the less permanent

is a blog with a story for every year since 1400.

I have done 1546.

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I am up to episode nine. If you decide to read it and you enjoy it, please ‘follow’ it and/or tell your friends about it and how you like it.

CHAPTER ONE

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I’m doing a reading next week and since I’ve slipped this into the latest issue of Art and Things I think I might read this. Illustration by Shiv.

Ten months ago, as spring broke, the four of us went away to the seaside. Siofra’s eyes had been glassed over by grief for weeks, an uncharacteristic silence descended upon her like a blanket of snow. She spent the compassionate leave granted to her by her job sat on the worn living room sofa, thumbing through paperback novels (sticking exclusively to ones she’d already read) and filling the ashtray with half-smoked, laboriously hand-rolled cigarettes.

Bryan and I would return home from work to find her in her usual spot, day after day. Her father had finally succumbed to his cancer, her mother had refused the short flight from Geneva, where she lived happily with her new family, to attend the funeral. Siofra’s mother did not like to acknowledge the shards of her past-life, her now-dead ex-husband and grown-up, lesbian daughter were a mess she had tidied behind four hundred and sixty-five miles of land and sea. Days after Siofra learned via a phone call from the hospital that she had missed those crucial moments of passing, as one life that had created hers evaporated, a letter arrived in a familiar crisp, elegant hand. Full of graceful, formal condolences, at it’s crux was a firm and curt message- ‘I’m sure you’ll understand my unwillingness to attend the service, after all that’s happened.’ she wrote. She enclosed a cheque for two-thousand pounds “to help with any funeral expenses that might arise”. Siofra understood, all too well. After her father was safely tucked into the earth she vowed (tearlessly) never to think lovingly of her mother again, and in the space of a month, at the age of twenty-four, she had lost both parents for good.

None of us had seen her cry yet. I began to feel as distant from her life as I did my own. Siofra was frozen in ice. All of the elements over which I had no control were wrapping around me. Soon I would be trapped. I could feel things beginning to turn dark.

Someone else, to my own good fortune, also felt shadows lengthening as Siofra shrank away. To Laura, Siofra had always been the older, bolder, wiser sister that she had badly missed growing up. Until the light inside her began to flicker, this was a role that Siofra had accepted gladly. It was Laura that suggested that she, Siofra, Bryan and I leave the city for a few days to “Take a break. Together.” I was relieved.

And so we took Laura’s decrepit, rusting Citroën to the road, it carried us reluctantly to the blustery coast, we stopped in a depressed and lonely town, wet and salty with rows of severe, mournful looking buildings that looked like they were waiting for the sea to come and claim them once and for all. A strong, cold wind blew and Christmas lights still hung limply from the lampposts, shimmering half-heartedly in the wintery spray. We rented rooms in cramped bed and breakfast with dark carpets and musty pillows.

It was impossible to say that Siofra wasn’t beautiful. She was in perfect balance. Her handsome father’s dark hair and light eyes, her mother’s elegant bones and olive skin. Beauty like hers seemed to be the perfect excuse for anything, That’s more or less why imagination creates such contrasts in the world and why the mind allows it. Beauty was invented so that we’d have a light to crawl towards. Within my own thoughts I couldn’t look away from it. Without Siofra there was darkness. It’s true to say that I loved her. Against all reason, I found it impossible not to. As pointless as it seemed, my love for Siofra could at times allow her to eclipse the universe.

Indeed, for a variety of reasons, each of us needed Siofra back, lest we be plunged into eternal blackness.

We swam in the icy sea at a point where it crashed playfully onto a shingle beach. We whooped and cheered as wave after freezing wave crashed over us. We bobbed up and down in the surf telling jokes and laughing loudly. Laura sat on my shoulders, Siofra on Bryans and the two contested to push each other into the water. Her soaked t-shirt clung to Siofra’s belly and her chest, the wet fabric revealed her belly button, her nipples. She laughed and screamed as she fought to keep her balance. I couldn’t look away.

The bed and breakfast had a general-purpose living room. We were the only guests and that night we played cards and worked through a bottle of whisky. Eventually Laura fell asleep in Siofra’s arms. I noted with shame a pang of jealously shoot through me. I blamed the alcohol. After Siofra dosed off, I lost repeatedly to Bryan at Palace and had to pay him ten pounds.

The next day we climbed a steep hill in the heart of the town and stopped for breakfast in a café with a large, grubby window and a view of the whole area, of the cobbled streets and clusters of huddled houses and shops, the outlying scrublands and out to sea. We drank tea from stained mugs and ate omelettes and toast. Laura shared stories about various misadventures Siofra and Laura had shared, including one in which Siofra’s father made a brief appearance. The mention of his name hung in the air, dampening the conversation. Eventually Bryan proposed a toast with a chipped purple mug.

“To Siofra’s Father.” He said.

We all took a hearty gulp of lukewarm tea, while Siofra merely wet her lips. A half-smile froze on her face and she gazed out of the window for a long time.

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She told me that her name was Raphael, which immediately struck me as a completely unsuitable name for her.I asked her if it was the name that her parents gave her. She said that she assumed so. I wasn’t sure what she meant but I let it drop. Maybe she was an orphan. My mind automatically flicked through a few scenarios to make sure that I didn’t find the fact that she might be an orphan sexy. I didn’t.

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You’re out having a good time with some friends but it’s getting late and you’re about to miss the last bus home.

a) There’s no point in making a choice, resisting fate is futile. Things will just happen the way they are supposed to. I’m just going to keep drinking until something happens to intervene. 6 points
b) So what if I don’t go to work tomorrow? The choice is essentially meaningless, I might as well have another drink and have fun before I die and rot away. 7 points
c) I have to go to work tomorrow. If everyone else bunked off of work it would be a nightmare. 10 points
d) Fuck it. I’ll DRIVE. WHERE’S MY CAR? 2 points
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Her eyes were still partially open. Her eyelids didn’t quite meet. You could see a tiny slice of pale blue through her eyelashes. She wasn’t wearing any make-up. I stood by the bed under the strip light biting my index finger hard. My mouth was hot and dry. (more…)

The flat was in one of the worst areas of London. The estate agent drove me along the depressed high street, all of the buildings were grubby and tired-looking, newsagents advertised long-distance phone cards, run-down shops offered fruit and vegetables in untidy stalls opening out on to the street. The people, descendants of numerous exotic cultures, all hunched and shuffled along the pavement in shades of grey and brown. This was Greater London, the bowels, hung between the glamour of the city and the sterility of the suburbs.

The estate agent was called James Coles. We went back a bit- I’d known him since secondary school. We’d never got along much. After half an hour of forced conversation, James suddenly wrenched his small hatchback down an almost impassable side alley and stopped in a seemingly disused car park.

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The reason Martin England was so feared by his peers, the reason that he so richly deserved his undisputed title as The Hardest Kid in the School is because he was not (unlike his contemporaries in the scene) careless with his threats.

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There’s a very thin, invisible membrane somewhere inside of me that holds my personality in. Often, it bulges and swells painfully and threatens to split like an overflowing colostomy bag. Sometimes holding it in is a gargantuan effort. Other times I feel as though I should allow it to burst, allow myself to be splattered all over anybody who happens to be standing nearby. On bad days, when the strain gets to be too much, there’s never any sound. It’s just silence, as if I were under water. I can almost tell things are about to happen before they do, everything is the answer to a question that was just on the tip of my tongue the whole time. Then I’ll do something and it all falls apart. It’s a fairly useless form of precognition, like turning to see a bus just before it hits you.

I like to buy the papers. I’m still there, on the radar. Y’know? Caring.

I had to stop to vomit in someone’s front garden. Sorry. I’m going to the shop. Going to get a milky bar, a can of red bull and the papers. Got some news to read.

For quite some time now, my life has been a fake. No crude imitation, but an intricate forgery, crafted delicately with the most diligent attention to detail.

It’s an astonishingly realistic little piece of art, something that could easily be considered the work of a true genius were it placed in a gallery or on a plinth. It’s allure is ironically foiled only by it’s glassy perfection; when investigated closely (although perhaps more closely than is fair) it radiates cold.

Cold. An inexplicable by-product that leaks out of my perfect little crystal existence and is (regardless of how hard I try) impossible to ignore. I can often feel it in the icy morning air that claws at my bones, the thick taste of sleep still upon my tongue as I drag my unwilling body out of bed and into the frost. The more I am aware of it, the more it betrays it’s presence everywhere. It’s the cars sweeping grumpily past on the dark streets, those hissing rivers of aluminium and rubber that are never far away, the twisting in my stomach, the constant effort of keeping my face turned upwards.

I’ll never be warm.

It’s on the coldest days that I’m acutely aware that  I’m in a future that never really happened, that splintered off into chaos and out of existence and is gradually freezing. Grinding to a halt.

Hi ***

I’ve been travelling through Cambodia on my own for a bit now. I’ll cut right to the chase and let you all know what I’ve been up to recently.

1. Arrived in Cambodia from Saigon. Waited for an eternity at the border for a bus to come and pick us up and take us to Phomn Penh. When it eventually arrived I was delighted to find it was a mini bus and that there was room to put my feet up. Wasn’t so delighted by the state of the roads. Eventually had to bribe a border guard to get into the country because I temporarily misplaced some paperwork. The wrong thing to do, I suppose, but my options were limited.

2. Just this second rented a motorbike. A British guy just hobbled in and out with bandages on his arms and legs, a broken arm and nasty cuts and bruises. The traffic here is probably the most insane yet.

3. A Firing range. Fired an AK-47 and 9mm semi auto handgun. Now I’ve done it I don’t think I’ll bother with it again, but it was an experience. I didn’t realise the shocking power of those things until I fired them.

4. The killing fields. All I can give is a literal description of what I saw there, which is a little pointless. Basically I saw a sickening number of skulls, in age and sex order and mass graves, filled in but still clearly visible. I also found myself stepping over bones jutting from the ground and I could see the clothing that these people died in. There was also begar children. Lots of beggar children. 

5. Got the bus down to Shianoukville and watched the England game in a bar owned by a couple of Brit guys called Red Snapper. Shianoukville was a really nice beach town with plenty of bars, restaurants and guesthouses around but it pissed down non stop for the 2 days I spent there so I decided to come back to Phnom Penh.

6. Watched England throw away the game against France the other night.. many of us lapsed into fits of drunken swearing. Wild accusations of blame flowed through my head, eventually decided to blame myself.

7. Arrived back in Phnom Penn, explored the city, drinking in a few of the bars. Moved myself this morning to a guesthouse by the lake where I shall stay to observe the next England game.

Anyway, I am off to find something to put on my mozzie bites, they’re killing me. I hope you’re well.

 Love

 *****

P.S. Off to Angkor soon. Will send photographs.