The Earlham Road Project

Historiography

2008-02-20T21:47:00.003Z

There were two professors. One said that the stuff you saw and touched was real, and that when you saw and touched it you were touching the same stuff everybody else saw and touched; the other said that the stuff you saw and touched was all in your head, and that there was no sure way of telling what was real and what was not.

They argued for some time.

Both had, at different points in their careers, pondered the question of infinity, but had put the question aside as not being within the realms of human understanding.

They died, one after the other, in fairly quick succession.

Two other professors came along and took their places, continuing their arguments. One said that the stuff you saw and touched was real, and that when you saw and touched it you were touching the same stuff everybody else saw and touched; the other said that the stuff you saw and touched was all in your head, and that there was no sure way of telling what was real and what was not.

Both had pondered the question of infinity and both had concluded that life is short, but that the argument continues forever.

New Morning Rain by Kenny Stetson

2007-05-05T13:10:00.000+01:00

It is seldom that I awake cottonmouthed and joyful
After a tiring night of dry nightmares

To the reality of rain, dripping rhythmically
On the sad tin roof outside our kitchen

To the sweetest smell of water, leaking into my room
Dripping from the leafy ovaries of our chestnut tree

Unbroken by the lewd monotony of drought
I will wash my face in the grey morning sky

The Beau Forte Lodge - (Situated on the B1108, also known as Earlham Road). By Tony Krüger

2006-05-26T12:55:00.000+01:00

John Clare, owner of the Beau Forte Lodge, greeted me with a thin moustache, cluttered teeth and lots of enthusiasm. After clamping my hand in his large mitts, and pumping my arm like a beloved ratchet, he showed me to my room - a spacious en suite overlooking the grounds of the refurbished Victorian house. After discussing the merits of oil-based paints, he bowed in the doorway and with a final flourish produced a floral-patterned card from his shirtsleeve. The embossed promise read:

‘You are assured of a warm and friendly welcome.’

I immediately felt relief. John really had been everything his warm handshake had suggested. I sat down wearily on the chintz-quilted corner of the bed, removed my steel capped boots and wept tears of gratitude. The walk from the train station had left my nerves in tatters following an incident with an errant cyclist who had abused me for my taste in overcoats. Walking the dusty road through the fumes and noise, I had hoped the lodge would be all the brochure had promised: ‘Comfort amongst the refined’, and there I was breathing in pot pourri and the lace of antimacassars.

That night after a fish dinner, John’s wife Claire: a husky contralto and pearl earrings, sang by the piano to a tape recording of Jeanne Moreau singing ‘When Love Dies’. As she bowed to the pre-recorded applause, my fellow diners and I threw our floral table decorations at her feet, she bowed low and delicately gathered faux roses and hydrangeas, before distributing another card:

‘We regret that we will no longer be able to accommodate risk.’

Another round of applause. We drifted from our tables to our beds. I have never known a more peaceful sleep, than the night I spent at the Beau Forte Lodge, on the Earlham Road.

Exercises in Earlham by Kenny Stetson

2006-05-14T23:15:00.000+01:00

It was midday. I was cycling down Earlham road, swerving around the occasional large hole, downhill towards the city centre. Pedaling frantically, I reached the point when air drag and the friction of my tires on the hot tarmac prevented further acceleration. A swift-footed citizen hurried uphill against the tide, and into the mess of blurred shapes at the corner of my eye. He or she was carrying something, possibly a sledge hammer or a pickaxe. I resumed pedaling at an absurd speed, almost knocking myself off balance as I flew passed the crematorium. Tiny insects slammed into me and stuck to my forehead. I kept a tight grip on the handlebars, squinted and ducked even lower, tearing through a thick cloud of exhaust fumes. The brake lights of a truck flashed on the runway ahead of me. Maximum velocity. The rushing wind in my ears subsided and the flavor of carbon monoxide on my tongue faded. My blistered tongue. The warm lorry. And a shitload of fries. Unaccustomed as I was to cycling on the left, it surprised me to see Kruger and O'Cinneide suddenly overtaking in a blue Cortina. Kruger waved as they passed and steered clear of the truck. The truck turned to the right.

An hour later I caught sight of them again outside the Castle Mall post office. Kruger was advising his companion to have another button put on his overcoat. They didn't see me. I walked in to send a parcel of tobacco to an acquaintance on an Arizonian farm.

Tool by Tony Kruger

2006-05-13T17:25:00.000+01:00

‘You’ve got to be in the system, to play the system, to get out of the system. That’s what you’ve got to do.’ The site foreman stared at me, waiting for me to nod in affirmation or raise an eyebrow, so I did both, but not because I understood him. I could only concentrate on the line of hair perched close to his upper lip, which looked like it would dissolve in his tea. I resisted the desire to flick it away, propriety standing behind me, its hands on my shoulders.

He carried on sipping tea and staring at his shoes, which made me stare at mine, but the boots had stopped feeling comfortable and anxiety began to spread from my steel toecaps upwards. So I followed some advice I was given once and wandered out into the backyard and picked up a hammer. It was the best advice anyone ever gave me: if you want to look busy, carry a tool and walk fast.

I hurried back through the site office with the hammer leading me, but just as I got near to the door I saw him take off his hat and for the first time since I’d met him, I got to see what he’d been hiding underneath. His head was hairless on top and as he went to smooth his scalp I saw his hand falter above the white shining pate. It happened in an instant, but plainly the hand still remembered the departed hair.

At that point I should have carried on by, but I didn’t. Instead I leaned forward and very gently placed the hammer on his head. Actually that’s not totally true. I made the sound of a helicopter and then very gently placed the hammer on his head. He looked up from his shoes, and it was then that I saw that he hadn’t really stopped talking to me and that there were tiny flecks of yellow and grey in his irises, that his pencil moustache was blond and his hand had a long scar running from knuckle to knuckle, and his mouth trembled from time to time and that the hammer was slipping from his bald head and he hadn’t even noticed it.

So I pulled him to me, hugged him tight and told him that he could count on me always. We stayed clasped together in the site office for some time, swaying to the sounds of the mixers and the cranes and the chisels and the drills.

A talk on aesthetics by Leo Runcible

2006-05-01T11:29:00.000+01:00

I worked on a poem all day that day, called ‘Yer Thighs’, about my love of her thighs.

Her: gone now like all the others. I’ve taken what I can, used it in my work.

My work: seems at times so dusty and inelegant, like an unwanted phone directory lingering too long in the darkened garage of a long-abandoned house.

Abandoned house: like what I was when she left me for the circus.

The circus: where she went after she left me. The longing to breathe fire for a living could no longer be suppressed, she said. Why?

Why: I said. She said she could not explain to someone who had never swallowed a lit match.

The lit match: back then, long before, burning down to its base without me putting it in my mouth.

My mouth: unburned then, but, now: unloved.

So many whys: yer lovely thighs.

I never was much of a poet, but I’ve stuck to it like a limpet. You get used to it, like life, they say. One thing has become clear over the years of grinding out the lines: make them rhyme, hammer them out. Get paid on time.

With the rhymes came the adverts, and with the adverts came the money. I bought a new pencil.

Pencil: so sharp at the beginning, but dulled with time.

Time: what I now have a lot of. Since she left me.

(Chorus: FOR THE CIRCUS)
Where
The other night, I went,
Where all my money I did spent,
Three rings my entertainment provided
No clowns elevated my humours,
Or gave any explanation for why-she-did
Leave me for the dubious joys of
Flammable exhalations in the shabby sawdust
Damp with tiger piss, softening the blows
Dealt to the disappointed imaginations of
Once bright-eyed children.

Bright-eyed children: what I once was (at least, one of them).

I bought two new pencils. The second one a spare, retaining its point, keeping its sheen. Like a portrait of Dorian pencil. I kept it in a special wooden box at the foot of my bed.

Then, one day, it was gone, and in its place, in the small wooden box, some ashes.

She had smoked it, or something like that.

I never asked.

Soon I could detect the fumes of paraffin lingering around the house when I returned from the office.

The Office: where I go to work, hammering out rhymes like a man with a hammer hammers out whatever you hammer out with a hammer.

Another hammer, perhaps?

Metaphor: something you write when you can’t think of the exact word for something.

Circus: six quid in? Not exactly a bargain, but another chance to try and explain the world through a microcosm.

I thought, if the lions represent good, do the tigers represent evil? And what about the elephants?

They represent wisdom, I thought, as I watched one take an enormous dump on the dank sawdust in front of an entire family.

The monkeys could represent Christianity and its struggles with the bananas of truth.

Transubstantiation? Paraffin into fire.

Her: standing there blowing fire. Turned me on, slightly. Felt a twinge, and then had to leave the auditorium, shamefacedly, with a programme held crotchwards.

Crotchwards: towards which all art tends.

'A History of the Earlham Pits' par Jozef O'Cinneide

2006-04-27T15:36:00.000+01:00

With apologies to Hans Prinzhorn (sadly not late of these partes)

Holes are apt to open up on the Earlham Road, it is a limestone/chalk area; primal, cuniform, inviting holes into which buses sink at an average of (at least) one a decade, usually in the short stretch of tarmac that connects the so-called “Secret Gardens” with the dwelling-place of W.H., who is now incredibly old, but still a visible and extremely cantankerous local presence, and who has enjoyed something of a critical and commercial revival in the wake of recent appreciation of his work by sexy young writers from England, the Republic of Ireland, Germany and Mexico. If not enjoying the fame - he has been a recluse ever since his hand was maimed in a slapstick incident in the late thirties - W.H. has enjoyed the monetary rewards of his own rediscovery. His royalty payments have paid for a new digital camera, which he has recently used to photograph the disappearance of a number 26 bus below the surface of Earlham Road. Employing a very slow shutter speed, W.H. has created the illusion a white, pink and blue (some might say violet) blur emanating from a murky, gradual crevasse in the highway.

Of course, we can share in facts that W.H. is too obstinate (but he would be at his age) to recognise. Most of these require no further discussion, but is it not time that we acknowledged that this crack and its vaporous eminence have always been there. To W.H., and indeed to the few visitors who have been welcomed into his acquaintance, the translucent blur represents the potentialities opened up by modern photographic techniques. But the old sod can’t be right all the time. No, to tell a secret, he’d actually captured an image of what was actually taking place: he had only deduced that a bus was entering the hole because he had read the Kodak manual in rather a meticulous fashion.

What is this strange violet spirit? Well, in truth, it’s buying fags.

Even ill-defined and amorphous quasi-spiritual entities enjoy the lovely taste and effect of FAGS. Who doesn’t enjoy the relaxing effect of their first TAB after work. W.H. loves SMOKING and considers it a crucial element both in the successful undertaking of a literary life and his own superannuation. The pink ghost emerges from his crack and goes and buys twenty CIGARETTES from the shop. It does this several times a day but is ashamed of the stigma that comes with buying 4 packets of MARLBORO REDS all in one go.

--------------------------------

I have just related the above FACTS to W.H. and, while disappointed that his camera had not in fact captured the disappearance of a busload of scholars but a chronically addicted genius loci, he is well pleased that ghosts love BINES. And so am I.

The Profusely Bleeding Hand of W.H., Whom Astute Readers May Recognise as Being Himself the Author of this Sorry Tale, But Then May Be Not Quite So

2006-02-16T15:51:00.000Z

Astute As Their Teacheres Have Led Them To Believe In Matters Of Stories And Fables

W.H. picked up his pencil and his cigarette using the same hand, because he was using the other to open the window. Outside, it was spring on the Earlham Road. This was in 1935 when the secret gardens had just opened. It was nicely raining. He began to write. When he had completed the following passage-

Wonderland and Looking-Glass land are fun to visit but no places to live in. Even when she is there, Alice can ask herself with some nostalgia “if anything would ever happen in a natural way again,” and by “natural” she means the opposite of what Rousseau would mean. She means peaceful, civilised society

- the sash fell on his hand. “Cunts”, yelled W.H., never the kind of man to offer a platitude when a profanity was available (“to hand”, he initially thought, but that was just a bad pun). With one eye he inspected the crushed and bleeding appendage, and with the other glanced at what he had written. W.H. looked like a crosseyed dog.

First he said (out loud) “why did I write that?”

Then he said (out loud) “I haven’t written that yet.”

W.H. didn’t know what Rousseau would mean by “natural” but he didn’t know what he meant by it either. He suspected it didn’t mean bleeding profusely out of an open window. How had his hand got back there? A crocodile of schoolchildren, who were just leaving the secret garden, began to scream en masse at the sight of the limp digits that were splayed across the sill. Their teacher was yelling something up at him, but could not make himself understood as a result of a cleft palate.

“Fuck off!” shouted W.H. “Nobody sounds as stupid as you do!”

The schoolchildren began to throw small pebbles and coins at the window. W.H. picked up a heavy paperweight and threw it through the window at the teacher. As the glass from the shattered pane embedded itself in the already-broken hand of the solipsistic author, the teacher slumped to the ground.

“Good fucking riddance!” shouted W.H., who had never really liked his left hand anyway. Admittedly, he was regretting having positioned his desk so close to the window when the room had a plethora of cavities in which one could work in peace.

Because it was 1937, the police were too busy giving directions to strangers and helping old ladies across the street to investigate the strange death of the schoolteacher on Earlham Road. The children went back to school and raised a skull & crossbones on the flagpole.

(From the Papers of M. Joe Kennedy, lateley much of these partes)

What was the Earlham Road?

2006-01-04T18:34:00.000Z

Baby, I was talking to you about the Earlham Road, and you were asking me what it was, and why it was so important. Remember the time I said to you that places are constituted more by people and experiences than as actual physical entities?

“Yes, I remember,” she said. “But it sounded like bollocks then, and I’m less than convinced now.”

“Even though you’re slightly stoned, and infinitely suggestible to all manner of bullshit?”

She said yes and shrugged in a rather minor way. I felt I had made my point, but wished to make it with broader strokes.

“The Earlham Road,” I pronounced, “was a street that connected the centre of a town I once lived in, to a university I once attended. Many was the time I walked in my friends’ company in both directions along this road. It served, first as a way of getting around, then, long afterwards, as a sort of metaphor for the time we spent there. As a focus of our longing and nostalgia. It made such urges manageable, as we aestheticised it, coloured it with feelings we held for people we now rarely see. Some people get sniffy about the Mississippi, others talk grandly of memories of the Golden Gate, still others will speak of an old house that somehow holds memory for them. For us, it’s the Earlham Road. And as long as the road is preserved in what we do, and what we think about, our time spent there will remain with us too, and those whose company we kept back then are always, somehow, with us.”

“So it’s like a movable feast?” she asked.

“It’s more a feast that has been consumed, but is being very slowly digested.”

And with that, we both went back to sleep.

SO MUCH SILENCE (Saturday, June 28, 2003) by Ernesto Priego

2005-12-23T11:19:00.000Z

The first time I saw the Earlham Road I had been
travelling for more than 20 hours. From the coach's
tinted windows it looked like an infinite road to
monotone suburbia, its houses on each side the same
color and size, its trees, not yet naked from the
Autumn winds, giving still more shade under the grey
and cloudy sky. I remember our host saying, "this is
Earlham Road, if you get lost at night coming from the
city centre, simply follow it and you will get to the
University". Back then I did not know how many times I
would end up walking that old road, in the wee hours,
sometimes with a few drinks causing trouble in my head
and in my heart. Not because I'd gotten literally
"lost", but because Earlham proved to be the fastest
way home when one could not find or afford a cab.

But what once was some sort of last resort measure
ended up becoming a habit and, in a way, a necessary
pleasure. Walking home via Earlham after midnight has
always been a very deep and intimate experience for
me. Between three and five a.m. birds will be your
company, singing incessantly, subtly ruining Norwich's
nocturnal calm with their high love songs. In the
Winter, and even more in the Spring, I remember
walking back home and saying, stupid birds, they are
so confused. It's only 2 a.m. and they think the Sun
has come out. Don't you know fools rush in, I would
tell them.

The CoOp delivery service joins the birds in the night
symphony that takes place on Earlham as the old day
fades out and the new one slowly fades in. They come
back and forth in their little white (electric?)
trucks, leaving fresh milk on elderly couples'
doorsteps, silently, like thieves, like leprechauns
hiding a very simple treasure.

I have stopped counting the times I have walked that
road. But I can almost recall with the most painful
clarity those who have walked it with me, as well as
the conversations we have had, or, when I have walked
it on my own, the storm of emotions and thoughts that
have clouded and electrified my tired and drunken
braincells and bloodcells. Once I walked back drinking
from a pocket-sized bottle of Vodka my friend Jon gave
me, and every step meant a flipping of the mental page
of my recent past history.

Without those walks back home after a night out in
Norwich, I would probably have been home only to face
insomnia and my own mono-thematic, ever-returning
emotional aches. I have done it, taken a cab, and then
I am here, without the ability to read or write, too
late --too early-- for anything, without being able to
close my eyes and sleep.

Yesterday, after saying good-bye to a Swiss
girl-friend who I may never see again, my thoughts
were surprisingly quiet, almost absent from my
walking. The birds usually over-crowding Earlham's
trees were oddly absent as well, quiet and respectful.
Only the slow buzz of the milkmen's little truck could
be heard along the clashing of milk glass pints.

Earlham Road, your trees, your birds, your apparently
endless path: I know you have listened to me more than
once. I know you will keep the secret.

An evening on the Autobahn by Kenny Stetson

2005-11-09T12:09:00.000Z

Winter is creeping up on the cities of central Europe. Somehow I always forget how friggin' cold winters are and then it annoys me when they come round. Someday in the future I'll live in a warm country, sending postcards to people in bad weather places. Last Friday I came down with stomach flu at work and was forced to go to the John about six times in four hours. Perhaps the worst day in the office ever. Even so, I got in the car and started out towards Frankfurt after dark, a two-and-a-half hour drive in good conditions. The throttle cable and the cardan shaft still need replacing. The throttle cable somehow gets stuck during acceleration and keeps the throttle from retracting. Like cruise control which can't be switched off.

After about forty-five minutes of driving, eating pretzels and drinking coke to counter my abdominal condition, sickness and exhaustion overwhelmed me. I stopped at a decrepit 1970s Autobahn roadhouse and sat in the dark with locked doors. At night these places are crowded with truckers, prostitutes and charlatans trying to kick money out of travelers. Eventually I forced myself to get out and walk towards the building in search of a latrine. The radio in the toilet area played tacky Italian pop music and there was an advertisement for fireplaces on the door of the cubicle. Coming back through the building I walked through a deserted cafeteria area which smelled revolting to me at the time. My stomach began contracting as I left the building, so I walked faster and made it to a dark spot near one of those wooden picnic table things before spewing 1.5 litres of warm Coke with Pretzels. The Coke was still sweet. Not surprising really, since one litre contains more than 50 sugar cubes.

Now feeling very empty, I returned to the bathroom to wash out my mouth and nose with water. The Italian pop music was still playing and there were some children examining the condom machine. I felt better and immediately got back on the road, listening to reports of accidents, staus and road kill on the old Becker radio. Arrived ten minutes before midnight, unloaded five wheels and a 19 inch monitor. Went to bed feeling feverish. Got up the next morning at six o'clock, had an Aspirin for breakfast and took the car to an early appointment at a specialist workshop.

The Pope’s Throat (a dispatch from Kenny Stetson)

2005-02-27T14:32:00.000Z

Live from a hospital in Rome. The Vicar of Christ appears in a window. For the first three minutes nobody understands what he says. Relatively clearly, he then whispers into the microphone: “Christ, you know it ain’t easy.” Singing at the Easter service was forbidden by his doctors: too many pipes down his throat. So he hums into the microphone instead. Papal aids and deputies join in to the melody of He’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain Following the Tracheotomy. He repeatedly refused to step down Wednesday, explaining that the ninth Pope to step down breathed his last breath in the late 15th century. What would ordinary Catholics say? His holiness should remain hospitalized in the traditional way, appearing occasionally in his window to wave at the crowd. “I will only be removed by God,” he breathed, on his own. Church experts expect God to send an unequivocal signal ordering him to step down Monday. John Paul may travel to Poland for more details, leaving his tubes and the army of doctors behind. A holy vocalist unfettered by bans on singing and talking. Poland is said to have numerous windows to appear in and wave from. Angelus blessing bulletins however announced the papal health situation required the insertion of additional devices into his throat. Alas, appointed to the throne of St. Peter for all eternity, the Holy Father remains in detention.

Adventures in the Golden Triangle

2005-01-20T10:17:00.000Z

I suppose you want to know who I am and why I’m writing this, but that will have to wait for another time. For there are more pressing things at hand, and I cannot divert my attention into the sheer placidity and dopy literariness of areas like biography and plot and a character’s motivation. Movement, that’s what it’s all about.

All I can tell you is I stole a car. A powdery green number, from Mill Hill Road. Keys were in the ignition, dumbly, so I just climbed in and offed I went. The look on some drivers’ faces as you plough through the neat front gardens, avoiding traffic as you do so, is something to behold. If I could read lips I would have been offended, no doubt. Their red piggish faces crouched over the wheel miming expletives at me who didn’t care.

I never knew what ‘bling’ meant, and, in a way, I still don’t. I met a kid, kicking a ball on the side of the road, real snotnosed like, and he told me it was something to do with rappers and their cars. Doesn’t make much sense to me. I stole his ball and kicked it in the river. I would have cried if I was him, but he didn’t, and said he had stolen it from someone else and what goes around comes around.

Little Prick. The car starts to wobble, which could have been caused by the wall I demolished back there around the corner. Minis can’t take much punishment, it seems. The back wheel goes flying off and flips forward, bouncing on the bonnet, before rolling down the road, a slight quiver in its movement, and rolling across the junction with the Unthank Road, nimbly cutting between traffic and rolling up the hill slightly on the other side before tipping over at the kerb.

I watch this, transfixed by the unusualness of the scene, while the car careens into a wall. I keep my focus on the departing rear wheel, oblivious to the damage I’m causing to the car and wall.

I’m hungry, so walk to the shop and buy a pasty, then walk to the station to get the train back to London, where I’m due in Hoxton in the evening for the opening of my exhibition.

When I first met Ravique, she drank coffee hard like an addict, and swept her dark hair back across her face as she talked fast about everything on her mind. She chewed up topics and spat them out. She moved me.

Then she got into conceptual art hijinks, selling the empty contents of jars that weren’t there to media folk who weren’t there either. It made me laugh; it made her money. I wanted in, she wanted out. We swapped our identities and I claimed to be Ravique. No one raised an eyebrow. I didn’t even change my appearance, just swept my blond hair across my face as I talked hard and fast about everything under the sun.

She left London and moved to a small island in the Pacific, where she’s become a teacher of kung-po, or something like that. Sometimes she sends me leaves through the post, with my address and a stamp on one side and on the other side the word ‘beautiful’ written as many times as she can fit it. I think she’s finally found herself.

So anyway, on the way through Ipswich tunnel I think back to the graveyard I was smoking that bag of shit in, and I swear the monument next to me moved, although I can’t confirm it as I was fucked at the time, and by the time I realised it moved I was in the Ipswich tunnel. Someone should check to confirm it. Or not.

Beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful. Manningtree. Beautiful. Colchester. Beautiful. Liverpool Street. Beautiful. Old Street. Beautiful. Hoxton.

Out For a Stroll by Kenny Stetson

2005-01-19T10:46:00.000Z

Rolling along out across the entrance way passing gas, through the sliding doors of the hospital. The daylight dazzled me. While lifting a hand to shield my eyes, I rolled towards the 15 steps next to the wheelchair ramp. Severely bruised, and having banged my head on the pavement, I struggled to stand up unassisted by pulling myself up on the handrail. The midday sun shone onto my battered skull. Finally, I regained my balance and limped down the street, one slipper missing, conscious of my sad appearance. But the limping meant nothing, everybody limps from time to time. I felt distantly relieved at my successful escape from the clinic, although the sun was still seriously messing up my vision. No more fat nurses or dioxide dinners with the old white cancer man.

As I shambled along the sidewalk, a figure emerged from a doorway somewhere in the wall ahead of me. I heard the drumming sound of a lady’s shoes tapping over the concrete. The harsh click-clacking was still echoing inside my skull as I burst into a fit of coughing, spewing phlegm. An indistinct figure, silhouetted against the light, she moved across the street through the wavering heat. A growing dark shape, like the shadow of a person approaching a source of light. The force of a renewed bout of coughing took control of me - I trembled. Too late, my eyes acknowledged that she was a shower of black arrows, flying towards me out of the haze. Struggling to avoid the barrage, I stepped on the tip of my gown. As I fell headlong onto the pavement, I felt the stinging pain of low flying arrows piercing my back. The sensation grew worse, until it felt like a fizzy building collapsing on top of me, for about ten seconds.

At that moment the clicking heels suddenly grew fainter, and my coughing died down.

Coughing is natural; it keeps the phlegm from settling permanently inside the lung, where it would eventually cause irreparable damage. And never mind women. We live on the same planet, and women are alright, although an indefinite fatigue had long since collected around my efforts to communicate with them.

The row of cars was clearly a secret message from the professor. I threw two Linoquine pills into my foaming mouth and started down the sweltering street, shambling, my bathrobe without a belt, open at the front, my shrivelled member dangling.

Although the pain was acceptable, the shady entrance of a closed-down shop seemed irresistible as a good place to lie down for a rest. I entered the shade and crumpled in a pile of semi-dried vomit. A sour odour emanated as I broke the grey crust with my elbow.

As my head touched the floor, there was a loud snoring noise. I spat out two teeth and some bloody saliva and looked up – there was nothing. I fumbled around in my robe’s pocket to find more pills.

Being shot with a well-designed weapon is not necessarily a painful situation. Even less so a prolonged situation. Rather, the brain merely registers a foreign object. No more. This is the only discovery. I say this based on experience, and to explain my situation. I felt calm and peaceful. Blood squirted from my side. I am out shopping. Just as I am about to hand over the money for this stuff I have been saving up for for months, this thing hits me.
Who shot me?

Big Vern, Author of “In the Graveyard…” (as told at Joe Kennedy)

2005-01-18T17:09:00.000Z

“Baby, I can’t believe you put me in one of your stories!”

I was crouched underneath the windowsill, popping my head up from time to time to see if they were outside yet. Not yet, but soon.

“So sweet of you!”

Of course, it wasn’t her. She didn’t even drink coffee. I’d let that slatternly appearance deceive me, in that bar. Turns out she only smokes when she’s drinking, no, only when she’s drinking on special occasions. But I was trying to keep a low profile right now; tell her the truth and she’d be right out in the street, clicking her heels loudly.

“Shhh. They got sound detectors. That’s how they caught Vic, y’know.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. Honey, this is all paranoia. Let’s go out tonight- it’s not right locking yourself up like this.”

“Paranoia? Is it nowt.” I said, mimicking one of my characters.

A car came down the street. I don’t know much about cars, but I know they’re cars when I see them. Pastel green. Two men sat in the front, wearing suits. She was still sitting at the computer, browsing for my work on the web, a bottle of sparkling water to her left. I should have gone with my instincts: the left handers are always the most trouble.

“I’ve got to vacuum. Petal’s coming over at three for tea, and she’s got a dust allergy.”

Dust allergy?

“Darling,” I said, fixing her with a masterful expression, “do you think you could leave that for today? Call Petal and tell her you’ve got flu.”

“I spoke to her on the phone twenty minutes ago, and I think I’d have told her then if I had flu.”

Scuppered.

The car had gone past, but I know they were just waiting for the moment.

Two Men

2004-11-06T20:28:00.000Z

1
Two men stood on the edge of a cliff, and one said to the other: ‘well, that’s it.’ Below them, in the water, the rear of a car slowly sunk from sight, beneath the surface. Then they turned around and walked away.

2
Two men stood on the edge of a cliff; one said to the other: ‘well, that’s it.’ Below them, in the water, the rear of a car slowly sunk from sight, beneath the surface. A pool of cash bobbed on the waves.

3
One man stood on the edge of a cliff, next to a car. With an excited look, he counted the bundle of bills in his hand. Below him, a man struggles with the waves; he gives up, crashes against rocks, and sinks.

4
A car stood at the cliff edge, lights on and doors wide open. From the bag that lay askew on the ground, hundreds of notes blew into the air towards the sea. Neither of the men could be seen in the water.

5
It is a windy day, and rain slants down onto the cliff from the sea. No one here. Miles away, two men agree to rob a bank and come here to divide up the loot equally; each plans to double-cross the other.

The stories that write themselves

2004-10-31T13:38:00.000Z

Here was the thing: he wrote a slew of very short stories but, sooner or later, he discovered that they conformed to a structure that he found easy to repeat. There would be two people: a man and a woman. They would be in love, but then fall out of love somewhere between the third and fourth paragraphs of his very short story. It would be moving, he thought at first, but the more he thought about it the less moving he felt it to be.

The overwhelming feeling he got, looking back at his collected works from the last few months, was of a writer wrestling with demons of his own creation; his stories had become a place to act out scenes which had never occurred in his actual life. Some of the characters slightly resembled people he had once known: they had the same shoes, or the same haircuts, or similar eyes. He imagined people resembling people in situations that had never happened. He wasn’t crazy, just creative. It’s all material, after all.

This was the cloth he cut his stories from, but, no matter how different the cloth was in terms of texture and colour, it always looked the same in the engulfing gloom of the cut of his story.

He wrote a story about a narrator and his girlfriend fighting. He focused on the items she had just bought, and rammed these items home as some sort of vague metaphor for loss. There was a touch of irony too, a wry humour to it. It pleased him.

He started to live again and write less. Instead of writing about sadness he started to feel it. It was different from how he had imagined it on paper. He vowed to go back and write stories that more accurately reflected these feelings felt in real lived life.

What happened, though, was this: his life started to be lived as if he was a character in one of his stories. There were fights with girlfriends; there were disagreements about actors from television; he quite accurately played the solitary writer sitting writing observations in cafés.

Sadness became part of his life to such a degree that he could no longer scalpel it out and leave it sitting, carefully carved into a pleasing shape, on the previously blank page. It had not only become part of his life, it had become part of him, and no matter how hard he tried he could not get rid of it. At first sadness clung to him like a leech, then it grew inside him like a cancer; there was nothing he could do.

The sadder he got, the happier his stories got. He sold millions of books, and became famous as a feel-good author. His views were sought on vital issues of the day by daytime television programmes, where he sat in a neat suit and nodded when required to do so. A smile was uniformly plastered on his face; his skin was tanned orange and powdered to stop the glare; his teeth had been expertly engineered into the perfect smile. Now he was successful, he looked incredibly – irredeemably – happy.

In the Graveyard, the monument moved in the morning by Joe Kennedy

2004-10-26T18:52:00.000+01:00

You have to become a creature of routines I hear myself saying as her foot kicks over the coffee that she didn’t drink last night making my fist ball up as though it were around some object not to be lost. Morning, her face is all swollen up like she’s got an allergy, well, I suppose she does have an allergy but it’s not affecting her right now. Christ I am a routine only on different arterial roads in the west of the city, a routine of nailbiting (better to have a nailbiting routine, eh?) on the Unthank, the Dereham, the Earlham. People in this city talk about the arterial roads like people in proper cities talk about metro lines. At this precise moment in time I glance at the computer and remember the story saved in a sub/sub/sub directory about a flaneur sort of guy riding an invented underground in this city, “The Eastern Underground”, one I wrote when younger and overexcited by what the old lecturers had to say about excluded middles postmodern geographies and all that shit. Must I say I didn’t complete the story, I was ambitious then and couldn’t knock out a piece in ten minutes ‘cos I was always thinking of novels with black&white photos on the cover maybe of girls applying lipstick and powerstations in the twilight, it doesn’t pain me that I didn’t finish that particular work or the one about an island overrun with hotels or the Italian porno or the magical realist (hahahaha) one, only that I didn’t finish something, which is a chronic pain in the arse.

So, I have though about all of these things and she still hasn’t replied, so I say I was only joking about the routines.

Coffee’ll never come out of this fucking carpet, the fuck. Best to leave it because I decided that we had to go for a walk in the morning, another brilliant displacement activity, brilliant. You even get fit (6 years later). (tell a secret, I’m a hypocrite about the routines, real shit.)

But really I want to go for a walk ‘cos I want to see the monument again, in the graveyard inbetween the arterials I mentioned, I only saw it the once and it was on one of those brooding summer mornings where it’ll piss it down all day but you might get a reprieve if you get to work on time. It was a bold old thing, facing outwards, towering, classical not Christian.

So we take a walk up there and walk down the path which is completely covered in mud and leaves and dogshit.

There’s the monument, it’s facing inwards.

It’s not that big.

So to cut a long story short the monument in the graveyard moved, except it probably didn’t, and everything else I’ve mentioned is utterly superfluous. Maybe I should finish off those novels one day no fuck it you can do them.

Margaret by Ernesto Priego

2004-10-25T16:24:00.000+01:00

Margaret sat in the stairs of the square. A concrete sky looked down upon her with a little bit of pity, so there was not a single drop of rain to spoil her evening. She just looked beyond, into the distance, as if waiting for another albatross to pass her way.

Margaret wore a pair of worn low-rise jeans and a skinny white t-shirt that allowed her belly button to be seen. Her skin was the color of milk and her hair the color of Italian espresso, as black as the shiny pair of Doc Martens boots she always wore. She would sit there and stare at the yellow stitching of the plastic soles and caress the soft surface of the shoes. She liked to imagine she would take those same boots somewhere else, make them step on something else than this same ground she now stepped on. She liked to fantasize about walking distances, taking planes, riding a motorcycle, driving a Mini with the union jack painted on the top across the country, maybe all the way through the tunnel, into different countries where other languages were spoken, different currencies were spent and people looked the other way to cross the street. Margaret scratched her head with her left hand, laughing a little because she imagined herself to look like a monkey. The thing is, no one seemed to be looking at her.

Her hair, not-so-short but not-so-long, looked spikey and uncared for, even if in a thoughtful and premeditated way. Her eyes were big and sort of sad, the color of honey. Even though she did not like to wear a lot of make-up -as her so-called mates from school-, a thin line of black shadow emphasized the shape and color of her eyes. And so Margaret sat, in the stairs of the square, sheltered by a black blanket of a sky full of little light holes that were the stars this time of the year.

Margaret felt lonely, as usual, but was not sad. She was simply expectant. The trouble was, so she thought, she had no clue what she was waiting for. What she did know indeed was that she was supposed to be waiting for something to happen in her life. Margaret looked fixedly at the screen of her mobile phone, playing with the keys, writing nonsensical phrases that never quite got to compose a txt message that would get actually sent. She just sat there, then, and played around with her mobile. The rest was silence, she thought, as she realized there was no one she could actually call or txt, even though she had lots of names and numbers saved in her mobile's address book. She sighed, not really knowing why. She just stared into the distant landscape, a flat scene of houses that looked just like each other, windows opened into places she had never been to, pieces of strange lives she would never get to live.

Margaret sat in the stairs and looked at her watch. Two hours had passed since she had left her mates at the pub. It was summer, after all, and she had had a couple of gin and tonics, even though she knew she could not afford them. What the hell, she had thought, and went on to have a couple. She had played darts but had lost as usual, since Katrina, the cunt, would always have such perfect shots. She had got bored and out of money, so she left them there, drinking and jiggling and looking at the local boys discussing football and wearing those stupid Rugby jerseys with false numbers on their backs. She had felt incredibly lonely there, 9pm at the local, drinking her second gin and listening to some song about roads winding and lights blinding behind the noise of drunken voices. She decided she was better off on her own, and left for the square, where she sat now.

It was late for the albatrosses to be flying around. Still, Margaret sat there and wondered what her life could have been like had she left the town for the uni. She had been sick of school, anyways, and no one she actually cared for was going after all. She had not found a job yet, and her savings from the summer camp thing were running out. And here she was, she thought, sitting at the local Uni's campus square, trying to figure out why she had left her mates drinking at the pub and had decided to come here on her own instead. The sky stopped being friendly as she thought this and some drops of rain took her out from her daydreaming. She cursed in silence as she doubted about standing up or just staying there, what the hell, and get drenched with some harmless English summer rain.

¨We are going to the town¨, she thought, and stood up. She began walking to the bus stop, then she ran, and as soon as she got to the transparent protection of the shelter the whole sky broke down in violent and unexpected rain. The bus would take some ten minutes to come, if it was on time, which was kind of unlikely. There did not seem to be anyone around. Margaret sat and closed her eyes, listening to the rain hit the plastic. For a moment, there was nothing on earth but her and the drops of rain, and the sound of solitude. She thought of water, and clouds, and cold, and vast skies. The loud roaring of the bus brought her back to reality. She put her coins on the tray, murmured "City center" to the driver and rushed to the back of the bus.

Margaret rested her head against the window. She drew imaginary landscapes with her finger on the steamy and cold plastic, took her headphones out from her backpack and closed her eyes again. There was no one else on the bus either, but she did not seem to notice until the bus got into town. The rain had ceased but the roads still looked deserted. Shops were closed, but their signs outside remained on, glistening with a spooky spectral light that was reflected on the wet stones on the floor. Margaret got off the bus on the market stop. "At least I may be able to get some chips at this hour”, she thought.

A black bird flew very close to her head and descended into the fountain to drink some water. There was some strange buzz coming out of the McDonald's neon sign. There seemed to be no other sound, but she could not realize it because she still had her headphones on. Every shop in the market was closed. Margaret walked through the empty hallways like a lonely ghost, wandering without any sense of direction. She took her headphones on and stopped. She was grabbing her bag very tightly with her left hand and holding her head with the other. She looked up and down. She sighed, and left the market towards the town hall and the library. She began singing quietly, as in the lullabies her father used to sing to her, with louder volume at first, and then, gradually, turning into a very silent murmur. It was as if her voice could have been heard miles from there. Some other birds flew off some trees next to the Anglican Church. The gravestones were still there, Margaret thought, as quiet and still and muddy and forgotten as this town. She checked her watch. It was only eleven, so pubs would just be calling last orders. As she looked at the time, a strange and piercing shiver ran through her spine. She had never felt as lonely as then. She felt small, very small, as if she was the last person on earth, as if everyone had fled to another planet and she had been left behind.

Margaret sat in the stairs of the library, waiting for someone to pass by. But only minutes passed, and her stomach made funny noses, and she was getting cold with only that tee shirt on. She found herself there, all by herself, sitting on the steps and not going anywhere. She thought of herself as a ghost, as the last, abandoned specter in a cursed town. The sound of silence was all there was to hear. Even the trees stopped moving. Margaret sat there, holding herself tightly, with her arms crossed. The city center was full of lights but there was not a soul to be seen. Margaret looked at her hands fixedly, expecting them to get as transparent as air, but they did not. She pinched herself to see if she was dreaming, but it hurt, and she did not wake up.

Margaret sat in the stairs, which were still wet from the brief rain. It was England and it was summer. She did not have anywhere to go and waited for something she did not know. She felt alone and small, very small, like a particle of dust in the immeasurable universe. She felt like she had disappeared from the face of the earth, but on second thought she realized it was everyone else who had just vanished. She stood up and started walking back home, trying not to think much about it. In the distance, a lonely dog barked, and a full, round moon appeared behind the thick, gray clouds.

Them Is - By Joe Kennedy

2004-10-21T19:08:00.000+01:00

He knew it was what they did, them, people grew beards and never bought lager again and dressed serious and gave up Marlboro lights for reds or roll-ups, and then they, them, pretended not to love it and complained. Never directly. Object of ire was always the younger ones, the happy looking girls dressed for hundreds of pounds and the stylish talented-looking young men. They were cunts, the lot of them. And they were all stupid.

Now he was losing track of he, I, them. Them were the young-ones (as he’d heard them described by a reputable man at a party weeks ago when he still felt like one, young-one that is), but weren’t them (or they?) a bunch of beards straggling into ales with old world names and crushing roll-ups under their old smart shoes that they’d hidden under a bed for years and only came out for weddings and agency interviews, if it was a good agency.

Reflects on his own lack of eloquence, waiting for a bus on the Earlham Road. Them (one of them) knew all the words there was to know. The other them were kind of uncauterized, enraptured, speaking in sex. Them said that them’s language had an “erotics”.

He still thinks “erotics” are those books you find under your dad’s bed.

Or when he was with them pretended it was French films with Distel or Fontaine on the soundtrack. How could you set the mood with them?

In eloquence, then, them and them are the same but different.

There was another them, out of all the above circles now, but they had an easy eloquence about them and used words culled from the pub and the pitch and the office. He used to be able to speak like them but he’d been back with them and observing them for too long, so he was starting to speak like a mix of them and them and them but never with the right them and he’d drink the wrong drink when he was with them and smoke the wrong cigarettes when he was with them and get bored when he was with them.

So that was them, and this is now, and them, them and them is now. Honestly, the only hope is a she.

Sequence by Kenny Stetson

2004-09-20T17:58:00.000+01:00

The beginning of the end. Shorter than expected. The train slowly screeched to a stop at the far end of the sweltering platform. Clearly a nuisance – running to reach the end of an overdue train, not only mispositioned, but also painfully expensive to ride on.

Remember to buy a horse.

No tickets, no fuel, just hay and water.

It was even hotter inside. I wobbled down the grimy aisle as the train accelerated. Since most of the dual seats – foul, narrow and facing each other – inside the car were already occupied with at least two creatures, and although I dislike sitting directly opposite anonymous persons, I randomly dropped down when a black lady left her seat and transferred down the aisle to another seat. A chance to rest my heavy head and read the Sports section. Armstrong senses sixth Tour victory. Again!

She made no effort to conceal her stare. Rather unusual for these typical train situations. Then focussing on the floor for 30 seconds, passive, like an ordinary person on a train, perhaps examining the lower section of the seat, the triangular region between the wall and the floor. Now she gradually leaned forward to look at exactly what I was reading.

I held her glance. She smiled an insane smile. Her wet gums were glistening in the sunlight. So my dark glasses had not fulfilled their function as a curtain between me and the outside world.

‘This is Lance Armstrong’ I said, confidently pointing at the picture in the paper. 'Do you follow the bike races?’

Her expression was now slightly confused. ‘No— I ride a bike sometimes, but watching other people cycling on TV...’

She stared, looking worried.

I looked out of the window: silver wing, blue sky, white clouds. Everything was normal.

‘Did you see that ruined castle just there?’

‘What, oh— no, which castle?’

‘I think we just passed it on this side. It’s beautiful, must be at least
500 years old.’

She gazed out through the injured windowpane.

‘Where are you heading?’ I asked after a while.

‘Cologne’

‘Are you visiting somebody?’

In a flash, her upper lip drew back up towards her nose, exposing a row of yellowed teeth and pink gums.

‘No—.’

‘What are doing there?’

She smiled.

‘That really is a nice dress you’re wearing...’

‘It’s a skirt!’

‘A skirt, of course, sorry.’

I resigned and looked back out of the window, hoping she would get off at the next stop.

‘How can you be so— hard-hearted?’ she demanded.

I was amazed, how could she say such a thing?

‘I am not hard-hearted, not at all, I am highly compassionate.’

The light ocean of my childhood.

‘What do you want me to own up to?’

It could no longer be kept a secret. I was drinking continuously more. At all times of the day. Inebriated by 4:30 pm in the afternoon, wandering along the faculty corridors.

Always doing my best to make conversation. My interest has always remained alive. It isn’t this country’s fault that I feel alien. I grew up within Europe’s jugular vein, dreaming about my own demise. Packed up, with a bottle of wine in hand. Having wanted to open a fresh Merlot, but crumpled beforehand.

Departed.

Now, as the stones rattled among my ankles, we held hands and looked out to sea. See, the child I once was.

The First Thing You Would Have Seen

2004-07-06T18:24:00.000+01:00

The first thing you would have seen, if you were standing in the queue of the bank at that point, would have been the woman, distressed, but with a certain look of excitement in her eye, pointing a gun at the old woman’s head and pulling the trigger twice – BANG BANG.

The blood, you are forced to confront, as it wobbles through the air and covers you and everyone around you. You can taste it in your mouth and – even though you try to spit it out – you will taste it for weeks afterwards.

And then they’re gone, leaving a trail of destruction behind them. It seems like hours before the police arrive at the scene, and when they do there’s only two of them: the younger one, a young man with blond hair; and the older one, with a dark moustache and balding.

They see the brains of the dead woman, and the older cop pukes on himself. The younger one stares at the mess on the floor, with the bullet lodged in the floor-tiles, still smoking minutes after being fired.

You’re in shock, and so is everyone else in the queue, who still preserve the line they had been standing in minutes before the robbery. No one has taken advantage of the incident to skip places; civilised life continues unmolested.

You remember the swaying of the man’s head as he watched his female accomplice gun the old woman down; you remember seeing it and thinking how much it reminded you of something you saw once, in a film somewhere or in a half-remembered episode of a TV show from your youth, but how it was different close-up and made you afraid in a way you couldn’t say.

You wonder will you have to get the bus home now, in this state, covered in someone else’s insides. What will people say? You slide your foot away from something you had been standing in up until now and you feel your stomach knot in dread.

The footprints of the cops in the smeared brown blood on the floor; the oppressive silence, then the overwhelming chatter of the people there, then silence again; the impotent feeling of not having done anything, of not having been able to do anything, of knowing that should the same thing happen again, you would do the same thing again: nothing.

The Story of the Backwards Girl; Celine’s Adventures in Ceylon

2004-06-30T18:29:00.000+01:00

The sun – smaller than the inconceivably large object just outside the boundaries of our solar system which was approaching with an exponentially increasing rapidity – rose over the doomed planet.

Holly, a young girl with an interest in Ernest Hemingway’s shorter work, took a dusty old tome from the shelf where it had been leaning against Thomas More’s Utopia. The embossed gold print on the burgundy leather spine indicated the name of the book: Erehwon.

It told the story of Jack Vincennes – a smalltime book dealer who never had a chance – and his dealings with a couple of femme fatales: one chick who talked funny and was kind of indescribable, and the other, who was French and a hottie.

Her name was Celine and she was from the Dordogne but spent a lot of time in Ceylon trying to taste tea for a succession of unsuccessful suitors; they were mostly timorous thieves. She was mixed up with a bad lot, is what I’m saying. They were darkly diffident too, and at the worst times, so that Celine was often saddled with the bill at swanky eateries – when her consort slipped away – sans recompense.

Soon broke, she swiftly set sail from Ceylon, saying ‘adieu’ to no one but her trusted maid, who – the years of servitude suddenly lifted from her shoulders – sensed a liberation previously suppressed during her years sewing socks for Celine, and constructed a scale model of a viaduct from matchsticks alone in her Ceylonese cellar.

Celine, on returning to the Paris of her childhood, went into the booktrade and soon became a scion of the scene. However, the siren who spoke in words and sentences of polarity reversed had other plans; plans which didn’t include that slut Celine and her budding business.

Kenny Stetson (a.k.a. Jack Vincennes) a Texan millionaire of infinite wealth, unhealthy girth and unlimited libido, was having it off with both Celine and the backwards girl.

Attending a race, Celine shockingly fell beneath the wheels of a car at Monte Carlo and, dumbfoundingly, died devastatingly.

Many years later, the backwards girl was to give birth to her own mother, who would develop a discreetly discriminating tendency towards Hemingway’s short stories, which she would clandestinely consume in the study of the huge house, beginning at the end and reading each line from right to left until she finally found how each story began.

It's Soo Big by Kenny Stetson

2004-06-21T12:25:00.000+01:00

`It's soo big.'

`And so far away, many thousand times larger than our own sun.'

I marvelled as I spoke, what could be so big? The books had names like `The Holy Bible', Kamasutra' and `David's Coppers Filed'. Anybody walking past the book case or bumping into it would no doubt be impressed with the fantastic parade of canon literature. Even if nobody ever saw the books, they still made really nice decorative objects. And one day in the future, they will surely find a reader: a guest or a neighbour, or the cleaning lady's son, who has to hang around for a few minutes waiting for his mother and uses the time to rummage around in the book cases. Or perhaps the landlord's budding daughter, who has just been reading the Travels or a Hemingway story at school.

* * *

Now beginning to feel weary, I removed my gaze from the cat and fish of the `ejaculation on canvas' painting on the far wall. The sun shone in through the green branches of the elm outside the window.

`Gnippohs og ot deen I', the backwards girl chirped.

What did she mean and how did she get here so fast? I wondered while admiring delightful lips and golden hair. They flickered for an instant and subsided. Where are they now? The face of it I failed to understand.

`Could you talk like most other people for a change, just for ten minutes, say?'

She watched me and smiled. The hollow place behind her pupils contained nothing but sorrow. Perhaps a little resignation.

`Difficult - only if I try real hard. It gives me headaches.'

Gastric distress, I thought between farts. `Okay, you don't have to talk.'

All set for a hard time, I rolled off the bed and tied up my gown in a burst of activity.

An attractive woman in her mid twenties with a round face. No egg-sized purple birthmarks, no cellulite, no surgery.

`What we must do now is eat at once, you go and see what you can find in the kitchen, I need to go and call Gerard.'

The guy who ran the drugstore downstairs knocked. `You just got another call - this one from France - a girl called Celine. What are you running here? An international whorehouse?

`Skoob eht era erehw?' she said, pocking me.

`Honeythighs, let me explain—'

`Who are you sleeping with!'

`I bustled past her towards the door. The drugstore man was gone.

`Where do you think you are going?'

High-pitched footsteps echoed across the digital corridor. She emerged from room 108 running, spilling nearly all the spaghetti over the orb ball. Did loving really mean dying?

Frankie and Johnny (2) by Kenny Stetson

2004-06-07T19:11:00.000+01:00

(warning: the following text contains a description of violence)

Frankie and Johnny were lovers. Frankie was the guy and Johnny was... He wasn't sure, actually. Oh I think Frankie was the girl. Anyway, they were lovers. But the happiness they shared had been tainted by the premature loss of their daughter from sudden child's death syndrome.

“You said you no longer wanted to live after she died. And now, six months after, you are still alive - why? Because of your work, because of your toys, because of me or because of nothing?” Johnny had asked.

“I just don't know what to do with myself.”

“Live or die.”

(Men have nothing to do with birth and babyhood anyway)

The life force and a fearful inability to end the own existence forces a person to keep going and to finish up alive in the face of most cruelties. Occasional bank robberies provided a welcomed diversion. The couple were bad-as-fuck bank robbers. Check this out:

They enter a high street bank and as Frankie pulls out an automatic rifle to threaten the employees, an old woman in galoshes gets in the way and starts screaming she thinks the world is ending. Frankie (now as a girl) spontaneously hits the old geezer in the back of her neck with the butt of the gun, but the woman merely stumbles, and recovers to start screaming in a more throaty and hysteric kind of way. As Frankie lifts her weapon to throw on a more effective battering, the victim drops and begins squirming on the floor. Johnny glances at Frankie who is nodding convulsively from across the counter room, then Frankie pumps two bullets into the back of the old woman's head.

“Darling!”

Her dress is sprayed with waves of brownish-red blood erupting from the back of the old lady's cranium. Finally, she has stopped squirming on the floor; but now Frankie needs to buy a new dress.

During this scene, Johnny has been looking on, it's all quite surreal to him, because before the bank raid he took a fistful of pain killers, and now he's all woozy and thinks he's seeing stuff. For example, he imagines he just saw his wife blow an old woman's head clean off.

“Who, no, who said I was dreaming?”

He has also developed one helluva twitch, easily to be interpreted as some sort of nod by someone in bad shape, for example. Johnny's a right mess, but Frankie loves him all the same. He buys her dresses when she messes them up during `jobs', but often falls asleep when they're fucking. Go figure the enigma that is woman.

They drive off after threatening the floored occupants of the bank with the same justice that was meted out to the old hag.

“...lay you down SOLID !!”

Their car is white - white and fast, it carries them to the edge of town and beyond amongst the grey ribbons of motorway and exit roads, towards the abandoned wooden house which is big but drafty. Welcome home. It is where they have been hiding for the last three weeks, since Johnny shot the highway patrolman.

Here they lived unhappily ever after.

Frankie and Johnny

2004-06-03T19:32:00.000+01:00

Frankie and Johnny were lovers. Frankie was a guy and Johnny was … I’m not sure, actually. Oh, I think Frankie was the girl. Anyway, they were lovers. They were also bad-as-fuck bank robbers. Check this out:

They go into a bank, and this old woman gets in the way and starts screaming, like she thinks the world is ending. Frankie (a girl) hits her in the back of the neck with the butt of her gun, but the woman keeps screaming. She squirms on the floor. Johnny gives her the nod, then Frankie pumps two bullets into the back of the old woman’s head. Frankie’s white dress is now covered in the wave of brown blood that burst from the back of the woman’s skull. The woman has stopped squirming; Frankie needs to buy a new dress.

During this scene, Johnny has been looking on, but it’s all kind of surreal to him, because before the bank raid he took a fistful of painkillers, and now he’s all woozy and thinks he’s seeing stuff. For example, he thinks he just saw his wife blow an old woman’s head clean off. He has also developed a helluva twitch, which could be interpreted as some sort of nod by someone in a stressful situation, for example. Johnny’s a mess, but Frankie loves him. He buys her dresses when she messes them up during jobs, but he often falls asleep when they’re fucking. Go figure the enigma that is woman.

They drive off after threatening the occupants of the bank with the same justice that was meted out to the old woman. Their car is white and fast, and carries them to the edge of town and beyond, to the abandoned wooden house which is big but drafty, and where they’ve been hiding for the last three weeks, since Johnny shot that cop on the highway.

A collaboration, of sorts

2004-06-03T19:21:00.000+01:00

This is the Earlham Road Project, a site set up to provide a home for collaboration between 'the legendary' Kenny Stetson and Karl Whitney on a number of fictional projects. We plan to post pieces of stories, then rejig them and post them again. Effectively we will be scribbling all over the other person's work, so this may lead to some entertaining fights. Who knows?