The Ribble Manilla Shopping Centre

The twin rails advanced ahead, curving as they rolled over the crest of the hump. Between them an iron fence divided one trav-o-lator track from the other. Above there was a grim soot-begrimed sky, and below a mile drop into the streets and walkways surrounding the Ribble Manilla Shopping Centre.

Elia Sweetfuck had climbed these rails many hundreds of times. There were miles of them travelling over the irregular contours of the roof space. As a child he had come up here with Johs and Ianick, and with Attelina Montpancras, and together they had made a playground out of these obscure vertiginous illicit spaces above the Borough. But as he clung to the fence, pulling his tired bones up to the crest of the hump, it was obvious that he was no longer young or wild or fearless as he had once been. But he still knew better than to look down.

Every child knows how the rails rumble as the trav-o-lator comes from behind or whether it is coming from ahead. And every child knows that they must flatten themselves against the fence to avoid being caught and dragged behind the carriage as it passes by, and how to grab hold of one of the maintenance panels and hitch a ride to the next stop. Elia had seen no trav-o-lator cars since he had started climbing in the early afternoon. He wasn't sure that he'd be able to hunch himself up small enough if one came and he wasn't sure he could keep going up this forty five degree gradient for much longer. His arms were tiring, his back was tiring, it was only the fear of falling and the anticipation of multiple impacts over myriad angular roof spaces that kept him climbing - slower and slower, and the meagre light would be failing soon.

He had been driven up here by the machinations of three women: The vile old Martha Onions, the winsome pliant Edith Donne and his own wife, the formidable Mrs Sweetfuck. They had played him like a bridge hand - he had sat back passive, the dummy, and served sherry and liquers while they played tricks and the high trumps.

What had made him believe, for instance, that a society lady like Edith Donne would take an interest in a threadbare bum like Professor Sweetfuck of the Faculty of Aesthetics. Her mere presence in a classroom full of dry academics should have set alarm bells ringing. Why did he believe that she was really there to study the niceties of the Dodeca Sequence and Comparative Esomorphics? Too old, too slow, and too willing to go to bed with the first piece of skirt who had walked into his office in twenty five years.

Of course it was all around the Institute like wildfire. The old goats from the School of Humanities gurned at him when he walked into the staff refectory. And the spotty undergrads in his Introduction to the Beauty Paradigm sniggered behind their home knitted wollens. But that was just jealousy. How many of them would be able to pull at his age? And it would have all blown over if it hadn't been for Martha Onions.

A wind was starting to catch the northern face of the Ribble Manilla Shopping Centre. Elia regretted leaving his cardigan tangled in the wire fencing behind the recycling bins. He had been hot and bothered at the time and then as he had started his ascent the cold air from a outtake jet had cooled the sweat around his face and neck. But now he could feel the cold under his thin shirt - it was a shirt he liked too: the one that his wife had bought him for his fiftieth birthday.

Reaching the top of the hump, Elia found a heavy shielded connection box filthy with black soot and pigeon guano. He pulled himself onto it and sat looking out across the Borough. Down on the Mombassastrassa coloured lights were coming on in the bars and nightclubs that run for a half mile to the Windmill where five streets fan out fingers into the dark. Behind the diamond spray of the fountains in the main Plaza the Santa Rijala Cathedral prodded the sky with rude gothic spires and appendages.

He had sat up here, or somewhere like this in another lifetime, a hyperactive boy who was shy around strangers. But on that day he found himself sitting there nervously hand in hand with Attelina Montpancras. The big boys in the playground had laughed at him for talking with that girl from Quatre Fours. But if he could have told them he would have told them that they were wrong - it was her that had started talking to him, so it wasn't his fault and it didn't count. But whenever he tried to say anything, *anything*, to the big boys his voice would go all hoarse and high and he would become feverishly conscious of himself and his stupid, stupid shorts.

It didn't help that he stayed at the Headmaster's house either.

His parents had sent him away to the school, there was some trouble, some difficulty they found themselves in, and the Principality was not a safe place to bring up boys anymore. So he had been given a ticket for Kilburninreal and an old suitcase that smelled of must and the white cheese that they make in the Mastic Vale. Some nights when he couldn't sleep, in the old townhouse by the canal that the headmaster kept, he would curl up inside the case so that he could smell the cheesy aroma of home, so that he could enfold himself in it feel the sunny valleys around him. But it didn't work. He could never go home. War came to the Principality and the Giptic Horde raped and pillaged in the Mastic Vale and he never heard from his family again.

Within Earshot of the Wassgotterspeck Viaduct

Elia Sweetfuck hired an attic on the Beaconsfield Avenue witin earshot of the midnight mail trains on the Wassgotterspeck Viaduct. The room was spartan, bachelorish containing a writing desk, a folding bed, a brass telescope and some recieving equipment. It was not by accident, happenstance or a twist of fate that it should be positioned directly opposite to the Headmaster's tall townhouse. Elia came here to spy on his aging master - or at least that had been his original purpose in renting the rooms - but by its inconspicuous location and privacy it became an accessory to his affair with Edith Donne.

They would meet on the far end of Mombassastrasse in the Luminart Kino where they would watch films in languages they didn't understand. Mrs Donne insisted on watching movies with subtitles. It made Elia's teeth ache.

One night they went to see a film in a language they did understand. It was called The Gipt - a horror feature of a philosophically acute bent: Philosophically acute enough for the Luminart Kino. They went to eat in a falafel bar on the corner of the Windmill and retreated for the night to Beaconsfield Avenue.

The curtain opens on a room that is larger than we have expected. The brass telescope stands in the centre of the room in front of closed curtains. Elia Sweetfuck sits with a malfunctioning pocketwatch opened up like a vivisected frog in front of him on his writing table. Edith Donne sits on the edge of the bed. She is fastening her bra and smoking a featherweight pipe, the type which is popular in the Quatre Fours style imitated in the piano bar culture of Mombassastrasse.

"There is a suggestion of gauche immateriality in Soma Jones' film," she observes. She has taken to adopting a pedantic and aggressively authoritative manner when she is with him, "It is as if the world that we inhabit is merely a screensaver for a more authentic reality: The reality of the film. Our claim on stewardship is hereby belittled."

He snorts. He wonders where she read her opinions, who she borrowed them from. And it is perhaps his unwillingness to take part in the scene that carries him forward in his consciousness to the next afternoon. They wake late, it is the weekend. He dilligently porks her and reads the newspapers but he wants to be elsewhere. In these moments he often asks himself when he is ever in the moment. Perhaps it will only be in his final moment of expiry that he will sit face to face with himself in the dying light of mortality.

At four'o'clock in the afternoon he is jumping off a trolleybus on the Broadway. He looks at his watch - there is no time to look for paper flowers in the old supermarche and he is on the wrong side of the Royal Borough. He wants to be sitting in Papa Gelato's Ice Cream parlour on the Sanreal Approach. The dark will be falling soon and the maze of the Marchioness Estate stands between him and his goal. Dark spaces, angular in shadow - windows hardboarded against squatters by the council and milk crates piled to support ramps for aerodynamic bicycle kids. He finds his eyes fogged with the murk of the Estate. It feels like the nearest orange halogen lit streetmast is always behind a garden fence or a steel encased substation. Time is pressing on him and he will reach Papa Gelato's to find the shop shut.

He jump cuts.

Coming out where a long fence protects a reservoir from its own neighbourhood Elia finds himself once more on the Sanreal Approach. The dark brick appartments stand four storeys proud of the Commercial Parade. A busy thoroughfare where four lanes of traffic breath diesel fumes into the amber air of late afternoon. The sense of his mistress's revelation comes to him. He is now conscious of reliving a more authoritative experience - not necessarily his own. He should come to this place more often. The place at the far end of the rail network, the other side of the hill. It will only be later that its name comes to him.

A black bridge. Blockish and built in a clumsy faux-chinese style straddles the street. Ladders carry a constant stream of pedestrians up into it's long crawlway where they cross the road to climb back down the other side. Climbing the vertiginous steps, following the worn working boots of the artisan ahead of him, he recalls a Bank Holiday he spent in the Petroleum Flats with his wife. They were making cine films they would never watch. They ran, danced or cavorted in front of the burnt out shell of the Brunswick Cathedral. The firey streaks of a crystalline spectrum are smeared across the sky and the damp oily sand where pitiful seabirds test their ruined wings in vain. Far out on the horizon they could see the blue-white intensity of the refinery flaring off into the ultraviolet. They had been happy there.

But here cramped behind the earthy smell of a procession of pedestrians crossing the black bridge he is conscious only of the inertia of the crowd. In the wood of the roof above him is carved a primitive stickman with an oversized phallus and the legend: "Your Dad". There is a panic up ahead as a frightened child awakens to claustrophobia.

copyright z.j.krishna 2002

copyright z.j.krishna 2003