“I know you”

Posted on by inkbiotic

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 Lottery King

Posted on by inkbiotic
Another lottery, another king, and I’m sick of it all. On the screens I can see their faces, shiny with excitement, drooling with the possibility, whispering,
“It could be me!” And it could.
Anyone of those thick, unimaginative yokels could be making up laws by the end of the
week. Or promoting their cat to be foreign secretary. Like last time.
Nobody remembers how it used to be, the dignity, the order, the logic of it all. Instead a
random serf takes my rightful place, and I’m supposed to celebrate them, bolster their
ineptitude. Behind me there’s a cheer as the balls spin and the machine spits out another number. Soon, somewhere around the country some schmuck will shout with glee,
“It’s me! It’s me! I’m the ruler now.”
And we all hail our new leader, however much of a fool he may be.
Nobody else remembers aristocratic rule. I was taught about it in secret, I couldn’t show my
peers those gilt-edged picture books that explained my importance. I tried to instill their
adoration with subtle manipulation, but they had been brainwashed with delusions of equality and understood nothing. Instead I would hide with my books and dream of the life I should have had; how the eyes of the proles would shine, how they would doff their caps in an instinctual movement. Instinctual, because this is the truth they try to deny: hierarchy is not some arbitrary human notion, it is an evolutionary need, seen in every species. Gorillas,
elephants, wolves; animals have been practising genetic modification for millennia. Alphas
breeding with alphas to create strength. No king was ever an accident, they were destined.
And we took this fine, natural system and wrecked it, forced ourselves to walk this crooked
path. Turned power into a lottery that anyone can win.
I watch the screens and nod thoughtfully, as if I care. I have to pretend, I am a member of the supreme council, an overseer. They’ll tell you that nepotism is no longer a thing, but I am proof that is wrong. A member of my family has always sat on the supreme council, because they have to give us something, a cheap token of respect.
The final ball has fallen into place; the cheers have reached a new pitch. One of the
number-crunchers is checking and rechecking until he comes up with a name,
 “Frankie Arlett,” he says blankly. He doesn’t need to pretend enthusiasm, it’s not expected of him.
“Frankie Arlett!” says John, a fellow council member. “Isn’t that just a name you can trust?
Frankie Arlett, he’ll be the best ruler we’ve had.” Nobody points out that since all the other
lottery elected rulers have been so hopeless, Frankie can’t be any worse.
“He sounds wise, don’t you think he sounds wise?” says Penny, clasping her hands together.
“Wise, but not too lazy,” adds Brett, with a tinge of doubt. Sometimes I think Brett has a little more spark than the others, the ability to see a hint of truth through the demented fog of optimism.
“I can just sense his presence, can’t you?” that’s John again, dribbling his emotions all over the place.
Frankie Arlett’s name has already been sent to every piece of Internet-linked merchandise in the land. Coffee mugs now say ‘King Frankie!’, Balloons flash the words ‘All Hail King
Frankie!’ On screens in every street, on every motorway around the country, the words ‘King Frankie, long may he rule over us!’
We have half an hour of platitudes before a number-cruncher pipes up,
“I think Frankie is a woman. She’s a queen,” before he hurries away. Panicked reprogramming of merchandise ensues. My colleagues realise that perhaps relying on feelings alone is unwise, and start checking Frankie’s details.
Of course there are restrictions for who can be chosen. No one under the age of eighteen. No one who’s in punitive stasis. No one senile. Still there are always new issues appearing, we had a leader some years back who had a thing for little girls. While he was busy changing
laws to lower the age of consent and releasing all his paedophile friends from stasis, we were frantically trying to fill out the right forms to get him de-throned.
I flick through Frankie’s details, 26 years’ old; part French, part Armenian. A sales assistant, the masses will like that, they feel cheated when anyone close to aristocracy gets in. Of course they don’t see the irony that the only people they don’t want in power are those with the ability to rule running through their blood.
Queen Frankie has appeared on the screen, she’s hooked herself up to her webcam and is
giggling hysterically. I give her two weeks before the giggling becomes a breakdown. I’ve
seen her kind before; they accuse my ancestors of interbreeding, but look at what cross
breeding gets you. Her genes are all over the place. There’ll be another lottery in a few
weeks.
A few days later…
As I walk towards the throne room where the new queen awaits, the effort of restraint pounds my head. I keep my feet light and my face polite. Reduced to this: a pleasing minion, careful not to offend. This is not right. This is a travesty of civilization. We have become our own satire.
It may be my job to nurture and coddle the new rulers, but it is my moral duty to unseat these weak pseudokings. To trick and confuse until they tumble from the throne. I don’t know how many times I must do this before they finally see the pointlessness of their system. A hundred? A thousand? My patience will outweigh theirs, it’s in my genes.
And there sits Frankie. The giggle has gone. Her face seems as guarded as my own. As
Penny, John and Brett bow and scrape adoringly, I stand back a little. As an advisor to the
throne, I will be seeing plenty of Frankie. Until her reign crumbles to dust, I will facilitate,
but also I will push and trip, I will sneak.
I keep a bland smile on my face to show willing, no doubt she’ll be too involved with herself
to notice my lack of subservience.
John is fussing about her culinary tastes, what kind of pillows she likes to use, does she have any dietary requirements? It’s ridiculous, what could a serf know of the range of quality bed-wear available? Somebody introduces me, I can barely summon a nod. But maybe that’s as well, to wobble Frankie’s confidence a little. She listens to my name and then looks thoughtful,
“Ah yes,” she says, “the royal bloodline. I’ve been reading up about you.” And there’s a
glance, betraying something shrewd, as if she spots the glint beneath my polite façade.
“I see all the previous lottery winners have failed under your guidance,” she says. Her eyes
narrow, she smiles sweetly, then leans close to me and whispers,
“But not me, sunshine.”

Tragedy of a Trailblazer

Posted on by inkbiotic

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.

Coma

Posted on by inkbiotic

Last night I woke up clawing the walls again, my nails broken, my eyes open but seeing nothing.

I must have been looking for you.

I don’t know why I thought you’d be there beneath the wallpaper, just as I don’t know why I thought you’d be under the desk, or trapped behind the fridge. It’s the logic of dreams, something unfathomable to me. That’s what you’ve become now too. Watching your stillness, I think: I used to know you; how you liked your tea, the sound of your feet on the stairs, what made you laugh like a seal. I knew your love of having your neck tickled and who your childhood heroes were. How can I have known so much, but not have learned how to find you and bring you back?

Today I brought a different book to read, a murder mystery. You’ve always hated them, but I’ve been thinking: if I only read you things you want to hear you’ll have no reason to wake up. So I’m trying this. I may even leave off the ending, taunt you with the unsolved mystery. It’s not nice, but it’s tough love. No other kind of love seems to work.

Watching your stillness. This isn’t you, you were never lazy. You must hate lying there for weeks on end. Affecting nothing. You used to affect everything, a whirlwind of trouble, causing havoc. Now the havoc is only in my head.

It’s time to get up.

I don’t know how to say those words so that you’ll hear them – should I shout? Should I whisper? It’s time to get up now, you’re late for the party.

Everybody’s waiting.

Maybe I’ll find you tonight, I’ll grab your hand and pull you through to consciousness. You’ll be in the last place I look, and I’ve looked almost everywhere.

Watching your stillness, I wonder: do you even hear these stories I read you? They tell me you can hear, but maybe that’s a kind lie to keep me sane, to keep me tethered to the waking world. It doesn’t keep me sane and the tether is fraying. And I keep wondering, maybe I can’t find you because you’re hiding.

Maybe you don’t want to come back.

When I’m not dreaming about you, I don’t sleep. My restless brain ticks through scenarios, things I could have done differently, signs I could have noticed. I knew you weren’t looking after yourself well enough, but I also knew your pride, that you’d hate to have me interfere. I should have interfered. I let you down. I let you get lost. I let the fits claim you, cut you out of this world and steal you away. Watching your stillness, watching you lying there, day after day I wonder what it’s like to be so peaceful. Maybe I should be jealous, I think I am, a little.

Maybe I should come to you.

I’m not doing so well here. My exhaustion makes the daytime blurry and jumbled, my thoughts fractured. I drop things, I forget things. I put the kettle in the fridge, I’ve broken three plates and your favourite mug, I’m sorry, I cried about that for an hour. Sometimes I ramble on. Sometimes the only words I speak are to you, speaking them into this void. Waking life is a mish mash of frayed hope and bungled practicality. And then I dream, and the images are sharp and clear. I dream I’m searching for you, pulling apart our home, scouring the streets. One night I dreamt I was wandering the desert; I could feel the sand oozing between my toes, feel the heat of the sun as it sizzled my skin. I think I’m starting to cross over. Day by day I loosen a little from reality, maybe soon I can join you in nowhere, in the bone cage that holds you.

Would you know me there?

Can we carry on our lives there? I think I’ve changed, become brittle and vague. Maybe you wouldn’t like me now, maybe you wouldn’t want me tainting the peace. Maybe now I’m the whirlwind.

The nurse is pestering me, visiting time is nearly over and I’ve not even started reading the book I brought, too busy trying to explain everything to you. I can feel my blood humming, my breath barely skims my lungs. I don’t think I even replied as she fussed around your bed. She thinks you’re here, she thinks this is you, this lump beneath a blanket. She thinks this is me, with the startled expression and the shaking hands. She doesn’t see my stillness as I start to dislodge from this tacky world of sharp edges and bright colours. She wants me to go, but I’m not ready.

How can I leave, when I still don’t know where you are?

Questions for all of you…

Posted on by inkbiotic

Sometimes writing a blog can feel like throwing tales out into the void. I’m lucky in that people do comment on my blogs, but that just gives me a tantalizing glimpse into your minds. So this is to expand on that. I welcome anyone to answer, whether you’ve ever read my blog before or not.

Tell me about you…

  • What are the 3 best things that happened to you this week?
  • What are the 3 worst things to happen to you this week?
  • What secret skills do you have?
  • What would your superpower be?
  • What would you like to change about yourself?
  • What would you like to change about your life?
  • You have a time machine, you can use it three times, when would you go?
  • What subject do you wish you knew more about?
  • What do you think of as your job? Do you like your job?
  • What is in your pockets?
  • What is your favourite TV program/ magazine/ book?

My answers

What are the 3 best things that happened to you this week?

In no particular order

  •  I finished rewriting my book, which is why I have time to cogitate on blogs like these.
  • My boss liked how I pruned a fig tree, said it was perfect.
  • A good friend of mine is getting married! She’s dreading it!

What are the 3 worst things to happen to you this week?

  • Had an argument with a colleague, I think because he didn’t like how I pruned my fig tree and so he picked a fight over something else.
  • I had one of those uneasy dreams, where people close to me are acting weird as if they’ve been taken over by aliens. Spent the day feeling nervous.
  • I’ve got this new niggling pain in my back, I think I may have started sitting wonky.

What secret (useless) skills do you have?

I can write backwards, upside-down and then backwards and upside down at the same time.

What would your superpower be?

The ability to show people how others see them. I have a suspicion that nastiness is often a result of people not realising they are being nasty; that anxiety comes from believing other people actually notice and care about what you do when they don’t; and people I love don’t seem to have a clue about how much everyone else respects them. So I’d want to solve all these problems with my truth lasers.

Either that or really springy feet that I could use to leap my way around buildings and up trees.

What would you like to change about yourself?

It’s a dull answer, but I’d just like to get rid of anxiety and stress-based exhaustion. They taint friendships, adventures, hobbies, work. They improve nothing.

What would you like to change about your life?

To have some success with writing. To own a cat. Or a dog.

You have a time machine, you can use it three times, when would you go?

  • Assuming my time machine has a few attachments that allow me to survive in inhospitable landscapes and translate speech into something I understand. A few hundred million years into the past to see all the bizarre ocean animals, the first plants and fungi to evolve.
  • Ancient Greece, the time of Aristotle. It seems such a sophisticated time, but with many curious twists to their politics and morals.
  • The future – I’d probably regret it, but the curiosity would be too much. Are we heading for the destruction of the human race? Will the changes to our environment lead to an evolutionary burst of new animals?

What subject do you wish you knew more about?

History. I have only fragments and no way of holding it together, because my knowledge is so patchy.

What do you think of as your job? Do you like doing it?

I added the first question for people who do a job that means nothing to them, but do something else that’s very important. Or people not currently employed, who of course still have passions and labour that occupy their time.

For me, I think of work as the thing I get paid for. I’m a gardener, I love it, but the place I work is unusually complicated and competitive for gardening and I find that stressful sometimes.

What is your favourite TV program/ magazine/ book?

Currently Community (although in the past it was 4400 and Red Dwarf)

New Scientist

I’m not a great reader these days, back when I was smarter it was Swing Hammer Swing! by Jeff Torrington and The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts by Louis de Berniere.

Superhero Encounter

Posted on by inkbiotic

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.

Bitch

Posted on by inkbiotic

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 Day the World Ran Out of Tunes

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pictures 14 - Copy

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.

The Glint of the Palette Knife

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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.