Friday, June 16, 2006

Fear and Loathing in South London

What is the point in worrying about anything?

I have a fear, now that I am back in London, of violence, and feel surprisingly vulnerable when poncing down th streets, pushing my glasses back up against my nose and flicking my hair away from my face.

But why is this?

The bubble of living in university accommodation has burst, and so now I remain in my front room, hugging my television, attempting to enjoy the World Cup.

The answer is most likely to get a job and find a small solution to one's laziness and wandering of the mind by giving oneself a small target of eight hours a day to work and pleasure the graft-part of the heart.

Worrying is a useless trait, it becomes problematic when toying with caution. One should be cautious to a certain degree, but there is a thin, grey line between over-preparation and caution, which creates fear and defeats the object of vitality and basic civilised existence.

Being English during the World Cup amongst other things

I find that the English are not exactly as they seem. We are not all short of hair and free drinking of beer in plastic cups or tins. We are not all male either. I am male, however. But I have long hair, and I wear glasses, and perhaps look more Irish than Anglo-Saxon. I still consider myself English, when the country is involved in sports events.

What must the Germans think?

I find that most German fans look like most English fans, except that the English now have darker hair and perhaps are thinner than the Germans. The English have a better football team however. Is the dark hair of the English something to do with global warming? There are so many questions, and only three weeks of the World Cup remaining.

I find that before my father puts out the dinner, the clatter of plates, the low clonk of food-filled pans and pots, he clears his throat. How strange.

Monday, June 12, 2006

a Short Story

Aleksey sat on the wooden floor of the top room. He sat beside the pool of moonlight running from the small window above his head at the top of the house. Aleksey ran his hand through the pale illuminating light like it was a pair of milky silk curtains. He had been put in the top room by his father, ‘Sit down. Do not talk to anyone.’ his father had said, with a croak in his throat. He had not looked at Aleksey, only the floor, whilst gripping the top of his receding dark hair.
Aleksey sat alone in the small empty room, he was afraid, not knowing whether to sleep or stay awake. He was tired, he had been playing with his younger brother Fyodor in the river before he had been put alone in the top room. The faint hum of sobbing rose from beneath the floorboards where Aleksey sat with his chin on his knees. He drew shapes in the dust with his small index finger. His mother told him he would be a mathematician, and as long as he did right by God, he would have nothing to be afraid of. Aleksey thought he had seen God before, standing in the silver water of the cold river that ran at the end of the lane.
Footsteps pattered toward the door of the room where Aleksey waited with heavy eyelids. The wooden steps creaked behind the door. The door unlocked, Aleksey’s father entered short of breath, he took Aleksey by the hand from the floor, not looking at his face. Aleksey did not speak.

* * *

Aleksey’s mother sat with one arm loose on the table, she wore a white apron with a heavy black dress underneath. Her eyes were an icy blue, wide and staring beyond the table. She resembled a corpse sat-up in a chair. Aleksey’s elder sister Elena sat beside her mother, glancing between her and Aleksey. She was a young woman with freckled, snowy skin, her hair dark as coal, short and ruffled. Aleksey’s mother did not notice Aleksey and his father. She turned toward the window as he spoke. Elena sat with her arms pressed in her lap, shoulders curved together, facing her mother, with a look of despair.
‘Sonya.’ Aleksey’s father spoke in an attempt to rouse his wife.
The silence was peppered with the crackle of the dying orange and white embers inside the fireplace, raising the scent of stagnant ash and cold stone behind Sonya. Aleksey shuffled his feet on the bare wood of the floor. Elena held from speaking with the pressing of her lips and hanging of her head.
‘Sonya, Aleksey is here.’ He spoke again.
Sonya ran her hands across her mouth. Her words spluttering with slight laughter, on the cusp of hysterics.
‘I can’t.’
Aleksey’s father gripped his son’s shoulders, the boy peering up at him.
‘What can’t you do, Sonya?’
Sonya peeked between her fingers.
‘Look at him. He is a boy, just a boy.’ Her voice muffled between her hands and the rubbing of her nose and eyes, reddening her features to a cranberry flush. ‘I cannot even bare to look at my own son.’
A chill stood in the air of the kitchen, immersed in the quiet, where the rustle of Aleksey’s shirt could be heard passing against the collar of his small tweed coat as he looked up at his father and over at his mother, both not speaking. Aleksey’s pink lips trembled.
Sonya stood, walking to the window where the flickering candlelight bared her dim reflection in the misty glass. A gale struck the window with a wheezing thrust of its breath, the light of the kitchen swaying to its push. Elena hung to her silence, anxiety building around her brow.
‘I cannot have him here, I won’t.’ Sonya spoke with a burst.
Mitya crossed his arms around Aleksey’s chest. Mitya’s eyebrows pressed against his eyelids.
‘But mother why-’, Elena started.
‘Quiet Elena.’ Mitya addressed her with despair. Returning to Sonya, ‘You won’t? You won’t what?’
‘I cannot have him here, Mitya, not tonight.’
‘You want him to leave, you want our boy to leave?’
Sonya sent a scathing glare at Mitya, dissolving into a brace of tears as she lowered her eyes to Aleksey’s chin, inhaling a flustered breath. She held her lowered face in her hands, her head shaking.
‘Mitya, please, he is my boy. I cannot bear to look at him, not after what he has done. I cannot look at his cold little face.’
Mitya stood with his mouth wide, his hands tight around Aleksey’s chest. Aleksey was patient, he was thinking about the candles and the smell of the dark fireplace. He wanted to play with Fyodor. He spoke.
‘Where is Fyodor?’
An expression of terror ran across Sonya’s pale eyes, she shook from her shoulders to her waist, arms tight across her abdomen. Mitya twisted with Aleksey, hurrying him into the dark of the hall. Elena stood to watch Mitya and Aleksey bustle from the room, her small teeth appearing behind her dropped jaw.

* * *

The small decrepit shed had one square window with a pane of glass missing. The chilling night air crept in through the gap and under the door, groping, pirouetting navy fingers. Rusty garden shears and forks lay on the table and from the walls. Aleksey sat in a ball underneath the table, hiding his face from the dark, from the creaking and cackling of the night. The shed had a damp compost smell, vermin bones littered around the mossy nooks and clefts like a forgotten tomb.
When Aleksey was younger had not been afraid if he had woken to find darkness. He had been there to comfort Fyodor when he would cry and his mother would not hear him. Fyodor was afraid of the night, the twittering of the owls and the scuttling of the rats in the drainpipes.
‘Mama says it’s the sun, he has gone to be with the other boys and girls. He will be back in the morning.’ Aleksey would sit next to him for hours, until he slept.
Aleksey curled below the rotten table, trembling. The shed shook with the gale’s gathering flush, birds cooing in the shuffling trees, watching the shudder of the shed with black opal eyes, raising their voices as the gusts struck. The landscape an orchestra of blustering grass beds and thrashing branches led by the flurry of the night air. Aleksey sang to himself, ‘God is in the darkness, drifting through the lane, God is on the wind’s breath, washing in the rain.’ He rocked to and fro, singing, the thumping against the shed forcing a screech from his throat. He leapt up from the floor, cracking his head on the underneath of the table. A rat lay on the surface of the table, eyes closed, its legs sprawled, and its mouth ajar as if it were snoozing. Aleksey picked it up with both hands, holding it to his face. He stroked the soft brown fur of its back, giggling as he tickled its stomach. It was like Fyodor’s hair, but soft like nothing else, not even the wet grass, not even the soil. Aleksey pressed the rat to his cheek and kissed it on the mouth. He looked at the rat, and dangled it by its tail. Aleksey threw it to the ground, stamping on its head and frame with great ferocity, small exulting breaths bursting from his lungs. He wiped his bloodied feet on the floor like he would when he had come into the house after playing in the field. He ran at the shed door, lunging against it. The door shook, held together by the chain across its middle. Aleksey fingered the metal clump. He climbed atop the table, tussling with a pair of shears from the wall, the smell of summers and damp wood filling his nostrils. He laboured the shears down from the table, the shaking of the shed increasing. Aleksey charged the chained doors with the shears, a stumbled joust. Splinters of wood and dust flittered from the door.

* * *

The lane was dark and blustery, moonshine layering the ground with a damp silver shawl. Aleksey wrapped his arms around his chest, his knees were bare to the night between his shorts and tort grey socks which he pulled to his kneecaps. Aleksey had never been alone on the lane, but he had passed by with his mother on the way to the market. There was a man who would stare, pulling away from his soil with suspicion, as still as death behind the crippled wooden fence. Aleksey’s mother would hurry him and Fyodor along, although Aleksey wanted to stay and talk about the garden.
Further down, at the side of the lane was a stone building. Dressed in the scratching reach of bare branches and the crawling ivy, two pillars held the roof on either end of a step porch. Aleksey had never seen the building before, but he remembered Fyodor asking his mother about a place where quiet people lived. ‘Quiet people are best left in silence.’ She had said.
Six grey blocks of stone lay beneath the orange lamplight. Shadows flickered across the walls as the wind flustered the flame. Black shapes bursting against the grey walls. Aleksey thought of the crashing ocean waves, and the dancing bears of the circus.
On the blocks lay shawls covering curved rising shapes, there were five large, and one small. Aleksey lifted the first shawl. Beneath it an elderly face, with falling strands of white hair like a foamy stream. The old man had a mouth reminding him of the thin and crescent moon. He ran his hands through the old man’s hair - it was damp, thick like straw, and cool like the stream. He thought the old man felt better because of it, the man lay with an expression of content on his loose cheeks.
Aleksey wandered toward the small mound, which lay halfway across the stone, unlike the broad shapes of the five other perches, he was drawn like a stone to the flesh of a riverbed.
‘It’s like a little boy in bed.’ He said, directing his words at the white haired old man. Aleksey was pleased – he knew they would be good friends – unlike his mother had said. Aleksey drifted his hands across the shroud, revealing small black shoes and socks. ‘This boy should not be wearing his shoes to bed.’ He said in a disapproving tone. As the shawl fell, Aleksey found the thick curls and rose petal ears of Fyodor.
‘Fyodor! I knew you were playing somewhere,’ Aleksey’s tone hushing as he realised Fyodor was sleeping, ‘I wish we could have played longer.’
He crawled up on to the block, pulling the shawl over his legs and up to his neck, he lay with Fyodor, singing.
‘God is in the darkness, drifting through the lane, God is on the wind’s breath, washing in the rain.’
Fyodor’s white shirted chest did not push and fall like Aleksey remembered, although he was in awe of how long he had held his breath, when Aleksey had forced him in the cool river. The brothers lay beneath the flowing orange candles, with closed eyes like every other night before.

Thursday, June 08, 2006
























Welcome to my pretentious, self-indulgent blog which will exhibit some of my arty craftings.