Positiv+

Watching them even makes me angry. Once again they are moving us out, and I’m standing on the sidewalk with a bag of belongings and a sandwich in my hand, that I’m picking at uninterestedly.

There are some boys on the other side of the pavement. Well, I guess they’re men really, like me, young, and androgynous. They are shouting, throwing stones at the builders as they rush the last few tenants out, and begin to tear off doorways and smash out the remaining windows.

 

When I see them get to my flat I feel a wave of envy, and I lob my sandwich as hard as I can in their direction. I imagined it would strike a builder firmly on his helmet and at least make him turn around. Instead it lands about eight foot away, and lays itself down on the grass. In about 57 minutes one of the workers will walk over it on his way to put my room door in the skip.

 

I turn away, and begin to rummage in my pockets for bus fare to get away from here. I hear a burst of laughter from behind me. It kind of surprises me, but I don’t want to turn around, I know those boys are still around here

‘Hey’ I hear shouted behind me, I can hear whoever it is jogging up behind me so I still don’t turn around, but brace myself for what ever I need to expect.

By the time he he’s right up beside me I can see him properly. His dark hair isn’t quite long, but its not short either, he has a weak grin, stoned blue eyes, and black jeans and those skater trainers.

 

He holds out the cigarette he has in his hand, I take it, but continue to look at him suspiciously. He laughs, I guess in an attempt to clear the air of any tensions that lay between us. ‘Rotton’ he says, ‘Raven’ I say, and hold out my free hand, which he takes. And so we met.

After sitting on the curb and talking, he stands up and dusts his jeans off. His friends are beckoning to him to follow them, and they are already trekking halfway up the road towards the carriageway. He picks up my bag, and walks after them. Again, I had to guess, that’s his way of inviting me with them.

 

After we get to the carriageway, and all of us have managed to cross, we head off up a dirt turning away from the town centre, and end up at the old post office. Round the back of it the guys lift the wood nailed over the lowest window and we all climb in. Rotton dumps my bag in a corner, and sits on a green, leaf patterned velveteen-like sofa that has somehow found its way in here.

 

The next few days go by in a blur of drinking and speed. I remember grinning at him from over the top of my bottle of beer. I remember seeing groups of them pogo-ing around, to the non-existent sound system, replaced by the singing – or rather growling – of the tallest of them. I lay on the floor and laughed. And as I laughed the ceiling started to twirl and twist and take on a new form, as slowly colours moulded into it and through the swirls a pattern began to form, that eventually morphed into his face. There he was stood above me, holding his hands out and pulling me up. Leading me away from the group of pogo-ing kids, and towards the back of the house, with his arm around my waist. I dropped the bottle I had been clutching and let him lead me.

 

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I once had a friend who was convinced she was a vampire. Everywhere you went in her house she had the books, films, clothes, even a multitude of metallic vampirish gadgets that – frankly – I feared.

She tried to attack me once, and three weeks after that she was in some lock up ward with bitten wrists. She’d literally eaten away at her own wrists.

I’m on a boat right now, behind me are my rooms, and I have those bendable wooden frame doors which lead out onto the side, so I have a little deck to stand on and look down. I cant help but think of that scene in titanic where Kate is looking down, because it actually does look exactly that high. They must have just paid some camera man extra to lean overboard a bit with a waterproof lens and capture the height.

I think I can hear the door knocking so I walk back through my apartment and open the door. There is no one

there when I get there, just a few old people, who look at me as a cloud of smoke comes out of the room after me when I open the door. I step out, click the door shut behind me and wander down the hall into the reading room. There are many people playing chess or crowded around a very old TV set. There is a group of people reading on sofas. As I wander past the cover of one book catches my eye. It has a full black cover and says in red on it something like ‘Mary hasn’t got her teeth for me’. It looks intriguing but the girl reading it – sat next to her grandmother who seems to be mumbling to herself about the motion of the boat – looks up at me, and so I turn my head and carry on smoking and walking, so as not to be rude.

I decide to go to the shop. Yes this boat has a shop, it is very much like any other supermarket, except everything is in miniature, oh, and that its on a boat of course. I pick up some mango drink, which I will later decide I don’t want and leave at the till. I grab Rolling Stone, Kerrang, Q, Mojo, NME and an Uncut Legends to keep me occupied, as well as some cigarettes and 2 bottles of absinthe. It just about clears me out, but I shouldn’t have to leave my room for some time with this lot.

By the time I have paid on the mini till, and handed my money to the mini woman I am feeling drained, exhausted and alone. I return to my room, fall asleep, and next time I am fully awake it is 2 o clock the next afternoon.

I dreamt that I had gone to the opticians and that I was running around the rooms, looking for the way out, but that the signs are all in numbers so I couldn’t understand and even when I thought I was right I still kept getting it wrong and ending up back in the middle. I know I’m frustrated still by that dream because I can feel the tightness of the air in there; I can – even now – see the high-door-handled metallic booths, and the flashing numbers that I couldn’t interpret. I also dreamt that I was standing on the balcony and that something dropped from me. A small, soft ball, warm and red with a thick membrane surrounding it, and when I picked it up to look closer I could feel its immense warmth in my hand. After a few seconds I realised that I could feel a heartbeat. This thing had a heart beat and when I looked closer inside was a small foetus, alive, and warm, so warm. I didn’t know what to do. I put it on the side of the sink, ran the taps and rinsed it off. That is the last thing of the dream I remember and before I know it I’m looking up at a wooden panelled ceiling and I’m back in the world. On a boat.

But I get up and look around. I’m a bit dazed, and feeling quite alone. I know I’m not going to be able to be alone for the next few hours, at least until I have settled back into life for the day. I walk over to the door, and lean out over the sea. We have stopped, we must have been parked up for a while, and I can see land. I’m not sure what land it is.

After a few hours of wandering around, and drinking shots of absinthe, and looking for the book that kid was reading in the reading room, I give up and go up to the front of the boat. Here I find that most of the population of the boat has gathered. There is a man in front of me that has some kind of hat on. It look like tweed but is a lot fluffier then tweed, for most of the time I am standing there I cannot take my eyes off it.

Then – again before I could think straight – there is a huge jolt and the boat has run into this rusty old tanker.

 We’re not going anywhere else and I step of the boat.

I remember being aware that I had said goodbye to something, that things had moved on, that they were over.

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He’s wearing a Dropkick Murphy’s hoodie and leading her through a wind tunnel towards the river. Her face is not so much forlorn as oblivious, and she smiles at me as I walk past them. I feel that they have some kind of dark rope tying them together, so – as I walk on – I pretend to be disinterested, before turning back. I need to watch, I need to see. He is on his knees and is taking down her skirt as she stares at the sky. He lifts her jumper over her head and ties her hair up. He walks round behind her and before I know it she is in the river, face down. He has her by the throat and she is barely struggling. He has no expression, he makes no sound. All I can hear is the gurgling of the stream and the occasional splash from the jerking of her dying feet. She has lost her shoes, delicate little backless slippers with beads, that he forgot to remove from her feet. One floats down the river, and lodges itself on a rock near me. I stoop silently to pick it up. And then I turn and leave, in time to miss him pulling her wilting body from the water by a leg.

 

He leaves her at the root of a tree, sat upright almost as if she was simply sleeping. If it wasn’t for th

e fact that her tongue was half way down her chin, and that her nails were dug so far into her palms, the most observational of us would assume she had gone there to drink a bottle of vodka and be alone.

 

He runs off down the road, I can see him jumping as if he is urban climbing the road. He approaches invisible obstacles as if they were mountains, watching him jump so high distracts me from the approaching car which he bounces from, inimitably. He twists in the air, and keeps running leaving the stunned driver to recover. This boy must be the devil.

 

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I stare at the ceiling, unfeeling and almost forgetting to breath. I have the girls slipper in my hand down by my side, I use it as an ashtray, some of the beads have already come off and have fallen onto my floor. They seem so conspicuous against my dark carpet, their glittering presence assaults the room, and my failing senses. There is nothing left inside me to react. No stimuli is strong enough to create any feeling. I am aware of the world. But the world has given up on me.

 

Everytime I close my eyes I can see bearded laughing babies. It is quite unsettling, they seem to be floating in the blackness of  my mind, and I can see the sparkling beads lodged into the backdrop behind them. The beads twinkle at me, almost as much as the crazed eyes of the babies. Some of them have huge walking canes, with lumps of amber in the top. They are waving the canes around and when the amber passes in front of one of their faces it magnifies it, like a goldfish through a glass bowl. Their expressions twist even further when magnified, they seem to snarl at me, and – once again – I am forced to open my eyes.

 

I zone in long enough to notice the flashing display of my digital clock. The lines that make up the numbers quiver, making me reach, which send me sitting bolt upright and coughing and spluttering in the direction of the floor. The beads remind me of the babies eyes and I decide its time to go for a walk.

 

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