ben pester

49-50 Years Old

2011-04-06T06:10:00.000-07:00

The kitchen, finished, is perfect. More than six months gone and now the builder has moved in. He cooks for her, whistling music while she waits in the other room, listening, smelling, avoiding the kitchen that belongs to him now; not her at all.

He says he’s going to start work on her bedroom soon. Their bedroom. The bedroom he calls it, as if there has only ever been one. He works hard, always at night. Moving like an artist who has learned to hate light. Busting experimental holes in the corner where she used to toss her clothes when this place belonged to her, and the draughts in it were hers alone, and were of her temperature.

He talks of the future, an extension, somewhere for her son if he wants to come home. A place to keep his collection. She doesn’t ask, has never wanted to know, what exactly it is that he collects. It’s in storage at the moment, his collection.

‘Not nearly enough room here yet.’

Not yet. Her home is still exploding. She tries to find a tune in his whistling, but there’s nothing there, light constant noise. Wet air snagged, hollowed out by flakes on his lips. She taps her foot, rhythmless.

The idea of her son, wanting to come home makes her smile. The last time they were all together was to celebrate Fronde’s engagement to a girl called Egglamentia. She had not been introduced to his fiancé before the dinner, and was not surprised when Egglamentia didn’t arrive.

‘Ha! Don’t worry Mum. She’s just new in town. Gets lost easily, that’s all.’

Outside shaking his head calling Egglamentia a bitch to the dead answer phone and night air before coming in to the comfort of his father.

'Don’t worry son. It’s going to be OK.’

She had left them together, drinking, without ‘Goodbye’.

‘Dinner’s ready.’

It's served at the dining table in the perfect kitchen. The whistling doesn’t stop, even when he’s got food in his mouth, scratched torn paper edges cultivated by smiles over the steam of the impossibly hot food.

‘’swrong?’

‘Nothing! Just waiting while it cools down.’

For six months she hasn’t been hungry.

48-49 Years Old

2010-08-18T15:54:00.000-07:00

‘Tell me about love,’ she said to the builder. He was round again tending to the edges of the hole he was making in her kitchen. It was through the door way now. The corridor that led to the kitchen had begun to slope into nothingness. He always seemed to be applying plaster to the edges, or smoothing the precipice. She had given up asking him about it, he never really said anything except that it was fine. Everything would be fine. ‘It’s structural,’ he usually said if she asked more insistently.

So, ‘tell me about love,’ she said instead. And he would. He would stare into the hole in her house and start talking as if the things he was saying were things he found in the hole. Some heavy objects that he would dredge out and describe to her, before he lowered them back in.
‘Love,’ he said, ‘it’s like going outside. I go outside and it feels like I just stood on a thin pane of glass, and everywhere I look there’s a huge crack I just made.’ She said it sounded horrible. ‘Can’t help that,’ he said. ‘It’s just how it feels. A million cracks with every step, but somehow I know it won’t break. ‘

‘Tell me something else about love,’ she said. ‘Had a cat once,’ he told her. He told her about when he and the cat used to just sit and he would look at what the cat was looking at. He could tell that the cat really really loved him. He felt good about it.

‘What about me?’ She said. ‘Do you love me?’ And for a long time he stared into the hole, eventually he nodded. And then when she went into the other room he considered diving into the hole in her kitchen because there would never be anything to say the way it should be said.

He got a drink for himself instead. He had a bag, you see, with a little holder for his flask. ‘I love this bag,’ he said to himself. And then, loud enough for her to hear in the other room – ‘We should see about getting a cat.’

47-48 Years Old

2010-07-09T05:04:00.000-07:00

There’s a hole in the kitchen. She has to skirt around the walls to get to the sink and the fridge. The hole is empty. Soundless.

The builder doesn’t seem to want to fill it in. She doesn’t mention it. The hole is ok to her.

The sad builder. He came round less than 40 minutes after she called him. He looked at her designs and said ‘Nice. I’ll make a start tomorrow.’

But then he left and did not come back. He did not call. He did not write. After four months she summoned the courage to phone him again.

‘Are you still doing my kitchen?’

‘Yeah. Sorry. Yeah.’

‘You alright?’

‘Not really. Mum died.’ he said.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’ll bring the plans later.’

She waited for him in the living room. She wondered about her face. ‘Can you also fix this please?’ she said in the mirror.

After a fifth glass of Viogner she said. ‘Can you install a new pair of these!’ and she grabbed her breasts and shuffled them up and down.

She went around the flat in her pants, dancing and singing to her favourite Madonna songs.

Hanky panky was playing when the builder finally arrived. It was 10pm, but she didn’t even notice.

He smelt like the paper from chips.

They sat on her sofa and the builder got carried away, drawing pictures of how he saw the new kitchen. At one point he lead her by the hand into her kitchen and said.

‘You’ll be standing here. And everything you can see will be perfect.’

He had his hands on her shoulders. It felt incredible.

‘Start tomorrow.’ she said.

And he came every night for two months at 10 or 11 at night, keeping her up smashing holes in her home.

She made him strong drinks and cooked him meals. And all the time more and more of her kitchen was vanishing into a hole.

She creeps around it now, makes a couple of gins and then goes back to the living room to wait for the builder to come. Never sure if he will turn up. That sad builder who makes an unfillable hole in her kitchen.

46-47 Years Old

2010-05-26T08:55:00.001-07:00

Some things I overheard her saying and could not forget this year.

At seven am, whilst buying a Krispy Kreme doughnut: “This will be my one treat for the day.” before she boarded a train and went to work, knowing there would be no more treats until tomorrow’s doughnut.

"Ha!" In the office, when someone called her a MILF and she had to pretend she did not know what that meant. At home she typed the word MILF into Google and then watched a lot of videos she wished she hadn’t watched.

Once, out loud to an empty kitchen she said: “Oh. I love you Mark Kermode.” Meaning every single word and walking quickly from the window to the sink and back again while she listened to his voice.

When she felt ill and farted so badly she had to leave the room, she said: “fuck it all” and she stood in the hall for six minutes, not even bothering to go upstairs, listening to the television through the door.

Drunk, at a friend’s house, she said into the toilet while she was being sick, and her friends were talking about her round the dinner table: “Mark Kermode, where are you now, when I really need you?”

“Oh what a nice stick” to a dog by itself in the park

“Don’t worry, I’m not a MILF” to one of the teenagers who came to get the football from next to where she was sunbathing.

When she could not remember the name of the actress Faye Dunaway: “Sissy Spacek, only not her. She looks like a bitch.”

“Come out of the station and turn left until you hate yourself, then you’re at my road.” To a blind date who was coming to pick her up. He later asked her eight times to go back to his house and when she finally went, he made reference to her ‘quim’ and she spent £45 on a taxi home.

“I think this little black pebble is my father.” Quietly, behind the backs of everyone she spoke to, with her mouth moving in a way that she could not control, because I was making her do it.

45-46 Years Old

2010-05-02T02:18:00.000-07:00

Oh Fronde. Grandson.

Look at the state of you. Walking around and around my hotel bedroom. Constantly listing ways to seduce the maid:

Yodelling. Nonchalant without towel. Using two of the shiny black pebbles from the desk as a pair of comedy eyes. Clever invitation to dinner.

Nothing works. You never go anywhere. It drives your mother insane.
‘What kind of a holiday is this?’ she shouts in the corridor.

Finally the maid comes in and you toss something into the air like: ‘Christ! I could eat shit I’m so hungry!’ and she feels offended and leaves shaking her head. She’s beautiful.

There is the sound of screaming in the car park. It’s the porter. The porter is complex and people think he’s insane for screaming without any reason. But he does have a reason. He has been plagiarised by an artist.

He once had a brilliant idea:
‘I think I’ll paint a picture of everything upside down.’ he thought.

Then a year later, there’s a picture of something upside down in the town art gallery. It could be a coincidence of course, but the porter is sure the artist stole his idea. The reason he is so sure is because the artist clearly also copied his other really brilliant idea of hanging the upside down painting itself upside down, so the picture looked the right way up.

‘The first thing I’ll do’ he said ‘is punch that bastard until he admits he painted it upside down.’

You see, the artist claims the picture has been the right way up all along.

TRICKY!

Also he knows he won’t get a full confession because the porter isn’t actually able to paint at all. He’s completely without talent.

He's waiting. His anger will vanish as soon as he has another brilliant idea.

You’re in the room again now with your mother. She looks more alive and insane than ever. Neither of you have mentioned that you’re trying to find me. The porter knocks on the door, excited. He says:
‘Would you pay money to see a painting of someone’s daughter, who isn’t really their daughter? Who in fact never really existed?’

You both say ‘Probably not.’

44-45 Years Old

2010-04-21T03:02:00.000-07:00

Days pass slowly when you’re a small black pebble. A year drags.

The maid comes in, she cleans around me. They haven’t rented my room out yet. She’s cleaning it for me. They don’t know where I am, but money keeps coming out of my bank account into theirs. When you get transformed into a black pebble by a Hotel brochure, they still keep your bank account open.

Joe, the hotel owner comes in every Tuesday. He likes to pick me up and rub an area on my black-pebble surface that would once have been my throat. He rubs it gently at first, but then he starts to press quite hard with his thumb. And I feel like I’m choking. I want to shout

‘I might be a pebble, Joe, but it doesn’t mean I can’t feel you crushing me.’

But I can’t. I am a shiny black pebble.

After a while, Joe puts me back on the mirrored desk and picks up one of the other three black pebbles and he rubs them. He looks anxious about something. It’s impossible to know whether he realises we all used to be people before we became black pebbles.

One Tuesday he stays extra long and he rubs me over and over again across the ridge of his lip. Where it goes from skin to lip, Joe is almost as smooth as me. He is interrupted by the maid. She startles him and he drops me.

‘I’m going to start renting this damn room again.’ he tells her. ‘If there’s any of that guy’s crap left in here, you can keep it.’ The maid nods. She looks very tired. As Joe passes her to leave the room, she raises one of her hands towards him, but then lets it drop back by her side.

The first guest has just arrived. A chubby-ish man with mouse brown hair. The first thing he does is dump off his t-shirt and walk around topless. He’s quite hairy.

The t-shirt landed on the mirrored desk and if I squint, I can just make out the word

B-O-R-I-N-G

written on it. He orders some room service. He says ‘My Mum is paying.’

43-44 Years Old

2010-04-18T13:09:00.000-07:00

Four thousand years. That’s what it says in the book. Four thousand years since this hotel was built. It was built by the ‘early French’. In each room, a desk made entirely of mirrors. So I can see my face now, as I read again the fabulous lies of the hotel literature.

The owner’s name is Joe. Today is his birthday and he has invited me to spend the day with him. After I get dressed, I will make a list of things I can say to Joe about his hotel and the literature they hand out when you move in.

Early French, 4000-years-old , haunted, full of unmovable black pebbles, build in a shape that when viewed from above is racist against the Chinese.

The party is in full swing. I am wearing this incredible blazer I found in the wardrobe.

Joe’s mother has cooked a hundred boiled eggs for us to eat. I feel like last year it was a hundred and one boiled eggs. ‘When I die,’ Joe tells me ‘I don’t have to eat any more boiled eggs.’
We all help Joe out, eating a few eggs ourselves.

Stinky!

‘Happy birthday Joe!’ we all shout and Joe does a little, egg-laboured dance. He bows for us when the dance is finished and we all applaud.

‘Hey Joe!’ I shout. ‘Was the hotel really built four thousand years ago?’ and the room goes quiet. Everyone looks, not to Joe, but to his mother who says.
‘Yes. That’s true.’ and I say ‘and is it true that this hotel is ‘Early French’?’ and she says
‘Actually no.’ There is a gasp amongst the gathered crowd of guests. ‘It was built by the Chinese.’

And for no reason I can understand, they all start laughing. And then I notice that Joe is Chinese. And so is his mother. Everyone here is Chinese. I remember something about China.

My daughter! Her possible Chinese biological father. Back to my bedroom and the hotel literature on the mirrored desk. My mirrored face is different. It is black and smooth and has no features.

I have no body.

I am a black pebble on a hotel mirrored desk.

42-43 Years Old

2009-12-16T16:20:00.000-08:00

Fronde has gone.

We tried to search his room for clues but have no idea where his room is, or if he ever had one. We have no idea how old he is.

Perhaps he’s been gone for months.

His mother remembers he always wanted to go to London. Get into business. He always wanted to wear one of those beautiful, impeccable suits and ride around and around on the London Underground.

We leave notes everywhere and I try to put pictures up, but really, I can’t picture him at all.

Sometimes he has a beard.

Sometimes he is wearing a t-shirt with ‘Boring’ written on it.

In London May found herself following the shape of a man with a beard around the Euston/Kings Cross loop

(Take the Victoria Line south from Kings Cross to Euston, then change at Euston. Go South on the Northern Line to Kings Cross then change and go South on the Victoria line to Euston. Repeat forever.)

‘Fronde?’

He stops. Looks at her. She cries because she has no idea if she has found her son or not. Nobody, not even me, knows if it is him.

Meanwhile, at the Organic Juicebar, a woman tells me she used to be Fronde’s lover.

‘Took me to this hotel a couple of times’ she says

‘Told me once that if we’re out for dinner and I want to get up on the table on all fours, he would get up on the table on all fours too.
And there we’d be:
Two people, up on a table’

The most romantic thing anyone has ever said to her.

At the hotel, I checked into their room. Place is drowning in blankness. I spend hours on the bed staring at a couple of shiny black pebbles on the mantelpiece, thinking

‘They must have been people once. People who stayed here too long.’

Honestly, this room makes me feel awful, but I booked in and I’ve been here for almost the entire year. I’ve got no idea how to leave.

Somewhere in London, my daughter's weeping and clinging to someone who may or may not be wearing a t–shirt that says ‘Boring’ on it.

41-42 Years Old

2009-09-26T07:34:00.000-07:00

The photo of him in my wallet.

Fathers keep photographs of their children in their wallets. Mothers, of course, do the same. I don’t have a photograph of you in my wallet. I don’t have a wallet. You do not have a photographable face.

There is a picture of an old ventilation structure on Brighton’s east pier that reminds me of you. A pipey thing, hinting at a face. Observed closely it’s clear that it is slowly turning into dust. If it could talk, it would say:

‘Don’t look at me. I don’t know. Hurhurhur.’

We’re sitting at an atmosphereless table. I’ve been trying to work out how to tell you about my son.

“He has arrived!” I consider shouting “He is flesh and blood and I can see his face at all times!”

Even now, as I stare at you and imagine ventilating pipes in Brighton I can also see him:

His real human face.
His starting-point blue eyes, shaped like almonds.

“Are you having a starter?” I say

“I don’t know.”

“I wonder what the soup is”

“It’s Asparagus” you say. You've read it on the blackboard. For some reason you reading the specials black-board in this fucking place is the absolute limit. I stand up. I scream:

“I am a father in real life now. I don’t have to keep coming here.” Then someone coughs and you say:

“Do you think there’s croutons?”

Looking back at our life together, none of it seems that realistic. The park. The smell of grass when you were first born. These things were just guess work.

Most notable difference is that my heart was ok then. Now, thanks to my son, my heart is idiotically deformed. It is a fat lip.

Also the world was ok then. It now ends and starts again about every 2 or 3 minutes. It goes ‘Uh’

“I failed you.” I say “I failed you and you deserved better.”

I remember the old Chinese One Child Policy. Does that still happen? All those notional babies. They must exist somewhere.

“Maybe you’re Chinese after all.” I say.

“Don’t look at me. I don’t know. Hurhurhur”

‘Uh’ goes the world

‘B’DOIYOIYOING!!!!!!!’ my fat-lip-heart.

40-41 Years Old

2009-08-10T13:43:00.000-07:00

Long time since I wrote about you. Been in touch, but calls interrupted by the doorbell or an alarm or something. Lies. I am expecting a real baby. Less than a month now. Already all conversations are full of him.

I feel guilty because he makes me feel like a true father, but you never could.

You are in your forties already, and are contemptible at times. I can see you clearly, with different coloured eyes each time, hiding in a bedroom somewhere fondling some item of a man’s clothes and staring at your withered thumbs. The skin around the nails is oily, lined and thin.

Within you is an adrenal gland, releasing panic into you in small doses as you think about how deep and long your well of solitude is.

Your biology isn’t very realistic. I feel terrible for that.

The item of clothing is cream. It gives you a terrible sick feeling, first experienced at school. You remember school? Drawing pictures for me, your work output shamed me.

Your whole life has been devoted to making me feel either good or bad about myself. Is this how my real son’s life will be too? Probably a bit more complicated.

Why can’t you tell me how responsible I ought to be? And why aren’t I able to see anything serious happening. In an emergency, how does my constantly thinking about you and your thumbs, your elbow, your probably Chinese heritage, prepare me? I am not prepared.

The material of the man’s clothing is pale cream, it is thick, strongly woven. Good quality but old. Your nails are narrow and high-arched. They aren’t long. Downstairs in your fridge is another can of diet fizzy pop, waiting to break one of the nails.

My God. Why didn’t we do something better? Anything. We could have been out flying jets. We could have been lions for a day, roaring on the plains of Africa.

I try hard to make you suddenly extraordinary. You can breathe fire.

You breathe fire into the pale cream trousers in your hands and feel even further away from the rest of the world than before.

The fire alarm is going off.

39-40 Years Old

2009-05-21T11:32:00.001-07:00

I’m trying to see things differently. All this year I have had the perspective of my daughter’s elbow. It is 40 years old, like the rest of her. I have used the elbow to help her this year.

There was a time when she almost fell but I, the elbow, leapt towards a photocopier to keep her up-right. There was a time when she may have missed her tube, and so I, the elbow, knocked aside someone else to get her through the closing doors.

The elbow that I am sometimes betrays her instinct for kindness. I have bent back out of waving. I have reached out to take the last thing on the shelf. Savagely I have won at tennis.

In my year as one of her elbows I have learnt how ruthlessly I love her. Often I have had to hold tissues to her streaming eyes in the toilets at work because they won’ talk to her. To hold too tightly her son.

But she is successful. The tube she caught took her to a meeting. She was devastating in the meeting, she looked confident with her elbow occasionally on the desk, leaning in, banging the wood. When I was her elbow, she could cut through all red-tape. When I was her elbow she was decisive.

There were no tasks we could not complete faster together than when I was just her normal human father. She could clear tables, lift her son, break into the house when locked out. And yet

Out here on her elbow I don’t notice much how happy she has been. I can’t tell that she remembers when we first went over a bridge, and we stopped to look at the water and she felt so thirsty suddenly. She suddenly felt unsure of which way to go.

She can never tell her elbow that on that bridge was the first time she had the idea that she could jump into the water and drown herself.

My daughter is forty and most of her body doesn’t understand her.
My daughter is forty and I feel so many miles away, even though I am always by her side. As an elbow.

38- 39 Years Old

2009-04-16T10:16:00.000-07:00

Thrift. We saved up all year and bought a car. Everyone chipped in even though everyone of us is poor again.

The whole family in one house again. The house is larger than the one before, but falling apart. We can’t go anywhere on the oceanic carpet without bumping into each other and then we smile and say

“Good morning!” and everything seems to be ok. As if a big kind family in a house is the most acceptable thing in the world.

As if being happy is the most acceptable thing in the world.

As if being together and not wishing we could go somewhere else and sit silently alone were the most natural and acceptable thing in the world.

Yes, and we are all recycling too. We never get in a plane.

You drive the car in the style of a lady in a Hitchcock film. You drive the car as though you’re driving towards the unknown sweat of adventure and very probably murder and anonymity and the majestic American landscape. The colour of your eyes burns through the lens and people watching go blind and insane with desire for you and the life you drive towards. Even when you’re off to the shops.

Fronde, your son and my grandson he still makes an effort to talk his old Grandad. He talks to his MawMaw too. MawMaw is what he calls your mother. The other day he said:

“Maw Maw – I’m being picked on at school. It’s terrible, those nasty boys. Grandad – I’m worried they will never change until the apocalypse.”

And then he hopped off the lap he was on and dashed into the kitchen where he found you stirring a cup of tea. You were stirring a cup of tea and your cold knuckles brushed his cheek. And you suddenly didn’t blame me for your existence. You suddenly didn’t blame me for his existence or the existence of pain and ingratitude and loss. Because we bought you a nice car, and we all chipped in, and there is tea in the cupboard.

There is tea and biscuits in the cupboard as though it’s the most normal, acceptable thing in the world.

37-38 Years Old

2009-04-02T12:08:00.001-07:00

I am stopping everything for a 'year'. Shutting down the imaginary world where I have a daughter and she gets older by one year for every 365 words I write. I need to fix a few things. Everyone in the imaginary world will lose a year. Only I will know.

I have deleted my imagination. In its place is an 'Object'. It serves as a bookmark to remind me there is supposed to be something there. I am alone with my object. Everything feels nice.

The Object is a shape. I regard the shape; I pick it up and carry it around with me. First under my right arm, next under my left; as though The Object is some important document.

Now the Object is a small oblong of wood. Inexpensive, ugly, a cast off from something horribly clunky. I give it a good shake. I shout at it, shout right into the grain. I toss it high into the air and don't catch it. I listen to the sad knockknockknock music of the landing. I plug it into the internet and download everything in Wikipedia into it. All the words in Wikipedia are now written into the fibre of the wooden object. It grows ugly with the shape of the letters which teem like crude oil inside.

"Now you're a data stick!" I really don't know why I say these things.

I immediately regret giving The Object so much powerful knowledge. It copies itself a billion times. To stop it multiplying further I turn it into stone. The Object becomes a vast landscape, a stone desert and every rock I stand on knows the secret of my soul.

In the air is a song:

"We have lost the mountain.
We have burnt the gorge."

Panicked, I think of something pretty and the desert is devoured by flowers. Poppies, cornflowers, bluebells bloom. With the next wind the song on the air sounds much happier:

"Valley and glenn. Valley and glenn"

Every single word from wikipedia floats harmlessly away as pollen. All copies delete.

The Object is now a bouquet, which I hold, standing still like a clown.

"hu-rrah!" I say this to no one.

36-37 Years Old

2009-04-01T04:56:00.000-07:00

Today I found my father's blog.

If you can believe this, someone at work showed it to me.

"May! Doesn't this guy sound like your old man?"

All my friend's at work know about you Dad. I have to tell someone. I'm sorry.

I'm glad Dad has let me have a go at this. I am going to set the record straight about a couple of things.

Firstly, my son. He has been extremely unwell. His colon became twisted a couple of years ago (we don't know how this happened) if it hadn't righted itself septicemia would have killed him within a couple of days. We attend clinic after clinic to run painful (for all of us) tests to find signs it might happen again. I have never, would never allow my son to undergo cosmetic surgery of any kind. My whole family enjoy a balanced, sustainable organic diet.

Some things about my father:

1. Calls in the middle of the night, out of his mind on rum. Whistles at me. Laughs at nothing.

2. Talks like a baby whenever he is left alone with my husband.

3. Showed my son how to tie a noose.

4. Is racist towards the Chinese.

5. Cannot accept love.

To demonstrate what my father calls acceptable parental communication, here is a letter I received aged 22. When I received it it also contained a check for fifteen thousand pounds, which I have never cashed. Which would certainly have bounced. I have a tattoo of my husband's name in Chinese letters on my wedding finger:

Hello!!!!

In the corner of he room is a box. In the box, a drawer. In the drawer, a letter. On the letter, my name. That is all that really exists of me. My name is father. My name is Father tattooed on a letter in Chinese characters. I am in the drawer tattooed on paper in ink in Chinese letters, the word Father. Helloooooo!!!!

There I am allright. I love you.

You don't even exist

REALLY big KISS

All year I have been pretending to be my own daughter, all year covered in tattoos. the Chinese symbols for

Here I am. Your Father.

35-36 Years Old

2009-03-31T06:18:00.000-07:00

It is exactly half way through my daughter's life, for a treat I am not going to be her father today, but will reveal myself as the God of infinite creation which in reality I am. I created her world as a zone of success, populated with people I would love and who would love me. A world in which all my faltering plans for contentment can exist. Specifically the dream of being a good father.

"Where shall we go to eat? We can go anywhere."

She is made of my imagination. She can say absolutely anything at this point, there are no rules.

"Oh, let's go to ASK. At least you know what you're getting."

Knowing what you're getting is extremely important to my daughter. We're in ASK, she has ordered for me the Gnocchi in Gorgonzola Sauce. We are sharing a bottle of Pinot Grigio.

Reading the menu:

"oh WOW! They've got dough balls!" So happy it breaks my heart, she says, "but I thought you could only get those in Pizza Express!"

I am the God of infinite creation.

Later on I am swallowing gnocchi and pinot and going quietly blind. My daughter is grinning still, not just because of dough balls, but also because Fronde, my grandson, has been given hormones and surgery against all sound medical advice to enlarge his six year old penis. He swings it before him now as he leads them around town, pythoning into MacDonalds and the shopping arcade.

Suddenly bored and furious with power, I make ASK vanish; we are floating in space! I scream into the face of my 33.5 year-old child:

"We are floating in space! What do you think of that, you fatuous bore! hahahaha!"

In space, there is not much light. There is a bubble around us to allow us to breath, the steam from my gnocchi and her peppery sauce has already created condensation. My daughter wants to complain. She thinks there has been a power cut. Defeated I return us to ASK. I burst the bubble.

"Let's do this more often." Smiles while she pays. On the way home her father, God of infinite power, makes every traffic light green.

34-35 Years Old

2009-03-04T04:17:00.000-08:00

A year at the doctor’s with Fronde. At first May was secretive about the reasons, referring only to a ‘deficiency’. Eventually, in the car home:

“his penis is too small!”

Fronde’s small penis is now the topic of a huge medical inquisition. May is insisting he have surgery or be given hormones to stimulate growth. His father glares at me in corridors at hospitals. We all attend these clinics, even though we the grandparents share just one eye.

The father blames me for my part in the deficiency. He shuffles next to me in urinals, staring at my penis. Looking for evidence that I am the one responsible for his disgrace. He looks very often and for a long time. Do I like him looking at it? Any way, it feels as though we all have better access to one another’s anatomy now. We drink from the plastic cups in the clinics, we wait outside heavy wooden doors while Fronde and his mother humiliate themselves at the cold feet of surgeons. We think about each others penises.

Fronde talks to his mother and father about his feelings concerning the medical situation:

“After, can we go to MacDonald’s?”

They have been taking him to fast-food places ever since they started worrying. They are hoping some hormonal funk from the food there will trigger a targeted growth spurt. They hope in any case to make it fatter.

I try to talk to my daughter about the severity of her predicament. She is now almost half way through her life. She dies at 71. And she has married badly. Our relationship is in tatters. Her mother is becoming just a beautiful sound and colour.

“You aren’t growing up anymore, you’re dying. Everything left is less than there was before. None of this has gone to plan. I still can’t even see your face. I have a hidden paternity test result. Probable outcome: that you have a Chinese father, not really me at all.”

I’ve said all of this in MacDonalds. She hasn’t listened. She is telling my Grandson to sit with his legs wider apart. Telling him not to crush his miniscule penis.

Where did I go wrong?

33-34 Years Old

2009-02-17T09:09:00.000-08:00

I made reparations to my life, slowly building sticking plasters from the fragments of reality I had been spared when they tore me from my home. I don’t fight, or argue or grumble. I make mirrors, huge mirrors, and I clean them all day and from them retrieve the face I began with. Not easy. Unpatching my eye I find there is another patch beneath and another. The eye is blind for good.

Some successes, I check my skin, dewrinklining and somewhere inside I try to switch on a light to bring life back into my one eye. Every day I return marching to the site of my original family home, a simple square with sprawling wooden slats invincibly varnished in a thrust, low stage. The wings of my stage house vanish into the kitchen (stage-right) and living room (stage-left) I stare and wonder what madness happened to us here.

I remember the students and their acrobatic displays. I remember before when this was a simple house, I remember bringing in poppies from this garden. Remember dancing in the rain, a foolish self-portrait sentiment that left me blind.

I make a suit of tin foil and pots and old pans and I go out into a rainy day, just outside my daughter’s home and I begin to dance. My drowning percussion creates a shape for my sightless wife to follow, creating a sharp classical dancing man from the sound of rain and rust, we dance home together. Our daughter is grown up, and our grandson is a wonderful human being. Hence, we oughtn’t see them for a while. The only way for May to be happy, is for me not to see or think about her.

She writes to us. Little sentences. A holiday:

Dear both. In Larnaca with the boys! Blissful weather. Fronde snorkelling. Food great. Booze cheap. Menfolk send love.

Wish you were here (aha-ha!)

It fills about a tenth of the postcard, written in her tiny perfect letters that she practised and practised at school.

Her mother tells me she can see her on the beach, with her family, her hair is fierce white. Golden with unsettled thin streaks of crayon yellow.

32-33 Years Old

2009-02-08T05:02:00.000-08:00

My family of badly wired lamps float past me, producing hot noises of exasperation. They curse my clumsiness, my half-blindness. My daughter furious because her child is unremarkable, and obsessed with a twin she failed to conceive. Of course she never says this. She just says

“Oh Jesus Dad, get out of the way!”

She titters out savage little remarks to infantilise me when I spill drink on my chin, clear the table one object at a time, covering an age across the kitchen.

We don’t talk about the fact that they have come to live here at my expense. I’m assuming there was a financial crisis of some kind, which would explain why they don’t talk to me much. They want to keep this news from me because I am unfit for work, because the banner which once said ‘Father’, my standard, has lost its flutter. Is wrapped around me now as an adult nappy.

“You’re still under my roof!”

I yell it when they’ve all gone out, or I am walking in the park. I go walking with Fronde telling him stories only he and I understand, about how he doesn’t actually exist. How none of it is real. He happily gurgles, mutters out boxes that will soon unfold as real words. He doesn’t realise they contain more meaning now than they will when he learns to articulate.

“And now they talk to me like this! Under my roof!”

“buh-hi-ah-nooninini”

“Exactly.”

People listen when you talk like a baby.

I haven’t said a single word in English for weeks, people take notice of me this way. When I’m perambulating across the house carrying a dirty fork,

“googooogooogooo”

I smile and I dribble, behaving as though I have aged as quickly as they all have, when of course I have not, I’ve had just one birthday since this all began. And they treat me like an old man!

I confront them, speaking clearly into the impenetrable glare of lights

“This is my home! I will not stand for it!” (googoogooo)

But it isn’t mine. It’s theirs. My daughter has taken her mother and I in. I am completely at their mercy. Must escape this.

31-32 Years Old

2009-02-03T08:46:00.000-08:00

Once, long ago, I wrote a note to myself:

“If it goes badly, go and see the doctor.”

This entire year was spent at the doctor’s. Sitting in a huge chair I told him I had invented a family, I had invented a daughter and a grandchild and I told him that my house is demolished now because I have been trying to get rid of a shadow.

The doctor’s surgery is made of oblongs of maple and other expensive wood. It has no scent, but the doctor smells of an aftershave designed to make me feel as though we are in different universes, like I might as well be confessing to the stars.

I describe in detail the ruins of this failed dream, show him the evidence of my conceit: Lists written in gibberish, a couple of child’s paintings, I talk about how I spent weeks living in a hutch. How there are secrets about my daughter that I can never reach and which devour me.

I have imagined a family for some reason and now they are eating me alive, please help me! I beg the smell of the universe to help me.

He listens for hours to me crying, shouting, snoozing in his aftershave. I feel myself shrinking when he looks at me finally.

“Why do you say your family is imaginary?”

I am shrinking

“Does it make you feel safer to think of them not as real people?”

I am naked

“Have you tried talking to your wife about how you feel?”

It rains through the open window. I whisper:

“I’m not married. I have no children.”

He’s unfolding the list I wrote when May was born. At the top it once said No Matter What. It’s not writing now, just lines that mean nothing.

“No Matter What, I will always look after your fontanel”

I’m a speck of ash floating in the rain water.

“I am recommending a course of supervised recuperation in hospital. In the mean time, there’s someone here to see you”

He opens a door in the wall, and in they come, all of them, the faceless light-bulbs who I love. From whom there is no escape.

30-31 Years Old

2009-01-28T06:39:00.000-08:00

All alone again. And this time a silence without peace. The grandchild gone, I don’t see him for months on end.

They want space to ‘work it out as a family’. I tell everyone this is her husband’s idea, but I know it’s hers. Being around her is excruciating. I stand with my feet together, facing askew from my body. Awful.

Normal residents of this house have gone away too, for artistic purposes. A tour of Japan and more training. I spend all my time chasing this shadow about the place. The shadow is the shape of either a rabbit or a child.

Fronde’s diary frightens me as I fill pages describing the shadow as his twin.

You almost had a twin. Twins was an option, but somewhere this other one was forgotten and its shadow comes into the house, looking for things to play with. It never gets hungry or tired. It can’t touch anything. It just drags itself around my walls, looking and looking for a way of being entertained.

The shadow could be anything, but I can’t think of the diary without wanting to write in it

Your twin was…today

Another thing about your twin…

I tried feeding the twin chicken today, but all I got was smeared walls...

The shadow is probably just tricks of my eye, a ghost left over from being used too much. It could be my conscience, the shadow of a prick in the eye for judging my daughter’s parenting methods so harshly. Perhaps so harshly I didn’t even trust her with twins.

I keep telling myself (and the twin) that soon someone will come back for me. I keep telling myself that my stomach feels knotted because now my sonar wife has gone, the house no longer vibrates the way it once had.

The knots in my stomach and the shadows on the wall are, of course, a sign that I am losing my grip again. Slipping again back into occupation of just a tiny corner of our kitchen, a pit with transistor radio and whiskey.

The twin will go when your grandma gets home

The twin does silent Hu-rrah!’s at me from the white walls.

29-30 Years Old

2009-01-23T07:48:00.001-08:00

I’ve been keeping a diary for my grandson. His name is Fronde.

The more the diary goes on, the less possible it will be to pass on when he ‘comes of age’. No one is grown-up enough to see the absurd goings on of this diary.

For example:

Today you (Fronde) and your grandmother and I took a trip to the pier. We watched the boats coming in and out. I measured over 50ml of snot that came from your nose. That’s ‘a double’ of snot. You are quite disgusting.

We didn’t want to take you away but your mother and father gave us no alternative. We are convinced that there is at least one affair between them. We are happy you are with us because your father lays you on your back too often.

I worry that you are getting a flat head.

I don’t remember the age that May reached when I decided that the things she did were her fault and not mine any more. Her inability to parent this over-productive child should be a concern to me. I should be thinking:

“This is all my fault”

But I no longer feel responsible.

Another entry:

“I’m dressing up!” Your father talks to us both as though we are idiots.

“I’m a policeman!”

He shouldn’t have to say this. Only for an idiot do you explain

“I’m a cowboy! Pssk pshk!” There isn’t a frame of reference for gun noises, You don’t know what a gun is.

“peeow!” Bullets ricocheting, also a waste of time.

He changes costumes constantly. Fronde cannot understand that his brimless imagination is being flash-filled with pictures of violence. Guns. Authority.

”I’m a hippy! Cowabunga!”

Hippy is an irrelevance.

My daughter got ill. Don’t ask me what with. She phones, I say

“I’ll get your mother!”

It’s an old joke, but I do it. I do it like I’m joking

“I’ll get your mother! Seriously how are you? I’ll get your mother!”

The joke. The reality. I don’t know what to say to her anymore.

In the woods your father depicts the killing of an indigenous American by the colonising white man by way of guns. But not syphilis.

28-29 Years Old

2009-01-16T09:08:00.001-08:00

9 months of this year were spent in a mixture of panic and ever renewing devotion. I am a grandfather. A new fontanel to worry about, a boy’s this time. He’s been gestated like his mother and has appeared without warning. He doesn’t recognise me even though I see him often. He is a golden glowing yam without a face. He is swaddled always out of sight and when he cries it can only be abated by the hypnotising rear end of his imperial leather father. He watches as it swoops gently across his sky.

He sleeps for about 19 hours a day, which seems too much. May talks in secret with her mother, leaving me with the new child who fills his nappy in a constant flow of expensively produced shit.

“You’re a tap that can’t be turned off!”

I give a silent, sarcastic hurr-ah! I wonder if it’s worth trying to give some parenting advice to May, regarding the child’s diet. Regarding her own diet. I should leave them alone, and I shouldn’t constantly worry. I am looking at my daughter’s most beloved person as though it is a school report.

We are grandparents now, my wife’s (why not?) sonar hum seeks me and the child out and he responds instinctively with a little tune of happiness I cannot hear, she soothes him with soundwaves and settles his metabolism. My wife has super-powers, and even though we exist in a marsh of co-blindness, depending on just one eye between us, I am reassured that our daughter is a success as a parent.

She’s a big hit.

One day I returned to and very carefully opened the drawer to feel around inside for the list I made when May was born. Maybe it will help her.

The list is unhelpful. The list is written in Chinese. I feel queasy when I look at the writing, it means that I no longer understand who I was then. I am no longer in touch with any of this.

To shake this feeling I recommended a family walk in the woods, and was heartened by the carpet of bluebells that covers the spring floor. We’re starting again.

27-28 Years Old

2009-01-06T11:46:00.000-08:00

The celestial bottom cruises past my fragile pew, along the stone aisle of this church. We have no business being in a church. He is going to wait for my daughter, his bride at the front of the church with the scowling minister. She will be escorted past me by her old friend, the scrawny one, whose eyes she trusts more than my one eye.

I fluffed the rehearsal you see. There was a rehearsal of this wedding and I tripped and smashed open my chin on the stones. As she passes she must travel over the bloodstain shaped like one half of a bunny’s head. I consider the time I spent living in the rabbit hutch. I should not be thinking about those times now. There was a rehearsal for this wedding dammit! Bored out of my mind, I try to focus on something, I focus on a note.

Since the eclipse of blindness became permanent across the face of May’s mother, she has emitted a permanent note. It is like sonar that sustains her in the world by keeping her informed of exactly where she is. It is a wonderful note and I can hear the echoes of it coming back from our daughter as she floats over my bunny bloodstain. The noise these two women make is fabulous.

Later I make a speech. I say something short and feeble and humble, unable to articulate my damaged jaw. At the expensive meal I paid for, I can only eat soup. Soup was not on the menu so someone has to go and heat up a can of Heinz for me. The sound of me eating soup with my jaw wired drowns the beautiful note of my daughter and her mother, so I choose not to eat it.

When it was all over we sent them off to China. Here’s the problem:

I believe I have lost all sense of who my daughter is. And now she is with a man already determined to father me with his confident boring advice about cars.

I fall asleep listening to the note, and in a dream I hear its echo coming back from the distant East.

26-27 Years Old

2009-01-02T11:17:00.000-08:00

Dropping everything this year every other week to get to the hospital. May’s mother has been badly ill and has lost 50% of her sight in both eyes. By the end of next year she tells me there will be nothing but the swamp. She refers to blindness as a swamp in which her life will still be, and where other lives will still be alive but it will be impossible to see them.

“When I’m blind, everyone else will be blind too”

My one single eye will be all that remains of May’s parent’s sight on her wedding day, which has been planned for next year. They came round and showed us the ring. The fiancé is actually very sensitive about our blindness, and when he and I drink together I find myself asking him

“What the hell am I going to do?”

He’s got no answers but the planet, his arse, is comforting in the middle of the night as he crosses the room to fetch more for us to drink. He carries me up the stairs and I whisper

“Blessing”

To him, trying to regain the harness of fatherhood.

He hears but doesn’t care, I have blown it all in one go. Soon I will become his half-blind child. I hope I can keep May’s mother safe from this knowledge for a long time. I go around the house with her and the students.

I try to study the songs they learn and teach to every millimetre of our house, every creature nearby. They have learnt to recognise the breathing in each wall of our home and love it. When blindness finally comes to her it will be the lifting of a veil, and she will sense me and our family with more clarity than ever.

I try to learn all this but I can’t. I talk finances to May and tell her she can have everything she wants. I have taken extra work this year because they want to go on honeymoon to China. He tells me:

“May has always been fascinated with China!”

No Matter What, I will never sabotage your wedding on purpose. I won’t start any more fires.

25-26 Years Old

2008-12-23T11:08:00.000-08:00

May has turned into a sub-sentient replica of her fat arsed boyfriend. Between the two of them I feel as though they have almost ruined something I spent my life (a couple of months) nurturing. May's mother won't even sit down with him, he is so patronising to women. Laughs at his own jokes, a rank, cavernous chuckle that happens somewhere inside his own throat. I keep imagining that he is somehow controlling her with his bottom, which has its own gravity, which he must rest on her at night and crush oxygen from her body until she is as senseless, mawkish and bigoted as he is.

“You’re bound not to like your daughter’s lovers. It’s natural but you have to let her make her own mistakes.”

I have recorded another self help video. I may have stolen the scarecrow again. Is there a video of me setting fire to a large straw bottom? Is that the same warehouse as before? I only watch it once, but I don’t seem convincing. I really think I hate him.

All the things she used to think are dead, and now she is a vessel for all his fatuous opinions and dull notions. I ask

“How are you?”

“Oh we’re fine. We’re nesting.”

Nesting means they are putting on weight and becoming stupid. They enjoy a great deal of television programmes. They have learnt the schedules, they eat takeaways only. He enjoys watching programmes about cars. Now my daughter is obsessed with cars.

She tells me all about the kinds of car they want to buy. She tells me all about this programme she enjoys about makeovers. They makeover someone’s body, face, car and house all in one go. For the purposes of television they turn someone into someone else completely.

When they think about food and their favourite programme they both silently wriggle and vibrate their heads. They giggle and call each other ridiculous names. Once they came to stay and everything in our house was dismissed as weird. The food was compared unfavourably to their local Chinese restaurant.

“We love Chinese food”

They mean Chinese takeaway. They mean TV. They mean silence. They are talking marriage.

24-25 Years Old

2008-12-14T02:12:00.000-08:00

Graduation and a visit to May’s house at university, it was a strained affair. We sat in her living room. I sat on a huge brown arm-chair that was badly misshapen and full of dangerous springs. I drank tea that was cold and flavourless because the kettle they had is so broken it fails to reach boiling point, but switches itself off somewhere around 70.

“At 71 it just gives up.” May announces, badly arranged smile on her invincible face.

Seventy one. I look at May’s kettle to see if I can fix it, to stop everything ending at 71, but I have no power over the kettle. I have a screwdriver the wrong size, a hammer and a socket-wrench. All useless. I cannot stop everything ending at 71.

I was distracted by the kettle, why didn’t they get a new one? May’s mother understands, but has distractions of her own. For the first time in years she wears no makeup. She really isn’t supposed to do this, it is a mark of abject subservience. Today for her daughter’s graduation, she is herself. I still can’t see her face because of bad light. I settle instead for an ancient, familiar touch on the back of the hand, which makes me gasp a little. Reminds me of death.

I listened to speeches made by academics that were tributes to themselves and their scholastic powerhouse, not about May. I counted easily 34 faculty and relatives who were aged over seventy one: Unfair.

I thought constantly about death.

I asked May how she could cope with drinking tea from a kettle that only ever made it to 71.

“You just have to imagine the last nineteen.”

This depressed me: She is doing everything too late. She’s going to stop at 71.

We took May home for a few days, before it was time for her to settle down (boyfriend). The students performed for us. Sang heroic legends in our house that opens out now into a huge stage.

They seemed to be singing “What now?”

May graduated with a 2:1 and no idea what’s now.

“Good for you! There’s still plenty of time!”

There is hardly any time.

23-24 Years Old

2008-12-08T11:02:00.001-08:00

360 days in complete darkness. I was sick for much of the time. Locked in the rictus of the parent inactive. Bent double by the radio, blind in the cobwebs of the kitchen and drunk already in the infinite dawn in which nothing will open and no one will ever go to work. I learnt nothing. In the distant sound of memory is the echo of my voice, telephoning everybody I know one at a time to listen to them talking about a life I no longer have a picture of. I laugh an hour after something was said. And then there is a postcard. From Fiji. I am coming home.

I blinked and with five days left of the year I was surrounded by the new students, eight of them, of the mother of my daughter, who have all come to be schooled as warriors in the ancient art of Kabuki theatre. My home is being rebuilt around me, in huge elaborate colours and ornamented with flawless calligraphic words.

In the post is a thank you letter from May, six months before, in the pale smoke of my kitchen wilderness I managed again to bail her out of some financial difficulty. It was at the expense again of the electricity bill, hence the darkness. She tries hard to get by but I have realised in the fog of my time sitting still that my flaw as a parent may have been to fail in passing on a sense of thrift to May. I have failed to pass this on because I don’t have it. You can’t pass on what you don’t have. Entropy.

So that’s ok. A secret wish for things to be simple again has been granted. She is bad with money. So am I. But she can always have money at the expense of my light.

Good. Keep spending. You’ll never starve. We’ll never starve. Hu-rrah!

And from now on there will always be light, thanks to the ingenuity of the students and May’s mother who have created a small theatre of timber with gardens of ornate topiary.

I have no idea what happened to all the rabbits, or my exercise equipment.

22-23 Years Old

2008-11-30T17:26:00.001-08:00

Alone again. May’s mother has been in Fiji doing further preparation as a Kabuki artist. I miss her and her fierce painted face. Her ever-changing eye colours. May is happy and so I don’t hear from her. She has a boyfriend now called Stan. It’s serious.

I do not favour Stan. He won’t come here, so they spend all their time at his family home, which is far larger than mine. Stan is tall. He could punch a hole clean through my head if he wanted to. He can buy me and everything I own if he wanted to. He’s got a bottom that seems to go on forever, the idea of my daughter’s intimacy with it makes a smell of stale shit fill my nose and the entire world.

Still determined to be healthy at all times for May, I have erected a square trellis of monkey bars in the back garden. I swing 50 laps and then do sit-ups, hanging from a bar. I pretend I am getting ready for a war. I’ve got a bandana. All of the bars have names, each time I swing from one, I imagine it is a fellow foot-soldier who will fight by my side in the war.

Hanging upside down and doing sit ups, thinking: Do I trust this soldier with my life?

One is a little bit loose. I call it McAllister. I don’t trust McAllister, he might have been responsible for the deaths of local prostitutes (in imaginary Vietnam). McAllister is always taking speed.

I have taken up carpentry to relax me. I made a large rabbit hutch. One night I went out to try and catch a rabbit to put in it. I made a bargain with myself that if I didn’t catch the rabbit I would get in the hutch myself and act like a rabbit.

I was in the hutch for fifteen nights. I had to come out eventually because the fire brigade suspected a gas leak on our street. The guys (monkey-bars) all laughed at me, but they respect my dedication.

“Pester, you crazy bastard! You’re alright!” Those monkey bars are all I’ve got.

The new rabbit is called Stan.

21-22 Years Old

2008-11-28T16:30:00.000-08:00

What if I die? It’s a sensitive time for my daughter, who feels baseless. She needs from me a sense of home such as I have never been able to provide before. I must continuously send pictures to her of the living room with comfortable furnishings and of a dining table.

The dining table is laden with food, photographed under complicated lighting and using obscure dyes I learnt from a guidebook on food photography. I send her recipes and pathetic seeming amounts of money. All I can afford.

I must attend to my positions of fatherhood at all costs. I wear massive unattractive jumpers and mutter to myself funny stories from the past, under my breath. I talk to the Kabuki warrior about my various anxieties, she seems to still understand me, even though in many ways she has learnt to transcend our old life. In five more years she will be ready to take to the stage. I wonder sometimes if it’s easier or harder for her this year.

I have had to learn in a few short months what she has been dedicated to for years. I must become a ritual of myself. I must make a shrine of my house. I must now turn my attention to the preservation of my own body. Keep away the tempting corners of myself from cancer and other hungry diseases.

I have located the nut-lined recess of my own fontanel, and capped it in zinc alloy. I painted hair over the zinc alloy. It doesn’t look realistic. I wear a beret to cover it.

I have had every mole on my body expensively removed. I am losing weight rapidly and to prevent allergic reactions on my neck, I wear a bee-keeping outfit all summer long. People know I don’t have any actual bees.

I have learnt the mastery of all dog breeds. I stand for hours in my doorway with a statue of a dog for company and I wait for someone to need me.

I am similar to a superhero. I need glasses badly, but I only have one eye. So what I need is a monocle. A monocle and an eye-patch looks completely absurd.

20-21 Years Old

2008-11-25T16:14:00.001-08:00

May returned from her year (83 days) abroad filled with a new kind of gravitas. She is full of wisdom, has a tattoo given to her by a Maori. The tattoo is words in Chinese, they mean Cheap Horse. May tells people they mean Free Spirit, but some how she knows there is a Chinese insult blazed into her skin. I tell people it means Free Spirit, no one will ever know from me what it really says.

My tattoo says Silent Warrior (It says Fat Mouse).

She saw awful things on her travels, the best and the worst of humanity. She lost money to muggers who were civil to her and carried out their theft as a business transaction. The screamed threats of terrible violation were simple currency. She escaped many dangers without noticing.

Cheap Horse is a miracle. Cheap Horse is a joke at the world’s expense.

On her return she turned her ample mind to the pursuit of academic knowledge. She went to study History of Art somewhere.

I wince each time some friend of hers she once treasured buys her canvases. Oil paints, things she doesn’t need. Danny buys her a book about Breton.

Her mother has entered a trance in which she is to repeat the ritualistic dances of the Kabuki Warrior in Victory, Defeat, Humiliation, Cuckoldry, silently, unceasingly, for 18 months. I can tell she’s taking it all in when I follow her around, trying to throw news her way in less strenuous periods of her activity.

She has developed the power to cure illness with her hands. She removed a bruise from the back of my hand while she partook in the ritual of Feast. The Kabuki Warrior I live with has a gravitational pull of its own. That make-up, so impeccable, hasn’t changed for years.

I plan places where I will be standing if May ever needs to flee university and come home. I go to them throughout the day.

By the stove. Leaning on the porch. In the garage, fixing my bike.

For the first week I didn’t sleep but did sentry duty at each station, just in case she came back.

I need a hobby.

19-20 Years Old

2008-11-23T17:15:00.000-08:00

Travelling. I had to pretend to encourage it but actually it filled me with dread.

“You just have to trust them eventually. They may fly away, but don’t worry, they’ll always need you when they’re hungry” An advice video I made.

I have become the only person I still listen to.

On the video I am wearing a Hawaiian shirt. I’m mixing drinks, one of which I give to my camera man. Danny is my camera man. He still hangs around here, he won’t leave.

He’s the son I never wanted.

He makes videos of May’s mother dancing in her silk dressing gown, drinking sherry. They think I don’t know about it, but I do. It doesn’t bother me that much. I keep making tapes of myself giving me advice. I don’t always need a camera-man.

Once, while May was visiting Shanghai, I made a video of myself in what I expect was a warehouse somewhere. I’m sitting on a wooden chair in a vest. I’m very sweaty.

“In all battle, there is a thread of stillness. Be the thread of stillness. Be the ghost who does not speak. Be the silent warrior.”

It’s an intense video. Can’t remember making it. My knuckles were grazed afterwards. I saw people in the local allotments making a new scarecrow.

Did I beat their scarecrow using imaginary martial arts in a warehouse? Did I video it?

May sends letters and fridge magnets when she can. Most of them are pictures of fruit or tinned foods. From Thailand there are many cats. Occasionally we speak on the phone, the delay caused by international connections infuriates me so I barely speak.

She told me a lot of crap about sunsets, cheap drinks, Eastern philosophy. She’s learning Poi. I strongly disapprove of circus skills as a badge of global enlightenment. I hold my tongue (I am the ghost who never speaks).

Another phone call was more reassuring:

“In Cambodia they let you pay $10 to machine-gun a cow. Everyone I was with had a go. I don’t know what I’m doing here anymore.” YES! Finally the Real World.

I fell asleep wondering: Do all parents feel this proud of their kids?

18-19 Years Old

2008-11-20T16:51:00.000-08:00

Everyone has been so busy this year. May’s mother has intensified her practise. Hosting tea. A book club. She visits all of the divorced grandparents who are turning slowly into water in their little homes, or in retirement resorts. I didn’t go much: too guilty.

She takes May, who gets given money, pulled from some unspeakable recess of the armchair. Savings accounts. Entire pensions. She doesn’t think about how the money means less milk to them. No comforts. The cold. They don’t want her to think about that.

“Please, take this money and waste it! Waste it as soon as you possibly can on a ten-second-thrill!”

They press it into her hands, trembling with excitement. She can’t see what they see. She sees the end, but they see the beginning. They all hide the trickle of water that runs out of them, shrinking them. Being water doesn’t stop you dreaming.

All May’s artwork keeps coming in and out in a gigantic portfolio folder. It contains about 5,000kg of sketches, love-letters, photos in black and white of friends in the sunshine smoking cigarettes in a car-park. I don’t know any of this.

Inside the black portfolio might be a single, photo-real oil painting of a diminutive but powerfully charismatic man of Chinese origin, wearing a perfect suit. I try to use my imagination to see through the black portfolio bag. I fail.

I try to open it but it’s always attached to her arm or a young man’s arm. These arms are huge, hairless, hulking out of faded black vests. One of them hugged me and gave me dreams about bison.

While everyone’s busy, I practise my own new hobby: “Silent Running”. I try to go all day at home, at work, without being heard. I did silent running without detection for 12 days straight.

May secretly videos me creeping and rolling silently around the house. She gives the videos to her reedy friend Danny. I am Danny’s art project. He is watching me and imagining what it would be like to be my son.

He writes a diary pretending to be me, pretending to be May’s father. Pretending to be silent.

17-18 Years Old

2008-11-18T17:03:00.000-08:00

There’s a car. Did I sanction this? A metal box. A crushable metal box. What about her skull! She has an excellent brain inside it, grown under the meticulous canopy of ever-changing hair. And now access to the roads. What next? Some nooses?

To make it better, I teach her the finer points of (extreme) road safety. The mechanics of Aggressive Driving. I instruct her on basic automobile maintenance. All of this is made tricky because I cannot drive a car.

We sit in the driveway at dusk in the stationary crushable box, me in the driver’s seat. I tell her what she must do if she feels like she might be in trouble. How to respond appropriately to being undertaken. Tackling Road Ragers. I wish I could arm this car to protect her. I wish I had connections in the military to come and fit guns and missiles to this car.

We buy her GPS. An I-Pod adapter. Danny has a sticker on the front seat.

“This is my seat.”

I try to find out from her mother if Danny is May’s boyfriend.

“More like a wife I think”

Is he gay? Who knows? Danny is his own mystery. He still makes May laugh. I still don’t get it. They drive around all day swapping hilarity and the ability to drive. I stay at home and draw pictures of new military designs that would increase the safety of my daughter’s car.

In another room my wife meditates and plays ancient Japanese musical instruments. She lets me listen. She taught me how to do some of the comedy stunts. I was a big hit. She puts make-up on me. Neither of us drive but we laugh like all hell. This is because our daughter is grown up.

We are proud: May got an A for A-level art.

Her final piece was the celebrated study of a vanishing Chinese man. Her teacher was moved because it was a

“Disturbingly mournful observation of absence”

May says her influence was Victorian mysticism and colonial Chinese culture theft.

Somewhere in the future May plans to visit China as part of a world tour. But first: foundation art year.

Hurr-ah!

16-17 Years Old

2008-11-17T09:31:00.001-08:00

Where once there was a fontanel, now there is a soap opera with no rules and characters who all look near death. At the age of sixteen my daughter’s body, including the now firmly bridged fontanel is entirely her own responsibility. She seems intent on taking this for granted.

Much more concerned with emotional matters now, her body has become a kind of park pond to be filled liberally with illegally obtained substances, and caffeine and cigarettes.

It never seems worth consoling her sulkiness with news that it’s only by luck she isn’t dead from a disease or exposure.

“Look at you! Don’t you see the miracle it is that you haven’t got scurvy? That we all survived this long? You were always in such danger we went almost insane just keeping you warm and fed and alive!” I lace all her meals with massive quantities of vitamins. Buy gallons of spring water.

Also, her mother and I had to keep his balance going for most of the first half of the year:

It’s ok to be who you are and do whatever you want to do

Vs

If you fail your exams, then we have failed you. A part of us will never be forgiven or able to forgive you for this.

Schools put so much pressure on children. Schools put so much pressure on me.

“Don’t worry about it Dad. I’m fine!”

May has told me “I’m fine” in response to 98% of all questions I have asked her this year. It seems such a bland response for so turbulent a life.

Come July, I am happy to report

4A’s, 4C’s and 1D.

“Hurr-ah! A D in geography! Geography is for cunts” We went out for a special dinner. Bought her a new CD player. Bought her a festival ticket.

I write down my little disappointment in her D and put it in the drawer along with other moments of shame.

May is working hard on her A-levels already. A meeting with her Art teacher told us that she is out-spoken and has a unique autobiographical style. I worry about what might come out of May’s art.

She also does History and English.

15-16 Years Old

2008-11-16T15:12:00.000-08:00

Whatever happened before, this year, with help I have managed to sustain my ragged little banner that says Father on it.

When May is cold I heat the house, get coats. I prepare warming meals that take hours to cook. At work I ‘slog’.

I retell the stories she has forgotten from her very young childhood. There’s an old folk song she wants me to sing about conscription into the army. I pretend I can’t remember which one she means. Make her sing some of it.

I know every single word of those songs. I remember every story I have read from to make her go to sleep. And she has started asking about all of them. Is it me or her that needs to bring all these things up now?

There didn’t seem to be time for them before.

“I will never forget those songs” The list is faded now, but still makes my little flag brightish again.

New family tradition: Regular days out, every Sunday. May humours us by pretending she doesn’t want to come, but has a good time when we get there. She’s become aware of this idea that whatever we do as a family can be passed off as kitsch. As far as her friends are concerned, she comes on visits with us to be ironic.

She always brings this reedy boy along. Danny. A friend of hers. Divorced parents. Believes my family is the greatest family on earth. He’s funny, he makes May laugh till she can’t breath. I can’t keep up with him, so I patronise him. I tell people

“He’s a good kid”

Her mother has taken up Kabuki theatre for real. She must immerse herself totally as Warrior. It’s not the same as method acting or preparing for a part, she isn’t even in a play. She doesn’t even belong to a group. She has a kind of guru who schools her everyday in the behaviour and role of the Warrior in ancient Kabuki theatre, she obeys him vigorously. She must never remove her makeup. Maybe I can’t see her actual face still but it’s better than nothing.

“For you.” What a face! What a woman!

14-15 Years Old

2008-11-15T17:57:00.000-08:00

“We’ve called this intervention to talk about your sexual identity.” The ginger face of my GCSE Chemistry teacher.

Presumably my daughter called it. Interventions are something she has seen on television. She isn’t sure what’s going on, but she’s got people here, sitting on a long sofa. Their faces are familiar from school faculties. Supermarkets. It feels like a joke.

“My sexual what?” I try laughing. It doesn’t catch.

A portrait of May’s mother: She’s wearing the make-up of a Japanese Kabuki theatrical warrior. She’s smiling, her makeup is exquisite.

Only May has a normal face. She also has breasts and I’ve been told by her mother that she has periods and pubic hair. She says

“What’s the matter with you?”

How am I supposed to cope with periods and pubic hair?

“Do you have sex with men?”

This question was asked by a relative I can’t place. The relative is wearing a rubber mask of Abraham Lincoln.

“Next to motorways?”

May’s mother’s makeup is amazing. Fierce. Still. Anonymous. I think she finds this almost as sickening and ‘funny’ as me.

It’s a fancy dress party. I thought we were going to a fancy dress party.

“Wearing a costume helps us to express ourselves better. You can be open here.”

I’ve been hijacked at a Halloween fancy dress party. My daughter is distressed by my behaviour and the bundle of rags. These are who she has assembled to save me from madness.

I’m dressed in the gown of a Chinese Priest. I have two thin moustaches that worm from under my nose. Silk eyepatch.

“Something has gone badly wrong.”

One of the people has got his hand on my daughter’s thigh. He’s a colleague, eighteen years old, in the costume of a sequoia.

“Do you work nights?”

He’s not listening to me. Someone in this collection of ghouls is saying a list of things that women, especially young women fantasise about.

“Your daughter is becoming a woman. Naturally you feel threatened (I really do). Running away was a coping mechanism.”

Soon I have sent them all home. There’s just May and her mother.

My daughter is becoming a woman. Apparently I needed help accepting this.

13-14 Years Old

2008-11-13T18:00:00.000-08:00

Discovered. Early this year, after weeks of silence from my daughter, who makes no sense to me. Who’s approval I virtually depend on to exist, I finally snapped.

Her Mother was absent at Christmas. I still keep finding strands from the cheap tinsel I must have bought when I failed to find the traditional family decorations.

“You’re raping the tree!” My daughter says rape a lot.

“There’s so much garlic – it gives you rape breath!” She recommends her friends don’t eat my cooking. Which she herself devours alone after evenings out. I think she smokes drugs.

I tried fooling myself that I can accept May is a casual drug user. Would it be better if she got stoned and told her friends she loves my cooking? Probably.

In any case they were barely around. Without them there’s just me and my unstained clothes, going quietly insane in front of the drawer and wondering who else on Earth would sabotage their own fantasy so savagely as to give themselves an imaginary drug addict daughter and a wife (is she a wife?) who cannot show me her face.

So I vanished too. Leaving only the home behind, a fridge for May to get food from. Endless folded and washed clothing. Some money. I tried to leave enough of me behind for her to function. I left a note about how she might feel if she hears anyone else say Rape as much as she does. I try to leave her some way of contacting me.

“Wish you were here” I tell her.

They must have called me back because the next time I saw them I was at the door, in women’s clothes. I was wearing perfume from the Weimar Republic. A sexy bowler hat. Fishnets!

I was holding in my arms a bundle of rags, begging them to know

“Where is Ben? He left me! He left me! Here is his Son!”

My son is a bundle of rags. He has no human features or a brain. I’m gibbering into the face of my stoned daughter, with my eye patch on, in a bad Castillian accent. I have been gone an entire year. They barely noticed.

12-13 Years Old

2008-11-12T16:19:00.000-08:00

The boyfriend wasn’t a myth. His name is Wyatt. Paul Wyatt. I call him by his last name because I sense it is my job to be aloof.

Wyatt was invited around for his tea. He brought a small china dog as a present for May, and he was wearing a white woolly jumper with red diamonds on it. Was he taking the piss? He looked like his mother wearing those clothes.

We checked him for signs of puberty. There were none visible. A high voice. Production of sperm unlikely. So far so good! After mains, we left them in the kitchen to eat ice cream and shake.

May’s mother listened to them.

“What are they talking about?”

She didn’t know. They were mutes.

I wondered if my daughter will grow up to be socially awkward, maybe never have a boyfriend. That would be great for me.

Or just have boyfriends like Wyatt which would be bad.

Wyatt is a musical sensation, he plays tenor saxophone like a tiny, white Lester Young. When May’s mother found out about him, I had to watch the back of her head while she invited him to come round and play.

“He’s like a tiny, white Lester Young” she was excited. She didn’t know about my intense jealousy towards any child who can play a musical instrument.

I have no musical talent. I have no rhythm. My only good dances take place in puddles, under the cover of dirty puddle rain.

I only like musicians who are dead because I have no aspiration to be dead, so I am not jealous of them.

I really love Lester Young, but I tried to forget him while I sat and watched Paul fucking Wyatt styling his bebop in my house. I noticed with glee that May was embarrassed by him, hated how impressed her mother was.

“You’re on your way out Paul Wyatt. My socially incapable daughter wants rid of you” He can’t hear me, I’m saying it behind my hand.

“And you’re nothing like as good as Lester Young.”

The stained clothing has stopped. I can account for all of my time. No more affair! Think it's made me bitter.

11-12 Years Old

2008-11-06T09:31:00.000-08:00

Newfound confidence this year and an interest in my appearance. I bought a hat, I bought it at a festival I went to with 'The Girls'. 'The Girls' are my daughter and her mother, that’s what I call them now I have confidence. I lift them up and do little twirls, without even shaking. With my confidence I order from the menu without stuttering. I say “I am proud of you” without sounding like a tearful sop.

My confidence is false.

It is founded on happiness that comes from an affair I seem to be having. The affair, which is hidden even from me as a sacred mystery, is marked by long tracts of time during which I vanish completely. Returning with stains on my clothes – wine, expensive gravy, meat? Messy stuff. I smell of alien perfumes that could have come from the Weimar Republic.

In the room with the drawer looking at my filthy clothes, silently erasing some mark and thinking

“Someone is making me happy”

To disguise my secret invisible life of happiness I keep telling The Girls I am doing well at work. That I love them so much. Who knows – I might not even be lying. It's not as though they'll confront me (I cannot handle confrontation). It’s not even clear there’s anything going on.

Still they can probably tell that I’m not being normal, but that’s ok. They’re getting along fine with each other, always out of ear shot, waiting for me to catch up, but then moving on before I can join in. Over dinner they give each other silent coded looks that are only punctuated by the continued laughter at my silly jokes. At my hat that I bought:

Brushed leather. Dark Brown. Cowboy Style.

I wear it whenever I go wherever I go in order to come back so sated and invulnerable. Covered in stains.

This year May told us she has a boyfriend. She doesn’t really discuss it with me. I have given her over eighteen hundred pounds in “pocket money”. It’s possible my affair is going to bankrupt us all through guilt-spending and clandestine visits to the launderette.

My happiness costs more than anyone else’s.

10-11 Years Old

2008-11-03T01:02:00.001-08:00

“I’m so tired.” Our daughter has the nerve to tell us. She’s trying to avoid playing the violin we bought her. She’s always trying to avoid playing it.

I secretly hope she never learns to play it.

I have noticed that she is learning our weaknesses now, setting us up to argue with one another, aware like a wolf is aware if its prey is slow or easily fatigued. She weighs up each request for something and then chooses which parent to ask.

She asks for a lot of crap. She asks difficult permission. These things will get worse, I know they will, but at the moment it seems quite innocent. She wants money for garish accessories. Permission to see a friend after school.

These negotiations have depleted all other chit-chat.

At the dinner table she eats in silence. Once, over some stew that she wasn’t enjoying (none of us were) she looked at me, and her beginning-of-the-universe pupils gave me a glimpse of our world. It was nothing. Our family that I created suddenly was a little dead black tree alone in a desert.

“We ought to get a dog.” We were so lonely.

A picture of the dog we got: It is “Large Breed” according to the dog food bag. It is untameable. Pisses indiscriminately. Famished at all times. The master of my house.

It never gets tired, pads around at night looting all food, making toxic gas and disruptive noises. It loves May like a daughter, steals money from my wallet for her. Barks over unpalatable details of her evening plans, bites my hands if I say anything embarrassing. Barks until her mother abandons chastisement.

We waited until the dog ate the violin before May’s mother and I took it to the executioners. I showed the bites on my hands. They assured us it would be a quick death.

May was relieved that the dog and the violin were gone. She showed me some maths she had got 100% for.

To alleviate the loneliness of our home, I put on the radio in every room. May has friends round and they change the channels.

None of us feel guilty about the dog.

9-10 Years Old

2008-11-02T13:19:00.000-08:00

Reconciliation came at a price. I am now blind in one eye.

It probably started with a fight between May’s mother’s suitors. Things got ugly, so to speak, and round they came, to me, to cower with me from the violence. Not cowering, I stood proudly by windows keeping watch (ready to duck away at any moment).

There may not have been a fight. It could have been flooding. There were heavy rains this year.

In any case, while I kept watch at the windows, the rains hammered into being some tribal new me. I wanted to remind my little family again about joy. About Me.

“Who wants dinner? I’ll get us something to eat. Your favourites!”

No one listened really, they were regretting having come, but I didn’t seem to care. I would provide No Matter What.

“Don’t.”

But I went out. I didn’t faff. This was not a gesture but a reality. Clutching paper-wrapped food, they watched my drenched return. Both of them vigilant by the window, they saw no danger, but instead me doing a silly dance in the rain.

May, embarrassed but almost comfortable finally, rolled her eyes. The silhouette mother hands on hips. I could hear her shouting

“Get inside! Bloody man!” Not quite angry

I didn’t come inside but kept dancing. Eventually May’s mother came out to get the food but I held onto her hand and she danced too, with her hair over her face and May came too and took the food tutting loudly and went inside to present it nicely on plates. She kicked the door shut, breaking the already failing lock.

We were stuck outside. May was stuck inside and suddenly Nearly Ten wasn’t so old any more. She wailed freely with the prima claustrophobia of her age.

I almost managed the easy climb to the front window. Almost reached. Instead I fell and spiked myself badly on a redundant garden cane.

While I was in hospital there was reconciliation talk. May showed off at school about:

“My Dad’s half blind. He’s had a break down!”

A bizarre father is hard currency in pre-adolescent bragging.

May is proud that I have no depth perception now.

8-9 Years Old

2008-11-02T12:19:00.001-08:00

A lost year. Unable to cope with the continued absence of my daughter and her mother I lost much of my world to darkness. I can see only the drawer with its unspeakable envelope, the mirror, and the fridge from which I constantly eat.

In the mirror: I am wearing a fake Italian moustache and a straw Chinese hat. In my pocket there is a dry ladybird and at my breast a squalid poppy. There is a world outside of this, I know because May still comes here for “custody”, which we both try to enjoy.

I remove the hat and moustache before she arrives, I hurry around the house, everything is clean, everything folded neatly.

At this age May has become contrary. I try to remind her of the things that last week were her favourite. Sweets, some pyjamas, a character from a television programme. Wrong, wrong wrong. At the beginning of each visit I spend a few hours being wrong.

Then a few hours of silence, inexplicably nervous suddenly for this dwarf's attention. I made her (up) and now I virtually have a heart attack every time I ask her a question.

By the end of the final day of her visit, I think I have a grasp on the situation, and have imparted unexpected wisdom. We say good bye sad and relieved. Full of dread for next week’s visit.

Eventually I had a collapse. I didn't move, or open my eyes or eat. I didn’t answer the door when May came round. I ignored hours of knocking. Tears unheeded by me for the first time seeped under the invisible door and dried into powder.

With my eyes closed I was reduced to imagining (how pathetic!) that I might be happy. I pictured us in a huge home. Wide doors. Pretty colours. The endless sound of laughter and hurr-ah!

But I couldn’t imagine the future without some evil befalling us all. An affair. Finances. A death! I am incapable of even make-believe contentment, even for a few days.

Eventually I answer the door, there is no one there, but a post card on the mat:

“Wish you were here.” It says. Me too.

7-8 Years Old

2008-10-31T04:37:00.000-07:00

No holiday this year. Instead: Trial separation!

It must have been mutually agreed because I helped them move out. We were very civilised and they didn’t go far, so I could share in the custody of May.

We agreed we could see other people. I tried to see women, but the women I could see now I couldn’t see their faces. I couldn’t see their hair or their arms, legs, bodies. I couldn’t see anything at all. I saw instead the strong arms of the men she could see.

I saw 2 pairs. A young pair (a fling) and a pair belonging to an old flame, Herculean both. They bring gifts for May, when it’s my turn for custody she spends a lot of time demonstrating them.

I talk to the school in fits: "This must be a terrible strain on her."

I go down there.

“It’s natural for you to worry.”

“I’m not worried”

Shivering.

“May obviously knows she is very much loved.”

She certainly has lots of presents.

Suddenly appalled by these fun-time Santas I decided to teach May cooking. First Bolognese with hilarious Italian accent, producing rivers of apple juice through our noses.

Then tikka massala, no accent (risky move during trial separation)

She is a gifted chef. Her focus and attention to detail are extraordinary as she writes the ingredients and method in her diary. Adds more yoghurt, more salt.

“No one is allowed to read my diary.” Dead serious

“Fair enough.”

“How d’you spell Spaghetti?”

I thought hard before stealing the diary. I was convinced that it would hold the truth about her mother. That there are no Arms. That separation was a silly idea. In the diary there must be a way for my family to be happy. I stole it after she fell asleep.

The stolen diary is pink with a ridiculous giraffe on the front. Who gave her this crap? I open the first page: Blank. Second: Blank. I remain alone because the diary is completely empty except for homework about Orca whales and two recipes that I have just taught her.

With a pencil:
“No Matter What. I will never read your diary” Rubbed out after.

6-7 Years Old

2008-10-30T12:01:00.001-07:00

My daughter’s first holiday abroad this year. We went on a plane. I am not afraid of flying, but I kept thinking to myself

“You’re daughter is thirty thousand feet above the earth”

It seemed an irresponsible height to have her at, in a plane that may not even exist.

In the run up to our departure I put May on shelves of progressive height. On the fridge. A banister. I took her to visit a friend who lives on the top floor of some flats. I lifted her up so she could see the world below. Carefully, so even if I vanished suddenly she would still only land on the balcony and be fine.

She seemed happy about all of these heights. May is happy at school too, we had a parent evening to prove it. I felt like I might do something terrible during the meeting, accidentally imply that May’s mother is a bad parent. Do a fart. The teacher doesn’t seem nervous at all, even though he’s a new teacher. Even though he’s a man, he’s not worried what people think.

The teacher tells me all these things that May likes, that I didn’t know she likes.

“May is very helpful to other children, she’s very generous.”

I am proud but I wish I was the one telling people about my daughter’s generosity.

“She’s so wise. I think that’s what makes her kind” I say. He nods. Moves on.

On the way home I try to explain about May’s wisdom, her mother agrees. She told me she hadn’t known her to be generous, not more than other children.

When we arrived on holiday her mother and I gave May lots of change and walked her past beggars in the hope she might perform acts of generosity.

To make it real, we left her increasingly isolated in seething market squares, fists full of cash so we could observe with our own eyes this miracle of benevolence.

Nothing happened. Still, everyone we met we kept telling how generous May was.
Beggars stalked May a bit in the end because she flaunted our coins.

We wrote postcards to ourselves:

“Wish you were here.” They said.

5-6 Years Old

2008-10-29T12:01:00.000-07:00

There was a disaster. Whatever job I had been doing all this time suddenly sacked me. I found myself for a long time at unspeakably loose ends, which I created for myself by avoiding application forms.

None of the jobs around were what I wanted to ‘Be’. I had to put food on the table, but did I want my daughter to have to tell her friends at school that I was not a Fireman or Doctor but a clerical assistant? After a week of rejecting all vacancies, I couldn’t look May in the eyes. They were too bright with her frightening industry at school.

“She works so hard!” Her mother said to me, not meaning to be cruel. Not meaning to rub it in that even my (alleged) daughter was more productive than me.

While I lurked alone in our house, May became a factory for Art, half-baked languageless Handwriting and massive objects of Numeracy. All of which were held onto our fridge door by magnets shaped like letters.

On the No Matter What List I secretly wrote:

“I will never tear up all your paintings that make me look so lazy”

Humiliated, I began to fill in the forms. All of the forms. I applied for every single job and then each completed application was given its place, magnetted to the fridge door, before being sent off.

I took the first job I was offered, it was Nights. Working Nights I only saw May while she was asleep. Strange toys tripped me up as I crept about our silent, still slumbering house.

Chinese dolls I had never seen. Chopsticks covered in play-dough.

One morning when May had been roused early by her mother, she bowed to me.

“We are Chinese now. Have sam tee” She told me. I had some tea. I feared greatly that I was neglecting May. Or maybe her real father is Chinese.

After eight months I had to stop working Nights because I “violently insulted” a co-worker of Chinese origin. They moved me to Days again, less money, more sanity.

This year May painted 300 paintings that contained our family standing in the sunshine. No moons! So much wisdom.

4-5 Years Old

2008-10-28T11:46:00.001-07:00

Nursery School. Playgroup too. This year May as been spending more and more time away from home. It has left me wondering what I am supposed to do all day. Slightly lonely I pick up her toys and put them in a toy box, there are so many toys I can’t believe it.

I can’t remember buying half of them, someone else must have. I’ve tried to ask May’s mother where this or that doll came from, but she’s so tired from work all day. It’s not an issue I press because it seems indulgent. From time to time she still touches me on the back of the hand, which means:

“We’re still ok. Try not to be so frightened.”

May’s hair changes colour almost on a daily basis, bizarre tonal shifts caused by the weather. All of the divorced grandparents agree that the sun is doing it. It’s good to see them all getting along again, but I keep thinking it’s incredible how changeable this hair is. It doesn’t seem natural to me.

One night I woke up in a fever, gripped with the sudden notion that someone at the nursery school was changing the colour of May’s hair on purpose.

I dropped her off and waited outside the nursery, trying to find a window to look in through. To spy on May, to make sure they weren’t dyeing her hair against my wishes. Unfortunately the nursery school I imagined I sent my daughter to had no windows which faced the street. Her activity there was hidden from me and the best I could do was collect her early.

I didn’t go back. Instead I tried making the most of the time we spent together. Making them both laugh as often as possible: Laughter is an indication that we must be happy.

I was given comfort by autumn with its rapid changes from green to yellow, brown, red. On many walks in the woods I would hang back and watch the miraculous implacable colours of my daughter and her mother’s hair in the rich October sun.

May starts school next year, she tells me she is very excited about it.

“School? Hu-rrah!” I say.

3-4 Years Old

2008-10-27T11:53:00.000-07:00

She burnt herself on a kettle I left on the floor, it happened months ago and the burn still weeps regularly. We bandage it up, like the nurse taught us to, the back of May’s mother’s head is harsh while she applies gently the bandage to our daughter’s arm. I get the impression I will never be able to make her turn around and show me her face.

The kettle was on the floor because I was using boiling water to kill ants that were overrunning our kitchen, which is largely of white and red tiles, the black ants seemed evil against the background of white and red. Some on May’s yellow plate seemed less monstrous, but died all the same.

May seems happier this year, since the burn, which the doctor’s voice tells us will never fully disappear, the fits of anger that plagued us have stopped. Her happiness makes my guilt at having burnt her worse. I check my list, it doesn’t specifically say

“I won’t burn you on a kettle”

But the existence of a list implicates me all the same. The imagined sound of my daughter’s pain was horrible. I desperately wanted to open the drawer and the letter containing my paternity test. Maybe she isn’t mine. Maybe I can get out of this!

“Kids hurt themselves all the time”

A voice, a fiend of mine I think, he has no face. Light emanates from under his neat hair. I don’t care what this man might look like. I find it hard to take him seriously, even though he is right.

“Does your child have a permanent burn-scar?”

He’s already vanished.

We bought lots of different new clothes for May this year, there were frocks, Wellington boots, stiff coats and dungarees you wouldn’t believe. I must have worked hard to get the money.

May can talk a bit now.

“How are you May?”

“I’m Fine thank you.”

I can’t bring myself to hear “I’m fine Daddy.” What if I’m not?

In one of the shops May expressed an interest in a yellow hardhat, on the label it said: 6-8 years. I bought it any way in the interests of the fontanel.

2-3 Years Old

2008-10-26T10:09:00.000-07:00

May has discovered anger. She knows the difference now between being upset, hungry, frustrated. She knows when she feels hard done by, learning too quickly all the different ways life can conjure to make a person feel this way. I hope she has noticed joy too.

Her mother and I have tried hard to show her joy. When it rains we splash about, and do dances. I pull grotesque faces and we laugh at my ugliness. May’s grandparents come to visit, one divorcee after another into our house and hold hands and try to feel joy.

When I had a Grandmother she would say this No Mater What:

“Oh Hu—rrah! Hu-rrah!”

Regardless of the injustice or agonising injury, she would look for a reason to announce, with her arms up to heaven:

“What a nasty graze. But Oh hurrah! Ointment!”

She never troubled herself with hiding her amused exhaustion with trying to entertain us so abruptly. Her simian mouth curled always into something wry when she announced the miracle of ointment, as if it mattered! While we howled on regardless until the agony dwindled of its own accord.

Hurrah! was added to our list. How ridiculous we all are together; my baby and her mother, and me shouting Hurr-ah on the floor of our small hot living room.

I hope I was good at Hurrah! There are days now when May looks a little more like me. Others when she looks more like her mother. She often looks like neither of us. Her pupils are pitch black universes. There’s always food on her mouth. Her fat arms are thinning out.

During the final weeks of this year I looked in a mirror and found that I don’t look much like me.

I don’t know what her mother looks like. But I am in love with the back of her head, and her laugh which I know is happening because I am laughing. And I can hear

Hurrah! Rain!

Coming from the other side of her head when we splash in the puddles, trying to give a demonstration of Joy.

My baby May can sit up straight, burble, waddle and has better than average reflexes.

1-2 Years Old

2008-10-25T07:33:00.000-07:00

Her name is May. We named her as soon as she was born and this year, more than last year we have said her name out-loud and to ourselves more than any other word. May has become a spell that keeps all of the parts of our bodies and minds together. She is the subject of every story. The butt of every joke. The excuse not to care about anyone else very much .

May’s favourite colour is red we think. I come in from the garden often with poppies or a ladybird, anything red to impress my family.

Delighted to report the fontanel is in tact and day by day her precious brain is a little safer.

Vision is getting better. Each time she blinks or recovers from sleep or sneezing the world resolves for her and tapestries out in a colourful dawn, shaded by her dark, dark green shit, of which she is unashamed.

Her understanding of her body is growing all the time, her sensitivity to the emotions of the adults who hold her or hoot nonsense in her company is uncanny.

“The unopened envelope is still in the drawer. It will stay there forever” This reassures us both on the days when I feel brave.

She senses the steady growth of the world she inhabits, while her parents’ world shrinks. No longer referring to themselves as I but We.

On the list of promises this year, we have added: No Matter What. It’s at the top of the list, to strengthen the things we promise.

No Matter What, I will never open that envelope.

Her mother touched my hand, and I could tell from the back of her head that she did it because she is happy about May. The touch on the hand says: You helped me make a good baby.

Swollen with pride I venture to give the mother of my child a name. She seems to have dark hair, but is so often silhouetted it could be a trick of the light. I consider where she might go in the long daytimes during which our child swells with wisdom and guile. May has steadily improving grip and coordination.

0-1 Years Old

2008-10-24T11:53:00.000-07:00

My new daughter is no longer inside a person. She’s out here, a raging mess! Nurses, midwives, gynaecologists, her mother, me all have accelerated heartbeats as she comes out here. She senses the blood travelling faster around our bodies, it over-oxygenates us, my unemployable limbs shake. Her arrival, like other safe deliveries, is a relief and a joy, the drum beats plateau and then slow down as all our adrenaline dissipates.

Careful to support her head, she is held in adult arms and whispered to and goo-goo’d at. A list comes to me of things I’ll do to protect her, I just invented her, I have not had the usual nine months to prepare for all this. At the top of the list is a resolute promise to guard her fontanel.

She doesn’t exactly look like me. Her eyes are fiercely blue, with blacker pupils than normal. She has none of my features; she looks similar to her mother, who is lying with her face away from us. She is happy, pleased with her success in becoming a part of nature.

“I won’t let anything happen to your fontanel” I say.

She is in the shape of a long bean, still squashed into a shape that suits being inside a womb. She will change shape. Her skull will grow to protect her vulnerable brain inside.

Her experiences add-up fast. She hears all of the noises of our life for the first time. Doorbell, man next door who can’t play the saxophone yet, phone, prattling, people who come round, intoxicating noise.

During month four things are uneasy between me and her mother. I wheel my daughter to the park, she smells everything life in a park has to offer. She doesn’t seem to like it much, but is still very stimulated. Words fail me when I try to announce something to her undeveloped brain.

“You are the most beautiful and perfect person in the world. I love you. Never die (she will die in less than 71 days time). I implore you never to be sick.”

She senses I am crying.

“I’m getting a paternity test.” She won’t tell anyone, she doesn’t understand what I’m saying.

I May Never Have Children

2008-10-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

I have worried recently that I might be destined not to have children. It's something I assumed would happen to me. I assumed that being a ninja would also happen to me. It won't.

I'm not even sure I want one (I definitely do).

To find out, I am imagining having a child.

I predict my child will live for 71 years. That's Seventy One days starting from tomorrow that I will write a year of my child's life. each year will be 365 words long. I'm not going to do leap years, probably.

I am shaking a bit. This bit is me outside the waiting room. Someone here has cigars, maybe. Big day tomorrow.

Russian(?) Bride Beat Sheet Pt 1 of 4

2008-10-22T10:06:00.000-07:00

He orders the bride

(12-18 weeks)

The Bride is twelve.

He has no choice but to take her home

He feeds her chips from his chip shop, which is called Mister Chips.

He is forced to give up the “wedding bed” he had prepared for the wife

The next day he makes constant phone calls but can’t get through, he tries to entertain the girl.

Gloria comes home. She is with a skinny man, her pimp. She warns the bride not to eat the chips, but she loves them. It’s about all that keeps her happy.

The Bride wants to know who the man in the posters is –

It’s Gregory Peck. They watch one of his old movies together. The contrast of the little girl and the rough old man and the dashing Mr Peck on the screen seems beautiful to the pimp.

The Bride starts vomiting from too many chips. A drunk Gloria is forced to help him clean her up and put her to bed. She throws a tantrum.

The Bride and Gloria grow closer.

After the girl is asleep, Gloria tells Chips that she can’t pay him the rent, but she will pay him in kind. In kind means sex, as the skinny Pimp explains.

The presence of the little girl forces him to decline. “Pay me when you’ve got the money”. Gloria is very sexy.

He has to go to the bank, the Bride goes with him, her skimpy attire embarrasses him, he takes her shopping for clothes.

At the bank there’s very little to pay in.

There is an answer phone message – the wedding is all arranged, Mister Chips calls them back but he can’t get through. No matter, they are coming to perform the ceremony any how, he will explain everything to them then.

Some men arrive, one of them is an ordained minister. They have a false passport for the bride, which says she is sixteen.

“Now she’s legal!” Says the one who is ordained.

Chips tells them that the deal is off. They refuse to refund him, he doesn’t care. He says he will buy her a flight back himself.

They say there is no need for that. And they take the girl away.

He fails to stop them.

Gregory Peck is on in his house for nine days straight before he buys a ticket to Russia. They sounded Russian.

He boards a plane.

Bear witness

2008-10-20T16:29:00.000-07:00

"I couldn't help overhearing, and I had to come and find out"

Find out what? There was no real answer to this. Just a way of saying "I am alone, drunk and I want company". I've done it myself, who hasn't?

We had been talking about whoknowswhat for what must have been three hours, sitting outside because we were smoking and now we were finally inside, I had very pink hands. This end of the night was supposed to be reserved for our welcome back in to the pub, a spot of warmth before hometime.

I was announcing something, on the verge of concluding this or that of extreme importance. It's not impossible I was stating the necessity of a Boon in a modern story being written by someone.

I had almost concluded when we were suddenly stepped in between. I think he was faking an accent. Perturbed by his forwardness I took it upon myself to try and belittle the intruder for the amusement of my friend. I was put out because I knew I would never now be able to reach my conclusion about Boon in modern storytelling.

He kept saying "They're trying to Out us."

He meant throw us out of the pub. I intentionally misrepresented his claim, giving him saucily to understand that I had been outed long ago as a heterosexual. Nothing I could do about it. Everyone knows, I told him.

"I hope your girlfriend knows"

I don't have a girlfriend, I explained, sidestepping the complicated and painful reasons for my solitude (stupidity). I went on to tell him I was too fussy.

I have a strict system, I said, any prospective partner must adhere to a strict system of examination. If they fail on any matter, then I cannot consider abiding their company.

They must be able to count to only a certain number, and no farther, I explained. They ought to speak many languages. Only dye their hair a certain number of times a year. Cook.

"I've been married to my wife for thirteen years. We've got three kids. She can only count to three. She's a bitch"

He told us in his fake accent (South African?)

Amazed that he was keeping up, I pushed onwards, determined to convolute in a hurry.

It's a three dimensional model, I babbled, My perfect woman would, when put to the test, present a score sheet in three dimensions that accurately embodied the skinned and polished spinal arrangement of an adult male Brown Bear. If she were too meek, the bear would tilt and be unsuccessful as a predator. Too fond of outlandish colours or patterns and the bear she cast would be prone to lurching and possibly susceptible to urinary tract diseases.

I felt everything else become silent. I gabbled like this for almost fifteen minutes, hoofing point after point of weird misogynism deep into the outer atmosphere of the ball.

He kept laughing and bawling "that's fucking true. I like you. I fucking like him!"

He slapped my friend on the shoulder. He offered us ragged, chewed up cigarettes. I couldn't stop talking about bears.

While I looked at him, taking the opportunity to observe the lines and blackness of his eyes, like a natural history exhibit of taxidermy and criminal phrenology, I realised I was talking about him.

My perfect man in a pub should be shorter than me but terribly dangerous. I might expect him to offer a lift home, but only if it might cost me my life. He would be incapable of counting to four.

My perfect stranger will allow me to insult his intelligence and that of his delightful wife with any inane fancy I happen to conjure. He will let me ogle his fat meat head and touch his arm and slap his back and fondle the back of his smooth white hand without ever ceasing to smile and protractedly blink.

My perfect stranger will have the trunk and the sorrowful posture of a bear. For fifteen entire minutes he will give me gifts and allow me to confess to him dreadful conceits of sexism. He won't judge, he will fart-while-laughing and painfully slap my unamused friend. Then, when I am bored, He'll go. when I patronise him a good bye he will struggle to stop it seeming over, but only a little. Then he will accept graciously by feeblest and most awkward excuses for leaving.

My perfect Ball is round and invincible. He is a one night stand. He is Father. No joke, he is my unborn, unbearable child.

Sweatshop

2008-10-16T04:55:00.000-07:00

There is a real life sports equipment stockist called Sweatshop. Perhaps you've already heard about them, but I just heard today. Guess what they sell!

They sell leading brand sports equipment. They do it as though it's the most normal thing in the world. They don't care what people think. No one can stop them.

No mention is made of any ethical policy issues on their homepage. I am so amazed that Sweatshop exists I might try and get a job there and tell everyone who comes into the shop:

We're not joking. That's the real name of the shop. We spend thousands proudly advertising that our sports shop, that sells all leading brand sports equipment made in Christ Knows Where, is called Sweatshop.

I'm going to shake them by the hand. I'll show them around the Sweatshop. Palatial. Clean. Stinking of exquisite polycarbons. I will elaborate frantically on the sporting achievements they will certainly ascend to if they buy their goods from a Sweatshop. Sell them Nikes. Sell them nightwear by Reebok.

I'll tell them why I love my job working in Sweatshop so much: Sex.

Sweat is sexy. Shopping is sexy. Sweatshop shopping: Sexy.

Look at this Airtex t-shirt, I'll say. Just wearing it makes me want to take it off again immediately. That's how sexy a sweatshop is. This place is my girlfriend. This place is my life!

I can't wait for my new life inside a Sweatshop. Instead of an application form I intend to send a raunchy love letter.

Dear Sweatshop,

I can't sleep. The name of your shop means I can't sleep. I can barely exist. I can't quite believe you exist. If you don't return my love I don't know what I will do. Will you be my girlfriend? Or if you want to take it slow, maybe I could just hang around on the escalators with you.

I've been working on making you a human body. Or a plan to hollow myself out so I could be a shop. I was going to call myself 'The Body Shop'. What do you think? Does that make me sound fat?

If you don't give me a job I will kill myself in your wheelie bins.

Extremely Aroused

Benjamin Ravenhill Pester (MA)

x

http://www.sweatshop.co.uk

There is a Mouse

2008-10-15T08:19:00.000-07:00

There is a mouse. Because of the mouse, we’re hunched up on chairs with our feet stuffed right up next to our ankles. It’s unbearable. Something needs to be done.

My job is to negotiate between departments to solve things like this. There are over 60 thousand employees here. It’s my job to make them all communicate with each other better. I understand when a person wants something. There is a mouse.

This is you grabbing the phone: Hello. There’s vermin down here! One ran over my foot! Mice yes. Rats – as big as your arse there are rats. Get the hell down here and fix it! Cardiff? (we are not in Cardiff) You useless prick!

This is me taking back the phone: Hello. Yes, as I was saying – there is a mouse here. It’s possible there are multiple mice. We need assistance because none of us is quite sure how to handle the mouse. Or mice as a general species. This is the Magazines.

On the other end of the line you are speaking. I don’t listen but carry on: I can hear you just fine, but please understand, we don’t want you personally. Yes, as I was saying we don’t want you personally to come here and stamp on mice. Exactly, you can’t. I need you to put me back through to building resources, so I can speak to them.

A number is recommended. The recommendation is void.

This is me persisting: Ah, yes, I knew you would say that. It’s ok, the thing is that’s your number. It goes through to the same department. Please put me through to the company internal HR department. It does exist. Ok, I’m going to tell you the number – write this down and then put me through. Are you listening? It’s 66873. Don’t make me explain how to use your phone.

This is you not grabbing the phone but seizing the silence:

MOUSE!

ok

2008-10-15T07:02:00.001-07:00

So I am still happy-ish about everything. I've uploaded some of my old work to see how it looks.

Mostly it looks long. Well, I'm probably going to add some shorter work soon.

I still feel like I am writing this just for me to read and imagine what it might be like if I was someone else reading it. It feels ok. Maybe because I like the idea of being someone else. Who would I be? I could be anyone. That's the fun.

Thanks to Andy for lending me a good picture while I save up for batteries for my digital camera.

x

Bee Keeping for Divorced Men

2008-10-15T02:43:00.000-07:00

I wrote this in 2006, but couldn't work on it since then. I am strangely compelled by the character though. He feels like a he might be vengeful. A lot of people seem to talk about bee eating. I am desperate to find out why we all do that.

I keep the wives in the cupboards that actually are boxes in the garden, I have no need for them. No use. A terrible wind blows and blows and blows all through the day. It gusts between my legs and under my study door. Through the window I can see all the little wooden cupboards on the lawn where I keep the wives shut up tight. Eight there are. When eight wives have left you, you know you are a failure. Or a success. It can be admirable for a man to be so single minded and so stubborn that he can literally drive eight women to the edge of madness and hatred, just by putting himself in their lives. So each time one left I put her things in a little wooden cupboard in the garden.
After a while, I decided to turn the first one into a beehive. And when the second one went I put her things in a new cupboard and I ate a bee from Wife One everyday for a year. Sometimes a bee mixed in with the honey. Sometimes alive.

I spent a year eating bees and promising that when Wife Three came along I would be a good husband and maybe we could grow old together and, when we died ask one of the children to put us in a cupboard together and fill it with prize-winning honey bees. After the year was up I started courting again and I turned the second cupboard into a beehive. “How glorious – beehives!” exclaimed wife number three as she looked at wife number 1 the old beehive and wife number 2 the more recently made beehive. She had such a lovely hat on that day so I asked her

– would you like to marry me?

I asked her in a much more charming way than that. As you can imagine I was quite the proposer by then: Still young enough to be cheeky, not too young to be serious. And I had a very deep voice from eating all those bees. My Prime.

Wife number Nine is buzzing about in the house, faffing over something I expect. That wind keeps on blowing and blowing. Steps will soon have to be taken. I’m thinking about what to do. I’ve already reached inside my little box of bees and can feel the labour of the worker as he struggles between my front teeth. I hold him in face first and let him wriggle around, his sting zapping uselessly against my teeth.

If he were longer by a millimetre even, I dare say he’d get some gum. I tighten my grip and listen to the delicious frantic soar in the buzz. From buzz to zziiizzz.

I loosen again and it slows. The wind whistles again through the study. Has she left a door open? In my rage I let my tongue come up and soak the bees face. Although it’s happening inside my mouth I can see it happening. I remember that’s how it felt the first time I had kissed someone. Really kissed them. I could see our tongues meeting on the inside of our mouths. Wet, pink and soaked in burning red sunlight filtered through the vainy walls or our cheeks. Like being in a womb. Or an alien spaceship.

I can see him now cleaning his face off, cleaning his eyes. I crunch through, severing the sting (but not jettisoning all of the poison) and then one crunch with the rear molar to stun him on his way down my trachea. Perhaps he’ll struggle and upset my ulcer.

Maybe I could just go off somewhere? I creep over to the study door and peep out into the hall. The wind rushes right into the room and surrounds me. I feel a little bit sick. Wife (soon to be a beehive) number Nine is nowhere to be seen. Maybe she’s gone out into the garden already and become a new beehive all of her own volition. I get up and open the door to check. I stagger back under the weight of the gust that blows through and fall backwards, knocking over my little box of bees. I take a severe stinging from the few that I land on. It hurts but I’ve had it before many many times, what upsets me is the battle ground that gets left behind, such pointless deaths. And now, too dusty to eat.

I can’t quite explain why there have been so many wives. I don’t want any one running off with the fantasy that I am a “bad person”. I’m not even an adulterer. I rarely tell a lie and I try my best to be supportive of my friends. I am, as I have explained, a flagelistic sort of man. Bee eating aside I punish myself in many different ways for the ill treatment I seem accidentally to distribute amongst these women.

But I ask you: Is it really my fault? Of course the evidence is overwhelmingly against me, there’s no smoke without fire as the old saying goes and my garden buzzes, roars with the smoke-sound of 8 busy little bonfires. But I ask (a second time) is it really because of some barbarity I secrete? No. I am a gentle person. Kind even. Is it then because of a deformity that eventually drives women away? A hacking cough? The beginnings of a tail? Not in the slightest. I can safely say, safely command, that you bring on all your means of battery and barristry, beat my body and bombard my personality and you will find that my shape and character stand resolutely upright and well mannered. The truth is, and I am convinced of this, that wives and I just don’t satisfy one another.

I don’t mean sex. Sex is easy. I could go on, but I shall respect the privacy of the beehives and get back to why I cannot satisfy women in the more general and immediate sense.

She is definitely up to something. Airing the house I expect, all the windows open. All the doors. Letting in the “air”. I suppose the air I was getting used to, the air we were quietly making our own is no longer good enough. We must have new air in here!

-It’s beginning to get musty.

She says.

- Let some light in for god’s sake!

These are things that wives say. As though I live in a cave and I bopped them on the head one day and dragged them back here to the dark, still air. I’ll go and have a look in the garage a bit later. See if there’s any timber. Perhaps I’ll have a drink first. Perhaps, like other husbands, I will go and drink beer during the day while my wife replaces air into the lungs of our house. Stunning me with too much oxygen. Blowing me over.

Henry. At the pub they call me Henry as in Henry VIII on account of my many wives. It’s no secret. People respect me for it in some ways and call me a glutton for punishment in other ways.

- One’s bad enough for me, but I wouldn’t leave her.

The man who said this is an adulterer. A man whose extramarital sex takes place in carparks in exchange for money with boys younger than his eldest son. This man’s wife is unaware that he has contracted Chlamydia and other un-named sexual diseases and passed them onto her, dosing her gin and tonics with prescription anti-biotics in front of us, with a sheepish grin on his face and claiming

- Silly tart the other week’s given me the clap again.

Soon we’ll be at his AIDS related funeral I expect. Or syphilis.

- I come here because people don’t judge me.

He says this with a straight face. I do judge him.

The truth about job interviews

2008-10-15T01:52:00.000-07:00

I heard this conversation between what I took to be a TV producer talking with the director of their television programme on a train from London to Birmingham last year. I may have paraphrased. They were not articulate the entire time. Who is?

Prod: The thing is, when you’re interviewing, you get a first impression and then you just try to justify it I find. So if you like someone, you spend the entire time trying to justify liking them, and if you don’t then you spend all your time trying to justify not liking them.

Yesterday I ended up just deciding based on the sound of people’s names. It sounds awful, but there are some really boring names out there. Like, did I want to hire someone called Duncan?

I’m looking at his name on this list and saying to myself: Duncan. Duncan. Duncan.

Is this a name I can spend all day saying? I mean, it’s me that has to say it, not him. It’s me that looks ridiculous. He almost never has to say Duncan. I didn't even listen to him while he was talking. I was justifying how much I hated his name by the fact he has a voice I find it hard to listen to.

Dir: What about Sam?

Prod: Sam. You see Sam had a good name but it turned out she is a sentence finisher. You know, when people finish your sentences for you – and you end up trying to put in really unusual words just to get round it. I mean, I can’t sack her for that, but it’s not working out. I just don’t want her to get it right. She isn’t me. She can’t promote herself to being me by finishing my thoughts. It’s like as soon as I open my mouth it’s a race to the finish line with her. I’ve ended up saying the opposite of what I wanted to say, just so she is wrong.

Dir: Maybe you talk too slowly.

Prod: So what if I fucking do talk slowly? That’s my prerogative, it doesn’t mean I need someone to tell me what I’m thinking. Especially her.

Dir: Why especially her? What else is wrong with her?

Prod: Oh what that isn’t enough? You want more to be wrong with her?

Dir: I liked her. Also I think you do speak slowly so I can see why that would be frustrating.

Prod: Oh you can? Oh well ok then. That’s fine. Ok, let’s see. What else. What else.

Dir: I’m amazed you got it all written down!

Prod: You know I don't write anything down. Wait a second. Ok. I’ve got one! Ha! Right: Her fringe, she does this thing with her fringe. She kind of plays with it. She tucks it under or something. It makes her look like Docto Spock. I don’t know – but it drives me mental.

Ballad of the Dirty Chair

2008-10-15T00:27:00.000-07:00

This is a silent film script I wrote a while ago. It feels like it should be really easy to make, I think I plan to make it myself. I will definitely need help though!

INT. SHED. DAY

ROPE LOOM sits alone - he is lanky, clown faced and miserable. He stares at the light bulb that swings gently from the ceiling.

His shadow rocks sadly with the too-and -fro of the bulb.

The bulb goes out. The room is in momentary darkness. There are the sounds of clumsy shuffling.

Then the room is flooded with the summer's light from outside - Loom stands in the door way. Gazing at the spent bulb as it swings.

He places a rickety chair underneath the bulb and tries to reach up to take the bulb out – as he snatches it out his foot goes through the middle of the chair, he drops the bulb and it smashes.

He gets down from the chair and picks it up to examine the damage.

Loom's face halo'd by the ring of shattered wicker.

With a claw-hammer he smashes an innocent, fat piggy-bank. A load of nothingy tat spills out – he rummages and finds a plastic brontosaurus. Some fluff. With a long, dirty finger he moves his meagre collection of fragments around on the table.

He glances around the room - there is an old Victorian dress. A lipstick. And a sign with 5d written on it.

Loom sighs and then moves forward.

EXT. PARK. DAY

Loom strolls through the park - his huge blanched legs are freshly shorn and glisten slightly as though greased.

He is wearing the Victorian woman's dress - he would look ridiculous but for the peculiar grace of his lope.

As he walks he throws a few whorish winks and nods to the AMBLERS-BY.

EXT. BY A BENCH. DAY

An OLD FELLER sits on the bench - he turns to see Loom perched seductively next to him.

Loom is not infact sitting on the bench, but on the busted chair. He inflexes t'ward the sign that sits in front of him, poking from the ground like a pauper’s crucifice.

Old Feller gets up and takes a look at the sign. In lipstick, it bears the legend:

“Dutty Cher - Holiest vu - just 5d!”

Loom's dress is raised haughtily as though he might be on the toilet - it's clear that the view from underneath the chair would be deeply revealing.

Old Feller considers this and the price, head cocked. Loom flashes his most salacious look and rustles from side to side on his smutty roost.

He looks to his left - there's a woman dressed like Charlie Chaplin. From the side a bit of CHAPLIN's bare bum can be seen - concealed by the tails of her jacket.

Old Feller is obviously in a quandary. Loom is transfixed by Chaplin.

Old Feller makes his decision - he shrugs an apology to Chaplin who tuts and kicks the dust.

Old Feller plops some coins into Loom's repaired pig.

The sound of the coins rattles Loom back to life - Old Feller is already on his knees and crawling underneath the dirty chair for his peep.

EXT. BUMS EYE VIEW FROM 'NEATH THU CHAIR. DAY

The grass rustles and the chair rattles as Old Feller's aged head wriggles into view, eyes shut.

They squeeze tightly shut and then very slowly they open and a kind of glow passes over that old face as though he might be gazing at the very angels of God.

A massive grin invades his face and soon it conquers his entire head.

EXT. PARK. DAY

Old Feller runs gleefully into the park - transformed by the holy vu. Chaplin shakes her head as he passes her - she notices that Loom is staring at her - she curls her lip and turns her back, holding her tails firmly in place.

A crowd gathers around Loom - they over whelm him pushing in and bustling. Chaplin sees him and gives a despairing shake of her head - Loom looks so sad and defeated - she sighs and goes over to the crowd - she whistles - they turn.

She orders them into a line.

After a while she is collecting money and smiling in front of a perfectly straight line. Loom smiles at her - she gives him the very tiniest prologue of a smile but it lights up everything.

Loom is just staring at her - barely noticing the procession of punters rocking him as they clamber underneath the dirty chair.

EXT. PARK. DAY

Dusk, the last PUNTER finishes his go and gets up and mesmerised, staggers off.

Some litter blows through the empty park.

It's just Loom and Chaplin left - staring at each other doughy eyed - Loom gestures for her to have a go under the chair. She considers it for a moment and then gets underneath.

Looms face is one of apprehension - he holds his breath - looks at her legs in their badly fitting trousers, poking out in front of him from under the chair. She has adorable feet - which pigeon inwards in her black cardboard boots.

She gets up grinning - turns and shows him what's underneath her jacket tails.

His face is aglo as he looks at her bottom.

He gets up and takes her in his arms.

In the park, at sunset, Rope Loom dressed as a Victorian prostitute and a female Charlie Chaplin in crotchless trousers kiss each other -

It is unmistakably the first kiss of love.

INT. LOOM'S HOUSE. DAY

A new light bulb swings in Loom's dingy house, but it is not lit.

The smashed pig lies on the table having haemorrhaged a fortune of coins. Next to it are bread, cheese, a carafe, half full of red wine and a bunch of flowers.

As the swinging shadows dance about the room, cast by many candles, Rope and Chaplin are still kissing that lovers kiss.

FADE TO BLACK.

First

2008-10-15T00:12:00.000-07:00

I write scipts for plays, films and sometmies videogames. I also write stories and am currently writing a novel. Who isn't?

Right now I'm quite happy with everything. I couldn't think of a clever title, so I just used my own name.

In a bit I'm going to go and take pictures of things to use as a picture on here.

First I will put up some of my writing, most of which will be extracts from scripts and some short stories I'm working on. Maybe bits of ideas that I will turn into longer work later on. With any luck, it won't look too empty on here for long, then I will feel happier about adding to it.

I like this. It's optimistic. No one knows yet that I am doing it, except the blogger people I suppose.

I have made this blog because it seemed like a good idea at the time. With any luck I won't end up regretting it.

Love from Ben
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