narcotic transmissions

this is why events unnerve me... iotar
4:00 am Thursday October 15, 1998

Ian was hanging. Hanging between this world and the next. Popol Vuh were chiming from the television speakers, and the abyss had opened under his feet like a chair kicked by the laughing jackass. There was a tightness around his broken neck, and he felt that he had shat his pants. Somewhere higher, a white horizontal line of light pulled across the firmament to catch the bending heads of a row of London plane trees.

Log jam.

re: love is... estragon
6:50 am Friday October 16, 1998

There was a fearful moment of clarity, as if a gap in the constant cloud cover had illuminated the piss-streaked overhead walkways of Edmonton Green shopping centre. A DNA vortex of leaves skipped like dancing virtues, and the 149 pulled in at the bus centre, discharging the usual lunchtime crowd of OAPs and troublemakers.

They had traced him across London, from Brixton to Battersea to Bow, on three separate mobile phone lines over the last two days. He was the man who had distilled the essence of seasonal melancholia into Newky Brown bottles and had precipitated the long fall of the great EZ towards the end of his sojourn in the city. No one knew how old he was, and his legend would fill several volumes of bound magazines. A slug in dank gabardine, he trawled past the self-service restaurant and the new Hephzibar Web Café, past Asian electrical suppliers and Cockney drinkers, raising his head to bless the passing sentinel tower blocks of Edmonton. Their opalescent optimism harked back to a half-forgotten post-war era when social housing had been all the rage. He remembered it all, as it had been newly built; he remembered the builders, the architects and their wives. It was said that he had had most of their wives. He was the memory of all of this and more, and the shining beacon of New Labour and the new millennium meant nothing to one who had seen it all. He was no "arsewipe sentimentalist," as he would gladly relate to any kind soul who would stand him a pint of stout. In a BBC interview in the early sixties: "Love is a form of blackmail. When we tell another that we love them we place a bond on their heart without any legally binding obligation." But the years had chipped at his resolution like the crockery in an Electric Avenue café. The young lady in question, who barely remembered another Labour regime before the blight of Thatcherism, had bowed him to it in a desperate attempt to shut out the draughts of old age.

Bacon Nostalgia Yachter
4:39 am Tuesday October 20, 1998

They met in the W-bar on Haringay Green Lanes. He with his mountain of coats, scarves, mittens and hats, she in a pretty floral dress she had inherited from her grandmother. His enormous hand in hers—an incongruous couple by any standard.

The W-bar was an old converted Wimpy. The man who had the franchise in the late seventies bought up the property. It was decked in a garish harlequinade of orange glass teardrop lampshades, mosaics that resembled some of Eduardo Paolozzi’s underground stations, sentimental portraits, an old clock with the words “dinner time” printed across the face, nasty brown leather booths and a variety of kitschy chintz. Beneath this Aladdin’s cave were the remnants of the old Wimpy hamburger logos.

They sat at their normal window seat. He began to shed layers as she lit a Silk Cut with a cheap yellow Clipper copy. He reached hungrily for the menu as she leaned over the back of the seat to seize a waitress’s attention. “Coffee,” she mouthed.

Eggs, bacon, mushrooms, lamb-burger, kleftico, knickerbockerglory, BLT, Spanish omelette, moussaka—so much to choose from. He looked up from the menu; she was watching him. One arm folded across the table under her right elbow, which levelled the cigarette at smoking height. He smiled self-consciously—too old for the self-assurance of youth. They’ll go to Finsbury Park and watch the leaves drop from the trees.

Her coffee comes. She stirs it slowly—a one-hand dance. The bend of her wrist—he can see it now as if it was real. There is so much he has forgotten. Some large stretches of Leyton had ceased to exist, and the middle part of Kilburn Highroad had become vague and indistinct. Drivers had been lost there during an unnatural fog of amnesia. Whole Bermuda triangles were cropping up within the confines of the M25. He couldn’t hold it together any more.

Fog was stealing upon Haringay as he focused upon her very pink lips—not lipstick, just perfect pink. Those eyes with their feral intelligence. The way home had been sealed.

Depot Iada Iada
5:14 am Thursday October 22, 1998

Daniel Pica turned the pages of the heavy leather-bound volume. He followed the lines of script with his finger: "on the nature of the soul." He mouthed the words, his eyebrows rising in curiosity. The bell on the counter rang.

"Delivery for T.A. Hulme, sign here!" A heavyset courier in filthy dark blue overalls and a baseball cap labelled "Quicksilver" handed him a pitted wooden clipboard with thin paper forms in yellow, pink and white. Carbons hung out like tongues of luncheon meat; a stubby pencil was attached to the bulldog clip. Daniel scribbled rapidly on the top form: once, twice and in triplicate.

"You got a bog here, mate?"

"Just by the gantries on bay 16a." Daniel pointed down receding arcs of dark passage. Hot steam hissed out of a partly lit bay. There was a repeated clanging of metal on metal. The courier was trying to read his book—head turned sideways. Daniel gave him an impatient look.

"Cheers mate, is it okay to leave the truck parked here for five minutes?"

"Yeah, sure."

"You certain? I'm not going to be clamped, am I?" The courier laughed.

Daniel shook his head and turned his attention back to the book. "...contained herein is the whole truth concerning..." The wind was picking up; he could hear it howling through the upper decks of the central station. He pushed back his swivel chair and bent under the desk to turn the fan heater on. There was a Christmassy smell of old heating coils. He looked at his watch: just over two hours to go. "...the relationship between the archetypal," he noted that word—have to look it up—he thought, "the archetypal entities that make up the illusion of consciousness and their relation to ultimate being." Ultimate being—what?

The telephone rang.

"Hello, uh, hi Mum—no, no, I'm fine." He had an obscure twinge of guilt. The courier was coming back to his truck. Big hulking thing. Driver waved his key and the brake lights flared momentarily amber. He waved at Daniel. "Uh, look, it's kinda busy here—can I call you back… yeah, it's always busy, I guess…"

the courte of queene catherine
by iotar
Posted on Dec 08 1998, 08:44 PM

A chill wind blasted through the bitter shell of battersea power station. It's fluted tower unshaken against a fast scrolling sky of black clouds. Dwarfed by the pigeon guano speckled vastness of the enclosure great jerry cans filled with burning pitch at eight cardinal points marked out the court of the hagqueene. Twentyfour royal halbardiers in close attendance and some eighty arbalestiers along walls, towers and nooks surveyed the western sweep of old father thames.

A great wailing of air-raid sirens moaned in the echoing empty spaces and a runner was granted admission.

Sir septimus steps forward from the hagqueene's side.

"My lord! Sir eliott peacocke begs permission to enter the hallowed presence of her majesty." The messenger knelt on his left knee face downwards holding a battered five and a quarter inch floppy disk in his mittened hand.

The hagqueen looks up slowly awakening. Her hair is wrapped in a knot of dry twigs and clotted mud. She opens her toothless maw: "THERE ARE WARNINGS OF GALES IN VIKING NORTH UTSIRE SOUTH UTSIRE FORTIES CROMARTY DOGGER FISHER SHANNON ROCKALL MALIN HEBRIDES BAILEY AND FAIR ISLE." Her eyes roll. It is as if a spirit speaks through her. There is a hushed reverent silence throughout the court. They have heard her strange revelations before but it never fails to astound.

The light goes back out in her eyes and she is elsewhere.

Sir septimus looks back to the one eyed prince jeremiah who sprawls in a deckchair on the queens right hand side. He moves his hand slightly and absently septimus detects a sneer on the prince's lips.

"Send for sir eliott peacocke!" Septimus hands the disk to a halbardier setting a chain of communication in action.

subliminal emissions
by ioio
Posted on Nov 2 1998, 10:38 am

Clide was getting soaked. The bus-stop by the aerodrome was placed carefully to catch the driving winds blowing wetly across the prince albert airfield. He shifted his bass case from right hand to left and checked his watch. There was a blast of an airhorn as a big cargo blimp maneuvered clumsily.

The gig had gone well considering the sort of venue they were playing. It was packed out and that was the important thing. That guitarist had seemed a bit of a twat - jahoda, or whatever he called himself. Still it was straightforward drone-stuff, he could play it in his sleep.

A power-dressed young woman was staggering up the road, hair awry. As she came closer - caught in the sodium glare of the streetlights he could see that the front of the expensive looking jacket was caked with crusty vomit. Clide scratched his stubble - this sort of area wasn't safe for a young lady, especially if she looked like a exec and even more so if she didn't know where she was going.

She sat down on the wet plastic bench under the inadequate bus shelter. Legs straight and parallel, arms wrapped around herself and her handbag. Clide smiled ironically - knight in fucking shining armour - he thought. He reached inside his vintage lewis leather's jacket and fished out a soft-pack of marlboros that he'd nicked from jahoda.

"Cigarette, love?"

clide breaks step
by eeohtah
Posted on Nov 6 1998, 5:07 am

Clide answered the door in his dressing gown. A cold draught goosebumped his naked legs. Plods, four of them, big visored helmets and flak jackets.

"Kilminster, mr clide kilminster?"

"Yes, what have i done?"

"We have a warrant for your arrest mr kilminster you will be taken from this place to a place of wailing and gnashing of teeth you are under no obligation to buy but anything you say will be taken down and used at your trial." The foremost plod said taking a deep intake of breath and producing a shiney pair of standard issue manacles."

"Knickers!" Clide's head began to reel.

stratford low level
by jadha
Posted on Nov 6 1998, 4:42 am

Maurice donne dragged heavily on a yehuan filter, "the erotometer is a relatively simple device but it will change the nature of reality in the next millenium," in his well manicured right hand he held a bewildering jury-rigged web of devices. A cd walkman was attatched to a curling snail-shell of crystal wired with thick multi-coloured cables and fastened with gaffa-tape and gobs of epoxy adhesive.

"Cut the salespitch, donne," salaryman gazed levelly from unblinking mirrorshades, "you can save that for the media," he nodded slightly at the prone journo.

Donne flipped open the cd player with his thumb and placed a silver platter inside, "this is a recording of a lost stockhausen piece. Acquired with certain difficulties - it was recorded at a secret location in new zealand by a hand picked group of musicians. They recorded the piece track-by-track - no two musicians met so that no-one could have a clear idea of the whole piece." He shut the lit of the player and thumbed the i/o toggle. "The main 'engine' of the unit works on the same principles as an orgone accumulator with certain wirings of my own based upon the dianetic e-meter." Pressing the power-stud on a steel housing beneath the shell the crystal came to green and gold life.

"I want to see a test." Salaryman's voice rang out as the band came to a sudden halt.

"On your monkey?" Donne indicated cro-magnon, who fixed the professor with an expression of hatred.

Salaryman shook his head and indicated the power-dressed girl lying in a pool of vomit at the foot of his barstool.

"Try her."

art, muzak, poetry and the liminal line
by zlotti
Posted on Nov 6 1998, 5:45 am

Friday November 6, 1998. Cathy in autumn. Wrapped in an old shawl sat on the bench at hinterlands south station. Before her are two large old plastic suitcases, the corners chewed by too many impacts. Beside her: the son of her brother who is also her son. He is just out of the awkward adolescent years. He is a tall well-built lad - his single blue eye fixes the hostile world with the contempt it deserves.

Both have sat in silence for two hours. A sunny day on the southbound platform whose rickety arc smoulders. There is an aroma of warm tar. The long windowed sausage of the control booth reflects dazzling white light from the opposing platform. Broken windows line its rusty observation balcony. No breeze disturbs the cobwebs or the age-bleached playing cards, the chipped teacups or the cracked leather swivel chairs.

The signal cluster's six dull ruby eyes are inert, the bulbs a decade old. The urine yellow timetable lies torn on the tracks amongst gravel, driftwood and litter. Its shattered frame was used in halcyon days to smash the bowl of the outside toilet. There is a rectangle of lighter stained wood where it once hung.

Under the chirping grasshopper silence there is an infinitesimal creak of bootleather as jeremiah rolls his buffered square heel over the carapace of a large beetle. Skin flakes as his dry lips break into an imbecile grin. It is impossible to say if the scene is changed by the swelling pride in his mother's breast.

Somewhere in the attics of her past there is a featureless concrete room. It is difficult to explain how she came to herself, as midwife, to deliver the twins. The crone's memory glosses around the inconsistencies of her memory for soon she shall be a bride again. Her granite steady patience still her heart's leap - she has waited this long. She sat for centuries in front of the box following his progress. He had never wanted, he had waited for nothing.

She the oak, he the butterfly...

art, muzak, poetry & the open road
by iotar
Posted on Nov 16 1998, 09:46 PM

"I'd have killed 'em, mate, taken the lot of them apart!" Clide leaned back on the burgundy seat of djelli's citroen ds convertible. The wind in his hair and the brightness of the cloudless december day had cheered him up no end. "Look back on this and laugh, that's what i thought: you'll look back on this and laugh. Shame about that bird at the aerodrome though."

Djelli smiled impenetrably taking miles of motorway in his stride. He'd left clide's conversation miles back. There was just a constant animated buzzing in the passenger seat all but lost in the rushing wind. Sometimes he'd look around and clide would be gesticulating or jerking in the most obscene manners. Ah well, he thought, poor guy thought he was going down.

They stopped at a granada motorway service area some miles from folkstone. It's logo daubed pennants breezed and snapped back under choppy gusts. Families waddled out into estate cars and space wagons faces glowing with fifties optimism. A long billboard fronted the carpark in front of neatly trimmed shrubbery. It advertised the protective qualities of volvo automobiles:

There are things out there that can break you.

autosuggestion
by iotar
Posted on Nov 17 1998, 09:03 PM

Djelli drained his glass of red. Clide had crashed on the sofa: he'd have a terrible hangover in the morning. Nerves had got him - springing about like a chicken after being trapped in that box all night. Djelli adjusted the fire closing down some of the vents. He put on his big parka and checked the halogen torch.

Pushing open the big wooden door a gust of wind disturbed the papers on the kitchen table.

Denge beach, the biggest shingle structure in the country. It was foggy out to sea and the new lighthouse gave a triple blast over the landscape. Checking his pockets for keys he crunched across to the parked citroen. There was another lost sheep to pick up.


the tinkling laughter of children
by iotar
Posted on Dec 08 1998, 01:31 AM

"Baby my heads full of colours," jerry strummed the steel strung lute with a playful look in his pierrot eye, "baby my heads full of pictures of yoo-oo!"

Djelli, clide and una red-faced pissed around the heavy oak galley table laughed hysterically and showered jerry with beer cans. "Sing something we know!" shouted djelli.

the madman of highams hill
by iotar
Posted on Dec 10 1998, 08:19 PM

The man who would be atlas rolled along blackhorse road light blazed along the path he had carved from chingford and a love for the world shone in his beautiful grey eyes. A mountain of patchwork over the heights of those great shoulders into dull suede foothills of his faded shoes.

Internal coloured light shimmered from the twenty four hour costcutter at the junction with st.james's street. His generous mouth stretched into a smile of pure childlike joy.

Food, arranged in packets, wine, learned journals of the day. A new jerusalem. He felt proud. Tearing open a packet of mince pies he ate heartily, with gusto. Yes, he did believe that mr kipling made excedingly good cakes!

"Stop that, you must pay for the goods!" A mean snarl erupted from behind the counter.

The man who would be atlas looked up. Eyes wide, mouth full of mince pie. He was back here again. He squatted and wrapped his arms around his legs rocking slightly and emitting a low moan.

"Get out! I'll call the police!"

They do things differently on the land on four stilts...

enter sir eliott peacocke
by iotar
Posted on Dec 17 1998, 08:43 PM

Sir eliott peacocke stood quite still, his cloak catching the wind off the river. His assignment was a simple one and assigned like a bloodhound he would never leave his prey.

The frigate "ganymede" all black, grey and white angles dazzled in the winter sun. The ruins of the taymes flood barrier receded to aft and the hundred patchwork shantytowns that grew like a fungal infestation along the banks of the river began to thin as Londres stuttered into the bleak sour clay of the estuary.

Gathering his cloak around him peacocke turned on his heel and strode back towards the bridge.

reflections upon peacocke
by iotar
Posted on Dec 21 1998, 10:01 PM

In the captain's cabin peacock reclined luxuriantly on his red leather chaise longue. Heavy william morris drapes made the cabin look more a romantic bedouin tent than part of a modern fighting ship. A triptych view of peacock glared from the black iron framed mirror on the starboard wall. He turned profile left to right, where an old duelling scar caught his eye. He wasn't altogether satisfied.

With an abrupt balletic leap peacocke rose from his relaxed position into a fighting stance bringing his rapier to touch the glass surface but no further. Drapes readjusted into a stationary position.

From his youthful days as a privateer in the adriatic peacocke had rapidly gained favour with the royal court. Considered by some to be something of a loose cannon and in possession of a reputation for alchemical experimentation the knight peacocke was at the piano hinge junction of a hundred court rumours and a hundred hundred more colourful exploits up and down the shanty towns that lined the thames.

There was a sharp rap at the cabin door. Peacocke resheathed his sword in a single fluid motion. He opened the door.

"Goose island sighted, milord!"

the temptation of maurice donne
by iotar
Posted on Jan 06 1999, 11:23 PM

A wave of nausea threatened to throw professor maurice donne over the cold aluminium parapet. Salaryman slammed the palm of his hand against the door of the fire escape.

"Two hundred stories of tower! We're at twenty thousand feet here, maurie!" Salaryman gestured broadly across the sun swept plain. Slight cotton wool cloud hazed towards the golden horizons. "If you'll incline your neck directly downwards from the safety rail you'll see the ancient marvel that is the land on four stilts some miles below. A strange land, a mysterious land. It is said that two men see it the same!"

Maurice stepped back uncertainly feeling the cold corrigated surfaces of the wall behind him.

"And beyond? The tableland! A continent of awe inspiring landscapes. The jewelled fountains of kushmire, the black stone deserts of wara-wara, the deserted skyscrapers of bradport-strauss," he pointed out a grey agglomoration on the seaboard of the northern landmass. There were slight pixels of light from a hundred suntrap windows. "And more. Much, much more!"

"Can we go back inside now?" Donne felt his way around the wall towards the fire escape's door.

"Where's your sense of adventure? All of this can be yours. I'm not offering you those dismal nations squatting under the petrol fog of your own world. I'm offering you power over all of this..."

the wrecking of the clara pandy.
by iotar
Posted on Jan 06 1999, 11:38 PM

"Iesus xristos!" swore clide puffing with the wheeze of a lifetime smoker. Clide, una, djelli and jerry ran up the beach sending canada geese waddling rapidly in all directions. Behind them the thames sailing barge began to sink. Splinters of its hull were thrown in the afternoon air as another high explosive shell rocked the boat.

Djelli waved his orange knirps at the stone tower on top of the hill, largely obscured by a mass of milling geese. "We're making for that church. It's a gateway through to holloway road."

"Why the fuck did we have to come all of this way just to get to holloway road?" Clide hissed around mouthful of harsh cold air.

"It's another holloway road. Parallel."

Behind them the battleship ceased firing and launched a gaudy gold and green ornithopter from the rails along the aft deck.

angelic messengers
by iotar
Posted on Jan 08 1999, 08:57 PM

"Go on!" Salaryman growled, "jump off the edge!" Salaryman was perched on the rail grinning from ear to ear like a cat waiting to vanish.

Maurice donne squatted by the wall with his eyes closed tightly. He felt like he was about to wet himself.

"You wont fall you know. I can hold back gravity and make you fly like a bird!" Salaryman stood on the rail and flapped his arms. Donne covered his face with his hands and peeked between his fingers. "Come on you savage! Do you want to be an immortal, or what?" Salaryman jumped down onto the fire escape with a thud. He grabbed donne by the scruff of the neck and lifted him into a standing position. "Assert your mastery over the elements. You're supposed to be a scientist, aren't you?"

Donne whimpered as he was lifted into the air. There was a creaking of great wings and he felt his tweed jacket bunch up under his armpits.

"No! Stop!" Opening his eyes he saw the platform recede below him and the tower fall away.

Salaryman swung donne back and forth like a tenpin bowler, "just throw yourself at the ground and miss."

"NOOOOOOOOOOO!"

sisyphus wept
by iotar
Posted on Jan 13 1999, 01:22 AM

In the infra red darkness of the winter's night there was barely a pixel of heat. In fact soma jones would have been undetectable if it hadn't been for the "ho fun" pork with green peppers in a black bean sauce (number 73) he carried in an aluminium foil dish in a white plastic bag in his old worn mittens.

He had waited for his food at the "lucky break". Watched some dismal documentary about prostitution on the ill tuned ferguson. Lads on bikes pushed past him to order their ships in curry sauce (number 118) and the crumpled black on the bench read a tattered crime novel. Its front cover was missing and only the sun review: "you won't be able to put this one down as p.i.debrowski cuts his bloody swathe through layer after layer of the hottest action..."

He waited for the train that morning and then he'd waited for lunch time. God, how he'd waited for lunchtime. Each hour his nerves had consciously traced the dial clockwise. Then he'd 'phoned the bank and waited a half hour on the line to be told that his overdraft hadn't been accepted. He'd waited until five o'clock for the day staff to leave and the last hour until nine o'clock he'd waited for the last customers to leave.

"Patience, my son."

Along rainwet streets he tramped his heavy way. Trying to keep his toes from soaking in the dampness that had collected in his boots. He spread his hands over the surface area of his burden trying to make the most of the heat it bled into the january night.

Reaching the top of the hill dullened by the long hours, aching and stoic he came around the corner at last into his own road. His slightly faster plod halted as he waited for a gap in the traffic to cross the road.

Apr 9, 1999, 12:40 PM
Speak to Me
by Zali Krishna

"Oh, speak to me," Soma Jones sang, "Adam and Eve!" The smell of drying linen filled the living room as the central heating began to warm. So cold for this time of year. The disturbances.

"That was 'Missouri' from the new album by Low on Radio Free Stratford. Coming up in fifteen minutes, our continuing series 'Art, Muzak, Poetry and the Land on Four Stilts'." The radio spluttered with atmospherics and honked into Glenn Miller. Jones kicked off his work boots—sodden military socks rucked on his ankles, long grey-green tongues extending from the toes. He padded duck-footed into the kitchen.

"I'll kill you—you fucking cow!" The neighbours’ muffled bellows ended with a sickening thud. Jones instinctively covered his ears with the long sleeves of his cardigan and whimpered. Tea—he thought. Always use freshly drawn water. He lifted the heavy kettle from sink to the hob of his Baby Belling. The plates on the draining board rattled and sang as the 20:48 to Stratford low-level rolled under the Victorian brick arc five storeys below.

"Soma! Soma!" Mum shouted from her room. Jones placed crumpets under the grill and shook his long sleeves impatiently. "Don't call me, Mum, you're three years dead and you never drank tea!" He laughed, shivering at his own wit. Kettle boils. Teabags from P.G., Tate & Lyle sugar from Silvertown, and milk from the cow. Moo!

"...and now, part one of the new series of..." The radio hissed sadistically. Jones piled scones on his plate, burning fingers. Turn off the grill—always turn off the grill. Coming into the living room, the atmospherics were breaking up the signal. "I never want to see you again!" Slam of front door and rattle of letter box next door. Jones puts down plate and mug on the coffee table and wrestles with the knob on the wireless.

"Cark! ART, MUZAK, POETRY AND THE LAND ON FOUR STILTS..."

Apr 15, 1999, 12:24 PM
Wellington Boots
by Zali Krishna

Horse-faced Eliott Peacocke strode out of St. John’s at Stratford into the church gardens—an enormous traffic island supporting the light stone Gothic mountain and the eight-sided column dedicated to the martyrs of Stratford. Buzzing cars, motorcycles, and roaring lorries carried a constant stream of pilgrims from the red brick mall of the Stratford Centre and the aeroglide arc of the reconditioned Stratford low-level rail nexus south to Lea Mouth, the Thames and the Docklands, and north into Leyton, Walthamstow Marshes and the great Essex lung of Epping Forest.

“These are they which came out of great tribulation and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb,” Peacocke read, his brow creasing with high Anglican piety. Fruit salad reggae bounced across the zebra crossing from a stall set up outside the sliding doors of the Stratford Centre. Stopped. There was a moment of still broken by a rattle of pneumatics from the Bovis development site.

“Hallo, Father Eliott!” A short figure in a green parka and thick specs greeted him from a memorial bench.

“Oh hallo,” Peacock hesitated and flicked his long scarf, “Soma, what brings you to the house of the Lord?”

“I was wondering if I could ask you a favour…”

Apr 14, 1999, 12:36 PM
Norman Paige Hi-Fi Specialist
by Zali Krishna

Soma Jones pushed a Sainsbury’s shopping trolley across the zebra crossing loaded with a large antiquated wooden wireless set. He grinned from the depths of his green parka into the icy Stratford air, rather pleased with his moment of inspiration. He had hefted the old box up the slope of his road some half hour, a disenfranchised Sisyphus in NHS specs.

“Ding!” The bell of Super-Fi said, and Norman Paige sat up with a start from his newsrag. Seeing the shopping trolley burdened with a great heap of aged oak, his forward-curling eyebrows contracted his forehead into a concertina of wrinkles.

“You do wireless repairs?”

“I do.”

“Could you have a look at this?”

“I can.”

“Can you give me a hand? It’s rather heavy.”

“Certainly.”

Hefting the box into the small floorspace of the shop, they looked down at the radio for some minutes, hands on hips panting. Soma wheeled the trolley into the street. Coming back in, he found the proprietor squatting behind the cabinet fiddling with a screwdriver.

“It’s very old!”

“Yes.”

“Valves—hard to find.”

“Yes.”

“It’ll cost you.”

“Yes.”

“Fifty quid.”

“Yes.”

“You could buy a good new radio for that.” Paige indicated rows of plastic boxes. Sleek angles. Digital read-outs. Sony, Philips, Binatone, Osem, Hitachi. Jones shook his head. Paige scratched his scalp, “I could be some time working on this.”

“How long?”

“Two weeks.”

“A week?” Jones pleaded, “I need it by next week.” It was Paige’s turn to shake his head. He mouthed a silent “no.” Jones reached into his pocket for a humbug—offered Paige one, who refused—and took one himself. He sucked hard and concentrated: no radio for two weeks. He’d miss the next ART, MUZAK, POETRY & THE LAND ON FOUR STILTS and possibly the one after. “That’s a long time without a radio.”

“Can’t you borrow one from a neighbour?” Paige reached over his glass counter for his receipt book.

“Neighbour?”


Apr 21, 1999, 12:58 PM
In the House of the Lord
by Zali Krishna

Light pinewood pews, clear arched windows—black iron lattice—no Romish tattooing. The high Victorian fluting of church organ. Bright tapestries spun by the womenfolk of St. John at Stratford. Jones quickened his pace to catch up with Peacocke’s long strides. Two West Indian ladies in cream suits and pillbox hats arranged flowers on the high altar. Peacocke threw them a snappy salute and led onwards and up the stairs.

The office was small but clean, bright and efficient. Paintings of Jesus by children of a local primary school and a plain wooden cross hung from the walls. Peacock sat on the corner of his large desk and motioned Jones to the swivel chair beside the old Amstrad PCW.

“What can I do for you, my son?” Eliott Peacocke’s long jawbone hung low and his lips pursed, emphasising the seriousness of his eyebrows. “Is work going alright?”

“Yes, we’re very busy but I’m managing.”

“Are you missing your parents?”

“I sometimes think of them. I never really knew Dad—he was out of the house a lot.”

“Your mother was a fine woman. She did a lot of work for the diocese. People still talk about her in this parish. I’m sure she received her due in heaven.”

“I’m sure.”

Peacocke stood and paced over to the sink. Filled the Mileta Vanguard multijug from the tap and flipped the I/O switch. “Tea?”

“Yes.”

The priest opened his P.G. Tips cookie jar and offered Jones a Hobnob. He fiddled with the biscuit, raining crumbs onto his corduroy slacks. “So, what is the problem?”

Soma Jones chewed ruminatively, clearing biscuit particles from his teeth. Don’t talk with your mouth full. Cleared his throat.

“Do you have a spare radio I can borrow?”

Date: Apr 27, 1999
Author: iotar
Title: greengold

Raj opened the door of the house to find a crumpled-suited Soma Jones standing on the doorstep with an enquiring expression on his bespectacled mug. Raj’s face opened into its customary sardonic leer: “That Soma boy is here again, ‘Liss!” he roared up the stairs. His features softened into paternalism. “Come on in, boy. We’ll have a cup of tea in the kitchen while we’re waiting for her ladyship.”

The hallway was spiced with the heady aroma of garam masala. Soma ran his fingers up the greengold flock wallpaper following the old Sri Lankan. The living room was all yellow bulb-light crackling with the bluish glow of children’s television. Jamie and Lee hid behind the sofa shooting capguns at the screen. Escorting the guest down the stairs to the kitchen, Raj feigned death from bullet wounds, instantly recovering into a broad-faced grin. Soma looked back into the living room to see the boys pulling pig-faced grimaces at him.

In the kitchen Edith waved a marigold-clad hand from the sink. Great clouds of fairy liquid bubbles threatening the hard flashing chrome of the taps and draining board. The whole room was a friendly orange-brown chaos. The blue of the twilight garden peering at the windows. Crash bang – two cats chased in through the catflap.

Soma sat on the edge of a coat-strewn bench beside the pine dining table. Raj bounded around the kitchen. Kettle and cups, Tesco’s coffee granules. Fridge door slam. Hassle of teaspoons.
“You come straight from work, love?” Edith drained another sinkful. Rinsed the basin and crashed more plates across the sink.
“Yes, I finish early on Thursdays.”
“He’ll be a manager one day.” Raj bustled, seemingly quite incapable of containing his mirth.
“I was thinking of leaving.”
“Going back to college? Better yourself? You have to these days, dear. You can’t get on with a handful of GCSEs these days.” Edith poured more fairy liquid into the basin. The kettle clicked to a boil and steamed the window milk-white. The stairs thumped: Jamie and Lee galloped across the floor, setting the fridge door colliding with a fluffy black and white cat.
“I think I might leave the country.” Soma felt he might be developing a headache. Edith yelled something at the kids and Raj gave a roar of laughter, banging a humorous mug of coffee onto the table beside Soma: “Remember who’s boss!” it read. The sounds of the room were fogged as if heard from underwater – Soma hung his head and inspected the mustard and brown tessellations of the linoleum.

He looked up.

Floating through the doorway, entirely removed from the family vortex of the kitchen, there she was. Melissa. Her gait lifted the simplicity of her blue Levi’s and AC/DC t-shirt into a new level of revelation. Soma stared at this apparition floating across the lino – the neon of the glowbar turning her great blonde locks into a halo.

Soma could hear a whistling in his ears.


Date: May 10, 1999
Author: iotar
Title: hieronymo's mad againe!

Jerome of Exeter raised his horn to the twin candy-striped chimneys on Dublin Bay. “Goodday to you upsidedown maiden!” Ferries sailing out of the long arms of Missy Liffy’s harbour foghorned back rudely: PARP! PA-ARP! Throwing himself headfirst at the sand and kicking his stumpy dwarf legs into the rainbit air, Jerome failed to cartwheel through lack of appropriate application of limbs. His skull cracked on a spiral-coiled shell of tiny leviathan. CRAIC! “Ow, me bonce, me bonce – I’s be givin’ me a migraine!”

Mygraine, daughter of Harlow Pendragon, rose from the seaspray smiling with a mysterious Gioconda frown. “Place yr bets,” she say, “for a Russian roulette.” Seagulls did turns on the wind rising from the strand. “Mah baby lost and I’m soo upset!” Descending to earth as Fragrant-Jane the flower-gerl, she paced the solemn steps of an elephant pavane. Finding Jerome clutching his sparse-tonsured noddle cracked eggy-weg-wise and he never get up in da mo-orn-ing! “Arise sir Hierony-nony-ony-ony-nony-mouse of Ecksy-estassi-eggsy-weggsy-star! You shall be the sliced toastbread soldier of the empyrian!”

Date: Jun 15, 1999
Author: iotar
Title: furzzbklzzzzt

zzzzkzkzkzk BVXRRRRRTZ xxxxxxxxxxctctct “…all yoo need is…” kxvzzzrzrzrrzt WHEEEEEEEEEZXT “…the prime minister, Mr Cornelius, in negotiations with the Chinese premier this morning…” kzzzzzzzzzt “SATISFACTION!” zxxzxzxzx PWEEEEEEEEEEEEzzzzzzzzzzfzkt “…trailing suspect near Stratford low…” PRRRRKZZZF hzhzhzhkhzhk PHIZZZZaaaaak “Shub Niggurath…” pwiiiiz “…he is the gate…” BLKLKBKLKBBBBTKTKTKtktkkt “….Victor the cleaner awoke to find his ear nailed to the…” ftftftft.

Raj had been very good to Soma Jones. By the time Soma woke up it was 10.30 in the evening. Raj bought him some brandy and laughed at him good-naturedly. “You don’t want to be acting like that in front of the ladies, oh no!”

It turned out in their subsequent conversation, which touched upon diverse subjects: politics, religion, astronomy, fantasy, tealeaf divination, family history, shopping centre design, and finally and most fruitfully their mutual interest in a certain weekly radio series. So Soma left that night, somewhat later than he had expected, with a handful of cassette tapes and a Philips portable radio-cassette to borrow until such a time…

krrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrzt CHAKRRRRTVVVVzzzz “…it was really screaming lord…” kzaaaaaaaaaaaaaakjj HJHJHJJHJJHJJttttttttkkkkkK K! “…what in the god’s name has happened to Agent Czukay?” bbbtwtwtwtwtwtkHSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS! ttktktktktkktktk WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! phew phew “…I want a station of my own…” kzaaaaaaaaaaaaaa kzaaaaaaaaaaaa “…originally a message board dealing with German…” buzzzzzzzzzzz ftchj “…ALL WE HEAR IS!” btbtbtb WHIIIIING G G G “…since the destruction of the Kingsferry bridge…” grrrrrrrrrrrrzzzzzzzzzzzzk!

He was just having a little problem tuning.

ssssssssshhhhhhhhhht WHOOOP! klk klk “…and now ART, MUZAK, POETRY & THE LAND ON FOUR STILTS!”

Date: Jun 17, 1999
Author: iotar
Title: waiting for potemkin

The old toolshed at the Maze Hill Observatory had been converted into a makeshift tracking station. Charts and tables of logarithmic calculations were tacked to every inch of available wallspace, and a BBC B microcomputer plugged into the crystal snail-shell of a Donne erotometer mapped the shifting rosette figure of the five worlds.

Donne slumped like an old tweed in a frayed deckchair, scribbled line after line of cryptic hieroglyphs on his W.H.Smith’s students exercise book (7mm ruled and margined) and drained another styrofoam beaker of Nescafe.

He’d been scanning the skies for nearly two weeks now. The five Earths turning oblivious cartwheels – a big dipper yawning across the zodiac. Potemkin, damn him. Down at the Army and Navy on Old Woolwich Road he’d drank away the last of his research grant gazing bleary-eyed into the warp and weft of the olde worlde windows.

Earth one was a green world of lush rainforests untouched by human hands but for a handful of research stations on the equator.
Earth two, not unlike this one but ten years behind in the fashions. All strange and gauche seemed half-awake as if in a sullen death-wish.
Earth three was largely water. Some forgotten disaster had cracked the continents into sprawling archipelagoes curling like dispersing smoke.
Earth four was a charred stump of a world destroyed by nuclear fire not so many years ago. Donne had been there once – the sad wretches eked out a living from the broken land with no intention of leaving.
Earth five was a place of rolling savannas where ignorant savages drove their mighty herds to and fro in search of newer pastures.

…and then there was this world and a trail of I.O.U.s and the cramped spidery letters in his exercise book and this winter that wouldn’t kick itself back into life and a cold that wouldn’t shift.

Jul 28, 1999, 11:11 AM
Into Our First World
by Z. Krishna

Into our first world…

Soma Jones’s sore-rimmed eyes would not delight in the golden sunrise. Citrus tones from sour lemon through fleshy grapefruit pink into the blood-orange of the sun purpled streamer clouds, which dissipated into another perfect day. He removed his steel-rimmed lunettes and rubbed some of the industrious nighttime hours from his face. Since suppertime yesterday evening he had been typing line after line of the Rushdean infinite recursion program into the clattering box of his Commodore 64. A vintage copy of C&VG dated 4th April 1984 propped in an ageing music stand was spreadeagled on the last page of the yellow programming pages. Hour after hour he had battled with the small dense typeface—an hour and a half from midnight to one thirty was wasted erasing several hundred lines of ZX Spectrum code he had mistakenly tapped into the machine. Finally, at three in the morning, his tongue heavy with coarse coffee and tobacco, the last END statement went onto the screen. He saved onto a chrome tape with the ponderous Datasette and prepared himself for the hours of debugging ahead. As night turned into morning, the high Edwardian windows of his round tower room caught the first creeping hues of the new day’s spectrum. The clink and rattle of bottles being unloaded from the milkman’s blocky motorboat sent screams of anxiety into Jones’s neck and shoulders: he had been awake too long.

Throwing a light cape over his stooped shoulders and setting a wide-brimmed hat on his sparse mousey hair, Jones climbed down the anti-clockwise spiral staircase into the pine-fitted kitchenette. He paused in the hallway to inspect his appearance in the Indian teak-framed mirror. Frowning, he pushed the brim of his hat lower, selected a good mahogany cane from the faux-medieval brolly stand, and quickstepped down the hundred stairs to the damp portal lobby. Quickly he kicked a pile of mail from the twisted basketweave doormat and was out onto the quay that ran in an irregular oval around Finsbury Island. Sun rippled brilliantly over the Blackstock Reach, littered with the early traffic of gondolas, boatcycles, and tradesmen’s coracles. From the arched wings of the Chapel palace he could trace the grand Holloway Canal from Odeon terminus to Angel. Jones hailed a grey and scarlet Islington Union gondola—the cabbie, smart in his grey uniform, turned the long boat towards the quay.

Stepping onto the broad pavement at Odeon terminus, an archaic dark-suited man sporting mirrored shades, leading a stooped primitive man, bustled past Jones to engage the gondola. It was all Jones could manage to maintain his footing on the cobblestones; he turned to glare after them, but the suited man was absorbed in the practicalities of coaxing his apeman onto the boat. The great columns of the terminus and custom house rose majestic into the morning air. Passengers from all over Londres carried heavy baggages, porters pushed trolleys, airship staff from numerous major lines swaggered importantly between baffled queues of auslanders and citizens of the Commonwealth. Taking the broadwalk at a brisk stride, Jones made his way up the route of the Holloway Canal toward a bistro called Djelli’s.

Jul 28, 1999, 12:58 PM
At Djelli’s Bistro
by Z. Krishna

Through the portico of Djelli’s bistro Soma Jones did go…

The low wooden-panelled lower deck was shaded at this time of morning—in the late afternoon it was clustered with chattering Islingtonian socialites. A broad staircase rose into the round upper gallery, illuminated by an enormous octagonal skylight. Post-qawali jazz played quietly on recessed speakers, giving the quiet bistro a jovial atmosphere. Jones waved to Frieda as she carried a tall teapot to the hawk-nosed figure of Eliott Peacocke. Peacocke nodded to Jones and folded the rectangular sail of his broadsheet into a compact half-tabloid; he uncrossed his long legs as Jones pulled up a chair.

“You look tired, old chap,” said Peacocke, peering over his tortoiseshell reading glasses.

“I’ve been up all night.”

“Reviving the lost art?” Peacocke drained his cup. Jones nodded—he wondered if he really wanted to be here. Peacocke always irritated him with his seen-it-all cynicism. “Still plugging away at those old technologies, eh? I thought you’d know better. These people,” Jones indicated a group of fashionably dressed students, “hardly remember what it was like before the waters began to rise. But I thought that you of all people would appreciate that we are living in a new era.”

“An undemanding era!” Jones growled.

“Have you been talking to Maurice again? There are far fewer of us now, and all this has given Britannia a new lease of life—ruling the waves and all that.”

Jones waved the thought away with a dismissive gesture. He turned in his chair, hoping to catch the attention of Frieda or one of the other waitresses; instead he was greeted by Djelli himself—a broad smile and a not inconsiderable girth he had developed in his old age.

“Soma Jones, the not inconsiderable wanderer in the realms of cybernetics returns!” Djelli seized Jones’s sickly claw with a large dry mitt. “What can I get you?”

“Ratatouille,” Jones spluttered with difficulty, “ratatouille and stewed fruit.”

“Old habits die hard,” Peacocke interjected, prompting an unexpected explosion of mirth from Djelli. Peacocke smirked knowingly, and Jones felt his thin lips crack into, if not a smile, certainly an amused grimace.

Jul 29, 1999, 12:22 PM
Catching Flies
by Z. Krishna

Soma Jones finished his ratatouille and began to doze off in the narcotic drone of conversation…

“How are your explorations of the old tunnels progressing, Eliott?” Djelli asked.

“Interestingly. Some of the newer lines—the Victoria, the Jubilee and its extensions—have survived quite well, while the Bakerloo and Northern branches have largely succumbed to flooding. But we are employing teams of divers and have met with success in finding groups of wretches still living in an air bubble under Pimlico station. They have found passageways leading to Victoria and into the crypt of Westminster Cathedral.”

“Has the cathedral been flooded?”

“Impossible to tell—papist gondolas have been moored off the top of the campanile tower for years. Locals have claimed to smell incense coming from there.” Peacocke finished his tea and rose to his feet in a deft single motion. Jones was slumped back over his chair with his head gazing unseeing at the ceiling—mouth open. “Shall we wake him?”

“Seems cruel. Let him sleep—I’ll wake him up before Melissa arrives.”

Aug 5, 1999, 12:38 PM
The Fall of the 53rd Stratford Rifles
by Z. Krishna

Soma Jones had been lying face down in the cold alluvium of the Medway valley for two days. For some time he had thought he was dead, staring unblinking at a crop of chalk rising from the dirty weeds and scattered rubbish of the ambush. He became aware that he was still alive when his leg was warmed by fresh urine running along his trousers by some freak of osmosis. He remained prone for some hours, piecing together the thirty seconds of the firefight that had wiped out his unit.

The 53rd Stratford Rifles had been operating behind enemy territory. Like the Romans before them, they attempted to cross the river Medway at Strood to make devastating raids on the City of Rochester. They had reckoned without the wiliness and viciousness of certain elements of the 28th Chatham Hussars, who had sprung their trap from behind the broken concrete stumps of the old motorway bridge. Within seconds, the vanguard of the Stratford infantrymen had been cut down by a withering hail of fire from the heavy Vickers machine gun camouflaged in the wreckage of the bridge. Sergeant Van Hoorn was one of the first to fall, and Jones’s comrades Privates Bligh and Mason were also lost in those decisive moments of surprise, as were many of Lance Corporal Baccioni and his cohorts, who had antagonised him so cruelly in the barracks. Jones himself instinctively dropped to the ground and pretended to be dead. Before the minute was up, it was all over. Jones hardly dared breathe as heavy boots trod around him; the groans of the dying stilled by the bayonets of the jubilant Kentish soldiers. That Jones had survived was a small miracle—the blood of Private Khan that splattered Jones’s drab woollen tunic apparently corroborated his act in the eyes of the roughly joking victors.

Somewhere in the hours that followed, he began to believe in his feigned death.


Aug 6, 1999, 12:30 PM
The Snoring of Soma Jones
by Z. Krishna

By the time the mid-day crowds had started to strain the wooden seams of Djelli’s bistro, it had become quite warm outside. The light hazy cloud had dissipated over the course of the morning, and now clerks, office boys, students and solicitors, employees of the council and the unemployed and the idle dilettantes made their way into the bars and the restaurants and the cafés and the tea houses of the Holloway Canal.

And still Soma Jones slept. The way he draped his small pigeonish frame over the back of the chair, head thrown back towards the sunny portal of the bistro, caused him to snore quite loudly. The bustling Islington crowd edged around the recumbent Jones, wedging themselves behind the round marble-topped tables or slouching stylishly against the bar. Frieda and Beatrice juggled with trays of iced tea, fruit juices, coffee, croque monsieur, pasties and pastries—and still Soma Jones slept.


Date: Aug 10, 1999
Author: iotar
Title: the plaice of kings

…really quite wonderful fish.

I’m not sure this is such a wonderful place, but the rainy weather has improved my mood immeasurably. As to what sort of answers the satellite may provide: well, we have the keys – what shall we place within these hallowed walls?

Eh?

Date: Sep 22, 1999
Author: iotar
Title: fish monastic

Stumbling through the arch of my newly inhabited Warner flat, I turn the clef in the green and cream Pullman-liveried door and step into my comfortable inner dimness. Tweed jacket onto coathook (something slightly pleasing about that) and carry bags (carriers) up the stairs into the first-class compartment kitchen.

Unloading cheeses, vegetables and the noble trout into cupboards and fridge, B enters the room silently with a smile easily mistaken for enigmatic.
“We’re having fish monastic,” I declare.

After tea and biscuits and trifles of household business, I heat the oven to two hundred degrees centigrade. I smear the dish and foil with pale yellow lumps of Olivio. Fish in dish, foil on fish, fish in oven, oven door shut – bang.

There is no time for lollygagging, and small potatoes are washed, sliced and immersed in boiling water. Garlic crushed, chop tarragon into tatters, cut mushrooms into eighths. Tomatoes must be sliced finely and exactly for maximum visual appeal.

Fifteen minutes: check fish – trout turning delicate pink. Oh my god! Forgot the eggs! Boiling water into small pan. Subaqueate two free-range eggywegs.

Twenty minutes: out with the fish, off with the foil. Garlic, tarragon and a snow of pepper on the noble trout. Scatter small mushroom pieces. Drain the ‘taties and layer over the fish with ‘matoes and a dash more pepper. Drain eggywegs – dash the shells with the back of a vengeful fork – a thin membrane comes off with the fractured shell. Bisect eggs from base to apex and arrange on the cardinal points of the dish.

Finally: smear with yoghurt and grate a block of cheddar into irregularities. Into the oven for another fifteen minutes.

Serve in the parlour.

Tarragon could have been fresher…

Date: Oct 21, 1999
Author: iotar
Title: Extract from email from Bjorn Upplaita to Linus Tossio - Undated (Translated from Finnish)

…Spent a strange evening with Aaron and Rhonda. All hints and veiled allusions: The rising of the waters (biblical?), the five worlds rosette, server burn-out on Network 54, the construction of angels and timepieces and the submerged Martello towers of southern Kent. After an excellent dinner and too many glasses of Spanish absinthe I declined their offer of the spare room and took my chances on the forbidding streets of Hackney. I couldn’t shake off the impression that they had been eyeing my stout winter coat with admiration. I caught the last monorail to Stratford Low-level, where further services had been suspended due to the unexplained appearance of a battalion of Roman soldiers in the Blackwall Tunnel. Cursing my lack of foresight, I prepared myself for the long walk back to Greenwich.

Ten minutes down the road near a large structure of steel girders, painted red to resemble a harvest of rhubarb, a roadblock of red and white candy-striped wooden barriers draped between oil drums filled with burning pitch loomed ominously below a banner bearing the insignia of the Plaistow Marsh-walkers. Militiamen armed with halberd-headed muskets strutted back and forth hollering thuggish inanities. Fortunately Maurice had wired a simple cloaking device (“A little toy of mine!” he’d joked.) into the circuitry of my Nokia. Hiding myself in the shadows I activated the device. The sky turned digital green and the very air felt charged with static. I crossed the border unseen with no great trouble, but switched the device off again when I could no longer see the guards. Something about Maurice’s technologies make me uneasy. When he first installed the cloaking circuit my mobile had mysteriously switched to playing selections from Gounod whenever it rang.

I may have been hasty in criticising your evaluation of this place as a “barbaric island”. There is something provincial and backwards about the people of the principalities of Londres, and from what I have heard about the lands beyond the capital it seems there is an asylum floating off the coast of Europa waiting for… I don’t know what. But I have the strangest feelings about this place.

Following the course of the many heads and rivulets of the Lea I soon found myself in unknown territory. The wind was moaning in the pylons and slamming warehouse doors in deserted industrial estates. Occasionally I would hear the distant pops of small calibre weapons, or desperate shouting, or laughter. Once or twice, following the directions in my A-Z, roads would suddenly end or branch out into unexpected complexities. The geography of the city had distorted and twisted since the stable era when the map had been drawn.

The cloud banks along the Taymes were coloured with the first pinks and oranges of dawn when I came to the tunnel at Greenwich. I had resorted to the cloaking device on my mobile more than half a dozen times between Stratford and the river. Perhaps I was growing more tired or it was some toxic effect of the absinthe, but each time I activated Donne’s “toy” I had felt more uneasy. There was something or some things in there with me. I became quite worried that something more dangerous was inside the field than outside it. In a broken old recreation ground near Canning Town monorail station I had caught a glimpse of the moon emerging from behind a cloud as a coiled emerald snail-shell. I will have to ask Maurice about the workings of his machine at some time during my stay.

I reached Donne’s Maze Hill rooms around six in the morning. The professor and his wife Edith were breaking their fast in a ‘continental’ style with croissants and coffee. I took a small bowl of muesli, conveyed Aaron and Rhonda’s regards, and took myself to my room to rest.

Date: Nov 5, 1999
Author: iotar
Title: apples

A bench beside the river Lea in the old filter beds on a foggy day. Two figures are seated on the bench; it is impossible to make out any salient features.

(FX: tonnes of water splashing through the lock.)

FIGURE ONE: “Skronch” is the noise people make when they eat apples. One cannot eat apples without making a “skronch”.
FIGURE TWO: (eating apple, talking with his{?} mouth full.) I’d disagree. When one eats an apple one makes the noise of eating an apple.
FIGURE ONE: And that sound is “skronch”.
FIGURE TWO: (slurping slightly.) Not so, not so. Or more accurately: you describe an onomatopoeic interpretation of a real sound. The sound is a thing-in-itself, while your “skronch” points towards that sound.
FIGURE ONE: Nonsense!
FIGURE TWO: Consider, if you will, the sound a dog makes. In English this noise is signified by the sound “woof”, while our French cousins say “ouah!”.
FIGURE ONE: The French are a bunch of ignorant apes!
FIGURE TWO: Ah, no! Another glaring error. The French are a nation and a republic with a proud history and great traditions… and apes? Apes are not ignorant, mon frère!
FIGURE ONE: You are a literalist!
FIGURE TWO: And you, you may pass me another juicy apple…

(CURTAIN)

Date: Nov 30, 1999
Author: iotar
Title: a warning of shoals

Baba had been very kind to Luther Blissett. After the heavy storms of the previous night, Blissett had felt nervous about staying in the old shack, so he’d phoned his old school pal B.G.Ramachandra, the noted manufacturer of electronic shruti boxes, to see if it would be okay to stay at his stilted maisonette in New Romney while he was away. His apprehensions had been well founded, and again the steady thud of fish shoals continued hour after hour into the night. Stout rubberised foam earplugs and an opium-based sedative washed down with a few bells of fine cognac had finally knocked him into his first proper sleep in a week.

It was after midday when Blissett aroused himself the next morning. The rheumy red eyes of awakeness and the escaping tale-ends of byzantine dreamtime awaited the half-slumbering Luther tiptoeing out from his multitog duvet across the old floorboards. The flat roof of Baba’s maisonette rattled still with the flapping tails of the roof-locked monsters of the deep. Blissett helped himself to a soup-dish mug of strong coffee and flicked through the lo-res pages of teletext. He was convinced that viewdata would be the most important innovation of the nineteen-seventies. After checking the stock markets and the horoscopes (on all four of the BBC and ITV channels) he studied the Grailings and helped himself to a fat Havana from Baba’s humidor. The price of Hong King Dairies Anchovizer units remained high, and Direct Thru-put Warmboards were still being manufactured in fake mahogany.

It was half two in the afternoon when Blissett eventually emerged from the maisonette. Stepping onto the raised wooden porch he slipped on an eel, skidded and landed heavily on his arse by the top step. Lucky break! If he’d slid the other way he would have gone under the rail and fallen forty feet to the fish-strewn ground. Taking a few moments to catch his breath and wipe eel gore from his boots and cargo pants, he surveyed the afternoon debris. The shingle shore of the south Kent coast was strewn liberally as far as the eye could see with every variety of sea life: trout, cod, bass, flounder, eel, lobster, crab, shrimps… After the first night of it, a great white shark had broken through the glass conservatory roof of the Britannia at Dungeness. Carefully inspecting the deck as he rose to his feet, Blissett gave a sudden start at the sight of the gapemouthed grimace of an angler fish.

By the time he reached his shack on Denge Beach it had become quite dark. The November sun was feeble enough in daytime, and the watery paperwhite cloud had now turned a dirty photocopier-stain grey. It was just as well that he’d stayed at Baba’s the night before; the sloped roof of the old cabin had given in from the night’s deluge. He didn’t relish the scene of carnage or the fishmonger’s stench that awaited him indoors. Cutting his losses he turned towards the Britannia. He’d see if there was anything he could do to help with the night’s damage there and pick up a spot of dinner.

Date: Dec 10, 1999
Author: iotar
Title: awaiting baba

Spiro was waiting. Although alone he was not lonely, staring over the filthy chipboard and aluminium barriers over the half-mile of vacant space that constituted the Trench. Between the negotiable present and a two-decade-old memory of moving with his family to Villejuif, a myriad of ghosts danced lightly in the amber air of the dying halogens under the whistling blowhole of the Trench. The Trench had been there longer than he remembered. Its origins were obscure, largely apocryphal, but where there had once been gridded intersections, housing estates, recreation grounds and katepilla lines (the old Westward Arches connection), there was now a ragged cleft open to the screaming winds and filled with stagnant precipitates. The water rose by a storey every thirty years or so. Spiro could remember the workmen sealing up the level below in his childhood – they used to come to the trailer and buy hot soup and pastries from his father. So it was strange that he should be here again.

He weighed the brass pocket watch in his hand. Late, Ramachandra was late. This was the third time he’d arranged a meeting and the third time he’d failed to show on time. He re-read the print-out – dirty fingerprints on dot-matrixed paper, lined with numbered rows of turquoise lines:
text

Rcv terminal 345111/65/sarker5.0100010
Snd terminal 218112/64/bgramachandra11.1101011
++ 23.53 26-10.14 ++
msg follows:

dear spiro,
meet me 30-10 at 16.00 - apologies for forgetting previous meeting. will bring HKDA, price as agreed.

Many thanks,
BGR.

Msg ends.
000001=>

All along the waterfront lights were flickering from the sick orange of afternoon into the eye-piercing white of night-time. Spiro sat back onto one of the decaying punkwood benches, hissing a wisp of heated breath into the coldness of the air. Bleak, damp and uncertain. The place looked fine on a sunny day. At the right time of morning in the summer, light would course down the Trench and touch the shorn red brick ends of the defunct shoe factory. It must have been over a decade ago when he’d met her here. She was early. There had been no harsh edge to her voice then…

“You’ve waited for this guy three times already,” ‘Liss had whined. “D’you really think he’s going to show up?”
“He had ‘flu.” He had protested.
“And the time before?”
“It’s a Hong King Dairies Anchovizer,” he had answered. “You see so few of them on the grailings nowadays.”
“But you’ve got a bloody… whatchacallit.”
“Delongii? They’re a different sort of thing altogether.” It was a source of constant irritation how little she knew. How many times had he told her? It was no good; she didn’t understand. The last time he’d seen one in the grailings it had gone almost as soon as it had appeared. Clide had found one by chance in a Tournqvist – but Clide was always a bit crimbly when it came to bargains.

Date: Dec 13, 1999
Author: iotar
Title: hasagawa in amber vapour

Low angle view. Spools of datatape, week-old periodicals, discarded bags from the bakery and rust-coloured paper-stain leaves are caught in the wind that blows down the Trench. First deosil, then withershins, they circulate like weather systems – sometimes a broadsheet achieves escape velocity and is carried over the water and into the higher levels of the sliced cross-section of the city. Up the stairs on three appendages – one old leg that functions and another that can merely support, and a light alloy crutch – up the stairs comes Mr Hasagawa.

The long years of his retirement have turned this relic’s cranium into a dry empty lot, unvisited by younger relatives and haunted by ghosts of the widower’s unhappy married years. As he reaches the cracked meandering paving of the plaza, Spiro rises from the damp bench and turns a slow prosaic pirouette. For moments master and pupil watch one another uncertainly in a yellow trance. Spiro holds his ground as the old man approaches. Hasagawa’s mouth twists into an expression he has not worn in many years.

“Why are you wasting your time here, young man?”
“I’m waiting for someone.” Spiro’s unspoken words echo blankly – they remain potent and potential: Aggression? Indifference?
“I remember you as an… unremarkable student.” The old teacher tries to smile. Fails again. He is met with silence. “You have been waiting long?”
“Not long,” stomach rumbles impatiently.
“You are not waiting for a girl,” Hasagawa observes. “Not that. You are waiting for some thing.” Spiro shrugs a shrug that says “It is none of your business.” He turns back to sit again on the bench.

There is a noise and a static discharge a mile and a half away as two Sekuritor materialise outside a minimarket. A rumble of the Unterstrasse katepilla taking a turn into the underpass. Spiro trembles with the nerves of one watched and unwatching. Dry-mouthed he turns his head: Mr Hasagawa is gone. Ramachandra is now an hour late; Spiro’s annoyance takes the form of a slight ache in his left eye socket.

Date: Jan 17, 2000
Author: iotar
Title: a dream

I’m afraid that I choked on my wine when one of the exchange students asked: “Are we going to fight the reds, Monsieur Tossio?” Jean-Pierre, a fresh-faced youth who was looking forward to his bac’ in the summer, fixed me with that unanswerable question. I hadn’t really thought about it seriously before. For days before we’d heard reports on the wireless: The home counties falling one by one to the Bolsheviks, and it seemed increasingly that we were going to have to buy merchandise from Clide.

After lunch that afternoon I took Blissett’s landrover down to Llandovery. It took a half hour of searching around the pubs to track down Clide. He’d been with Mademoiselle Anise, the supply teacher, all day.
“I can sell you rifles, mate, but I think you’d be better off with carbines for these kids.”
“How so?” I asked.
“They’re inexperienced. Most of them have never handled a real gun. What are they? Thirteen, fourteen? They probably still play war – bang, bang, you’re dead!”
“But you said the Lee Enfield is a good rifle.”
“In my humble opinion, Mr Tossio, it’s the best. But I can give you fifty Winchesters at a very good rate.”
“What about those American M1 carbines?”
“They haven’t been invented yet. This is 1920.”

I’m embarrassed to say that the old swindler won me over. I used the money that we’d put aside for a visit to London and agreed delivery for Wednesday morning. I knew we wouldn’t stand a chance against the long-range capabilities of the Mosin-Nagants of the Russkies, but perhaps the element of surprise would save us.

I drove back to Llandovery feeling slightly depressed. As I approached the hostel Luther came running through the gates towards me with a look of acute agitation. I slammed the brakes on, leaving the landrover in the middle of the road.
“What’s up, sir?”
“Where the fuck’s the rest of the legs?” He waved a lego spider at me. “One of those frog kids got it mixed up with the starter set.” I followed him inside and we looked over the lego shelves. Various Kinder Surprise toys were Blu-tacked to the brickwork and cars, tractors and spaceships lay broken on the common room floor. I tried to explain to him about the Winchesters as I extracted black bricks from various models, but he really didn’t seem interested. Ever since the demolition of Nelson’s Column he’d been hitting the juice pretty hard.

I spoke to the hostel staff and arranged an early dinner so that I could talk to the kids as soon as possible about the current situation. Miss Jones (who would be Soma’s mum…) magicked up a treat with the last of the tinned sardines and some local potatoes and runner beans. The tables of the refectory were a buzz of adolescent hijinks and Luther was back on form. For all his faults Luther was great with the students and I’d be in need of his support in the days to come.

Date: Jan 18, 2000
Author: iotar
Title: a report of winchesters

Well, Luther kept me up until early the next morning. Telling the students what was going on after dinner had caused some excitement. Some had been scared or apprehensive, while others were determined to test their youthful mettle on the advancing Russians with all the rash foolhardiness of the young. When we’d got them off to their dormitories, we cracked open one of Luther’s bottles of cognac and enjoyed a fine Havana. Perhaps it was the prospect of impending death that drove Luther to attempt to formulate his situation as accurately as possible.

“The past in the mind of a man is created dynamically in the period of the present as a constant. We must not think of the past as a chain of events leading to every now, but created in the moment.”
“Created in each moment?” I asked, finding Blissett’s monism difficult to follow.
“No, no, there is but one moment. There is no succession of presents, and the future is as illusory as the past. Consider if you will the man who dreams: Between the time he lays his head on the pillow and the hour that the cock crows he may live whole childhoods, experience the rise and fall of civilisations or view the fate of galaxies. But in real life he has but spent a single night adreaming.”

I laughed, draining another bulb of his excellent cognac. “And what, pray tell, is the practical upshot of his philosophy, O Gautama?”
“That there is no future for us to save this unopened bottle for.”

Bluish light was creeping between the shutters when we took our heavy selves to bed. Luther followed me to my room and stood in the doorway shifting uneasily. We wished each other goodnight and there was a pause as if he was waiting to speak. Looking him in the eye and finding nothing forthcoming, I bid him a second goodnight and closed the door.

I spent a few dreamless hours beneath my quilt when I was awoken by a sharp rap at the door. Finding my kimono and clogs, I opened the door to find Clide bathed in the light of another golden morning. I followed him outside to supervise the unloading of the Winchesters. Some of the students, curious to know what was happening, hung around the open windows of the refectory. Clide passed me a box of cartridges. I loaded them one by one into the carbine. Tying my kimono at the waist I walked over to the students.

“This, children,” I worked the lever action to load one cartridge into the breech, “this is a Winchester carbine. From today onwards your lessons will be centred around learning to use one of these.” Bringing the rifle to my shoulder and sighting along the barrel, I followed the path cut by a swift in the morning air. At the last moment before it vanished into the woods I fired once, bringing the bird down on the road. The sharp report echoed in the mountains and brought silence to the gathered students.

There was a creak from above. All heads turned to the naked figure of Luther Blissett at the French window. “Shut the fuck up! I’m trying to sleep in here.”

Date: Jan 21, 2000
Author: iotar
Title: and a face still forming

Soma Jones was strolling across the patchwork landscape of his dissolute youth. Unlikely connections of road, park, river, café, pub and church dovetailed impossible combinations of landmarks and well-worn haunts into an ideal suburb unknown to public transport. His head empty and his battered shoulder bag filling with an increasing collection of small miracles: ancient tape spools, well-thumbed paperbacks, unidentifiable plastic oddments. Oh, this world was fruitful beyond contemplation.

Time had curved and concertinaed into myriad crystalline structures. The time spent at bus stations and waiting rooms had compressed and promised to fall away altogether. The extended cross-sectional helix of time spent in libraries and bookshops eternalised into an emblem of the ideal. Internally lit familiar images scrolled beneath a bright blue sky blowing with a few early autumn trees.

Stepping up with dry-eyed nostalgia past afternoon-yellowed brickwork of favourite bed-sits, the day was drawing in. He skipped along well-worn shortcuts, back ways and tow paths. Behind a low brick wall Soma Jones spied an old church, a large church, virtually a cathedral. Pausing and looking back the way he’d come, he realised he was lost. The distant traffic thrummed in the distance and late afternoon birdsong twittered in the avenues. It was becoming a little chilly and an orange light bathed the stone walls of the church and caught multi-faced and complex in the arched windows.

Up the steps and into the courtyard it was lush and grassy. There were no tombstones, no graves, only a closed-off licence in the church precincts. Feeling uneasy, he was about to return the way he’d come when he noticed a gaggle of Canada geese cropping the lawn around the other side of the church. Jones smiled. The geese took little notice of him as he approached. Flying buttresses arced over the angular slate roof ending in an impressively gothic spire. Coming around to the high façade he could hear voices coming from inside. A large wooden sign read:
The Church of St. John of the Epiphany, Stratford Parish of Londres.

Soma Jones found himself kneeling in the midst of a square of kneeling celebrants. Ahead and to the right was another congregation stood in a square and at right angles to the first. Light, many-coloured and rich, poured from a great round window high in the dark before him. All stood up…
“Lord have mercy.”

The man standing in front of him, long-haired, bearded and wearing a dark raincoat, he recognised. But then he realised that this wasn’t Nathan, who was standing at the front of the other square in the robes of a priest. The man standing in front of him was Clide, Nathan’s brother. He turned and smiled.
“Clide, I haven’t seen you in years, how you doing?”

Clide, indistinct in the gloom of the chapel, limned in the fiery colours of the stained-glass, smiled modestly. Jones looked more carefully, removed his glasses. He noticed that Clide was wearing the same type of glasses as him. Clide never wore glasses before?
“When did you get glasses?”
“Only recently, the frames are better than yours.” Clide removed his glasses. Jones compared them: He was right, where the crosspiece of his were rounded, Clide’s had a slight double chevron. The plastic of the top half of the frames was also a slight tortoise shell rather than black. Looking up again, Jones became uncertain that this was really Clide standing before him. His eyes and mouth seemed to change shape slightly as if they were still forming – a stranger whose identity was slowly developing before him.

“Christ have mercy.”

Leaving the twin congregations they walked up an echoing colonnade towards a flight of steps leading down to the crypt.
“Your world is closing in, Jones. Every time you walk around your world it becomes smaller. You can’t sustain this vision for very long.”
“My world is non-dynamic. It has no need for development. The outside world might be larger in extent, but it lacks the detail of mine. And what’s your world anyway?”
“I am a bridge to the world of my Father. He brings everlasting life.”

Jones smiled: Rich kids! Dependent on their inheritance for everything. “Well, that’s all very well for you. I never really expected this to last forever; nothing lasts forever.”
“Except for eternal life.”

Jones left quietly by the side door and went to look for a bus stop.

Date: Jan 25, 2000
Author: iotar
Title: those who leave...

From the refectory I could hear singing. Luther had found an old guitar with two missing strings and was leading the students in a chorus of “Michael Row the Boat Ashore”. Voices would drop for the title line and rise into an enthusiastic cacophony of “Allelujah!” He was certainly good for the troops’ morale, and the preparations for war had made him slow his drinking somewhat.

I was investigating the possibilities for ambushes with an ordnance survey map in my room when there was a knock on the door. “Come!” I called, folding the map away. It was Mademoiselle Anise. I motioned her to a seat.
“We are leaving,” she said.
“Who?”
“Clide and me, we are leaving for Ireland.”
“I see. The kids look up to you, you know?”
“I know,” she shrugged and pushed the hair out of her eyes. “I think they should come too.”

I stared at her for a minute. She looked away and folded her arms.
“And when the Reds come to Ireland, what will you do then?”
“What good are you going to do here, Linus? These are not soldiers; they are children.”
“Children have always been soldiers. This is no time for sentimentality. They will learn the glory of war by bitter experience. They have been pampered and mollycoddled by doting parents; this will make men of them.”
“And the girls?” Mademoiselle Anise stood up. The singing had stopped downstairs.
“I never thought of you as a traditionalist.”
“Have you asked them?”
“Asked what?”
“If they want to fight and die and learn the glory of war by bitter experience.” She stood there glaring at me; her face and neck had turned the colour of lobster shell. Finally I broke contact and fished the flat pack of Senior Service from my shirt pocket.
“They do not know what they want at that age.”

I was rather surprised that she left it there. She closed the door quietly and her footsteps rattled down the wooden stairs. Lighting my cigarette and walking over to the French windows, I saw Clide outside seated in the cab of an anachronistic Opel Blitz, the engine running; he didn’t see me. Some of the students were climbing into the back. Opening my desk drawer I unwrapped my Webley from the striped scarf I kept it in. Breaking the cylinder open I checked that it was loaded.

Date: Jan 27, 2000
Author: iotar
Title: wither deletions?

peanut butter often sticky them does not six feety not ever ten more like ten million year…

ten million years?

words are drawn inexorably to their valence. green words go up – red words go down. italics can be numbered and pigeon-holed…

much like shoe boxes?

promise me the sun will rise again again

Date: Jan 27, 2000
Author: iotar
Title: sisko

there was a man called benjamin sisko who liked to dance weird at the disko his trousers were plush and opened in a rush which was a considerable risko

Date: Jan 27, 2000
Author: iotar
Title: the great masturbator

and…
he makes just like a movie star
buttons flying in his hair
camera click & lighting bright
he’s got the whole world in his hands

and…
he’s the greatest masturbator
and…
he’s gonna lose his lunch
he makes out with Al Capone
he’s got the whole world in his hands

Date: Jan 31, 2000
Author: iotar
Title: a house on four stilts

Seating myself before the French windows and resting the heavy barrel of the Webley on my left forearm, I aimed at Clide’s head. He had sold me the Winchesters at a reasonable price, so I bore him no grudge; he had, however, become something of an object in my path. Clide was sat sideways on the driver’s seat of the Opel Blitz, his boots on the metal step behind the front wheel. He was concentrating on rolling a cigarette and presenting the top of his head to my revolver. I anticipated the recoil, the explosion and the smell of cordite. I wondered idly whether Clide would fall back into the cab of the lorry or topple down the step to lie inert beside the left side front wheel. I squeezed the trigger.

My perspective rolled upwards as the chair was kicked from behind. The shot went off and up into the blue cloudless morning. I windmilled erratically trying to regain my balance, but the force of gravity and the kick of the Webley threw me inevitably onto the wooden floor on my back. My skull hit the floor with a heavy thud. My vision flashed red and the revolver hit the floor beside me.

Above me, upside down from where I was lying, Luther Blissett stood grinning boyishly brandishing a square handgun cunningly fashioned from lego bricks. There was shouting outside and I could hear rapid footsteps coming up the stairs.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” I said.

Luther grinned and pointed the toy gun at my head: “Bang!”

I floated in velvety darkness, luminous soft globes of red and green loomed in the preconscious gloom. Opening my eyes I was in a dark humid place. A ceiling fan rotated noisily but failed to relieve the heat. I was lying on a soiled sofa dressed as I had been in the hostel. It was immediately obvious that I was no longer in Wales. I sat up to find Luther Blissett seated beside a small square table sipping at a brandy glass; another chair stood empty before the table.

The room was square with a window on each of the four walls. Smoky reddish light filtered in through the slits of the blinds; I could hear a crowd shouting; occasional bursts of automatic weapon fire and explosions could be heard in the distance. Looking around there was no door in any of the walls. A square hole in the centre of the room seemed to have stairs leading down from it.

“Where am I?” In a better situation I would have attempted a more original opening, but it was my most immediate concern.
“In a house on four stilts, Arjuna. Look out of each window: you will see a different war occurring on each side.”
“The name’s not Arjuna!” I stood up and walked over to the empty chair. “The name’s Tossio, Linus Tossio!”

He laughed. “We’re between the wars here. This is it. Wait until nightfall and there will be four more armed conflicts going on: same rules, same game.”

I was beginning to tire of his metaphysics. “How did we get here? Has Clide taken the students to Ireland?” I realised then that I still had the revolver in my hand. He smiled again, that same beatific smirk. I’d show that blue-faced bastard he couldn’t laugh at me. There was no surprise on his face as I shot him. I’ve shot many men and many women, and most of them have looked surprised or shit-scared. He fell sideways, off his chair and onto the floor.

Within minutes I was down the spiral stairs and into the fray. I stopped a car outside the Piazza and ordered the driver to get out. South of the river the aerodrome was on fire and the rebels had taken over the radio station. It was getting dark as I hit the autostrada, but the night was lit by a hundred small fires.


Feb 4, 2000, 3:36 PM
The Messiah of Ilbarr
by Iotar

Ilbarr.
The long afternoon shadows in the terminal building limned with emerald to the left and rose to the right. Golden sunshine through the big windows blurring figures in the middle distance. The light motes are larger here, as if the grains of photon quanta are fattening in the alien air. Rev. Eliott Peacocke takes his first lungful of Ilbarr. It feels somehow fresher, with a distinct taste of something unfamiliar. Ahead, in the sun-drenched vastness, baggages are defecated onto the segmented conveyor belt.

A few passengers from Lunden 14.22 interface gather around the luggage conveyor in almost reverent silence. A bag is retrieved here, a suitcase there, but with little urgency. Most of them seem preoccupied, stunned into uncommon introspection by what is for many of them their first experience of another world. The terminal is almost entirely staffed by humans, mostly Australians and South Africans, the only exceptions being the tall etiolated figure at the customs desk and the slow-striding Ilbarri approaching from Peacocke's right-hand side.

"Reverend Peacocke?" The Ilbarri extends a long-digited hand. Peacocke accepts. For moments he is inspecting an alien artifact; he had met Ilbarri at the conclaves in Lunden and Parys, but they seem different at home. The almost chitinous leathery skin, the tufted crests and the tight striped body suits made more sense here.

"You must be Eitz N'damma. Pleased to meet you in person after all this time." The Ilbarri lifted Peacocke's cases from the conveyor with ease.

"Likewise. Did you have a good journey?" N'damma motioned him towards the customs desk. The two Ilbarri exchanged a quick stutter of conversation and Peacocke was gestured through.

"Very comfortable, thank you. Perhaps transit between the worlds will become more common in the next few years when we get used to the idea." Outside, the flat international-style vectors of the terminal building gave way to the long perspectives of the Ilbarr landscape, undulating and folding cream, sand and grey, all tinted with the lime and honey-pink hues of the twin suns.

N'damma handed Peacocke a pair of Raybans.

"The light here is different from what you have become used to. It cannot damage your eyes, but you might find it less disorientating to wear these while you are outside."

The diplomatic black Mercedes rolled smoothly over mile after mile of newly built autostrada. Few other cars could be seen on the roads, a few terminal buses and even fewer Ilbarri on suncycles. The driver was a young Ilbarri in a formal Japanese-style suit. N'damma sat beside him and Peacocke in the rear. Ahead, in the haze of two falling suns, Akirmel spread across the landscape, a sprawling suburban lichen. It was mostly inhabited by humans; there was still precious little mingling of the races. The Earth people were too distracted to take much notice of the Ilbarri, and the Ilbarri seemed to regard the humans with something like polite amusement. The first embarrassed diplomats, mostly churchmen, had been surprised by the ease with which they negotiated refugee status on Ilbarr. Peacocke contemplated the impassive face of the driver in the rearview mirror. It was hard to tell if those multi-lidded eyes were looking at him.

Negotiating the smooth arc of a hillside, another sun-drenched river valley came into view. The river was straddled by a huge hydro-electric dam. Great numbers of people were gathered around the top of the massive structure beside a domed tower. Peacocke had read about this in the colour supplements and told the driver to pull over beside it.

Opening the door of the car, Peacocke was struck for the first time by the noise of the dam. White jetting waters roared and tumbled many hundreds of feet below, and a motley crowd gathered around the concrete-walled edges. N'damma passed him another pair of Raybans, which he put on with a momentary jag of déjà vu. This late in the afternoon, the light was still intense, and the swollen bubbles of light danced in the balmy air. The domed tower turned out to be a lifeguard station attended by a number of bored-looking Ilbarri. The crowd was exclusively human, with the exaggerated features of Old Testament prophets. Old, young, men, women and children—all human life was here. Two young men climbed to the top of the wall and stood there for moments, eyes rolled up into their brows and tongues spasming like overtired children. One turned to stare into the water while the other eased himself dizzily into a sitting position. One of the Ilbarri lifeguards came out of the booth, but before he had reached the edge of the crowd, there was only one of the men left standing on the wall. The other had rolled over like a slug and plummeted into the violent waters below. Moments later his companion toppled forward carelessly and was gone.

"Won't the lifeguards do anything to stop them? Surely that's their job?"

N'damma smiled, "So many of your people come here to throw themselves into the dam. There's only so much we can do to help them. Someone is down there now trying to pull those two out of the water, but it's dangerous work."

The lifeguard put his radio back into the top pocket of his jacket, "We save most of them. They're usually quite badly injured: we have some really good hospitals on Ilbarr, so most of them can be treated quickly. Then we ship them off to a sanatorium in Lutz for rehabilitation, but they normally come back and do the same thing again."

"Why?"

"I don't know. But I think your people are taking the situation at home very badly. They're… what's the word? Pining?"

Eliott Peacocke dreamed long uninhabited dreams that night. Surface tensions, volumes and densities presented themselves in non-Euclidian spaces, a procession of abstracted glimpses. He'd had dreams like that when he was very young. He'd awaken in the lonely hours of the night with the regular rhythm of blood pumping in his head. The wardrobe, a looming presence in the darkness of his bedroom, transfigured by the long angles of the early hours. But now, as when he woke in the unfamiliar cell of the monastery in Akirmel, he found himself truly far from home. A school friend's house he had stayed at during those pre-adolescent summers in Normandy had some tangible connection to his world. But here, many light years away from Lunden, he felt removed, perhaps truly for the first time, from his frame of reference.

"Lord?" He whispered into the dark. Could Iesus Xristos hear him here? Was he finally out of scanner range? He grinned or grimaced into the dark and picked up the bedside phone.

"Hello, Night service, how can I help you?"

"Hello, can you send up a cup of chamomile tea. This is room… um, four sixteen."

"Chamomile?"

"Sorry, do you have any herbal teas?"

"Mint tea?"

"That'll do fine… oh, and thanks."

The next morning, N'damma was waiting in the reception with the morning's broadsheets. The reception area was airy and spacious, more like a conference hall or a hotel than a monastery. A few priestly types and some generic suits floated in and out of the elevators with an air of importance.

"Good morning, Reverend Peacocke, the Merc' is outside. Did you sleep well?"

Peacocke mumbled vaguely, "Has the bishop been informed of my arrival?"

"Yes, you have an eleven o'clock brunch meeting. Quite an honour."

Eitz N'damma was dressed similarly to the day before; his cloak might have been different—Peacocke could not recall—but he was fairly sure the Ilbarri hadn't been wearing a silver fish pendant around his mottled neck.

"Are you employed by the church here?"

The Ilbarri smiled, "No, what makes you think that?"

Peacocke pointed to the fish, "I haven't read of any examples of fish symbolism amongst your people."

"It was given me by one of the Docetes." They walked out to the car.

"Docetes?"

Feb 17, 2000, 1:18 PM
Brunch with Bishop Cornelius
by Iotar

"I'm afraid the Cardinal was rather vague about my assignment," Eliott Peacocke helped himself to some more bacon from the proffered tray.

"Well, this is rather a sort of hush-hush business. Once upon a time we were a bit of a frontier out here: edge of empire and all. But increasingly we seem to be tipped for the role of Vatican-to-the-Stars." Bishop Cornelius smiled with sardonic emphasis.

"This is what the Nicene document would seem to suggest," Peacocke paused and opened his mouth to broach a new subject: "Who are the Docetes?"

"You've rather cut to the chase, eh?" The bishop laughed, "As you are probably aware, the Northern continent is inhabited by a human-like people. No, forget that! These people are human. They've been here at least two thousand years before our first contact with the Ilbarri."

"Quite a coincidence."

"Well, that's not all! They speak a tongue related to Greek. Experts disagree, but it may be significantly similar to New Testament Greek." The bishop gestured meaningfully with a bit of sausage on a fork, "and there are a sect amongst these people who call themselves the Docetes."

"Who claim their leader to be the original Christ who seemed to die on the cross one day in Golgotha." Peacocke folded his arms with a smile.

"You've rather ruined my conclusion. But yes, that, in a nutshell, is what you are here to investigate. As far-fetched as it may seem, the Church also fears that we may have found our Messiah."

"And you believe?"

"I believe nothing. I am a churchman; my interest in theology is not speculative: it is wholly practical."

"But in practice?"

The bishop turned a twisted smile, "Awaiting a Messiah is the making of an apocalyptic faith. However, that faith will no longer be viable if He decides to return. We proclaim Christ died on the cross and rose again… you know the story," Cornelius raised his eyebrows sardonically, "But if he didn't die, he might become a bit of an embarrassment. The Docetes claim living proof of this."


Date: Feb 29, 2000
Author: iotar
Title: b g ramachandra drops out

Extract from letter from B.G.Ramachandra to Djelli:

These London people are so cold and aggressive. Sometimes I wonder how much longer I will be able to stay in this city. I spent most of Wednesday trying to extend my visa and found myself bounced from pillar to post. The cold damp streets of the city were chock-a-block with chalk-striped Englishmen, bowler hats pulled low over their Anglo-Saxon brows, but worse were the twenty-some bureaus I visited today. Clerks shifted great sheaves of forms from one dry, fusty room to another, and the waiting rooms were filled with Slavs, Negroes, Muslims, Chinese – every race under the sun. It was like they were teaching us to queue, Djelli.

Towards the end of the day I got talking with a young man by the name of Spiro Arker. I never found out where he came from; perhaps he is another from your land? He was reticent and awkward, but when the Circumlocution Office closed at five o’clock I took him to one of those darkly oak-panelled pubs near Fleet Street. After a pint of stout he opened up a little and revealed something of his quest to me. I could not make out exactly what the device was that he spoke of (gadgetry is so much more diverse and complex since my days building electric shruti boxes…) but he called it a “Hong King Dairies Anchovizer.”

Date: Apr 3, 2000
Author: iotar
Title: marquess estate

On a wet and tempestuous night Solomon Kirshner peered through the raindrops that frosted the triplex glass of a number 73 routemaster heading north up Essex Road. The passengers learning to speak pidgin Swahili on the other side of the aisle receded into the damp evening fog as the shattered building site that was the Marquess Estate spread before him. A lump, a throb of migraine: The fools! What had they done? A few of the more salubrious Islingtonized apartments remained, but the unlovely dried-blood-coloured estate was being shifted brick by brick into the nether-realm of the city’s frowsty memory.

He dithered at the end of Essex Road: Should, would, could he continue to Stoke Newington, or should, would, could inspections be made of the atrocities? The bus crossed Balls Pond Road and juddered to a halt opposite the piano-makers and the futon factory. He flew down the stairs, his soles barely touching the floor. Swung on the vertical handrail and was out on the rain-black pavement and halfway to the traffic lights. At the crossing of Balls Pond Road he felt an emptiness and dislocation. An Italian family argued over a push chair. “Are you going to cross the road?” A crowing old maid navigates around the obstacle. The green man flashes and Solomon Kirshner trips light-toed headlong into Essex Road.

The looming church boarded and forbidding groans between unleafed winter trees. A quotation for Marie Steiner that he has never read momentarily bids for his attention: Another time, there will be time, if it is not removed. The stub end of Marquess Road thronged with parked cars; he negotiates the network of bollards and the small recreation ground where he watched children making worlds. What remains of the estate is hung with grids of scaffolding. Awaiting execution or renovation and gentrification. Portakabins and cement-mixers, discarded hard hats and generators – the signs of the invaders and the corporate logo pennants of their cause. A solitary character stands here and there with mysterious intent and impossible motives. The maze is threaded in and out of blind alleys barriered by the forces of demolition. Beside a disabled entry ramp that leads nowhere, a blond-haired woman in a macintosh eyes him warily. She is on the point of revelation. Solomon Kirshner steps up onto her stage and hears her greeting, but it is too silent to be addressed to him. He makes a wide detour and she reconvenes her internal dialogue.

The plan has changed. Its configuration has been altered while he was away. New shadows and flickering arc-lights disturb and distort the nature of the warren. He breaks out of the estate for a moment to get his bearings. An Islingtonized wine-bar, Centura, jeers with brash new-money from the other side of the road. The square glasses and mobile phones of the flexec Hoxton classes bray behind the overlarge windows of their chosen watering-hole. Solomon Kirshner feels the disgust, the rising gorge, and ducks back onto the New River.

On the thin strand, banked with grass and shrubbery where mallards nestle for the night, the mood of the night is transfigured. It is as if an invisible mist drifts over the dark surface of the water. The park gates are padlocked and the ugly spiked railings stand firm against intrusion. The front of the Marquess estate that faces the river is decked with the steel foliage of scaffolding and safety lamps hang like Chinese lanterns above the windows of neon-lit kitchen-diners. On the far side of the river grand Canonbury townhouses rise lofty amongst the trees. The squat democratic brick of the estate glowers across the park at its bourgeois neighbours. Solomon Kirshner inspects the gardener’s preparations for spring proprietorially. The river must survive. But for the fortunate and unfortunate alike. This lost river of the city must not become another playground for North London’s fashionable classes.

Striding the upper reaches of the elongated park the houses gentrify, ending with a folly of square glass brick. A spiral staircase can be discerned through its multifaceted front and a spreading larch throws routes beneath the white gravel into the London clay. Solomon Kirshner finds himself uncertain of this recent monument, ambivalent but not unattractive. Rounding the corner the Marquess pub throws off a beery air and glows with the wan amber light of a neighbourhood local. A man and his daughter are poised on the edge of exclamation. The man’s eyes suggest a restrained violence. As Kirshner passes the man explodes into a shout: “Taxi!” Kirshner hurries across the road to the derelict recreation ground; the daughter’s petulant quip catches in the air of his slipstream: “Oh shut up dad!”

The puddles in the drained concrete pools reflect the slight moonlight. It has stopped raining but the wind throws showers of droplets from the tall black trees that flank the rec’. The taste for a pint of stout and a parched throat hurry Kirshner past the complex hulk of an old cinema. Long since, like so many of its kind, it has become a bingo hall. Its upper offices, windows smashed by the brute elements, are long deserted and the long rectangle of its chimneys have not been used for the better part of half a century. The smokey blackness of its roofs are spattered and stained by pigeon guano and the ever-present grime of the Essex road.

Turning the corner by the unused public convenience Solomon Kirshner strode into a pub. His glasses steamed with the heat of a hundred conversations and he lost himself into the night.

By Zali Krishna
Posted: Apr 17, 2000, 4:40 PM | IP: 2656998590
Title: The Elusive Phone Number of B.G. Ramachandra

Spiro Arker hunched damply in the doorway and looked everywhere but at Clide’s face. Behind him, the fifth-floor concrete walkway rang with the excited shouts of children who would occasionally stampede from left to right or vice-versa. Clide motioned him inside and shut the door.

“You want coffee?”
“Have you got B.G. Ramachandra’s phone number?” Arker stood wetly in the kitchen and dropped his carrier bag to the floor.
“No,” Clide considered for a second. “No, I don’t—but I might be able to get it from Linus.” He flapped around picking up piles of newspapers, crockery and cutlery, putting them down and turning in circles over and over. “He’s not on Viewtext?”

Arker nodded in contradiction. “But he’s not answering. I need to speak to him urgently.”

The door chimes rang faintly. Arker didn’t hear them. It was only Clide’s trained ear that could detect the sound. He stood motionless for a second with a stack of objects in his hands: lifejacket, answering machine, roll of fax paper, economy pack of three pizza bases, dartboard, crayons, (clean) string vest, sheet music from Les Misérables, and on top of the whole pile, a grey-green beanie elephant about this big. “The door,” he muttered. Passing the pile into Arker’s receiving arms, he left the room rapidly.

The wall clock ticked thickly and Arker sighed long. Surveying the kitchen, darkening in the failing light, he could see the stippled face of Moseley Point opposite and the blue-grey scar of the river clustered with the scabs of declining industry. With a rattle of hard little boots, the children ran from left to right. The front door slammed, and the baritone voices of greeting could be heard growing louder in the hallway.

“Mr. Arker, what a pleasant surprise!”

Date: Apr 19, 2000
Author: iotar
Title: the tower on saint jerome

From the western head of Saint Jerome the river curled into the horizon and the orange, mauve, pink, amber sunset closing another summer’s day on the city of Parys. The cobbled concourse, speckled with ageing benches and poplars, idled back along the spine of the thin island. Past galleries, antique shops, noted patisseries and tall town houses to the eastern bridge where the Spires of Mere Sophia glittered jewelled and Byzantine in the golden air. Spiro Arker looked down at his thin-veined hands and sighed audibly.

“Come, come my boy, we can’t stare into space all day!” B.G.Ramachandra, noted inventor of ASCII vision cameras, took him by the arm and led him listless back into the late evening bustle. The city was reviving for a second wind; the proud and privileged of Saint Jerome danced up fire escapes and chattered in small bronze-mirrored elevators dressed for the night and the Parys Carnevalle. The sumptuous fabrics and rich tableau displayed in boutique windows dazzled Arker’s protestant eyes. He felt reborn, chitinous and insect-like, seeing the world through multi-faceted eyes.

“I cannot close my eyes,” his voice was delirious, caught in the thick perfumed air.
“Don’t talk nonsense, boy, why can you not close your eyes?”
“Can’t trust them.”
“What are you talking about?” B.G.Ramachandra, noted manufacturer of semi-automatic shruti-boxes, gave him a serious look. Many valences and variables hovered in that look. Arker was not sure he could read compassion in that face.

“It could all go away again. So easily,” the dampness of a katepilla platform near Villejuif sent a tremble up his back. “How did this happen?”
Ramachandra ignored his question: “You must only promise me one thing. Never ask where you are! Everything will become apparent in its own good time.”

Through quaint tall alleyways, under rickety footbridges and out towards the long southern bank of the island they tripped lightly over the rattling cobblestones. The high south bank of the river loomed with coloured lights and a neon Ferris wheel turned in a light balmy breeze. A high tower stood out from the smart apartments and café-bars. An overlong black Citroen was parked beside the quiet road. Ramachandra produced a long silver key and opened the arched door of the tower. He took Arker’s cloak and top hat and threw them at the hatstand, depositing his own umbrella in the elephant’s foot beneath.

From the chamber at the top of the tower Arker was confronted with a magnificent view of Parys and the light-drenched river rolling from east to west. The city’s nightly masquerade had started again. Pyrotechnics burst and died in brilliant blues, reds, greens and rippling gold and silver sparks. The Grands Boulevards to the north could be picked out in their trails of light-decked trees. The Opera, galleries and theatres competed for grandeur. Great strutting peacocks danced a pavane in the gardens of the Radio Tower.

“I apologise for my unreliability. But I think I have here what you are looking for.” Ramachandra opened a delicately carved mahogany case. Inside, on a bed of purple velvet, a Hong King Dairies Anchoviser with a rich sunburst finish and brushed steel furniture. “Go on, take it!”

Spiro Arker heard a distant ringing in his ears. His face had become hot. “I didn’t bring my cheque-book…”
“No matter. I owe you this at least for your trouble,” Ramachandra pulled a face of benevolent largesse.

“Who is he?” Arker indicated the tall suit in the corner. His eyes were two mirrors throwing speckled multi-coloured glitter back from the night’s festivities. He stepped forward extending a gloved hand in a single motion.

“He is my business partner.” Ramachandra’s face dropped imperceptibly, but his reassumed candour no longer convinced.

“Salaryman. Henry Salaryman, pleased to meet you.”

Date: Apr 19, 2000
Author: iotar
Title: the death of clide (again)

Clide was dying. He was dying because he had two nine-millimetre parabellum slugs lodged in his stomach and he was now bleeding to death on the tarmac. Linus Tossio stood before him with the barrel of a vintage Mauser military wisping acrid smoke into the sparkling air. Clide was not sure why he had not passed out already. He’d distinctly remembered living to a ripe old age and retiring to Southend, but the incontestable evidence pointed to the simple fact that he was dying. It was singularly uncomfortable, so he hoped it would not last long.

Linus Tossio replaced the Mauser in the shoulder holster beneath his leather coat. The long geometrical perspective of the autostrada stretched back into the heat haze. Some two hundred metres up the road a massive Citroen ornithopter lay on its side crumpled and ruined. Two metres to the right a Rothmans was still burning; minutes before it had been in Clide’s mouth. He usually smoked Golden Virginia roll-ups. His doctor had warned him about the danger to his health. Tossio dropped into a squatting posture. His athletic legs adjusted with ease.

“I’m going to tell you a story, Clide. I’m going to tell you a story of two inventors. You know one of them already: your friend and mine, Professor Maurice Donne, inventor of the erotometer and its derivatives: the time machine and the cloaking device. I think you’ve killed him before. You don’t recall? I think it was another incarnation of you – prevented him from inventing the time machine in that world, but nothing can stop progress in an infinite universe. Perhaps one of the greatest practical minds of our age – God save us from pragmatism, eh? Anyway, I don’t know if you’ve met our other hero Mister Baba Ganesh Ramachandra? Maybe in another life? It doesn’t matter anyway. He’s a lesser scientist than Professor Donne but a better business man. Noted builder of electric shruti-boxes and ASCII-vision cameras, marketed semi-automatic shrines in Bombay before anyone.”

Tossio paused to fish out a soft pack of Camels, offered one to Clide who stared at it goggle-eyed before accepting. “You’re wondering where I’m going with this? Fair dues. Now these two great minds might have gone on forever doing what they do best: Donne was interested in moving into cloning, Ramachandra was moving out of manufacturing and into marketing. But one… uh, man brought them together: You might have heard of Henry Salaryman? Yeah, that’s right, not the most ethically refined being I’ve ever met, but you’ve got to admit he’s something of a mover and shaker.

“A decade ago, around the time of the first microprocessor boom, Donne and Ramachandra bought a Singapore-based company called Hong King Dairies and went into manufacturing consumer technologies. Most of these flopped; they were way ahead of their time, and the company folded after five years of trading. Donne and Ramachandra parted unamicably and most of the products vanished into the dimly lit netherworld of pawnbrokers and hi-fi exchanges. So why did Salaryman manipulate this unwieldy company into being? I must admit his motives are mysterious to me, but he seemed to be interested in trading upon mythology and nostalgia: You know: fandom? Given sufficient time and an infinite quantity of worlds, anything will achieve a cult status, and it did. In a grimy half-world distantly removed from these ones a device called an Anchovizer became obscurely popular.”

Tossio’s smirk turned harsh as he saw that Clide was beginning to collapse. “Hey, wake up, don’t die! I’m trying to tell you a story.”
There was a faint rumble in the distance.

lunar terraces by zkrishna
Posted on Aug 22, 2000, 3:24 PM
from IP address 2656998503

"The evidence in the Keppler layers of the foundations of world cities provide incontestable evidence that technological civilisations have risen and fallen not once or twice but myriad times. Travelling in the rush-hour day after day we are following the same patterns that have been travelled a thousand million times before not only in the city as we know it now but in an inconceivable number of previous cities with strange and different names. How long, we may ask ourselves, before our own civilisation falls victim to the inexorable motions of History?" Laurence Behmborg - Introduction to "Cyclical History"

The outlandish fragment perched on the shore of Mare Imbrum could not be called a town with any rigorous justification. But to say that it was a village would be to miss the point that somehow there were about a dozen turn of the century terrace houses located on the surface of the moon. But even in saying this much we have already forgotten the small mini-market at the end of the row. The picture this normally conjures up in the mind's eye is a bleak and freakish prospect but the reality of this transported lump of suburbia is considerably more gothic. A goodly chunk of the tarmaced avenue; a few silver birches and twenty-five feet of the foundations, pipes, cables and connecting utilities had been carried together with the houses to find itself here in an age old orbit as part of the Earth's solitary companion.

If you looked now to the southern-most butt of this anomaly, just at the south-eastern edge, where the middle of the road would have been you would see two small boys climbing over the jagged precipice. Suffice to say, climbing down to the surface was strictly prohibited by most of the parents living in the terrace houses and these boys were no exception. But small boys can and will and most probably always shall climb up or down or across structures they have been specifically requested not to. As it happens the south-eastern edge was a particularly popular one for climbing down partly due to an inspection hatch that used to extend from a traffic island in the middle of the road. If you asked either of these children about the inspection hatch or the traffic island they would not be able to remember such a thing existing, for the very simple reason that they had been born and bred on the moon.

Landing with the slightest bounce the older boy, who was called Raji, sent up a small cloud of lunar dust. An insignificantly small step for the first generation of children of the Moon who had been exploring the craters and forests of their backyard since they had been able to walk. The younger boy, Will, hesitated visibly at the lowest rung of the ladder. "Come on Will, jump! Don't be afraid," Raji insisted. There was still something of his immigrant forebears in his accent, but there was no lunar accent or even language as yet and Will was certainly as foreign as he. The younger boy shut his eyes and let go, landing a touch awkwardly but the soft moondust broke his fall. Seeing that his playmate had landed Raji ran off with loping bounds away from the towering edge of the butt. Will, his first time so far from home opened his eyes to survey the endless silver-grey desert ragged and dry stretching to the ink black horizon where the watery blue green globe loomed at a fantastic distance. At the peak of a great crater he could see Raji waving. Picking himself up from the ground he ran with wide bounding strides to catch up with his friend. Then, as Will was nearing the crater edge, he saw the other boy turn to look back along the line of the crater top behind him. A flight of giant dragonflies hovered across the disc of the Earth towards Raji. Raji ran across the horizon, a dozen dragonflies behind him. Will stopped, uncertain whether to run forwards or back as the distance between his friend and the swarm closed. "Raji! Raji!" he shouted. Should he run after the dragonflies? Should he go back and fetch help? He wasn't even sure how to climb back up to the houses, he had assumed that the older boy would know how to get back.

Raji tripped on a lump of rock. A plume of dust rose into the dark as he fell onto his hands and knees. He looked up just in time to see the huge faceted ruby eyes of the leading insect and then he felt the armoured segmented legs, six of them, catch him under the belly and lift him without losing speed. The moon's surface receded beneath him and he could see Will waving and shouting inaudibly as if from another life. The anomalous wedge of suburban tarmac and brick fell away to the right. His face was buffeted by lunar winds and the irregular clickings of the insect made the sparse hair on the back of his neck prickle. His legs hung unsupported in space goosebumps were starting to form on his exposed legs where a dusty graze blemished his left knee. In the strangeness of the moment he had forgotten to be afraid and instead wondered where the dragonflies might be going.

Jan 8, 2001, 10:54 AM
Deliquescing Negative Snowflakes
by Iotar

"You look like the sort of fella who would agree with Linus, you do, you know, fella-me-lad." Maurice shook his head sadly, inspecting the well-chewed piece of jadite he had retrieved from the clamped jaws of the wolf.

George gave a gorgeous grin like deliquescing negative snowflakes in Sverge, indicating the elf-clad helpers.

"But you could be right about the employees," Donne dismissed the elves summarily with a click of fingers and a wiggle of hips to make a hardened tomboy swoon.

"Krmb has moved?" Blobby interjects.

"Eh? Where?"

"Never you, Blobby Blobby..."

"Oh, piss off." Donne weeps slowly at a damaged fingernail.

Jan 15, 2001, 11:53 AM
Afternoon on the Eternal Holloway Road
by Iotar

"What I reckon," said Clide, rolling the morning's fifth, "what I reckon is that I should be given the opportunity for some real character development."

Einstein sighed. His calculations were not adding up. The time constant was floating around, mucking up the months of work on his algorithm. His wrinkled eyes gazed at Clide with all the pity in the world.

"I mean," Clide lit the untidy end of his roll-up and snapped his Zippo closed, "I mean, what is my role here except to smoke like a chimney and moan on and on about my drab and amusingly naive opinions."

Einstein looked at him with interest. Momentarily inspired, he sketched a graph that resembled a steep mountain and scribbled a stick man on its north slope pushing a boulder.

"If there was ever anywhere else to go but here," Clide gestured idly behind him—his sweep taking in the Tennessee Fried Chicken franchise, the darkening afternoon on the eternal Holloway Road, the concentric brick and concrete circles of Greater London, the shores of the Western European island, the turning weight of the globe and the flattened constellated omelette of the galaxy, the stars beyond and those things that are beyond them, "I'd be off in a shot. Fwoosh! Goodbye! Outta here!"

Einstein excused himself for an urgent visit to the gents. The waiter brought two more teas in ex-Wimpy cups. There was a sound like the trumpeting of mammoths to the north.

Posted on Dec 11, 2000, 4:16 PM
by iotar

"memory is negotiable," maurice donne nodded sagely waving a havana towards the time machine's tangled ruin, "i shall choose the versions of my myth that the world needs."

"on what basis?" victor poked at donne's insubstantial person.

"on the basis of what is great and good," donne sat up in his chair as if preening magnificent feathers. lilly stifled a spluttering guffaw and helped herself to more pretzels.

"great?" spat victor, "good? i think if we were to pick and choose of that basis, sport, supper would be looking pretty spare." in the gloom of the chamber a quarter inch reel-to-reel flailed spastically. it had reached the end of the tape and had pulled away from the reel - it flapped uselessly in the draughty air.

"i remember much that was good..." lilly mused.

"why thank you, my dear, i feel that my contribution to the human race has often been overlooked..." donne leaned back in his chair until he feel over backwards onto the floor. schoolboys the world over sniggered.

"not you, twat!" lilly got up and pressed stop on the tape machine.

Posted on Dec 15, 2000, 12:44 PM
by iotar

maurice donne, hair dishevelled, poised posidrive screwdriver in hand above the roland s-10. there is something of a look of surprise, something of a look of dismay in his face.

"the bugger bit me!" he sounds slightly miffed, a bit hurt.

"you should always switch off the mains when repairing electrical equipment!" lilly announces brightly. one of donne's little helpers, dressed eccentrically in elf costumes takes the screwdriver from his hand.

"if this cunt doesn't work i'm going to..." the backlit screen on the s-10 flickers into a moody green glow. There is a 20 cycle per second hum through the speakers. "oh, it works!" donne smiles.

"and we can make this into a time machine?" linus tossio picks his teeth pessimistically. there is something about him that donne really doesn't like.

"we can connect it to a jadite crystal as one might with an erotometer but as to what it will do - that is in the realm of conjecture."

"where's that?" victor calls from beyond the screen. juno leaps up and dashes across the workbench throwing tools and elf clad helpers flying. stopping in front of the green glowing tank he dips his head inside. when the wolf's head emerges there is a coiled crystal shell clamped between the teeth. donne scampers after him the tails of his labcoat flying: "goddam' mongrel!" he growls.

tossio & lilly nip out for a quick pint (or two).

Posted on Jan 8, 2001, 10:54 AM
by iotar

"you look like the sort of fella who would agree with linus, you do, you know, fella-me-lad." maurice shook his head sadly inspecting the well chewed piece of jadite he had retrieved from the clamped jaws of the wolf.

george gave a gorgeous grin like deliquescing negative snowflakes in sverge indicating the elf-clad helpers.

"but you could be right about the employees," donne dismissed the elves summarily with a click of fingers and a wiggle of hips to make a hardened tomboy swoon.

"krmb has moved?" blobby interjects.

"eh? where?"

"never you blobby blobby..."

"oh piss off." donne weeps slowly at a damaged fingernail.

Posted on Jan 15, 2001, 11:53 AM
by iotar

"what i reckon," said clide rolling the morning's fifth, "what i reckon is that i should be given the opportunity for some real character development."

einstein sighed, his calculations were not adding up. the time constant was floating around mucking up the months of work on his algorithm. his wrinkled eyes gazed at clide with all the pity in the world.

"i mean," clide lit the untidy end of his roll up and snapped his zippo closed, "i mean what is my role here except to smoke like a chimney and moan on and on about my drab and amusingly naive opinions."

einstein looked at him with interest. momentarily inspired he sketched a graph that resembled a steep mountain and scribbled a stick man on its north slope pushing a boulder.

"if there was ever anywhere else to go but here," clide gestured idily behind him - his sweep taking in the tennessee fried chicken franchise, the darkening afternoon on the eternal holloway road, the concentric brick and concrete circles of greater london, the shores of the western european island, the turning weight of the globe and the flattened constellated omelette of the galaxy, the stars beyond and those things that are beyond them, "i'd be off in a shot. fwoosh! goodbye! outta here!"

einstein excused himself for an urgent visit to the gents. the waiter brought two more teas in ex-wimpy cups. there was a sound like the trumpeting of mammoths to the north.

Posted on Jan 31, 2001, 3:10 PM
by iotar

ellen highwater sat on the concrete isthmus on the sheerness waterfront. the pathway zigzagged away up the sheppey coast losing itself to the east in the grey grey misty air of the thames estuary. to the west a container ship foghorned into transit carrying automobiles, garden ornaments and assorted luxury items to the hook of holland and beyond.

imagine clide is here: dandruffs the corrupt air that orbits him with a micro-climate of fag-ash and chip fat. perhaps he says: "it's no good ellen," perhaps he sees an apparition of two children against the angular sea defenses, "you're going to have to go back to work."

ellen gave him a look that made him feel transparent. his reality had been somewhat compromised since he'd crossed the kingsferry bridge. island of the dead. he sat down on the concrete beside a hard crusted dog turd and started to roll golden virginia into one of his novelty bible-skins.

"i'm not going back until she's gone," ellen insists, "there's only room enough in that concrete yard for the one of us."

"what i reckon," reckons clide, "what i reckon is that the two of you need to calm down."

"lilly is uncontrollable!"

"whatever..."

"and hysterical!"

"i reckon..."

"and sabbatical!"

"sabbatical?" clide realises of a sudden his rolley has gone out, "how can someone be sabbatical?"

"get me a thesaurus!" ellen stands, brushes herself down and turns to face the wind. soon she is a myopic set of fog motes in the distance as she walks back to work.

"i

Posted on Feb 8, 2001, 4:58 PM
by iotar

dylan swarfega awoke from disturbed dreams to find that he had been transformed into a giant jazz musician.

"hot ptootee!" he screamed draping his lemon yellow zoot suit around the tectonic plates of his digitally enhanced frame. testing the reed of his chromium plated baritone schmoozafone he slipped over on a discarded plantain and broke his head.

(excerpt from j.waldo sargasso's TREK in ARSEHOLE: JOURNAL OF THE CENTRE FOR SPONTANEOUS OFFENSIVENESS 1978 vol6(3) pp11234-12004)

Apr 5, 2001, 1:26 PM
Billiamina & Samosa in the West Wing
by Iotar

The following text is transcribed from a manuscript acquired by Mr. Soma Jones, of automatic writings by Ms. Billiamina Carrow. In its original form, Carrow’s spidery handwriting was scrawled from bottom to top, right to left, with the letters inscribed in reverse. At various points the text becomes completely illegible, or sets of incomprehensible letters appear. Soma Jones explained that these apparent aberrations are most likely written in the glyphs of the City States or the Outlying Regions, which are entirely unlike any writing found in our world. The author finds it strange, and perhaps overly convenient, that the language of the Principality resembles ours so strongly, albeit in reverse.

On one of those days in the middle of the week when I had no studies to attend to and little to occupy my mind. Perhaps it was on one of those early spring mornings after the completion of that bloody-buggering harpsichord-tuning assignment that near drove me out of my wits. Perhaps it was then that I had arranged to meet Samosa, my librarian friend, during her lunch hour, and then that we found the “lost west wing” of the Institute Library. Whenever it was that it happened, I recall the scent of the new blossoms that twined through the knotted pergolo creeper vine that spread peach-pale and bottle-dark over the red brick façade. I also have an idea that I carried a punnet of greengages and a bottle of elderflower cordial in that rough string bag I had purchased from the market at Alves on that daytrip with Solomon and Nadya. On that day in Alves I was wearing blue, but on the day, the day I went to the library, I was wearing a dark juniper red. And automobile goggles.

I had first met Samosa in the herbiculture section. This was the area she had been given to tend. She was brushing the tops of the shelves with a hessian duster, and the dust motes caught in the afternoon light from the high windows above the archway that led into the foreign literature section… (The next five lines of text are unreadable.) … lent me the book nonetheless. She said that she would put it on her card. So the next time I came to the library I bought her a cactus all covered in light hairs, and I brought the book back, although I must admit it was a couple of days overdue—I insisted I pay the fine and she bought lunch in the refectory. Samosa was a native of Berol—had never been anywhere else to live ever at all. She had been to other places—other towns and the like—I believe she had been to Lutz, where the Kirchners came from. She had never been to the City States or the Outlying Regions ever, but this is not to say that she was small-minded, unimaginative, or inexperienced. Indeed no. This was one of the reasons that I was in the habit of visiting her at the library whenever I had the leisure.

On this particular day, on this particular lunchtime, I found Samosa to be in a state of considerable excitement. We had originally planned to take lunch on the small lawn behind one of the turrets beside the beehives and the small cool pond, but Samosa had insisted that we explore a particular stairway she had found the evening of the previous day. Since she was so excited by this discovery, and although I had occasionally found her to be overenthusiastic about novelties, it seemed that no harm could come from investigating this particular avenue of enquiry.

We squeezed past some railings which nearly cut off access from the far end of the western tower. Beyond the railings and through some trees we could hear the playing children in a school playground. The cover of a number of aged oak trees and overgrown nettle bushes gave way to a rough pavement—cracked and neglected—and there where the ground sloped so that one could climb down to the basement level of the tower, there was an old oak door. Samosa pushed the door open with a flourish and a fanfare: “Ta daa!” I was somewhat less impressed. It looked damp inside and smelt of mould and age-old fustiness—not an ideal place to take one’s luncheon. I adjusted my goggles, pushing them up onto my forehead, and stared into the gloom. Dusty, cobwebbed light billowed from a partially blocked window at the top of the stairs. Perhaps it was the intriguing silhouettes of those things piled unevenly in the gloom that pulled me up the stairs, over those creaking and perilous floorboards. On the landing, old bound magazines, trolleys, candelabra, broken toy dolls, damp teddy bears, cracked lutes, discarded hunting trophies, (The next eight words are unreadable.), broken billiard cues, and a variety of theatrical disguises vied for my attention. Through the window, dusty and festooned with thick cobwebs, an ancient hermetic courtyard narrow and weed-infested waited for a gardener or the final defeat of the surrounding brickwork.

We climbed the next staircase. From the dusty window on this landing the children lining up in the school playground to return to their afternoons’ lessons could be seen over the tops of the aged oaks. To the left there was an old door locked or jammed shut. A broken sign hanging at a sorry angle read “Interlocking Machinery”. We continued up the next staircase full of hushed expectation. “Sometimes you read about old ecclesium in the mountains all full of hoos, ghuls or haunted by ghostly enfields,” Samosa enthused, “They say that the caves on the Chine are full of the spirits of smugglers betrayed by their ship mates or honest sailors who came to grief on the rocks.” At the next landing, the window afforded a view over crenellated rooftops littered with maintenance ducts, radio antennae, gargoyles, and ladders, the whole speckled black and white with pigeon guano. The tower continued upward, but at this level the landing became two corridors: one back east towards the occupied parts of the library, the other north across to the front of the western tower. Faintly along the eastern corridor the sounds of occupation could be heard: the clattering of crockery in the refectory, some sawing, other unidentifiable noises. To the north: nothing but the wind catching in forgotten alcoves and quadrangles.

Since time was getting on, we decided to head back eastwards and investigate further on some future occasion, and besides, we had not had a chance to eat our lunch as yet. Along the eastern corridor we found some windows low in the floor just atop the wainscoting—the library could be seen below: quiet but busy. We stopped there and spread out our assembled picnic: cheese, pickles and rye bread, greengages, plums and cold sausage, elderflower cordial and lemonade. Samosa pointed out the librarians and readers passing by below: “That is Professor Donne, a fusty strange one he is: uncommunicative sort,” she might say, “You see that door where Pandit Leicke is going? In a very few minutes Alyssa, the periodicals specialist, will follow him in there... Ah see! They have been making these furtive rendezvous since the Assumption last year.” Before long, Samosa’s lunch hour was almost over, so we made our way back east until we came to some chairs and timbers blocking the way, and beyond these, the familiar climes of the library stock rooms and offices.

We returned to the western tower a week later, this time in the evening. I had found some miners’ helmets with electric lamps in an antique shop near the Strada Cove, and Samosa brought a stout silken rope in case we needed to do any climbing—neither of us could climb, but we agreed that it might be useful in any case. It was twilight by the time we had made our way back up the forgotten staircase to where we had found the corridors bearing north and east. Switching on the electric lamps, we stole cautiously into the antique gloom of the northern corridor. On the other side of the overgrown quadrangle, the passage opened into a large room gridded with metal frames upon which old-fashioned plug sockets with heavy brass toggle-switches, some switched up some down, were fixed in regular rows. “See, these were once fixtures for machineries for some forgotten purpose,” Samosa opined portentously, “I have heard legends of analytical looms and telephony switching boxes,” she suggested, but when pressed to explain the exact purpose of these devices became somewhat vague and circumspect.

Investigating the rooms connecting to this one, we found more clues and hints of unfathomable technologies. Here and there, yellowing charts and tables of work schedules and rotas, technical data and safety regulations. On one of the doors I found a faded poster in an archaic style of an armoured angel and a valiant soldier. The words “Defending the Principle!” were emblazoned across an ominous sky. I pointed this out to Samosa, suggesting that it dated back about a century to the last time the Principality had been threatened by an invasion from the Giptic Horde. Perhaps this had been one of the “listening stations” that had been set up across the land to defend the Principality from aerial invasion.

In a back office with a boarded-up window, we found a locked door which seemed to face outwards into an outside wall. Samosa tried to force the door but it would not move. In a drawer, amongst folders and an antique revolver, I found a bunch of keys. We tried various candidates until one turned somewhat stiffly and the door pushed open easily. Outside, an open walkway passed beneath heavy branches of a number of well-established trees to a wide concrete column hidden by trees from prying eyes. We opened the door on the side facing us with one of the keys and found ourselves standing before an old lift shaft whose electrics had been deactivated long ago. To the right, a steel staircase spiralled down the column. Checking the lamps on our helmets, we descended into the dark.



Posted on Aug 2, 2001, 12:43 PM
by iotar

Soma Jones strode purposefully across the leaf-littered late September of his patched and pasted always. It was another early afternoon and a cooling breeze rattled the branches, filtering a pomegranate dying sun on his cloth capped head. He sighed with the solitary contentment of one released from the ties of temporality. Perhaps, he mused, he had always been alone: Breathing the world into colour. Perhaps that bloke he'd worked with at the depot, Rory Valentine, had been right.

"This is a half-world, imperfectly constructed," he had insisted, "the story's already over and done with: The battles of angels and devils, the greater darkness and the lesser light. The day of judgement came and went, Soma Jones, and those assembled there were judged. But things go on. It all made, in the final analysis, precious little difference. This is a world for crippled and half-witted souls, impoverished spirits and those who died in childbirth."

Turning off the wide leafy road where second hand motors rattled into the orangey haze Valentine took Soma Jones by the arm and led him carefully down the steep slope behind the the Victorian clocktower. Here the pulpy discarded pods from the Pergolo vine gathered beside the remains of a stone wall.

"Built by Roman hands and rebuilt by serfs under the Norman oppressor," Valentine commented, "when this island was but the westermost outpost of a spreading empire, carrying parasitic, symbiotic bacteria that would one day flower into the cruciform axle tree. Do you believe that he walked upon these pleasant pastures? We travel across a holy land, Soma Jones, the bones that were crushed and the spirits trampled to make this fair acre are nothing more nor less than the compact earth upon which we make our voyage."

Soma Jones looked into the wide benevolent face of Rory Valentine, uncomprehending and troubled. "I seem," he muttered, "to have broken my glasses. You don't happen to remember…"

Swept on by the big man's rolling stride they came out onto the flooded course that had once been the Holloway road, where new cobbled quays had been constructed from the Archway bridge in the north to the bustling concourse of the Highbury corner the filthy water lapped at the stone. They sat upon a memorial bench near the railway bridge and watched the blurred transits of a hundred births and deaths racing self-importantly under the yellow golden lion sun.

"We pass beyond the circuit of the bear," Valentine described an arc across the sky and it was dark, "a few paltry furnaces glow here and there in the limpid darkness. Soon they will expire into the night and we shall be left alone with the cosmic dark," he drew his hand across Soma Jones eyes and removed the glasses, "or perhaps the endless white void of the luminescent wasteland."

Soma Jones stumbled across the dried out rubble of the desert that he had once called home. Stale dust blew into his masked face and his worn out shoes scuffed with a hundred light years of journeying tripped on broken concrete, bricks half-chewed by the passage of millenia and the layered detrius of wires, valves, resistors, capacitors and the broken shells of video cassettes and the half-shattered rainbow disks that once spewed forth bright visions. His skin turned to parchment where aged glyphs spelled out strange and obscure old conflicts: Gunshots fired from an ambush near the motorway bridge crossing the Medway, The accelerated shrieks of supercharged felines in subterranean arenas, the snap, crackle and pop of a dying FM reciever.

Leaping onto the open back of a departing No73 Routemaster Soma Jones caught his breath. That, he concluded, hadn't been worth the risk. There were always plenty of buses at Stamford Hill Broadway. If he was ten minutes late for the appointment it wouldn't be the end of the world, would it? Gripping the rail securely as he climbed the winding staircase of the accelerating omnibus Soma Jones climbed onto the empty upper deck. Empty, but for the hefty, jovial bus conductor: Rory Valentine touched the brim of his hat and rolled out a long band of tickets.

"We carry ourselves from one battlefield to the next," he commented, "rarely aware of an enemy but nonetheless outnumbered by the absent foe. We are half-made, less-than-nothings orbiting a dull thirty watt bulb, transfixed by it's fiery magnificence and afraid to spend our meagre hour in the unknown musty blackness of the attic room. And every moment…"

Posted on Sep 21, 2001, 4:31 PM
by iotar

with the tang of autumn in the air and once again upon the hallowed old recreation grounds of long before. treading the route in the tattered turf of the bookmaker's crescent i find myself poking about here and there for traces.

i never saw ghosts or shades in the reflective windows. perhaps one cannot see spirits at such a great distance. perhaps i would see no one standing there in the mirror

but with warclouds on the windblown eastern horizon and the awful silence of a distant explosion what is there that we can say. we speak into the broken glass and the torn tube and into the gutted heart of the terminal - all our childsplay at connexion and culture was finally only pretend... perhaps just a game.

we find it has become cold and we are no longer certain what we feel guilty for... and so was there ever any need to cry?

Posted on Oct 18, 2001, 10:35 PM
by iotar

"cava!" the catlady squealed, "bring me cava!" she had been lying there on the upset wooden chair for the last half hour. things had got out hand.

ellen hightower shook her head, "look at the state of that."

"started early," agreed clide.

"well, that's not all. she just hasn't been the same since... well, i think you know."

"cava!" sang the cat lady in a querulous falsetto.

"well, i'm fucked if i'm clearing it up," clide grumbled. they took the night air on the promenade. below, balooning out from the central spindle were the glasshouses of the high garden. they were less than half way up the tower but the air still felt thin and charged with... or perhaps that was the charlie.

"so what are you going to do with all those exchange students?" said ellen, picking a cocktail umbrella out of clide's hair.

"fucked if i know. we had to do something with them - the bolsheviks were advancing on the welsh and, well, you know the story..."

ellen nodded, looking up to the top of the tower the perspective became dizzying. vortices whistled in the antennae - sometimes it seemed as if the tower was hurtling head first through an endless cloudy void, "it's beautiful during thunderstorms," she mused.

"cava!"

Posted on: Oct 30, 2001, 11:22 AM
From IP address: 2656998440
Title: ice age
Author: iotar

clide sat back against the big marshall combo. rickenbacker face down across his knees a roll up emerged into coherence between his fingers.

simon and tony were arguing again. the old farts whose revival gig this was were fighting out old ancient difference. tony, a craggy stick of a man tapped the switch on his classic fuzz onto the off position. his face twisted into a lemon sucking pout as he pulled waves of minor modal harmonies across the six strings. prefer it to have a bit of fat trem, he thought.

simon smiled and set bow to string playing out some old churchy chords with hints of dissonance playing out across the top end of the phaser. clide shook his head. old bugger looked more like an english teacher these days. he placed the rollie in his mouth and touched a light to its frayed ends, stood up and fell in with the band.

tony leaned in toward the microphone, "ice age came again last week..."

Posted on: Nov 5, 2001, 3:58 PM
From IP address: 2656998438
Title: broken nails
Author: zali krishna

linus tossio looked down at his long bony fingers. his nails split and splintered at the tips of cold whitened chipolatas of flesh.
freshening the day motes carbon began to blow across the absence of old father thames from the docklands east and out towards thamesmead. the woolwich ferry rose massive in the terminal below the grained concrete edifice. "fuck my metal teeth," tossio hissed, spitting fragments of chicken liver on the chewing cover trampled floor.

great was the temple: far reaching the sides of flying buttressed gantries. a firey crimson eye of late autumn sun winked conspiratorially under a thick eyebrow of grey cloud. the ten year closed bingo hall shrouded in the paper-bag beige-brown cladding of disposible leaf-litter accepted its tribute of young vagrants, oxen, vat 69 and negro slaves.

stepping off the ferry tired to the cuticles linus tossio scraped the jagged talons on his right hand on the diamond checker of the ascii-izer. punk would textify by the time the night was out. tossio heard as if from a distance the hollow chuckle of his dismembered mirth. prey for it, buddy.

shattered glass like a window full of teeth and the mock-tudor beams of graceless faux-oriental bier-keller. shaven-head kid spy: face wet from a goodly draught of mine host's favourite tipple. breaking the back of his thirst after a hard day's graft. (don't let no fucker tell you you've not earned it no doubtlessly...)

bonehead throws the table high - shitting himself fearfully - and runs slo-mo toward the gents. tossio raises the ascii-izer thumbing the toggle to 12 point courier. kid looks back leaking salt from both pockets and legs disolving with splinter-boned knee sanding.

"you're text!"

kid, immortalised between boozer and crapper stands frozen in a shower of extended characters. his youthful features only identifiable from a distance & @ a squint.

Posted on Nov 8, 2001, 10:51 AM
by iotar

"oswald?" eliott peacocke hissed into the cumberous bakerlite reciever. there was crepitation on the line like dust particles held in some antique telecomplex amber. then pips & chirrups.

"please press "two" to re-record your message," the bezainted schoolmarm rasped in distant circuitries. eliott's finger hovered shivering over the "2" and then stabbed at the "next call" button.

outside the callbox in the driving rain of the royal albert aerodrome a dozen or more macintoshed foreigners queue patiently. behind them silhouetted grey against grey row upon row of elephantine cranes saluting the coming and going of freight packets and passenger airships bound for the americas and distant cathay. eliott fingered the nine-facets of another twenty pence piece. He placed it in the slot and punched a string of numbers, turned to the weathered face outside the box. indicated with five fingers and nodded. thought. crooked the reciever under his chin and showed the original five plus the thumb and forefinger of the other hand.

"you have reached the answering service of bastable, turncoat, mcguffin. i'm afraid there is no one available to take your call at the moment but if you please leave a message and a number where you can be contatcted we will get in contact with you as soon as possible. thank you."

"oswald?"

Posted on: Nov 8, 2001, 11:54 AM
From IP address: 2656998441
Title: Untitled
Author: iotar

"new pollinations," announced the noted professor maurice donne, "new blooms, new life for the new century!" he gestured towards the huge black petalled sunflower on the workbench. baba ramachandra stalked around it. hands behind his back, glasses low on his long patrician nose.

"so, what's it for, maurie?"
"what's it..." donne shook his head in red faced perplexity.
"...for, maurie. what does it do?"

donne pointed at the multiplex head of the plant with a perspex rod, "this," he spat at his partner, "this bugger here, baba. this changes things!" a long red tongue shot out of the flower and wrapped itself around the rod. donne pulled at it feebly and then let it go.

"charming," smiled baba, "but i still think we should concentrate our energies on the ascii-izer project... no maurie, you've said all of that before. we already have the technologies in the place with the ascii-vision camera and the newer versions of the anchovizer. we'd need a couple of months in r&d and we'd be able to put it out by christmas."

there was a knock at the door. it opened a crack and soma jones head craned around the corner on a long neck. "mr henry salaryman is here to see you, gentlemen."

Posted on Nov 15, 2001, 11:03 AM
from IP address 2656998441
by iotar
smoky green

soma jones took the crumpled dot matrix print-out from the waste paper bin. he flattened it carefully on the table. the crudely formed nine-pin print had been cut and slashed with red lines of corrections:

"the obsessive compulsion of auto-didact retrofuturity"

soma jones sighed. it'd be nice if he could write in english every once in a while. he shook his head and padded into the kitchen. in the dark outside the window tracer bullets showered the windy air. there was a distant boom of heavy ordnance. he clicked the mileta jug on - there was a dry rasp - he switched it back off and filled the thirsty kettle with cold water. a cloud of steam turned everything cloudy.

this was the kitchen, he mused, where solomon kirchner used to come and make his tea. he'd sit from twilight until midnight typing his memoires into the old amstrad in nostalgic reveries. a sad old man who had lost his world - sometimes he would turn on the radio...

soma jones switched on the radio.

the kettle boiled and he poured water into the cup and onto a couple of grains of gunpowder tea. they danced and unravelled in the smoky greenness of the cup. soma jones carried the cup back into the other room. the tornadoes were playing telstar on the radio and it was 1962 again. he typed:

"a zx spectrum is haunting europe."

Nov 23, 2001, 12:20 PM
On the Destruction of the Pier
by Iotar

Clide sat in his wheelchair looking out of the French windows across the balcony and over Southend seafront. The Isle of Sheppey loomed concrete grey on the horizon. Edith brought him a cup of tea and placed it on the dark wooden occasional table beside him.

"I remember the night they declared independence," he pointed accusingly at the long flat shadow in the mist, "I was in Canvey Island that night patrolling the caravan park with Cornelius's arbalesters. You could see the blaze when the fireflies burst onto the refinery at Grain. Bad memories haunt that place."

Edith looked at her watch. Half four. As soon as Patsy turned up she could be out of here. That nice young professor from the institute had invited her to the Kurstaal.

"We rode back to Southend as fast as we could. We were in time to see the rockets smash into the pier—that was no accident—that was an act of war. There was little we could have done in any case."

Looking over Clide's shoulder out onto the seafront she saw the professor stride purposefully up the promenade. He was dressed in a blue and yellow striped jacket with white trousers, a straw boater and white deck shoes.

"Maurie! Maurie!" she waved her handkerchief but he didn't hear her. The old man looked at her with an air of disgruntlement.

"If it hadn't been for the likes of me and the boys this fair town wouldn't still be here. Pretty flowers like you would be servicing the needs of Kentish men," he paused and reflected, "or is it men of Kent?"

The half hour couldn't pass quickly enough for Edith.

Date: Nov 29, 2001
Author: iotar
Title: at the kursaal

Edith was sitting at her own at a table. She wasn't sure that a girl like her should be sitting alone at a table in the kursaal of a Friday night. On the table in front of her was a candle holder, a glass vase with a plastic flower, an empty cocktail and Maurie's straw hat. Maurice himself was at the bar talking with a suited American who wore mirrored glasses. He had introduced him as "mister salaryman" - he'd been very polite and offered a large hand which turned out to be cold and smelled of something expensive. "Henry" he'd said and inclined his head slightly. He didn't take off his dark glasses although it was quite dim in the kursaal. Edith had thought this rude.

Two tables behind her, a corporal with the arbalesters was sitting straight-backed at a table. In front of him was an untouched pint of ale. She hadn't turned to look at him but he sat ready to nod at her if she did. He felt that he would look somewhat gauche nodding like that - nodding dog, he thought.

On the stage a three-piece were playing a light trad jazz set, what they called skiffle in Essex. It wasn't what they called skiffle in Kent and no one listened to skiffle anymore in the divided boroughs of the city. But whenever the entropy circus played in Hackney or Islington or Putney or Croydon they played kosmische folk or drone ska. Tonight, a local celeb called Herr Bochs was fronting them; he wasn't a German but he sang with a German accent. He was singing a witty song called "the media's darling" - he hadn't written it. In fact he hadn't written any music. He wasn't a composer he was a performer and his father had taught him to keep the two disciplines separate.

Maurie came back from the bar. He put another avocaat in front of Edith. "Are you enjoying yourself?" Edith smiled - she had a nice smile - her stepmother said so. "I've just got one or two matters to sort out with mister salaryman and then I'm yours all evening. We can dance if you like." She turned her head slightly to smile again and caught a glimpse in the periphery of her vision of a tall corporal sitting alone at a table. He nodded just too late as she turned her head back.

Maurie went back to the bar and started laughing with mister salaryman. ("Henry") Corporal Eliot Peacocke wasn't sure what he should be doing. The pint in front of him was still untouched; the band had started playing an original composition called "whatchoo doin' (sophisticated lady)". Herr Bochs would sometimes pass his microphone from one hand to another. Edith sighed - he was too old to be still doing this.

The corporal stepped up to Edith's table. He took off his hat and held his pint, still untouched, full-square before him. "Excuse me, may I tell you about a pleasing dream I had?"

Nov 29, 2001, 3:26 PM
Re: on the destruction of the pier
by Iotar

Edith Wadsworth ran all the way home, stopped in to change into prettier clothes and check the Grailings and the Viewtex—Snarkey point down twelve—before dashing out again to be at the Kursaal by six. A group of squaddies on leave laughed amongst themselves smoking cigarettes swaggeringly and checking out the talent.

A tall, dreamy-looking corporal caught her eye momentarily. He half-smiled shyly and then looked away. Edith looked at her watch: six and a bit. She couldn’t expect Maurie to be exactly on time, but then, she’d seen him walking in this direction only half an hour ago. Still, he was a busy man—always working on some project or other. He’d told her how the director of the Institute said that he was shaping up to be one of the great young physicists of his generation. So, if he was a little arrogant—well, it was to be expected.

She noticed the corporal looking at her again. She scowled, as if she was annoyed. But he was nice.

"Hello, old thing!" Maurice stepped up from behind. She lifted a cheek to be kissed, "Sorry I'm a bit late. Important client—an American. We don’t get many of them around here these days. Good day with old Clide?"

She smiled back and let herself be led by the arm into the Kursaal.

The Arbalesters gathered and divided into two factions. One half left to get some ale down them at "The Ship Inn" on the front, while the others paraded off to the dodgems at the fair. Corporal Eliot Peacocke extricated himself from both crowds and took himself into the Kursaal.

The amazing Herr Bochs was performing tonight to the accompaniment of a popular skiffle band who called themselves the Entropy Circus.

Date: Dec 1, 2001
Author: iotar
Title: sucking pig

"I dreamed that my mother was still alive," the colonel said. "I dreamed that she had remarried and that she had married a rich foreigner: a Frenchman or a Dutch. We were in an expensive restaurant in a city I didn't recognise. It was all glass chandeliers and gold and velvet trim, nothing like this place." He gestured idly at the dark interior of the kursaal - the band had launched into a lively number called "ain't got much money you and me (but baby we got toiletries)" - Edith nodded and he went on with his story.

"My stepdad was dressed in the costume of a colonel or a general - lots of gold braid and a big handlebar moustache. I felt a little afraid of him and I was glad my mother was there. After a clear tasteless soup as an appetizer and goblets of golden wine, four chefs with oversized hats brought a large platter upon which a big crustacean with the face of a pig lay.

"The general stood to carve and my mother and the chefs applauded. I didn't know that I was supposed to clap so I clapped too late when everyone else had stopped, but the general smiled at me in a kindly indulgent manner. I think he might have winked - which made me uneasy.

"The thing on the platter was still alive and snapped its pincers as it was carved. Then the eyes flicked open and it spat the apple out of its mouth at my mother who clapped her hands again and laughed joyously. She took the big apple in both hands and took a bite.

"The pig cleared its throat, turned its neck to look at the general and barked: 'Good lord, George! Do be a bit careful with that machete, eh? The troops are awaiting their orders on the front, old friend.'

Dec 6, 2001, 3:44 PM
Bad Day in Bow Creek
by Iotar

They found the solitary Catholic sitting beside Bow Creek within view of Canning Town DLR. He had a fishing rod rested idly over his left arm and a gold and ivory pipe in the right hand through which he inhaled an incense-laced weed.

Angus Trout stepped into view nervously, "we've come from Mrs Onions. She said you'd help us."

The Catholic eyed Trout and his cohort cautiously from beneath his red fedora. He took the pipe from his mouth and split his face into a Lee Van Cleef smile, "who's saying that I know any Mrs Onions?" He turned and spat at a stunted thicket—hung thickly with crisp packets and recording tape.

The other man, whose name was Aloysius Prawn—but went by the alias of Henri Wintermann—stepped forward with his palms extended, "you must help us, Pope-man, the converse is too horrible to contemplate."

A dry chuckle came from somewhere low in the mix. Trout and Prawn looked about themselves nervously. The Catholic rose to his full height—which was considerably less than they had imagined, "yr interferin' with my fishin'. Yr scarin' them away. I don't know no Missus Onions, so..."

Angus Trout brought out a cracked statuette of the Virgin. Green light dripped out of the opening and onto the sparse withered grasses. The Papist creased his mouth into a thin-lipped smile, "no choice, huh?"

Dec 7, 2001, 4:46 AM
direct inject nightmare
by iotar

Things were changing radically and irrepairably in the fictional and obviously flawed landscape. Seismic changes of occupancy in the high rise slum on Tenebraestrasse and on the ziggurat topped towers of the new projects, east-on-the-river.

Things were changing in the Luitpold pavilions and the onion domed palaces of the city. Faerie work gangs were clearing out the accumulated clutter of a thousand late night pageants and dreamtime soirées, and a lick of fresh gold paint was being applied to the woodwork and wainscoting of the grand halls.

I was a hundred yards from my dwellings on Dry-Willows-North, the recreation ground and cemetery. We had been in the all-night mini-mart down on Shanklin and Beaumont, where minor celebs staff the shop counters on a flexi-time system. I had forgotten to buy the loaf of sliced white and carton of milk that I had intended and had instead filled my pocket with dangerously primary coloured penny sweets and sugar treats. The worn-out puppet of a has-been indie pop star who was in my company that night was whooping and singing into the giddy wind around the gravestones as we danced back with our ill-gotten purchases. His keyboard player, a dull-faced cipher of a man, carried his heavier bags and tried to hold together his backing harmony. I can remember neither of their names.

It was then, nearing the homeward end of the green—where the stone carved battlements are ruptured by curving baroque stairways—that I saw him: square head, long coat blowing in the wind, fevered romantic eyes I had repainted in my head over and over.

And I knew I had been looking for him.

We had all, all of us, been looking for him.

We’d distracted ourselves from the finding with our regular nocturnal binges and random acts of “creativity,” and seeing him I knew there was something dead serious about this character. I’d created the narrative distance to keep him at arm’s length. I wasn’t going to get too close—he was direct archetypal matter: almost pure like surgical spirit.

There was no avoiding him. There was no one else there, not really. The pop star continued his tuneless crooning accompanied fitfully by his goon, but they were automated subroutines—I touched that sort of thing in reflexively these days.

Square faced and lantern jawed, he stopped in front of me blocking the way down the stairs. I tried gibbering the customary Eliot pastiches that normally cut the mustard with such dignitaries but he was having none of it. I looked and searched but I couldn’t gaze at him directly. It was akin to the effect of two like poles of a magnet weaving and turning from each other. There was something that was being said in the wind that never caught my ear in any direct manner.

And he was gone.

I think I escaped somehow but I can never be sure. Sometimes when I close my eyes his familiar gaunt face is there calling across distances, against the tide. I can’t distract myself with debauches and reveries for long these days, and I feel I should be preparing myself for his return. But I can’t face that.

December 8, 2001, 7:55 PM — IP address 1044415156
Author: iotar
Post Title: Re: Ego support ?

Eliot Peacocke looked around him. To left, to right. Turned around and concluded that no one was here. The kursaal was empty - no-one about. Until a cleaner came in through a door behind the stage.

“What time is it?” he asked. The cleaner pointed to a clock that suggested that it was quarter past seven, “in the morning?”

The cleaner nodded, “sure is,” he had an American accent.

Peacocke took a chair down from a table and sat on it. The last thing he remembered he had been arguing with that professor, the girl’s fiance - he’d said, but he couldn’t remember anything after that. Had he been drinking? As far as he could remember he hadn’t even touched his pint. Which was gone, it turned out, and he wasn’t hung over anyway.

He remembered that there had been a tall man in a suit who’s eyes were hidden by mirrored sunglasses. Had he said something? Peacocke was under the impression that he had.

He’d said, “Sorry, pal!”

Dec 11, 2001, 11:59 AM
kilburn inreal (a letter)
by iotar

“O my love I can’t stand, the sun drops in your eyes” — Amon Düül II, Sandoz in the Rain

You have never heard directly about Kilburn Inreal. Few people have. But it is hinted at in the singing of tyres on the motorway heard as a complex aggregate in the distance at night. Sometimes an overheard telephone conversation remembered from childhood will contain veiled references to the method by which one might obtain tickets for the train that will carry you there.

Kilburn Inreal bears little resemblance to the Kilburn in West London. The only point of comparison between the two is some infolded pattern that reveals hidden resemblances, and in the fact that both can be reached by train.

I had been trying to acquire tickets for that train for most of my adult life. If I have seemed preoccupied in the last few months, perhaps you will forgive me when I tell you that I lived in Kilburn Inreal for a few years when I was a boy. In the years between my parents’ separation and the final settlement of their divorce I was sent to attend a comprehensive school there. I still remember the long dour faces of my parents appearing before my closed eyes while I lay in bed in the headmaster’s house, where it had been arranged that I should stay.

I am not proud of the things I have had to do to purchase the tickets for the train. Late night meetings in the darkened streets of the commuter belt towns of Bedfordshire and obscure early morning international phone calls from the insect voices of speech synthesisers. At one time I was induced to break into a sleeping family’s house during the night to set their video recorder to tape an Open University program concerning the formation of Norwegian glaciers.

But I regret most deeply that I was forced by unseen powers to betray you in ways that I cannot, even now, bring myself to admit. I hope that one day I will be able to tell you about them face to face if I ever return from Kilburn Inreal.

I caught the train at twenty past eleven on a Tuesday. The morning rush hour had died down and the winter sun was burning away the fog that hung around the eccentric towers of St. Pancras Grand Hotel. Do you remember how we visited the chapel of St. Pancras in Canterbury and how the National Trust staff had let us into the grounds late and reluctantly? There were ulterior motives behind that journey that you never noticed—a letter I had to pass on to a certain woman at the Starburger. I don’t know what was written in the letter, it was sealed and I was warned against opening it by muted threats in the toner-drenched words spat out by a fax machine at the office.

While I stood on that platform looking out of the dark shed of St. Pancras station into the swimming light motes, I was even then beginning to doubt my memories of Kilburn Inreal. Perhaps I had been acting out of some strange pathology? Perhaps I should seek treatment rather than journeying further into this knot of circumstances? I had already been led around blind alleys and up the garden path by the faceless agencies that I had been forced to contend with. But then, as a green and gold liveried diesel sprinter pulled into platform five, all doubts were put aside and I stepped aboard the waiting train.

It was a long five minutes before the driver returned to the train with a steaming mug of tea. There were few other passengers: an old man who might have been Russian and a young woman who might have been his daughter. She looked a little like you. There was a tired rather portly gentleman who looked uncomfortable in his parka, sweater and jeans. He looked as if he was more accustomed to the pinstripe and bowler of another generation of city types. In the other carriage I could see that there were other people but I could make out little of their appearance.

As the train juddered away from the station, out of the gloom and into the now bright morning, I heard the ticket inspector in the carriage ahead. I checked my pocket and pulled out the moiré patterned card—green and gold like the train. It was a relief to find it there, I had been impressed by the importance of having a ticket to ride by certain passages of authoritative articles. The inspector had the head of a snarling jackal, although to look at him he had the time-worn features of a middle aged East Ender. But appearances would be deceptive until the train had crossed certain boundaries.

Even through the sun-hazed film of dirt on the windows it was possible to pick out familiar London landmarks. The line we were carried on travelled high over unfamiliar viaducts between gas works and city missions, beside scrap metal yards and tree bordered parks where mothers pushed toddlers swaddled in heavy knitted scarves and hats against the cold. The arc described by our transit seemed somehow familiar and it was already possible to feel the magnetic pull of Kilburn Inreal at my journey’s end. There were no route maps in the carriage so it was impossible to tell how much further it was. But in the subtle changes of architecture and the tense youthful excitement that swelled in my chest.

I began to notice certain buildings that I remembered from a lifetime ago, their emotional charge was palpable but ambiguous. The angles or the dip of the cityscape would fire long unused neurons and I strained to see further. To see when we would arrive.

The train stopped at a few small stations with unusual names: Clarges, Petits Fours, Ashton Park, Eshoka. You cannot know what these places meant to me. Places that children would talk about in the playground of the comprehensive and fragments of conversations I still remembered from the headmaster’s breakfast table. The worried looking man got off the train at Petits Fours with a smile he had not used for many years twitching at his lips.

But it was quite by surprise that the narrow curve of a viaduct between the tall trees rising from Isthmuth Park that I caught a glimpse of the turreted towers of the Broadway, deep red, and the strange columns of dark green brick of the old Palladium backlit with a golden light. My leg muscles twitched and I could not keep still on my seat and the track rolled gently downwards between tall Victorian townhouses and into Eshoka Street where the railway shared half of the road as if it were a tramline. I remembered that I had forgotten that the station at Kilburn Inreal was a Byzantine sheltered enclosure along the pavement like an elaborate overlarge bus shelter. I had arrived at my destination.

It started to become dark quite soon as I walked along the lamplit streets. I sampled the delights of Papa Gelato’s, one of the finest ice cream parlours of which Kilburn Inreal has many. I shopped around the grand arcades near the old Palladium. Baroque, somewhat gaudy, monumental fountains play in the traffic island at the centre of the roundabout and I half expected to see old faces, faces that I recognised from my time at the comprehensive. But no, there were only strangers here but the grand alien architectures were like old friends. They are like nothing you have seen in this country, like an Italianate Gothic with hints of Moorish or even Hindu decoration. In the parks and graveyards massive dark stone memorials coated with generations of birdlime and leaf rubbish testify to ancient victories of the lost metropolitan.

And now, as I sit here in the Oslo, taking an early dinner of fish pie and mash with a cup of weak tea I am writing you this letter. The postcard that accompanies it should prove everything I have said. I wish you could follow me here and be with me but I know that is impossible. This evening I must visit the headmaster, there are things about the past we must discuss. I do not know whether things will go well for me so I am posting this letter to you to try to explain where I have gone. If I do return I will tear up the letter as it comes through our front door before you can read it.

But I hope this is not goodbye…

Jan 4, 2002, 2:36 PM
back on the ranch
by iotar

In the chicken ranch, which had replaced the Tennessee Fried Chicken, on the world famous Holloway Road, Clide rolled the last of his baccy into a slim roll-up with greasy chicken fingers. It was starting to get dark outside and his reflection in the plate glass windows gave him no compliments. But then again, it didn’t show his companion at all.

“Where did you get this?” Henry Salaryman turned the broken piece of jade ammonite shell in his gloved fingers.

“Can’t remember, mate,” Clide put the cigarette into his mouth and tossed his hair back, “it’s been knocking about in the kitchen for as long as I can remember. D’you reckon it’s a health and safety risk.”

Salaryman nodded, “Yes, I’d say it’s probably a risk to your health. I’d better take it off your hands: for your own good.”

“Hold up, hold up, you haven’t given me a price.”

Salaryman gestured at the counter, “Bring my friend here more fried chicken.”

“With chips?”

“With chips.”

“And beans?”

Clide shook his head, “No beans, they play hell with my digestion. I’ll be up farting like a Honda all night. Now let’s talk about a reasonable price. This piece of whatever-it-is is worth good money. Now you might think I’m thick, and I am—so that makes two of us. But I’ve seen things like this on the Grailings.”

“Grailings?”

“Videotex auction pages.”

“Sorry, I sometimes forget where I am.”

“And besides,” Clide continued, “if I don’t get what I consider a fair offer from you I might just take it down the road and see what my mate Blissett is offering.”

Jan 5, 2002, 12:21 PM
closer
by iotar

From four islands rising haltingly from an unnamed ocean the enormous steelwork of rigid gantries rise some twelve hundred yards to a hexagonal platform above. Upon this platform three miles in diameter: forests, hills, towns, a river, and in its centre—a tower a mile high points accusingly at the uncertain sky like a great steel gnomon.

Up past the citrus bulge of the glasshouses of the botanical gardens. Up through layer upon layer of offices, canteens, libraries, laboratories and observatories near where the insectile cluster of antennae whistle and groan in the high air a fire escape depends from the steel skin of the structure.

A well-dressed figure in mirror shades leans back against the parapet and a fourth century Christian monk shouts into the rushing air. From this distance it is impossible to see what is the relation between these characters, as it is hard to see what is happening inside the room that spills yellow light out of its open doorway.

Let us draw closer.

Jan 5, 2002, 3:10 PM
yes/no
by iattar

The penguin-headed man groaned once and expired on the carpet of the hospitality suite. Djelli swung up the carbine and levelled it at Henry Salaryman. Salaryman for his part spread his teeth into a long grin like a harpsichord keyboard.

“You know you can’t destroy me, Djelli,” he stepped forward towards the doorway slowly with one arm extended, “hand it over and we’ll discuss this like civilised people.”

“Maybe I can’t kill you, Salaryman. But I can seriously inconvenience you—so back up! If I pull this trigger you’re text. It’ll take generations of critical method before you are understood correctly.”

“Do you really think that?”

“Ah, fuck it!” Djelli pulled the trigger twice. A cloud of 12 point Courier in the shape of the cyborg stood in the air for a moment before it was carried away, scattered in the violent wind. “Well, that was easier than it should have been.”

St. Real backed against the parapet and climbed onto the rail. “What are you doing?” Djelli put down the ASCII-izer carbine.

“I need only lean back and I shall be carried away from this place by the grace of the Holy Spirit,” Real put his hands together in a gesture of prayer, “I shall not fall.”

“That’s not the point, Real. Assuming that you don’t dash yourself on the rocks down there. Assuming the other thing happens. Where are you going to go?” He gestured at the point above the tower, “That’s not the sun up there. We are no longer in the realm of your god. His rules don’t apply here, Real.”

“The power of the Holy Spirit is in me.”

“That’s the power of a local deity, Real. A Hebrew tribal demon who got popular amongst the gentiles. He’s out of his jurisdiction here—what little power you have is your own.”

“I am a conduit in the transmission of pneuma. The spirit is spirated by the Father through the Son by His grace and into me. Think of this as an experiment. It will prove that God is truly Catholic.”

“But that’s the point. He isn’t: the god you worship is Saklas the blind Demiurgos who became so inflated by his own importance that he believed himself to be the One in All.”

“That theology is heretical—or at the very least radically non-canonic. Gnosticism was discredited by St. Irenaeus as the insane babblings of deluded minds inspired by demons or the darkness of their own perverted souls…”

“That’s not quite what he said…”

“And Manichees like you are even worse!”

“Okay, whatever. The point is that’s not the sun, the logos that you would be escaping into. You are not on the point of communion, Real. That is the dark counterpart, the inverse, the black sun. If you fall upwards you will fall into radical non-being, d’you understand?”

A look of terror came over the monk’s face, “By the Holy Word! That which was all blazing light becomes the epitome of nullity—the dark that encompasses all being, the fog that shrouds the thoughts of those lost in the darkest hour of the night in a foreign land. I do not believe what I see.”

“See,” Djelli pointed, “we are not in fact looking upward into the fiery orb but downward into the blackness of the pit. If you are carried into the sky you shall be absorbed into that dark which has no-name, no-being—it is no-place.”

St. Real threw his arms out at his sides, making himself into an icon of the holy cross, “Get away from me, fiend! You turn light into dark and up into down. You are the servant of lies and I call you a liar.”

“No, come with me. We can take the elevator down to the base of the tower—Clide’s waiting with a van to take us to Kilburn Inreal… I mean Qalban.”

“What did you say? You said ‘Kilburn Inreal’!”

“No, I meant Qalban…”

“You said ‘Kilburn Inreal’!”

“You do not know where Qalban is at all, do you? It is as our lord said: the Kingdom of God is within. Qalban is inside me.”

“No…”

“That’s why you need me to find Qalban. You cannot find Qalban without Real. I am already there, I need only let myself…” and with that St. Real fell back off the parapet and disappeared into the dark windy sky.

Jan 15, 2002, 12:41 PM
on the trail of elliot peacocke
by iotar

It was not without difficulty that I travelled back from Folkestone to the big city. Train services had been crippled by a top-heavy management structure and repeated de- and re-nationalizations by several London patriarchs. Above and beyond this were the barely suppressed rivalries between counties and parishes across the south east. The slow moving eleven twenty-eight to Charing Cross (a station on stilts fighting a constant losing battle against the rising flood waters) was stopped at regular intervals by armed bands and militia who would pull dissidents of other factions off the train and carry them away into the badlands where they would vanish without trace.

At Ashford a mother was shot in front of her five year old son. Single bullet from an artilleryman’s Parabellum in the back of the head…

And the train pulled away.

In the city things were no better than they had ever been. I took an armoured cab from the riverside taxi rank in Soho (the geography had been altered irreversibly by the movement of the waters) and made Stratford before nightfall.

My rooms in a converted office tower near one of the snaking heads of the River Lea felt small and distant. The clip-framed art prints I had put on the wall when I moved in only a couple of months ago looked naive and shabby. The washing up piled up in front of the kitchen window rattled precariously every time an express roared through the station at Stratford-Low-Level.

I connected my notebook PC to the modem cable: pornographic junkmail, miracle cures and instant cash schemes had caused my ISP to send two warning messages. I had caught the rising kipple in time—I wiped the messages and fired up my personal webspider: green alphanumerics scrolled across the screen and the connection clicked and rasped at itself.

The fluorescent tube in the kitchen had blown before I’d left, the result of a run-in with Madame Cava, so I washed up a mug in the dark and filled the kettle. There were a few Dogadan rose-hip teabags in the cupboard. I poured on the boiling water and went back to the notebook in the lounge.

If I’d known then what I knew now, I’d have known that Elliot Peacocke had been living in Stratford back in the black days of the vigilantes. He’d been the vicar of St John’s, when it was still standing. It seemed that after the death of a close friend and several threats upon his own person by the Plaistow stilt-walkers he’d quit the city to make a new life for himself on the south Essex coast. Certain data from monetary exchanges on the Grailings a few months back suggested that he had moved to Southend-on-Sea.

Why would a man with the key to Kilburn Inreal hide away on the estuary?

There was nothing further the webspider could tell me so I closed down the connection. The only way to find out would be to travel to Southend. The old Silverlink line still ran from Leyton Midland. Leyton was an uncertain quantity these days so I put my snub-nosed ASCII-izer on to charge for the night and tried to sleep.

Jan 17, 2002, 2:36 PM
plastic road
by eye-hooter

Some days you wake up and the world asks you, “What would you like for breakfast?” I knew instinctively that this was not one of those days. Driving back from Romney Marsh to Folkestone with the late afternoon sun behind me and the muggy stale warm smell of a room where the window hasn’t been opened since time immemorial in the air. It was piss and Soma Jones was pissed off with me.

“How could you have lost it?” he asked the windscreen for the umpteenth time in the same number of minutes, “that folder was specifically entrusted to you. It’s not like I’ve weighed you down with responsibilities, is it?”

I shook my head, what could I say? “I’ve already told you—I didn’t lose it: it was stolen.”

“Oh yes, and you think that fucking Baba Ramachandra wants a stack of insane scribblings by that Billiamina girl? It doesn’t add up.”

I sighed and turned my attention back to the coastal road—and brought the car to a sudden halt. There in the middle of the road was a sack-like something. Like a large dead dog or a sleeping tramp and too uncertain in outline for me to decipher through the dirty windscreen.

It is moments like this, this juncture, this axis point where things could have gone in a number of different ways. Sometimes I wish that an unlikely thing, like a future incarnation of myself, would have leapt out there and then and told me to stay the fuck in the car. But at other times I’ve theorized that the something that lay there in the road was exactly that unlikely thing. But that’s when I have extended periods of undisturbed time, or whatever this medium is that we have found ourselves in.

A blind sage I met along the way described it in this way: there are only spaces and Lego blocks. Up, down, left, right, yesterday and today. But these blocks are specific indivisible quanta and they can only be moved within the enclosed snug of empty spaces in which we reside. (But others believe that there are no spaces and rather that there are certain blocks through which we and other pieces may move.)

But then again, he was almost certainly mad. As he sat there with his pocket Tetris in that insulated loft above the swimming baths, sipping gin with aubergina, I heard a catch of another voice in the edge of his pronunciation. I was certain that I recognised that voice and that it had changed through some crisis.

“Well, get out of the car then.”

Jan 17, 2002, 3:43 PM
edge detector
by io-t

Sometimes I wake up in the night. The central heating is too hot and I can still hear the hoarse raging against God and man, against the earth and heaven. The yellow sodium arc-light in the leafy avenue colours the drawn curtains. I am left with only the veiled hints of arguments and plots. Perhaps there is an auditorium filled with honest citizens.

“What were you dreaming,” Barbara would say. I was sometimes uncertain it was Barbara—with her back turned from me. Sometimes the voice didn’t sound female.

Or male.

But if I was arguing with some authority: what manner of authority was it? And for that matter, what would be the purpose of arguing? My reflection in the bathroom mirror in the cool early morning blueness showed me a tired, worn-out face. Like the year dying and the fear that it might not come back again. There was nothing to argue with. I had argued enough already. I had argued myself into this corner.

Sometimes when I go to the swimming baths and I see that loose panel in the ceiling I think that I will fetch a step ladder and wring the truth out of the wise man. I can see him now: his head shakes back and forward like an old toy. I can see myself from outside—my teeth bared like an animal. I am shouting something at him again and again but I cannot hear what. It is like the sound has been turned down and the scene is somehow pathetic and comical.

I cry sometimes at inappropriate moments.

I think that was my first reaction when I stepped out of the car on that muggy day in late summer. The dark shape on the ground shifted slightly on the ground and I reminded myself to book an appointment with Specsavers. I still haven’t done so. One popular theory suggests that much of the cloudiness and inexactness of the system is internal rather than external. But the haziness seems to help me to think. The razor-edged mathematical edges of some of the blocks throw me into a head-eating migraine, like a vertical thumping up and down through heaven and earth.

The angels cannot stand the tolling and call for silence.

Jan 17, 2002, 4:10 PM
jack's dead
by iotar

It happens something like this: you are going out for a meal with friends in an Algerian restaurant called “Le Corbu” in the banlieue of a modern international city where major rioting has taken place in the last few days. You and your friends have not been involved in these activities and you find that you would be hard put to describe the political goals of these disturbances in any detail. But you’re enjoying yourself, these are old friends and you haven’t seen each other for a long, long time. There’s a lot to talk about and the wine is just starting to flow. Old stories are coming out and you’re all starting to feel comfortable with each other again. It’s going to be a great evening.

An old work pal called Jack gets up to go to the bathroom, he is laughing at something hilarious that Baba has said and as he turns to leave the table you hear him say, “Captains of consciousness,” and nothing else. Before you can ask him what he meant he is gone and the jokes and anecdotes go on as before but you are somehow out of the loop again.

I left early with Barbara that night. She was a bit put out, she had been enjoying herself. I made some excuse about being tired and stressed out, which was true—but that wasn’t it.

And so the subject becomes increasingly isolated. He is seen in the corner of a modern living room, isomorphically projected, he is curled around so that a right-angled triangle is formed in the internal cavity of the shape. He has just received a phone call from Soma Jones.

“Jack’s dead!” He puts down the phone, even though he can hear Soma Jones saying something else in the tinny round receiver before he is cut off.

Jan 23, 2002, 5:12 PM
zoolog
by iotar


During those first few months after we moved into the Temple Lane Estate my life became erratic in a way that made me nervous in the extreme. I was working at the Midsouth Polyversity. One of those non-Euclidian concrete institutions that had been built during the latter days of the Blissett regime. Things were going badly for the city authorities and the mayor hadn’t been seeing eye to eye with national government. Londoners feared a split between local and national authority, there were talks of individual boroughs rebelling and declaring their independence. Heady days.

At the same time student unions in some of the non-Euclidean institutions had pushed their members to strike and occupy buildings. Midsouth had been unique in that the teaching staff had stood side by side with students and the institution was eventually wrested from government control: But at a price. The Zoolog Tunnel Massacre was the best known of these incidents. A hundred and fifty protesters had been killed and many more injured when a detachment of riot police, separated from the main body of the peacekeeping forces had opened fire in the enclosed spaces of the Crocodile House. The tape recordings that a young media student, who was caught in the crossfire, had made with portable equipment were sinister and harrowing.

But by my time, a good two decades after these events, the staff-student coalition had become a largely symbolic corporate entity and the facilities staff were a third disenfranchised layer. We were subject to all of the disadvantages and none of the benefits of the Polyversity system. The venerable library at the Zoolog building had become tatty and underfunded. We lent out dog-eared textbooks, years out of date and the multimedia stock was largely designed for formats that no longer existed. The new generation of students, none of whom remembered the glory days of two decades before, were a snotty-nosed, aspirational bunch.

So it was in the first month that we had moved into the Temple Estate that I bit a student.

It was during a dull, leaden and busy counter duty one winter’s afternoon. I had been swamped all day with little shits with little problems. Edith was on the enquiry counter, or more accurately, she was being run from pillar to post by demanding little tykes who didn’t understand the concept of user education.

So when one of them invaded staff territory, my territory, and started looking over my shoulder and poking at the screen while I was searching for his precious references, I bit his hand. I’d been having the same problem with his loud-faced girlfriend earlier and I’d just about had enough of the two of them.

And besides it worked.

“You bit me, you’re mental!” He leapt back and away sending a pile of reservations crashing to the floor. I led him out of the counter area gnashing my teeth.

“And stay out! Staff—students, students—staff. We don’t mix.”

My boss was pretty good about the whole thing. She laughed—we’d all been there. But she had to impose the official reprimand as protocol dictated.

“Sod it, Linus,” she said, “you should get out of this line of work. You’re not cut out for customer service: None of us are. I’m just hanging in here until retirement. But you could be doing better.” She gestured idly at her calendar, pictures of a squat dull provincial airport, “you could be a flyer, mate. You could fly aeroplanes. Do you fancy that? Flying to Borneo and Canada and South America, do you fancy that?”

I laughed and explained that they’d never let me inside the cockpit of an aircraft and besides—if you were flying those old crates from Wroxeter airport you’d be taking families and discount businessmen to Cardiff, Birmingham and the South London Aerodrome.

“Okay then, Linus. Fuck off for a week, okay? Come back in a weeks time. You’ve just moved, get a feel for the house, buy some soft furnishings, whatever. Come back when you’ve had a rest.”

Jan 23, 2002, 8:50 PM
what the taxi driver said
by iotar

Cabbie turned around in his seat, “I can tell you two things about Kilburn-Inreal,” he winked—I wished he’d turn around and pay attention to the oncoming traffic instead, “first thing,” he said turning the cab violently to the left and barely missing the eighteen wheeler that was pulling out backwards, “first thing is that it’s not in Kilburn—that’s the first thing.”

“Well, fucking hell—give the chimp a banana,” I didn’t say. I would have said it but cabbie was a well built six-footer, possibly ex-police. Also, I had no idea where we were.

“Second thing,” said cabbie, “second thing I can tell you is that you can’t get there in this cab,” he sighed heavily and swung the car recklessly into a parking space outside the Donne Corp offices, “you can’t get there by black cab and you can’t get there in a Ford Granada driven by that paki from ABC Minicabs. That’s not to say that there’s no way to get there by road. But you’ll probably have to hike.”

I got out of the cab and handed him a rolled twenty through the window, “I don’t think the roads go that far west anyway,” I said weakly.

He shook his head, “It’s not to the west, mate. A lot of people think it’s in West London on account of the other Kilburn. But confidentially, between you and me, they don’t know their arse from their elbow.”

“It was intimated to me that it had been glimpsed from Maidstone, and I’ve made wrong turnings around the Holloway Road to find the dark streets filled with that same quality of street lighting you think you remember from visits there in the fifties with your parents. The curve of a row of shops—a laundrette, a betting shop and a greasy spoon—drives me fucking insane when I see it in the rain. What right has it got to be there, eh?”

Cabbie handed me two crisp new tenners, “I’d keep your fucking trap shut, mate. Especially around here. I’ve known poetic young men, like yourself, to vanish for weeks. The remains they find aren’t pleasing to look at, mate. They are not things of aesthetic beauty, if you follow me.”

And with that he drove away.

Jan 24, 2002, 2:36 PM
the gipt
by iotar

It was almost a year later when I picked up my second clue. A friend called Soma Jones was working on a science fiction horror movie at Sound Mirror Studios near Folkestone, up on the east cliff. He’d invited me along for the day to see what he was doing in the computer graphics lab.

Jones had got into the business designing Videotex pages. He had a real facility for making real art out of low resolution primary colours. As the technology advanced he’d moved sideways into game design for the Vektorex system and had been snapped up by a big Hollywood studio. He’d spend a decade in the States and we’d caught up with each other while I was doing courier work in London.

He met me at the security gate, “You should see the stuff we’re working on, really macabre. You’ve gotta meet Ellen Hightower too. It’s all her show really.”

Sound Mirror Studios was a set of converted warehouses. Inside it was all plush international courtesy. After picking up a bottle of Australian red from the bar he led me up a vertiginous set of staircases to the computer graphics suite.

“What d’you think?”

In the centre of the large room a battery of red, green and blue projectors generated a frighteningly lifelike hologram. A dozen humanoid, but inhuman, forms were connected by a fibrous root system. The whole thing swayed sickeningly. I felt myself hanging back, in spite of myself, the impression of life was so strong. But there was something else too.

“Pretty fucked up, eh?” Soma Jones motioned me towards a seat. His shoulder brushed one of the humanoid forms and the arm of his suit was bathed with a splatter of light, “This is the Gipt, y’see. It’s all Ellen’s idea—they normally don’t appear like this to humans. The script describes them as being of human-like colour—so that you or I would see them as a group of individual people or as one person or not at all.”

“I think I’d prefer not to see them at all.”

Soma Jones switched off the projectors and poured two glasses of wine, “Ah well, they’d be there anyway. They might suck your brains out without you knowing! But they’d only do that if you posed a threat to Kilburn Inreal.”

“What did you just say?”

Jan 27, 2002, 10:52 AM
against the rules
by iotar

Well, the rules of the game are somewhat obscured. I think they are related to the rules of “the game” that I invented with Alaric Pether circa 1991.

There was a pink thing. A dog toy or somesuch. A ball with nodes pointing outward in every direction. The thing had to be thrown somewhere at some point in time.

Those were the rules.

It was about five or six in the morning and Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals was playing on Radio 3. In a few hours milk floats would be rattling up and down Elaine Avenue. The world was dark outside and infinitely alien—the complexities of “going out” could not be suffered.

Alaric throws the thing over his shoulder and it vanishes behind the piano. It’s followed me to London and it may well follow me back to Kent—the pink thing is still about: obscene & malevolent & perfectly good for throwing somewhere at some point in time.

Does anyone know the score?

Jan 28, 2002, 11:16 AM
st real
by iotar

Look at this:

“Kylbern St Real is located at the furthest end of a railway line that runs from Kings Cross St Pancras. There are in fact three railway stations in Kylbern St Real: Kylbern Photius Street, Oslo St Real and Kylburn St Real Terminus. The path of these three stations follows the curved arc that descends from the Wassgotterspeck Viaduct. The station at Photius Street is somewhat unusually located in the middle of the street itself, like a tram stop, and Oslo St Real is underground and can be accessed from an oval subway at where the end of Photius Street meets the Broadway. This station is best known for the immortal Oslo Ice Cream Parlour in Spiro Arker’s ‘East Meets West’.

“The Kylbern St Real Terminus is an ornate hydra faced cathedral of a station, an exalted baroque vision of Kings Cross St Pancras at the far end of the line. The destination board of the station is positioned on the exact centre of the original chapel of St Real. The Novum Basilica, which holds the relics of the monastic king, was built in the late Middle Ages and is one of the most impressive examples of the green stone architecture that Kylbern is known for.

“The exact source of the river Kylber…”

Jan 29, 2002, 11:27 AM
st riel in the doldrums
by iotar

In 325, shortly after the events of the tumultuous Council of Nicaea, St. Riel retired to the outlands near the city of Caesarea Philippae in Palestine. The council had not been a good one for him, being a long time associate of Arius and the Alexandrian school, and the halcyon days of his Manichee past were too far behind him. He had burned his bridges in his arguments with Djelli and Hadrian Saloman, indeed his violent attack on the person of Saloman had led to his forced expulsion from the Persian empire.

Caesarea Philippae was pleasant enough. He had made a few friends amongst the Greek population and was even considered welcome amongst the Hebrews, who considered most of the Romeish gentiles to be in league with the empire to a greater or lesser extent, and besides the weather was fine and on a good day you could see the Son of Man imminent in the clouds, the vineyards and the olive groves that spilled over the hills out eastwards towards Syria and Jordan. But he was a man who was waiting out the day of judgement, rather than one of the footsoldiers who would actively bring that day closer.

So it surprised him to see, one day in June along the dusty road, a Roman centurion in a uniform of at least a generation before approaching his humble abode. He had had few troubles with the authorities in recent years but he hid his codices and scrolls behind the loose brickwork at the back of the stove and came out to greet the guest. What surprised him even more was that the guest was his old adversary Djelli.

“Hail Riel,” he smiled through the trail dust that had adhered to his face, “might a traveller impose upon this holy hermit for perhaps a drop of wine and a bite to eat?”

“What new scheme is this, Djelli?”

“Where’s your Christian charity, brother? I am on my way to Caesarea Philippae and I thought to stop in on an old friend to catch up with the gossip and perhaps share some information of my own… perhaps he will be interested enough in this information to travel with me to Qalban?”

“Cryptic as ever, eh? Well, you might as well come inside and we can see what you’re really about.”

Jan 29, 2002, 3:36 PM
the cup of the blood
by iotar

“I drink to you in brotherhood with the blood of the Son,” Djelli raised his cup and drained it, “the local vineyards are good. You have done well to settle yourself in such a comfortable corner of the empire.”

St. Riel refilled Djelli’s cup, and brought bread and olives. Djelli took a knife from his belt and cut the bread, “You will not eat and drink with me, Riel?”

“I was hoping to partake of your news and your company. I will not eat until nightfall.”

“Suit yourself. But this is what I have come to show you: the cup of the blood of Christ Jesus. I know where we can find the cup—it is in the city of pillars in the Arab lands. In Qalban.”

Riel shook his head, “You have misunderstood the sacraments: all cups are the cup, all wine is the blood and all bread is the body.”

“You don’t believe that. You are Greek enough to understand in your head that all cups are somehow only dim reflections of the original form of the cup, and perhaps you have some vague idea how the peasants might share in the miracle of incarnation through a sympathetic symbolic sacrifice but in your heart of hearts you cannot tell me that you are not interested in the cup of the blood.”

“The contents of my heart are no concern of yours, Djelli. Anyway, supposing that you did know how to find the cup in Qalban why would you want me to share in that secret?”

Djelli smiled and spat an olive stone into the cold fireplace, “Let us say that it is the love and brotherhood that I bear for you, Riel, that I want you to share in this holy mystery. You are interested, aren’t you?”

“Well, of course I am.”

Jan 30, 2002, 9:16 PM
the golem in the discotheque
by iotto

St. Rejol and Djelli the Parsee took the metro from Caesarea Philippae Icthus Street terminus south to Jerusalem. Djelli buried his flak jacket and crash hat beside a terebinth tree near to Rejol’s abode. He dressed in the business grey of a trader. The saint took only his codices and scrolls that fitted into one old leather bag.

At the holy city Rejol made acquaintance once more with Henry Salaryman in a crowded noisy discotheque near the city walls.

“Why have you brought me here, Djelli?”

“We are here to pick up Mr Salaryman.”

“I have no desire to talk to Salaryman. I tried to throttle him in Babylon and I will do the same again if necessary and then our quest will be at an end.”

Salaryman smiled, “He says that to all the girls, Djelli. Now listen up, little Rejol, things are proceeding towards a definite conclusion. In spite of yourself you are being offered the chance to take part in the most important event of the century. If you will shut your pigheaded trap for just ten minutes I will explain why Djelli needs me on this job.”

“Lord protect me from demons,” Rejol downed his ouzo and aubergina.

Salaryman rolled up his sleeve to reveal a muscular arm, “You couldn’t have killed me if you’d wanted to, Rej.” He caught his thumbnail under an invisible seamline and pulled the skin back to reveal gunmetal machinery.

“A golem!” Rejol stood up crossing himself.

“Whatever. But the fact is that I’m fucking hard.”

“But I nearly killed you in Babylon!”

“You did not,” Salaryman smiled, “I allowed myself to pass out. It was necessary to get you expelled from Iran, if we hadn’t forced you to leave Iran you’d have never become involved with the Jesus lot.”

Djelli refilled Rejol’s cup and indicated that he should sit, “I’m afraid I’ve been forced to manipulate certain situations. But at the end of the day it’s for your own good.”

Rejol looked at Djelli with one eye closed, trying to decipher the mystery of that mobile face, “What are you, the two of you? Fallen angels? Djinni? Magicians?”

“Oh grow up!” Salaryman fired a hypo-dart into Rejol’s neck.

Jan 30, 2002, 10:24 PM
Top of the World
by iattar

When St. Real awoke he was lying on his front on a cold steel platform. Through the grill of the floor he could see an island a mile below. High winds buffeted around his exposed head, up the homespun cassock and turned his nuts red.

"This is my second attempt to teach a man to fly," Salaryman stated reasonably. He sat in a tatty deck chair near a doorway on a pitted steel wall. Through the doorway Real could see Djelli seated on a beige sofa wearing a rather natty straitjacket. A man with a penguin head held a Donne Corp ASCII-izer carbine at the Manichee's head. "I'm afraid Professor Donne, my first attempt, plummeted like a lodestone. He smashed on the rocks behind the Ferry Lane estate rec ground. I rather worry that you will do the same thing."

"So what are you going to offer me, golem?" the saint picked himself up, rather groggily, from the deck, "What's the deal then, are you going to offer me all of these kingdoms spread out below us like a rich man's banquet?"

Salaryman laughed, "Offer you these? Bradport Strauss and its empty city blocks, or the opera house at Gatport Airwick, or even the lands that the Giptic Corsairs have rewon from the Semitic tribes who drove them from the Russian steppe all those long long millennia ago. Can you even begin to get into that little head of yours what any of this represents? And it's nothing to do with you anyway. This is not your inheritance—you've given fuck all for this. But I will offer you one thing," he licked his lips, "I'll give you the martyrdom you so desperately crave. The good old days ain't over yet buddy!"

St. Real described a tear in the windy air. Fire poured out of the rupture and his breast sang with the hymns of New Rome, "I was warned long ago and far away of this tower, and of the airborne land that it depends from. We hang upside down looking into the black hole where the solar icon should rightfully hold sway," He grabbed the cyborg's arm with the ferocity of all the assembled saints, "I claim jurisdiction here, Saloman!" He turned to carve another sigil in the air between himself and Djelli. The straps of the straitjacket became old and fell apart. Djelli burst his restraints open at the seams and grabbed the penguin-man's carbine by its barrel. A shot was fired and the bar area of the hospitality suite erupted into a Hemingway short.

Salaryman swung his arm around tearing muscles and ligaments in Real's shoulder, "Come on then, you fucking want some!"




Feb 1, 2002, 8:18 PM
insubordination outside the kursaal
by io io

Eliot Peacocke stepped out of the kursaal early in the morning. After the night after gloom of the interior the white light across the estuary and the blowy air stunned him with a sense of here, now, right here: immediately. It wasn't cold but there was a sense of urgency in the wind that blew across the seafront. Litter and plastic bags flew in lively pirouettes.

His sense of well being was brought to a close by a military policeman striding up the pavement towards him. He looked at his watch: 9.22. His battalion must have set off for the Kentish mainland already.

"And what have we here? Woke up late did we, dearie?" The MP stuck out his stubbled chin and closed one piggy eye.

"It seems," Peacocke's mouth continued in spite of him, "that I have been displaced in time by some sort of matter transference technology."

"Oh yes? Well that's a new one on me."

"Yes, it's never happened to me before either. I take it from your hamfisted attempt at sarcasm that you don't believe me," Peacocke put up his hand as the MP's face turned red, "no, no please hear me out before you get on your high horse. I believe I have something of importance to report to the major-general. I believe that the inventor Maurice Donne is working against the interests of the High Principality of Southend-on-Sea."

The MP's big mouth opened, closed and his left eye reopened to allow his right eye to close. He stuck his stubbled jaw very near to Peacocke's ear and whispered, "Can you think of any good reason why I shouldn't frog march you back to barracks and give you the buggering of a lifetime, sonny?"

"Well, quite apart from the defense of the nation, if the rumours I hear are true - what you're carrying in your boxers is roughly the size and potency of a common garden worm," and with that he drove his fist into the MP's stomach. The MP crumpled, winded.

Eliot Peacocke ran for all he was worth. Which at the moment wasn't much.

Feb 1, 2002, 8:43 PM
Last of the Bulldog Breed
by iada iada

Mr Payne was on the make with a new punter. "The Ship" was fairly empty at this time in the morning, especially since the troops had set off for the Kent coast at dawn. The customer was an American—nice suit, nice shades. Called himself Henry Salaryman.

"What I don't think you understand, 'enry—"

"Please. Call me Mr Salaryman."

Payne spread his hands wide, "Whatever you like, ducks. But what you have to understand is that business in Southend is a matter of patriotism. You have the ASCII-izer technology that will put us at an advantage in the Estuary War, and you don't like the deal I am offering."

"The Union Jack braces are a non-negotiable currency in most of the rest of the country, Mr Payne."

"That is because they have forgotten that they are British Lions. Something we will never forget here. Why do you think London is in the state it's in now? I'll tell you why, Mr Salaryman. They are in the state that they are because they forgot their Britishness. Too much American money, too much European culture, not enough British Bulldog."

"Stirring sentiments, Mr Payne. But what can you offer me apart from Union Jack braces?"

Payne smiled knowingly and reached into his bag, "Only Fools & Horses videos, Mr Salaryman. They'll sell in London, in Essex, anywhere!"

At that moment the door burst open and a red-faced MP staggered into the pub, "Anyone seen a fucking deserter? Little bastard! When I catch him, his arse won't be worth living in!"


Feb 5, 2002, 12:21 PM
closer
by iotar

From four islands rising haltingly from an unnamed ocean the enormous steelwork of rigid gantries rise some twelve hundred yards to a hexagonal platform above. Upon this platform three miles in diameter: forests, hills, towns, a river, and in its centre—a tower a mile high points accusingly at the uncertain sky like a great steel gnomon.

Up past the citrus bulge of the glasshouses of the botanical gardens. Up through layer upon layer of offices, canteens, libraries, laboratories and observatories near where the insectile cluster of antennae whistle and groan in the high air a fire escape depends from the steel skin of the structure.

A well-dressed figure in mirror shades leans back against the parapet and a fourth century Christian monk shouts into the rushing air. From this distance it is impossible to see what is the relation between these characters, as it is hard to see what is happening inside the room that spills yellow light out of its open doorway.

Let us draw closer.

Feb 5, 2002, 3:10 PM
yes/no
by iattar

The penguin-headed man groaned once and expired on the carpet of the hospitality suite. Djelli swung up the carbine and levelled it at Henry Salaryman. Salaryman for his part spread his teeth into a long grin like a harpsichord keyboard.

“You know you can’t destroy me, Djelli,” he stepped forward towards the doorway slowly with one arm extended, “hand it over and we’ll discuss this like civilised people.”

“Maybe I can’t kill you, Salaryman. But I can seriously inconvenience you—so back up! If I pull this trigger you’re text. It’ll take generations of critical method before you are understood correctly.”

“Do you really think that?”

“Ah, fuck it!” Djelli pulled the trigger twice. A cloud of 12 point Courier in the shape of the cyborg stood in the air for a moment before it was carried away, scattered in the violent wind. “Well, that was easier than it should have been.”

St. Real backed against the parapet and climbed onto the rail. “What are you doing?” Djelli put down the ASCII-izer carbine.

“I need only lean back and I shall be carried away from this place by the grace of the Holy Spirit,” Real put his hands together in a gesture of prayer, “I shall not fall.”

“That’s not the point, Real. Assuming that you don’t dash yourself on the rocks down there. Assuming the other thing happens. Where are you going to go?” He gestured at the point above the tower, “That’s not the sun up there. We are no longer in the realm of your god. His rules don’t apply here, Real.”

“The power of the Holy Spirit is in me.”

“That’s the power of a local deity, Real. A Hebrew tribal demon who got popular amongst the gentiles. He’s out of his jurisdiction here—what little power you have is your own.”

“I am a conduit in the transmission of pneuma. The spirit is spirated by the Father through the Son by His grace and into me. Think of this as an experiment. It will prove that God is truly Catholic.”

“But that’s the point. He isn’t: the god you worship is Saklas the blind Demiurgos who became so inflated by his own importance that he believed himself to be the One in All.”

“That theology is heretical—or at the very least radically non-canonic. Gnosticism was discredited by St. Irenaeus as the insane babblings of deluded minds inspired by demons or the darkness of their own perverted souls…”

“That’s not quite what he said…”

“And Manichees like you are even worse!”

“Okay, whatever. The point is that’s not the sun, the logos that you would be escaping into. You are not on the point of communion, Real. That is the dark counterpart, the inverse, the black sun. If you fall upwards you will fall into radical non-being, d’you understand?”

A look of terror came over the monk’s face, “By the Holy Word! That which was all blazing light becomes the epitome of nullity—the dark that encompasses all being, the fog that shrouds the thoughts of those lost in the darkest hour of the night in a foreign land. I do not believe what I see.”

“See,” Djelli pointed, “we are not in fact looking upward into the fiery orb but downward into the blackness of the pit. If you are carried into the sky you shall be absorbed into that dark which has no-name, no-being—it is no-place.”

St. Real threw his arms out at his sides, making himself into an icon of the holy cross, “Get away from me, fiend! You turn light into dark and up into down. You are the servant of lies and I call you a liar.”

“No, come with me. We can take the elevator down to the base of the tower—Clide’s waiting with a van to take us to Kilburn Inreal… I mean Qalban.”

“What did you say? You said ‘Kilburn Inreal’!”

“No, I meant Qalban…”

“You said ‘Kilburn Inreal’!”

“You do not know where Qalban is at all, do you? It is as our lord said: the Kingdom of God is within. Qalban is inside me.”

“No…”

“That’s why you need me to find Qalban. You cannot find Qalban without Real. I am already there, I need only let myself…” and with that St. Real fell back off the parapet and disappeared into the dark windy sky.

Feb 15, 2002, 12:41 PM
on the trail of elliot peacocke
by iotar

It was not without difficulty that I travelled back from Folkestone to the big city. Train services had been crippled by a top-heavy management structure and repeated de- and re-nationalizations by several London patriarchs. Above and beyond this were the barely suppressed rivalries between counties and parishes across the south east. The slow moving eleven twenty-eight to Charing Cross (a station on stilts fighting a constant losing battle against the rising flood waters) was stopped at regular intervals by armed bands and militia who would pull dissidents of other factions off the train and carry them away into the badlands where they would vanish without trace.

At Ashford a mother was shot in front of her five year old son. Single bullet from an artilleryman’s Parabellum in the back of the head…

And the train pulled away.

In the city things were no better than they had ever been. I took an armoured cab from the riverside taxi rank in Soho (the geography had been altered irreversibly by the movement of the waters) and made Stratford before nightfall.

My rooms in a converted office tower near one of the snaking heads of the River Lea felt small and distant. The clip-framed art prints I had put on the wall when I moved in only a couple of months ago looked naive and shabby. The washing up piled up in front of the kitchen window rattled precariously every time an express roared through the station at Stratford-Low-Level.

I connected my notebook PC to the modem cable: pornographic junkmail, miracle cures and instant cash schemes had caused my ISP to send two warning messages. I had caught the rising kipple in time—I wiped the messages and fired up my personal webspider: green alphanumerics scrolled across the screen and the connection clicked and rasped at itself.

The fluorescent tube in the kitchen had blown before I’d left, the result of a run-in with Madame Cava, so I washed up a mug in the dark and filled the kettle. There were a few Dogadan rose-hip teabags in the cupboard. I poured on the boiling water and went back to the notebook in the lounge.

If I’d known then what I knew now, I’d have known that Elliot Peacocke had been living in Stratford back in the black days of the vigilantes. He’d been the vicar of St John’s, when it was still standing. It seemed that after the death of a close friend and several threats upon his own person by the Plaistow stilt-walkers he’d quit the city to make a new life for himself on the south Essex coast. Certain data from monetary exchanges on the Grailings a few months back suggested that he had moved to Southend-on-Sea.

Why would a man with the key to Kilburn Inreal hide away on the estuary?

There was nothing further the webspider could tell me so I closed down the connection. The only way to find out would be to travel to Southend. The old Silverlink line still ran from Leyton Midland. Leyton was an uncertain quantity these days so I put my snub-nosed ASCII-izer on to charge for the night and tried to sleep.



"At that the general put down the knife, stood to attention: 'My word you're right, Porky!' He put his enormous half-moon hat on his head and stormed out of the restaurant rattling his sabre and yelling 'To arms!' - I was glad he'd left me with the chefs and my mother. We sent the platter away and ordered quiche instead."

Corporal Peacocke clicked his heels together and gave Edith a snappy salute. Edith had never heard the like and reddened like one about to explode. Then she downed her avocaat in one and laughed a hearty belly laugh.

Professor Maurice Donne came back to the table. "What on earth do you think you are doing with my fiancée!" The tall American with mirrored shades stood behind him. Unseen by all, a green LED turned red on a box in his jacket pocket.

Feb 13, 2002, 12:53 PM
Carpet World and the Telefonecomplex
by iofa

At the end of the phone, at the end of the tether, at the very end of all human life, and after the death of Jack, I discovered the dualistic nature of the structure we had all wrongly considered to be a level playing field. To whit:

At the brown end is Carpet World. An almost immeasurable mammoth warehouse containing the treasury of international (and some say intergalactic) rug design. An uncountable number of serfs, assistants and sub-assistants man the check-outs and wander from aisle to aisle in search of the allusive customers. (“Hallo, how can I help you? My name is Shit.”) But as the high arithmatickers have pointed out on every conceivable opportunity: in a vast space that approaches infinite size the possibility of finding a customer is remote.

At the blue end is the Telefonecomplex. This enormous exchange floats in the deep lonely spaces between the galaxies in constant conversation with itself. The original message was sent before the time of Abraham and the working out of its viral decay still has 40 million years to go. There is one old man who makes occasional calls from a phone box in Maidstone to the Telefonecomplex. At the other end of the line he hears a distant scrambled hissing with the slightest hint of the warmth of the original message. He makes great claims for his discovery and has been known to hire hitmen to do away with “interfering fuckers” who learn too much.

There is a bakelite desk telephone in one of the back offices of Carpet World that has been ringing for the last fifteen years. The Telefonecomplex is trying to contact Carpet World. The two are merely mismatching halves of a greater entity. What is this entity? We cannot know — but whatever it is, the nature of its two halves should lead us to seriously question the nature of polar oppositions.

I am convinced that Jack knew.


Feb 13, 2002, 1:29 PM
Soma Jones at Oslo St Real
by ioslo

Soma Jones was sitting at a table near the window at the Oslo ice cream parlour. It was late morning on a sunny winter's day and a pool of light escaped the oval subway underpass of Oslo St Real station and spotlit his orange Miffy sack. The dirt on the window frosted where the light touched and all was quiet in the world.

Soma Jones idly probed a knickerbocker glory with a long spoon; he was in no hurry to be anywhere and his thoughts were neither in the past nor were they in the future. He found himself centred in the moment... at the Oslo ice cream parlour on a sunny winter's day before lunchtime.

In fact, he imagined that he was writing a postcard to himself, writing his present space-time location in big round lower case letters. The letters of "Oslo" were quite beautiful—so carefully formed that he wanted to present them to Helen Cava on one of the small round plates that they served wafers and gateaux with at the Oslo ice cream parlour. Helen Cava would pick each of them up carefully and inspect them with an intent worried expression and place them back on the plate so that they might spell "solo" or "loos".

Eternity, wrote Soma Jones some thirty years later at a care home in Southend, is like a morning at the Oslo ice cream parlour. I ask you to imagine that it is just approaching half eleven and it is a sunny day outside. Perhaps you are toying with a knickerbocker glory with a long spoon. Occasionally you tap your back teeth with the rounded back of the spoon. You are not waiting for anything and you can hear an indistinct buzz of traffic on the Broadway, but the oval subway at the front end of the station catches the sounds and throws them against the plate glass windows of the ice cream parlour so that they reach you distorted and indistinct. You cannot make out the sounds of individual motors and the "beep" of horns and the klaxon vortex of emergency services is merely part of the street symphony.

When it turns to noon, well, then the world shall reassume its urgency. Tug at your sleeve with the remembrance of forgotten utilities bills and people who need to be contacted, seen and sent on their way with all possible haste. But at the moment—there is no noon.

Feb 17, 2002, 6:00 PM
co-op & onions
by iotar

i cannot express the measure of my joy to have found the co-op on the far end of the broadway where the perspective of the road twists and bends into the flyovers of dashanka junction. the co-op was one of those outdated supermarkets that felt a little too large for its contents. the aisles stocked forgotten brands and occult consumer goods: lipton yellow label tea, bisto granules with chicory, bags of freeze-dried okra, ramachandra electronics sensual massagers, turkey bacon. i pushed a rickety trolley rather fast around the tyre stain streaked linoleum in an ever elevating mood of elation.

crackling recessed tannoys broadcast the composers of today programme on radio inreal. a premier of wassgotterspeck's light requiem was being performed at the vieux abbey near petits fours. the piece opened with an agnus dei in a style reminiscent of wantsum valley flat music but then the whole choir pitch-bent alarmingly like the architectural sweep of the station at stratford-low-level.

i raced down an aisle that stocked women's hosiery and table tennis nets that also housed cassettes of computer games for the zx spectrum, msx and amstrad cpc: pubfighter 2, the lsd kid, powerboard challenge. i snatched up armfuls greedily and threw them into the trolley. it was darkening outside - so little time - and i was supposed to be meeting soma jones in the oslo at eight.

and then i was awake...

identifying my nausea with the reek of the delicately scented white rice that mrs onions was placing on the table beside my bed, i buried my face in the pillow trying to make it all come back: the requiem, the co-op, the konami coin-op hits collection. i had been cheated again by the old woman.

"you'll have to eat something, mr tossio," mrs onions raised a spoonful of the rice to my face. i closed my mouth against it and shook my head. she grabbed me by the nose and shoved the rice into my open gob.

i shut my eyes and saw myself, as if from a security camera in the artexed ceiling of the supermarket, pushing the trolley, faster and faster, around the shabby aisles of the co-op. but my concentration was broken by mrs onions forcing her heavy body into the bed beside me.


Feb 22, 2002, 9:49 PM
the question?
by the gipt

"what was significant, i feel," said solomon kirchner reaching back into the armchair to scratch his arse, "what i feel was significant was that i felt a genuine fellow-feeling with the greyhound."

"how so?" eliot peacock smiled, radio four like.

"in that, in that i feel beyond my best, eliot. my god!" he exclaimed, "i've never called you eliot before."

"it's my name."

"well, of course. but, i never call anyone by their name very much. i'm not sure why it is... it might be something to do with diplomacy."

"ah, the old board game."

"eh what? no, that wasn't what i mean't at all," he paused as trying to find the word that might bring his next pronouncement to life. and failed. so he headed back along his original path, "greyhounds - yes, i feel something very much in common with them. it's as if i might be folded away and put into a carrying case."

"where's clide?"

Feb 26, 2002, 12:43 PM
the churches(edit)
by iotar

where the road leads up and out of wassgotterspeckstrasse past the old telephone exchange there is a mostly derelict area. an area of transit where big lorries and dumper trucks race up and down the wide dusty roads towards clarges. it was here on a day in late july that soma jones found himself pressing the button on the one one four (carnevalle and rustmarsh) and swinging down the stairs as the bus pulled to a halt at a neglected bus stop beside a building site. what had caught his eye from the top deck, had been an unusually tall and decayed looking church not more than a hundred and fifty years old.

from the ground it was difficult to see a lot of the lower part of the building, as it was hidden behind the ubiquitous chipboard and scaffolding barracades of a type that lined so many of the construction sites in the area. the campanile tower, not unlike an italianate factory chimney rose high into the hazy air. the sun behind the tower's peak made identification of the grottoed arabesques difficult. soma jones juggled theories about its construction and cursed his lack of forethought - he had neglected to bring a camera.

from a gap in the barriers, near a row of half-derelict townhouses that would not survive the current wave of urban renewal, he caught a glimpse of the front of the church. a light blue sign across the facade lettered in yellow read simply "the centuries".

soma jones pondered the significance of this sign. for no particular reason he associated it with the sugar packet that he had picked up at papa gelato's ice cream emporium. the back of the packet had been printed with a badly drawn quadrega - four horses pulling a chariot and the word "justice". the other sugar packets he had been given with his guacamochaccino had featured the normal procession of athletes and kino stars but this one seemed somewhat singular.

looking out into the sun drenched brightness of the wide road that opened out into a mile of forgotten public houses, garment wholesalers and the greasy end of a disused canal, he caught a glimpse of the twin towers of st ignatius. he recalled a late night meeting eight years ago with a diffident girl with big glasses and the daily monorail journey he had made for six months while he was working at pilchers. it all fitted, or didn't quite fit into some sort of pattern.

another bus pulled in at the neglected bus stop and soma jones returned to the main sequence of his days.

Feb 27, 2002, 1:06 PM
at pergolo bridge
by iotar

when i was a child i would sometimes find myself lost on the upstairs landing of my parent's house. i would wander from room to room with no idea in my mind why i had come upstairs. sometimes the confusion would subside and i would remember a favourite toy, which i would then retrieve from my bedroom, and i would go back out into the garden to play. but at other times i could not make any progress. i would end up in my parents bedroom, the net curtains blowing lazily in a light breeze and my head empty.

once i started to cry. i have no idea why.

i felt some of this confusion come back to me as i walked up to the far end of the platform at pergolo bridge station. it was a bright day in early autumn and the girls sat on the bench beside the weather worn shelter eating vegetable chips. the mud flats extended into rough scrub all around, except for on the other side of the platform where a trio of tower blocks blocked the view. two of the blocks had been reclad in gay particolour liveries while the third was still hung with scaffolding, elevators and the machines of the contractors.

the platform curved slightly towards the end, and the shapes that had been indistinct from the bench by the shelter now resolved themselves into a fussy knot of cogs and axles. a trail of ticker tape was attached to a sliding shuttle that was connected to the right hand rail. two technicians manned the equipment. one typed jerkily on a manual typewriter while the other helped himself to a cup of instant coffee from his thermos flask.

at a distance ahead, where the line crossed the hieratic concrete structure that bridged the muddy swathe of the river, a train was approaching. i walked slowly back towards the girls, the bench and the shelter. the line sang with reverberations as it drew near and as it passed the machinery at the head of the platform the shuttle was pulled along with the wheels of the train. a length of ticker tape was released until the shuttle locked at the other end of the platform.

i caught up with the girls as the train came to a halt. naomi offered me the bag of vegetable chips and we boarded the train. i craned my neck out of the window to look back along the platform. the man who had been typing was now cranking a winch. the other man waved a red flag and the train departed.


Mar 7, 2002, 12:52 PM
a a adler - information broker.
by iota

as i entered the small, busy premises of mr a a adler (information broker) i was struck by two things: the cluttered but orderly tools of the trade - a shelf of standard references, the big reels of the secondary storage device on the wall-sized mainframe and the twin viewtex terminals downloading a constant feed from the grailings; and then i was struck by an oversized hardback thompson local hurled from the counter by the proprietor.

as luck would have it, i was caught on the cheek by the flat of the book. rather than the more painful corner in the eye, which might have caused long term bruising or even partial blindness.

mr adler, a short balding man with officious slap-strings plastered across his spamhead, was yelling pink-faced into the handset of a turquoise trimfone, "i don't give a flying monkey's what MISTER salaryman wants, if MISTER salaryman wants something that bad be can come down here to southend and collect it himself!" and with that he slammed the reciever home onto it's rather delicate-looking cradle.

i handed the thompson local back to mr adler and parked my arse on the black patent leather chair in front of the counter, "i'm looking for some information."

"you've come to the right place," adler indicated the shelves and machineries around him, "i am, after all is said and done, an information broker and i can broke you as much information as you can eat."

"thank you," i accepted a bag of frozen peas from him and applied it to my impact-reddened cheek, "i'm looking for a certain eliot peacocke."

"girlfriend?"

"uh, no. he is, that is, he is a "he" - he is!"

"no no no no," adler shook his head vigourously, "are you his girlfriend?"

"no no, i'm..."

"you are a "he" - you are? yes, i see. it's just that, what with you having a penguin's head and all it's not immediately obvious."

"i am sorry."

"no reason to be. we see all sorts around here. so, you are looking for this eliot peacocke chap. a penguin looking for a peacock - well, it's not unheard of. and is this mr peacocke a..."

"soldier?"

"no."

"priest?"

"no, no."

"friend of the family?"

"no no no no! please let me finish. is this mr peacocke a resident of southend-on-sea."

"yes... i mean, i think so."

mr adler hummed to himself and switched on the mainframe on the wall. little lights flickered and tape-reels spun. there was a smell like a dry cleaners. he turned to his bookcase and retrieved a number of volumes. flicked through them idily.

"you have a great deal of information here?" i asked.

"yes," he replied preoccupied, "yes, i do. it's all a matter of knowing how to retrieve it. it's less than useless lying dormant, unused. it has to be agitated, activated, brought to life." he put down his book and searched the shelves in vain. looking down at the counter he thumbed through a couple of card indexes and sighed.

"do you have other information?"

"hmm?" he looked up puzzled and tetchy.

"do you have information about places?"

"you mean an atlas, or a road map, or a gazeteer or something?"

"well, i was actually thinking about some place which isn't on the maps."

"how do you mean?" something moved behind his eyes and i became scared. was he, mr a a adler in on it? was he part of the conspiracy of the borough of st rijl. i thumbed my ascii-izer in my pocket. how much effect would it have on a man who was mostly words anyway?

"oh, it's not important..." i said.

adler looked back down at his book. closed it. turned around and picked up the thompson local. thumbing the pages like a card sharp he opened the book at random and drew out a flattened rizla packet that had been concealed in the fold of the book.

"here he is! eliot peacocke - this is where he's hidden. he's on the run from the military police," adler handed me the rizla pack with an address typed on the inside.

"thank you."

"that'll be four pounds ten."

Mar 10, 2002, 11:11 AM
a call from the telephone complex
by iotar

billiamina carrow had been recieving phone calls for days from a distant source. she had missed the first couple, but they had been recorded on her answerphone. that was until hovis, her mischievous tabby, had pulled the plug on the machine during one of her late shifts as some sort of protest. all of her calls had been wiped.

but they went on.

one of the calls had occurred during a weekend when soma jones had been visiting. the little house on the hoo peninsula was actually legally hers there were still bits a pieces of business, a hundred little matters that come up when two people cohabit, still to be sorted out.

they had been arguing over some of the paintings they had bought in greenwich a decade ago, when the telephone rang. bill had been glad of the reprieve. she picked up the reciever and heard a distant rushing of wires and the click of exchanges rotating, as if the call were switching from satellite to satellite but its focus remained true, pinpointing that little house near grain.

"somo! somo! come and listen!" bill had forgotten about these strange intrusions from far away in the recent mass of domestic complications. she called jones again. soma jones put down the berlin tourist guide that he had been remeniscing over and ambled into the sitting room with its big french windows looking out into the scrappy winter garden and the paperwhite sky of another dismal saturday. the funny girl who he'd spent the twelve years of his late youth with, was waving the handset of the old bakelite telephone at him. he took it to his ear and listened.

at first there was the impression of waves breaking on a distant beach, the sort of impression you might get putting a seashell to your ear. but as he listened closer he could make out smaller quanta of electric sound that were building up this picture. he was about to say something, make some sort of derisory comment but found that the boom of his voice was blocking out the dark phonescape of the call. so he had to go back in again: through the seashell waves and across the deserts of static and the irregular clicking mountains of the call.

and there: beneath it all, under the tundra of whistling atmospherics, there was a voice. old and far away, he couldn't understand what it was saying. "it sounds like latin?" he found himself saying. but the boom of the bass register in his voice had closed the picture again. he took the reciever from his reddened ear and handed it back to bill. "i think he's talking in latin."

bill shook her head, "it's greek. antique greek, about the time of the patriarchs."

"you can understand it?"

"no," she shook her head again, "no, but i know that it's a distress call," and with that she put the phone back to her ear. soma didn't see her again until it had become dark outside. he came into the darkened living room with two cups of tea and she was still there, her lips moving slowly. he had the feeling that she had invented the call, invented everything and that he'd been drawn into to game. that was what she always did, wasn't it? he sipped his tea. he wasn't even sure he'd heard anything at all. suddenly she put down the phone.

"you don't remember, do you?" she turned to him accusingly.

"don't remember what?"

"the civil wars, the flooding, the manse of maurice donne, your old radio set, the oslo..."

"i'm afraid i haven't the slightest idea what you are talking about," soma replied. she'd done this before, she used to do it all the time, tell him he had forgotten all sorts of nonsense. the problem was: it was all so damned suggestive, after the storm had blown over he'd think back and he'd start to see hints, glimpses, glaciers reaching out of mirky water.

she walked out of the room leaving her mug of tea steaming in the diffuse moonlight that reflected off the glass-topped coffee table. soma jones sighed. he looked at his watch - it was too late to go back to folkstone tonight, he'd have to go back first thing in the morning. they needed him at the studios.


Mar 15, 2002, 11:15 PM
This baby's got style...
by Chooka

We played the vibes. We all played the vibes. What we really wanted was to play the Wurlitzer but we had the vibes and that's what we play in Brussels.

In Brussels.

Drinking Hoegaarden all night. The yeasty taste has lost its appeal and we're throwing slices of lemon at each other over the glass-topped table. There's a song playing all night called "Omnipotence". No fucker seems to know who the band are. We're the band - we spent a month recording this number in a flat in Luton: Didn't get nothing for our efforts neither. There were no heaters, it was winter, we got ourselves ripped off by those wankers who we called our friends.

Not each other of course. Not the band.

'Cos that's who wankers are y'see? Wankers are the others - the people who are not in the band. It's not like Mercury Rev sang back in the days when they did the "Car Wash Hair" single (Great title - two musicals.) like the man said: "Just cos I'm not in the band don't mean I'm square..."

But no, we're here with Iotar and Lloyd and a guy called Elmo. Lily's coming along later, they say. But they say a lot of things cos they've been drinking Hoegaarden and Eau de Vie since sun-up. But that's not who we are, is it? The Old Establishment: The house on the corner where we piss on BMWs to relieve our bladder. Try hard not to think that way. Look at 'em: An echoed shout from the bar - the echoes in here form their own sentences.

Character is emergent! The two Mikes are playing scrabble. The letters are getting chucked all over the place. The old guard is limbering up more new moves. Mocha and Vermouth - not for them. The Berlin kids play blow football out in the back room where the VJ is showing projections. Art House crowd.

He forms a circular shape. The man who is just erupting from the fag machine. It doesn't take fifties: He's fucked off! There's a back lighting on him - not unnatural, but like the light on a photograph on the road all the way back. Before we, as we are now - was born.

The Elmo has gripped the supurhu and the HuluBu is playing a card game against a static wall. He finds the static wall perfectly invisible and doesn't see - he built that wall. Iotar has lost his shape.


Mar 22, 2002, 12:03 PM
The Defeat of Night in the Borough of St Real
by Chooka Frood

It all started like so many nights: Buying a ticket from a tout outside the tramshed at the top end of Mombassastrasse. Realising that he'd sold me a kid's four zone pass, catching up with the fucker as he fast-walked up the street, and extracting a two zone hopper from him instead. The hopper would be fine for my purposes, all that I really needed was to get into the network and then most of the stress-blinded graveyard shift wouldn't notice if I was waving a beermat in their faces.

I caught a dark green and red liveried Liverman's Harrisbus as far east as the Mombassastrasse runs and then hopped across the tracks to catch one of those old open backed double-deckers for the Grands Boulevards. The chocolate-brown brick of the west turned to red speckled green and the lights on the Broadway caught in the fountains and water sculptures of the Centro Plaza caught and refracted in the top deck windows of the autobus and the seats began to fill out with large wedding-cake ladies and dark-suited naratchiks splashed with eau-de-cologne. I jumped off at the Circus just before Chinatown and took the back roads from Pomp-a-l'aix to the Windmill where I arrived at my destination: The Trattoria Espagnol.

The bar behind the Trattoria was filled with bohemians from Petit Fours, a TV production team celebrating the end of a long running Welsh Gangster Soap and the rugby team from the Polyversity on the hill. I brushed through the throng in the darkened space past the coloured lights of the bar and found the old gang from the Wassgotterspeck viaduct. Tim and Manda and Ilya and Rooge were there, pissed or inhaling vapours. An acrid whiff of amol nitrate over the table. The two Mikes were fighting out old territorial ground as their spouses and ex-spouses discussed the price of eggs. But most of all the twins Rose and Tanzy were here. It was their birthday.

I could spend another two thousand words describing the carnage that night: The tears and recriminations; old stories revived like so many stagnant corpses. We drank toasts and we jostled the rugger lads and the bohos. Fights were narrowly avoided by Tanzy's delicate diplomacy and we moved from bar to bar along the Windmill up to Sigmundbahn. What they call "walking the line" in the Malabar district. Somewhere we lost Rooge in a vapour-haze and picked up a pair of wedding-cake ladies in Jenny Ondioline's. Rose and I fought, argued, spurned one another's attention and played the double-act against beautiful outsiders. Nudging and scowling our way to the Grands Boulevards in an opium fug.

Rose was two years older than me. She could play professional to my degenerate, slattern to my puritan, and vice-versa. In other circumstances we were strangely uncomfortable with one another. Sometimes I'd wonder if there was any reason we knew each other at all. As if we only existed as a dynamic, not as a combined essence. Sympathy was almost more than I could take and my flippant barbs seemed capable of upsetting the fragile nervous structure that held back what could have been a real acrimony.

And I don't know what happened that made me hide from her in the maze of compartments at Papa Gelato's. She had picked up a sensitive poetic rugger lad at the Limpo-Po Swamp Cafe who I had liked very much. The three of us saw off a good deal of red wine and most of his Black Russian fags. Two or three of the Mike's spouses were dancing in the parquet floorspace in the centre of Gelato's while a gypsy troupe from Meopham played a lively two step. I was playing a hand of inscrutable masks, stopping at a number of tables to blag cigarettes and offering to find the bar. No mean feat in the labyrinth of Papa Gelato's. With the accumulated dollars from a half hour of scrounging I felt a breeze coming from the next corner and took myself out into the street.

It was cold out there. The night had settled on the broadband autostrada that curved over the Northway. Hearing a familiar voice calling my name from behind I made haste, out into the street, pulling my hat over my eyes and feeling the mask deepen around me. The pong of a dozen kebabish fought the gas and ammonia of the buzzing road. The yellowish rectangles of a double-decker travelling in the Malabar direction loomed into the street and I hailed it as near the bus stand as I could reach. I hopped off near the southern end of the Windmill and ran after a night bus, really not much more than a converted transit, as far as the old supermarket on the Broadway.

After I'd spent an hour looking at my lengthening face is the shop windows of all-night stationary suppliers, I caught two or three night buses back and forwards along Mombassastrasse. Avoiding the end near the tramshed and curving my course closer to the Paperwhite parc to avoid the lights and water at the Plaza, I felt my melancholy lift. It was an honour and a privilege to be on one's own in the night-time in the borough of St Real. The brown black brickwork of town houses near the park, lit here and there with the low lighting of formal drawing rooms, and the wind in the elms that border the beginnings of Nuthatch and Chessolp. My head began to clear in the sharp balmy air. Feeling myself in the mood for further adventures I caught the tram that runs through the Plaza towards Petits Fours.

Dazzled by the rainbow sparkling fountains I was taken by surprise as a ticket inspector, in his dark green cap with red trim, boarded the tram. Two hours earlier in the height of intoxication I would have slapped his face and tossed his notebook out of the window. He had the eyes of a zealot, a man who would know the difference between a two zone hopper and an central zone travel permit. The shame faced loser who was currently turning out his pockets in search of a spurious ticket-he-lost bought me some time. I brushed past both and leapt off the departing tram across the road from the Nova Basilica cathedral.

It must have been a madness or an abject perversity that carried me over the road. I was out of sorts, out of my zone. I made a point of keeping the Nova Basilica always at a remove, behind a block, behind my back. But at this moment I was seeking a sanctuary, I was shaken by the surprise that the night had thrown at me. I'd tackled the challenge badly, I was tame, lame, a sheep not a wolf. I was looking for the good shepherd. And besides the door was open. It was a tall arched portal with big wooden doors propped open. Halberdiers with polished breastplates and crested casques stood on either side of the entrance, a papal guard. Inside, through plate glass doors, the open entrance hall was lit with discrete uplighters. Behind a closed door marked with a big number two choirs could be heard singing and the whole place reeked of incense and age.

To the right, and on a raised dias stood the Popemobile: A baroque, arched carriage in burnished high gloss black, trimmed with too much gold. A quadrega of four mechanical greyhounds, also in gold, stood paused in mid motion before it. The halberdier behind the carriage noted my interest and began to pace towards me. I smiled at him and sized up the thick oily darkness of the gold framed painting that covered most of one wall. A suffering bearded man died with eyes rolled to heaven his supine tortured luxuriant body held by two women, one in blue - the other in red, but otherwise indistinguishable. Beneath the painting an old irish woman sat on some steps knitting.

"It is a beautiful carriage, no?" she asked from somewhere in that creased face. I looked first up at the painting and then over to the Popemobile, uncertain to which she was referring.

"A lot of gold."

"It's mostly gold leaf."

"What does gold leaf cost per ounce these days?" I laughed, we both laughed.

"He's a good lad," she said. Again I looked from one to the other.

"You must be proud of him."

"My son!" she smiled.

There was a call of clarions and bells and the big doors opened. A procession began to appear, behind them I could see the arched perspectives of the sanctuary, the great banners in their deep reds and blues rolling down from the high recesses of the roof. Cardinals, clerical, hierarchs and hierophants, the glorious and great of the papal host in slow procession, like the ghostly wild hunt of Paperwhite Parc but heavy with the solid rich glory of Mother Church. Heaven had come to earth to walk the night-touched strada of Kilburn Inreal and to see in the rising of the solar orb over a new day.

Apr 4, 2002, 9:26 PM
Anaesthesia Brown
by Chook

What surprised me was that I still travelled on holiday with Anaesthesia Brown when she went on holiday for the last five years before the Giptic invasion. Couldn't be averted the UN said. It was necessary, they said, to prune the Iberian Penninsula so save the continent.

"Packed with fucking darkies, they were," she might content if she offered her opinion and it was rare that she did. Normally that sort of thing did for a conversation. We did all the Sheffield pubs one summer and she would never fail to clear the place. Different trick every night, we were just waiting on it: Seeing what might emerge, what form it would take.

Stealing cigarettes: "I'll fucking Tekken 2 you, you bif poofter!"

Setting light to barladies hair: "Say thank you! Say fucking thank you!"

Or perhaps just by crawling through the sewers on the way to the pub on the trail of a colony of vampires that lived under the city: "They're under there you know? They fear the light! They drink blood, human blood!" But she was mistaken. There was something under there and it wasn't vampires. If only we hadn't driven the penguin headed man away. He might have found the way to free St Rijl from the telephone complex. Oh, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Would you like a guacamochaccino, duck?

May 14, 2002, 12:07 PM
Black Railings
by iotar

It had been a long time since I had visited the District of Black Railings and the violent deaths at my workplace over the last few months and the late arrival of spring that year had nudged a half-arsed nostalgia into full flow. It was one of my late shifts on a monday and the sky was still navy blue, rather than the plum black I had become accustomed to, when I was leaving the Longacre building. A fine rain covered everything and the delicate pink blossoms of the cherry trees that line the front entrance of the Institute had be trampled into the tarmac pavements by the passing of a hundred careless feet.

The season was indistinct and indecisive. My own grief at the recent losses of colleagues and the feeling that I was stuck in a rut made me contemplate a way out: Not just from the temporal and economic difficulties, and I certainly didn't consider myself sufficiently engaged or idealistic to understand whereby a solution to the broadly political global affairs that would bring the nation to its knees might be sought.

A quandry of a very particular and special sort.

And so I followed in the footsteps of Soma Jones, or rather I followed the marginalia of his densely written notebooks that had fallen into my care following his departure from this world. All was following. There was no sense that I made my own path but rather that the path which I trod had been trodden by eminences that I considered in someway authoritative. Unfortunately much of that authority proved itself spurious.

The plum dark had fallen upon the day by the time I found myself on the Towpath that runs behind breaker's yards and light manufacturing works overhung with the fragrant elderflowers that would ripen in the fullness of the year into small bitter berries. But I knew that I would not be here to see that season: For there, ahead of me in the yellow halogens the tall spiked railings were a gloss black, as if freshly painted.

And the railings stretch off, black like the armour of beetles, curving this way and that, into the distant vanishing point.

Jun 7, 2002, 12:42 PM
Jubilee
by ZVX

Some way between the grey oblong of estuary, where an eyebrow of cloud shaded the Isle of Sheppey from the white indifference of the sky, and the twin lines of the railway we were caught by gusts of wet wind from the west. The late morning had the cast of bleak afternoon and the day was uncertain. Clide's cigarette wouldn't light ("Zippo's were designed for these weather conditions, you wouldn't believe it though would you...") and Augustus had long since given up his efforts with matches. Burnt fingers had left echoes of his father's voice ringing in his ears ("Don't want to be playing with matches, young August.") and I for myself was getting tired of the whole endeavour.

I shielded the photocopied map with my body and tried to make sense of it again, "So that's the Caravan Park."

"It might be that one over there?" Augustus indicated another cluster of rectangular boxes back down towards Whitstable. I moved my finger back along the coast to indicate the caravan park that he had suggested - a spot of rain landed on the paper just below the blue biro cross that Wassgotterspeck had inscribed. ("It's right here, piece'o'piss, can't miss it!")

"Well, I'm pretty keen on giving up on this. I don't think there really is a hidden railway station along this line." I screwed the map up and put it back into my pocket.

"I don't reckon anyone had any reason to lie," Clide picked bits of tobacco out of his mouth, "What I reckon's happened is that we've got ourselves in a muddle."

"But the track's right here! We've followed it backwards and forwards eight hundred times and there is fuck-all at the point specified by the cross as there is fuck-all anywhere else!"

"I think you're just being tetchy," said Augustus, "you're not reading the map right are you?"

"Oh fuck off!" I pushed the map deeper into my inadequate pocket. A triangular edge stuck out. Augustus picked at it with his big mittens. I turned round and round trying to avoid them.

"Yeah, come on! Give us a look at the map!" Clide paced around me his nicotine-stained fingers held out. I kicked at Augustus who backed off to avoid my boot and started walking fast head first into the damp wind, "Oh, come on, man. Be reasonable!" said Clide, "We paid our share for the map."

Augustus caught up with me and pulled at my arm trying to tug the map out with it. I turned suddenly to swing at him and the tattered paper burst in the air. Not as paper but as feathers. Three doves glowing with a soft golden light that had no place here on a wet bank holiday weekend. The doves circled each other like the coils of a DNA helix their upward ascent held in check by a slowing of the natural order.

Sometime after that we found a Shepherd Neame pub along the creek by Faversham. I couldn't remember exactly when that manifestation had stopped happening or how we had got there. In fact I had viewed the three of us entering the pub from outside, as if I had been hovering above the road looking down on the three hooded pilgrims - fuzzy and indistinct and apparently invisible to the local kids in puffer jackets and red faced seadogs of the dried up creek.

"They are carried on wings of angels," an old voice had told me, "the boats are lifted by the hosts of heaven and placed in the estuary."

"They bob like corks, don't they?" my voice had said.

"Pretty things aren't they? They're under the protection," the old voice had said.

My head didn't adjust for the duration of that afternoon and neither Clide nor Augustus had mentioned the map again. We'd been quite happy to sit there at the table, our coats drying on the big round iron radiators, drinking slow pints of a local brew and eating peanuts. A news program that we did not recognise showed us quick cut images of darkened city streets, where the brick was a dark green and the golden mozaic of a grand Basilica cut the night air. A procession of cowled and masked hierarchs paced stately and ancient out into the cobbelled streets.

My memories of the conversation in the pub are fragmentary and fractured. Sometimes there was jeering applause as Clide scored another goal in the shove ha'penny tournament and I heard my voice recite a poem to one of the barmaids. The recitation was in hebrew it seemed and although I do not speak that tongue I felt that it had originally been the composition of a king, perhaps Solomon.

And then there was an airy laughter that I will never forget. A hilarity edging on madness like one might feel under the influence of butane or solvents. Augustus banging his fist on the table, "We can't get through to it! We're being held at a remove!" he would insist - gesturing obscenely at the small television screen. Then he was sitting on the floor and one of the sailors was talking to him in hushed tones. Again Clide scored a goal and raced around the bar, "I'm the winner, I'm the winner!" And then back again to that strange phased laughter: Augustus's head was next to the television screen. The lines of the picture bowed around the corners of the tube, "I can see inside!" he revealed.

And then his head was inside the picture. His face flickering with the coloured interference of the screen. The barman sat cross-legged upon the bar in a profound state of meditation: They're cultist, occultists, satanists - it occured to me. And then I saw the soles of Augustus's shoes sticking out of the screen - his elated head being helped through by a uniformed halbardier on the other side.

Jun 11, 2002, 1:55 PM
Star of the Sea
by ZVX

"How much longer have I got, Doc?" Soma Jones said, putting his shirt back on over his spare and awkward frame.

"Well, as far as I can tell, Mr Jones, there's nothing much wrong with you. At worst I'd give you another four decades."

"That bad, doc?" Soma Jones nodded to the doctor and staggered from the surgery. Another four decades! He'd be scraping the four score years and ten - it seemed unjust. As he Crossed the road in a daze the traffic squealed to a halt. An articulated lorry jack-knifed and a BMW mounted the pavement and hit a tree. He checked his watch - the sands of his life were running away grain by grain.

He climbed the steps between the black railings and entered the Sacred Precinct. The age-old cold stone all around him projected an atmosphere of permanence and antiquity. A pair of masked hierarchs robed in deep amber spoke in hushed tones in one of the side chapels. This part of the Sacred Precinct was a fifteenth century reproduction of the Basilica of Santa Reale. The plaster-casts of the original had been carried along the Wasgotterspeck Viaduct by pilgrim penitents. Many had died under the weight of their great burdens, tottering and falling from the narrow overhead walkways. And so the casts would have to be remade and carried and finally reassembled near Asciibridge on the Vulga.

Upon reaching the end of the great nave Soma Jones' eyes were carried upwards into the lofty gloom of the major dome. A lofty stone canopy above the heavy marble altar was dwarfed by the high ceiling: Dimly from the paperwhite light that caught in the arched windows the golden tesserae of the mosaic stars caught and winked down on Soma Jones.

A birdmasked ecclesiastic whispered over his shoulder, "Ave Stella Maris, intercede for us Lady of the Noctural Sea." Soma Jones turned to catch the cowled figure retreating, making admonitory gestures with his red gloved hands. Behind him, where there had originally stood a chapel to the Archangel Michael, the yellowish lights of a gift shop and the flat modern lines of the conveniences and baby changing room imposed themselves like incongrous elements of a badly concieved collage.

Beyond the ladies and gents the corridor turned left and widened in an ill-lit tiled trolley park. A long sign on the wall read "A million thanks for shopping with us!" and the Kwiksave logo. A bow-backed boy pushed a train of trolleys into the supermarket. Soma Jones staggered, listless and vacant through the aisles of tinned processed peas and oversized boxes of washing powder and nappies. Some of the larger branches of Kwiksave were selling white goods these days but this seemed to be some insignificant corner of the Empire decaying under the mismanagement of a tired disappointed graduate.

Out through the front entrance of the supermarket the shopping centre remained dim and shabby. Where the ceiling opened on the grey clouded sky the tiled floor was speckled with pigeon guano and litter. What future this arcade had, if it had any future, was uncertain. Real estate in Asciibridge was too expensive for new projects and the Sacred Precinct caused certain difficulties with planning permission. Unless the government was willing to subsidise new initiatives the place would fall prey to the processes of nature.

The bird-masked ecclesiastic whispered in his ear, "Some four decades hence the keepers of the Shrine and the inheritors of the Pilgrims of Santa Reale shall stalk the broken piss-stained car parks by night. There upon the roof, where the rotors of the dead air vents turn in the stale wind we shall crouch and listen to the Song of the Stars: The Shivering Ancient Galaxies and the weeping lament of the Lady of the Star of the Sea."