The Tap

Thomas had been sat in the bath for hours now, listening to the distant explosions, waiting for the water to get cold and staring at a drip that seemed perpetually on the edge of dropping from the hot tap into his bath, without ever actually doing so. He could see, in tiny warped and upside-down detail, all of the bottles of shampoos and soaps that lined the edge of the bath behind the taps, and as he moved his head slightly from side to side the details changed and appeared to move. The explosions started to creep closer to where he sat, until one was so close that it caused the drip to drop. Somehow Thomas knew on seeing this that his time was nearly over, and sure enough the next bomb to fall landed straight on his house, catapulting his naked corpse, along with all the soaps and sponges and other paraphernalia all the way across the street and against the wall of the opposite block of flats. Thankfully his dignity was preserved on account of his being blown into several pieces in the process.

The gibbon story

I was walking through back streets of Bethnal late one night when out of the corner of my eye I saw a gibbon, slumped rather contentedly against the railings at the side of the road, and in the instant that it took for me to shift focus to that point I imagined how he had arrived there.
It began early that morning, in London Zoo in Regents Park. The primate warden had been doing the early morning feeding rounds as usual, only this time he was a little distracted as he had finally managed to get the penguin warden in to bed that night, something he had been trying to do since her first day at the zoo 4 years ago. So this morning he was chipper and happy, whistling as he worked and in a constant reverie about the future and the new prospects that it held. So pre-occupied was he that as he entered the Gibbon enclosure to hide bits of fruit around their cage that he didn't notice the catch not closing as he went in through the back door from the feeding room, as did one particularly observant young male Gibbon affectionately known as Bart, due to his pernicious nature. More out of curiosity than any intent of escape Bart quickly hopped over to the open door, sniffed and peeked around the corner before scurrying through into the large, brightly lit white-walled kitchen area where his, and all his friends, and all his cousins' food was prepared. As the light was so bright it made Bart feel dizzy, so he quickly followed his nose to the fresh air across the room coming from the cat flap in the main entrance, ducked through the see-through plastic curtain and felt grass beneath his feet for the first time ever.
As I have said, Bart really wasn't trying to escape. But as he sat there looking around at the huge spaces around him, seemingly infinite possibilities of adventure entered his mind, and he scampered off to begin realising them. Within the first 10 minutes of his liberty he saw countless new things, beasts, plants and birds of all shapes, sizes and stenches, with a cacophony of sounds ranging right across his hearing's range of frequencies, and any weaker monkey would have probably fainted with the overload of input, but not Bart. His single-mindedness kept him focussed on the next new thing, the next adventure, and he was soon out of the Zoo and in the biggest, most open green field he had ever seen, far bigger than anything he could have imagined whilst fenced-in in that cage. With a slight sense of bewilderment at the task of crossing this emerald expanse he set off, past young human couples rolling around in a drunken sun-rise, and great panting dogs pulling humans along on leather straps, as though the humans were too lazy to walk themselves. Before too long he reached a hedgerow and a fence, and as he popped through the bars in the fence with an enjoyable ease he saw his first road, complete with a steady stream of cars, vans and trucks. For the first time in his short life Bart was struck with a sense of true, primal fear, and any weaker monkey would have died on the spot, if not turned right around and ran back to the sanctity of the cage. But not our Bart. He took a quick breath, gathered his wits, and hopped along side the moving metal wall, following its direction, until they all stopped moving at what seemed to him as a small red sun floating in the air, at which point he hurried across, underneath the bellies of these metallic leviathans. Once across he decide to continue in the way he had just been going, as there seemed to be more humans that way and he knew humans, and wanted to watch them in the same way they had been watching him since as long as he could remember. So he made his way into Camden town and began some serious people-watching.
Now, in the wild, many primates have learned to sniff-out fermenting fruit that lies in shaded spots on the jungle floors, as when they consume it they get drunk, and who doesn't enjoy getting drunk? Of course, Bart had never enjoyed this particular monkey-treat, but if you've ever been to Camden then you'll know that you don't need a monkey's sense of smell to catch a whiff of the cheap-cider that seems to flow through the gutters, and before too long Bart's inherent senses took hold and he found a discarded, half-full can of White Lightning at the foot of the little, half-dead tree he had been observing these strange creatures from. Carrying it back up with him he sat back in the crux of the branch he had spent the last happy few hours and began to enjoy them even more, as the sickly sweet but delightfully intoxicating fluid glided down his little monkey throat. It didn't take much for Bart to become a rather drunken monkey. In fact before he had even finished his first ever half-can it slipped from his grasp as he gestured at a passing leather jacket, and in a vain attempt to catch it he sent himself tumbling down after it, at which point the leather jacket stopped, and while laughing with the girl next to him stooped down and picked up our pissed friend, and Bart began the second stage of his adventure with humanity.
Somewhat unfortunately for our little hero the couple that picked him up in Camden were, you could say, 'in to drugs' in a rather casual but frequent way. They smoked a lot of weed, and drank a lot of booze, and most days would add something else to the mix, be it uppers or downers or trips or, well anything else really. Today though, at least in the afternoon when they came across Bart, they were confined to the weed and the whiskey. Jumping in a taxi they dragged him off to their friend's flat in Islington, where he quickly became the centre of attention being fed a horrible, hot smelly smoke from a big plastic pipe, and small glasses of an evil tasting brown liquid that burned his throat as it went down, and as the day progressed in this manner Bart's senses became duller and duller, the room span more and more, and he eventually came to the conclusion that fight wasn't going to work, so flight it must be. As his companions were almost as inebriated as he was it wasn't too hard for him to stumble across to the window unnoticed, and he scrambled up and out, onto a thin ledge about 30 feet above the hard concrete below. Normally this would have been no problem for an ape of Bart's climbing ability, but drunk as he was now he botched the climb down right up, and ended up tumbling the final few feet into a scraped-up bundle at the bottom. Un-perturbed and still drunk he stood up, shook himself off and walked, somewhat sidey-ways, along the pavement into the darkening evening.
Before too long he found himself at a small shelter under which a collection of humans were stood silently next to each other. A long, red metal machine approached them all and stopped, with a door opening. Bart followed the humans as they entered the door, and was presently zooming along towards Shoreditch feeling rather sick. In fact his sickness grew so rapidly that he jumped off the bus as soon as the doors opened again, ran to the first dark corner he found and evacuated his little monkey bowels with great force. Once he had finished he was feeling rather worse for wear, and frankly starting to miss his cage, his friends and his family. He stumbled bedraggledly along, leaning against the wall to prevent himself falling on the cold, hard concrete, until he found a well-lit junction, complete with multiple sets of pretty changing lights, and leaning against a fence on the corner Bart watched the varying sparkles and drifted off into a drunken doze. That is when I saw him.
But really, as I shifted focus so that Bart was no longer in the corner of my vision, I realised that he was in fact a simple, black and white striped, bell-shaped metal bollard, common to that part of town.

The running man

I met a man the other day who looked liked he was running really fast, but he was moving really slowly. It took me a long time to be able to understand what he was saying, as it took him such a long time to say it, but it turned out that in fact he just saw time differently from the rest of us.
He had been born in Northern Africa six million, five hundred and seven thousand, six hundred and thirty eight years ago, and had basically been running north ever since. He was definitely human, though when I looked hard I noticed some slight differences in his appearance; deep-set eyes, a sloping forehead, all-round hairiness. He was also wrapped in bear-furs, though they were so worn they had an appearance of modern patent leather.
He described to me how as he ran trees would explode out of the ground around him, he could witness the whole life-span of creatures of all descriptions as he passed. He had been in a huge fertile plain when he got caught in a vast, violent flooding that left him swimming across the rest of what we now call the Mediterranean sea. He had seen countless cultures, civilisations and eventually empires rise and fall, heard thousands of different ideas on how we got here, who and why we are, and seen the most beautiful works of art created and destroyed. He had experienced the very best and very worst of humanity through infinite wars and recoveries. Most recently he had been struck by the rapid growth of our own huge stone, metal and glass structures, and I think I saw a tear beginning to form in his eye as he remembered the earth he used to know.
It wasn't a short meeting; I spent the best part of a day with this man though we travelled about a metre and a half in that time, and I've related all he told me.

The Whistling Man

Somewhere, floating about in the universe, there's a small blue and green planet populated by a multitude of different species. In the northern hemisphere of this planet, towards the western most point of the largest mass of land is a large-ish country that's mainly forest and mountains in the south, and as you get towards the north of this land its scape becomes more and more flat, or boring. Or mind-blowing, depending on how you wish to look at it. Either way, where the hills become plains slightly east-of-centre in this country there lies a city on the banks of the river Spree, a city that only recently was split into two; One side as liberal and capitalist as the rest of the western world, and the other a faux-communist dictatorship as corrupt as it was controlling. But that doesn't really concern us today.

Our tale takes place in a small block of flats to the south of this city, a fairly generic block as is standard to socialist Europe consisting of three sides of a square rising five floors with one apartment to each side on each floor and a partially grassed courtyard in the middle, with a head-height wall separating the garden from the one in the next block. On the top floor in the southern wing of this block was K's apartment, like the rest the door from the stairwell leads on to a corridor extending the length of the flat with 3 doors to the right and one at the end. The first side-door leads to the kitchen; The second (which is remarkably small for any door in any country) leads to the bathroom; The third leads to the bedroom and the end-door opens on to the living room, which in turn has a door onto a small balcony, again as is standard to living-quarters in this town.

K was an old man, and he had lived in this apartment for over forty years. For the last seven he had been an invalid due to a misjudgement of basic physics whilst moving a piano with a friend, and had not left the flat since his last check-up at the hospital three years after the accident. During this time he had depended on the meals-on-wheels that got delivered to his door at five every afternoon (a hot dinner, some microwave porridge for breakfast and a different sandwich each day for the next day's lunch) and his daughter, C, who devoted herself to making his life as comfortable as possible despite having a successful career as an architect and loving husband of her own, though sadly six years after K's accident (and just over a year before we join the action) C had an accident of her own in an unfortunate incident with a BMW at a pedestrian crossing, leaving K with little more than the daily knock at the door to remind him that he did not exist alone.

Having prevented a full-sized grand piano from smashing against the wall with his body after it had fallen down a flight of twenty-two stairs K had been paralysed from the waist down, and since he could not afford to move from his fifth-floor apartment he remained there non-stop, apart from when C brought him to the hospital, dragging himself about using the hooks that her husband had installed for him whilst she was at work or home. Since her death her husband had forgotten about K completely, as had everyone else who had at one point been 'in his life', and his daily routine consisted of waking from fearful dreams at sun-up, dragging himself to the bathroom and on to the toilet, manipulating himself in order to perform those morning bathroom duties (remember he was paralysed from the waist down) and an hour or so later making it in to the shower. After a painful and lengthy wash he would heat up his porridge and drag it and himself to the balcony where he could enjoy the morning sun. At around two in the afternoon he would switch on the radio (which had been conveniently placed on the floor by the balcony for him by C's husband) and relax for the afternoon concert. His favourite composer was W.A. Mozart, and 'Eine Kleine Nachtmusik' was his favourite piece; Whenever that was played he felt himself transported far away from his painful life by the grand orchestration and pretty melodies, as though a little night music brought the sunshine further in to his life. As the music got replaced by the frightening news at four he would drag himself back to the kitchen, eat his sandwich and await the knock at the door announcing the arrival of the next twenty-four hour's food. Having heaved himself to the front door and back to the kitchen his appetite would be already revived, and he would eat the lukewarm 'meat and two veg' messes while watching the ever-changing orangey shadows of the sunset in the courtyard, before beginning the lengthy process of changing and getting in to bed.

Now, even with the most rose-tinted of spectacles this could not be called a healthy existence, and indeed it wasn't. After just-under three months of this desperate solitude K's mind began to crack. It began with an almost manic desire to hear 'Eine Kleine' on the radio at lunch time, and culminated in a complete loss of the ability to speak, combined with this never-ending frantic itch to hear those arpeggiated opening bars, to the point where he was so completely consumed by the need to hear them that he forgot to wash, then to visit the bathroom, and finally to eat so that the as the foil-wrapped packages piled up at his door (at which nobody thought to comment, such is the nature of our privatised lives) his health deteriorated even further. It got to the stage, eventually, where he would wake up on the floor of the living room, drag himself on to the balcony, and muster all the remaining strength that he could to communicate with anyone or anything that might hear him in the only way he could imagine; By whistling.

He had always been a good whistler, but now the tremendous effort that it took meant he could only whistle a few random notes for about thirty to forty minutes, before having to rest for a good couple of hours in order to regain his strength and begin whistling again. Sometimes he would hear a response to his whistles, usually a mimic of the notes he had just sung, but he could never tell if it was a caged bird in one of the other apartments, or kids messing around, or even somebody assuming he was a caged bird and pretending to keep him company; It never worked though. Nobody ever triggered that his pretty melodies were actually a cry for help, and he remained alone with his pain, and his yearning to hear that beautiful piece of music. In fact, it was usually different refrains from that piece that he whistled, though they would only be recognisable to someone who knew the tune as well as he did, as he could normally only manage four or five notes in succession before having to take a long breather.

One sunny Monday morning in August while trying to whistle the famous opening bars K thought he heard somebody continuing the phrase where he left off, and the excitement that he felt surge through his body was almost enough to cause his massively weakened heart to arrest, so that he couldn't respond to the mysterious whistler and simply lay sobbing on his balcony floor, and his collaborator soon vanished from his ears. The come down that he felt then was even more powerful than the initial excitement, and he remained in that same spot on the floor wishing himself dead (not by far the first time he had done so) for a good couple of hours. While he was drifting in and out of consciousness, as was fairly normal these days for his hugely malnourished metabolism, he thought he heard an orchestra playing that famous opening phrase just outside his window and immediately put it down to his over-active imagination. But as he lay there the music continued, and to his delight he realised that it was true! Somebody in the courtyard was actually playing a recording of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik at a very high volume on their stereo! Oh the ecstasy he felt as the violins raced up and down among the 'cellos, swelling and receding as though it were an organic being and he was laying on it's chest as it breathed. His mind became filled with swirling, beautiful colours as the allegro gave way to a repeat of the first and second phrases, the subtle changes in the melody making huge alterations to the patterns billowing under his eye-lids. Before the music ended the spinning colours span faster and faster until, like one of those multi-coloured spinning tops, they blended into a dazzling white, and K began to notice a distinct lack of pain in his body. In fact, as the white light got brighter still he realised that he could really only sense his arms, and then his hands, and finally his fingers as all of the energy he had left seemed to seep from his finger-tips and his hands fell limply to the floor. He never made it to the grand finishing chords of the music.

A few days later, on account of the weeks worth of meals piled up against his door that the delivery guy finally decided to mention to somebody, the police broke in to K's flat and found him lying dead on the balcony, twisted into an agonising contortion but with a huge, content-looking smile on his face. The coroner recorded a death by natural causes.

Self portrait in red

Oiz ii Men - 'Up the Anti'

Alfred The Duck

Alfred was a duck, who hated being a duck.
From an early age, almost straight after his little beak broke out of its little shell prison he felt a resentment for the strange, awkward, bill-nosed waddling creatures he saw around him. As a young duckling, not content with the simple pleasures of pond life Alfred would look for more complicated pleasures, such as trying to climb a tree and jump in to the pond, or explore the woodland around his little Sussex pond. In fact, it was on just such an outing that he missed the day the vets came to the pond to clip the wings of that season's litter, so that not a week later when he jumped from his favourite branch of the big over-hanging yew tree into the pond, and gave his usual flail for balance, he never actually made it back to the pond. Ever.
Oh what joy he had, swooping high above the little woodland he had been intrepidly exploring for the eternal-seeming 2 months of his life, so high in fact that he saw it to be just that; for the first time he realised how little the woodland was, or, more specifically, he realised how big the rest of the world was. Not having any place in particular to go, or really understanding exactly what it was that was happening to him, he decided to head for the big body of water he saw to the south of him (although, obviously, he didn't know it was to the south). As he was enjoying swooping for the first time, relishing the feeling of the air streaming through each of his feathers, he was mesmerised by the glimmering white, blue and golden mass ahead. So mesmerised in fact, that he was taken quite by surprise at a sudden wave of exhaustion, and veritably crash-landed into a puddle in the car-park of a country pub. (Although, obviously, he didn't know it was a pub. If he had, he may have been endeared by the quaintness of this particular pub, set on the turn of a quiet country lane with a thatched roof and abundance of hanging baskets, and a pretty little hedged-in orchard by the car park).
After what seemed to Alfred like a short nap but was in fact a 13 hour slumber under an apple tree in the orchard, he set about working out how to get air born again. The main problem he had was that none of the trees were near any fences, or had any low branches, so poor little waddling Alfred had no hope of simply climbing up as he had at his pond. He searched in his memory for any clues as to what he was supposed to do, but as all the ducks in his pond had suffered the same fate as his brothers and sisters and cousins (although the links are quite dubious, for this very same reason) and had their wings clipped, none of them had ever even considered flying, let alone tried it. In fact, if Alfred had cared to look back as he flew off he would have seen the huge commotion his new game had caused in his former home, but he didn't. And here he was, with no idea how a duck is meant to get off the ground to fly without jumping out of a tree. He decided to have a look in the building next to his tree.
As with many quiet country pubs this one kept its doors open most of the time, and before long Alfred had shuffled his way in to the main bar, where the first thing to catch his eye was a row of shiny, somewhat fake-looking ducks similar to him flying motionlessly across a pile of burnt tree-branches. Strange, he thought to himself, they look like me, and that looks like what I was doing yesterday, but I'm sure I was moving a lot more when I was doing it.
'Quack, quack quack?' He asked.
Nothing. Not a peep out of them. Feeling a little offended and entirely confused he wandered around the bar and stopped, dumbstruck. In front of him, in all its moving multi-coloured glory was Alfred's first television, still on the sky sports channel from the previous night's enterprise. And even more surprisingly the images that happened to be on it at that moment were those of lots and lots and lots of ducks, flapping their wings and running across the surface of the water, faster and faster until their ugly webbed feet were no longer getting wet, and off they flew. What happened next was more than a little odd, it seemed to Alfred, but he was too excited about what he had learned to really figure out what the men with noisy, smoking sticks were pointing them at the ducks for, and he was already out of the door by the time the Labradors were retrieving the carcasses.
So he needed to find a stretch of water. He thought he maybe remembered seeing something as he tumbled towards the car park the previous afternoon, but had no idea what or in which direction, so he set off down the country lane in search. The first drama occurred when a small, square, very quiet little van came hurtling around the corner, with its white shiny cargo making a terrible racket, scaring Alfred half to death, but it was soon gone and he composed himself, and set off again. The sun was much higher in the sky, and our poor little friend was quite knackered by the time he finally saw a reasonable stretch of water on a small, secluded river. Barely stopping to breath or even have a drink he rushed to the water and began running as fast as he could, flapping his wings and generally making a lot of splash, but not really getting out of the water. Soon though, after a rest and a rethink, he got the hang of it and soared off into the sky, this time remembering to conserve his energy.

As it got closer the huge shiny blue thing just got bigger and bigger, until it looked like it went on for ever. Although the idea of this eternity scared Alfred somewhat, he was still compelled to fly towards it if for no other reason than to bathe in its sparkle. As he got closer still he started to see buildings gathered around the edge of it, even closer and he saw that there were a great many more buildings than he had ever seen before, and a lot of them were bigger than anything he had ever seen. Among the buildings were dozens, hundreds of people walking around, zipping along on funny metal frames, driving around in an astounding array of shapes and sizes and colours of those noisy metal boxes he'd seen at the pond. Spying a nice-looking pond in the middle of a large field he made a slightly sloppy splash-down and caught his breath, looking about at his new surroundings.

The first thing that struck him was the dirtiness of it all. There were bits of coloured plastic and metal in all of the flowers, and around the trees, even just thrown down on to the hard dark grey surface that the humans walk along. The second thing he noticed was that all of the humans walking around this particular pond were boys. Not a single girl or child to be seen. Strange, he thought, as he had seen many families at the pond and thought that they always travelled so; A big boy, a big lady, and 2 or more children. He had never seen boys alone like this, and never ones dressed in such a colourful way. As he watched he saw two of them who had been walking around alone start to talk to each other, and shortly afterwards they disappeared into the nearby bushes, holding hands! Now, Alfred had seen boys and girls holding hands, and sometimes big boys holding the hands of the child boys, and it seemed to him like an act of intimacy similar to when his siblings would preen each others feathers, not something to share with a stranger. He decided to follow them into the bushes and investigate.

Ten minutes later Alfred was waddling down St James's street with his eyes wide open. These big creatures all around him – who incidentally were regarding him with a great deal of amusement as he passed – went to some pretty great lengths for pleasure, something he was quite interested in himself. The two men he had seen in the bushes, while using their bodies in ways Alfred would never have imagined, made sounds of pain mixed with pleasure that held him transfixed. They were clearly enjoying themselves, but the discomfort seemed to equal the pleasure and this is what Alfred picked up on. As he walked along one of the most bohemian roads on the island he was seeing the young people with bits of metal stuck into every available bit of flesh, the boys whizzing along on flat bits of wood with wheels, jumping up onto a bench, falling, and rolling along on the hard floor only to get back up, laughing, and start again. As it got darker he started to see people behaving very strangely, staggering all over the place and shouting what sounded even less like a language to Alfred than normal, though almost all of them apparently happy and enjoying themselves. Having found a nice shelter under a huge wooden structure that jetted out into a massive, scary, shiny black thing that reminded Alfred of the blue thing he had come here looking for, he settled down to a night of some of the strangest and most vivid dreams of his short life.