“It’s a gesture, I’m wary of gestures, it’s how somebody treats you when no one is looking that shows their true feelings,” she said airily, with a flick of her hand.
He lowered the flowers sadly and since her attention had already wandered, he walked away. As his feet scuffed the gravel and his shoulders slouched, his mind was ticking over the conundrum: how can I do something that isn’t a gesture?
The teapot had a Buddha painted on it and he poured the tea with great reverence. A ritual that had clearly repeated throughout the years unchanging. He carefully arranged the cups in their saucers, lovingly swirled the tea leaves around the pot, and didn’t speak until the tea was poured and he had added the milk and sugar. When he did speak, the words rolled across his tongue, heavy and husky, and she knew that these words were also a ritual, often repeated with every girl he enticed back to his flat.
“I know you, I know what you are,” he paused to let her soak up the significance. “I know everything about you, from your fears to your needs. I know with what I like to call my uncommon sense.”
She hadn’t the heart to tell him she didn’t take sugar in her tea, instead she sipped it dutifully, while he went on to explain her thoughts.
The man looked impossibly sad and lost, a ring pierced his frowning brow, he clutched his skinny latte, leaning forward on the student canteen sofa. Sabil could see life had cheated this man; he had set out on his journey through the years with optimism, and fate had rewarded him with mockery. He had the appearance of someone who had clawed his way through life, battling the powers of darkness while fate chuckled from the shadows.
“What happened? What happened to you?” asked Sabil, wanting to reach out and comfort him.
“You see that?” the new acquaintance said, rolling up his sleeve and showing the Japanese characters that snaked down his right forearm.”
“Nice,” said Sabil dutifully.
“When I got that done, no one had Japanese characters. Just me. I was a pioneer, a trail blazer. But now? Now everyone has them, so they call me a sheep, an uninspired copycat. But I was first. They copied me.”
The weight of his bitterness weighed heavy in his words as he said again,
“They copied me.”
Sabil made a sympathetic noise in his throat and thought for a moment.
“And of course that would be considered cultural appropriation now,” said Sabil. The man’s horrified gaze said it all.
All objects are art, it just takes an artist to point it out. But my mum literally cannot see that. It’s like she has a piece missing in her brain. Instead she sees all this irrelevant shit. Says stuff like,
“That’s not art, that’s a bit of the hoover. I need that to clean up this pig sty of a house. You’ll have to dismantle your sculpture.”
Dismantle my art? Doesn’t she know anything? That could kill me, it’s like tearing out a piece of my soul. So I say,
“No, mum. Actually that’s a physical expression of all my childhood dreams in a unbroken representative space. Reminiscent of Renoir, as seen through the eyes of a millennial in torment.”
Then she says,
“You don’t even know what half of those words mean!”
“No mum, you don’t know what they mean. I looked them up.” That told her.
He carved her name on a cactus leaf, that way she would know just how much he loved her, would love her forever. She kissed him and he felt all his fevered hopes collide with reality. He wanted to be lost in her arms, the moment that he had daydreamed about, but he was only thinking of the spines in his fingers.
Weren’t some cactus spines so tiny that they could embed deep in the fingers impossible to remove? Couldn’t they last for years, decades even? Could he really love her longer than the time it took for the splinters to ease themselves from deep in his flesh? Just that sense of time stretching out ahead gave him chills. To listen to her donkey laugh, to pander to her petulant whims and soothe her tantrums; all the while the cactus spines would be pricking at his fingertips. Forever seemed like no time at all, but a year? A decade? He panicked and ran, leaving his love behind him.
Listening in, at Tesco…
Bloke: You know, I’d rather talk to a cat than a person.
Woman: Oh that’s so-
Bloke: Yeh, better talking to a cat than a person.
Woman: Oh yes, well my-
Bloke: Because cats really listen and people never do.
It was a bog-standard task. Take the cherry picker up to the roof and fix the leak. To be honest I could do it without the machine, there’s loft access and apart from a few holes, it seemed pretty solid. But that wouldn’t justify us spending over a thousand on the cherry picker itself, so for that reason I was sitting in the cab about to go sixty feet up in the air. And then I heard the shouting.
I saw the two men running towards me, their shiny spandex suits rustling, silky capes flowing out behind them, that’s how I knew they were superheroes. Although I didn’t actually recognise them, a couple of the more minor characters, I guess. I was leaning over, trying to understand what they were shouting about, when the larger of the two men leapt up into my cab in a single bound. The other struggled a little, the bars were too far apart and I’m sure he caused himself some pain, but he made it over.
“Hey missy,” said the superhero, “get us up there, now!” he was shouting unnecessarily, he was only a few inches from me. And I don’t appreciate being called missy either, I’m a woman doing my job, not an insolent child.
“You can’t come up here. This cab isn’t supposed to hold more than two,” I started to explain, but the bigger chap was having none of it.
“Listen, we’ve got five minutes before that building explodes,” now he was doing that forced whispering that superheroes do, and he gestured to the very building I was meant to be fixing, “and there are people trapped inside. We have to get up there now!” He shoved past me and began fiddling with the controls. I looked at his sidekick (clearly he was the sidekick) who gave me an apologetic shrug.
I turned back to the bolshie superhero, not particularly worried, since he didn’t seem to understand how a dead man’s handle worked and was pressing every button and pushing every lever in a totally futile manner.
“It seems to me that if the building is about to explode, then we want to be as far away from it as possible,” I said. To be honest, I didn’t believe him at all, these superhero types are always kicking up the melodrama. However, the caped crusader wasn’t flagging, he put a hand around my throat and shoved me up against the railings, hissing into my face,
“Take us up there, now!”
Seriously, is it that difficult to say please? Anyway, I took us up there, slowly, because the machine doesn’t go up fast, no matter how much a superhero screams at you.
To cut a long, anticlimactic story short, I got them both up to where the super villain held the woman. They smashed through the window and swooped inside. The window was open, so I don’t see why smashing was needed. She started screaming, which helped no one. They rescued her, she got her shoe caught in the window frame and started screaming again – seriously? Where do they find these women? There was a tussle with the super villain, who I was quietly rooting for. More screaming, whispering, and smashing stuff (I feel sorry for the cleaners). They rescued her, and I took them back down again. Slowly.
She never even said thank you to me, just stood leaning back against the railing (I made her put a harness on, she had no awareness of safety) and snogging the superhero. The sidekick ran out of quips about half way down, so we continued the journey in silence, just the slurping of the other two to listen to.
And of course it was them who got the TV interviews and the front page photo, nobody asked me. The superhero even lied about how he got up there, said he flew, the twat.
You will not believe what this bitch did to me. It was at the station, she was sitting slurping at coffee, her bag on her lap and she wasn’t even looking at it. I think if someone doesn’t even watch their bag, then they’ve probably got too much money anyway, I’m just helping relieve them a little of that baggage. You just know she’s had everything handed to her, no one ever handed me anything. Nothing but pain.
Anyway, I know what works with an idiot like that, just act natural and walk past her grabbing the bag. So I walk past her and put my hand around the bag, and she looks up at me. So I flash her a smile, you know? Like we’re besties and she wants me to have the bag. I’m thinking by the time she realises, I’m already out of the station, right? So I flash her the smile and she throws her coffee at me! Hot coffee! She could have scarred me for life. So I’m dripping boiling hot coffee, all down my new jeans, and I’m shouting at her, because I can’t believe what a psycho she’s being, and without even looking at me, she walks off. Just walks away to catch her train. Bitch.
The panic started small but scattered, as across the world bands and songwriters floundered in their hunt for new tunes.
“You can’t use that. That’s Love Me Do by the Beatles,” said an advertising executive in Manchester, when he heard the proposed new jingle for Asda.
“No. Eso es Beethoven,” said a drummer in a death metal band in Buenos Aires, when he heard the song the band was working on.
With each new pin prick of alarm, the truth shone through a little more clearly. Until finally there was no getting away from it: every combination of notes had been used, even the ugly ones. There were no more tunes possible.
Journalists leapt with enthusiasm onto one of the biggest feel-bad stories of the century. This was it, this was the moment when it could truly be said that the youth of today were fundamentally unoriginal, when the decline of society and the abandonment of all joy were a certainty.
Pseudo experts and professional doomsayers were linked up by satellite to talk about exactly what had happened and what it meant. From the dry to the melodramatic, every emotional response was covered.
“Well, it was inevitable, really. There are only so many notes and a finite combination of them.”
“We will be a music-less society, only time will tell just how this will affect us.”
“These are the end days, without music our souls will wither!”
As always the world carried on, people went to work, dogs were walked, coffee was drunk; but there was a sadness to it, a reverent quietness. The human race was in mourning. Nobody whistled or sang, afraid to be seen as insensitive. Work slowed, its dullness impossible to escape. Lovers looked at each other with shocked honesty, without the delusion of tune to hide the truth with romance. Radios played only white noise, the TV played credits in silence.
It lasted three days.
Then an impatient journalist started shouting across Twitter, he was a man who was practised pointing out the stupidity of the world
“Seriously? This matters? This doesn’t matter. Just recycle the old tunes. Play them fast, slower, sung by an elephant in a clown suit,” he tweeted.
“Nobody cares about music anymore, it’s all about the spectacle,” he continued.
The tweets quickly spread and became a hope, the hope became a belief and the belief became the truth.
And so the music played on, faster, slower, sung by elephants in clown suits. People tapped their feet and forgot there was ever such a thing as a new tune.
Jorge wasn’t sure how he became a celebrated artist. Utterly lost to the swirl of a palette knife, he barely noticed when his paintings, hung at the local café, were noticed by a shrewd agent with a knack for publicity, and sold to local landowners for an inflated price. Jorge kept painting, too engrossed in capturing the details of light and shade to notice his agent carry out a campaign of exclusivity and mystery that saw his paintings exhibited at larger galleries and sold to celebrities, who loved the stories of this reclusive painter as much as they loved the paintings. Eventually even princes and kings across the world became caught in the whirl of colour and the promise of a talent that only the elite could afford.
Jorge kept painting, he was happy to paint on demand, the colours were the same no matter who he painted. He painted party scenes, domestic gatherings, ceremonies, even the bizarre rituals of secret societies that were to be hung on the walls of private chambers. He painted life, animated faces that showed more expression than the botoxed originals.
It was years before someone noticed the anomaly, that in each painting, standing at the back of the action, head down, face blurry, wearing a green dress; there was a girl. At the back of a party scene she stood, barely a sketch. Hovering in a doorway of a grand hall, her clothes shabbier and barely defined, there she stood again. Through the decades he painted her, always at the back, her face never clear. Through his glittering career, painting portraits of dignitaries and royalty, always she was there. Sometimes just a shadow, sometimes only a sketch of her hand and a flash of the green dress, but always there. It became a quirk, a signature, something a connoisseur would recognise. The rich and the famous congratulated one another on knowing about the secret girl, of course the commoners barely knew Jorge’s paintings. Jorge kept painting.
Jorge told nobody that the painting was of his sister. She had died aged ten. Her cancer was treatable, but Jorge’s family couldn’t afford the medicine. That was in more difficult days.
With each painting she grew stronger. A little more definition to her threadbare dress, more darkness to her eyes, a glint to her teeth. Sometimes he would chuckle as he painted her, remembering how she would dance on the sofa and pick flowers at the side of the road. Each painting was a step closer to when she would walk free and live again. Throughout the richest households in the land, at quietly held meetings of the secret rulers of the world, his sister was there, watching. She was waiting, one day soon she would be ready to step free and take revenge.
Jorge kept painting.
inkbiotic 