Writing horror graphically

Since on New Year’s day, at Topping and Company (in an as yet unburned hemisphere of the world), I was not tall enough to pull down I Remain in Darkness from where it sat squashed in next to its twin between Happening and The Years in the Biography section – and the rest of us were still dispersed among the rooms upstairs (except for Nela, who was folded over a book of what looked to be modified Garfield cartoons, and shorter than me anyway), I stood there waiting around in my habitually numbed out state for one of the two taller people in our group to come downstairs to help me out. And while I was half looking at the other books on the lower shelves, I could hear someone behind me talking continuously and energetically about what had to have been books and their authors, although at that stage I still wasn’t interested enough to follow what he was saying. Evidently, I had assumed there had been a conversation going on – although really one of those conversations in which two like minds carry on with each other in parallel, half to be overheard and half for self-comfort – but when I heard the main voice say that X (i.e. the person he’d just named) writes horror graphically, and in such an enthusiastic and thoroughly Scottish enjoyment of its own emphasis, I became curious enough to turn around and so got to see the teetering back of an unusually square, short balding man in a long, very rumpled beige coat, which made the deep brown, wiry U-shape of his remaining hair all the more striking – an eccentric if ever there was, I remember thinking then – perhaps even one that was occasionally homelessness or at least without friends – someone who needs to go into a bookshop or some other wide open, vulnerable location – that is, vulnerable to its denizens being harangued by people who are driven by the need to harangue. And so I began to look with some interest, now, at this small situation as it was stirring on this side of the counter, with the man still moving from one foot to another as he waited for the other to respond, and I couldn’t help but note, in contrast, the overly smooth because perhaps also startled expression on the face of his interlocuter on the other side, which is to say on the face of the younger and paler of the two men behind the counter (the other had his head down and shoulders forwards – clearly busy), who must not have been saying anything but a yes or a no the entire time the supposed customer had been speaking. This, as it turned out later, was the very same bookseller who, after I had bought my books from him with a card, flinched when I asked him for a paper bag and then turned his whole body to the wall where the bags were displayed to point them out – the 5p one and the larger one with handles for 20p – as if he were expecting me to blast him with my scorn. Of course – to be fair – even before I had bought my books, I had already been asking this younger bookseller about book vouchers, and he had told me, in what might only have been his usual quiet, stop-start, tremulous voice, that the vouchers were not delivered by post to the person unless they were separately paid for – and the whole time he had spoken then – which is to say, the whole time I had stayed in my place at the counter and, necessarily, responded to what he was saying – I myself had become increasingly nervous and hesitant in everything I was saying too, which in turn might have only made him more and more nervous, or rather, nervous straight out (whereas, before, he had only been gentle and quiet). All in all – as I remember thinking very obscurely at the time – even if it is the same old story of the bookish kid who persists in his dream of working in a bookshop despite its many awkwardly venal and uncomfortable social realities, this is still a very cooked up, complicated process of becoming nervous. And I can only say that, since I left the shop that day, I have been thinking somewhat differently about the short square man with the U-shaped head of hair, who might only have been trying to be encouraging to this younger recruit to the Topping and Co world, in his own similarly confused and confusing way.

The distortive rage of Osborne Cox

When she asked me why I hadn't said anything to John Malkovich the time I got into a lift with him (and his companion) from the rooftop terrace of the Hotel Monopol -- I said that he was pointedly ignoring me, of course, and that the whole time between when the lift started moving and when he (and his companion) got out at level four, he was looking up and away from me and towards the place where illuminated numbers might have been sliding from the right to the left. I also said that when I had been standing, waiting for the lift on the roof, I had been aware, merely, that a couple of older people had stepped up behind me to wait as well -- an utterly silent couple -- you know (I said) the sort of couple who might have just spent the whole of the afternoon sitting, as I had done, by an air-conditioning duct in the wind as they drank their pale, and probably equally tasteless coffees, while they worked or read or had just sat staring -- this couple who, once they stepped into the lift after me, had stood as far away from each other as possible -- and so when I turned and noticed that indeed it was he, the famous actor, standing towards the front of the lift as his companion stood towards the back, all I could think of was the meaningless mantra of Being John Malkovich -- that and the distortive rage of Osborne Cox -- but when I said all this, her face had pleated with an immense irritation. Because she would have said something to him. She wouldn't have let such a moment pass. In fact, it was only the previous week that she had addressed a gathering of gravediggers at Rookwood Cemetery and had heard, afterwards, that her breakfast meeting talk had been the most interesting one they had ever heard.

Between random relatives

Travelling with a sister in a city that neither of us lives in -- a city which draws in me long ropes of memory, happiness, mystery -- a city which means nothing to this sister, since when we were children here, on our regular visits, we were always being dragged around, as she tells me, between random relatives -- this sister who is continually being taken for my twin.

Invisible writing

You've been thinking that writing, the more you do it — the more that you love to do it, or at least love what can happen on the giddying occasions when you do it and it works — is no easier than it used to be when you still considered your self an abject beginner. Far from it. Okay, you write even more than you used to write — you write and you write and you think about writing for most of the day (in the shower, in the train, in front of the class you are teaching) — and you seem, too, as a result of this writing, so much more aware of when the wrong notes sound, but this only means that half or even more than half of the time that you are writing you are either deleting what you’ve only just written or once more re-writing. More deleting and rewriting than writing in the first degree. But then all of it is writing, still, surely. You tell your self that the best of the writing will come when you’re no longer waiting for it, since the more that you write without caring — or thinking or looking (even though all of it is done while caring) — there will soon come a moment when something comes alive in the dredges of the letters — a stirring of serifs and virgules — a rippling along the bumpy length of its horrible spine — and then the whole of the writing gets done in a single gesture, a single move. Yes, this is why you write, you say when it happens in front of you. When you whoop and jig around in your room in your socks. So, you write and you write, since you are always susceptible to the memory of this whooping — after all, it’s nothing more than an addiction to writing — a chasing of the writing — a seeking after the whoop that has come and gone or misfired in the past, but could well come again.

All you have to do, you know, is keep paying for that writing. You don’t go out or wash up because you are writing; you don’t answer the phone or make that call or sweep the stairs because you have to write. Of course, the smutty smears that follow from your writing will be visible, as you know — everyone must see it — the addict of writing, they are always saying, at least to themselves — the pathetic addict of terrible writing. It’s embarrassing, too, the way you set up for the writing: three fat pillows, one on top of the other on a bed in a hotel room. You go down for the free coffee and tea from a machine every hour or so, when the staff at their standing desk with its pyramid of apples turn around to look at you as you emerge like a sucked dry thief from the fire escape. What kind of person turns her back on the Synagogue of Wrocław so that she might keep on writing? What kind of person writes and writes and knows that for the most part it is lifeless, pre-known, a dry little sponge?

You begin to suspect that, at its best, writing might just be some sort of useless labour: the heaving of a pile of boulders from the front of a house to the back — which is to say that every one around you is laughing as they watch you at it. Better to pay an expert, surely, and get it right from the start. And yet, really, although the writing that you do is wasteful, you still work at it doggedly, stupidly — spending the whole day labouring over a single section — writing and writing, like someone who has not the least idea of how to write but who still keeps on writing in spite of it all. Because there will always be something, as you say to your self as you work — an ephemerally, flipping something — and this you will curl around your finger so you can wear it out in the evenings afterwards — when you listen with a smug distain to the talk of your friends who have been doing nothing all day but making decisions.

The sometimes pride of your invisible writing.

A fakery of a fakery of a fakery

I only go this way home, west through the park and up the hill towards The Great Hall when I can't bear to go the other way round -- today walking up the stairway from the pond and the bridge and onto the landing by the entrance to the oldest university in the city behind a group of middle-aged Chinese tourists as if I were one of them only: a middle-aged tourist too.

This is the direction home which always takes me past the spot on the landing where I once saw a woman standing with her feet apart and arms akimbo in front of a bollard. It's no longer there, this bollard, but its absence still reminds me of the way this woman had been looking up towards The Great Hall -- standing with her back to a man who was squatting with one knee on the concrete at the top of the stairs so that he might take a photo of this grand moment -- since, with the afternoon sun on her hair, all of her life seemed to have been ignited by a profound connection to all that is beautiful and old (if fake, since the colonial Gothic is so much a fakery of a fakery of a fakery, as I'm always thinking).

It had seemed to be one of those moments of blissful oblivion that you see everywhere in these kinds of places, I was remembering yet again, and so hence my surprise when, as I went on to pass the woman, I had looked back to see that her face was tight and closed, which made the way that her friend was still kneeling behind her, with his phone held out just a little and forwards -- the phone-cum-camera in the place of some delicate and hopeful offering -- too painful to look at.

Facing south-southwest

Crashing and circling

A few weeks ago, as I opened my bag up in the train and a pantry moth escaped, I dashed it against my trousers. And so why the regret -- why the pain when, after moving to the door so that I could get out at the next station, I turned back to see it circling the spot that I'd left -- crashing and circling and crashing? All the way walking past the stationary people on the escalator -- all the way in the queue at the exit gates -- pushing through the crowd at the corner of the street so that I might jay walk when I wanted to -- all the way walking into the lift when the lift doors opened and riding in silence to the second top floor, I kept thinking of that circling moth in the empty spot that I'd left, but also trying not to think about it, because who wants to think about one of those tiny pesky moths for hours and hours or even days?

A 'Fire Book' trailer

Three seers

Three seers, if you like, or three seekers: the tiny, rectangular old man, possibly newly arrived from a China Southern airbus -- the one who was pushing a trolley of suitcases on the narrow feeder to the ring road when we left the airport behind him; the one whose purple-skinned fingers were pulling at the wires at the back of a burst-apart analogue television in the gutter opposite when we parked; the narrow-faced, white-haired one who, only a week earlier, had blurred one word into another, not from dementia -- or perhaps also that -- as she developed the most beautiful stories of envy and longing from the glass of red wine she had been given at the door.

Lost

Today I found that my father, who is still my father, has lost the feel of talking, although he still talks.

Remnants of personal pronouns

When the lesson was over, I told my colleagues in the staffroom that I had just heard from a student about how, when he was in his final year of high school at the end of the Iraqi war (that is, in 2005), the students had killed their teachers. I said that we had been discussing education systems in preparation for the essay topic: compare the education system in your country to the one in Australia, and it was when we had got to the bit in the task that asked them to describe whether the system of the country they'd been born into could be called a formal system or an informal system that the student had told us about the killings. I described to my colleagues, who always liked to hear these kinds of stories, I knew, about the way my student had said that they had first killed the Chemistry teacher, and then all the teachers who taught the senior subjects -- six in all -- and, in more detail: that it was when the Chemistry teacher had stepped forwards in public, as the student put it, that he had been shot. At this point, there was some confusion amongst my colleagues. What had I meant by step forwards, one of them asked. But I found I was unable to answer her, since I hadn't asked the student, and that in fact, as the student had been talking, I'd got the impression of two distinct but incompatible scenarios: one with all of the teachers standing in front of the students, but on a slightly higher platform than their soon-to-be-killers (such as on a wooden stage at the front of a meeting hall), and the other (since the killings had been in public, as the student kept insisting) outside in the dust of the street -- with the kids bringing the teachers right to the edge of the roadway in front of the school, and so putting on some sort of public trial the teachers who, until this moment of apparent freedom after the war, had always been strict, unfriendly and had failed most of them (as my student had said), which had stopped them from being able to go to university (this same student, I told my colleagues, had earlier told us about the brutal way, when he had only been ten years old, a teacher had slammed his face into the blackboard and sunk her teeth into his head because he had leaked, without thinking, the questions of a test to a cousin). I said too that, after the student had told us all this, another Iraqi student in the class had tried to soften the edges of our incredulous questions by saying we should understand that when the first student had said the word kill he didn't mean kill -- definitely he will mean something else, the second student had said, not kill (although the first student, of course, had insisted that everything he'd said was true -- and that he had been living in Baghdad, while the other had not). I even realised then in the classroom as I was listening, I said, that the first student had made it very hard to believe him because the whole time he'd been talking he had been smiling (and almost laughing) -- this compulsive need he had to smile as he talked, which should have made it impossible to believe a single word that he said but, instead, had seemed to make it all the more unavoidable and true, as if it were only a distorted lump of something that it had been been his job to place before us -- his odd and rough but hilarious job. In the staffroom someone, then, had observed that, over the years she had taught, there were always so many stories like these being dropped into classroom discussions about the ordinary, dry and generally predictable and earnest topics that our textbooks suggested -- and that from this she had concluded that most of our students had stories like these to tell but, also, that they only occasionally let them fall -- dropping them into talk about the levels of government, or public health provision -- and either with no emotion at all or otherwise the most odd, foreshortened, glimpse of something that was hard and shrunken, nearly dead. After all, she said, these accounts that are dropped like this are not novels or movies with their arcs of sentiment but only the shards of things -- just broken bits of moments that have been reflected onto the sides of some god-awful fact that we are only given so that the person who tells it might have a chance to relieve themselves of that object (just for a moment), which we are invited to look at but never absorb -- that the feelings in the student about that object had long since escaped or been pressed into a grimace -- and hence all we could do was to suspend what we, as teachers, had been going to say for the time of the student's telling, which always made it so difficult to go on with the lesson afterwards. Of course her saying this about the continuity in the lesson made me recall with no inconsiderable embarrassment that, after the first of the two Iraqi students had said that for the rest of their final year, with the other teachers dead, he and the others had been taught by the junior school teachers, and that none of these junior school teachers had been any good -- the students still failing their exams -- that even at the crumbling end of the Iraqi student's story I had found myself saying something completely inane about the difficult things that all of us carry -- how hard it must to be to bear such memories, I had said as well -- such being the useless clichés I had come out with (as I was thinking, but didn't have the guts tell my colleagues) -- all of this unfelt nonsense about the things we carry (as if our heads had arms). I went on to tell them, though, that in the end all I could do was to move right along to the parts of the task that I needed to cover that day: and consequently how I'd got the students to write down their contrasting points in two columns, so that all we had had to hear that morning might fit into the constraints of the well-planned essay -- that the story about the teachers might be further leached of feeling, stripped of even the remnants of personal pronouns, and shoved in, too, with all the more pre-known material about classrooms that the other students had come up with, and thus become the requisite block of writing that is built on through a chaining of transition markers -- that block of writing that is known to all who teach it as the model essay paragraph: that is, a paragraph with a topic sentence, then ones with supporting evidence, and a concluding statement -- where the concluding statement functions as a link to the paragraph (and argument) that follows it on the next indented line.

And who can avert their eyes?

I'm sure that the only reason I thought he resembled Prince William was because the news had been everywhere yesterday about the new baby Charlotte -- and who can avert their eyes? -- the prince in the features of the red-hooded, slack-jawed man lying sideways with his tracky-dack legs on the seat across the aisle in the train -- his eyes hardly open, his skin at the jowls knobbled, raw -- his too pink too thin too wet-looking lips hanging open in a crescent that had been rested on its front -- these lips, I've been thinking, which must have been the only feature in common (no matter that I have never seen the prince with his mouth like this), since nothing else of the man was visible -- no hair, no forehead, no ears -- and the skin, which was pale as an expensive plate, was obviously suffering too much from the grease at the rim of the hooding to have ever have been placed alongside in a similar set.

When the ticket inspectors stopped at his seat, it was impossible not to hear how there had been so many people at the barriers at Central asking for money that he hadn't wanted to take out his wallet -- that instead he had walked through the gate for the disabled and prams -- nobody stopping him -- and that it had been important to rest right now because he was going to the gym and he shouldn't overdo it -- to lose some weight -- and as he took out a wallet that was furred on the inside with unreadable receipts -- he had left, he said, his I. D. in a taxi -- one of the inspectors had asked about the gym -- which weights was he doing? -- the circuits? -- was any of it helping? (as if a friend) -- and somehow, like this, he pulled from the hood an address, a name (the spelling) -- by which time the man was saying he was feeling that he might have a heart attack or something.

Glad they had done what they'd done to the garden

Now that the days are greying and cooling despite the heat I've been remembering those times when I've watched from too great a remove, such as when those people ahead of me in the queue at Woolworths had managed to get the woman at the till to tell them about how a lightning strike had cracked straight down into her garden in Woodford the evening before -- and how there had been a terrifying ten or more minutes when she and her husband had thought that their free roaming peacock had died -- the storm was that bad -- but then Matey had come honking through the sheets of rain when they went out looking -- and how her husband had been glad that they had done what they'd done to the garden so they could make the most of the rain -- the folding of her hands as she waited for the people to pay even as they were smiling and nodding. But then she to me: do you have fly buys? And me: no.

That I had a horror of this burial

When we sorted out the pieces of clothing in the bag we were putting into the charity bin -- it was too late to sort them properly -- too late to do more than check the inevitable, as I'd said -- I saw that our daughter was dumping the gray skirt with the bright red lining that I had worn for my grade three ballet exam -- that and the muslin apron, with its three or four rows of zigzag applique -- two pieces of clothing, or at least dress ups, that our daughter couldn't have fitted into for so many years -- and you said to me, then, as soon as I described what they were, that I could take them out of the bag if I wanted to. But I said no.

As we walked away from the bin, I told you that years ago I had realised, too late, that she had dumped a couple of tiny rubber dolls that my mother had played with before the second world war, and how distressed I had been to realise this -- how it still distresses me -- even now as I write, and for no reason that I can fathom -- but still, all the same, that I had known I should send the skirt and the apron into the chute -- what else was I to do with them? -- that if this part of me had its way, I would be buried under the profusion, under the mountain of useless objects that connected me to my past -- so completely buried I would not be able to move -- that I had a horror of this burial, even as I had a horror of the loss, of the gaping wound from the place where each of these objects had been torn from me, these wounds that will never heal, no matter than it has been years since, unknowingly, I had cast those small rubber dolls into a similar bin.

But, as you had seen, I said, when I had come across the piece of crushed blue velvet that my mother's childless and wheezing childhood friend had given me at the door of my grandmother's place, when they had both been alive -- this piece of useless velvet that I have never known what to do with and that was squeaky to touch, not even very nice -- I had removed it from the bag -- the red lined ballet skirt and apron going into the bin but the velvet staying out and having to be carried home. There being no sense to any of this, I told you -- will I even be glad about what I have done today? -- and you: as you usually do, you said it was up to me.

Sweet and innocent, childish colours

As we walked past the colourful coke ad at the bus stop -- the one with the cans ranged in sweet and innocent rows, as she called them -- in sweet and innocent, childish colours -- my friend told me about the woman who had called out for help with the coke can that was stuck in the side of her pram -- this coke can that the woman was having trouble getting out because she had no hands or wrists, and in place of ankles, a metal bar in each of her shoes -- and how it had been the metal bars that my friend had first noticed as she passed the woman who was worrying at the sides of her pram, the dark metal bars of her legs at an angle -- this woman who in that furred way of someone who might have been drunk but perhaps only helpless and annoyed at the allotment of words she'd been given at birth had called out for help in retrieving what turned out to be a half-empty can of coke, and whose baby all the while was lying on its back in the pram, apparently happy. My friend then told me that for the whole day after this she had been unable to forget that she had helped the woman get her can of coke -- her standard coloured can of coke -- and that it had made her sick, for some reason, to think that she had done this -- why should it make her sick -- why on earth? And the only thing my friend had been able to say to the woman at the time, she said, was about the baby: something about it being beautiful. Which it was.

To find the rabbit waiting

She told me to tie the long, grey towelling rabbit by its ears to the sapling, because this way, should the child who had lost it return, she or he would find the rabbit waiting and what joy would ensue, so now I tell her that when I go down the path from Govetts Leap I manage to forget what I'd done -- about my abject obedience I almost say -- until I come to the bend where the thing is dangling, and each time I'm struck not so much by the body that's now hard to distinguish from the bark but the way the once brown stitches of the rabbit's eyes have become drained, as I've been trying to call it -- it's hard to describe -- of all that is friendly -- not dead of course, since it's always been dead.

Dainties on King Street

At the corner of the first block: a single arum lily left upright against a tree, its bulb bare and fringed with pale roots; in the middle of the third: broken chunks of white polystyrene in a pot of plastic restaurant flowers (it is not yet night); in the second block: a green padded jacket with its arms spread wide, loose, generous even, over the back of a wooden bus seat -- so pleased, as if it's conducted this whole thing for us -- these dainties on King Street -- but one of the arms is twisted unnaturally -- is it dead? -- and most of what we can see is only the lining.

For whatever is hidden is meant to be disclosed, and whatever is concealed is meant to be brought out into the open

A view, coming around the corner of the university library, of someone on the phone who, leaning forwards over the cobblestones on one tiptoed foot, is noiselessly leaking from his open mouth one long white pendulous gobbet before pivoting and huddling over his handset to say that he'd been just about to spit when someone had come around the corner.

Gathering Evidence

Since she had last seen Newtown, she told me, King Street had gone downhill, what with the homeless people lying open-mouthed and snoring on blankets on the footpath -- and on the north side of the street too, which meant that they were vulnerable to the squalls from the south -- and so many shops closed, the windows smeared and empty, which was due to the rents that the owners were charging -- ten thousand dollars for a single week, she'd heard, and these weren't the original owners but the sons and daughters of those original owners who had worked out that, even if their shops stayed empty, no rent coming in, they would save thousands and thousands of dollars in tax from their many other investments and so, in the end, would be far better off.

To a girl in one of the closing down shops who, since she was suffering from pleurisy, was unable to keep still -- the pleurisy making her want to iron all the pieces that my friend wanted to try on or to dash from one side of the shop to the other to find a pure wool jacket that she could make a very good price, with the pile of clothing the owners had brought in that morning still heaped, unsorted, on the counter and the girl's still feverish hand pressing to the cornered edge of her forehead as she described how she had recently had to give up her doctorate on Elizabeth Gyring but that now, if my friend could believe it, she was far better off -- to this particular girl my friend had recommended a book she thought the girl should read for no other reason than that there was pleurisy and anger in it -- a bit of pleurisy and a lot of anger.

The gorge of the darkened kitchen

Isn't it always when walking along a street in the dark that you pass close by a lit up window where a white Maltese terrier has climbed onto the back of a sofa to touch its tongue to the glass whereupon you recall, suddenly, that for at least half an hour that morning you were convinced that you were going to be hospitalised with a disease as corrosively gruesome as osteomyelitis -- the lit up window with the laughing dog and the gorge of the darkened kitchen behind it making you feel as if the light at the front of that house was turned on you?