The House That Shadows Built

It had been almost a year since I had found the Fat Man’s house. I wondered if Iwas better in any real sense, any more prepared for the world that had beenworking out full strength this whole time in spite of us, throwing up new apartmentblocks and front lines while we had been in here readying ourselves without adeadline, playing catch up with a slowly unfolding apocalypse.The feeling was getting harder to ignore. I felt like a fraud in the corridors, in frontof all those people at the intoxications, following some idea I had, following mewith implicit faith that I knew what I was talking about...

I woke up with a stabbing feeling, a sound I felt,  the screeching of braking a train on the tracks. Awake but unable to move I knew that the Fat Man was in the room with me. I could smell the putrid dampness of his skin. After a moment my body suddenly let out all the coiled up tension and I sat up in bed screaming with a dry mouth. On my mattress was a greasy black handprint. Once awake my mind was full of thoughts. How unprepared we all were, hunter gatherers searching for the migration patterns of a grazing animal in a world dripping in information, sweating patterns. Our brains were primitive calculators overstretched. They had to evolve. Some managed this alone of course, by will and effort, but others required manipulation.We kept the windows covered so that none of the shadows escaped......

It was the great chasm that motivated me. The unassailable gap between the bombed out villages and thriving city centres. That abscess of white noise and polished floors between the churchyards and dirty backrooms, spaces with no greater purpose than to provide a spot in which to try and meet oblivion at a low price. Everything was set up to sparkle and catch our eye. We were magpies and vultures, scared by the shadows - the great fucking ‘what if?’ of death and pain.  My whole idea was to abolish the chasm, destroy the dam and let shopping centres be washed in blood. To break one hallucination and replace it with another. Reconfigure our brains to at least see where the two worlds crossed over; to see the overlaps between comfy Sunday afternoons, hot soup and suburban fences and the spontaneous suicides of smartphone assembly line workers and office block cleaners, tumbling through the air from the great physical heights that they had looked down on their own lives from every day. Skyscrapers and immense factories; great manifestations of the mythical career ladder, the falling figures rushing towards null, on their way to become one with the cracks in the pavement, the cracks that children hop-scotched over playing their imaginative games and which the grazing homeless scanned for dropped coins and cigarette butts......

I crisscrossed the first room with torchlight revealing that the wall was floor to ceiling with stacked VHS tapes. I searched the wall for a light switch and to my surprise the light came on. I turned off the torch and then gathering my courage approached the wall of tapes…As I got closer I saw that every video was labelled with the date and a title in careful almost runic biro script. I slid a tape out of the first stack on my right. It read “19.10.89 - Heart attacks”.  I put the video down and slid out the next video from the stack: “2.3.01 - Floods”. I put that video down as well, went back into the corridor and pushed open the door to the next room. It was bigger than the video room but equally full with stacks of  tapes......

Soon after meeting The Kid I moved in with him in the Last Free House in the World.  It was during a cold winter, the kind which cracks cobblestones and the room we shared had broken windows that he’d hastily repaired with gaffer tape and cardboard and a corner bed made from an old door stacked some beer crates.  Our room was on the first floor, only one flight of stairs away from the backyard. Only one flight of stairs from the mound of decaying waste. Only one flight of stairs for the rats who scavenged their survival in the mound to ascend. Some former resident had even painted a large rat over the door and when I first met him The Kid sometimes went by the name The Rat King. He was still pre-pubescent then and addicted to glue and skunk.  In those early days together we shoplifted exotic fruits, the names of which he poetically mispronounced, and spent our days sleeping and our nights exploring the city looking for back alleys that looked film sets and forgotten chunks urban something or other than reminded me of the slithers no-man’s land between carpark fences and petrol station forecourts......

I swilled the mixture of blood and toothpaste and spit around my mouth and let it dribble out spoiling the perfect white of the sink.  My teeth were crooked and stained the same mustard colour as the walls of old pubs. I ran the nail of my thumb along them and think about how they barely fit in my mouth, all competing for space and purpose like the shops and houses on the terraced streets I grew up on, before all the broken down charm was neutralised by the great renewal, that never ending rhinoplasty, that glass and steel assassination.  I splashed my face with water and stared hard into my own eyes reflected in the mirror.   "The first girl I ever kissed is dead”“What the fuck am I meant to do with that information?”“I dunno, it’s just interesting we were both kids at the same time, I kissed her and now she’s dead”“I don’t think that means anything, you’re talking total shit”“It’s a connection to death, a palpable link”“Sometimes you’re so pretentious it makes me sick"“Death is the currency of change, always has been, always will”“You should copyright that and sell it to the army, it would make a good slogan, the army always needs good slogans”“Did you put the key back?”“Yes”“She’s really dead you know, I met a guy I knew as a kid in the supermarket and he told me, she had some rare incurable bone disease, she died last month”...