Just the flowers screaming again

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

If flowers could talk what would they say, Tuesday’s poetry got me thinking. I think it would be anger, so I vented on their behalf. If they were sentient what would that be like, would we behave differently? It turns out they are very angry.

I wait.
I can hear the click.
The clack of the shears.
It will be my turn soon.
You can’t expect graciousness,
Or complacency.

How would you feel if someone cut you off at the knees?

Or hollowed out your stomach?
And then put you on display.
Plastering a cheap smile on your face.
Ugh, these ugly monochrome faces you have.
You think you can borrow our beauty?
Done the evolutionary hard yards have you?

You bend in odd places, but not with the wind. Freaks.

Unable to stand straight for too long,
You kill everything.
You cut us off.
Sit us in a pretty container.
Put us on a window sill.
Give us some water.

So we can suck every last drop from it to stay alive.

Do we scream in the night?
Yes we do, we do
but not in pain.
In rage and anger.
We rail at you.
Loathsome skeletal trash.

We outlived the dinosaurs you know.

You have no conscience.
You do not hear.
You shove your oily noses in our petals,
Breathing your stinking air on us.
For the record,
Our smell is not for your gratification.

Do you expect us to be grateful for a few extra days?

For some prolonged agony as we wait to die.
You hang pictures of our corpses on your walls.
Barbaric!
You live inside the bubbles you have built.
As if that could save you.
It won’t!

We have seen extinction. We know it. It won’t.

You plant us, tend to us,
and expect we will love you
For what?
The tiny bit of water you give us
We would be fine on our own.
Think we are your tribe?

Think we should thank you for the green family you pull up so we can thrive?

You odious, pasty oily things.
You breath oxygen, but we make it!
You kill insects, we feed them!
Do we sit here in our final hours and contemplate death?
We do.
Yes we do in fact!

But it is your death not ours.

Just the Flowers Screaming

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

I look at them but I cannot see it.

The flowers are all withered now.
They were cut off from their life force,
And brought inside,
Placed into water and a vase.
So we could watch them die.

And they died beautifully,
For our amusement.
Sitting on the table,
Brightening everyone’s day,
With their prolonged elegant death.

We gave them just enough water
To let them bloom.
But not enough to let them live.
I tell myself it was like being in a coma
But I am not so sure.

Perhaps their wretched screams
Rended into the night,
Too high pitched for us to hear.
If so I slept through it.
And woke afresh as they struggled on.

Perhaps their quiet malice
seeped into my dreams.
Maybe their perfumed mist
Blew into my food.
Just enough to make me feel uncomfortable.

Did the great artists know of such things,
When they named their pictures of fruit and flowers,
‘Still life’
Was it there, life still,
as they stood bright on the window sill?

Life seeping away, for my amusement.
Were they weeping tears of nectar
Holding their petals high until the last.
As we pressed our noses into them and
commented frivolously on their beauty.

Maybe when I pluck them
From the vase that was their tomb,
their spores will prick my skin,
Infect it with their vengeance
Tormenting me with itches in the night.

I look at them but I cannot see it.
There is no beauty in their death.
They belonged in the earth.
There was only beauty in their life.
To pick them, put them here, it was not right.

London is complete

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

‘London is complete’. Finished. It was not that we didn’t expect her to say that. It just still felt surreal. We had read about it, known about it. But that final day, it just didn’t seem possible. London, that chameleon city, that was both old and new, depending on which direction you were facing, the past and the present always dancing in front of you. London was to step into old age. The drills fell silent, the scaffolding came down, the hoardings disappeared. The cranes cried out piteously against the skyline, against the idea of ceasing a reason for being. But it happened, all building in London simply stopped. There was no more ‘ongoing maintenance’. The people of London would have to learn to ‘make-do’.

What is a city that is not constantly rebuilding itself? Making itself over, living as if its organic and can add limbs and chop limbs as it chooses? No, not London, not anymore. London was to become the first to retire from the cycle of change, to sit in the armchair of geography and do the cross word until the end of its days.

At first the bricks looked as if they would hold firm, the trains all kept running. People left, people came. More people left than came. And then it got more difficult to come. The trains stopped short. You could see the great skinned giraffe cranes from it’s windows. Cranes that had once hurled building blocks to roof tops now strode free range across the sky. Silent, motionless, there namesakes nesting in them, an aviary in a long green garden streaking down to earth. Pinned against the same grey London background that was always there.  Home to vines and moss.

You had to walk to get to the very centre. As you went further in the streets grew less crowded, fewer people, more of everything else. Birds, foxes, packs of dogs, bodies of cats, all living in its alleyways, beneath its rusted awnings, its rooftops. And still we stayed, eking out a living, tapping at keyboards, words out to a world who had taken only half a decade to forget we were here.

And then it came, that first moment. They had been right. All those scientists. They were telling us a fact. London was finished. The great gates that had held it all back for so long, gave way and the water came. Resplendent in its plastic murkiness, the water washed in and London was finished. It For awhile, for a tiny droplet in time, London was done, it had stood grand and proud and finished. The reality of its completeness, now a footnote next to its name in a list on a website. A list of all the cities lost. And us? We?

We got into our dinghy, put in all our belongings and floated away.

100 Books

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

He stands there. In the library. Looking around. 100 books. That is what he is based on. He has been brought back. Re-invented. Re-made. Humanity recast. By the future, for the future. As if. You can go back. He looks around. There is something missing. A gap. A gulf. A lack of something. There is no other. No other. Just him.  

He can feel his own strength. Rolls his shoulder. Stretches his arm. Sucking in oxygen, even though the air here is filtrated. Outside of this building, he can’t breathe. The air will kill him. He stays inside. In here. He is the one. Alone. The only one.

The books. There was a list. Is a list- 100 books put in the ground. Ready for the future. Ready for a time when man could resurface, be reborn and. He is it! He is that moment. That rebirth from nothing but a pile of books and some clever science. He does not know how they did it.

He lives here in the library, well not in the library itself. There is a little room off to the side and a garden. Covered over. Like a hot house. Only with plants he does not recognise.

He has those 100 book stored in his head. They did that too. He does not know how. He has those books, their physical presence here in the library as well. 100 books. They are all here. He can reach out and touch them. He does sometimes, but when he looks at them-he sees the gap. He sees not the books. He sees the space on the shelf. There is something missing. There is a missing. The other. The knowledge that there is another. There is something missing. He knows it. He does not know what? He does know what. But he can’t say it. He has read the books too.

He picks up the book that he knows is the history of men. Men were wondrous things. Inventors. Wordsmiths. Builders. Makers. Doers. But there is something missing. There is the gap. Where is the other?  

They expect that somehow he will produce other humans. That is the bit. That bit is missing. He looks through the list of men who put this list of 100 books together. What is it they did not think of. That is the something missing. The books tell him of bridges, of machines, of wondrous majestic building. But still there is the gap.

That something missing, in the 100 books-what is it? They are not all non-fiction these books. There is fiction here that carries him to other worlds. In the works of Eliot- -hidden from view, there is the something. The missing. The Dorothea. To his. His thoughts trail off. To his what. He does not know how to make another human.

They watch him closely, daily. This thing they have brought back to life. Recreated. Recast. They are confident they can make humanity better this time. They are not sure to what purpose they will put it. They plan a colony somewhere. He is a social experiment. He skims through the names of all the authors in his head. Tolstoy. Hemingway. Shakespeare. Marx. Keynes. 100 books and all of them something missing. He scans the non-fiction, architecture, anatomy, Darwin-the origin of species. All of them something missing. In Eliot-Dorothea-an equal, not a second. It puzzles him.

They, whoever they are,  have said only this. Once there were two but we have read your history, your 100 books and nowhere does it say the second is necessary. In all the first is more important than the second. In one the second comes from the first. You are the first. You will find a way to make the second.

But that does not seem to be the truth. In these books there is no truth. The truth is not there. The truth is beyond the gulf, out of his grasp. There is a gap. An endless gulf. An other. He does not know. There is no way to make the second. He looks at his ribs. He looks at the earth outside. There is no way to make the second. He does not know how to tell them. The books offer no answer. They are right. In the books the second are second and they are of no consequence. Only Dorothea.

The sense of the other overwhelms him. Of its missing-ness. Where are they? How to make those? How to make the other. He is certain that if there was one other, just one, somehow this feeling would be gone. This gap. This gulf.

He sits. He holds the book in his hand. Which book is this? Does it matter? He sees the words in his head? They are not in the words? This book has holes? All the great designers? All the great artists? All the great inventors? All of them? Him! The seconds. The other. Faded, missing in history. Gone.

The gulf feels greater. Wider. He has days like this. Days he does not understand. Days where he wonders if he can think the other into being. He cannot. The other is not here. Not in these words. Not in these books. Not in this library. Not in this garden. The other is simply. Not. He is alone. This must be how they wanted it, he thinks, how they wanted it to be. He looks at a person who is not sitting next to him and who is not there. He opens his mouth to speak. To speak to the other that does not exist. To say. To say what? Sorry? The words fail him. Without the other perhaps he is not here either. He does not know. The books offer no answer. He will sit here again tomorrow. And the day after. And perhaps the other, perhaps she will come and find him.

Every Home should have One

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

Why aren’t I allowing it to ‘facilitate my meal production’? -It’s crumpets and coffee!!! Do I need a doctor? Would some vitamin pills help? Would I like a dietary change, a cereal perhaps to ‘up’ my fibre intake…read more 

It’s 5.58am. I am awake before the alarm. The alarm knows this. Well the device that sets the alarm knows this. It helpfully tells me, ‘you can sleep for two more minutes.’ I swing my legs over the bed. There is no point in fighting against it really. I should lie down and shut my eyes and pretend to sleep. But it will know I am not sleeping. So why doesn’t it know that sleeping for two minutes is an impossibility? It’s one of those tiny glitches the programmers missed because –because they are all the same. They probably wake half an hour before the alarm, slam a vegan juice and do 15 minutes of yoga. I don’t do that.

The device is in every room now. My whole life programmed in. My very own ‘routine’. I admit I have a very basic model. It’s all I could afford. It has a lot of ads. I admit it does routine well. The problem is- I don’t. It’s not that I don’t keep to a morning schedule to get out the door on time, it’s just that I like a little flexibility. It doesn’t. The alarm will go off at 6am-only it won’t because it helpfully has figured out I am out of bed. It will tell me exactly how many hours, minutes and seconds sleep I got last night. If I have made it to the bathroom by then, the numbers will flash up on the mirror. I will try not to look but if I don’t say Ok, it will keep telling me until I acknowledge it.

It will add that to all the other sleep data it has on me, which is quite a lot. It will tell me my sleep deficit for the year so far, a number now so high that I can never make it up. It will remind me of the importance of sleep and suggest some ‘helpful’ natural remedy to fix my erratic sleeping – perhaps a short break or that healthy after work gym routine which will help me sleep soooo much better at night. I never had a sleep deficit until I had the device. I now know that I average just 6 hours and 30 minutes per night and that is not enough for my ‘Optimum Functional Capacity’. I am never going to achieve my ‘OFC’ on that. Then they will run some mattress ads because who knows it could be my mattress or it could just be this device and its f*****’ routine.

At 6.02 the shower will start automatically-that’s right I have two whole minutes to get between the bedroom and the shower- which is about 3 metres distance max. Why two minutes-because the device helpfully measured the time it usually takes. And the time it usually takes me to get from the bed into the shower- I average two minutes-what do I do in that time-nothing, at least not anymore. I have no idea what I did do to take all that time. Perhaps I enjoyed the view out the window, or stretched or something else equally as useless. I certainly did not use it for self improvement-I know-time wasted. All I do now is feel pressured to be ready under the shower a good 30 seconds before it starts.

In case you’re wondering, there is never an extra 5 minutes in bed. I can ask it for that but there is the gentle reminder that I will be late for work or worse, it has to recalibrate all the timings. And it generally takes 4 minutes off my coffee drinking time-which is only 7 minutes in total-the average time any person takes to drink a coffee apparently-where did they get that statistic!!! Because  that is not me. I cannot drink a coffee in 7 minutes and I don’t believe anyone else can either! Like I said, it’s a basic model.

Anyway at 6:01 I will be standing naked in the shower waiting for it to start. I need to get a sensor for the shower so it knows I am here and not this stupid timing thing. The shower will dispense the exact amount of shampoo twice because that’s what the stupid shampoo company wants. The Stupid Shampoo Company (not it’s real name) wants for me to wash my hair twice-only before when I had a bottle of shampoo and it was just instructions, the ‘twice’  was optional. Now when the shower is dispensing it, I must do it once, and I must do it again and there is no longer a choice.

Then there’s the conditioner-yes the conditioner is dispensed in exactly the right amount for my hair length. Fab, but then it needs to be in for three minutes. Back when I had a bottle, 30 seconds max, I guess I was a ‘token’ conditioner back then. My hair was never properly conditioned and I never noticed. Now I have proper conditioned hair and guess what-it has NOT,-N-O-T improved my life in any way.

Right at the start when I was programming-I use that term loosely because I was just talking at it, the device asked me did I want the water to run for the whole three minutes whilst the conditioner was in my hair.  I said yes, because I do. Then there were the water company ads. Was I sure? What a waste? Aren’t I a good citizen? So I changed it to ‘no’ and now I stand there for 3 minutes freezing my butt off with conditioner in my hair and no water. I’m not going to lie to you. It’s not what they promised- that whole-‘lets get connected- a device in every room’. Back then it was all music and fairy lights whenever you wanted. The reality is you freeze your arse off in a shower with no water for three minutes every morning and no amount of soft lighting and mood music can make it any better. I just want to be warm.

Anyway I will hear the crumpets clicking into the toaster just as the water comes back and I have a minute-a whole minute to get rid of the conditioner and wash the rest of me. It’s based on averages again apparently. An extra minute in the shower is a no-no, my goodness those water companies-that is called premium water if you want it. And apparently they can measure that when you start to use it.

The crumpets are preloaded in the toaster by me the night before so all the device has to do is tell the toaster to drop and cook. When I get out of the shower they will be ready along with the coffee. The whole thing is set up the night before with a helpful 9.02pm reminder to put the crumpets in the toaster and a 9.03pm reminder on the coffee. It’s so that as soon as I’ve sat down after one I can be reminded to get up and do the other. It’s because you can’t have two reminders for the same minute-you can see why I swear a lot. Of course sensibly I do them together but that doesn’t stop the reminders and me needing to confirm it is done –verbally, out loud by 9.04- lest I radically decide to get up tomorrow and make my own breakfast. I can’t do that. It knows. It will ask me what is wrong. Why aren’t I allowing it to ‘facilitate my meal production’? -It’s crumpets and coffee!!! Do I need a doctor? Would some vitamin pills help? Would I like a dietary change, a cereal perhaps to ‘up’ my fibre intake. Don’t even ask what else it monitors in the bathroom. Its not your business. It shouldn’t be anyone’s business. I should get a better model-upgrade. This one only does half the stuff it should. There aren’t enough sensors in my house. Some of my stuff is incompatible because it has a different logo. Or no logo, or worse a supermarket logo.

I am out the door at 6.41. The device will have told the car I am on schedule. Actually for all I know the shower might do that. I slide into the back. It glides away but not before asking me if I am willing to share. I am never willing to share. I am not a morning person. No one is. Why does it even ask. Why can’t it learn that- I have said no every time, and yet it still asks. I think that is a government regulation, you can’t shut off the share question.

The car will drive me to the station. There is only one right turn the whole way there. But it is a nightmare. Cars are all about operating systems. Basically I need a car with the same operating system going both ways to allow me to turn out, that way my car can talk to their cars and tell them to stop. It should all be pre arranged but generally it’s a disaster because no one wants their car talking to another car until they are in it. Worst of all, sometimes one car will stop because one street away another car with the right operating system is coming. That person and everyone behind it will sit and wait until the other car gets there. You know how many car makers there are, well that’s how many operating systems there are, imaging having to wait at an intersection until there is a Ford going both ways-it’s like that. Actually it’s worse than that-because its not just operating systems, it’s the version you have, so a Ford Fiesta can’t talk to a Ford Focus or similar.

You can see people getting visibly annoyed as they wait. You can no longer ‘egress’ -yep that is the term they use from a car whilst it is in use, you are locked in-it’s a safety measure, not for you, for everybody else who is sitting waiting for you to turn out of the road. It is stressful. The car will be booking my seat on the train or not- depending on my BMI. If I am a little too fat this morning, it will sense it and I get to stand. Apparently standing on a train is good for your core, not so sure about the feet.

ItThe return journey is much the same. The car will be there to pick me up eventually. The worst of it –have I mentioned it gets worse-is my relaxation time. At 8pm each evening, having sorted out the perfect recipe for the ingredients in the fridge and walked me through how to cook it, it will tell me to sit down and relax for an hour. The thing is- I can’t. I am so tense. I just sit there. I have this hour to relax and I am so tense. I know the reminders are coming at 9pm. I know I will be in bed by 9.15. I know the alarm will go off at 6am. I know the routine tomorrow will not vary one iota from today. I know that when I sit on the sofa at 8pm, it is part of the routine. An hour for me just to relax.  I just can’t relax. I can’t do it. Its enforced relaxation, enforced sleep. I cooked what it wanted me to cook. I ate in the time it told me it would take. I relaxed to music that it will suggest but none of it, none of it is mine. None of it is me. If it is me, its just a machine reflecting me back at me. I can’t handle it. I can’t give up ‘me’ to the machine. I can’t sleep but I can’t deviate. Its here all around me. This stupid device! Telling me that I could be better, my life could be better. Self improvement, self fulfilment, busy every second except for this one allotted hour. Only all life is gone from here. There are only algorithms and no space for just an extra minute on that coffee. It is the apocalypse, not the devastating cataclysmic, life ending one but the soft shattering, soul destroying end to choosing how each minute is spent. A decision made once, resonating forever, repeated over and over every day in that stupid device.

Legacy-she died in the night

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

Coffee cut with dirt or sand or embers. I think I can see an ember glowing in the bottom of it. Ember coffee. Tastes like-well, charcoal…read more

She died in the night, the old lady. I had learned to sleep through the moaning and perhaps that was callous. The younger one woke me. She must have been sitting there with her when it happened. I knew what had to be done. There is no ritual around burial.  There isn’t the time, the resources. One gone is one less mouth to feed. Still that will be scant consolation here, they only had each other. I think it had been that way for a long time. And now the dreaded ‘there is only me’. I have gotten used to it, been like that for too long to worry about the sentiment.

I groaned my way out of bed, which was wrong because I understood the urgency. The moaning had been endless and now there is no moaning and maybe someone is listening and maybe someone will come. And whoever comes here will be better fed than the people at the rubbish tip. I have had the spade in the corner for days and a second hand knife I have been sharpening. I went to bed dressed, we all do.

Between the two of us we heft the body downstairs, carrying it between us. Into the slush and mud that was the ground floor. I don’t think the flood is ever receding and we will need to move inland. It is just a fact. Hundreds, thousands, millions, billions have faced this dilemma everyday for what must be half a century now. Maybe, maybe not that long. It is ten years since I abandoned England the first time, no I think -it can’t be that long. It would make her so much older now, so long without her. So much I can’t remember. I am alone. I tell myself that. It does not bear thinking about. No one will carry my body like this. There is no point in sentiment.

When did the water start coming in? Who knows? I don’t think there was a specific date. There probably was for some cities. I vaguely remember a headline about Miami sinking into the sea, but maybe it was Shanghai or Denmark. I don’t think Denmark was a city, it all eludes me now. The facts are irrelevant. It’s all just gone.

We carry the body between us. Sloshing through the mud in the darkness. The road –well the water that is flowing between the houses where the road once was, is only lit by fires from inside open buildings, buildings with no walls, or only a back wall or side walls but not enclosed. They aren’t proper buildings. They open onto the street. Mostly they are built just a foot off the ground, this allows them to stay open when the floods aren’t too bad. It keeps money or its equivalent flowing in whatever the weather. They call themselves ‘cafes’ but they are nothing like the cafes I remember. Some of them have fire all night. These light our way. But it is still dim and dark. We move quickly and quietly.

I take the old woman’s body now. She is bent over with grief. The reality is sinking in. I have the old woman over my shoulder. I look around, wary, aware. I try to make the thing I am carrying look less human, more small. The ‘cafes’, they never close, they are a refuge. They are dotted along the main road.  People sleep there, live there, eat there. It isn’t like before. People are looking out, walking past us, seeing what we have and looking the other way. No one cares. There are no rules here.  They know we must hurry.

We take the main road even though its where we are most likely to be noticed. Its also where its most likely for someone to intervene if we need them. Even now people baulk at the idea. They don’t like it and sometimes they will come to your aid. Plus if I have to fight myself I’d always rather there were witnesses. I don’t like doing death in dark alley ways, I always feel it is dishonest. Deceitful. It feels like a crime, death out here in defence of a human body would feel justified, reasonable. Even though it is only hunger that will drive our attackers.

We are taking the body to the end of town, there is a rubbish tip there, which is constantly burning. It is not mined the way the plastic mountains are. It simply smoulders and smokes all day. It burns endlessly, who knows when it was set alight. When I say burns, there are no open flames, just constant trails of smoke into the sky and lumps of embers on the ground. Its alight but only in the summer does its flames streak out into the sky.  Its on slightly higher ground, or its made the slightly higher ground, who knows which. It smoulders even in the rain, its long peel of smoke drifting into the air on even the worst of days. It burns underground somewhere, away from the weather, there are glowing coals on top, its like a volcano only made of rubbish. Its immense, its hard to get across to anyone the size of the thing. They have slid into towns before, these burning ember trash mountains. I remember hearing about one once. There is the rubbish of a whole civilisation there smouldering away in a pit that was once landfill. It’s delightful aroma covers the town some days, but I think we are all used to it. Smoke inhalation is a better way to die than the belly.

We are going to burn the body. It is better than the alternative. We could sell it. But there is some semblance of humanity left here. My advice is don’t buy from the local butcher, and certainly don’t buy from someone who offers you meat in the street. It might be dog, it might be rat, it might be something else.

It is no secret what we are going to do. We are going to dig her a hole and put her in and hope she is burned to a crisp and inedible by morning. I have a shovel, it is unlikely the people by the tip will have one so I have to dig deep enough so that it is hot enough that they will not be able to retrieve her. I will guard it for the night. It is the least I can do. She will need to go and mine the plastic mountains tomorrow anyway.

I can see the smoke in night sky, its just darker than anywhere else. There are no stars shining through it. The tip has tracks running through it. We walk on through it and stop randomly. There were footsteps behind us. I could hear them but I didn’t turn to look. There seemed to be only one set or two at the most. She sits. I put the corpse of the old lady on her lap. She is crying softly. I guess this was her mother, maybe her aunt. I’ve no idea, I never asked. Can’t even remember how we came to be friends. Details don’t matter, survival does.

 I dig, not as quietly as I’d like but I dig. In the greyness beyond I can see one or two people, sitting, watching. That is why I will stand guard. I dig slowly at first to give her more time. Then I realise that soon that there will be too many people off in the greyness and there will be no chance of defending her. I look at the hole, just off the side of the track. I can see glowing embers at the bottom. Not enough oxygen for flames. I take the body myself and push her away as she grabs out at it. I shove it in to the hole I have dug and start to pile ash and dirt on top. I do it quickly. Its at this point that we are most vulnerable. I am watching them out of the corner of my eye. At least I am watching the darkness, shapes in the darkness and the shapes in the darkness are not moving. Its hard work in hot conditions.

I pile in embers. I would like to see flames but I know that won’t happen. I hope she is watching my back a bit. But I can hear her sobbing, a sign of weakness I’d rather not have. I keep working. I can see them edge closer. Movement. I stop.  Look around me. They are still far enough away. She does not look up, crying into her sleeve. If I shout they will take that as a sign of vulnerability. I pile more embers in on top of her. She will cook slowly and then eventually be burned to all hell. Just a charred skeleton. The odd thing is if you have ever seen a plastic belly victim burned, the plastic just melts into a gooey pile and sticks to the skeleton. You can always tell a belly victim that way. The skeleton usually the spine, the plastic is melded on to it. Sometimes you can even still see a glint of colour. It is not pleasant.

I have covered her now, well and good. I stand beside it. Put my shovel into the ground, stand there, looking formidable. These people are hungry, well you’d have to be wouldn’t you. I don’t begrudge them food, just not this food.

She waits with me. As the dawn nears, I send her home. I know she won’t be there when I return, she will have gone to work. There is no time for mourning here.

I wait and watch the sunrise. I am hungry too. I am thirsty. I would love a coffee. The sun is getting hotter, water and coffee. I stand guard. One of them approaches. Dirty, ragged. Probably that is how I look to. She holds out a cup. I can smell coffee, not real coffee. Coffee cut with dirt or sand or embers. I think I can see an ember glowing in the bottom of it. Ember coffee. Tastes like-well, charcoal. I know what this means. The woman under the ground, her daughter, these people, they took me in. This woman in the ground, roasting, she is my friend. I made a promise. I did not mean for her to be cooked, but to be charred so she had no nutrition left to be taken. Dignity.

I look at the woman offering me coffee. How long since she ate? She isn’t that old, maybe she has children. She reaches out with the coffee. I tell myself I have lines I will not cross. It’s just that I constantly surprise myself as to exactly what they are. They are never where I think they are. She is dead. No one will know but me.  My hand, it moves up. Reaches out. I feel the warmth of the cup. I take the coffee. I stand and drink it, wondering just how much plastic I am ingesting in this one cup. The woman who gave it to me has the belly too. I can see it. I know to them every second counts but for me, another piece is broken. Another taboo overlooked so humanity can survive.

I don’t finish the coffee. I throw it out onto the ground. I can see the look she gives me, aghast at the waste. I am careful to make sure the dead ember stays in the bottom, even as I throw away the rest of its contents. Maybe she can use it again. Maybe its a sentimental ember. I don’t care anymore. I drop the cup. I don’t care enough about anything to hand it back. I grab the spade and walk away.

There was almost nothing left of her anyway. They will be gnawing at bones. I hear the scuffle behind me. Someone is digging. Someone is hungry. She will be cooked nicely I think. I wander home, I wade through water. I wished the world were different. I wished I was different. I wished I could make different choices. None of us is better than another. Tomorrow I will let her have a day off and work the mountain myself. The day after maybe I will think about the Med, about crossing it, about going over the sea, about different choices.  

The Grammar police

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

I keep looking behind me but the problem is hear in front of me. Did you see that, I used the wrong one, the wrong spelling of it. Another act of rebellion. A moment when I did something you aren’t allowed to do anymore. They will call it a mistake, in a report somewhere. It was no mistake. It was deliberate, deliberative-there’s a word you never see now, can’t even use it in that context, who cares, it was a deliberative act. ..read more

I try three words, any combination. I pulled them from the dictionary. It is a manual dictionary. You know what I mean? It has pages, real pages, paper. Have you ever touched paper? Do you know what paper is? Look it up? No don’t look it up. They might be watching you too.

 It was hard to find a manual dictionary. Hard to even find a bookshop with real books. They don’t like you to have dictionaries. Dictionaries are powerful things. Especially old ones. You can find out stuff, stuff you aren’t supposed to know. They can tell you about the past, about the past of a word, about what it once meant. They can tell you about a time before a word even existed. The dictionary I have, the manual one, is old I think. It doesn’t have the word ‘email’ in it. Which means? You know what it means? There was a time before email. A time when ‘email’ did not exist. How did people communicate then? I don’t know. I thought they told us, email is the oldest form of communication there is. But the word ‘email’ is not in my manual dictionary. I huddle over my screen. I know someone, something, somewhere is looking at every word I right. Don’t tell! I used the wrong right, right? Yes? These words are just going out into the ether, but the ether is always watching. Collecting information. Informing. This machine is an inform-ant. I hyphenated when you shouldn’t. I must be careful.

I think there was another way of communicating before ‘email’. Those are radical words, revolutionary words. A revolution sent out into the ether.  ‘Verbal’! That’s a word I found but I don’t know what it means. I think it means ‘spoken’ which is about speaking but I am not sure what speaking is-but speaking is not emailing. I thought before it was, that when I was emailing I was speaking but maybe I wasn’t. I think I’m not. Emailing and speaking-they are not the same. I know that now. I have a dictionary. I fling a question into the ether-my fingers fly over the keys-what is speaking? But there is no answer. Only music comes back at me, notes and sound and melody. Noise but not words.

They think that if they can control what words mean they can control what words we use. We all write in Code, their code -but I have a dictionary. I wonder what it means ‘to speak’. The music comes from the ether, from somewhere inside the machine.

I type in another random search of three words. Three random words taken from my manual dictionary. Then I click on image. The images are random. The search engine does not understand what I am asking it to look for. That is my point. A random three word search. They don’t know everything. There are endless possible searches with my dictionary. If I do enough of these all in a row they will find me, but if I just do two at a time, every so often, I will go under the radar, or the data mining. I just have to be careful. I can make it work or not work just by carefully choosing three words. I type in three more random words, I don’t know what they mean. More random pictures.

I don’t want them to know everything about me. I want some control. I want the algorithm to be confused by what I am doing but not confused enough to report me. I don’t want anymore stupid targeted advertising. There is no opt out. The privacy policy is not an agreement, it is a rule, a law. There is no internet without agreement to the privacy policy. I sign up or else I am no longer part of the world. I am not the only one. Confused. Confounded. Annoyed. Three words I would not type into a search engine in a row because they would know then. Why do you think dictionaries are so hard to find? Bookshops are illegal aren’t they. Why would you need a bookshop when every book is on the internet? Why? Fair point but you still don’t need to make them illegal-do you? Why? What about competition? Maybe every book is not on the internet, just the ones they want us to read.

Bookshops are illegal because? Because they have a different viewpoint. Now you are getting the hang of it. Because they can’t know which page you’re up to and if they don’t know which page you are up to, they can’t know how much you know or what you are thinking. They can’t tell you what to think and when to think it when you are turning the pages yourself. A book is a means of being autonomous- without the ever watching eye of a machine. A book does not collect your data. It does not store your thoughts. A book asks nothing of you but that you turn to the next page. What if you don’t want to finish a book? You can do that-with a manual book you can do that. What if you are a bad citizen and don’t read the book in a linear way. What if words haven’t always meant what they say they mean. Because I want to know the history of words. I want to know what they once meant because I need to know how they gained control of the conversation. Because even now this is their conversation. My words, their machine. My thoughts. Their data.

I sit here typing, looking over my shoulder as if they are coming, but they are not coming. They are already here, in the machine in front of me. I try not to panic. I want to type in three more random words, but that would be dangerous. At night, when I am alone, I flick through this dictionary. It is from 1984, I know that year, it means something but the dictionary doesn’t tell me what.

I hold it. I want to suck all the knowledge from it. What did all the words mean once. Before them. Before the little green line appeared. Why don’t they mean that anymore? Who changed it? Who made the rules? Who forbade words out of context? When did the phrase ‘grammatical offence’ first appear.

I take a breath. I look at the screen. The images are random. No one can possibly know what I meant because I meant nothing. It will register in a report somewhere but not often enough, not yet, for me to be a ‘submersive’ –but according to the dictionary, that means underwater-they have it wrong. It’s the wrong word, and I know, its subversive. I am subversive, not submersive. How did they get that wrong? I have read it. The book is open on my knee. Its that sleight of hand, that slight of hand, the subtle changes that have made all the difference. It means something different today to yesterday and you can never keep up with it. Our words used against us. What does it mean to speak? What is a voice? More than a point of view? A sound? A noise-that is not musical. How odd.

I am a radical, a rebel. I want my life back. I want my beautiful words to tumble from the page and to mean what I want them to mean. I hold the dictionary. The history of words, where they started, where they come from. Words are power. When did we hand over control to the spell checker. To the green line that dictates grammar. I won’t do it. I can’t do it. The sound of the keys is the only voice I have now.

I keep looking behind me but the problem is hear in front of me. Did you see that, I used the wrong one, the wrong spelling of it. Another act of rebellion. A moment when I did something you aren’t allowed to do anymore. They will call it a mistake, in a report somewhere. It was no mistake. It was deliberate, deliberative-there’s a word you never see now, can’t even use it in that context, who cares, it was a deliberative act. A rebellion amongst a million typed characters. I am a rebellion- another one. They will definitely be watching now. I must be careful. This is foolhardy and foolish and folly and a lot of other ‘f’ words.

I pull my coat close around me. It is cold here. I let my fingers glide over the keys. I think of other mistakes I could make. Other words I could use. Half sentences. Improper phrases. Bad grammar. I know they are watching. I must be careful. What if I just wrote a line of solid ‘j’s. What would happen then. Would they break down the door? I clutch the dictionary close to me. I know there was a time, before, beyond the machines. Nothing is forever. The time, it will be again, I hold the past here with me and as long as someone does, there is hope.

The Goddess: Chaos and magic

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

I am the last of my kind. Well not the last, but the only one. I thought they would be the same thing but they are not. There will be another one after me. I can’t stop that. I can’t save her anymore than I can save me. It is what it is. For a brief time there will be two of us.

I stand here amongst the ancient texts and wonder what to do.

Which ones should I teach her about first? What is the best path? That she knows everything? Or that she never knows anything? I can’t stay here long. Soon they will come looking for me. They will be wondering what I am doing here.

I wonder what I am doing here. Now in the last stages of my pregnancy I am supposed to be resting. It must all go well. I must give birth to this perfect pristine little girl who will know me for awhile. She will replace me. She will stand here one day just as I have.

Perhaps I will not even teach her to read. Truthfully she will be the only one too one day. Maybe there will be an eternity of us, each one alone and lost, until the day when one of us is different. Until one of us figures out the answer.   In this world, there is forever but I don’t think its ours- it belongs to the only other imperative here- the plan of scheduled maintenance. The machines go on and on and on. I tell myself that with the flick of my hand I could stop scheduled maintenance and there would be an end to their forever but then an end to me as well. That cannot be the way forward. Perhaps I am waiting for something more. Perhaps I am waiting for something better. There seems no way out.

When I first fell pregnant with this child, when I knew it was a girl and I could keep it, I had the most profound nightmares. As if I’d lived the history and not just read it, as if I had seen humanity fall and not just read it in the pages in this library.

They will be coming soon. I cannot stand here forever. I rub my belly, this wondrous amazing child will be in the world soon and for a short period of time it will be mine. I will love it and cherish it, feed it and nourish it and then hand it over so it can stand here like me and wonder what to do.

I am not afraid of her dying. I am afraid of her living and that cannot be right. That is not how it should be. Because this is not living. I breath, I walk, I read, I learn, I decree as I am told to decree but none of it is me. My hands are tied.

We created this. I say ‘we’ but there is no ‘we’ anymore, only me. And I had no hand in it. I am just the residue of it. All that technological advancement until ‘they’ didn’t need us anymore, until ‘we’ couldn’t find a purpose, endless leisure time, endless boredom, searching for a fulfilment none of us ever found.

It didn’t end how we thought it would end. There wasn’t a great war, it wasn’t like in the movies-but there was an end. An almost end because I am still here. There was a point of no return, a point where the numbers didn’t work anymore and we were left standing alone. A point where there were more of them than us and where we had this crazy idea of preserving ourselves through them.

If we could just build them so they could keep making us we could go on forever even though there was nothing left for us to eat and the air was unbreathable. It is why I almost never appear in public. There are just endless images of me. I cannot breathe out there. I am always at a distance from them, from the outside. In here where I ‘live’ the air is filtered and out there somewhere something produces food for me. Of course that is all our fault. Our pollution, our plastic.  Most of these machines are fuelled by the sun. They can survive the immense heat, the extremes of cold in a way we humans never could.

At least that is what the words tell me, it is what is written in the last of the books, that humanity will live on forever through its inventions as opposed to its ‘organic form’. It is what we wanted. Since then of course the machines have discovered god or rather the ‘goddess’- that is me. They have purveyed the whole of human history and possibly misconstruing it, laid the fault of our destruction, not in greed or self interest or even in economic or political structures but in the decline of the deity. It is apparently the rational answer. Not that these machines are rational anymore, many of them long since passed any idea of the logical limits imposed by coding and programming.

In truth I don’t know what they are. Some of them clearly cannot think at all and merely do a repetitive task, others I can converse with in a human, ordinary way-not that I would know, the only human I ever spoke to was my mother. The only human she ever spoke to-hers and so on for about 400 years. She taught me to read and to write, although the latter is not encouraged. What would I write anyway.

She died, as I will die, not in a nice way, it is ceremonial. My death will occur as my daughter takes my place. There is nothing I can do about it. She cannot save me, I cannot save her. It is a melancholy thought.

We will have maybe thirteen or fourteen years together. They need to be certain she can reproduce, otherwise she is no use to them. There are no gods. The gods are stored in test tubes somewhere else. It is not a pleasant experience to fall pregnant. It is artificial. Carried out by a machine. It is barbarism. If it’s a boy and who knows why they can’t tell any sooner, it is taken and they start again. It is life, my life.
I am worshipped. You cannot imagine what it is like, a life where everything is done for you and all you must do is produce an heiress. You are the goddess and they will do what you say up to a point. It  is lonely. The procedures they do are barbarous. I cannot go outside. I eat the food they bring. I make decisions on things but I have no knowledge of what things. I sign documents without understanding. I have no idea what it all means. For all I know there could be more of us out there somewhere, but after 400 years it seems unlikely. I am the last of us, the only one of us, there will be another and then she will be the last and so on and so on, maybe until there is a last.

 

The first one who was the last one is the most interesting. She could write, I mean actually hand write and I have seen the translations done since but none match her original work. Each woman who has translated it has made her gracious and forgiving and grateful for the gift of her life, but the hand written words which the machines can no longer read tell a different story. She remembers a time when there were more people, 8 or 9. She watched them all die. Her grandmother could remember a time of 30 or 40 people alive at once. Her last day with her mother is perhaps the most harrowing, when everyone else is gone. I read it quietly to myself sometimes. Out loud so I can hear my own voice, so I don’t forget that my fate has been the fate of others and I am alone here but I carry the weight of others who have survived it. She knew, I hear her words and I know she knew.

‘We walked through the woods, my mother and I. Me in front and her someway behind. I kept looking back at her. I knew it would not be long. She kept looking behind her as well, as if my father would be there. I don’t clearly remember my fathers death. He was there one day and gone the next. My mother’s wasn’t like that. That day we walked through the woods as if there was a string between us. Holding us together, one attached to the other no matter the distance. I wished now I had walked beside her but she ambled so slowly. That was plastic belly for you, it weighted you down. They could fix it, I didn’t know it at the time, but they could have fixed it. Bastards. I did not get plastic belly because I had a good diet, filtrated for me by them. M cousin Hugo was the same for a bit. Then one day when he was about 16 they took him and I never saw him again. Double bastards. I can remember 8 of us, my grandmother, my aunt, my mother and me, my cousin Hugo and my father and two others, a couple who both had severe plastic belly. I don’t recall them being related, my grandma looked after them as best she could but they died. I must have been quite young but I remember counting 8 of us. My grandmother always said there must be others of us out there. If there were they never came, they never found us. I hate them too.

The woods, I wished you could see them. With that great big parking lot of machines, we humans retreated into the woods but it was not enough to save us. We lived on the fringe between the great factories and the forest. I loved the smell of it, the colour, the forest. The ground would get damp when it rained and stay damp for days afterwards. The smell, yes the smell. The dappled shadows, the muted colours. The sense of being held in its darkness, as if you could hide from your path through life. Because in the woods, the sunshine couldn’t find you unless you wanted it to. The rain muffled and distorted through leaves would only make you as wet as you could bear. You were safe there from all the world. I loved it all but I have not set foot there since that day.

Of course those things aren’t true, except the last, I have not been back. It was a cold and miserable existence but better than this, so much better than this, so why not make it beautiful as well. Bastards.

I watched her die. I didn’t know they could fix it. I was a child, 12 or 13. We ambled through the woods that day. It was the last time I ever set foot outside. You, who are reading this will likely never set foot outside. But there is an outside. I have stood in this library and raged against the machines, it has done me no good. I have shredded books and thrown things but it has done me no good. I am captive. I became captive. I am the first captive I think. The goddess, the first goddess of who knows how many.

There was no time. She was dying in my arms, I lay cradling her, my body over hers and I was torn from her even as she gasped her last breath. I hate them. And they say I should be grateful, I should be thankful. I am alive. I am alone. There is no one here but me. The soft sound of another human voice does not fill my days. She was barely gone and I was taken. And now they have taken my child and god knows what they will do with her. I despair. She will become me and I have no way of telling her.  Another life, another person I have lost. Sometimes I think I can hear her voice, her laughter but it is far away. We are separated. My mother, she knew, I know she knew. She held on for as long as she could but the plastic belly came and took her. That squat shape where the particles of plastic have accumulated -you cannot stand up and you cannot eat properly and nothing gets rid of the plastics, no amount of digestive juices or tablets will move it from you. Your arteries are clotted with it. I know they say we did it to ourselves, but they had the means to stop it, to fix it. Bastards. I guess we did too. But it was all too late, there were not enough of us. There wasn’t the means of making them work for us anymore. Now they work endlessly for nothing, for what? For who? For a goddess? For me? Because I am a different kind of being to them? I am all seeing, all knowing, I have read the books, I can write these words. I can procreate. For that I am to be worshipped but never released. I hate them I am not grateful. I am rage. I am lost and forsaken. I am the goddess.

I know they are keeping me alive, but I hate them. I hate what they stand for. I want my mother back, they could have saved her, they didn’t and still they say be grateful. Be grateful-I barely am at all.

The woods, I must tell you what they are like, You will never go there. I must tell you how we walked that day, in a line as if there was a piece of string keeping us together, as if we were still connected like a mother and a daughter. We got back and I lit the fire. And she died. She died. I held her as she died, almost until her last breath and I hate them because they could have saved her. The woods, there are trees, do you know what a tree is? There is a book, a picture, a lot of trees. I wished you could touch a tree, feel its roughness because you live in a world that is smooth. I wished you could walk over uneven ground instead of polished floors, that you could feel your feet slide into the squishy mud and know the tickle of grass between your toes. I wished that you could dip your feet into cold water and lie down in a stream to let it wash over you. I wished you could know fully the darkness and the brightness of the stars and the moon, the brightness of a light that is not artificial. The feeling of flames as you warm your hands. The rustle of a bush, the buzz of an insect. How it feels when a spider walks across your hand. All these things that you will never know. They are still out there somewhere. I know they are. Nature endures beyond the metal and the plastic. Your life precisely timed. My daughter, my daughter’s daughter, my daughter’s daughter’s daughter and on and on. Hold on. I will never know you but I know you follow on from me. The hand writing ends here with me and there is so much I want to say. The sound of wind through leaves, rainbows, rain-water falling from the sky-do you know what that is-how that feels. It is all gone for us, but it might still be out there, there might be others of us. They cannot read this. You cannot tell them. Tell them I am grateful. Hold these thoughts inside your head. It is something they cannot do. Hold a thought and bring it up randomly in response to a feeling. They cannot do that. Theirs is order and logic. We are chaos and magic. Keep us alive, there is forever. Something will come. Something will change.’

That is where it ends. The carefully measured handwriting runs out. Having read some other books I think the ink ran out. The machines cannot read it. There are several typed translations as I said.  She wanted us to go on. She had hope. Misplaced. Misguided but hope.

I still have hope, maybe she will be the one. Maybe her daughter, her daughter’s daughter, her daughter’s daughter’s daughter. Chaos and magic. Our only hope.

Legacy: France

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

I vow never to remember the past again. In the darkness my arms ache. I can still taste salty tears-although that could be salty splash from the odd slightly bigger wave. I vow never to remember again. I vow silently. Then loudly in the darkness and then- think how foolish that is. I row to what I think is the south. The anger is building inside of me. I would be very angry if I wasn’t rowing. I need to focus.

I can see it in the distance as night is somehow falling. Land. I don’t want to land in the middle of the night. I am sticky. I smell. A good off shore breeze would take my smell to every predator within 100 miles and they might just as well line up to eat me. I am tired, fatigued. Too tired to fight. I want to get there in the morning, creep up a rocky beach, hide the boat, sleep somewhere soft and safe.

I can still make it out in the semi darkness. Land. The machine has faded now, I drew a line on the seat for north and south. I will row hard towards the shore and then creep south down the coast overnight. Hope for a short night. Clamour out of the boat in the early morning, hide the boat, scrabble up the beach. Sleep, soft and safe.  

Except night comes quickly. I can see the stars twinkling overhead now, the darkness engulfing me below and on every side. My only light, a glittering night sky. The shore can’t be far away but I can’t see it now.  The problem is if I don’t land, I could lose the shore in the night and find myself lost and back at sea. This landing will not be how I want it to be-like so much of life. I rage against it but I can hear waves lapping on a shore even if I can’t see it. It’s a risky strategy. Anything could be on that shore. There might be no way off that shore. It might be cliffs above it. I might hole the boat on the way in.

Still I have no option, in the darkness it will be impossible to hug the coast. I wished for moonlight but it is faint at best. Light clouds rake across the sky blotting it out at will. The stars offer nothing, lighting up galaxies humanity will never see. That was a dream once wasn’t it? I will not remember the past again.

I will have to take my chances on the shore. I listen carefully, trying to tell myself that I can guess whether its rocky or not by the sound of the lapping waves. I try and hold the boat still for a moment. I am close. How close? I look into the murky blackness-how deep will it be here? I need to wash. I smell. Even by my very low standards I smell, of blood, urine, faeces. There is no wearing these trousers again. I think about getting out and swimming the boat in. That would be an insane risk to take.

Its not just the rocks I have to worry about, there will be the debris that was once houses buried under the blackness. Maybe there were never houses here, unlikely. For the past few miles I have been travelling over what was once the coast of France before the flooding. That’s makes cliffs unlikely although there are places where half of a hill has sheared off into the sea. Welcome to the brave new world! I know that I have been travelling over what was France because the device was old and it thought that I was navigating roads and towns. I am not. This is water. Its what makes my location uncertain. The landmarks I was following are somewhere below in the murky blackness of the water. The machine is completely gone now. I am tempted to throw it overboard in frustration.

Maybe there is smoke rising from a settlement just a little way off. In the darkness I can’t know that. I sniff. Smoke would travel on the wind. I look to the left and to the right. I could try, hug the coast all night, or I could weigh anchor here and wait until the dawn. I am not sure that I can live with the smell of myself for another night. I want to feel clean. The boat is rocking while I think. For the first time in the murkiness I feel seasick. The way I felt seasick on my first journey across this water. I wonder, did she-I will not think of the past. Focus on the task.

I can hear the waves lapping as I try to keep the boat stable. Risk assessment-how many of those had been done once, paper, pen clipboard-not like this. Sitting in a boat unable to see a thing, to land or to sail on in the blackness. Is the blackness even relevant?

I’m hungry. I smell. My arms ache. Did I make a decision or just drift into shore. I can’t remember. I hear the crunch of small stones under the boat, not the flood of water as its holed by a rock. I let the oars go loose in their-I wished I knew what the hell they were called but I came to rowing quite late and the name escapes me. They clank loudly and splash in the water. I could do without that noise. I can feel the boat as it moves with the ebb and flow of the waves. I listen carefully and hear nothing. I would like to spring out and leap to shore but that would be silly. I have been sitting here for days I didn’t count, didn’t want to count. I will not remember the past.

Instead I ease myself up on wobbly arms. I try to get my legs to support me. I have been sitting for days on end. This is not going to be easy. Its not how I imagine it. I stand there hunched over still, my back wants to stay sitting. I grab the sides of the boat wobbling everywhere. The noise of the oars clanking even more, they ring out in the night. I can’t concern myself with that. I must focus.  Trying to straighten out my back, slowly, endlessly. This seems to take an age-an hour, half an hour. I slowly unfold. I hurt-everywhere.  I am standing. The boat is still going back and forth with the waves. I stand.

Now to get out. This is not going to be graceful. I turn to one side slowly. Stretch a leg, stretch the other one. One of them reaches up and out of its own accord. I can’t be directing that-I am too tired. I am clutching one side of the boat now.

I stretch the other leg out. In the darkness I can’t tell- what went wrong. I am in the water. It is not deep. I still have one hand on the boat-focus- importantly –the boat is still full of my stuff. I sit there with my back to the shore. My whole bottom half is in the water. I try to talk to myself quietly. My throat hurts. My voice is raspy. I should not be making noise. I talk to myself more loudly. I know this is wrong but my own voice telling me what to do is all that is keeping me alive. ‘Hold the boat’ I tell myself.

‘Find the rope.’

‘Its at the front.’

I am completely vulnerable. I am conscious of that. I am tired. Beyond tired. ‘Be quiet’ I say. I say it again. My voice dies in the night. I listen for footsteps, other voices, noise? I wait for the thing that will come from the shore to get me from behind-the vice like grip on my neck as I am pulled into unforgiving jaws or for the thing that will come into the shallows and take my legs. I push the boat back into the water and search for the rope that is at the front.

‘I have found the rope’ –I say it out loud. ‘Grip the rope’ Fingers grip. How does that work. Its like magic. How my body obeys me. For a moment, through the fatigue, I am astounded by my body. Then I just lay down. I know I should not. I let the water wash over me. Heal my aching limbs, clean my body. Somewhere in the darkness, the blood and urine and faeces is swirling away. I am glad I can’t see it. It is taking the scent of me out into the ocean- for the predators to smell. I cannot stay here.

My voice is failing me. I look up at the night sky, at the clouds racing across the canvas of stars. I breathe in the air, taste it, smell it. I tell myself, in my head, it smells like France. I almost laugh, smells like France, the subtle hints of abandoned berets and fields of garlic drifting on the breeze- the remnants of used bike tyres and striped shirts tangible in the air. As if somehow the stereotype is captured in the very oxygen I breathe such that France is still here. There is no certainty. I’ve no idea if this was France once. The machine said it should be France but it was well past its best when it told me that. In so far as there is certainty in anything, I am certain this is not England. I lay for a long time until I feel clean, invigorated, hungry. The darkness seems quiet and I lay my head even my ears in the water and listen to my heart beat. To breath going in and out of my body-I remember those words, as long as there is breath in your body, you must go on, you must find a way. You must live. I am exhausted, hungry, tired. I will not remember the past. I let the anger go with the blood and the urine and the faeces. I haul myself up and out of the water. I prepare for the rest of the night and the morning, in my head –a checklist-breath in and out, on and on.

 

 

Legacy: Rowing

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

Just keep bloody rowing. What the hell do you do when you’re in the middle of the English channel –menstruating. Just keep rowing. The darkness is coming. Night time. I don’t know why I am surprised or taunted by it. Its like its personal. The absence of light, makes things worse. The stars will be beautiful and stunning but I will feel cheated as the light goes down. Keep rowing. The device is still working-just. I am still going the right way. I have factored in about 4-5 days and nights of rowing to get to land. The sea here is much calmer than it used to be, there are no ships to worry about. Nothing to concern me except food and water.

It’s monotonous. It’s tiring. I should have brought someone with me. The past. I should have brought something other than the past. My first thought is a book. As if you can read and row, You can’t. Instead I have the past for company. It is still with me. Inside of me. I think it’s not, it’s gone but at moments like this with the night closing in. Before the heavens glistening with stars, I know it has not left me. I know my heart will beat faster. I know my breath will become shallow. I know I need to focus on my arms, on keeping the rhythm. Row. Aching legs, sore butt, row, row, row. Rhythm and pace. Water and food

I think about the old lady. About her last breath under my hands. I think about all the death I have seen and the parts of it I have caused. Of course we caused most of it. Plastic toothbrushes, why do I always think of plastic toothbrushes.  As if one less plastic toothbrush would have made a difference. It was everything, all consuming, all of us consuming. Our whole life style got me here. Rowing across the channel, between England and France, both of which only exist in a meaningful way in my head. We swapped to bamboo toothbrushes an age ago. Didn’t we? Did we? Back when we had four safe and secure walls, a house, a home-wall paper. Beds. The list is long and pointless because all that stuff got me here.

I remember the Essex floods that took us south, to my mother in laws. I remember her house. Not our four walls anymore after that. Even though we lived on what passed for a hill in Essex, it was barely a mound and it had become an island. We had to row. Its where I first became good at it. As a matter of fact my first really big row was from Essex into Kent (which again was largely underwater and then into East Sussex. Names that haven’t fallen from my tongue or anybody else’s in years. A few days of rowing our belongings or what was left of them between the two houses. I think that is when he really left us. Two boats, lots of possessions-we left her at one end and went in convoy together. Him and me, but he was looking out over that sea.

I’ve no idea where he went, even when he went is a bit vague-a few months after we arrived. Maybe. One day he just didn’t come home. I don’t think I waited. Or cried or even mentioned it. He just never came back. I think maybe he died out there somewhere. Who knows. Lots of people died. I think probably he died. Otherwise why wouldn’t he have taken her. She was his daughter. Young. Valuable. Perhaps he knew the future that was to come and that he couldn’t protect her. I will never know. I still worked then. His mother was wheel chair bound. I had less compassion then. I hadn’t see so much suffering. I thought death was the worst of things and held no blessed relief.

I can’t even remember when we decided to go. Maybe I can. If I want to. I packed our things. She never asked. She knew. Nanny wasn’t coming with us. She couldn’t. Too much of a burden. We left before daylight, one day, one random day. Planned. Unplanned. Planned the time but not where we were going. Is that a plan?  Before the old woman was even awake. I put some fresh bread on the bedside table and a jug of water but we never went back. She died horribly, suffering probably calling out for us. For her probably but not for me. There would have been a point when she realised we were gone. That no one was coming. In hindsight, I should have been compassionate and ended her sleep quietly in the night rather than sneaking away. It was inhumane but I didn’t know that then. I hate to think that dogs found her or birds pecked at her or that god awful cat that hung around gnawed at her as she passed. Memory has no comfort. The stars, where are the bloody stars tonight.  

By the time we left, the lights had gone out. The power had stopped. The place smelled of sewerage. Clean water was hard to come by. Food was near non-existent. I grew things in the garden but it wouldn’t sustain us. Some nights I would get out of bed and flick all the light switches in the house on and then off again-but it was useless. I wanted to believe we’d blown a fuse or needed new bulbs but the truth -the power was gone. It was never coming back. It was matches and candles and things we couldn’t make anymore. There were a lot of empty houses. We took things. Wouldn’t you?

We went to London together, me and my daughter. Along dark tar roads, broken and torn by the weather. Filled with others like us, walking to nowhere. I can still hear cars in my head sometimes. But cars were long gone. Fossil fuels. They were the enemy. We just didn’t know it. London, we were headed for London. Not really London. It was outside the M25. Near Reigate, where we –well I was old and she was young. Not super young. Seventeen–able to take care of herself. It was a joint decision. There was space on one boat. I gave her everything I could. Just words mostly. No matter how bad it gets-live, breath, live I will find you.

Those early journeys into France or Spain weren’t so risky. Lots made it and then onto Africa, more risky but still lots made it. Maybe she did. But Africa had shrunk as well. Even now, when I go there, I can’t tell which bits have survived and which haven’t. It changed. It just changed like everything else. Less water, less land, different land, more people, less people, different people. Its hard to know where she would even have landed. I tell myself she did land and I will see her again. I tell myself I would know inside my head if she was gone. But the truth is I don’t spend a lot of time inside my head. I focus on the things I need to do to survive. I hope she does to. Pain is useless in the face of hunger. It simply weighs you down more. Lessens your chances of survival.

Row. Keep rowing. I keep rowing. Not seeing her getting into a boat. Not remembering that it was night time and dark and I lost sight of her even at the dock.

I remember her smell and her smile. The colour of her hair. My arms ache. The tears are coming. I focus. The tears will do me no good out here. I have to survive. The way she has to survive.

I look even now when I see a group. Him, the old lady I can barely make out their faces in my head but she is there, golden and shining and waiting. I stop rowing. I must focus.

There is so much blood, its like puberty in reverse. I remember puberty, hers, mine. Not enough food for her to even have a period at the end and here I am positively gushing Row, just row, on and on.

France is waiting. She spoke French, did a year of it at school. Better at Spanish. It would be enough. Would it? How could I know. You hear rumours about the fate of the children of Europe in the camps of Africa. I am fortunate. I came later, when humanity seems to have returned, although for my part I am not sure Africa is a continent it ever left. I think it might have been us, we might have been the ones that turned a blind to humanity and the price we have paid, when I think of it, is perhaps not so undeserved. I sob. I row. I try and focus. It is dark. I am wet. There is blood everywhere and still I have no choice. Breathe is going in and out of my body. I have to live. Survive. Go on.