a new poem...'one wish'

Billy had one wish:

To die happily.

Why?

Because he

Lived so miserably.

an eighth new story...'steel'

She came into the living room in a close-fitting, red party dress, unsteady on her heels.  He was working at his drawings, head down, lost in a world of colonnades, balustrades, steel and glass.

She steadied herself on the back of their brown leather couch, wiped the liquor away from her mouth with the back of her hand.

He looked up from his drawings, the lamp light showing his dry, white, expressionless features.  ‘What do you want?’ he said as she observed him woozily, washed-out gaze somewhere above his eye-line.  ‘Yes?’

Her nose twitched a little, but she didn’t speak, instead raised her wine glass to her lips, held it there.

‘It isn’t poisonous’, he said flatly, ‘I haven’t poisoned the wine’, and he returned to his drawings.

‘You’re a bastard’, she said, her voice thick and throaty from drink and cigarettes, then, more forcefully, ‘why didn’t you come tonight?’

He put his pencil down, and rubbed his wrist, not looking up at her.  Behind the drawing table there was a picture of a magnificent Doric skyscraper, an architect’s heaven, a latter-day cathedral, a monument to the self-realisation of an ideal made real, made to touch, feel, to explore, to live. 

‘I hate that picture’, she said, and she let her wine glass slip from her fingers – it broke in two at the stem on the hard, carpeted floor.  Her gaze continued to hover over him. 

‘See’, she said, ‘look what you’ve done’.  A dark red wine stain several inches in circumference spread around where she stood.

He sighed deeply, sat back in his chair, and looked past her, to the tall wooden door that stood ajar and lead into the soft-yellow glow of the hallway. 

‘It’s late’, he said, blinking.  ‘I’m tired’. 

Her nose twitched again, her body all drunkenness and bantam defiance.

‘Fuck you’, she said.

He didn’t answer, continued to look past her.

‘Fucking bastard,’ she said.

‘You metal-faced bastard!’

He winced, and his big, proud head slumped forward onto his chest.

She stepped over the broken wine glass.

‘Give me the steel’, she said through her teeth.

It was midnight, but it would happen anyhow, sharp and quick.

a seventh new story...'fragments'

‘You’ll never know…’, Terry put his coffee cup to his lips, and Sandra continued to play around with the sugar in the sugar bowl – she had a plastic spatula in between her fingers.  ‘It’s hot – this coffee’, Terry continued.  ‘What will I never know?’, said Sandra quickly, throwing a scornful glance at Terry, ‘that coffee is hot?’. Terry looked placidly back at Sandra, Sandra found Terry’s insouciance frustrating.  ‘Wait’, said Terry slowly, ‘I was just saying’ … ‘I know coffee is hot’, said Sandra, ‘what will I never know’ – she stopped poking around in the sugar bowl.  The coffee grinder in the café kitchen started up.  Terry reached forward and dropped a sugar cube into his coffee.  Sandra often wondered if Terry was all there. ‘I was going to say something nice’, said Terry.  Sandra let out a sigh, her shoulders collapsing.  Terry was smiling at her with his eyes.  Mad, thought Sandra, I married a mad man.  I married a child.  ‘I was going to say’, Terry persisted, ‘that you’ll never know how much I loved you when we first met, how much I was in awe of you’. With this he drained his coffee.  Sandra smiled weakly.  ‘And now?’, she said.  ‘Aren’t you awestruck anymore?’, she had felt peeved all morning, ‘do you still love me like you used to?’.  Terry needlessly wiped around the sides of his mouth.  The coffee grinder in the café kitchen had stopped, there was banging instead.  ‘Love’, Terry began, smoothing down the table cloth with the palms of his hands. ‘The ways of love …’. And then Sandra knocked the empty flower vase off the table, onto the floor: it shattered into a thousand brilliant fragments.             

Peak Oil and the Frackers

Peak Oil and the Frackers: An Important Musical and Political Influence

By LD Chambers

With the sad passing of the last member of the band, Sam Staveley, it seems timely to reflect on their enduring influence and attempt to take stock of their impact.

Peak Oil and the Frackers was by no means the only environmentally conscious band of their time, but they were almost certainly the only group classified as a ‘single-issue’ band of the now much-diminished genre of enviro-rock. In my opinion, this slightly derisory description is unfair. While the focus of Sandra Obern’s lyrics did tend to channel the group’s legitimate concerns over hydrocarbons, there was always room for playfulness.

Take the jaunty early single, ‘Stuff that in your Pipeline’. Obern’s tongue-in-cheek delivery of the opening lines: ‘I fell in love with an oilman’s daughter/ Together we swam in polluted groundwater’ showed off the band at their more outrageous. Along with Staveley’s booming drum sound and Martine Gonzalez’s whiplashing bass, re-listening to that song highlights them as the musical risk-takers they often were.

Peak Oil and the Frackers were, of course, the only enviro-rock group to make use of the moog, persuading the mighty Georgio Moroder to take the controls on their 11-minute epic ballad, ‘Exploratory Drilling is Still Drilling’: further evidence of their musical guts. On the other hand, the reunion album, twelve years after the dramatic split, is rightly called up as an instance of fading adventurousness. ‘Earth, Wind, but no Fire’ was a re-tread of many of their old ideas, played in a style more akin to other, more middle-of-the-road enviro-rock groups such as Scrubbers or Tear Down the Flues, than their distinctive fashion. However, I’d rather not dwell on that probably misguided move.

The band achieved early notoriety with ‘that cover’ for their debut LP, the fizzing ‘Barrels of Lies’. The image of the group, naked save the strategic smearing of raw bitumen, simulating the drinking of diesel from a forecourt pump established Peak Oil and the Frackers as a major force. Sadly, it is thought that the exposure to tar for this photo shoot contributed to Obern’s cancer and her untimely death two years ago.

‘Barrels of Lies’, which exposed ugly stories of corrupt lobbying and the backhanders routinely used by Big Oil and his corporate friends, was soon followed by the more circumspect ‘Renewable Utopia’. The second album was more of a critical success than the first, although it did less well commercially. The album, and the activism the band carried out in a novel take on promotion of the record, is often credited with playing a vital role in the approval of the twenty-two turbine strong wind farm over Chipping Campden, overcoming considerable local resistance.

The group were lambasted by some sections of the right-wing press for this victory, but it merely added to their aura of infamy, precipitated initially by ‘that cover’. Their popularity as voices of radical environmentalism grew. The UK tour during which the band travelled only by bicycle (albeit with a support van for instruments and other equipment) and which culminated in a second billing appearance, behind headliners Mineral Rights Collective, at the Live Earth concert marked the peak of their environmental posturing.

By the time of the third album, ‘Platforms of the Soul’, Obern’s increasingly ascetic lifestyle was influencing the musical style, which became more stripped down. Prolonged funk-like jams were preferred to the more direct, urgent sound of their earlier work. Still, the band remained no strangers to controversy, with Gonzalez appearing on stage dressed entirely in the pelts of animals she claimed were recovered from roadsides after accidents. The noble effort at upcycling did not chime with all of their fans, however, and the album marked a low point in terms of sales.

Yet the band was to find a new audience after a two-year space. The recruitment of keyboard player Simon Martin Le Fylde marked a shift towards a more chart-friendly sound and his experience in the music industry secured the group a major-label deal. The track that sealed their renaissance, the eminently catchy ‘Trees of Rome’, made its mark in the UK chart top twenty: still their biggest hit. Arguably, the lyrics indicated a softening of the hard-line attitude on earlier records, but to me it sought instead to reach a wider audience with more oblique references to dependence on fossil fuels. One reading of the lyrics places the track as an allegory for the decline of civilisation as oil, gas and coal run out, with its description of the fall of the Roman Empire due to excess deforestation. Most fans, perhaps, were instead drawn in by the anthemic refrain: ‘I kiss the last of/ All the trees of Rome’.

The more commercial incarnation of Peak Oil and the Frackers regrettably alienated a portion of their original followers, who could not get past the use of pyrotechnics in the evolving live show spectacle. These fans saw the use of combustible gas as hypocritical. Even when the band switched to the use of biogas from fermented cow dung, a core of deniers remained. It was these people who of course caused the harrowing early demise of Le Fylde after his head injury in the bar fight after their show at Sheffield Arena. The aneurysm caused prevented him from playing with the band again and led to his death aged just 36.

The band produced one more album before their break-up, in the absence of Le Fylde – a return to the initial line-up. The remarkable concept album ‘AfterLife’ depicted various visions of a post-fossil fuel world, some more optimistic than others. The sweeping opener and title track imagines a lifeless planet, with a rocky, watery surface – a return to the early Earth. The song is tinged with redemption, nonetheless, as it suggests the rebirth of life and evolution picking up once again in the post-ordial soup. The album was a success, largely on the strength of the last song penned by Le Fylde before his injury and the only single released from the album, the powerful, elegiac ‘Many Wells to Drain’. It is at this point that I prefer to remember the band; before the split and the ill-judged reunion.

Obern had been drifting from the other band members for some time, as her involvement in the monastic Devotional Non-duality movement became the dominant influence in her life. The tabloid press enjoyed making hay as images of her performing the ‘tree meditation’ ritual and details of her diet of eucalyptus oil and raw locusts emerged. Her behaviour became increasingly frustrating for Gonzalez and Staveley. The proverbial final straw, however, was Staveley’s drunken spilling to journalist Robin Reeves. His suggestions that the band was out of ideas, that the loss of Le Fylde had cost them their commercial edge, unsurprisingly did not go down well with the rest of the band. Obern and Gonzalez scrabbled out a statement declaring that it was nothing important and Staveley checked into rehab, probably only as a gesture. Nonetheless, soon they had to admit that Peak Oil and Frackers were over.

And so they were, until their reunion. The intervening years had coloured the band with the status of cult figures, even as the new tunes did not live up to this reputation.

Now, with the virtue of hindsight, we can reflect on the band’s legacy. Their sound is clearly an influence on modern groups such as Micro Machines and Catch Catch Catch. Their brand of environmentalism has been inherited by blogs such as Boiling Oil and by author Madeleine Brock. The band will be remembered for their unique sound, their experimental mind-set and their lasting effect on the landscape of environmentalism.

So the impact of Peak Oil and the Frackers lives on, even now none of the four are with us any longer. RIP Sandra, Simon, Martine and Sam. 

a sixth new story...'anniversary'

So Julie said she did not want to live anymore.  We were in a bar, drunk as sin, on what would have been our tenth wedding anniversary.  ‘You don’t mean that’, I said, refilling my tumbler.  And I looked up and there were tears rigged in her eyes.  ‘This could have been our tenth’, Julie said, shrill emphasis on tenth, bottom lip beginning to tremble.  I bit mine, to stop the lump rising in my gullet.  Couldn’t speak for a whole minute.  Julie was staring at me, as if I was supposed to say something profound, searching me for an explanation as to why we were here.  I didn’t have one.  Except that I wanted to see her – nothing more, nothing less. I am a simple man.  I sunk my whisky in a single gulp, the lump in my gullet sliding back into the pit of my stomach.  ‘Julie’, I said.  She was on the brink.  ‘Julie’, I said again, uselessly plumbing my gin-soaked brain for something, anything.  Julie’s pretty features looked as though they were about to cave in.  I imagined a black, fleshy wound were her face remained, agonised, imploring.  I put my hand on her wrist.  Julie had been grasping tightly to her whisky tumbler for a full fifteen, as if her arm and hand were petrified.  ‘I care for you’, I said.  A big, gloopy tear rolled down her cheek. I reached out and let it come to rest on the end of my fingertip.  It tasted beery, and salty.  ‘We can see each other again’, I continued, uncertainly.  Julie clumsily dabbed her eyes with a scrunched up napkin in her free hand.  ‘Our tenth’, she said quietly, pathetically, her sad gaze returning to the floor.  It was then I did something stupid.  I leaned awkwardly towards her and tried to kiss her on the mouth, she didn’t present her lips, I kissed her on the teeth.

a fifth new story...'the back room'

We moved Esther into the back room, so she could have a view of the garden – the Sycamore trees at the end, and the crest of hills beyond.  She was heavy, even with wheels on her bed. 

‘Where are you taking me, boys?’, she croaked, her voice worn and rattling.  ‘To the back room’, we said.  ‘You’ll have something to look at’.  The bed scraped against the door jamb, flaking some paint.  ‘I’ve seen it all before’, she said.

Once we had got Esther and her bed set against the wall in the back room, we propped her up on two big feather pillows, and put her glasses back on the bridge of her nose. We wondered whether she would, in fact, see anything at all, still we thought she could at least imagine. 

‘She’s seen it all before, besides’, Arthur said, when we were sat on the back porch later that evening, looking up at the night sky, each with a beer, fresh from the cooler.

‘Can you read the stars?’, I asked.  They were quite a few out, winking on, off, set in the big, purple dome of the heavens.  Arthur, rocked back a little in his easy chair, took a long drag on his cigarette, tapped away the ash and embers.  ‘No’, he said. 

‘Do you believe in God’, I said.  He shrugged, crossed his legs, he was wearing a pair of dirty white Tennis trainers. I knew he had flirted with religion after the break-up of his first marriage. ‘Esther sure as hell does not’, he said.  ‘Do you?’, I pressed.  He laughed bitterly, and then silence fell between us. 

When Arthur had said ‘good night’, I stayed where I was on the back porch.  There was a cool breeze. ‘I believe in you’, I said, to no one and nothing.  I meant God.  ‘Look after Esther’, I said to the darkness. 

Esther was a weight, but she wasn’t all bad.        

Growth

The Office of the Controller called early, waking Kathleen up. She had to go in.

Kathleen brushed her teeth while checking the weather on the screens lining one wall in her two-room place. There was rain moving over the sorghum fields, which was encouraging, but a low pressure front heading across the very south of the Production Continent could affect pollination in the region. Kathleen made a mental note to point this out to the Controller.

She swallowed her vitamin pill then poured coffee, which was still nostalgically named ‘Kenyan Highland Blend’ by the Dwelling Coffee Corporation, into a cup with a top and headed to the office.

The building was the most important in the world, so Kathleen had to pass three sets of locked gates minded by armed guards. They smiled grimly at her, recognising the early start.

Kathleen was briefed by the Controller herself then she briefed the key staffers. There were rumours. A name. A leader. Someone who’d somehow overcome his or her mental training, discovering their free will, long latent. The terrifying prospect of revolt rippled from the heart of the Production Continent to the Office of the Controller.

~

Strong sunlight drilled through the hole in sky’s bowl, giving the silent endless fields a garish glow, but Filament was unperturbed. He was thinking about Happen’s lesson from last night while he was on weeding duty. Happen had explained to his band of followers, who were simply his squadron of twelve, that they didn’t have to do what they were programmed to do. They didn’t have to tend the fields in their cycle, embedded in them like circadian rhythms. Happen explained that the people on the Dwelling Continents were just like them, except that they’d been taught to believe from birth in something called self-determination. Whether they believed in a truth or fiction, Happen did not say.

Like all the growers on the Production Continent, Filament was illiterate and educated only in planting, pollinating, harvesting and so on. He had an in-built sense of the seasons, the growth of the crops, the shifting populations of insects. To Filament, it felt like he had been born with this sense of the growing landscape, but in fact it was thanks to a systematic programme of immersive lessons, to which all growers were subject.

The other key lesson consisted of an amazing manipulation of their sense of free will. Using decades of research into purpose and notions of autonomy, a fine line was trod, whereby growers could make helpful decisions regarding fertiliser choices, timings of harvests and the release of pollinating insects, or even quite radical agricultural decisions, such as crop rotation. However, in other parts of their lives, such as when to eat or sleep, where to go and what to think about their role in the Post-Transition globe, they were incapable of making conscious decisions. In short, he was an agricultural savant, but oblivious of almost every other aspect of human culture and society. Until now, that is.

Happen had exposed some of them to impossible new ideas, head-scratchers for sure. Happen suggested that he was ‘freeing their minds’. But then the concept of a mind had needed some explaining. The growers, though they would not have been able to articulate a philosophical position, were inherently materialists – they did not have a body, they were a body. And even then, there was a sense that they were together part of some larger organism, a giant animus that held sway over the plant life of the Production Continent.

Filament was struggling to picture the Dwelling Continents. He knew what buildings were, of course; he and his squadron lived in a long, low dormitory block surrounded by their fields, and they had larger buildings to park the tractors in. But Happen had said:

‘On the Dwelling Continent, there are no fields, and no crops. Everywhere, there a huge buildings prodding into the sky, and everywhere, there are people.’

This was a difficult idea for Filament and the other nascent revolutionaries. The biggest group of people they’d seen in one place at one time was at breeding time. Their squadron of twelve male growers were ordered into a tractor trailer and driven through many hectares of swaying corn, wheat and millet to the dorm block of a squadron of female growers. There, they were commanded to fuck, with rough demonstrations for those aged fifteen or sixteen, so inexperienced. Thus was the grower population maintained. They never returned to the same squadron of female growers; this was to prevent inbreeding. But Happen had described countless crowds of people, buildings reaching the clouds, roads which were illuminated after the sun had gone down, and parts of the Dwelling Continents where it was so cold that the rain fell as white frozen powder flakes.

‘How can you know all this?’ a grower called Shuttle had asked Happen in the meeting. So Happen explained.

‘Once, I lived on a Dwelling Continent.’

There were gasps at this.

‘It was soon after they had set up the Production Continent, where we are now. They moved every last person out of this place. It was called Africa back then. Giant machines came in and flattened the landscape, including people’s houses. They churned everything into dust and brought over soil, on ships from other lands. They turned it into a continent of food production, for everyone in the Dwelling Continents. You see, the land was shrinking because the sea was growing, and there were too many people. So an international… you won’t know what that means. So a group, called the Transition Council, made this happen. But they needed people to look after the crops here. In the early days, they hadn’t invented the growers like you yet. They sent criminals… people who’ve done something wrong… to work here.

‘I was one of those people.

‘I am not a grower, like you, but I am just like you in other ways. And, more importantly, you can become more like me. We just have to free your minds.’

The group of eleven listeners was flabbergasted enough, but Happen had more.

He explained how the Transition Council soon realised that sending these criminals to work was a bad idea. Many of them were poor workers, crops were not looked after properly, and some of them fought back against the Auditors. So they developed a training scheme, where children were taken at birth and taught how to farm, but also taught that they were not free to make choices; that their role was to tend the crops and that is all.

Anything else, any other option, was unthinkable.

These were the growers, perfect drones, and before long the Transition Council was ready to replace the criminals. So, Happen said, the Auditors simply went from dorm block to dorm block, killing every person there. Their bodies were ground into fertiliser.

However, Happen was overlooked. When the Auditors got to his dorm block, in their green uniforms, it was after sundown and the men were in bed. Happen paused a long while before the next part.

‘But I was in bed with another of the men. They shot into my bed, not realising in the low light that it was empty. They shot into the top bunk where me and the other man lay, but only hit him. His body protected mine. He died, but I survived the massacre.’

This was the part that sat most uncomfortably in Filament’s mind that morning in the fields. More than the idea of buildings full of people, more than the image of solid rain, even more than the idea of many people being shot, it was the idea of Happen in bed with another man. In his education, Filament had learned about procreation, of course. He had also learnt that it was wrong for two men to be together like that, and had believed that it was impossible for it to happen. But this description of Happen in bed with another just propagated a little sensation in Filament’s brain, a dubious and ill-formed feeling that he could not yet put into words, yet he couldn’t dislodge it.

~

Kathleen urged caution, to see if anything else developed, but the Controller wanted to act fast. She knew her stock had fallen after the late delivery of the oats from the forty-fourth sector last harvest, and had some point-scoring to do with the Transition Council. She was mindful that a merciless response would get her back in favour.

The rumours lacked detail, but there was a whisper that one of the original exiles had survived the cull. Finding him or was the Controller’s priority, and it fell to Kathleen to gather information. She spoke at length to various Chief Auditors, those singularly chalky men and women who spent half of every year on the Production Continent, and always seemed bitter about it. Mostly, they just complained about how stretched their teams were, with most farmsteads and their squadrons only being seen every fortnight.

‘Would it be possible, even, for squadrons to organise? Can they even communicate with each other? They can’t write,’ Kathleen asked, knowing that mixing was not sanctioned, apart from for reproduction, but would be hard to police.

The Chief Auditors tended to struggle with this question. One did not want to admit to the Office of the Controller that one wasn’t exactly sure.

‘It is possible,’ said one. ‘Although the dorm blocks are a long way from each other, their fields are adjacent. Fences were obviously judged a poor investment by the Council.’

Kathleen could not see it: growers coming to the edges of their farmsteads to exchange messages, plot against the Controller and overthrow their Auditors. It was just too absurd! She had met growers, of course, during the official tour of the Production Continent, which the Controller was obliged to carry out from time to time. This brainwashed subspecies, childlike in their wonder at the Controller’s entourage, were ignorant beyond belief. They lived like beasts, and commanded the language like beasts. Kathleen couldn’t stomach the idea of them rebelling: her conclusion was that an Auditor had gone rogue.

She took the idea to the Controller.

‘Some liberal, intellectual freedom fighter could have slipped through psychometric screening. And now they fancy themselves as some sort of messiah to the growers.’

~

After dark, and long after the squadron fell asleep, Filament lay alert. He was busy generating some nerve.

He had found that he fully believed in his ability to do it; acknowledgement of the possibility of an encounter with Happen was enough to stir that contrary optimistic nodule in the mind of all people. The same nodule that tells us ‘it could be me’, and, indeed, ‘that won’t happen to me’. So all Filament needed now was nerve.

Filament whispered, ‘Happen,’ then immediately let his mind think of something else. He found that it was not so bad, so he tried it again a couple of times. Happen, in the bunk opposite him, eventually answered.

Filament and Happen talked for most of the night. Filament, without the inhibitions born of living in conventional society, poured out his feelings and his fascination with Happen. He revealed, thought Happen, a desperate desire for freedom that the others in the squadron had not, at least not yet.

Happen, with his pre-transition flair for secretiveness, suggested a rendezvous the next day during tilling duty.

It would not take place.

~

The Auditors, a team of four, came into the dorm block as the twelve men were eating their breakfast of cornmeal gruel and the obligatory vitamin pill apiece. The Auditors were agitated like Filament had never seen and waved their mace cans about.

‘Tags, you drones!’

One Auditor moved between them with a scanner. He passed it over the forearm of each of the growers and checked the display.

On Happen, he scanned, then stepped back slowly and gestured to his colleagues. Two grabbed Happen under the arms and dragged him backward off the bench.

‘We’ve got an Oh-Two model here!’ the Auditor with the scanner was shouting. ‘We’ve got him!’

Another landed a thump on Happen’s jaw. ‘How’d we miss you then, flower?’ he growled.

Filament felt a new emotion, not recognising rage. He leapt over the table to the captors and aimlessly beat at them with his fists. The fourth Auditor calmly stepped forward and sprayed. Filament felt a blizzard of pain, like he had stabbed himself with hot quinoa stalks, but multiplied, and in his eyes.

By the time his eyesight had recovered, all was quiet, and the Auditors, and Happen, were gone.

~

Kathleen let the Controller into the impromptu cell. It was actually the executive bathroom, used only when the stakeholders’ board met each month. Happen was awkwardly cuffed to the pipes under a sink.

The Controller asked Kathleen to leave them.

‘What is your name?’

‘Happen.’

‘A verb! Last of your kind. All growers are nouns now, inanimate objects. But you’d know that, as something of a rabble-rouser. Happen, somehow you made it through the Refreshment Scheme of eight years ago. I do hope you are the last who did. I don’t want to know how you escaped, but you did and here we are.

‘Things were a lot more untidy, unseemly even, back then. Poor Gibson resigned his commission after ordering the Refreshment, of course, so here I am. But, Happen, I am a very precise person. Production may be huge, but my eyes are everywhere. It was eight years late, finding you, but I don’t think you’ve had time to cause a mess as yet.

‘No, you won’t get the chance to disrupt my systems. You see, the Production Continent is the only way. The world relies on it. Don’t think that the rest of us didn’t make sacrifices for it too. We can only grow grain, for efficiency. I, for one, greatly miss eating fruit. The sheer number of people here on Dwelling means we didn’t have a choice. It isn’t easy here, either. Ten thousand people in a block. Two rooms each. A lottery for who has to live in old Siberia, and who gets to live on the old Mediterranean. In some ways, Happen, you have more freedom there on Production. Even the growers: and if they don’t know what to miss, how can they miss it?’

‘Are you going to kill me?’ Happen sounded resigned as he interrupted.

‘Actually, no. You’ll be sent back. Just, we’re going to try something new first. An experiment, if you like.’

~

Filament still thought it strange that Happen’s spot on the squadron had not been filled yet. Many days had passed, and after a death on the squadron growers were usually replaced within days. The others picked up the extra work without complaining. He had tried to bring up Happen at mealtimes, talk about the remarkable ideas he had seeded, but they ignored him or told him to stop, saying he’d seen what happened.

There was an additional layer to their self-control now.

Then, Auditors heading to the dorm block as the growers came back from the fields for their dusk meal. They had someone with them.

Happen was changed. He spoke in grunts. He did not look directly at others, and his eyes were dull. He ate more, and worked faster. There was not a glimmer when Filament mentioned the Dwelling Continent, asking him about freeing his mind, or even when he asked him about that other man, who had died.

However, Happen did let Filament climb into his bunk after the others were asleep and encircle him with his arms, pressing his face into his neck. 

a fourth new story ... 'the room next door'

Gillian came into the room.  She had her light blue shirt open, and I could see her belly button and side breasts.  The dog padded after her, following an invisible trail.  Gillian had on a pair of white lace knickers.  ‘Sleep well?’, she asked.  I moved to get up, and my chair scraped across the wood-board floor.  We met in the middle of the room.  I placed my hands on her shoulders.  And she looked down at the dog, sniffing around our feet.  ‘Yes’, ‘OK’, I said, and brought the crown of her head to my lips and kissed it.  She took my wrists gently, but firmly, and lowered my arms, pressed her dark head of hair into my chest.  She shuddered, then sniffled.  The dog whined.  I put both of my hands on the top part of her back, just underneath her shoulder blades.  ‘Have you fed him?’, I asked.  I meant the dog.  ‘Yesh’, Gillian said, head still buried in my chest.  I was wearing a thick woolen Guernsey.  It was cold, even for October.  The cold made Gillian shiver.  ‘Put some clothes on’, I said.  The dog was now nosing around the tatty, kapok mattress where I had slept, nosing around my dirty, old sleeping bag, the zip-fly broken long ago.  Gillian turned her head to one side and put her cheek against my chest, ‘I’m cold’, she said.  ‘It’s cold for October’, I said.  ‘The log fire – did it burn out?’, she said.  I said it did, but I wasn’t awake all night because of it; what with Gillian in the room next door, with her loyal-stupid dog.   

a third new story ...'sun-block'

‘You should use sun-blocker’, she said.  He shrugged.  They were standing on a rooftop overlooking the suburban sprawl of the city - red brick houses, greenery, a swimming pool here and there.  ‘Don’t need to’, he said, ‘I go brown’.  She took his forearm in her hand, ‘you’ve got freckles’, she said.  He liked it when she touched him. ‘I know’, he said, and let her hold his forearm longer.  ‘But my father grew up in Malaya’, he said.  She looked at him curiously.  ‘And what difference does that make?’, she said, a note of rising triumph in her voice.  He didn’t know.  And he didn’t know why he said it.  ‘He’s half Malay’, he lied.  She grinned.  ‘You’ve never told me that before’, she said, and let go of his forearm.  ‘Haven’t I?’, he said, feigning absent mindedness, casting his eyes away from her and over the buildings.  ‘You are brown though’, she conceded, ‘browner than me, I suppose’.  An ambulance siren sounded in the middle-distance, moving away from them.  ‘Do you want another beer?’, she asked.  He turned back to face her.  She looked up at him, smiling.  ‘You’ve got something in your hair’, he said.  He reached out and plucked it from her fringe.  ‘It’s ash’, he said.  ‘I had a cigarette on the way here’, she said.  He placed his hand on her cheek and ran his fingers down and around her neck.  ‘Don’t touch my spot’, she said, half-recoiling.  ‘Your spot?’, he said.  ‘Yes’, she said, ‘I’ve got a spot’, and she turned around and hitched up the hair on her neck.  ‘Oh’, he said, ‘it’s black’.  ‘Is it?’, she said, ‘I thought it was red’.  He pressed his thumb on the spot, and then for some reason he jabbed his nail into it, as if he were lancing a boil.  ‘Owwww!’, she exclaimed, and pulled away from him sharply, wheeling about. ‘That hurt!’.  He looked deep into her brown eyes.  ‘Let me bite it’, he said.     

a third new reflection - 'her'

The other evening I watched Spike Jones’ ‘Her’, starring Joaquin Phoenix, in arguably his best performance to date.  Phoenix plays a man, who in the not too far off future, suffers a painful divorce and subsequently falls in love with his operating system (computer). 

It is an interesting movie in the way it examines the human need for physical relationships, or otherwise, and in doing so raises the question of how legitimate feelings for a non-physical thing or being really are.

They are, of course, perhaps just as real and just as legit. 

As the plot of ‘Her’ slowly builds, and Phoenix’s character (Theodore) finds his AI soul-mate, he is frequently confronted by friends and colleagues alike, when he tells them ‘Samantha’ (voiced by Scarlet Johannson) is an operating system, because of the fact that she has no physical form.  For these people, since they cannot see or touch Samantha, she does not truly exist, is make believe, cannot be a pleasure-giver, or a genuine comfort.  Phoenix, meanwhile, expertly displays the agony of someone whose feelings, feelings that run to the core of his being, feelings that define him in a major way, feelings that legitimise him as a member of society that, after all, values togetherness, are tacitly derided.  He is humiliated.

We humans, for all our splendid inventions, for all our prowess, too often show a jaw-dropping lack of emotional intelligence, and subject even those closest to us to humiliation.  It is worth remembering that we do not know what is good for other people, what they should do, when they should do it.  Wisdom is knowing we know nothing.   

Another interesting aspect to the movie ‘Her’ is the power Phoenix’s love interest, Samantha, generates over him – because she is incorporeal she can be, as Phoenix says half-way through the film, ‘so many things’. 

Away from the silver screen, a friend, who we’ll call Tim, went through an elongated divorce a few years ago.  It was not his decision to call time on his marriage.  In the aftermath he found it very difficult to ‘move on’, precisely because his ex-wife became a very powerful, incorporeal presence in his head, rooted in his heart (the ‘tight connection’ that Dylan so wonderfully wrote about).

Tim created a ‘Samantha’ for himself in the image and sense memory of his ex-wife as an entirely legitimate survival mechanism, and one which, though this ex-wife had long since gone loco, brought him some degree of contentment, in part alleviating his grief at losing the person with whom he thought he was going to go together with through life.  As a friend, I found it hard at times to understand why he could not simply move on, and I was perhaps too crass to realise the value of Tim’s Samantha in keeping his hope alive, and in legitimising him as a human being, a member of society.  Somebody with genuine emotional components, someone of ‘value’.

Physical relationships are important to our emotional well-being; touch, in particular, is a wonderful, sensual communication of some of the deeper feelings we harbour and hold dear.  And yet, physical relationships are not perhaps integral, or the be all, end all: it is possible to be touched by the non-physical – music, words, our thoughts and memories, our dreams, our hopes for a better future out of the wreck of the past.