to move away from Bristol and not know each other, and
living two streets away from each other in a different city was not going
to change that.
"You don't mind?"
"No, but you know he doesn't really speak to me, he's quite abrupt when he
sees me, and I doubt that will ever change, so don't be upset when it
happens."
"It's ok, I don't expect you to become best friends or anything."
Albert was concerned about Colin; Colin had blatantly loved Lucy since the
beginning of forever, same as he had been a long time ago when Lucy went to
school with him. Colin would be sad to know that she was going out with
Stephanie's 'mystery brother' as they often called him; they saw him around
quite often but never exchanged more than a few words, to do so would feel
like betraying Stephanie's feelings. Colin was upstairs painting some
Citadel miniatures in his room, Orks, and they were coming out quite cool.
He saw a shadow pass over his head. He turned around, but there was nothing
there.
Outside the streets of the city were full of fear, good people were tainted
with bitterness, and people walked on by rather than help those who needed
it. The streets were full of much elms and speed bumps. The orchards of
high-rise flats, which circled the city, had begun to be demolished, there
was millions of pounds of EU money set aside to pump into the worst
estates, where young children met outside off-licenses and patrolled the
streets at nights, throwing stones and singing. Every third house was
boarded up, and every third one of these was a haven for smackheads. The
city brought up too many possibilities for anything bad not to happen. The
few people with pure hearts found themselves crying at night as they smiled
by day; silently attenuating their despair with gin as they spent their
weekends sat in front of old movies. When the people in the city get old,
what was once forgotten is now paramount; their friends and more so, their
family.
Kate hated the city more than anyone in the house. Her mother, a bad
asthmatic, had died in the infamous London smog of 1991. The city had
killed her. Kate was thinking about how Jesus had split history in two, she
was thinking about how she wanted Crème Brule. Anything that took so much
effort to make must taste special. She was reading an email from her friend
in London; her friend had become a vegan, she now ate nothing but cous cous
and alph alpha. She still smoked thirty a day however. Maybe her priorities
are a bit wrong, Kate thought to herself. There was a sense of pathos
behind her friend's message and she felt a bit guilty for not being there.
Kate had not gone to New Zealand with the others, she had spent some of her
summer in Portugal; it had been an exercise in survival more than anything,
although she had enjoyed it immensely. Bathing in the cold Atlantic
everyday, getting sunburnt, drinking Super Bock and being the kind of girl
she secretly wanted to be had brought her home with a smile on her face, a
new outlook on life and a love of chicken piri-piri. She had been a club
rep at night and a time-share rep during the day and had met lots of nice
lads. In Portugal the song she heard most was 'If I ever feel better' by
Phoenix. Kate was strangely behaved, she needed to be drunk to get any
confidence to dance and pull people, but once she was drunk she was
anyone's. She had often wondered whether her drunken life would slowly leak
into her real life, the confidence that drink gave her diffusing in. maybe
the converse would happen and she would feel like she had to drink more and
more to be less timid. But every now and then a smirk slid across her face
as she remembered how she had been someone else and loved it.
Its weird when you've been home for hours and then you step outside. The
world feels like an extension of your house; you feel safe, like nothing
bad could happen. You feel like you can take your shoes off, you can sit on
the floor, you can talk to strangers, fleeting members of life's beautiful
contribution; you can stroke cats and pick flowers because they are all
yours. Kate was daydreaming, about Easter Island big heads, and really tall
people, and someone telling her how the British museum stole all of the
world's best stuff. Then she realised that she was daydreaming about
Albert. Kate and Albert hadn't known each other that long, but they had
become very close and she had missed him profoundly during the summer. He
had seemed a bit different since he'd come back; he spoke more, yet at the
same time, seemed to have more going on inside his head than outside. If
Kate really wanted his love, and she wasn't sure if she did yet, she would
have to fight him for it.
She decided to maybe talk to Stephanie about it, Steph was like the mother
of the house really, wise and well-spoken. Lucy was reluctantly graceful,
every movement timed and poised. And Kate, well even she would acknowledge
that she was a bit childish, maybe because since her mother died the world
had indulged her. She wasn't spoilt or anything, she just spoke simply and
liked simple things, some people probably just thought she was a bit
stupid, how she'd just say things like,
"I'm excited cos I made jelly, I made jelly with ladiesfingers in, tonight
I'm gonna have jelly with ladies fingers in."
That sort of thing.

Sunday

Cache and Stephanie were lazing around, contentedly wasting their Sunday
afternoon. The window was open and the sun was shining in between the
weeping willow's busy branches. He was reading her copy of Glamour while
she stared emptily at a morning paper. Cache's speakers were rumbling;
Cache liked both kinds of music, drum and bass. He listened to the same few
cds obsessively, apart from that he had a few acetate white labels which he
only span on special occasions, they had beautiful finity; they only lasted
for about a hundred plays. An Ursula Leguin novel rested on the blue
carpet. I wish she wouldn't leave stuff on my floor, he thought to himself.
Cache was due in work behind a bar in a few hours; he loved it, he'd get so
many tips that he'd finish and drink the bar dry, they always had a
stay-behind until at least 1 am. Cache loved the simplicity of being drunk,
getting home and waking Steph up by drawing invisible pictures on her back
with his finger.

Stephanie had enjoyed an easy, privileged life, but she had made herself
see the bad side of everywhere, she had seen true poverty amongst the dust
and heat on her travels around India and always put herself in the worst
situations, she spoke to anyone who spoke to her; it worried everyone who
knew her.
"Do you know that Shakespeare invented the word alligator?"
Cache answered her with silence. He couldn't be bothered talking about
small things, unless they were rugby statistics.
"You've been rinsing this tune, haven't you? What is it?"
"Krush," Cache pointed at the magazine resting on his huge palm, and added,
"She's fine, she is. If you looked a bit more like her."
He smiled at her, instantly pardoning himself of causing any upset. She
rewarded him with a playful bite of his finger. He didn't hold eye contact
with most people. Stephanie lay circling the important parts of the news,
not that she kept newspapers or ever read them twice, but it seemed to make
her remember them better; it was probably a learnt reaction since she had
studied journalism. As she fingered the horoscopes, she wondered how the
gravity from planets millions of miles away could really affect her life.
Cache ran a finger through her perfect brown hair as he swigged her mug of
espresso. Stephanie was thinking about how good it would be if they had
lighter cutlery for breakfast, you struggle with the weight of cutlery
first thing in the morning, you should save the heavy cutlery for meals.
Imagine if cutlery was different, Stephanie was proficient with chopsticks;
she could probably learn to use anything, Martian cutlery or whatever. It
would serve her well when she gets to be an international diplomatic
correspondent. Cache was thinking about the six nations. Stephanie looked
at Cache, his coffee-brown legs full of little pink scars from wiping out
while VTTing. Steph pictured him riding furiously around the countryside
and thinking of her, and all the emotions he would never say. He would
never tell her how once, when he was 15, he had saw an angel while he'd
been smoking round the back of his school. How he felt that everything that
he had or ever had was broken, or insufficient; apart from her, and that
made it worse. Or how he felt like his life had been set in stone since his
seventh birthday, when he heard the news that his father had been stabbed
to death while on a business trip in New York. Stephanie looked at a bee
flying through the leafy garden; it looked fat and charming, like it would
be nice to eat.
"What are you smiling about?" asked Stephanie with the emphasis on the you,
like an inquisitive old Aunt.
"Nothing." Cache lowered his head, trying to hide his mirth. A pause, and
an exchange of stares between two people who knew each other better than
themselves.
"I was thinking of the other morning, when me and Albert had the raw bacon
battle."
"The what?"
"We slapped each other in the face with your bacon, to see if it would
hurt, but it's okay, we washed it before we put it back."
A smile. Stephanie didn't eat bacon anyway, so it wasn't hers.
"It was Albert's really."
"That's gross, Cache."
As Cache looked through the magazine he thought to himself, these clothes
look ridiculous; everything is cool if you call it cool. As the tune ended
and his speakers ceased rumbling, Cache heard the world out of his window;
he could hear children playing, running water, a dog howling, maybe a
steadfast old widower mowing his lawn with a tired wave to his neighbours
as they left for an afternoon throwing a Frisbee around in the park. He
held her fingers between his; they fitted perfectly, it was like they were
plastic models that had both come from the same kit.
"Your nail polish is all chipsty,"
"I know, I look like a hobo."
The night before, Cache, Stephanie, Kate and Colin had been out for some
drinks. Albert had stayed at home because he needed to (he whispered in
confidence to Cache),
"exorcise a few demons. I've been thinking about things far too much."
They had been drinking Flatliners in Bar Luxembourg, with ever increasing
amounts of Tabasco in them. The last one they had, they downed at the bar
and then downed a jug of water between them that Colin's friend Rik kindly
handed them. Which turned out to have half a bottle of Tabasco in it, it
was harsh and surprising that no one was sick.
"Yeah, it was fun last night. Kate kept talking about Albert, it was weird,
I think she really missed him, its sweet really." Cache had little to say
to this.
"I hope he sorts his head out soon." He initiated some kissing.

A couple of rooms away, Albert sat writing with his feet resting on his
mixer. Not comfortable, but he was too lazy to move; plus his occasional
flicking of switches with his toes would be making some kind of music if it
had anything plugged in. Pete Yorn was playing out of his old wooden
stereo, making him feel breathless. The room was big and messy, full of a
thousand little lives that had yet to coalesce into the one he wanted.
Strewn between clothes of every subculture, some Stanton decks, an ancient
Dobro guitar and a skateboard was a couple of photos taken on a black and
white disposable outside the St. James's theatre in Auckland, he looked
really happy on them. Albert had a grin so wide that it cracked his lips;
as a kid he had never smiled or laughed, so he had learned to do these
things big. He was drinking decaf, but it seemed to wake him up and make
his heart palpitate like real coffee, maybe it was a conditioned response;
taste of coffee = wake up.
Albert had survived a mad, cathartic night. He got stoned and stayed up
till 8am having an emotional crisis, threw all of his paracetomol out of
the window in case he got hungry, and decided to mentally sort his life
out. He remembered looking in the mirror and trying to find a clue as to
why this stranger he was looking at had fucked up and disappointed him so
badly. He decided to tidy his room, it would waste some time and maybe
living in cleaner surroundings would un-mess his brain a little. He
remembered that eventually he had gone a bit mad, the shadows had started
to look like they were people mumbling their disapproval at him, maybe
because of the lack of sleep, or he was on a whitener from smoking the
green. It was harsh, but it only felt half-real, like he had to feel these
feelings of intense isolation to understand himself better, that once the
night was over he could phoenix back into life again.
Albert looked out the window across the road at a big tall tree swaying
sadly in the wind, waving its arms as if to say 'Help me, I'm stuck in the
ground!' It looked like it was snowing out, (it had randomly snowed a few
times recently) but it was just the dust settling in his room. Snowflakes
are cool, he thought; water is the most amazing thing, if ice didn't float
on water, there would be no world. Albert was going through some printage
for his essay; he thought he had administered a papercut as he sifted
through like a Las Vegas poker dealer cutting his cards. There is no cut as
unforgiving as a papercut, but on this occasion he had been spared. He
slurped his coffee as Kate entered the room.
"Whatchoo up to?" she sweetly asked sweetly.
"Doing a bit of work, I've got ages to do it though, it's not due in until
next week. Was it pleasurable last night?"
"We sat around and drank, until we were drunk. We spoke shit to each
other, then we came home and closed our eyes until we were asleep. Your
room looks a bit less messy than usual."
Albert was almost embarrassed. His messy room was part of his person, a
physical incarnation of the mess in his head.
"Yeah," he said, "I had a bit of a mad night and became a comp-ob for a
few hours. But I'm ok now, it'll be messy as fuck again by tonight I
reckon."
Kate wore a blue hoodie, a thin silver chain with a crucifix on it, black
leggings, childish pink socks and never shoes indoors. She was quite
beautiful to Albert, she had mischievous brown eyes shaped like canoes, and
her face was one big vaccuum-formed curve from her chin up to her high
jutting cheekbones. She had a child-like body with very thin, toned limbs
sprouting from a flat-chested trunk. She was constantly performing a little
dance, like she had just staggered off a roundabout, or she had worms. He
loved her eyes; they were just amazing; two big brown crystal balls that
told everything in a code you would never crack.
"What's this?"
"It's the Hybrid Theory album, before Linkin Park were Linkin Park, they
released this mini-album as Hybrid Theory; I think I like it better." A
pause, then he added, "Have you got any crisps? I'm Lee Marvin."
She had come prepared, and beemyoed him some cheesy Quavers at a very high
trajectory. The potential energy as it reached its pinnacle caused a bee
four miles away to do a little Bee-dance.
"I'm disappointed with myself. I got offered a cigarette last night and I
took it," Kate spoke really simply and directly, she had a purity and
optimism.
"I wish I was a smoker," Albert only smoked green occasionally, and hadn't
smoked normal cigarettes since he got back; "I feel like a tit for smoking
and I feel like a tit for not smoking. I identify with everything about
smoking apart from dying young of cancer or whatever. Some people blatantly
smoke even though they don't enjoy it, but I enjoy the taste of cigarettes,
and the feeling of nicotine in my brain; it's not very dissimilar to being
stoned."
Kate liked this burst of truth, her hand tenderly rested on Albert's
shoulder.

"I wish it was the 40s and we thought smoking was healthy," Kate purred.
"I'd be dead if it was the 40s," lisped Albert, ruefully munching on his
corny goodness, "it's only modern medicine that's kept me alive."
Albert had never been addicted to smoking, and he saw it as a purely social
addiction, a weakness of character. Cigarette addicts were too weak to
stand out in the smallest societal way, if it was avoidable. It also made
you one of the cooler people in your workplace: when Albert had worked
behind a bar, he smoked because you got a break to smoke, if you didn't
smoke you didn't get a break. Albert had once been addicted to painkillers;
a genuine physiological condition, so he thought. He sat on the bed next to
her as '3am' by Matchbox 20 came on.
"Do you not think you might end up one of those old people who smokes and
drinks because it reminds them of a happy past?" Albert asked her.
"It's strange," Kate never answered questions with a simple yes or no, "But
being healthy and wise doesn't really appeal to me. You're not adding years
to the start of your life, you're adding them to the end. You just get to
be older longer. I don't want in on the deal. I wish we could just lie here
forever. I don't want to be an adult."
'She thinks that happiness is a mat that sits in her doorway' was the lyric
trickling into his ear as he kissed her.
Outside, a thousand little comets and asteroids threw themselves at the
earth, attracted in by the magnet at its core but destroyed by the high
pressures in its atmosphere.

Later that day, the sun was out, The Strokes were fumbling their way out of
the speakers and Kate and Stephanie were sat cross-legged on Kate's bed.
The sound of some clumsy footwork on the stairs heralded Colin's arrival.
"Cache is in work?"
Stephanie looked at Colin; he was po-faced, a big mess of hair, sometimes
one eye was looking at you and the other was somewhere else. He wanted to
act stern and pedantic, but was far too clumsy and reckless to pull it off.
"Yeah, he's in work."
"Do you have the time? My watch says one o'clock."
Stephanie and Kate replied in unison. "One o'clock."
"No," he said. "It's said one o'clock all day."
"Why are you asking the time when you have one?" Stephanie and Kate smiled
at each other; "It could be one o'clock."
"What is time?" Kate asked, faux-philosophically.
"Time is the number it says on your watch," said Stephanie as Colin was
already half way down the stairs, probably mumbling to himself about how
annoying silly-minded girls were.
To some people, it was strange how close Kate and Stephanie were
considering how different they were; they were chalk and chicken. Maybe
Stephanie gave Kate the wisdom she would have liked to have had from the
mother she had lost so young, although Kate was older than her. But
Stephanie was maybe too strong, scared of ever letting herself be
emotionally vulnerable.
Outside, the clouds flew past slowly, like voyeuristic motorists past an
accident. They would see everything in their time. The world span on its
axis, and a gang of ants brought back a bit of lollipop for their queen.
"Do you like my painting?" Stephanie liked to paint when the light was good
enough. The painting was a scary looking demon faced thing, under a dark
arch.
"It's nice, is it Cache?"
Stephanie laughed. Kate smiled and said, "I remember once when I was small,
I was painting a watercolour, I was sort of looking too close, and the
brush went up my nose, and I bled. I used the blood to paint with, it was
such a brilliant red."
"Very modern."
"It upset me when I looked at it a few weeks later, and the blood had
burned through the paper, I thought 'why should blood burn through paper?'"
Stephanie proudly held up a tube, "acrylics are the best paints, you can
texture them like oils, but you can thin them with water."
Albert walked past on his way from the kitchen. He had chocolate round his
mouth.
Kate looked at him there, tall, a big compulsive alien face with staring,
squinting eyes, big lips and a big Jewish nose. His hair was short and his
body hung down from his head as if he was too lazy to hold all of his
muscles up at the same time. He was wearing baggy, fucked up Katherine
Hamnett jeans and a tight navy T-shirt.
"Hey." He smiled a knowing smile at Kate, which was returned with interest.
"Was that Colin getting back?"
"Yeah."
"Cool, I wanna play TimeSplitters." He disappeared upstairs faster than you
could say badger.
When he was securely out of range, Stephanie inquired, "What's going on
there then?"
Kate grinned. "What, with Albert and Colin?"
"Don't play dumb with me, girlfriend!" Stephanie hollered in a very
authentic-sounding drawling Texas drawl.
"Well, let's see? I know I like him, and I know he likes me. He can be a
bit of a whore sometimes but so can all men. He can be quite amazingly
nasty sometimes, but that's because he hates the thought of there being
things that people can't say. But sometimes he can just be this intangible
object, there's like, he doesn't even know he's alive. What do you think? "
Stephanie loved being asked for advice.
"Albert's a strange one, you know that if there's anything you don't like
about him, he's not gonna change, if anything I think he gets more set in
his weird little ways every day. But if you like him K, you may as well
give it a go."
"It's easy to say, give it a go, what's the worst that could happen? But
you get relationships where people just seem to be stuck, emotionally
chipping pebbles off each other, and both people are too weak to leave it.
But I don't see that happening with Albert anyway."
There was more though; Kate paused, breathed deeply and decided she had to
oust what was worming its way down her mind.
"But what about New Zealand? Why don't any of you want to speak about it?
And you all seem to say different things."
"It's just done with. We don't want to bore you with it if you weren't
there. Try to speak to Albert about it if you want."
By the time Lucy came home it was dusk and the crickets were singing a
variation on their chorus from their usual hiding place among the
chrysanthemums. She struggled to put her key in the door. Saw the stairs
ahead. Left foot, right foot; that's good, we haven't fallen back down;
we're doing well. Turn. Up some more stairs. Wandered into the kitchen.
There was a note on the fridge, upside down:
Loosy, ur chocolate cake was out of date and it smelt funny, so I ate it. A.
Bastard! As she staggered out she caught sight of Colin through his door,
sat off on a beanbag watching an old anime cartoon, maybe 'Cities of Gold'.
"How are you?" she asked as she entered his lair of science-fiction crap.
"I'm dandy," he said. He looked funny to her with his glasses on. "You been
in Stephen's all day?"
"We went the pub to eat," she said, taking off her coat. "I think I drank a
bit too much." She moved his copy of New Scientist and awkwardly sat
herself on his floor. She could see "Some sort of incident going on out
your window, Colin. Fire engines and stuff."
Colin could hear the familiar thundering of the police helicopter too. He
usually loved to watch this sort of excitement but didn't want to turn
around; he preferred to face Lucy. He turned off his video, and put his
Chris Clark cd on; to him it was romance music.
"I think Stephen is really great, he's going to become my rock, I need a
rock that I can rely and place myself around and it will always be there
and always remain the same. And Stephen is that rock, I know I can rely on
him." She smiled. "Or Stephy will kill him." Stephanie was Stephen's
sister, but in reality it meant little because they hadn't spoke to each
other for about two years.
It was the person who least wanted to hear it. To Colin, Lucy and Stephen
was an event that would have a lifespan, and he was just hoping it would be
shorter, it would be a succinct occurrence and be over before he had time
to think about it; he had thought about it far too much already. He didn't
want to hear that it was something real. Colin was distracted. He didn't
want to speak about Stephen. He looked at his shelf, full of Babylon 5
figures, for solace and said,
"Dance for me. Dance to this." Lucy had jazz lessons.
She rose to her feet.
"OK." and she did the weirdest, most exquisite gyrations he had seen, her
hands moving up and across each other like her arms were ladders and her
body an eel's. It had a fucked-up kind of concord with the music and what
is more it made Colin smile, and Colin never smiled.
"That's cool. I never thought anyone could dance to Chris Clark."
She nearly knocked down his full size Alien figure, but kept it up by
shaking its green wiry hand, like it had been her dancing partner. He
smiled some more and said "tomorrow's going to be a 'I'm never drinking
again' morning, I can tell."
She shook her head. "I'm too old to kid myself."
Albert came in. "How are you, honey? Have fun with Mr. Ambrose last night?"
"Yeah, it was great. How was your night?" shot Lucy sarcastically.
"Fine. I stayed in and lifted weights and tidied my room. Mr discipline."
Half way through saying this Albert's cockiness had fallen out of his
speech. it silently ran away down the street and the next day helped a
corrupt politician to get his lying ass elected.
Lucy also relented from the patronising tone of exchange and plumped for a
compliment. "You're starting to look quite buff with lifting all these
weights."
Albert remained happy, Colin jealous. Colin was the barista of buff. Why
wasn't she admiring his muscles? Life was so unfair, especially the part
that involved Lucy.
She ran her hand up Albert's chest and pushed up his jaw, making him look
like a proud, Caesary statue. "You'll probably undo all that exercise if
you eat my cake all the time though."
Albert said, "Colin had some too."
"Yeah I did."
Albert looked at Colin. He liked him, but he was one of those people he
didn't picture having genuine thoughts about things, like things just
happened and he just reacted and did stuff without any introspection about
what he was doing. Albert almost wished he was like that, it was probably
better than watching yourself acting out the same mistakes again, and
knowing it but not be able to change it. Maybe it was because Colin wasn't
verbally self-conscious like the rest of them, unless you got him drunk
enough.
Lucy looked at Colin. Through her beer goggles, he actually looked quite
attractive, in a Nazi-general kind of way. He was tall and had a stern,
deep-set face on top of a male model's physique. The real trouble with
Colin was his scattershot personality; it was like there was a really fast
strobe light going on in his brain, and whether it was on or off at the
precise second he thought would completely colour what he did. His actions
and especially what he said was almost always completely random and
unpredictable. He was chaos theory incarnate. He was the sort of person you
didn't picture having parents, you wonder if his upbringing made him so
autistic, maybe a strict upbringing had instilled a sense of strictness in
him, or maybe it was a reaction against being brought up too openly without
any proper guidance.
"Is Stephy in?" Lucy asked.
Albert replied. "Yeah, I think she was in her room, watching a film about
an old man driving across the USA in a lawnmower."
There was an electric current flowing around the room, and Colin was left
out of the circuit. Colin didn't know about what had happened with Albert
and Lucy but the way they acted reinforced his suspicions.

Upstairs The Straight Story had finished (she didn't cry much, this time)
and Rufus Wainwright's clarinet reed of a voice was rasping through
Stephanie's speakers, making the dust on them frazzle like moths on light
bulbs on summer nights. The music playing was more bohemian and 60's than
60's bohemia could have ever been. She was looking at some photographs and
thinking about young children, and how they just betray their personalities
all the time. She remembered a young boy she spoke to India, who sat
cross-legged in the street eating pakoras and chatting to her to practice
his English. He had a delightful smile and kept asking her if she was from
New York. It was a relief to meet him after so many people who would offer
assistance, to guide her were she was going, then demand a 50 rupee tip.
She asked him his name, and he had said 'Joey', it turned out that his
name was Madhav. She told him a little about England, and he told her about
the red-bottomed Bandar monkeys that were irritably picking fleas off each
other in the mid-day sun. Apparently if you hung your washing out to dry in
the sun, they would steal it and only give it back in return for bananas or
limes. She was amazed to think that they could just learn this by
themselves. She took him with him to the Ganga to bathe, the two of them
sat on top of a jeep going down the uneven roads; her teaching him some
English and him teaching her some Hindi. He was clearly very bright, his
English noticeably improved as the day drew on. She explained to him that
in England not everybody got married, and she wasn't planning on it. He
showed her phugadi, a sort of dance where you held hands and span around
with each other. It felt scary, and her weighing probably twice what he did
sent the momentum all wrong and them landing on their backsides on the hot
ground.
He had been so truthful, so absorbed and happy in his own world, and proud
of what he knew. He had shone. When the jeep dropped him off home, he said,
"I should like to see England one day."
And she wished he would, but he would probably only be as disappointed as
she was delighted with Rishikesh. Her thoughts were interrupted by the
sound of wild pigs; Cache was back. Kissage.
"How was it?"
"There was a complete twat in who kept asking for more drinks than he
needed, and then blaming me. And the tills were down. Won a few games of
pool though."
She saw he was breathless. "Did you bomb it home?"
"Yeah, the trees on our road are getting quite overgrown. I pruned them.
Turn this hippy shit off."
She didn't. She was used to him trying to act big and manly by randomly
telling her what to do, and he was used to her ignoring it. "Have you been
painting?" it smelt vaguely chemical.
"Yeah, the light was shining in really nicely before."
Cache smiled as he thought of how she needed such good light to paint such
dark, scary stuff. "What are you smiling about?" He asked her.
"Albert and Kate."
"What about them?" he began to get his breath back. "Albert and Kate?"
Stephanie put her photos of India back in her pine drawer. "They were
kissing. I walked in on them."
"Scandal." He said, only half-sarcastically. It was relatively surprising.
He remembered the night that Kate and Albert had first met each other, they
had both surreptitiously took him aside and professed how they couldn't
quite place why, but they already loathed each other. What Stephanie said
at the time probably rang true though, she had said "They're too similar,
it must be like looking in a mirror for them, and if you look in the
mirror, you won't always like what you see." I suppose that with hating
each other so much at first, they were a romantic comedy ending waiting to
happen, he thought.
"That's quite interesting," he said. "It would be so weird to think of them
being together."
Cache went into the kitchen, and got an apple, a nice braeburn, but he
dropped it on the floor. He picked it up; it slipped out of his fingers
again. It had been a long day and the ride home had evidently stopped his
brain from working properly. He had dropped it so many times that it was
bruised to shit, was about to bin it or put it back for some other lucky
soul, but he thought no, it could still be nice. And it was. Little things
like this convinced Cache that maybe he had changed a little. Somewhere
along the line, the circuits in his brain were getting reprogrammed, and it
was probably Stephanie's influence.
A few rooms away Albert was talking some intelligent rubbish to Kate to
avoid speaking about the day's events. In the background, Radiohead's
'Pyramid Song'.
"The world is full of people doing jobs where day after day, they are
achieving almost nothing. If they were only allowed to read some Brecht, or
make a butterfly out of molten glass; but no, they have to look busy, look
like they are being paid for something. If everyone keeps up the illusion,
we'll all get paid at the start of next month. The conspiracy is -and only
ever whisper this quietly into the wind when you know everyone is in bed-
most people in the western world do hardly anything. The white-collar
revolution has left millions of people doing work that barely exists. They
get paid and plough their money back into companies by consuming whatever
so that the man at the top of the hierarchy gets most of the profit.
They're getting the small half of the wedge, and investing their wedge back
in so that someone else takes the big half of the small half that they've
earned. If people only bought the absolute minimum they needed for a few
years, at the cheapest prices, it would force some equity into the system."
Kate interjected. "Maybe, I'm not sure that's all true, we do have fairly
high taxes which pay for some good universal things, a decent attempt at a
health service and stuff."
Albert thought about taxes. He thought the health service was quite
ludicrous in some ways; it cost him twenty pounds to get his teeth cleaned
by a dentist, but because he was a student, he had a HC2 certificate and
got it for free. People's taxes paid for him to have his teeth cleaned.
Outside, a bus driver whizzed along his last shift, no passengers. The air
was crispy with whispers and barking dogs, like carrier bags from a classy
boutique. Kate's eyes stared into Albert's, wishing him to say something
about anything.
"Yeah, that's true I suppose. I think maybe I'm a leftie with a chip on
both shoulders."
"I'm not sure that's true. But I think you have to answer every question,
whether it's right or not. Maybe it's better to reserve general judgement;
only judge individual situations."
Someone else saying this might have hurt Albert, but in his eyes Kate was
far too petite and beautiful to ever be wrong. He doubted himself anyway,
he only spoke to pass the time, and often, to generate controversy.
"Yeah, you're right. I'm gonna go to bed I think. Güte nacht."
"Yeah, Slapfschôn."
Albert walked back to his room, they lived in a big old dusty house; it was
about 150 years old, probably built for a merchant. The cellar with weird
stuff in lay below. Everyone's fantasy was to do it in the cellar, nobody
had yet. He was deep in the depths of deep thoughts. He was thinking about
the last few days and his life generally. He had grown up like a battery
chicken, destined for a stupid, normal life. One of so many people sat
around doing nothing and drinking tea. As much as he tried to, avoiding it
was like walking a tightrope; after a few years, the net seemed very
enticing. Years he had spent searching for answers in paperbacks and the
sermons of angry Irish priests who had ceased to believe what they were
teaching. He went into his room, scrubbed his face a bit, brushed his teeth
vigorously, and got into bed. Today had been the antithesis of the last
few, and it felt good. But he felt a bit too lonely to sleep, he needed
someone to hug while the alpha frequencies started to fill his brain; they
could just leave when he was asleep. He always felt lonely, even with
people around. Maybe he needed someone else with his crazy insecurities to
show that he wasn't alone, but it would probably reinforce these
insecurities and send him completely nuts.
As he fell asleep he thought of weird things, weird things were seeming
really obviously connected, like a horse he had fed once while staying with
his uncle in the country, and a big mug of coffee, and the number four, a
smell a little bit like broccoli, and a sound it is impossible to describe
here. These were obviously all the same thing under different guises, yet
this discovery would never be remembered for the real world. Somewhere a
rainbow lorikeet preened the feathers around its mate's eyes. Albert was
thinking about Roman Thessalonica and Roman New York, under his NREM sleep
it all connected and all made perfect sense.
In Albert's dream Julie was apparently trying to make him understand her a
bit better. She was sat on the end of his bed in here at home, but it
seemed like her face was just in his face. Like many dreams, he was
watching it from third person.
"Do you ever feel like the world isn't enough for you? I always just feel
like praying to all of the different religions, finding something special
at the back of the refrigerator, like? like drinking meths, taking all of
the craziest drugs and getting the oldest man I can find and asking him if
he knows the secret yet and kissing him; it's the worst thing in the world
to be lonely. Yeah like cos so many people are just fucking lonely,
everything else stems from that. And yeah you know lonely isn't a measure
of how many people you're with, or which people you know."
She was crying a bit, the strangest thing was that she had never actually
been like this, it wasn't like her, and these weren't her words. Albert
woke suddenly, wrapped up in his blankets. The dream had probably been more
aimed at him than it had been about Julie. He started to feel cold and
afraid, he realised that he could not reconcile the way he had acted with
who he was anymore; luckily he wouldn't remember this dream unless
something reminded him.
Cache had an even stranger dream as he lay in Stephanie's skinny white
arms. It was the summer, and he was working in an airport that drew
pictures in the sky, pictures of Santa Clause or Ken Dodd that would appear
slowly over the sea in perfect colour. He would do odd jobs around the
airport, every so often going outside in the sunlight to see the beautiful
pictures. Somehow this day he cut both his index fingers and both his
thumbs with glass. On his way home from work he walked through a leafy high
walled suburb, the trees shading out the sunlight but sealing in the
warmth. The perfect red bricked walls were day and night. Today a huge
muscled bald headed man dressed in a vest and ripped jeans ran at him and
jumped on him in the street and grappled him to the ground. This crazed,
disheveled man then proceeded to shout in his ear a six-stanza poem he
called "The Suffering Story". This poem was written in arcane language and
mentioned Jesus and Napoleon in it; according to this crazed man the cuts
on Cache's fingers had given him the chance to hear these words that no
political or religious leaders could cope with having people hear, because
it profoundly changed anyone that heard it. Cache managed to run away after
this but certainly felt different after having heard the poem, like man's
place in the world had been explained to him. He could only remember the
last two lines properly, they were
The things you love and hold dear the most
Will always be the first to fall.

Cache didn't think about this dream too much, but if he had he would have
certainly worried as ultimately dreams do not come from nowhere, rather
they come from our own unconscious; so this dream must have something
strange to tell Cache.
Colin and Lucy were on a train, part Orient Express, and part the train out
of some Albert Hitchcock film Colin had once seen. They were sat opposite
each other. Outside the window Colin saw trees and terrain. They went under
a tunnel where someone had spray painted 'THE CLASH'; how long had that
been there, he wondered. Suddenly it was twilight. Lucy absent-mindedly ran
her fingers through her honey blonde hair. The ch-ch of the train got
louder, like it could drown out any other noise. As the train crossed a
level crossing, the bumpiness of the old road sent Lucy off her seat, into
Colin. She looked up at his eyes and with a slight smile she whispered his
name. Her lips brushed against his, across, again. Their tongues were
fighting now, two fat slippy ballet dancers romancing onstage. He ran his
hand down her leg, he felt no nervousness, this moment was ready forever.
Suddenly there was a sound though, like an alarm or something, maybe
someone had hit the emergency button.
Colin woke abruptly, to the sound of his mobile ringing. He looked at the
screen, Rik.
"Hey, mate." He had morning voice.
"Did I wake you?"
"No."
"I'm not coming down the gym later, dude. I've had a harsh day."
"How come?"
"It's a horrible story. Horrible, you know that girl from my work, Haley?"
Colin pre-empted. "That horrible girl?"
"Yeah, well last night I got really hammered. We were drinking shots of
lager every sixty seconds for hours. I hate that game, and anyway she came
back and we got down to it, but that's not even the horrible part."
Colin groaned.
"When I woke up this morning, my bed was full of blood. My blood. I broke
my nob! I was in the shower and it was killing, so this morning I had to
wait in A & E for four and a half hours, just so some junior doctor could
laugh at me; he said it would heal itself if I refrained from using it for
a week or so. It was terrible, its still killing me."
Colin wasn't sure whether it was inappropriate to laugh. He did anyway. "I
can't believe you broke your cock, man!"
"Well, anyway, I'm gonna try and rest it now. I might see you later. Take
care dude."
"Ok, man, I hope it, you know, gets better. If it gets hard again will it
just bleed? ? Imagine."
Rik was gone. Colin tried to remember his dream but he couldn't. He
remembered it was good, it was probably about Lucy.

Doves were playing in Kate's room. She was emailing one of her friends from
London, that she had lived with through college. They were supposedly
modern and feminists, but they were such cliché type A bitches. The whole
day it would be 'Oh my god I'm so fat' all the time, creating such a vain
outlook on everything, but they would never criticise any of their peers
for being fat, that would be wrong, better to create an atmosphere where
everyone simply knew what was expected of them. They would always look down
on the girls who were 'conventionally attractive'; it was a big pageant
where the most unconventional looking, but attractive girl won the approval
of everyone for being attractive without resorting to the stereotypes of
femininity, as if they had any control over it! They would always be
running to the toilets every five minutes to throw up to maintain a
'natural heroin chique thinness' that was always much more to achieve peer
approval than male interest.
Most of her friends back home had grown up a bit, and they all liked to
convince each other that they had good jobs in the city. The truth was
probably that they were card-carrying soldiers in the white collar
revolution, employed to type the same letter a million times, and listen to
the same sleazy innuendos that their rugby watching male colleagues had to
espouse all day to resolve their masculinity issues with not working down a
mine shaft. Kate was glad that she was studying a degree, even if it did
mean that she was a pauper and she would not get her big open plan next to
the river till she was at least 25. Delayed gratification was an important
thing to maintain here.
Kate sat at her desk, her swan neck arched, thinking of what to say. Emails
are funny because people often seem to accidentally sneeze out emotions and
bits of personal information into them, maybe its because people are so
used to hiding their emotions and not seeming vulnerable when they speak
that when they sit down and type it just slips through. Kate maybe didn't
appreciate that maybe people did want to let people know stuff that had
happened, that they didn't worry about looking weak all the time. Kate had
lived a nightmare about rats the night before; she hated rats.

Albert had got up early for some reason, okay, it was a stupid reason, he
didn't think he could think rationally in the house. What was true was that
he couldn't think rationally full stop. Kate had undoubtedly wanted him to
stay and speak to her all day. He had an excuse anyway, a student committee
meeting; there had been five so far this year and this was the second he
had gone to. He had stumbled in late and said
"Sorry. I was busy eating food."
People in those meetings talked so much shit. It was like this was the
highlight of their lives, and they had to fill the meeting with such
arbitrary, meaningless crap to fill time. Nothing ever got done because you
always had to consider like, the Russian feminist dyslexic perspective, and
more importantly, how things would seem to the outside world, as if they
cared. Albert knew too well that nothing ever got done if you worried about
how you looked. Albert spent the whole meeting saying,
"This is so anal and vacuous. Why don't you all shut the fuck up,"
but no one actually seemed to notice him. It was clear to them that this
person didn't belong in the small decision making world. He felt like
poking himself in the eye with some scissors just to alleviate the boredom.
After the pain was over he had gone into town and bought some essentials,
the weather was hot today and the city reminded him of New York, not that
he had ever been there, but he often felt like he was in New York when he
didn't feel like he was living in a really cool French film, waiting
patiently for the scene where Vanessa Paradis got naked and went down on
him. In the businessy part of town he saw a couple having sex in a phone
box: so cool. It certainly was sex-in-a-phone-box weather. Their bodies so
close together, like a perfume advert, made him think of Kate. But it
wasn't right, he wasn't strong enough yet. He had seen a man walking down
the street with what looked like a muzzle on his face. Albert was thinking
maybe he was a psychotic compulsive people-biter who had been let out on
day release. Or maybe it was a breathing mask; he was paranoid about what
was in the air, scared of catching TB, or the SARS virus, or some weird
chemical. Maybe he thought that the government put chemicals in the air to
control their subjects. Or maybe he had genuine breathing problems.
Whatever it was, it looked scary.
Albert was quite hazily walking home; the sun highlighted the flaws in
everyone's skin, making everyone beautiful. He saw in someone's shed on the
side of their house, a big Coke machine like you'd have in a sports centre
or whatever. Did they steal it, as a souvenir? Maybe they tried to get the
money out but couldn't, so they took the whole thing. Maybe they found it
really satisfying to buy Coke from a refrigerated machine. It's weird, he
thought, you walk past streets full of houses and assume they all have the
same old shit inside, TV, kitchen, beds, washing machine. What if it just
had a big dolphin that they'd stolen from an aquarium, or a pile of
Argentinean money, worthless since corruption sent the whole country
bankrupt. What if someone's house was just full of pianos?
Colin began to turn the key in the door when it opened itself, like a
futuristic space lock. On the other side was Colin, even more fuzzy haired
than usual, he must have just come out of his annual shower.
"Alright man."
"How are you, Colin?"
"I'm good." The two of them sat down in the lounge. Albert opened a can of
Dr Pepper. Cans make such a satisfying sound, a sound that says 'this is a
fizzy drink'. Colin lit a joint.
"I saw an old Chinese couple arguing before, in Chinese. Shoving each other
and stuff. But underneath all the high pitched vowels, I could somehow
still pick out how they loved each other."
"Yeah, I see that. What's going on with you and Kate?"
Albert smiled a little. He and Colin were on the wave same length. Colin
never danced around the issue. He was like a stand-up comic with no links
at all, just switching the subject to what he wanted to know.
"I don't know, I like her. Things have been harsh since we got back from
New Zealand though; I think about things a lot different now. It was one of
those times when the page of the calendar flips over and you think 'that
was then and this is now'. Now a lot of the time I walk around saying to
myself, 'what am I looking for?' over and over until a voice in my head
says, 'I don't know, but I can't find it.'"
This brought out a rare piece of reflection in Colin. "Yeah, I was like
that when I came back from Tanzania. When I went to the Rift Valley, it was
one of those times of real self-actualisation. When we were bathing in Lake
Nyasa, I don't know why but I really began to feel like I was a person, not
just a machine in a weird shaped box. Before that I felt for months that it
was taking more and more to make me care."
Colin ruffled his messy hair and paused.
"But what are you going to do with Kate?"
Albert closed his eyes, open again. He was thinking about Emma, how she
made him never want a relationship again in his life, and it would be a
relationship with Kate, he couldn't just not call her and let it fizzle
out, they were in the same house. Stephanie had come in now, listening to
them with concerned face. She was spying for Kate to some extent, she did
want to be a journalist, but Albert never looked at things like that
anyway, probably to his detriment.
"When I went out with Emma, it was a weird relationship; I didn't want it
initially but I wanted to be the one in the position of power, the one who
was wanted. So when she finished me, I was just gutted, it wasn't fair. The
nastiest part was that I was so transparent, I was honest, I was myself, I
didn't compromise, so it felt like she had rejected the exact me, not some
lie or whatever that I had acted out."

by solomon brendan, age 21.
contact BC@NME.COM
Copyright 2003 Brendan Collins
Reviews and comments requested
Posted 11/13/2003