Untitled - Goodreads

Cloud Storage
by Samuel Astbury
First published 2013
Copyright © 2013 Samuel Astbury.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold,
hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser
Pool
I held his tiny shoulders and slipped him into the lake. His head melted like honey as the water folded
into his clothing, every conversation drowned in an artificial Chinese lake filled with piss and cold and
mercury.
I was nervous with you today, but it doesn’t matter now. We were the only ones who heard it, and you
don’t exist any more.
The boy was all split up and broken. Light through a prism. Everyone talked about him - some people
loved him, and some people hated him. He was all and none of those things.
That won’t do for them. They won’t let him rest. They’ll draw a line around him. Dig him a grave. Bury
him with a skinny fit polyester suit and a Wallmart discount coupon.
I won’t let it happen. Not to him.
The lake was black. Black like the beginning of the world. The tip of the spire reflected in the water - a
crude, pixelated silhouette studying the back of my head.
I think it was the inevitability of the whole thing which got me so upset.
I picked up the belt and folded it into my rucksack. The cloud had cleared, and the feather grass waved
as I reached the crest of the hill. The airport poked through the smog and shit far to the north, the vast
cityscape beyond all neon and rain and cigarettes and dancing girls. I picked up my bag and walked.
North.
Though the march is hopeless. Into walls of Russian wind. There is much work to be done.
Nightclubbing.
Gastro Pub
Sorry if this reads like a rush job. My brain is too fast.
I love to walk. I feel happy when I’m walking. Long distance urban walking is my favourite. I take long
Sunday night walks through the big city edge lands. Disused shopping precincts. Corrugated steel
multiplex cinemas. Humming metal and dark glass. The happy songs of small ill birds. Hoodies and
wire and polystyrene containers. Septic Chinese curry sauce. Moss Side sodium lamps and amber tarmac
and the curbs all pulse and menace.
They split the atom here in1919. The University of Manchester invented the world’s first programmable
computer. The world’s first railways operated from a purpose built station on Liverpool Road. This was
the world’s first industrial city - this is where the rot started. Beetham Tower stands a shitty ziggurat glassy veneer over this great and terrible town as it circles the drain. Everyone knows it. Even the tower
knows it.
Masses of Chinese students in this dank piss mill town. Gigantic white headphones bobbing up and
down along Market street. Cigarettes smoking over Victorian red brick libraries. Dense wooden boards
daubed in clotted red and peppered with condensed gold hanzi. A vast finishing school for Chinese MA
Graphic Design students.
I like walking at night mostly. Reference points don‘t work in the dark. Film strip knifed up and glued
back together all wrong-like. It is important to get lost sometimes. It is important to get a feel for where
you are. It is a difficult thing to do. However hard I try, that big bastard tower never lets me out of its
sight.
Costa coffee on Oxford road is a Wi-Fi hotspot. Multiplayer Mario Kart. Spot Pass. P2P torrent. Public
Pickups. Amateur Allure. Google Street View. There is no adventure left in this world. I can look up the
opening times of Tower Records, Kyoto, Japan from a £300 bed-sit in Burnage. The 23 mile walk to
Manchester from my parent’s home in Northwich is the last remaining odyssey. The Romans made this
journey once - dragging tonnes of rock salt to the front lines to help keep the Celts out. The whole of
Cheshire was covered by shallow marshes 220 million years ago, and when they evaporated, deep
deposits of rock salt were formed. The Victorians pumped hot water down there to extract the brine, but
then the mines collapsed and all of our houses sank into the ground.
The Manchester A-road loops like a 3 minute MPEG on repeat. Four gastro pubs. Eight gastro pubs.
Toothless sacks of bone and gristle thrashing their way to the retail park steakhouse. A wave from a pink
limo stuffed with morbidly obese hen-doers. Tutus. Chocolate penises. Rolls of subcutaneous fat.
Middle-aged divorcees feeding on Shami kebabs. The 24 hour garage and Little Chef wasn’t always here;
now it is in the middle of nowhere, and there are cows living in the field out back. This is their home. A
stark contrast with the designated beauty spots of Tatton park or Arley Hall & Gardens - the world of
home and work and retail and leisure. My route is ugly, but at least I know where I am.
High Street Format Grocery and General Merchandise Stores
I walk to the Tesco Metro on Market Street every Monday morning. I buy a large tray of brioche and
three bags of fruit - usually two bags of oranges and one of apples, sometimes two bags of apples and
one of oranges. I try avoid making eye contact with the staff team whenever possible.
I know a lot of people don’t like them, but I always use self-service supermarket checkouts. I like the
anonymity of them, and I find the process less stressful than dealing with shop assistants. The R.P lady is
very polite - she makes me feel like a human being, and I dig her cut-glass accent. Nobody talks proper
like her any more. I look forward to using checkouts with a range of regional/multicultural accents. A
Pakistani North Walian. An East Midlands Afro-Caribbean. A west-country Manchu Chinese. They
haven’t made them yet, but one day they will.
High street format grocery and general merchandise stores have changed my life for the better.
When I was a little boy my parents shopped at a local branch of the Post Office. (Soup, stamps,
magazines and boiled sweets; not the main shop - no one did their main shop there.) We knew the
owners quite well, and used to talk about little things: primary school, the town centre, the ring road, Alevel re-sits, the new multi-lane bypass.
My mother told me that the manager had once been sent to prison for ‘helping people.’ I didn’t really
understand what she meant, but I always felt apprehensive in there. I held myself differently around
him. My shoulders got all hunched up. My voice went up and down. Sometimes I forgot how old I was,
or what I needed to buy.
When I got older I made a deliberate effort to maintain eye contact, straighten out my back, and hold my
ground when he made a little joke at my expense. I learned to chat with him, to read his body language,
to negotiate the price of spearmint pips. He sold me dinosaur magazines when Jurassic Park came out,
and he sold me my first pack of Superking cigarettes when I turned sixteen. When my mother withdrew
money from her savings account his wife shuffled the notes with her little paper hands. She suffered
from depression and seemed awfully downbeat sometimes. We would say - ‘Wendy doesn’t look very
well today‘ or ‘ Wendy has dark eyes today, doesn‘t she?‘
Some shady Scouse family and their one-armed South African associate bought the property a few years
later. It was closed down within a few months and turned into another anonymous semi-detached.
Satellite dish. 40” HDTV. Silver plastic Christmas trees. Faux Victorian railings. They got a lot of
compensation money in return - my father reckoned they’d planned it that way all along.
I miss the old Post Office; I can’t say I particularly liked the earlier couple, but I do miss my subscription
to How My Body Works, and their extensive range of boiled sweets and competitively priced Superking
cigarettes. Now I have to travel two miles to send my parcels and Ebay packages, and my family have to
drive to the supermarket to do their shopping. I‘m fucked if I can name anybody who works there.
The world is different now. I walk to the city centre metro store with my MP3 player, Smartphone, and a
thin piece of plastic filled with invisible money. Anonymous brioche and bran flakes and everyday value
porridge oats. I used to rub against people all the time, and it used to sand my edges down. I don’t have
to do that any more. I can do anything now. I can be myself.
Braeburn apples will not scan. Fuck. I need a member of staff.
Big rubber head nightmare with a name tag caught my eye and tutted to herself. I’d forgotten my name
again. I routed through my pockets: NUS card, national insurance card, provisional driving license.
-‘What av yeh dun wiv them carrots there, mate?‘
-’Uh…I don’t know. Are they supposed to lie flat?’
-’The bar code’s ‘aff-ripped ere.’
-’Oh, sorry. I mean, I just picked them up. They were like that anyway..’
No response. She leaned over the bag of Value Range Carrots and studied the label as I pulled back and
examined her big latex face. No subcutaneous fat, not an ounce in her big flat head. Mottled, oily skin,
pockmarks of a million battles, a million meteor showers. She was a caricature of herself. She paused for
a second and waited for the display to update. A penny dropped, and she rapped at the touch screen like
a Pianist.
I don’t even need fucking carrots.
Riot
I took a break from my weights and searched my room for the wireless dongle. Laptop. External hard
drive. Smart LED TV. Postgraduate social work textbook. Thank God I don’t have to talk to people any
more. I don’t want to lose another drop of myself.
100 reps to 1080/24p Ghost in the Shell. I am Motoko today - lean and boyish. I will lose my arms
ripping the hood off a bipedal tank in a rain-soaked melancholy near-future megalopolis. I will sink a
ghost-hacked terrorist with a powerful bullet-time roundhouse kick.
But I will never get her abs. Lord only knows I try. I can never get off the internet long enough to finish
my crunches. Michael Fassbender was born on the 2nd of April, 1976. Dana Plato soft sex scenes. Fuck
slags tonight in Lymm. Wolfdog vs. Wallaroo. Who is Suki Waterhouse?
And then the riot started.
6th of August, 2011. I sat with a hot bowl of Everyday Value Porridge Oats and browsed the BBC News
website. Armed police in Salford. Helicopters circling the city centre. Fires breaking out in the Northern
Quarter. Torched Vauxhall Nova suffocating in its own durable waterproof matting on Chapel Street,
Salford. Smoke rising from a molotoved Victorian red brick warehouse a few hundred yards down the
road.
Fifa was a lot less laggy that night.
I spent most of the evening in my apartment - a converted council flat on the 8th floor of a 60’s brutalist
high rise with a clear view of the city centre to the south-east: police helicopters circling the CIS Tower
and Chinese fireworks rising from St Peter’s Square.
Party time. Exiting shit. It’s like L.A or something, but no synth Vangelis soundtrack here. No pouting in
outrageous raised collars. No seething Chinese peasant Diaspora. No shake ’n bake off-world colonies.
Just leaden Mancunian boredom. Smoking maritime skies. Casual violence. Rain. Yo Sushi.
I sipped premium pale lager and passed through smouldering red brick terraces, decaying cotton mills,
sloping glass-paned conference centres and water stained re-cladded shopping arcades, reaching the
central square at 10pm.
Carnival. Listless young men smashing shit up, setting fire to store fronts, and getting hit in the legs by
men on horses. Big fucking horses. Riot police smeared faces into perforated security shutters. Jiving
Dubstep fuckwits raised Reebok Pump Omni Ultralite to the heavens.
The right thing to do. The only appropriate response. May this tepid Monday evening be the first of
many.
Kinetic Elite
A childhood friend moved to Stockholm, Sweden three years ago today. I spent seventeen days with him
last summer, and enjoyed my time there very much. At Summer solstice (Midsommardagen) they drink
lots of beer, pretend to be Moose, and dance in a circle around a decorative tree.
He works for a French company who arrange conferences for fortune 500 companies: Coca Cola,
McDonald’s, PepsiCo, etc. He makes lots of money, has a beautiful Swedish girlfriend and gets to fly to
lots of different places every week, but his life seems pretty strange to me.
Luxemburg, Helsinki, London and Paris on an endless loop. Home. Stockholm airport. Helsinki airport.
Helsinki hotel. Faux-American steakhouse. Hard Rock Café. Helsinki airport. Heathrow airport.
Hanley’s beefeater shortbread tin. Steel and glass shopping mall. Premier Lodge. Heathrow airport.
Stockholm airport. Swedish retail outfit. McDonald’s. Home. I could never live like he does; even the
thought of having a full time job terrifies me. I live in fear. They will find me eventually, but they'll never
take me alive.
That's how it started last time. A few years earlier I had found an article in the newspaper advertising a
three month voluntary aid programme in Ho Chi Minh City, Socialist Republic of Vietnam. I volunteered
on the Wednesday morning, after completing a ten minute Skype interview with a man called Mr Bill Yi.
I would travel alone through South-East Asia, staying at cheap backpacker hostels and budget hotels
until I met the other volunteers in Ho Chi Minh city. I’d been fascinated by Japan since I was a little boy,
and it was top of the list when I drew up my itinerary.
My Mother made me promise that I would find other westerners before going anywhere dangerous, and
when he came to see me off at the airport my brother presented me with a digital watch, a compass, and
a silver St. Christopher necklace. My father hugged me at the security gate, and I couldn’t really feeling
anything. I used to feel things all the time.
Hong Kong
Two weeks in Hong Kong before flying to Bangkok on October 13th. ‘Mr Sam’s’ hostel in Causeway Bay.
Paper. Neon. Dirty cement. Parasols. Bamboo and steel. Salt. Sweat. Chlorine. Heat and lichen and
seafood. I was 22 years old.
I wanted to see the Kowloon walled city, and I wanted to see the little postmen, the constant dripping,
the miniature dentist’s surgeries, the crime and the drugs and the miniature primary schools of
corrugated iron. They told me it had all been knocked down in the 90‘s.
Man Mo Temple, Hollywood Rd, Hong Kong. I’d wanted to go ever since I played Shenmue II in the
summer of 2001. I wanted to get a job airing out ancient Taoist library books. I wanted to catch falling
crimson leaves for my beautiful kung-fu master. I wanted to wipe soot from the temple walls in a search
for the four ‘Wude.’ Watch the rise and fall of an ancient pharmacist’s interlaced cigarette ember.
I don’t remember too much about it, really, but it didn’t feel much like Shenmue at all. The temple
interior a thousand suspended incense coils, a thousand minute wooden drawers and a gift shop with
thirty pale tourists from Utrecht. The wrappers of a hundred Bacon Double-Cheeseburgers danced
through warm monsoon rain. Man Mo Temple sits yards away from a Walk-Thru McDonald’s
restaurant. It felt like a real shame at the time, but it doesn't bother me so much any more.
I remember the girl in the yellow and black Corona dress at the ‘New Heights’ bar in Causeway Bay. She
was beautiful. I was completely besotted. I sat sullen as a schoolboy, wishing that I had learned a few
words of Cantonese.
I met an Australian backpacker at the bar that evening, and he took me to a businessman’s massage
parlour called ‘Ocean Dragon Club.’ Laminated flyer with a lithe oriental lady on one side, concise map
to said establishment on the reverse.
A metallic Thursday evening. All smoke and teeth and giggles. I’d never been to a massage parlour
before. I was excited and nervous. I didn’t really go for the sex. I don’t really know why I went. I wanted
to feel like a man. I wanted to pin a badge on my lapel.
We asked the tout to take us inside and she led us to a pristine glass and steel monolith elevator: a
chrome cylinder padded with white imitation leather. Her face terrified me - rubber skin and a tiny gap
in her overlapping baby teeth.
My friend asked if we could get a happy ending.
-‘Aaaah…’
Combined shower and changing room. Antiseptic white. Steam and flip flops and Absolut Repair
conditioner. Naked Chinese businessmen slicked back their starless hair and frowned. No cubicles here.
No communal bathing in England. The masseur gave me a pair of slippers and an extravagant Chinese
robe. Silk thread golden dragon, hand painted Chrysanthemum design. We padded into the waiting
room, toes barely contained.
3m projection screen. Leather reclining chairs. Mahogany cigarette cases. Rakish Chinese businessmen
sucking cigars and chewing on kelp. Kelp helps to keep baldness at bay. The matron approached us,
looked me up and down and muttered something in broken English. Ad lib.
’Uh…yes…me no experience.’
I was greeted by a vanishing Asian girl in gold nylon hot pants. She smiled, waved me over to the bed
and put on some mood music. Panpipes. Whale songs. Tropical rainforest ambience.
She giggled at my long, white legs, and she played with my novelty flipper feet. She rubbed Soya bean
and wheatgerm oil into my back and used her hands, forearms and elbows to push, stretch and knead.
20 minutes - and I started to fall asleep. And then she asked me something in Chinese, and I knew what
it meant.
I sat upright and asked her to sit down next to me. I asked her where she was from. I asked about her
pets, her school, and her mother and father. She looked confused and worried, and I offered her my
hand. We dangled our legs over the side like schoolchildren and talked about monsoon season in
downtown Taipei.
She is from a different world. Her home is a billion twinkling lights. A high-density residential
apartment. 6400 per km2. Dogs in cages. Battery hens. A billion table cloths drying in 83% humidity. A
billion JRPGs. A billion micro worlds. A billion faulty air conditioners. Legionnaire’s disease. Legionella
pneumophila. She never has to worry. She is anonymous. She is a baby spider. One of a billion. One of a
trillion. The searchlights will never come for her.
It would never work. They would find me somehow. They would find me and take me away.
I have visited prostitutes all over the world, but I have never had sex with one.
Koro
The Tsunami had hit Ko Phi Phi island a few months earlier. Yellow thickets still pasted to dead earth.
Little holes in the concrete where communal shacks used to sit. Most of the damage had been repaired by
then: the sky was blue, children smiled, and the town centre bustled with pink, overweight tourists once
more. But people were wary still.
A little Thai barmaid told me all about it - she’d recently moved to a bed-sit on the hillside and was fast
asleep when it hit. She heard screaming and banging and a terrible gurgling noise, opened her curtains
and saw a lake of brown shit studded with bubbles of scum and blood and flecks of wood. She didn't feel
glad to be alive, she felt guilty for not dying along with her friends. At least that's what she told me.
‘Big John’ the English barman had waded through the muck and shit, pulling Thais out of their houses
through their own shattered window frames. ‘Oh my friend…..’ the fay pancake stall proprietor told me,
‘..when Tsunami come my friend…Big John save me. He save seventeen people here on Phi Phi.’
We moved into a new build shack on the beach front, unpacked our things and headed out for drinks in
the centre of town. Tiger bar: shit Hip Hop and Dubstep and naked mole rats covered in UV body paint Friday night in Crewe town centre.
I found a girl who looked a little like Zhang Ziyi (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 1999) in the bar that
evening. Her friend said hello in English and sat at our table - I bought her a rasberry Mojito and asked
her what her name was. She didn’t talk much, and I didn’t think to ask why - it never really occurred to
me. I was sick of tired conversations with western backpackers and we slipped off back to my beach
shack.
Two Brits passed by in a rented Jeep.
-’Hiya mate, how are you?’
-’Good, thanks…what are you up to?’
-Oh, we’re ju….’
He looked her up and down.
-….Er, mate…..Are you aware?’
-’What? Oh, um…I don’t know - what do you think?’
-’Well…..It’s borderline, mate. At your own risk.’
I took her home.
We sat in silence. The bullfrogs sang. The cockroaches fizzed. She wrapped an arm around me and
pointed to her stomach, so I left for Booze and instant noodles. 1.2-litre Super Big Gulp from the nearby
7-Eleven. The streets reeked of pancakes, Red Bull and urine. Tattooed fire dancers bearing photocopied
leaflets. Foaming dogs sauntering through the Muay Thai venue.
I got back at 2am and knocked three times - no reply. I switched hands and pushed the handle down
with my knee.
The room had been ransacked. Sand on the bed sheets. Smell of nail polish, cigarettes and feet. A
winding trail of cosmetics and a terrible noise from behind the bed like an old cat trapped in a washing
machine.
And there she was. A dried, willowy spider curled up and keening like a Banshee. Saliva necklace
hanging over the bed frame. Cigarette ember kissing the back of her hand. Fine charcoal hair matted
with vomit and seawater. Chicken fillet resting in a pool of Bombay gin and ice.
I asked him what was wrong, but he gave no reply. I placed my instant noodles on the bureau and lifted
his head. Cat eyes flickered and rolled back into his skull as I watched his ribcage rise and fall. Shallow
breathing. Complete paralysis. A rictus of fear. A lobster in boiling water. Paper hand clasped to his
genitals.
Koro.
I checked his pulse: 120bpm. I slid my arm under his rib cage and lifted him from the floor tiles. He
weighed nothing. I carried him to the bathroom and showered him with cold water - he stirred and
pawed at his chest.
-’My friend - he Thai kickboxing you.’
We made it to the beach, followed the dirt road down to Phi Phi hospital, and were waved away by an
enormous militant nurse in dirty green overalls.
-‘Finish now. Full! Full! You go get boat!‘
Rough crowd on the beach that night. Immaculate Swedes writhing in sand and Sambuca. Sinewy St.
Petersburg gymnast sweating over double cheese burgers. Thai Rastafarian smoking opium and dancing
the Macarena on a foldaway polythene table. Glaswegian cornrow school girl escaping the attention of
some wild Algerian menace.
The sun was rising. Deep blue and electric insect hum. I don‘t like staying up all night, I never did. It
makes me feel nauseous. And guilty.
A two hour ferry ride to the mainland. She lay on the deck in the foetal position, staring into space. A
young woman sprawled over the starboard deck - I approached her young male attendant and asked for
water. He handed me a bottle of Evian filled with lukewarm Red Bull and vodka.
-‘…Is she ok?’
-’…He, he is koro.’
-’…Excuse me?’
He pointed to his genitals and scooped his hands up to his abdomen - I didn‘t understand.
The hospital on Chalermprakiat Rd was an hour’s drive from the docking area. It was 8am and busy. A
fleet of mopeds blocked the automatic doors.
We were greeted by an overpowering odour of antiseptic fluid and Thai Muslim cuisine. Bleeding dogs
sauntered through the hallway. A small green bird circled the high dropped ceiling.
I checked my watch and retired to a waiting room bench. Thirty young Thais weeping and shaking, all
fixated on their genital regions. Some used pegs and clamps, others a constant firm grip from concerned
family members.
A white man came in off the street and mopped his brow. I caught his eye and nodded.
-‘Awwww fuck…It’s the end of fucking Ramadan, man. We’ll be waiting for hours.’
We waited for our number.
-‘Koro.’
-’Excuse me?’
-’Tell me what Koro is.’
The Canadian dug his fingers into his scalp and pawed at an ice white Smartphone.
-‘Koro - the fear that the penis will retract into the body and cause death.’
I looked out across the waiting room.
-’…What else does it say?’
He cleared his throat.
- ‘…Koro is often viewed as a form of panic disorder with the symptom-complex of fear of penile
retraction and impending death, palpitations, sweating, breathlessness and paraesthesia. The factors,
which contribute to the occurrence of koro, include beliefs and attitudes pertaining to sexuality. A
common Chinese belief is that the loss of semen weakens the body, and loss of yang occurs with
masturbation and nocturnal emission. The loss of semen through sexual excesses is thought in traditional
Chinese belief to lead to fatal ill-health. Personality traits associated with koro have been described as
nervous temperament, suggestibility, sensitivity and immaturity.’
I walked to the vending machine. Two Thai males stared dead-eyed at a chic vintage style wall clock, one
sobbing and breathing heavily into a paper bag, the other holding his testicles and sweating profusely.
My 20 baht hit the vinyl floor tiles and rolled under the bench. The older man watched it spin, wobble,
and finally come to rest.
-’Koro.'
-’Excuse me?’
His name was Anuman, and the boy was his little brother. I sat down next to them and he told me a
story. During a screening of Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006), his brother suddenly felt the need
to urinate and left the auditorium. While in the bathroom, he felt a sudden loss of feeling in the genital
region and was struck by the fear of penile retraction. He gripped his member with his right hand and
cried out for help, but the foyer was deserted during the show. Intense cold in his limbs and weakness in
his legs - he lay on the floor for twenty minutes until his brother came to find him. Anuman scooped him
up in his arms and took him to the nearest hospital, using a plastic lady’s hair clamp to grip his
retreating member.
Classification. DSM-IV-TR. Signs and symptoms. Causes. Diagnosis. A culture-specific syndrome. A
psychosomatic disorder. Mass outbreaks had occurred in Thailand in 1976. 200 patients, two-thirds male.
Before the outbreak of the epidemic there was concern about chickens being injected with oestrogen to
increase their growth - men were afraid that the oestrogen in the chicken would cause gynaecomastia
and avoided chicken meat. A rumour emerged that contaminated pork was being sold on the market
and that diseased pigs were being inoculated against swine fever. Many people linked the inoculations
with the injections, and the rumours quickly escalated.
Similar outbreaks in Hainan, China - 1948, 1955, 1966, 1974. The 1984–1985 epidemics lasted for over a
year and affected over 3,000 persons in 16 cities and counties. A mental health campaign was conducted
to combat the epidemic - since then, no further episodes had occurred.
-‘Evidence suggests that the outbreaks occurs in specific circumstances.’
-’What are they?’
He paused and tucked his phone back into his jacket pocket.
-’……..’
-’What are they?’
-‘…Social tension or impending disaster.’
I smiled and nodded and invited him to the full moon beach party.
Mushroom Mountain
I’d swallowed three E’s already and decided to crush and smoke the fourth. We walked to the end of the
beach and bought caramel and vanilla mushroom shakes from the faux-Rastafarian vendor. Avoiding
the throbbing mass of 20,000 salivating inebriates we lay with our backs to a palm tree and stared into a
faceless Hunter’s Moon.
We grinned and chatted about little things: Alton Towers, student loans, Les Ferdinand’s appearance on
ESPN, finding a lunch box full of cocaine down a grim back street in Headingley, Leeds, mountains of
peanut shells on the geometric floor tiles of Raffles hotel. I told him about a piece of research I‘d found
on the internet: on average, seventeen 18-24 year olds are admitted to psychiatric care annually following
Khaosan full-moon parties. He laughed it off, lay back against the trunk and took deliberate, nasal
breaths.
I looked out to sea and counted the crests of the breaking waves. The birds sounded like cats and the air
smelled like salmonella and beer batter. We sat in silence as my neck muscles tightened, my skin turned
to orange peel, and I counted a million oscillating floaters. The world dissolved in pearlescent oil, and
then I couldn’t see at all.
I wondered if he was rushing, and turned to face him. His head had dropped, chin tucked into his chest,
goat eyes pin sharp and dry.
-’Are you alright?’
-‘…I forgot how to breath.‘
His Slavic complexion now dim, white and threaded.
-’I don’t like this, mate.’
I tried to reason with him.
Don’t worry. It’ll pass. We’ll buy some savoury pancakes - with that high viscosity mayonnaise you like.
You’ll be okay. I lied about the article - I found it on Wikipedia, it was probably bullshit. You can borrow
my copy of The Hobbit later, if you like. Stay with me.
He spent the next three hours circling a parked moped, hands cupped to sides of his head.
-’What are you doing?’
-‘…Pulling the music out of my ears.’
An hour passed with no improvement: I took him to 7-Eleven and led him back to his shack with a sunfaded bag of Skittles and a bootleg copy of The Hobbit. Dry eyes. Clenched jaw. Dilated pupils. He
locked eyes with his reflection in the dressing mirror and froze like a rabbit in headlights.
I lifted the camera from my bag and he screamed like a peaking kettle. If he broke eye contact his soul
would be trapped for eternity. A perfectly reasonable concern, I thought - a Mayan or Native American
superstition.
Digital photography is ubiquitous. 3.0 mega pixel cameras have stolen our souls. Posted to a billion
irreverent Facebook news feeds, forever pissed and grinning in a Milton Keynes Gastropub. A fate worse
than death.
An open bag of Skittles and a cracked, empty smile. I left to find help on the strip.
Ten thousand fairy lights. The smell of eucalyptus, fermented fish paste and raw sewage. Rubber face
fire dancers with backpacks and gigantic propane poofers. I bought a savoury pancake with mayonnaise
from an old lady’s food cart. She didn’t have any plastic forks, so I ate it with my fingers.
Dust and neon and meat. An improvised pharmacy with a handwritten advertisement for Valium
mounted in the window display. I rooted for change and prepared for an awkward exchange with the
chemist.
Bring him down.
Strained, drawling voices over my shoulder. Two pretty Canadian girls wrestling with a small white
paper bag in vociferous disagreement over how best to administer powdered ketamine. I caught a milky,
bloodshot eye and said hello. She paused for a moment, then tucked the package into her handbag and
smiled cautiously. I was peaking now. They were eight-feet-tall.
-‘H…hi, how are you?
-’Hi…’
She stepped forward and studied my pupils.
-‘…I’m sorry. uh, I’m English….whereabouts are you from? The states?’
-’…..Golden, BC,’ replied the taller girl.
-’It’s in the rockies,’ added the other.
-’Oh wow…lovely mountains I should imagine?…What do people do out there? I guess it’s quite a slow
life up there?’
-’Uh…Kinda, yeah. There’s not much for kids to do there really.’
-‘We sit in the woods….and take mushrooms.’
-’And listen to metal’
-’Nice...you travel a lot too?‘
-’Yep.’
-All around…We’ve been to Thailand like…4 times already…’
-‘Cool…Uh, I wondered if you could help me. I spent some money on mushroom mountain tonight and
now my friend isn’t enjoying life too much…I was thinking of getting him some Valium to take him
down a couple of pegs. He‘s getting worse and worse.’
They looked at each other.
- ‘Hhhmmm. Uh, actually Valium might make him a lot worse.’
-’Yeah…’
-’…Just stay with him.’
-‘Yeah….Stay with him and kept him hydrated…‘
-‘…and reassure him. The worst will pass…in a couple of hours.’
I wasn’t entirely convinced, but I thanked them and walked back to the beach front.
Trays of Kaleidoscopic egg-fried rice. A pirouetting drum ‘n’ bass club riddled with elongated smoking
gargoyles. A troupe of beautiful 10 foot transvestites dancing the Turkey Trot. Microwave nine-year-old
girl skewering a Common House Gecko. The blood drained from my face. I scrambled over the street
and lay on the porch of a balsa wood dance club.
I twitched and foamed and rocked on my haunches. Sickness. Despair. Anxiety. My dearest friend. My
only friend. Twelve-year-old panic in my grandmother’s apple orchard. Strip of amber lighting under a
concrete underpass. January lead-lined eyeballs on the bench of the village church.
Guilt. I think it was guilt.
I stopped at the shack and snatched my money belt from the camp bed. Ankle deep in sand, saturated
with the odour of athlete’s foot and counterfeit Chinese cigarettes, shower room flooded with two inches
of shit and piss, drains overwhelmed by a chunk of unimaginable organic guff. Pioneering hybrid
tropical diseases: typhoid, river blindness, dengue fever. I put my friend to bed with a tepid bottle of
Evian and a sackful of Wheetos Meteors, then left to find my friends.
Losing Face
Cactus bar: Snoop Dogg, cocaine, inertia and Extra-Strength Red Bull. Working class Englishmen
motionless on a heaving dance floor. I could have picked them out from a mile away: straight backs,
jutting chins, surrogate beverage holder pot bellies, pints of Kronenbourg held to sagging, alabaster
breasts.
Every fucker’s on the road now - even a northern pleb like me can spend six months in a futile effort to
‘find himself’ at some poor bastard peasant’s expense. A cheap holiday in other people’s misery.
New members tonight - two Essex-born tax evaders and an ageing Swiss-trained Chinese optometrist.
My fingers were frozen, pulse faint and rapid, pupils dilated. They persuaded me to sit for a while banana leaf cigars and a pint of Chang classic. I smoked a Marlboro Light and ordered a White Russian.
Neil looked anxious - he sneezed, scratched his head and circled the bar area. Chinese Tommy chuckled
to himself and asked how long we’d been on the island.
-‘Eh?…Oh…yeah…me and me girlfriend have been here for almost a week, like.’
-‘I just got here yesterday morning…You see that idiot with the fackin’ coin in his ear over there? I’m
with him and the group of Swedes he‘s dancing around with. He said it’s good luck or some bollocks.
Haha.’
He turned to me.
-‘Um…I’ve been here almost three weeks now.‘
-‘Wow, three weeks? You love it here, yes?‘
-’Yeah.’
He turned to Neil, a Lyle and Scott Barber clad cockney skinhead.
-‘Six years, mate.‘
Silence.
-’Fuck off...’
-’No…seriously.’
A small-time drug dealer and counterfeiter from Croyden, Neil had decided to leave England after
receiving an aggressive letter from the inland revenue. He stole his friend’s Vauxhall Nova, made a
phone call to Cheapflights from Manor Park service station and left on a one way ticket to
SuvarnabhumI, Bangkok after shaving his head and beard in a Heathrow toilet cubicle. He hired a
motley crew of Thai ex-farmers and bought a little bar on Khao San road before moving to Phi Phi island
to spend the rest of his years living ‘the good life.’ His employees sent the monthly profits via Paypal
while he lay on the beach drinking Essex cocktails, growing pink and fat and smoking packets of
imported B&H SuperKings.
-’There was this one time, right…’
Neil regaled us with foul Patpong escapades. I don’t like that kind of talk. I visited the bathroom then
circled the dance floor with a frown and a powdered milk White Russian.
Bob fucking Marley. Ubiquitous Bob Marley.
A pretty Thai girl looked down from the balcony and smiled: deliberately distressed Pixies t-shirt and
American indie-style NHS glasses. Mid-nineties college student on a Morrissey trip. Serotonin and
dysentery and a lungful of dry ice. I was tired and sick and wanted to disappear.
I returned to the bar. It was Charlie’s turn now - severe dehydration and sinewy Cambodian prostitutes
in De Wallen red-light district, Amsterdam.
I turned my back for a moment, and she caught my eye again.
Look occupied. Browse your apps. Casual-like. Another White Russian. This milk is skimmed, and long
life - I didn’t pay £2 for skimmed milk.
She separated from the flock of glitterbug girlfriends, tottered over to the bar and jived to Rihanna like a
solar-powered anime bobblehead. I watched in a stupor. My eyeballs glazed over. Ultra low-frequency
50 Cent medley skipped once, twice, and cut out.
Silence.
And there she was, lifting my head and running her hand over my cheek.
-‘You look like movie star. I want to kiss you.‘
I’m not good at being tired. Please. Leave me be. Please God. She leaned in and tried to kiss me.
I frowned, turned my back and mopped crystals of sweat and grit from my brow.
High frequency noise. Intense heat. The sense of being stared at. A speck of hot saliva hit the nape of my
neck, and I turned to face her.
Ashen face screwed up like the top of a duffel bag, she recoiled and launched a ball of grey phlegm at
my feet. An imaginary knife drawn across her throat as a girlfriend sprinted over from the dance floor
and grabbed her by the shoulders, wailing and kicking and spinning off into the bathroom.
My God.
I should have heeded the guide book - losing face is very bad news. My friends open-mouthed as I tried
to explain. I studied the back of my hand. The cigarette burned into my fingers.
A rusted iron staircase. Secluded smoking area. Sweat rolling off the brickwork. There are no lizards
here. I pictured a set of sinewy kickboxers breaking in to my shack at 4am and giving me a horrible
beating. Marble-eyed Thai Muslims glared beneath a sweating Budweiser parasol.
I should not be here. I should be at home. At home with my pretty head girlfriend. Cross-legged in my
bedroom, playing with my toys. It’s my niece’s birthday next week. I could buy her something nice. A
new computer game, maybe. I know all about computer games. Perhaps she’d enjoy a little JRPG, now
that she’s a little bit older. Something accessible. Zelda. Dragon Quest. That’d be nice. That’d be a nice
thing.
A familiar accent caught my ear. I paused, took a deep drag and pretended not to notice.
Two more days. Ferry to Bangkok. Re-arrange flights by phone. Fly home to Heathrow. Heathrow to
Manchester. Ring my brother. Escape.
A nasal voice cutting a channel through the sheets of cooking oil and tobacco smoke.
Not here, surely to God. Yes. You are never more than six feet away from a Scouser.
-’Ere mate, you’re English aren’t yeh? Yeah, how’s it goin’ mate?’
-’Hi man. I’m ok. How are you?’
-’Top mate. Yeah. Are you going to another club after here, like? There’s a wicked one further up the
beach. We’re all going down in a bit.’
-’…I’m actually not too great at the minute mate, to be honest. I’m going to head home when I‘ve
finished this smoke.’
-’Ok, mate, yeah no worries. Do you want some M.D first though, like?’
-'........'
I left the club, chewed on a magnesium tablet and followed the intricate weave of my shoelace. My
synapses flooded with serotonin, a blood vessel crosshatch blooming on my hands. I lay in bed, and the
silence hurt my ears. Looping voices now: extended conversations with childhood friends, careers advice
from forgotten headmasters, vociferous disagreements with my late grandfather. I lifted my head and
scanned my bedroom: rotating Escher walls, paisley wallpaper moonscapes, dancing fibre optic tendrils
groping the bed sheets. I switched on the light.
There.
A motionless little body made out of clothes and scrap paper. A crude polygonal model of a delicate
Japanese flower girl. I climbed out of bed and stepped forward. Skin like snow. A ribbon in her hair. A
mess of bitmap baby teeth. A midnight vigil. Nag Champa and Diet Coke and Mama Instant Noodles.
She must survive the night. I sat cross-legged and watched her chest rise and fall. She smiled. Only for
me.
I shouldn’t have listened. I should have stayed put. I should have resisted the urge to scratch. I came
here to travel the globe. To hit every hotspot. To penetrate this foul world’s neon epicentre. But there is
no pulse, and there is no city. I am not here. I am still at home. I haven’t moved an inch. I am a ten year
old boy locked in his bedroom, listening to the traffic roll by his window. No girls. No disco. No
barbeques. No office parties. No Christmas morning selection boxes.
Rainy afternoons watching Kurosawa DVDs with my father. Egg-mayonnaise sandwiches and cups of
sweet breakfast tea. An hour of light gardening. A sober chat and a rolled cigarette on the porch. A quick
bath in the evening. Leave enough hot water for Mother. Brush your tongue as well as your teeth.
Those were nice days. Clean days.
And they are far away.
You shouldn’t try to be what you can’t be. Don’t look for the road home. It doesn’t exist. There is no way
back.
I didn’t sleep that night. A trillion Crickets rubbed their legs, a trillion Bullfrogs croaked. The flower girl
smiled and evaporated in electric blue morning light.
Morning
I left the shack at 5am and purchased two all-butter croissants from 7-Eleven. The shop assistant asked
me about Manchester United and seasonal weather systems.
-‘Is it true that you can have four seasons in one day?‘
I shook his hand and wondered how he managed to maintain his good grace through an 18 hour shift.
-‘No, not really. Bye. Thanks.‘
I found my way back to the shack, rooted for my keys, and stopped - a willowy, cat-like figure lying in
the hammock on the front porch. I took a deep breath and rolled another cigarette as she stirred, yawned
and gave a flash of pink mouth and a million milky teeth. A pair of black NHS spectacles lay by her side.
The cigarette fell from my lip.
She had followed me home.
I kicked up a mushroom cloud of bank gravel. She opened her pink, teary eyes and muttered to herself,
wiping the pearlescent crust from her eyelashes and smiling a tired little smile.
I introduced myself and asked her why she had come. She didn’t want to say. I apologised to her.
I’m sorry. I was feeling tired and sick. I’ve had bad experiences with girls In Thai bars. My friend was
spiked by a transsexual pickpocket in Hat Yai three weeks ago. He couldn’t remember his name, and
then he left for cigarettes.
She giggled, nodded her head and wiped her apple cheek with the receipt from a Satun ferry ticket. A
PVC Chang beer dress, pockets stuffed with dual Thai-English leaflets: advertisements for fancy dress
nights, all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets, rigged Muay Thai weekend venues.
Minutes passed, and we said nothing. I led her inside and we sat together on the musky camp bed. The
party had died now - a handful of muttering Swedes passed by the open window as I drank Red Bull
from a warped bottle of Evian. Tears collected in an iridescent pool on the vinyl floor tiles and harsh
fluorescent light filled her every pore and pock mark. She touched my leg and asked for some water as
her face flushed pink and she started to cry. She wasn’t pretty any more. I reached around her back and
traced her ribcage with my fingertips as she lifted her arms and wrapped them around my neck. Asian
skin is fascinating. It pulls apart like dough.
Postnatal scarring.
She held my hands and looked me in the eye.
Losing face is bad news.
-‘My boyfriend. He leaving me. I have a poor child. He needs shoes. I will love you if you help me.’
I regretted that evening for a long time.
We sat in silence for an hour afterwards. I wanted her to get angry. I wanted her to be upset. I wanted
her to threaten me. But she did nothing. She didn’t make a sound. She didn’t even cry.
Dried-out cockroaches resting by the drywall - a live one investigating a dead one. He was either trying
to eat it, or have sex with it. I couldn’t quite tell - maybe he was trying to bring it back to life.
I called a taxi, led her outside and gave her far too much money. She turned onto the strip and
disappeared as the blood rushed away from my head. I ran to the bathroom and vomited into the sink.
The Ocean
I have a vile nasty streak. I am a bad egg.
He prods at the back of my eyeballs. He tap dances through my dreams. I don’t know where he came
from. I don’t remember meeting him. But he’s been here for a long time. He was here long before me. I
will never be rid of him.
It was only ever going to get worse. Here on this beach. Where there’s nobody watching. Where nobody
cares. This place is bad for me. Freedom is bad for me.
The entire day rolling and sweating and clenching my teeth. I wanted to visit a priest. I wanted to be
clean. I stepped out and took a walk along the beach front. I didn’t ever want to come back. I wanted to
wade out into the sea and dance my way down to the ocean floor.
Singed St. George’s Cross beach towels and shattered buckets of Sang Som and Coke. An eighty-year-old
widow clearing up the debris. She will do the same next month. And then the next. And then one day
she will go to sleep.
20,000 gurning crab meat clubbers. A calamitous sea of boiled gyrating devils. A tidal wave of atrophied
rubber-head caricatures. Septic. Flaccid. Peeling. Obese. Glow sticks and fire-eating, overweight scuba
divers with unconvincing henna tattoos. A sea of matted dreadlocks. Tattooed denizens of a thousand
western Buddhist centres. Green teas and Islington flotation tanks. Seated Buddha necklace tracing the
orange peel neck of a Brixton Capacity & Scheduling Manager. Traditional Sak Yant Temple tattoo on
the upper arm of a cocaine-addled Widnes joiner.
No Buddhist would ever come here. No Buddhist would robot dance to Dubstep. Smoke a gram of crack
at a full moon beach party. Scuba dive with dehydrated 60-year-old I.T consultants. Buy faux-Thai name
tags at an over lit temple gift shop. A real Buddhist would be sitting at home contemplating the void.
Jogging through a West Midlands council estate at 4am. Darning his socks in an overcast North Walian
seaside resort. Darkness within darkness - the gateway to all understanding.
They seek a world untainted by wicked corporations and control systems, a place where our inner light
can break forth and illuminate the world. But there is no light here. Not on this Godforsaken beach. The
monitor lizards know. They know to keep their heads down. They are older and wiser.
We didn’t come here to ‘find‘ ourselves - we came here to feed. There is a pestilence upon this land. I am
the crest of some great and terrible wave. I will devour this godforsaken beach at the far end of time,
facilitator of our ageless, weightless, innate shittiness. We know not what we do, and we cannot help
ourselves. I pray the next wave will take us with it.
Baracus
I left Pang Ngan the following morning. A ferry to the mainland and a cab from the port to Bangkok.
Two of my Cactus bar friends joined me.
Old Siam. I hadn’t planned to go straight to the city, but Mike had met a driver who said he could take
us for 600 TBH. We couldn’t refuse the offer - he looked exactly like B.A Baracus. Heavy-set with darting
eyes and a vast oiled faux-Afro doused with litres of volume-pumping mousse, high volume weather
resistant hairspray and Aqua Fish moulding wax. Phenomenal hair. Impossible hair. Maybe it was a
weave.
He led us to the taxi rank, stuffed our rucksacks into the boot of a rusted 1988 Volkswagen camper van
and hot-wired the engine. Our shit fell out of the back as we pulled away, the door handle came away in
his hand as he climbed from the driver’s side. Sighing and coughing and slapping the steering wheel, he
pulled out a length of elastic rope and secured the hood to the bumper with an overhand knot.
-‘Yet Mae.’
He climbed back in. We rattled off down the old dirt road.
An hour of chewing gum and humming tarmac. We didn’t have a map. We didn't even have a compass.
He could have been taking us anywhere.
-’Oi mate, can you take us to McDonald’s, please?’
Nothing. Baracus did not speak.
We passed the turning.
-’Aw, for fuck’s sake. I need a Double Cheese.’
Countryside now. Yellow grass. Potholes. Dead cats. 94/95 season Manchester United away shirts.
The CD skipped. And then.
-‘…English, huh!? I love your…uhhh…Iron Maiden!‘
-’…Oh yeah?’
-’Yeah!…I love…the rock!’
The MD had kicked. Happy now. Smiling. Tapping.
-’I am musician myself, you know?’
-’Yeah?’
Baracus told us about his metal band and the gigs he’d played at the half-melted jazz bars of Krabi .
Covers, mostly: Metallica, Sabbath, Deftones, Zeppelin. ‘Agent Orange’ had once held a record deal with
a minor independent U.K metal label and had pulled in respectable crowds at one time - he even played
with Lemmy at a festival in the East Midlands once. But that was all water under the bridge. Like most of
the townsfolk, he’d left Krabi in the aftermath of the tsunami. Now it was all dead or dying.
We pulled in at the bus terminus and wandered out onto the strip. Empty karaoke bars. Fizzing neon
entryways. Clouds of incense and cooking oil. Bacterium-infested air conditioning units. Giddy packs of
foaming Bangkaew dogs.
A karaoke bar teeming wih bikini-clad dancing girls and elderly Thai men in silk business suits.
Miniature wicker baskets of Bombay mix and cheap pints of European draught lager. A notch up from
the backpacker bars of Phi Phi.
An hour of grating Th-Pop. Juvenile snickers at a pretty teen waitress called ‘Pu.’ Electronic drum rolls
and pink, luminous curtains.
A herd of lithe Thai girls in fuchsia monokinis lined-up and giggled bashfully. A well-oiled announcer
appeared on stage, ripped into a rendition of ‘My Way‘ and saluted the audience with a wink and a
serrated grin. A willowy girl walked to the front and curtsied, a nervous little twirl and a coy smile as the
crowd applauded. Raised hands and whooping and a hundred vicious little heads nodding in unison.
He produced an extravagant tropical wreath from behind the curtain and hung it around the her neck.
She bowed and smiled and walked off stage.
Some elaborate regional beauty contest.
The announcer took a deep drag on his cigar, mopped his brow and pulled a girl with bleached skin and
tattooed eyebrows on to the stage. A faint ripple of applause cut through the cigar smoke, burnt fish and
pink fairy lights. We were drunk and careless now - Dave raised his hand and shouted. I winced as the
spotlight hit our table.
-‘What the fuck are you doing?‘
The patrons turned and clapped cautiously.
-’Buying her some flowers.’
-‘You're an idiot.‘
The announcer slipped it over her head, turned to our table and bowed.
Thai spirits now - Mekhong whiskey. Sang Som. Lao Kao. Mike was feeling unwell - he took a piss,
dropped a note on to the table and stumbled through the rear exit. We shook his hand and ordered a box
of Siam Havana cigars.
An hour passed, and the booze was finished. Dave’s head rested in the breadbasket. Steve screwed-up
his nose and sneezed into a packet of Spicy Chilli peanuts.
-'We'd better leave soon. Settle up.'
I slipped on my jacket and tapped the back of Steve's head. The music stopped. The manager dropped
his pen and glared.
-'What the hell is this?'
The saloon doors burst open and Mike bolted across the room, trailed by a wild, gesticulating Caucasian
with a luminous green mohican. They seized upon the immaculate middle-aged Thai with mad flailing
arms and broken Thai vowels. He looked at his watched, hissed under his breath and waved them away.
This was no beauty contest - this was an auction. We’d agreed to take the girl home and pay her wages
for the following week in return for her 'services.' The manager was furious. The punters had left - there
would be no sale tonight.
Saliva and hissing from a heavyweight crowd of sinewy pimps, crack dealers and raven-haired
salarymen. We picked up our things and scrambled to the door.
-‘Fackin’ ‘ell boys - five minutes here and you almost got your legs broken in ‘alf.‘
Alan had saved us; with a green Mohican and a lungful of broken Thai. We followed him to the Coastal
Paradise bar on Thanon Utarakit where the drink was cheap and the interior was made of bamboo. We
sat cross-legged and chatted and smoked and drank through the night.
A half-Cherokee, half-British 27-year-old punk hairdresser raised on a grinding Wolverhampton council
estate, Alan had moved here three years ago to get away from ‘England…and the bastard
people….fucking shithole…I never fitted in there.’ Now he worked for a Thai hair salon on a forged
working visa: cornrows for western backpackers, skinheads for counterfeit Buddhist monks, green hair
for Emo schoolchildren. Alan was a cool guy, a true freak. Alan didn’t belong - not even this meat hook
back alley town.
I digress. Bob Marley - Baracus thought Bob Marley was ‘happy hour shit.’ His real passion was death
metal. Industrial metal. Beelzebub nailed to tarmac by pneumatic drill. He played us some of his demo
tape - we grimaced and clapped politely.
SmiLE Beach Boys bootleg raised a cautious smile. Our Prayer. Heroes and Villains. Roll Plymouth Rock.
It felt right. In the sun. And the waving feather grass. Happy and queasy and tired. He loved the Stone
Roses, which surprised me - it must have been the atmospheric pressure. He burst into song as we
turned into a long, banking left turn. Mike‘s door opened, and he almost fell out.
-‘Fucking Christ. What’s this!?’
Baracus twirled a lock of hair in his fingers and chuckled to himself.
-’Sorry…this road is most dangerous in all of Thailand…’
-’Haha…….really?’
‘My brother drove along here every day for seventeen year. He tell me stories about this place. Many big
crashes, my friend. Many tourists killed.‘
-‘….Was your brother a driver?‘
‘Yeah, yeah. He die last week.’
The hum of bald tires on asphalt.
‘….I’m sorry to hear that….How did he die?’
‘He was driving big bus. Big bus for tourists. His tire burst.’
‘Jesus….Were the tourists ok?’
‘ Oh yeah, mostly. Three died out of 40 I think. Not many. It was this very…piece of road here….there.’
He doffed his corduroy cap and saluted the eight foot charred skid mark cutting through the right hand
lane and ending abruptly as it met the conspicuously polished section of barrier.
Silence.
-’…I’m sorry...’
He smiled and forced the window down with his palm.
‘Oh no, it’s fine. I have lots of brothers, you see? Too many.’
Baracus had been born into a hill tribe to the north of Chiang Mai and had moved south in the 90’s to
take advantage of the tourism boom. Now he was an old hand, and his family were dead. The 15% he
had once sent back to his family every month accumulated in the glove box. He probably could have
bought a new house with it if he wanted. It never really occurred to him.
No regard for the future. No savings. No mortgage. No long-term plans. Just drive. Drive the bus.
Further. There is nothing more. Engaged in a perpetual now. There was no beginning. There will be no
end. Life is blind drift - cheap and fast and nasty.
-’The older Thai people are scared of you, you know?
-’Yeah?’
-’Yeah, there are afraid of what you are…what you are doing to their culture…and their children.’
He lit a fresh cigar and opened the battered jewel case of a well-loved early Motörhead album.
-’But I am not. I do not care.’
Baracus was a force of nature. Baracus fascinated me. I wanted to introduce him to the folks back home:
to the people who discuss the intricacies of the property ladder, who dream of golden golf-saturated
retirement, who believe in some overarching significance to life, who scrimp and save and scheme from
cradle to grave. Come, spend an hour in Baracus‘s ramshackle cab.
He dropped us off by a Thai lady tending a tin noodle stand. Odour of chilli powder, fish sauce, ground
peanuts and sugar. At first I thought she was about nine years old, then I realised that her noodle cart
was enormous.
Baracus bowed deeply and wished us luck on our travels.
-‘Hey English! Merry Christmas!’
Rag Dolls
Ko Chang island.
Mosquitoes settled on my alabaster legs. The satellite was close overhead. Sand rash. Heatstroke.
Burglarious transexuals. A lady-boy had broken into the shack and stolen my guide book and camera.
‘Oh yes, my friend. Big Lady-boy come,’ said the stout little landlord.
Kathoey.
And so I packed my things and moved across the street. 7-Eleven. Spicy instant Ramen. Naggin of 80%
proof Chinese Baiju. I retired to the wooden shack and read 3 ½ chapters of The Hobbit. Alcohol stupor.
Grains of sand embedded in my forehead. I couldn’t settle that night, and I left at 4am to forage for
western food. Deep fried. Glistening.
Ko Chang was another tourist trap. Pancake stalls. Faux-hill tribe jewellery. Tiny rabid monkeys chained
up in trees. Six foot transvestite calling out to me.
-’You are very tall…can I love you?’
I tripped on a burned-out Moped and landed on my chest. Sand in my teeth. Cigarette ember fused to
my pelvis. An ear full of sibilance. High frequency radio transmissions. I scanned the strip. Somewhere.
She is close.
There.
An ancient Thai lady frying meat over a pockmarked tin burger stand, translucent filament hair diffused
in sodium lamplight, sacred head framed by a grim septic halo. Wonderful and terrible, she possessed
this grimy backstreet of Ko Chang like the spinning-wheel spirit of a mute Japanese forest clearing.
Displaced Aokigahara woodland in an unholy backpacker pisshole arrested by some powerful morphic
field.
I bowed and muttered into my chest.
‘Sawatdee Khrab’.
No response.
I raised my hand and pointed to the chicken burger: a tepid, oily nightmare fused to the petrified film of
her hot plate. Coils of hatred branded my forehead, her eyes high field electromagnets. I turned my back
and sniffed, the air smelled like burning hair and plastic.
She had never seen one like me: an unholy, bloodless apparition, radiant pallor of an anaemic twelve
year-old-girl, elongated and shimmering, internally illuminated, paper lantern head stuffed with value
range supermarket tea lights.
She was in the presence of a lower Deva: sexless, ageless, passionless - a being more powerful and
blissful than mere humans. Yes, a Deva had glided over to her plastic food cart, seized upon her hot
plate and ordered a double chicken burger with sweet chilli sauce and polyurethane mayonnaise.
A relic of a hundred generations of Chiang Mai tribesmen confronted by some towering demon beanpole
in Billabong board shorts, vanguard of the plague of spastic ciphers pissing and mewling about on the
beach. The white man has no blood. The white man has no soul.
She was old and wise - she knew I was no formless ‘Ārūpyadhātu’ Deva: I was some sustenancerequiring lower form. This one has no need of a magical chariot, at least not on a Friday night.
She had awaited this day for eons: the end of the declining third age, a time when Devas arrive in great
numbers, portending the final end of days. She turned and observed the grim spectacle on the beach
front: some great and terrible omen.
A charge popped through my skull; a troupe of little oiled devils tapping away at my optic nerve. I
studied her ancient moonscape face - shallow rubber valleys and flaking chalk ridges - a high-poly
bump-mapped death mask.
Fragments of skin separated from her head, strafed to the right and hung in the air as a fine, pearlescent
mist. Complex particle rendering, flat-shaded polygon cubes dancing through a cloud of meat juice and
processed cheese.
I shook my head, retching and staggering backwards.
Blue cheese flesh. Dead hollow eyes. A shrieking banshee corpse. Half her face missing, screwed up like
the top of a hessian sack. Bolts of silver hair rising from her head suspended in blue, viscous liquid. A
yawning, metallic howl echoed down the strip as she lifted her head and reached out.
The blood drained from my face. I raised my forearm and waited, twitching and salivating. My legs gave
way as I clipped my heel on the curb and fell into bleached white sand.
Her hand closed around my face. I closed my eyes and waited.
Death. Here. Now. On this beach. It feels right.
The magnetic field popped once, twice, and then it was gone.
I lowered my arm and looked again - her face was flesh once more, fragments of skin flanking my
shoulders, fizzing and popping and dissolving in neon half light. Her missing features bloomed - a time
lapse paper tree in a Chinese crystal garden. Her mouth lifted and curled. Her eyes lit. She released a
cautious smile.
I gulped at pockets of moist air as she raised her head and slapped a horse meat steak on to the frying
pan. I stood and watched it fuse with the film of fly carcasses and coagulated fat. I had forgotten my
name again.
A slight frame shifted at my shoulder, and my forearm was cold. I flicked out a hand and grabbed hold
of a white, fleshy cylinder. A tiny little arm, and a pristine moon face girl, no more than fourteen-yearsold. I peeled my eyes away from the steak, arrested by a pair of distant brown eyes.
She stared through the back of my head and mouthed something dreadful. Her head dropped and she
studied her plastic beach plimsolls, wiggling her toes up and down. I stepped back and released her arm;
her lips trembling as she looked to the clouds and in a hushed voice said ‘Please. She is my grandmother.’
She held my hand and stroked my arm as her grandmother stepped from the food cart and approached
me.
-’She is nice, look.’
The old lady bowed and smiled and presented me with a double chicken burger. I accepted and bowed
gingerly. We sat on the curb and she spoke to me in fragmented, pidgin English. I listened and nodded
and counted the golden hairs on the back of my hand.
They were all alone now. Grandfather killed in a Chiang Mai car accident. Mother taken by malaria.
Cousin swept away by the Christmas tsunami. Their land was taken, and they left their northern foothill
tribe to find work on Koh Chang. The girl soon found a job at a hostess bars on the main strip, dancing in
a plaid school uniform for retired Canadian I.T consultants. I’d visited similar places in Phuket nauseating spectacle of neon, meat, and rubber plimsolls - a million rusty meat hooks. She smiled and
bowed and handed her Grandma the earnings from the 12 hour shift, earnest and dignified. Grandma
knelt down and whispered in her ear.
-‘…What did she say?’
She blushed and flicked the hair out of her eyes.
-’She say she want me to go with you. Tonight.’
Among Thais there is a consensus that prostitution will always be a part of the social fabric of Thailand.
My mother would have wanted me to admonish them.
You don’t have to do this. You must push past your cultural inheritance. We can help you. We are all the
same underneath. We can all make it if we do it together. We will become one glorious whole. We can do
it. Believe.
Then I looked out to the beach, to the all-night Bob Marley sing-along nu-rave VD vomit party. I said
nothing.
I bowed deeply, thanked them both and staggered back along the strip. Bells rang out from the Muay
Thai venue. Tiny monkeys smashed Brazil nuts over loose cobblestones.
Four A.M now - I was tired and dirty and spent twenty minutes scrubbing my fingernails with a
Sonicpower Medium toothbrush. Cold shower. Ex foliating facial scrub. Zig Zag Plus Medium Pro
Relief. I curled my legs into bed and tried to pick up BBC Radio 4 with a proxy server. ‘In Our Time’
podcast: Malthusianism. This programme is not available in your region.
I dreamed of the Scottish highlands that night. Late September midge evenings in the Kyle of Lochalsh.
Rainy coastal hamlets. Fish and chip shops. Carbonated mineral water. Cardboard cartons of pasteurised
milk. Sweet tea and battered Mars bars. Silent primary school playing fields on the Isle of Skye.
That would have suited me. I should have been born out there. Where everybody knows each other.
Where there are no big surprises. Where I can hear the church bells ring. Where the air smells like peat.
That would suit me best.
There is no such thing as an accident.
Cloud Storage
I spent my first week in Osaka with a pretty waif American girl called Whitney. Her camera was as wide
as her shoulders; she had apple cheeks, natural eyebrows, and liked to take pictures. She was beautiful,
but I could never be with her.
Her surname was Völler, and she could fit inside a capsule hotel room. When we first met she was
watching a selection of Chinese pirate movies and working her way through a dried out packet of
Swedish rolling tobacco. She was a little older than me, and I never expected her to show an interest.
She ran through her obligatory backpacker routine on the vinyl patio furniture of a slab of concrete
called The Luckyman Fine Hotel -‘The thought of a 9-to-5 career for the rest of my life terrifies me. I just can‘t understand people who
jump in to a job straight from college. It‘s just…it’s like all about consuming man, why don’t people just
try to follow their…well, not their dreams, but…you know?’
-’Yeah…’
-‘With the internet, we won‘t have to do any of that stupid shit for much longer. It’s like…Gnostic, you
know? Have you read any Gnosticism? We’re slowly getting there, we’re slowly becoming one…
glorious whole. I’m not saying that there won’t be problems on the way of course, but we’re making it, I
think - you know?’
-’Yeah.’
I like it when I can be quiet with people. I don’t much enjoy conversation, but I am well-rehearsed: smile
and nod, give agreeable but noncommittal responses, give a few examples, keep from chewing my own
teeth, keep from staring blankly at her forehead as the serotonin stupor grips.
I don’t like lying to people. I’m not very good at it. I have to do it all the time.
I’d been staying at the hostel for five nights, and we had worked our way through the standard Osaka
tourist route: Nijo castle, Dotombori, Umeda Sky Building, Okonomiyaki filled pancakes by the Taito
Towers video arcade. She invited me into her room that evening, and as we undressed each other in the
blinking hazard lights of the owner’s Mitsubishi Shogun I discovered a huge tumescent bloom on her
inner thigh. She screamed and turned on the light with a clap of her hands - a foot-long kidney-shaped
patch of bedbug bites. The moment was lost, and she left in silence to speak with the manager.
That was the night I met Michi.
A young Japanese man sleeping prone in the hostel‘s communal room couch: slight even by Japanese
standards, with a starless bouffant and a fitted paisley shirt - some sinewy East-Asian Johnny Marr.
No-one knew who he was or what he was doing there - the hostel was frequented exclusively by gaijin,
and Japanese usually avoid such places. We figured he was probably homeless, or crazy, but we never
really found out.
Later that evening I found him leaning over the railing of the balcony, drinking Red Bull and feeding on
a dried-out Marlboro red. He turned and smiled and looked me up and down.
- ‘Hello. You are very tall. How are you my friend?‘
-‘Very well, thank you. How are you?‘
-‘I am okay, but…that couch is not…comfortable, you know?‘
Some inscrutable mandarin intellect, his eyes old and calm and melancholy.
He offered me a cigarette, and I bowed and accepted with both hands. We talked about Osaka, Bangkok,
and the Portuguese hotel manager, I tried to explain the appeal of ‘Borat: Cultural Learnings of America
for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006). He’d watched a pirated copy earlier in the
evening, and couldn’t make head nor tail of it.
-‘So…where are you from, my friend?’
-‘England.’
-’Oh…oh…’
His eyelids twitched, his brow flexed, and he struggled to speak. He lowered his head and searched
desperately for something to say.
Several weeks earlier, a 22 year-old English teacher had been buried in a bath of sand and compost soil
on her apartment balcony. The killer had been on the run for several weeks, and a diplomatic row
surrounded the ensuing court case. Her parents had criticised the judge‘s decision, and made regular,
tearful appeals for witnesses on Japanese TV.
I think this probably had something to do with it, but maybe not. Maybe it was something to do with the
war, maybe he just didn’t like English people. I’ll never really know.
A heavyset young man skipped into the room, lit a Mild Seven, and flopped onto the couch with a thud.
-’Hey!!’
-’Ah! Hello my friend…You are English too?’
-’Huh? No…No, I’m an American.’
- ‘You are American! Sodesuka. Where are you from, in America?‘
-‘New Orleans, actually.‘
-‘Ah...Is it okay now?‘
-‘It’s getting back on its feet, yeah. They’ve done well down there.‘
-‘Mmmm…America…your government tells us everything what to do, you know?’
-’Uh...yeah.’
Michi was interested in surveillance, and plausible conspiracy theories. He turned to face me.
-‘ UK, hah?…Hmmm…They are watching you, I think.’
-’Yeah? How do you mean?’
-’CCTV! camera! Many, many.’
-‘Yeah.’
He slapped his hand on my thigh.
-’Ahaha! Englishman…Stanley Kubrick!’
-’Uh…yeah…you like him?’
-’Ah! 2001...you understand this film?’
-’Um...not really, no. I don’t think you’re really meant to understand it. I do quite like it though.’
‘American! You tell me, do you think it possible to put chip in teeth of young man and…monitor his…
uh…thoughts?‘
He raised an eyebrow and rummaged through his pocket for a vibrating phone.
- ‘Uh, no…no…I’m pretty sure they can’t do that, not yet anyway. Actually, my father works for a
biomedical research company in Ohio and he…uh…you know…I don’t think they can. Well maybe they
could, but it wouldn’t be worth all the expense and whatever.’
-’Sodesuka…’
Silence.
-‘My name is Michi. Hello.’
He slipped his arm under my nose, shook my hand firmly and turned to the American.
-’It’s a pleasure to meet you Michi, my name’s Zack. Anyway, sorry guys, but I gotta go. We’re meeting
some girls at the Judo tonight. I’ll catch you both later on.’
Zack snuffed out his cigarette, doffed his cap and slipped back inside through the patio doors. We were
alone now. The television shuddered as a HGV passed by the open window. I studied the script
engraved in the old Genkan entryway: bronze Kanji in corrugated iron, patina of rust and lichen. Michi
stood beside me and lit another cigarette.
- ‘So…why did you come to Japan?’
Two deep drags on an untipped cigarette. Drown the words in tar and carbon monoxide. The birds were
singing now. Strange birds born under amber sodium light.
- ‘…I have always wanted to see Japan. I’ve been interested in it since…I was a little boy.‘
-’I see.’
And then I said something stupid.
-‘…You know, I think Japan is a great country…..but…I feel like an outsider here…more than anywhere
else in the world…and I have been to some pretty strange countries.’
His shoulders dropped, and the features shrank from his face. He turned and flopped back on to the
couch.
Silence. We smoked and drank and smoked, consciously now. The birds stopped singing, the television
talked to itself, and the sake was no longer hot. I lowered my head and muttered under my breath.
- ‘…They are….shy, I think.’
His eyes lit. He lifted his head and opened his mouth to speak.
-‘Yes! Yes, this is the reality! They are shy.’
Michi was intrigued now - Japanese don’t expect foreigners to have a receiving set. We talked and
smoked and drank for hours: Stanley Kubrick, premium pale lagers, and the untimely demise of the Sega
Dreamcast. And now we were friends.
Michi
Michi was a contract worker for Yamato Transport delivery company. He worked irregular hours and
made $800 a month, which paid for his internet café accommodation and a 24 month mobile phone
contract. A lifelong outsider, he hated his job intensely and was routinely bullied by the full-time
employees. Part-timer. Slacker. Weirdo. Gaijin. He didn’t much like other Japanese, and used to spend
most of his time with foreigners, always on the lookout for other dropouts and chronic malingerers.
Michi was an itinerant - he'd been treading water since graduating university with a degree in marine
biology several years prior. He couldn’t afford to rent his own place and lived mostly between the local
internet café and at home with his parents in Nara: a pretty little temple town 20 miles east of Osaka.
You must get a full-time job. You must get married. You will be too old soon. You must buy a house.
You must give us grandchildren.
But their world no longer existed. They got full-time jobs upon graduation and had held them for life,
partnered and procreated, saved and lived and loved - Michi could do none of these things. Lost
Generation, Freeter, McRefugee. He hopped from factory to convenience store, working menial jobs until
his probationary period was up and handing in his notice before the company branded its logo onto his
arse. For the past three months he had worked at a Gentleman’s club, handing out numbered tickets to
Japanese salary men queuing for awkward sex with teenage Yokohama runaways.
-'My job is...very...shit.
He told me some fascinating stories that night: he once spent a year living in a cardboard camp under a
bridge over the Yodo, and then three months living in a booth at his local internet café. He liked it there:
the privacy, food, showers, free drinks and ice cream, a huge library of books, manga, video games,
magazines and movies - it was better than being at home.
A trickle of grad Jobs appeared after the great Japanese ‘hiring ice age’ lifted - he found a six-week
internship and then a part-time post with a small graphic design company in Kyoto; he even got a
girlfriend and moved to a tiny apartment on the outskirts. Things were looking up for Michi; and then
the financial crisis hit. He was made redundant and found himself back on his arse at his mother‘s house
- new jobs were taken by more recent graduates. Michi was dead and gone. At 24.
-‘Japanese companies don’t want lost generation…we aren't…equipped to move into the….corporate
world. Don't have the skills like this, you see.’
Despite all of this, Michi was content with his place in the world, and had quite a cheerful demeanour for
the most part. He would describe a sense of relief at knowing that his life was forfeit, and that he no
longer had to worry about scrimping and saving and sweating and praying for morning to break. Now
all the exits were blocked, and there was no light at the end of the tunnel. He groped through smoke and
rust, through labyrinthine underground ventilation shafts, sifting through burger wrappers and
collecting tobacco from old cigarette ends. It was a hopeless, meaningless existence, but at least he was
free. The anxiety was gone, and he was finally able to enjoy his life. It was like being a little boy again he had a spring in his step and a sweet melody in his belly.
He invited me into the city one morning, and we spent several days shuffling around Osaka - I’d found
Japan utterly impenetrable, but he lifted the veil for me. He showed me the hidden Japan: the human
wreckage, the Lost Generation caught and mangled in the machinery, the legions of homeless middleaged men with full-time jobs and mobile phone contracts. The death from overwork, the suicides and
aneurysms in soundproofed Osaka suburbs.
‘Depressing, mental disease,’ he called it. Government statistics refer to depression, stress, work-related
fatigue; Michi knew all about it - most of his friends had received psychiatric care of one kind or another.
Schizophrenia, Personality Disorder, alcohol/substance abuse. He was on the verge of being sectioned
himself once, and had been referred to Osaka NEET outreach centres for confidence building classes and
support with his resume writing skills. They could not help him - Michi refused to engage. He wasn’t
looking for a job. He didn’t want to move forward. He hated institutions and uniforms and hierarchy.
Nobody above and nobody below for Michi. He was looking for a way out of the whole programme, to
bolero his way off the tip of the Earth.
I enjoyed the time I spent with him - I felt like it meant something. I’ve always been quieter than most,
but even I still feel the need to mask silence with inane chit chat. A race of compulsive verbalisers is what
we are - maybe it’s genetic.
Michi and I didn’t need to talk - our communication was near-telepathic. We shared our own little
private morphic field and walked for hours without a word - a dual-core CPU processing the dense code
of Osaka city streets. The arched wrists of immaculate blue Bus drivers, the subtle cue of a security
guard’s pink neon truncheon, the heat and moisture of a salary man’s glare, the cracked smile of fake
Geishas shuffling along the Gion. Words are lies. Silence is genuine. Truth comes from the belly. We
shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.
I’m starting to sound like some fucking Taoist.
Handicraft
Michi wasn't there one morning, and the owner’s moulting Japanese Akita took his place on the
communal couch. I spent the next few nights with Whitney - we talked and drank and talked, and then
we fell asleep in an Irish cream stupor.
She took me to a Kyoto Handicraft Centre in Sakyo-ku one morning. Ninen Jaka street was monochrome,
overhead electrical cables serrated by six nights of hard frost. It smells different here when it’s cold.
We were led to an elongated table attended by several austere old ladies with taut, disciplined faces.
They reminded me of my grandmother‘s - you don’t see faces like that on young people. I don’t think it
necessarily comes with age.
My forehead braised in Nivea Intensive Care moisturiser and dry heat from the period wood burning
furnace. The tutor approached us and bowed, shoulders stooping dramatically like some ancient
newsreel Okinawan grandmother dwarfed by a 6-foot G.I at Operation Iceberg. She took my hand and
waved rhythmically over the Washi with a small tapered brush, demonstrating the fundamentals of
traditional card making: how to hold the knife so as not to tear the paper, how to cut in a straight line,
find centre points to make folds, pierce the paper with an awl, and use the minimum amount of glue.
I struggled on for an hour and destroyed reams of pristine hand-picked Washi. Whitney was faring little
better - she soldiered on for thirty minutes then muttered and grimaced and shrank from the table. I was
frustrated and hot and wanted to go home. I stretched out my legs and glanced at my watch.
No graft. No discipline.
A troupe of Japanese children entered the classroom as I tucked my chair under the desk and sneezed.
Yellow sun hats, Ghibli lunchboxes and Super Mario Galaxy 2 umbrellas. A young female teacher
followed them in, stood in the centre of the room and gestured to a minute raven haired little boy with a
slight limp and a Nintendo Ds tucked under one arm. He padded over to the back of the classroom and
opened the uppermost drawer of a large metal filing cabinet. Lifting several large sheets of Washi, he
flicked his tiny shoulders and padded back to the central desk. The children opened their pencil cases
and waited contentedly as he laid the sheets out on the desk. I stood and peered over the table.
A deathly pale little girl caught my eye, consulted her friends, then picked up her painting and held it
high over her head. In pencil and pastel she had drawn a highly detailed drawing of a little western girl
with pigtails and blue dungarees feeding an enormous fiery Lion/Dog creature with a box of Pocky
biscuits. At the top of the paper she had written ‘Komainu’ in Roman characters. She couldn’t have been
more than five years old.
A slightly older boy fingering a Totoro phone strap and scribbling in a bound leather notebook lifted his
head and followed suit: a colourful scene from the Olympic games, eight figures racing towards the
finishing line beneath a trail of rippling flags: Norway, Great Britain, Germany, U.S, France, Brazil,
Russia, South Korea.
The smallest boy turned to face me now, dead eyes from a different star altogether. He offered his
picture with both hands, bowed and skipped away as his cheeks flushed pink. A sketch in purple
crayon: a wonky horizontal double line met on both sides by two uneven oblongs. At the head of the
page he had scrawled ‘Scissors.’
The teacher glanced over and smiled.
-’…He want to check his Engrish with you.’
I stood in silence. The children watched open mouthed. I was terrified. Cradling a newborn. Dusting my
dead grandmother’s music box.
-’…It’s…very good. Thank you.’
I placed the paintings on the table then slumped back to my desk, exhausted. The children whispered to
each other as I took deliberate breaths and studied the sheets of crumpled washi and the cumbersome
hands responsible. Slender, feminine hands - piano playing hands, a girl had once told me. But not
today, today they were crudely rendered: dense and knotted and awkward. They no longer belonged to
me - they were the hands of a welder, a coalman, a miner. They belonged to my grandfather, to the old
man who used to run the fruit and veg shop over the road, to the Neolithic animist forming grooved
ware on the Orkney islands.
Not a single cell of this hand existed when I was born. These hands are not fit for purpose. I am a
troglodyte pawing at shadows. A clumsy, brutish ape who managed to cut a few strips of cloth, forge a
needle from bone and paint himself in to a corner for the next 100,000 years.
Whitney took my hand and led me to the door. I bowed to the tutor. The children smiled and waved.
-’Bye bye!’
Frightened
On Saturday night we had dinner at an expensive sushi restaurant. The chef picked the fish from a large
tank behind the counter and drove a knife into the back of its head. The Yellowtail gasped as the chef
eviscerated it with a Sashimi knife. Whitney stood from her stool. I smiled and tried to console her.
That was a reflex action. Fishes aren’t able to feel pain; they sense injuries, but they do not suffer.
I didn’t believe myself. Never show a westerner what’s on the end of their fork.
The sushi was delicious, apart from a little bundle of amber fish eggs wrapped in seaweed, the texture of
which made me splutter and heave. I caught the chef’s eye as I struggled to swallow, and he shirked
away from the bar in embarrassment. I had done it again. I had made him lose face.
Whitney’s hands were shaking when we got home. We sat at the kitchen table and talked about fish and
samurai and Tanuki racoon dogs, and we drank from the bottle of sake she had bought for her mother.
We didn’t know that the cheap stuff is supposed to be served warm - it tasted like vodka, but it didn’t
get me drunk.
Her mattress had been fumigated, so we decided to stay in my room that night. She told me she wanted
to go home and then she started to cry - she missed her family, her western toilet, and the little Cedar
garden where they’d buried her dog. She loved that dog - he was the only one who understood. We lay
together in the dark and listened to each other breath, and her laptop exhaled as it dropped into standby
mode.
Brief flashes of light from the open window. Too slow to be lightning, and silent. She kissed me and
lifted my shirt. Another cast elongated shadows over her face, then faded to a dim amber afterglow.
Pulsing. Regular. Her eyes were closed, but I am sure she had seen it. Her breath was visible.
One eye on the window now. High frequency noise. A set of paper knuckles and rising, wireframe
fingers. A crude polygonal hand, black line fingers mapped on to a six-sided cube. I did not want to see
it. I closed my eyes and counted to ten. An angular torso rose in a staggered motion then paused and
rotated upwards. A set of elongated arms now, black and sleek. A tarantula bearing its fangs.
There.
A blank, CG face, crude bitmap textures pasted over flat polygons. Lifeless specular map eyes scanning
the room and waiting. Light scattered on impact with bump mapped skin. My mouth hung open. My
head rolled and capsized and swam across the room.
-’What’s wrong?’
I turned to face her, and then I looked back. It was gone.
She kissed me on the cheek and turned over. I lay awake for hours and watched the pocket of my T-shirt
rise and fall over my labouring heart. For a moment I thought I recognised its face.
-’Ssshh. You’ve had a nightmare.’
-’I’m fine, really.’
She held me for hours that night. It was good of her to do that.
Michi’s House
I wrapped the cable around the band of my earphones, lifted my head and saw Michi asleep on the
opposing seat. He smelt like alcohol and sandwiches, and he was carrying a plastic bag full of garden
tools. He had a large hole in his t-shirt, and his hair was long and greasy.
He opened his eyes and we stared at each other for a moment. I passed him a cigarette as the train
stopped at Tomio station - about halfway to Nara temple town. Michi stood and stepped off, and I
followed him.
We crossed over the tracks and made our way over a patch of knotted countryside. It was a dull,
overcast day - I had no idea where we were going, but I trusted him now. We hiked for several miles
before turning left on to the disused car park of a large tire factory.
He stopped and turned to face me, and I looked out over a wasteland of old tires, sandbags and smashed
and scattered headlights. He waved me over to a pile of bricks - dried out sacks of Portland cement and
ancient steel handle spades - and slapped a sack of cement-encrusted tools onto the dirt. Reaching into
his rucksack he turned his back and pulled out an inch-thick paper document: dense pages of kanji and
kana and a number of black and white technical illustrations. I scratched my forehead and smiled. It was
an instruction manual.
-’What is this place, Michi?’
-’…This…is my house, Nichan.’
I circled the mound of bricks and wet cement. The clouds gathered, and an emaciated Fox dropped his
dried fish and watched from the steps of the Shinto shrine.
-’…This is where I am going to live. I have decided.’
He pulled out another piece of paper and pointed to his signature.
-‘This land is very cheap. It belong to Michi now. Haha.’
-’You’re mad, Michi. You can’t live here, it’s…’
-’Yes I can. I have bought a brick shed kit. I can wash like this. There is fresh water nearby.’
I wanted to say something. I didn‘t say anything.
-’This is my last stand. I will die here. Or succeed. No more drift for Michi.’
He drew his thumb across his belly, and I rested my arm on his shoulder. We sat on a concrete bench
and waited for a bus. It took 93 minutes and 47 seconds.
Michi was a lost cause. Japan wanted him gone - he was a burden. One night they would take him, carry
his frame through the nursing home, wrap him in his Gundam blanket and lay him to rest by the butane
stove of his little brick home. And no one would notice. All Michi ever wanted to do was disappear. To
vanish in a puff of blue smoke. To walk through the snow and leave no trace.
Chapter 24324
I set a vibrating alarm for 6am, withdrew some cash at the Post Office and booked the 10am Shinkansen
to Kyoto. I had found an English advertisement for rental apartments in the Metro newspaper - cheap
and Gaijin-friendly. I couldn't bear to see his face again.
Moving in was easy: an extremely passive young landlord invited me into his office and asked to see my
passport and deposit, then showed me to the apartment - no questions asked. I would be sharing with a
French Japanophile Business Studies student from Bretagne, and met a few new people in the communal
pool hall that night. They were foreigners mostly, and two young Japanese student dentists from
Hokkaido University. I told them about my travels and my job and my life back in England, and we
drank heavily and listened to In Utero on a reinforced concrete balcony. Nirvana had never really
appealed to me much, and that particular album left a metallic taste in my mouth, but I enjoyed it all the
same that night.
Later, I sat in the kitchen with my flatmate and a pair of newly qualified French Gps carrying an
expensive 17 inch IBM ThinkPad. We watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), chewed on
Pocky biscuits and packs of salt liquorice, and bonded over the French knights scene.
-‘Is not just comedy. This is the reality, you see?’
They were both very funny and nice and they left me with a full crate of beer and a packet of unfiltered
Gauloises. I moved back out to the balcony, looked out over the city and listened to Beck - The
Information (2007). It was my twenty-third birthday that night, and I had come to an agreement with
myself - success will finally come for me this year. I’m only in my Love Me Do phase, I still have a mop
top, a couple of years until Rubber Soul and Revolver, even. Mantras and Japanese conceptual artists are
still aeons away. I hurled a ten pence coin into the nearby canal, bowed deeply and made a solemn wish.
Time is on my side.
Four chu-chu-aisu fruity ice-pops from the mini fridge-freezer to mask the after-taste of expired Duracell
batteries with Sodium Benzoate and artificial sweeteners.
Amazon Verified Purchase
By Kinky Ninja
I'm currently working in Afghanistan for a private military contractor. I ordered a box of these bad boys
on a whim and they arrived in a blur! What did I do next? I stuck that stuff in the FREEZER dude!!! 24
hour later I was in popsicle heaven bro. Grapes my favourite;) Since this box has 200 assorted flavors I
tossed a bunch in a plastic bag and went around my base handing them out! Needless to say a free
popsicle on a hot Afghan day will brighten anyone’s mood:)
A solid hour of Japanese Television. I didn’t understand a single word, but I was entranced by it all the
same. I love the advertisements here: they melt my brain and their graphic design is slightly
unsophisticated: cheap logos, unconvincing CGI newsrooms - I find it all strangely comforting. They
have real live human beings presenting the news programmes here, not the android sacks of reflex
mechanism and Harvey Jones fitted kitchen you see on ITV News. Sian Lloyd is not of this world, she
will devour your soul - she is a profound cosmic threat, and we must be ever vigilant.
Dawn broke and strange bird songs rattled my cochlea hairs, I lay on my bed eating ice cream mochi
cakes and watching clips of Japanese schoolchildren circa world war 2. Kitted out head to toe in Kendo
armour, they shouted and screamed and stabbed at a straw dummy with sharpened wooden staves. The
teachers stood and applauded as they assembled in the courtyard and sang If run away, you bring our country great disgrace;
if you die bravely, you win many glories.
Instead of surviving shamefully,
you must fall admirably!
If you will be a samurai,
don't pass away at home!
It is not until your body is hoofed
and remains on the front without burial
that people say: You are a true samurai!
What do we fear at all?
Nothing in the world shall threaten us!
I was hot and dirty inside. Dread and nausea and orange sodium seeping from my forehead. A dense
orange night at the far end of things. The hum and chatter of a million white vending machines. The
hack and clack of faulty air conditioning units. I leaned out of the window and inhaled a lungful of wire
mesh, neon, and overhead cabling.
Japan deals in a different currency. They were smart - they took what they wanted and left the rest.
Superficial aspects of western culture shorn of a layer of fat: battleships, medicine, industry, economics.
This could be two thousand years ago, two thousand years in the future. Condensed spaces. Condensed
families. Parasite singles at home with parents and grandparents. A dense flux of hand gestures and
non-verbal communication. Cellophane-wrapped umbrellas and Cyclopean vending machines selling
used women‘s underwear.
Japanese houses are very different: nests of ceramic tile, asphalt and reinforced concrete. Buddhist
impermanence and change here: bombs, tsunamis, earthquakes, Russia, China, Korea - calamity is never
more than a whisker away. Japanese homes are built to be rebuilt : Metabolism - expandable structures
evoking the processes of organic growth, the traditional laws of fixed form and function deemed
obsolete. My parent’s house is an Edwardian semi-detached of red brick and cast iron, and it will stand
for 500 years. It was a Minister’s home, originally - my mother told me that his daughter had died in
childbirth in our living room; encaustic tiles and parquet flooring facilitating the Christian narrative of
redemption.
A-Ke-Do
I reached the main strip at 3am: neon, retail, booze, ice cream, massage parlours and maid cafés. I
grabbed a ten deck of fags from the vending machine and walked to the Game Center.
Sweat, perfume, light, smoke and mirrors. Young men hunched over smoke-stained Astro cabinets,
cigarettes hanging from lips, dry eyes and dilated pupils, Ganguro girls scrawling messages into
Purikura machines, sweating and grinning and making spray tan V signs. These kids practically live
here, they don’t ever want to go home - they want to get washed away, dissolved in showers of rainbow
liquid crystal. They mewl and puke when the plug is pulled, laboratory rats denied a hit of cocaine.
I spotted a secluded row of classic arcade machines of 80’s/90s vintage and tucked a 10 yen piece into
the slot. Three dabs of MDMA, ten unfiltered Gauloises and an hour of 'Sega Rally Championship 1995'.
I smoked and sweated and sailed away on a sea of fizzing CRT phosphors. Death porn. Pain relief. An
electrical storm. A self-induced seizure. The ancient bastard shadow drowned in a sea of polygons, hiscores and sibilant midi audio.
A shoal of sun hat schoolboys and white collar young professionals checking in for a pro Virtua Fighter 5
tournament. I pulled a crumpled cigarette from my shirt pocket and watched a young man with
neotenous facial features, impeccable fingernails and bald, doughy arms dangle a Marlboro light from
his lower lip and dispatch seven challengers in quick succession. Sega Saturn t-shirt, Day-Glo
wraparound shades, Union Flag jacket patches. This man has his shit together. He is a sharp one. I
offered him a smoke, but he didn’t respond.
A gangly schoolboy in his early teens approached the cabinet, bowed deeply and cracked his miniature
knuckles. Sega Saturn man turned his back, attached a cooling pad to his brow and took a deep drag on
his Marlboro Light. Here comes a new challenger!
Jackie vs. Wolf. Jeet Kune Do vs. Pro Wrestling. Autumnal ancient Shinto temple. Falling maple leaves
and crystalline moats. Round 1 - Fight! Arachnid fingers dancing over microswitches and illuminated
pushbuttons. Furious counters and complex combos. Final round - Fight! Buffers. Cancels. Parries. Evade
attacks. Jackie thrown from the ring with an opportunistic Twirl n‘ hurl. K.O! Wolf wins!
The schoolboy watched in awe as the young man flicked up his collar, downed a crisp Mountain Dew
and tended his immaculate rockabilly quiff with an engraved wooden comb, boot-fit red corduroy
trousers dancing over neon-threaded rubber flooring. The cigarette fell from his mouth as he flicked the
stick away, rose from the stool and made his way back to the entrance.
Serotonin swirled about in my gut. My jaw clenched and my pupils dilated. I left the arcade through the
rear exit, followed a troupe of teenage girls distributing handkerchiefs in French maid outfits and found
a compact independent games retailer further along the thoroughfare. An E-candy store of a million
primary colours, blue skies, big hair, violence, sex, demons, scattered power stones and high adventure
in plaid miniskirts. I rubbed my eyes and saw giant rainbow pixels. Hai. Sure beats the shit out of a
bookshop - none of that ‘character’ bullshit here, only the bare essentials: violence, explosions, starry
galaxies, clouds with smiling faces and green dinosaurs shitting out giant eggs. Video games make no
pretence. They have no agenda. They never deceive. They give me what I want. They are utter shit. They
are modern detritus. They have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. And that is why I love them.
I left the store with a sack full of boxed Sega Saturn games, opened another premium Kirin lager and
wandered into the nearby McDonald’s 24hr Walk-Thru service. An antiseptic white polished steel crew
module filled with Airbooks, ceramic ashtrays, menthol tobacco smoke and immaculate Big Macs
trapped inside little cardboard rings. Japan’s fast food restaurants are a far cry from Britain‘s: no
impoverished customers here, no learning disabilities, mild mental illness or lank, yellow lettuce.
A boy of twenty or so sucking on a vanilla milkshake and scribbling on an A5 Madoka Magica notepad
rifled through a stack of academic text books and muttered to himself, pale knees quivering under his
claret corduroy slacks. Exhausted and dead-eye alert, he poured a handful of Solonax pills down his
neck and twirled a revolving Gundam pen in his fingers. I ordered a Double Cheeseburger, rested on a
giant ceramic toadstool and watched him sweat and grimace.
His brown eyes waxed and waned as he battled the urge to sleep. Midterm exams tomorrow. Lastminute prep school exam crash. Relentless social pressure: Juku. Shame: Haji. As he dipped his hand into
a foil tray of brioche his chin dropped to his chest and his body slumped forward, overwhelmed by
nervous exhaustion, salt, antibiotics and saturated fat. I gasped in horror. An overcooked fry escaped
from my lip and landed in the smokeless ashtray. Do not intervene. This is not your place, young man.
His eyelids twitched and flickered, and a buttery hand emerged from the tray as he shuffled back in his
chair and shook his head violently.
A senior staff member caught my eye, bowed deeply, and flashed an apologetic smile. The youngster’s
face turned white as the old man approached - he buried his head in a Social Studies textbook and
whimpered faintly. The Japanese abhor interpersonal conflict. They are an emotional race; an anxious
people. Confrontation is a last resort. I bit down on a cigarette and braced myself.
They locked eyes over the mushroom table: two coiled springs, two duelling stags. The boy twiddled his
pen like a duelling pistol and swallowed another speckled pill as Staffman twisted his head at an angle
and glared like some scorned yōkai demon. I couldn’t bear to watch. I stubbed out my cigarette, picked
up my rucksack and calmly made my way to the entrance.
A terrible wailing banshee scream erupted, and I turned to face them. The boy had folded himself under
a mushroom stool, sobbing and clasping his head in his hands. As Staffman dropped to his haunches
and shot out an arm the boy broke away and stabbed at his hand with a Gundam pen, face bloated and
glistening, desperate skinny arms flailing, tears streaming onto his starched white shirt.
Staffman was unperturbed. Staffman was in control. He reached under the table, twisted the boy’s arm
around his back and marched him to the entrance, struggling and shrieking and sweating. That was my
cue - I dropped my beer into the trash and paced out onto the street.
The strip was silent and orange and empty. 7-Elevens hummed, and foldaway bicycles slumbered in
their racks. I caught my breath and turned back. The boy‘s face distorted by streaked Perspex, pupils
elongated and shimmering, a feudal peasant dragged to his death by ruthless Varangian guards.
Happy Meal ¥450. I closed my eyes and choked, and then I turned and walked away.
Metro and Gaijin
Barbaric pack behaviour at the Higashino metro station. A troupe of inscrutable salary men with black
kelp hair and egregious underbites like a heard of harassed buffalo fighting their way to the water hole.
Tooth and nail now: elbows buried in lower backs, knuckles jammed into kidneys, salt and chilled green
tea breath, snatches of saliva and canine. A vast shoal of forage fish: business administration managers
sleeping upright, dead septuagenarians discovered at 5am by cleaning staff. A thousand
microenvironments in this 67 foot tin carriage: Nintendo DS RPGs and dense manga volumes housing a
thousand mineralised souls. Every Japanese is alone. Freedom through anonymity. The highest regard
for the individual. Oh, sweet land of liberty.
Schoolgirl pulls down her plaid miniskirt as middle-aged white collar worker angles his mobile phone.
Chikan - up skirt panty pics and public groping. One-third of Japanese women have been assaulted
while accessing public transportation. They never complain. They know their place. The shame is worse
than the crime.
The train pulled in. I headed to Haagen-Dazs and came out with Green Tea & Hibiscus and a coldstimulus headache. Arigatou gozaimasu. I took a left and walked past rusty back streets, wire fences,
storm drains and abandoned umbrella racks. Here the dangerous areas are safe. An ex-pat bar fizzled
away on some dim Minami back alley, and an affable lock jaw crew cut American smoking a Lucky
Strike by the entryway shook my hand and introduced himself.
-‘Hey man! Are you lost or something? Come in here for a while - there’s a few of us drinking inside. It’s
the best ex-pat bar in Kyoto.‘
I passed through the entryway and pierced a blockade of lithe Japanese girls in crushed velvet bunny
leotards greeting me with smiles and gasps and high frequency voices.
-‘Irrashaimase!’
This was not a bar - this was a mini-casino. The girls offered me small shots of sake, curtsied and waved
me over to the game table. I played roulette for an hour with a Finnish Death Metal aficionado, but I am
no gambler, and I lost most of my money. Twenty minutes on a fruit machine and ten meagre measures
of cheap, warm sake. Slow drunk now, headache drunk.
Zack asked me if I wanted to play pool. I didn’t, but accepted anyway. I have never learned to play pool
properly - I suffer from a social anxiety complex, and there is always an audience. I like games you can
take away and practice on your own - I’m quite good at darts, for example. Seven games of 301, and I
won four of them. We bought adult-sized drinks now - double vodka-cokes and premium pale lagers.
He told me about himself as we drank: his name was Zack and he’d majored in Communications Studies
in Chicago, graduating without honours in 2005. Zack had worked part-time at a video rental store in
Cheboygan for several months and had never quite managed to find his niche. He had wanted to
become a Vet, but had failed the entrance exams twice before deciding to move to Asia to smoke hash,
drink sake, pick up girls and catch V.D. Here he could win, here he could be somebody.
He pulled the flight from his dart and dropped it on to the carpet, slapping the waitress on her backside
as she passed. She giggled, waved her white bobtail and covered her mouth as he pulled another free
shot from the tray and lit a Mild Seven.
-’Say, you’re a pretty cool guy. You should come here again. There’s a few of us who come here at
weekends. You’ll fit in just great.’
Not having attained our aim and continuing to live is cowardice.
To paraphrase Burroughs - the long term ex-pat differs from the benign, common-or-garden drifter or
asshole. They are malignant organisms: dead in the road, wondering vampires sucking you in through
their gills with warped facial features, mild to moderate mental health problems, and severely
underdeveloped interpersonal skills. I have met many on my travels: Irish traveller tattoo artists,
Cockney tax-evaders, Swiss-trained Chinese optometrists, ‘Pistol Pete’ the burglarious proprietor of the
unlicensed Langkawi island wine bar. They call themselves a special breed: they are always on the run,
always checking their shadow - they still believe that they can win, and they always have to be right.
Ex-pats walk a fine line. Most of them don’t even know it. Sometimes I see myself reflected in the whites
of their eyes, and it scares me half to death. I must be ever vigilant.
Lawson
I crossed the street and walked north-east along Kawaramachi. Spots of tepid rain fell - I studied the
pavement and took in the odour of wet foreign tarmac. Flocks of Homogenous pedestrians raised their
umbrellas and shuffled under the bus shelters in perfect synchronicity. I was damp and hot now, and
home was far away.
The shopkeeper of an immaculate Lawson convenience store froze mid-sweep as I made eye contact and
bowed gingerly. He managed a cautious smile as he lowered the cordless sweeper and nodded. I turned
and leafed through the freshly stacked fridges to the rear.
6-pack of Kirin.
He had made a tactical retreat now, stooping low over the counter, fingering his house keys and
muttering faintly to himself. I lowered my head and approached with a sheepish smile as I pointed to the
row of Marlboro Lights. He turned and reached for the Lucky Strikes.
-‘Ah!’
He glanced over his shoulders, gazelle eyes elongated and glistening.
Three rows up. Two to the right. An awkward, tender exchange.
He handed me the pack and smiled again - he seemed content now.
I accepted with both hands and bowed as he stepped away from the counter and picked up his sweeper.
I sensed him staring at me as I left the store, and turned to see his meagre frame zipping back across the
floor. I pushed my face up to the glass as he scanned through the fridges desperately, setting a slightly
skewed Bento Box back to its original position with the precision of a hi-spec calibration technician.
It almost brought me to tears.
Such devotion and care and attention to detail. This earnest, dignified shopkeep - practically invisible to
most Japanese - would’ve fight tooth and nail for this anonymous backstreet convenience chain store.
The shop floor was him - he was nothing outside of this modest role. I pulled out my mobile phone and
took a snapshot through the window.
Men of high position, low position, deep wisdom and artfulness all feel that they are the ones who are
working righteously, but when it comes to the point of throwing away one's life for his lord, all get weak
in the knees. This is rather disgraceful. The fact that a useless person often becomes a matchless warrior
at such times is because he has already given up his life and has become one with his lord.
This man was far greater than me: the king of the Lawson convenience store - the man who had stayed at
home.
Shanghai
I picked at my nails and sipped cold Sake in a deserted internet Café on Muromachi-Dori. A desperate
search: IGN, Facebook, The Guardian, BBC, Amateur Allure. I read a page, and I then refreshed the page,
and then I read the page again. I smoked 27 cigarettes, drank 4 small bottles of warm sake, and read one
fifth of Down and Out in Paris and London. My toes were pink and bleeding.
Stay out here and eke out a living, or go home and apply for my PHD. Get clean and straight and right.
Poison-tipped Punji stake traps at either end, glistening walls closing on both sides. All I ever wanted
was a modest Wikipedia entry - a photo of me from my good side: well-defined cheekbones and dark,
vulnerable eyes like Elizabeth Taylor.
Parties the world over tonight - all the world’s a party now. New profile pics on Facebook - swirls of
liquid nitrogen vapour over raised cocktail glasses in Boltonian Gastro pubs, morbidly obese American
blondes stapling their jeans over distended stomachs.
Life is an indignity.
In the late afternoon I packed up my things, made my bed, turned off the air conditioning and left my
clothes hangers for the next occupant. I called Whitney and told her where I was going - she was in
Tokyo now, wandering around the Harajuku Snoopy department store; later she would visit Yoygi park
and then a tiny little Shinto shrine where she would collect water in a wooden cup and buy a pocket
origami set for her Mother. She was quiet on the phone that day, but she didn’t seem angry or upset. A
little flat, maybe; preoccupied.
-’Maybe we’ll meet again sometime. Are you going down to South-East Asia at all?’
-’Hhmm…I’m not planning on it at the moment but…uh…yeah, maybe. I’ve never been there before…
Isn’t it dangerous?’
-’It can be, I think…I’ve never been there either so I don’t really know. I’m just gonna keep my wits
about me…lose the money belt probably.’
-’Ok….I’ll…see you again then..’
-’Ok…bye.’
I gathered my books and sifted through rolls of damp clothing to find a comfortable spot in my rucksack.
A sharp pinch, and blood - a pair of concealed travel scissors in the side pocket. I raised my hand and
studied the cut. September in Kyoto. Intense heat and humidity. My heart was beating light and fast, and
my blood was thin now. I stood and watched it run down the length of my forearm, dripping
rhythmically from my elbow on to the beige shag pile carpet. The sight of blood can be comforting. It
reminds me: I am only tissue, nuts and bolts, lines of binary code, a bone machine, nothing more.
A phone call. I paced up and down and let it ring.
-’Hello Michi.’
No response.
-’…..Where you go, Nichan?’
-’…Uh…I told you I was going to Shanghai, Michi. I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye. I was in a real rush’
His voice wavered.
-’I…have nowhere to go…I will come with you.’
-’…I…I don’t think that’s a good idea, Michi.’
-’I cannot go back. My parents don’t want me there now. They are angry with me.‘
-’…It’s a bad idea, Michi. I need to get to the induction on time. You have a job to do.’
‘…I was…beaten at work today.’
-…What?’
-’Nichan, I cannot stay here. I am bullied. The manager don’t want me. I need a break. I will find another
job when I get back.
-’…H…how can you even afford it?’
-‘I can pay my way, and I will help you in China. I speak Chinese. I will come back here in one week and
speak with my parents. I must get away now.’
He met me at the airport, three hours ahead of schedule. I found him sleeping on an airport bench, hands
gathered on his lap, spine aligned with the chair, hair glossy and neatly trimmed. He carried a tiny
rucksack and a shopping bag full of e-ma Candy lozenges.
-’…Michi.’
-’Ah!! These were on offer. I had to buy. I need many lozenges in Shanghai. Air is bad. Too humid for
me. I cannot breath in humidity.’
We ate smoked salmon on the plane, and barely said a word.
We took a taxi into town – the cityscape a stark contrast to the concrete and cable-ridden streets of Japan.
Shanghai is not built to scale. Shanghai is mesmerising: twisted metal, vagrants and LED panels
careening into endless death marshland, framed by the 5:4 aspect ratio of a Volkswagen Lavida
windscreen. Elephantine concrete monoliths of a trillion fibre optic cables. Dirty aprons and yellow
school uniforms hanging from rusting balconies. Microscopic worlds of dense script, kitchen appliances
and counterfeit Ghibli lunchboxes. Water stain and mildew. The rattle of electrical cable. Humming evil
under the motorcade. Sensory neurons of some cyclopean nervous system. Circuit board high-rises
tearing gaping wounds in the sky. X4 anti-aliasing might smooth out the edges, at the risk of moderate
slowdown - must maintain an acceptable frame rate. If it drops below 25 frames per second it will
stutter, and the scene just won’t work. Best to leave filters turned off - no Dynamic Noise Reduction or
Edge Enhancing tonight.
One day this town will meet mine.
We found a cheap hotel close the Bund and wandered around aimlessly for a couple of days. I got drunk
on the second night and almost passed out in the heat the following morning. We bartered for plimsolls
at the Nanjing Rd fake market, we hired a karaoke booth high over People’s Square and had a 5am hash
brown fight in McDonald’s.
Michi loved it in Shanghai, though he thought the streets were very dirty.
A precious little peasant girl clinging to the retaining wall of a roofless prefab house as her elder brother
kicked a burned-out laptop through some dirty piss puddle downstairs. Paraplegic Grandfather reeled
back and shot phlegm to the heavens as Tai Chi Grandma scraped the sweat from her shoulders by the
public park monkey bars. Little, dark children in wrapped up in smiles and toasted Sphenarium
Grasshopper dinners.
On the third day I saw a man punch a Dog in the face - that is my abiding memory of Shanghai. Sinewy
Boston terrier pissed on his owner’s bicycle as he entered the Seven Eleven for cigarettes. The owner
returned, dropped to his haunches and gave it a straight power jab to the sniffer. Random chaos. The
pocket of air is slight here - people walk the line.
We met a few ex-pats at the hotel bar one evening: university graduates and gap year TEFL teachers.
They told us about the shitty ESL company they worked for - Shanghai BSK.
‘Chinese are bent as a nine bob note, man’ said Matt from Cambridgeshire.
-’No, honestly, they’re a complete fucking joke.’
Jim from Ohio told me about the manager - Mr William Chan.
-The guy’s a fucking snake, man. Nobody trusts him. They're not all like that though, not all of the staff
are bad.’
His name was William, but the teachers liked to call him Will.i.am - I thought that was pretty funny.
William was a crook - he never gave his teachers a straight answer, and had several distinct tones
depending on his audience - some soft and yielding, others harsh and nasal. He would switch to
‘Shanghainese’ when in earshot of Chinese-speaking Jim, making the conversation incomprehensible.
The company was disreputable, even by TEFL standards - the management frequently threatened it’s
staff with deportation and had recently ordered 15 people to move to Guangzhou at the drop of a hat.
Last week they had asked one Australian teacher to transfer to Inner Mongolia for five months to cover
for a Kiwi freak-out in Ulan Bator. The teachers hated working for them, but they loved living in
Shanghai and considered it a necessary evil.
Jim took us out for a drink at a nightclub in the French concession that evening. I forget the name of the
place - some Über-hip music venue filled with local celebrities, photographers, models and suchlike.
Neon and glass and giant LEDs, and the music was fucking dreadful - government approved children’s
birthday party medleys.
There were fifteen of us in all: an assortment of wayward Canadians, Brits and Americans - and a nearcatatonic Japanese. We drank Chang beer and smoked counterfeit Marlboro Lights while the New
Yorkers jived to shit Dubstep and drank miniature glasses of Budweiser. A group of Russian and
Eastern-European models entered the club at 10pm and the boys shuffled over and tried to pick them up.
Michi and I moved upstairs: vodka, dilated pupils and glitchy IDM.
Michi was fluent in several languages, including conversational Chinese - he sunk 5 shots of Sambuca
and scoured the club for pretty Chinese girls. They couldn’t place his accent, which was fortunate. We
spoke with three female design students for an hour or so, and Michi told them that he was South
Korean - Chinese people don’t hate the Koreans quite as much. I asked them what they thought about
the Japanese -’Haha…yes, all Japanese should die…Hahaha.’
Michi smiled and laughed for a moment, and then his eyes dimmed - he left to buy drinks and didn’t
come back. I tried to keep them talking for a while – we discussed Manchester United, Manchester City
and 'Beckingham Palace' in Cheshire. ’Ah, Beckham! Beckham! You look like Beckham!’ ‘Rooney!
Rooney!‘ We ran out of things to talk about - I dropped a note onto the table and waded into the dance
floor.
A dense fog of sweating Chinese: chemical breath, bacteria and beer hair. No sign of Michi now - they all
look the same to me. I stood and lit a cigarette. Desultory head nodding. I am enjoying myself. I turned
around paced towards the exit. He tapped me on the shoulder and shook my hand.
-‘Where the hell have you been?‘
He smiled and closed my hand over a pair of red oblong pills.
-‘…You’re an idiot. You’ll get skinned for buying drugs here, Michi. The police don’t fuck around.’
-’Don’t worry. I was careful.’
-’What is this? It’s not ecstasy. It’s bright red.’
-’It is. They have many colours here.’
-’It’s soft…’
We washed them down with warm Pilsner, shared a bowl of salted mini pretzels and tried to talked to a
group of American girls dancing the Macarena by the rear fire exit. I peered over the balcony and saw
the others slipping on their jackets - we finished our drinks and followed them outside. A fleet of yellow
taxis waited on the main strip: grinning cataract drivers with chrome pepper pot trims. They invited us
back to their apartment in the residential area of Pudong.
The journey would take half an hour - we stopped at McDonald’s for vanilla milkshakes, sipped frozen
corn syrup and sodium benzoate and waited for the come up: MDMA entering the axon terminal via the
5-HT reuptake transporters, prompting the vesicles to flood the synapse with serotonin.
But it never came.
Shanghai K-hole is not a pretty place. Lead-lined thighs, garbled information from failing nerve
pathways. We pulled up at the gate and waited for the security guard to return from 7-Eleven. I dangled
my legs from the car and looked out to the shattered Pudong skyline - China’s financial and commercial
hub: Oriental Pearl Tower, Jin Mao building, the ‘Bottle Opener‘, Shanghai Stock Exchange, glass and
steel megastructures dwarfing the remnants of the old foreign concession. This area was scrubland 20
years ago - reeds and dirt and crops and peasants - now there are 5 million souls in little Lego houses,
sitting in traffic jams, smoking Lucky Strikes and steam cleaning their shag pile carpets.
The south-east of Pudong is mostly suburban, and the Americans lived in a new-build gated community
close to the Municipal Children’s Hospital. The apartments were expensive by Chinese standards - lots
of ex-pats and multinational brands here: Wallmart, Tesco, Holiday Inn. Middle class Chinese families
padded through mooncake littered convenience stores. 80-year-old lifeguards smoked cigarettes at the
private swimming pool.
They let us sleep on the couch for a couple of days - we smoked weed on the balcony and watched
propaganda films on CCTV. On the Tuesday I saw an old lady with a live Terrapin suspended in a
keychain – in the afternoon we walked in to town and rescued one from a seafood restaurant - we named
him Charlie and kept him in a little glass bowl on the balcony. We went out drinking four nights in a
row, and I discovered Baijiou in the local convenience store. Baijiou is foul, Baijiu makes people cry - if
you take it with cocaine it turns your brain to blood and pulp.
The Canadian invited me to the local massage parlour one night. A secluded orange backstreet littered
with paper and Styrofoam, bordered by an abandoned construction site. A row of brothels disguised as
little hair salons - bored teenage girls draped over cheap vinyl furniture tending their glossy hair with
counterfeit hair dryers.
The Matron asked me something in Mandarin and I glanced at the Canadian - he shrugged his shoulders
and nodded firmly as the girl rose from the couch and sneered at her.
She took hold of my gigantic pink hand and led me out into the street: sheet rain and traffic lights, mansized potholes, and rats the size of Beavers. A few blocks of burnt-out shop fronts led to an ominous,
blood red Motel on the corner.
The receptionists lowered their heads as we passed through the foyer - there was no check-in. Cheap
rooms rented by the hour to inscrutable businessmen, drug cons, prostitutes and occasional ex-pats.
Corn syrup carpets littered with receipts, tickets, napkins and cigarette ends. Glistening walls in black
and white Zebra print. Grotesque baroque chandeliers.
The lift panel was broken - we climbed several floors in silence as I studied the floor and tried to clasp an
ulcer between my teeth. An intimate moment - I shifted my feet and made eye contact as she raised her
head, mouthed something horrible and looked down at her glossy vinyl heels. And then I lost my
confidence. A thread of nausea tracked up my calves and lodged itself in my lower back. I looked at her
face and studied the line of her cheek bone and the texture of her skin. She didn’t want to engage. A
studied, jaded indifference. This was strictly business.
There must be something under there. Beneath the shtick. Beneath the veneer. I wanted to tear it down. I
wanted to meet her. I wanted to take her away. I wanted her to fall in love.
She led me to a room and unlocked the door. Musty towels. Nasty diamond pattern curtains. Inadequate
plastering. Gaudy pastel painting of smiling Mao. The CRT television screamed and fizzed as she
gestured with her little wireframe hand. She lay on the bed and removed my belt.
I reached out and tried to touch her cheek - she whimpered and recoiled, eyes darting around the room,
hands searching for something to hold. I cupped and stroked her breast, put my arm around her back
then reached for her cheek again.
She trembled, stood on her tiptoes and skipped off into the Bathroom. She stayed there for ten minutes I have no idea what she was doing.
A barrage of high frequency noise as adrenaline flooded my brain. I turned on the T.V to drown my
thoughts in static and images. Only a chemical imbalance. A garbled line of binary code. Nothing more.
Toyota. Calvin Klein. Sony. Gucci. Glossy commercials punctuating a state-sanctioned documentary
celebrating the Chinese military and Civil war heroism. 1940’s propaganda movies - sadistic Japs with
thick-rimmed spectacles and oiled moustaches butchering honest, hard working Chinese farmers.
I rose from the bed and walked to the window. National Day loomed over the city that night: Chinese
flags billowed along the length of Nanjing rd, a barrage of fireworks erupted over People’s Square,
glitter bombs drowned in the mahogany eyes of open-mouthed schoolchildren, trillions of airborne
lanterns burned channels through the smog and shit of central Pudong.
I pulled a cigarette out of my pocket and wrapped my hand around my throat.
There is my jugular. Those are my carotid arteries.
If you compress them fully you will pass out in seconds.
I can kill myself any time I want to. I could stay here forever.
The sky was filled with rainbow coloured smoke and fleets of lanterns holding formation over the
French Concession. They sell Chinese lanterns in Britain now - I have seen them advertised on
Amazon.co.uk. They cut through grim Rochdale skies on Guy Fawkes Night, they levitate over service
stations along the M62. I will taste Shanghai one day. My children will hold lungfuls of Pudong smog.
This town is a dead end - death and dirt and hum and menace. And all the pretty girls. Cheek bones over
fishnets jacked off in a flickering neon tube on the 300th floor of a glass and steel monolith. I want to leap
from thousand-mile-high shopping arcades and drown in seas of pixels and polygons and Sony 4K
OLED TVs. I want to dance tonight, dance through all the blood and teeth and wonder of this
Godforsaken rotten sore of a city.
The door slid open, and the girl emerged from the bathroom with a yawning, slanted grimace. She
pointed to her stomach and asked my permission to leave. I don‘t know what she’d been doing in there,
but I like to think she’d been crying - I like to think that I’d made an impression.
I dressed myself and followed her down to the bar.
China has lots of cheap, effective alcohol. Baijiu – 52% alcohol and £0.80 per bottle at the time of writing.
I like to drink it from disposable plastic cups personally - polymer, not glass. It doesn’t deserve glass.
Glass is too good for Baijiu. It smells like death and cough medicine. I could have happily drunk myself
to death that night.
This was not my Shanghai fantasy of 1930’s melancholy Blade runner 45s, Szechuan peppercorns, glass
noodles, neon streets, burning plastic and rakish prostitutes. This was something different - something
even more terrible.
The Tramp Made of Paper
We parted ways at the airport. Michi told me to keep in touch and asked me to visit him in Osaka
sometime.
-’I will have a new job and apartment when you come. Thank you for having me, nichan. I enjoyed
myself very much.’
He seemed a little more settled now, but I had no idea why. He scuttled off from the departure lounge
with a bag full of mooncakes and 200 duty free cigarettes. I was due to start training in Ho Chi Minh the
following week.
‘Sacred Places’ - a relatively new company run by a thirty-four-year-old British ex-English teacher
‘dedicated to safeguarding biodiversity and ecosystem integrity and building sustainable livelihoods for
marginalised communities in the world's poorest countries.‘
I flew from Shanghai on a Sunday morning and met the other volunteers at Ho Chi Minh City Airport in
the late afternoon. I collected my bag and wandered through to the arrivals lounge where a company
representative was due to meet us. Not a Caucasian in sight here - a flock of elderly Taiwanese in
matching breathable cagoules glided silently by a row of gossiping ATMs.
There.
An ungainly white man lying supine on the aluminium airport bench slicked-back his Rick Astley quiff
and cleared his throat like a feudal peasant. I asked him if I was in the right place - his eyes narrowed,
and he asked me who I was.
Fresh from Nova Scotia with Thai bride in tow, Peter was the type who spills his entire life story within
minutes of meeting you. He was a Springsteen fan who’d been rejected by the Mountain Police due to
poor eyesight and had drifted through various disreputable Canadian care companies before drifting
through various teaching posts in South Korea, Japan and Thailand. I watched him twitch and breath
heavily as he counted the volunteers and scribbled something in his notepad.
His thoroughly bored bride painted her fingernails nails and flicked through an in-flight magazine - I sat
beside her and introduced myself. Her name was Prang, and she was a twenty-three-year-old ‘coyote’
girl – an 'unavailable' semi-professional dancer employed in upmarket bars to attract wealthy
professional men. Prang had met Peter while he was on vacation in Bangkok - they had been in a
relationship for two years now, and planned to save the money from Peter's next teaching job to make a
down payment on a modest Canadian duplex in Nova Scotia. Things hadn’t gone to plan - Peter received
a phone call from Canada informing him that his father had died in a bizarre boating accident. He left his
job and his girlfriend and returned home to support his mother and attend the funeral in Halifax. Peter
had a damascene conversion while walking through Point Pleasant Park in the bleak midwinter - after
years of aimless drifting and smoking and looking after number one he felt the sudden urge to give
something back to the world; to be a good Christian. He searched for reputable volunteering
programmes in Asia, and soon found the Sacred Places website.
A wide variety of glassy-eyed misfits: two elongated Kiwis in garish Hawaiian shirts, a disconcertingly
enthusiastic fifty-five-year-old American with a suitcase full of multi-coloured sock puppets, a young
American woman with swimmer’s shoulders and mottled skin picking her teeth with a novelty
paperclip. The whole gamut here – from fuckups, itinerants and chronic malingerers to hard-working
professionals with social Science degrees: MA Public Relations, Msc Project Management etc.
A company representative filed us into a line, checked off our names on a list and took us to a
dilapidated hotel in District 3. We were asked to foot the bill ourselves - that was our first warning. The
rep told us to meet her at the company office in ward 6, district 4 the following week. She gave us a bus
pass and told us to tour the city for a few days: get to know each other, practice our Vietnamese, drink
and dance and be merry. I handed my passport to the hotel manager.
-’Ooooh, you are English! Please sir, I can buy you some…cigarettes? Marlboro? Camel?
-’Oh…Some Marlboros would be great, thanks.’
-‘ So, have you been here before?…I love the Peter O’Toole.’
-‘No. It‘s my first time…Actually - he’s Irish, I think.’
A blank face. He summoned his boy from the counter and pointed to the entrance.
-’Marboro!'
Anh Dung climbed onto his moped and zipped off to 7-Eleven.
I unpacked my rucksack and took the elevator down to the hotel bar: wood chip wallpaper, steaming
bowls of Canh seafood broth and the odour of seafood and cheap cigars. A group of newly qualified
English teachers from Wakefield huddled over an original Galaxian arcade cabinet, cramming 100,000
Vietnamese dong into the slot. The bar had run out of alcohol, but the waitress found a dusty bottle of
Dutch Advocaat tucked away in the kitchen. We smoked Marlboro Lights, got shitfaced on raw eggs and
Brandy and talked utter bollocks into the early hours.
My room was extremely humid - I got 96 minutes of sleep that night, and in the morning we took a coach
to the Cu Chi tunnels, 40 km west of Ho Chi Minh city. Several military campaigns took place here – this
was the Viet Cong's base of operations for the Tet Offensive of 1968. Today it played host to eight
flippant Yorkshiremen tittering through a partisan tourist information film about the noble suffering of
the man in the black pyjamas.
An unnaturally slight tour guide led us through the battlefield and showed us the numerous wellpreserved booby traps: Manufacturing Panjis, Spike Boards, Mace Traps, Grenade Traps, Venus Fly
Traps. An overeager retired American I.T consultant volunteered to drop through the trap door tunnel
entrance. He got his arse stuck in the hole, and it took three of us to pull him out.
We were led through a section of tunnel network and crawled on all fours through pitch darkness. My
Yellow Submarine Zippo lit the way, and I singed my eyelashes and nasal hairs at a hard right turn. Rob
from Leeds was agoraphobic - he bolted half way through, kicking an old Chinaman in the chest as he
scrambled back to the entrance. The tunnel opened out into a broad chamber as we neared the exit, and
the tour guide looked me up and down as I made my way through.
-’Oh! You are big man, well done!’
After lunch they took us to the firing range. I picked up a 5.3 kg M1 Garand and paid a handful of dong
for a handful of .30 calibre rounds. My friend got an M16 and a pair of 5.56 mm cartridges. The RCOs
wore no ear protection - they were probably deaf already. In Cambodia there is a place where you can
pay £60 to shoot a Cow with a rocket launcher. If you miss you’re allowed to get closer and pepper it
with a K-57. I made do with the rifle. And there was no cow.
The War Remnants Museum - a series of themed rooms spread over several large buildings, period
military equipment displayed in a walled yard to the rear. UH-1 "Huey" helicopter. F-5A fighter. BLU-82
"Daisy Cutter" bomb. M48 Patton tank. A-1 Skyraider attack bomber. A-37 Dragonfly attack bomber.
Unexploded ordnance stored in the corner of the yard, charges and fuses removed. "Tiger cages" for
political prisoners. Graphic photography accompanied by short text in English, Vietnamese and
Japanese. Agent Orange, chemical defoliant sprays, napalm and phosphorus bombs. "American war
atrocities."
Melancholy dog-eared black and white photo - a little girl standing guard over a patch of saplings near
the old American base of Quang Tri. Area marked off by rows of old artillery shells, birds and rats
scattered by a wave of her atrophied stump. Classic teratogenic symptoms - double joints on every
remaining limb.
I remember the foetuses - the little pickled babies suspended in jars: babies born without eyes, babies
born with multiple limbs, Siamese babies in formaldehyde. Alleged victims of agent orange. Dioxine.
I wondered what attracted people to this place: this was not a museum - this was a funfair attraction, a
hall of mirrors, a vaudevillian freakshow. Nothing pulls them in like a good car crash.
A withered old beggar man approached as I sipped Um Bongo Tropical by the external artillery and
armour collection. His face was made of orange peel, and his only limb was an atrophied paper arm. He
told me that he’d lost his legs in the war, that he was raising money for fellow veterans and their
families. He opened his jacket and showed me two history books: ‘Valiant Vietcong‘ and ‘American war
atrocities,‘ both of them crudely photocopied and typed-up in botched English. I declined his offer but he
persisted, raising his voice and forcing his Papier-mâché hand between my face and my mixed tropical
fruit juice. His eyes flashed and danced, and the others began to take note, eyes torn from rows of
harrowing images: child napalm victims, My Lai massacre, Battle of Ia Drang Valley, G.I cradling the
skin of a Vietcong lieutenant like an empty cloth satchel. I was getting piqued now - I looked him
straight in the eye and shook my head forcefully. He paused and lowered himself from his chair, jaw
clacking shut as his eyes yawned back into their sockets.
-’Hey Hey! American! You look now!’
He reached down and undressed his left thigh, lifting the crudely hacked stump and waving it in front of
my face. I watched it shimmer and dance in the failing sunlight – fascinated, appalled.
The pickled foetuses made grown men vomit and wince and weep. Magnanimous Grandfathers fled the
museum in tears, consoled by friends and family at the reinforced entryway, their blissful Parisian mites
swinging from the turret of an M551 Sheridan. The foetuses didn’t bother me all that much though. They
never really felt real: a glass screen framing a grotesque image, distorted by dense liquid and smoked
brown specimen vases; isolated, without context, a crude, abstract caricature. But this old atrophied limb
was different - its valleys and peaks, the fragments of high carbon steel, flecks of sawdust from the
Chickens he tended at home - this was integrated, this was real. The pocked surface of Mars, canals
winding through an Afghan desert, the magnified texture of a Staffordshire oat cake. I was completely
absorbed. I studied it for three seconds, and it felt like years.
He couldn’t have fought in the war, he didn’t even look old enough - at best he might have been a very
young boy. Maybe he was lying, maybe his parents had amputated his limbs - a crippled son could
supplement the family income; it had got them through the hard times, it had put food on the table, it
had kept his sister out of prostitution. But now he was all grown up, now he lived here in this courtyard,
now he had an honest trade praying on the colonial guilt of rich American tourists. I found this far more
troubling than the anonymous pickled babies in brown glass. This was insidious, malignant.
The world is a terrible place.
I reeled back and shook my head violently. Nonsense - this is not some abstract landscape, this is an old
beggar’s hacked and mangled stump, beams of light reflected and received by my eye, an image drawn
up on some internal virtual reality display. I reached for a cigarette and told the man to put his leg down
- he cried out and lurched forward, gripping my head firmly and trying to make contact with my face.
No. That leg is exactly as it appears. It is not inside my head. It is there, exactly where it appears to be.
We are a coupled system, a feedback loop - there is no beginning and no end.
My mouth hung open - a comet of sweat rolled from my nose and dropped on to his thigh - a miniature
shockwave disturbed the fabric of his piss-stained chinos. The blood left my face - red blood cells
rushing to protect vital organs. I lifted the heavy souvenir ashtray from my shopping bag and prepared
to strike him over the head.
A black silhouette glided over the shimmering tarmac - a slight frame with a curtain of dense black hair
covering an indistinct face. It had been there for a while now, but it hadn’t fully registered. Another
background element of the film frame - waiting, smiling, watching with a pair of twinkling coal eyes.
The tramp tore at his hair and bit down hard on his fist, then levitated over the courtyard, hauled from
the wheelchair by his moth-eaten polo shirt, spastic old stumps clicking and thrashing around. A group
of Vietnamese schoolchildren dropped their ice creams on to the body of an M48 Patton - Rasberry &
Vanilla bubbling and popping in the midday son.
He landed on the tarmac in a big, stinking heap and thrashed around like an upended crab. A security
guard blew his whistle and ran towards us - I stood studied his face for a moment, then sprinted full-tilt
towards the northern gate. The shadowy figure followed suit, tracking me through the courtyard. We
raced out of the gate, past several blocks of crumbling serviced apartments and bundled ourselves onto a
rush hour public bus.
Vietnamese tea breath, warm, damp hair, dog shit and hot tar. We shared a sticky handhold and stared
through each other‘s foreheads. It took a few minutes for my heart and lungs to sync, and then it finally
registered. His eyes were different today.
-’…What are you doing here, Michi?’
He wiped the patina of dirt and sweat from his cheeks and looked out of the rear window.
We got off the bus in district 3: French style villas, coffee shops and live music venues. I stopped to buy a
can of Lilt from a vending machine, then we crossed the street and entered the serenata café. A converted
old French colonial house: flowering plants in the courtyard, fishpond, small fountain, classical
Vietnamese music and subdued amber lighting.
Michi paid for the drinks - I ordered a large Arctic latte, and he had an expensive espresso. We sat at an
imitation mahogany table and watched droves of upper class Vietnamese jostle their way to the counter.
A disconcertingly romantic atmosphere - we sat facing each other, pastel votive candles throwing fingers
of soft light over the table. The coffee was excellent.
-’I need your help, Nichan. I am in trouble…I cannot go back to Japan.’
-’…What?’
-’I did something…silly. I made a…fire…at work. A small fire…‘
I rested my forehead on the table and pushed latte foam through my teeth with the tip of my tongue.
- ‘…I hated the factory...I hated the people. They bully me. Look…it was not big fire. I just get uhhhh…
get angry one day. Nobody die. Nobody get hurt.’
-’……How do you know that?’
-…Nichan, I cannot go to other Japanese. You told me you were coming here. You are my only friend.
You will help me.’
-’I will help you?’
He applied a Mild Seven Original to his lower lip and picked a stray hair from his eyebrow. His forearms
seemed leaner today - not a trace of subcutaneous fat. His face was hollow, and his eyes deep-set and
tired.
-’…Of course we are, but what do you expect me to do? I’ve got no money here. You’ve got no money
either…and how did you even find…’
The boy could not be told. We had a half-hour long rhetorical debate, then I reached into my pocket to
buy another round of drinks.
My pocket was empty.
-’Oh yeah…You’ve got no money now.’
-’Oh shit…oh shit.’
-’The tramp - he take it, your wallet. I tried to get it back but the guard came and you run.’
Gone: cash, debit card, I.D.
‘…I…don’t know what to do.’
I’d withdrawn several hundred pounds for a deposit on a one bed apartment, and now it was gone.
-‘Telephone.’
I pulled out my phone and called the bank.
-’…Uh huh…ok.’
-‘…How long will it take?‘
-‘I’m fucked.’
A new debit card would be sent to the United Kingdom within five working days. A debt ridden credit
card, no income, hotel fees to pay, and Michi was completely broke. I couldn’t hope to make it though
the project now - I would barely make it to the end of the month. I listened to the live mariachi band,
sweated profusely and tapped on the table with a bread stick. We didn’t speak for half an hour.
Melancholy trumpets. The smell of frying garlic and stale cigar smoke.
Michi broke the silence – he let out a belly laugh and slapped his hand down on my thigh.
-‘We need to make more money, Nichan. Don’t worry. I come with you and we make more money.’
-’…I’m gonna call my parents, Michi. You need to go back home too.’
His eyes narrowed, and he rocked back and forth in his chair.
-’I cannot go back. I am in trouble. I told you.’
Smoke billowed from his tiny mouth, covering his face in a net of fine silver hair - he looked like a witch
in this light.
-’I have a way we can make money….I will start a volunteering tour company today.’
-’Excuse me?’
-’…It’s simple. I have read about it. Easy money. I have a little to invest.’
-‘…This is bullshit, Michi. Go home. Leave me alone.’
-’Look here…I took some money from work…I can invest…You will help me with this, Nichan.’
-’I thought you were broke!?…How did you get money?’
Michi was on the run now - he’d broken into his workplace, transferred the company’s entire monthly
revenue to his Paypal account, set fire to the unisex toilets and calmly strolled out through the main
entrance. The following morning he kissed his mother, gathered his things and booked a one-way ticket
to Ho Chi Minh .
-‘ We’ll never get caught, Nichan. It is a quite small amount of money. They don’t care and they will
never see me again anyway. We will be rich. We can buy an island. A small one. Do not worry.‘
I wanted to say no, but I was desperate now, and scared of what he might do if I refused. Michi was a
very capable young man, and a complete and utter nutcase. I was his closest friend - he didn’t like other
Japanese, or anybody else for that matter, but he felt comfortable with me - we were on the same
wavelength. I was a wholesome white boy with native English skills, and he needed me to get his
company off the ground. Westerners need to see a white face on a website - it lends an air of legitimacy,
like a watermark or rubber stamp. I needed money quickly, and I would struggle to get it any other way
- I was confident that he could make it happen. If it didn’t work out, I could just fuck off home to
England - I had a flexible round the world ticket after all, and he had half of Osaka chasing after him.
-’We will make this happen, Nichan. Do not worry.’
Unlicensed Internet Café
A column of mopeds parted like herring as I waded in to the Pham Ngu Lao - 9 million mopeds for 12
million people.
-’If him not have moped, him not get girl,’ the cadaverous bell boy told me.
Old timers urinating on corrugated iron fences. Heat and rusted metal. Faeces and coriander and
Kentucky Fried Chicken.
We needed to advertise - we needed a website. Michi’s written English was limited, but I could design
one myself in a couple of days. It didn’t need to be anything elaborate: polished and well-written,
contemporary, sustainable. Michi visited the government offices to apply for the necessary permits while
I searched for an anonymous internet café with decent Wi-Fi and air conditioning.
I didn’t want to use my credit card and borrowed cash from Michi to buy a KFC Zinger Tower meal - it
gave me the shits and chronic palpitations. Phuong Cyber Cafe, Tu Xuong Street. Windows barred by
shutters of patinated iron. The place looked unlicensed but seemed quiet and relatively discreet. It had
English breakfast tea and pretty waitresses who dressed as anime maids on Tuesday afternoons.
I parted the plastic curtain and walked into a dense cloud of black particles. A fine mesh of Static
electricity enclosed my face, and I brushed my hands across my cheeks. A rancid fruit bowl of sliced
sapodilla infested with thousands of fruit flies swarming and dancing and escaping through the front
door. A flock of Vietnamese shuffled past me, oblivious.
It was noisy in there, and it smelled like fast food and chlorine. A moon-faced little girl with eyes like a
Siamese cat and an immaculate bob of starless hair turned to face me, her head pivoting 90 degrees as
she placed her headphones on the desktop and tracked me.
Lumbering, bloodless white man.
Chickens circling the water bubbler. A pack of schoolchildren beavered away at MapleStory. Anxietyridden office worker dripped chicken fat onto his keyboard. Owner wrapped in a blanket, cigarette
burning into the shit-stained faux leather office chair. MP4 videos of frottage in packed Eastern European
lifts. Orcs clicked to death with eight foot golden scimitars. I pictured a recently-sacked office clerk
expiring in a blaze of Maple Story induced aneurysm - the kind of thing you read about on Kotaku. But
It didn’t happen.
I rummaged through my pocket for filter tips: two left - that won’t go far, this will be a long haul. I
ordered a syrupy Red Bull - the kind that causes massive cardiac arrests - a cup of Twinings Delicate Earl
Grey, and nine hours of internet.
-‘Where are you from, my friend?’ Asked the manager.
-‘England.’
-’Oh! You are English!’
A beaming smile as he clicked his fingers and ordered his boy to the convenience store. Fresh deck of
Marlboros, Mountain Dew, and spicy instant noodles. He guided me into a tobacco stained private booth
and told me to come to him if I ever ran into to trouble.
-‘If you are ever in trouble, you come to Stanley!’
My Webstarts account had been suspended for several months. I signed up for a new one in my
brother’s name. Please confirm your E-mail address. Ok. I struggled to word the ‘About Us‘ section - I
studied the websites of other slum tour companies, copied, pasted and reworded. And then I called
Michi.
-‘…No, no. Most of them are in India, man.’
-’Sou desu ka. What does it say?’
An eye full of counterfeit Marlboro smoke particles.
-’What? The old one you mean?’
-’Hai.’
-' On all of our tours, visitors will see on foot why this area is the heart of small scale industry in
Mumbai. During our tour through 'India's largest slum,' visitors experience a wide range of activities:
recycling, pottery-making, embroidery, bakery, soap factory, leather tanning, poppa Dom-making and
much more. When passing through the residential spaces, you will undoubtedly feel the sense of
community and spirit that exists in the area. People from all over India live here and a tour through its
narrow alleys is quite an adventure- you will leave with an enlightened sense of the purpose and
determination that exists in the area.’
-’Let’s go for something like this. it’s good. You people like this, I think. You people like this…’
-’…What? It’s bullshit.’
-’Yes…it’s…. Christian madness. You all fucking maniacs. Japanese know. Japanese know to mind their
own business.’
I needed some background information: the history of Vietnam, cultural concerns, customs, etiquette. I
searched for two hours through tens of academic websites, journals and travel guides. I took dab of M.D
and washed it back with a sip of Twining‘s.
‘The older Vietnamese generation hate Japanese people for their crimes during the WW2 like stealing
rice from Vietnam for burning their trains. A lot of Vietnamese starved for that reason.’
The Vietnamese hate the Japs just as much as the rest of Asia.
Tour
I took a stroll through the area as a test run, and walked Michi through by telephone. I’d read about the
rampant drugs and prostitution here, but I didn’t see much evidence of it myself: pretty custom Pedi
cabs, small-scale industry, tens of writhing market stalls, women cutting bamboo sticks for sale, children
tending small stalls of fruit, gutting fish drawn from plastic buckets, ancient men with sheets of scrap
metal strapped to their backs.
Google Scholar search. In 2005 the UN estimated that 9 million Vietnamese were living in slums - 41% of
the urban population. ‘Slum.’ ‘…a neighbourhood where the buildings and land have no clear title of
ownership. The people who live on that land and "own" those structures cannot legally defend their
property, nor is there any way for them to sell or mortgage their property, get loans from a bank to make
improvements, or to secure basic services.’ These people don't know if or when they will be evicted; they
have no hope of finding similar accommodation for a similar price, and no hope of buying a house with
the money they would receive in compensation. Many cannot afford anything else - not within the city
limits - the government offers limited affordable housing and frequently clears slum neighbourhoods;
they build apartment blocks and try to give residents an opportunity to live there at a relatively
affordable price. But there is an intractable problem - there are too many people here.
Most of them came from the neighbouring northern provinces of Hung Yen, Hai Duong, and Nam Dinh,
They are extremely poor, and try to earn small amounts of money in the city to supplement their meagre
farming incomes. I met a Canadian English teacher called Ben picking out durians at a rotten wooden
fruit stall - an Oxford graduate who had decided to teach and live in the slum area, he had lived here for
eighteen months and greatly enjoyed life in his tiny tin bedsit. It smelt like chickens and rotten vegetable
matter and had no Wi-Fi or hot water, but it was real.
He took me to his favourite street vendor and introduced me to his neighbours over a bowl of Bánh canh
noodles - Phan Thi Dung and her son lived next door in a 6m2 decrepit cell, paying a monthly rent of
VND 800,000 (£25) and making a living by picking up scraps and other waste materials to sell to scrapiron dealers. On good days she earned VND50,000, but when her health did not permit she earned far
less. People from the ward authorities visited them occasionally to check whether they were still alive this was their only connection with the city. They were forgotten, invisible people, and the slum was full
of them.
It was a dangerous area: petty theft, purse snatching, pick-pocketing. The road death toll was staggering,
and political violence widespread. But I felt strangely at ease there. Out there in the crowd. There is
safety in numbers. Keep your enemies close, and your enemies closer.
-’Sounds ok. It’s the community people you people want to see. Pat the people on the head. But keep
them away from the nasty things, yes?’
-’You’re giving these tours as well, Michi - not just me.’
-’Yeah, but westerners don’t want Japanese tour guide. They want white face like this, you see?’
-’I don‘t know about that. I think they’ll want someone authentic looking.’
-’I am not authentic, I am a Japanese.’
-‘Well, just don’t tell them you’re Japanese - they won’t be able to tell the difference anyway.’
He laughed and put the phone down.
The following day I moved into a one bed apartment on Traung Sa street - a ground floor apartment
forming part of a little complex catering to young male working class Vietnamese. The entrance was
relatively sheltered and discreet, but at a high risk of burglaries and petty crime - the padlocked sky blue
rear-facing door had layers of faded newspaper covering its shattered glass panel. The rear courtyard
was all stained concrete and knots of rusty steel rods, plastic bags, cigarette packets and general detritus.
The occupiers hung their clothes outdoors - God only knows how anything dried in that humidity every inch of balcony and stairway handrail covered in vests and underpants and yellowed office shirts.
A grim corpse patchwork quilt of hand-washed garments.
I wasn’t sure what the other residents did for a living - I assumed they were mostly factory workers,
shop assistants and blue-collar workers, that sort of thing. One morning I found my next door neighbour
rummaging through a mountain of shit-filled plastic bags under the canal bridge. He can’t have been
very well-off.
I enjoyed living in the apartment, all things considered - I certainly never had any bother from the other
occupants; even if they had spoken English they probably wouldn’t have introduced themselves - they
covet anonymity here. I dig East-Asians - they really know how to mind their own business.
I got into the habit of putting on strong sunblock and taking long walks through the city edgelands. I
would find my to the centre of town, wander around for a little while, then find my way back via a
different route. I never did this at night time, although I often wanted to - it was far too dangerous.
The Thi Nghe canal is foul. The Thi Nghe canal is filled with human waste. The putrid odour attacks
your nasal hairs if you breath through your nose, and coats your teeth and tongue if you breath through
your mouth. There was no escape - that river fucking stank, like mountains of burnt hair and melted
stinking Bishop cheese.
I stopped at a savoury pancake stall one morning and spoke to the proprietor - a comely old man living
in a nearby apartment block. He told me that the water used to be odourless and crystal clear 50 years
ago, and that he used to fish there as a boy of 25. The pollution had started when the slums grew
dramatically during the war - refugees from the countryside streamed into the city to escape the bombs
and fighting, and built temporary homes from which masses of waste flowed directly into the canal.
Even today, thousands of Vietnamese dump tonnes of waste directly into the four main canals: furniture,
electrical appliances, dead pets and household waste. At 9 am a tricycle with a steel trailer full of sand
and cement pulled up beside me; the driver stepped off, coughed-up a huge ball of green phlegm and
casually spaded the contents into the water - there must have been a tonne or more. As I moved into the
centre of town, two men in florescent overalls pulled up in a white Transit van and threw a small
mountain of broken and leftover building materials into the water - two police officers watched from the
opposite side of the street, completely oblivious. On my way home that evening, a man in an orange
jump suit and hard hat threw a relatively small bucket of waste from the central Thi Nghe bridge; his
badge was that of the Ho Chi Minh City Bridge and Ferry Co LTD - the company responsible for keeping
the canal area clean. The government planned to clean this whole area up soon - a radical overhaul of the
drainage system and new residential and retail developments along each bank. I hoped to God it would
remain a slum for the next few months, or I’d be out of a job.
The first week of slum tours were relatively successful - they were uneventful, at least. Our first group of
clients were fifteen young Australian backpackers on a gap year from the University of Adelaide - a
troupe of earnest guys and gals aged from 18-22 who came to see the sights, pump a little money into the
economy and do their bit.
The tours were two hours long, and we ran them twice daily. Michi and I did them together at first, but
we began taking turns after we’d figured the route out properly. For the most part the residents were
very keen to meet the foreigners - they exchanged photographs, tried to learn a little English, and were
fascinated by their blonde hair and coloured eyes. Most of them were extremely poor and eager to earn
coin in exchange for their food and homemade wares - these were mostly crafts items: brightly coloured
wooden dragon charms, ‘Ethnic’ costumes, accessories made from Tho cam brocade, edible figurines
based on characters from Vietnamese folklore, handmade with multi-coloured dough. They went down
a treat.
The standard of hygiene was poor, and several tourists were crippled with severe stomach cramps
during the first few days - but we soon figured out which stalls to avoid. Apart from that, the food was
superb - Vietnamese cuisine is predicated on the balance of the five fundamental taste senses: spicy
(metal), sour (wood), bitter (fire), salty (water) and sweet (Earth), and comes in a range of brilliant
colours. Only the freshest ingredients here: fish sauce, shrimp paste, soy sauce, rice, fresh herbs, fruits
and vegetables, lemongrass, mint, long coriander, bird's eye chili, lime and Cinnamon basil leaves.
Michi held the tour on the sixth day, and escorted an elderly British couple from West Sussex around the
market stalls. They got on swimmingly, though we neglected to mention that he was Japanese - they
probably wouldn’t have liked him had they known. The man was a retired former B.P employee and had
earned an enormous salary at one time - he’d been born in Leeds in a two up, two down, and now lived
in a garish faux-Tudor mansion on the outskirts of Petworth. They saw some interesting things that day a herd of stooping silhouettes sorting through the rubble of a demolished high-rise for surplus plastic
and metal; they sidestepped a plastic bag full of hypodermics at the bus station, and watched group of
young children in Manchester United shirts playing street football nearby. He was completely
enamoured with the place - he bought a huge bag of hand-crafted figurines for his grandchildren and
asked about adoption schemes for Vietnamese children. A couple of weeks later he wired us a donation
of £200 and sent an E-mail telling us that he‘d decided to sell his home and his Bentley and move to
Kuala Lumpur to set up a residential home for impoverished Malaysian slum children.
I was cautiously optimistic about our business venture; the tour was turning a small profit and the
money was beginning to trickle in. I used my Paypal account for three weeks, but set up a Vietnamese
bank account within a month. I could afford a Zinger Tower Meal now, and I could get back on the
Marlboro Lights. I could save a little money and put it towards my university fees. Maybe I could stay
here and buy myself a penthouse suite in the Phu Nhuan District. I soon forgot all about my Sacred
Places gig.
Apocalypse Now Bar
Apocalypse Now Bar, Phuong Ben Nghé: Bailey’s Irish Cream, vomit and Bombay mix.
The Vietnamese-American owner allowed backpackers and working girls to enter free of charge - the
young Vietnamese paid 150000 VND cover a piece. Surf boards mounted on the wall - ‘Charlie don’t
surf’ in Apocalypse Now typography. Contract on the world love jam.
Early 90’s house punctuated by mid-late 90‘s indie and alternative rock. Short, wide doormen herded us
into the back room - a stifling dance floor saturated with working girls and western men doing the
deracinated backpacker shuffle. We politely refused, pulled up a chair in the bar area and chewed the fat
while downing double vodka and diet cokes. Michi was quiet - he curled the tip of his fringe around his
forefinger and stared at a group of American girls with enormous backwater hairdos. 30 years adrift extras from the set of 9 till 5. Americans have such powerful hair.
-’You never talk, Michi. You talk less than I do...and I never talk.’
He tapped on his watch and chewed on a bolt of Swedish snus tobacco.
-’You’re not supposed to chew that, you know. You’re supposed to tuck it under your lip.‘
-‘What?‘
-‘…We’ve got plenty of money here. Let’s go and do something. I’m bored.’
He ran his finger over a damp eyebrow and muttered to himself. He seemed pensive that night - one too
many simultaneous applications. The sweat pooled on his fingertip and dripped down into his glass. He
rose from the stool and stretched his arms out over his head. Sinewy elbows clicked, and his knotted
shoulders rippled - for a moment I thought he was going to strike me. He slicked back his hair, leaned
across the bar and in a hushed voice said ‘Ok, Nichan. We go now.’
Getting drunk with a Japanese is fun - I highly recommend it. Dour and disciplined by day, fanatical by
night: break dancing, screaming, floods of tears and wild gesticulation, massive emotional outbursts in
the smoking area. It is all alien to me - I am a northern Englishman. I don’t like to give it away, I like to
stand at the bar and look cool.
Japan has a strict anti-dancing law - from Roppongi to Sapporpo, if you are caught dancing after
midnight you can be arrested. Michi was enjoying himself tonight, making the most of the unregulated
Vietnamese night life: Hip Hop, House, Dubstep - he loved it all. I followed him over to the floor for a
moment, and then I turned back and walked away.
I do not dance. I refuse to dance. I move like an ungainly robot ghost.
I retired to the bar, took a dab of MDMA and watched him gyrate from afar. He paused for a moment,
sucked the beer from his hair and tried to pick up a Ukrainian catalogue model. He was unsuccessful.
The barmaid taught me a few words of Vietnamese as I studied the patterns in the frosted pint glass and
thought about my dead pet dog. The MD kicked and the working girls circled, fishing for a single glance
from this bloodless, elongated Westerner. Backpackers sauntered into the club, barging their way to the
bar like they owned the place. I hate them, and the Asians hate them even more.
All the world’s a party. All the world is in love. I have been to so many nightclubs now. Tens of
thousands. Clubs all over this weary, swollen planet. I hate them. I despise them. I want them all burned
to the ground. And yet still I come. Still I pay my cover charge and buy my overpriced drinks.
The music piped up, and the foul creatures gathered - cursed and mottled and ill, shards of teeth all
broken metal and flecks of wheat. There are too many of them now. There is no way out. Not this time.
I am tired. I am weak. I have drifted for centuries. I have rolled in shit and piss. I have been battered and
bruised. I have suffered indignities. I am the solitary Tiger squatting in the jungle. ‘Le Samourai.’ Yeah,
that sounds cool. That’s an identity for me. The solitary Tiger, the Gallic hitman smoking Gauloises in a
frozen, mouldy bedsit. ‘I never lose. Never really.’
A fit of hysterical laughter from the back of the room - a pack of hyenas circling some poor, struggling
animal. I stood from my stool and peered over the dance floor - a seething mass of sweating bodies
surrounded Michi, cheering, giggling, and filming the action on their Iphones. He was desperate now tearful and spinning frantically in a wild, spastic break dance; trying to shake himself out of his skin,
trying to drill himself under the Earth. He let out a yelp as his arms tangled up in his legs and propelled
his meagre frame down an iron staircase.
I ploughed through the crowd and skipped down the stairs. He lay on his back, legs tangled up in a
speaker stand, head wrapped-up in a heavy black stage curtain.
-‘You’ve had enough now.’
I unravelled his legs and helped him to his feet. He laughed, scratched his head and stumbled away to
the bathroom.
10 minutes passed. The sympathetic waitress offered me a cigar and two complimentary glasses of
Vietnamese weasel coffee. He returned and sat next to me at the bar. His expression was fractured. His
tear ducks raw, eyes old and tired and irritated.
-’…Have you hurt yourself?’
His chest lifted, rattled, and sank.
-’ I…have lied to you.’
-’What?…What do you mean?
He shook his head and waved my cigarette smoke from his eyes.
-‘…I dread to fucking think, Michi. Just tell me.’
He cleaned his face with a Johnson’s baby wipe and sucked the froth from his coffee. His hands were
trembling.
-‘I was hikikomori once.’
He tickled the bottom of his glass with a spoon and ladled the last dregs of milk foam onto his tongue. I
gave him my glass and crossed my arms.
-‘I will tell you a story, Nichan.‘
'Hikikomori' - acute social withdrawal.
Michi told about his childhood: his mental illness, the problems with his parents, the fights at school and
the bullying at work. I’d never known him talk so much - internal monologue overloaded by four hours
of vodka and MDMA and low grade Bombay mix.
Michi had been a ‘school refusal’ (toukoukyohi) child - his parents had taken him to a psychiatrist
numerous times but he had never been formally diagnosed with anything. He was obsessed with
numbers as a little boy, and it had driven his mother to despair - he refused to come home from school
until he’d memorised the other kid’s number plates and made tally charts of the number Honda Civics
he’d passed on the way home. He had an obsession with locking doors and spent an hour each night
locking and unlocking each one in a specific order, terrified of fires breaking out or intruders entering.
Before going to bed, he would measure the amount of tobacco left in each of his father’s cigarette ends.
Sometimes he smoked a lot. Sometimes he took only a couple of drags. It depended on his mood.
He was a withdrawn little boy, and never argued with his brothers or school friends. He worked things
out all on his own, shaped himself around the world. He was an aerodynamic boy - the boy who lived in
a wind tunnel. He’d been physically clumsy all his life and was bullied at school and college because of
it. But something had changed in Michi, something had given way - now he moved with a feline grace.
The real trouble started when he finished university - he got good grades but couldn’t get a job for
several months after graduating. He became increasingly withdrawn, spending most of his time alone
watching anime and reading Yukio Mishima novels. After an unsuccessful interview at a Tokyo
aquarium, he decided to lock himself in his room and slept for several days without shaving or
showering. After a week he started pissing out of the window, shitting into a waste paper basket and
throwing it onto the lawn. A month passed, and he stopped responding to his parents altogether - they
passed food and clean clothes around the door, smoking and fretting in quiet desperation. They were
terrified by the stigma of having a hikikomori child - at first they refused to acknowledge the problem
and didn‘t discuss it with anybody.
Michi tossed and turned in his cell for eight long years: eight bedroom-bound years, eight years without
speaking to his family, eight years without making eye contact. He started his own internet DVD
business buying Jean Claude Van Damme made-for-TV sequels in bulk from Eastern Europe and selling
them on for a profit. He took payments by Paypal and managed to support himself for a couple of years,
paying rent to his parents and ordering all of his shopping online.
Sometimes his Father would try to rescue him by breaking into his room, throwing a sheet over his head
and dragging him down the corridor and out of the front door. It didn’t help - Michi shrieked and wailed
like a Mandrake, then threatened to kill himself if he wasn‘t let back in.
The problems with his mother grew increasingly severe in his early 20's - he started to leave his room
periodically and shout at her, telling her how fucked-up the family was and calling her a terrible mother.
They fought tooth and nail, and she had considered calling the police on several occasions.
Michi regretted this deeply, and told me that he ‘wasn’t himself’ at that time - he was haunted,
tormented by some diabolical, external force. His father couldn’t bring himself to intervene, and knelt
and smoked at the family altar, praying for the Oni (鬼) demon to leave his son‘s soul and take his
instead. After four years of violence and emotional turmoil, they finally pulled the trigger and presented
him at a community mental health team.
Michi rested his head on the bar as he spoke - I smoked cigarette after cigarette and searched frantically
for something to say. He didn’t want me to say anything. When he finally raised his head, his eyes were
raw and weeping, exposed to air for the first time. A new baby’s hellish first breaths.
He sniffed the air, reached into his inner jacket pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of A4 paper held
together with sticky tape. He unfolded it and presented it to me with both hands.
‘Family assessment device’ (FAD).
The psychiatrist had given it to his family as a heuristic device to self-administer and screen for
deficiencies in their ‘whole family system.’ It specified six criteria:
1.Problem solving,
2.Communication,
3.Roles,
4.Affective responsiveness,
5.Affective involvement,
6 Behaviour control.
Michi scores indicated ‘poor perceptions of family functioning.’ He was already well aware of that.
I coughed and checked the time on my phone. My coffee tasted metallic now.
-’…What…What’s it like…living like that?’
He looked down at his hands and stretched out his fingers.
-’Anno…it…nothing. The same as doing anything else. I don’t feel anything about it, really’
He was sober now, his rakish grin had deserted him
-’Hmm…It must have been…limiting though.’
-’…What this mean, limiting? I was depressed sometimes, yes, but sometimes it was good.’
-’And how are your parents now?’
-’My parent are soft. They never tell anyone. I was a secret. I never had many friend. Not many people
notice really.’
-’How old are you now, Michi?’
-’I am twenty four. It was 12 months ago now. It’s been oayk since. I like to hang out with Gaijin now.
They all outsiders in Japan. Like me.’
I had seen photos and read articles about hikikomori - it was my understanding that they all grow wispy
beards, get enormously fat, and develop chronic hoarding behaviours. Michi was different though Michi was pretty and kempt and took good care of his feet. He had a sparkle in his eye, lean, sinewy
limbs, Converse hi-tops, black skinny fit t-shirt and trendy bouffant hair - he could’ve worked in Urban
Outfitters if he wanted to. Out of the shopping mall he stepped.
Although he was much smaller and lighter than me, I found Michi intimidating - he had some dreadful,
sunken, violent quality - something feminine and terrible. He was nimble, bullet-proof, some
androgynous anime cyborg ninja pirouetting through the air and slicing androids in half. There were no
flies on Michi.
-’So…how did it all come to an end? There must have been something….something that…uhh…broke
the Camel’s back?’
-’What this mean ‘broke the Camel?’
-’…What made you leave your room?’
He shifted in his seat and reached for his glass. The blood raced away from his head, and his quivering
fingers flicked foam milk over his trouser leg.
-’…It…I…’
-’Are you alright?’
Flecks of white spittle danced on his lower lip, and a creaking smile crept across his face. His knee rose in
a staggered motion and knocked the bar stool to the floor. The waitress gasped in horror as his body
slumped forward and his forehead struck the bar rail. His eyes rolled back into his skull and lukewarm
coffee poured over his chest and legs. I jerked up from my stool and supported his shoulders.
-’Michi…’
His torso was motionless now, right arm quivering, hands clamped firmly to his knees. I put my hand
under his chin and gently lifted his head.
I cannot forget that face. A look of utter desperation. Morbid dread.
A lifeless automaton. An advanced humanoid robot. A wooden marionette cut from its strings. Rapid
eye movement. Two distinct muscle groups all steel pins and levers. Servos and optical fibres. DC gear
motors driving facial muscles. The uncanny valley.
He stirred in his chair, pin eyes focussed on the pearl buttons of my denim shirt. I held his shoulders and
cradled him like a little brother. Some kind of partial seizure. I asked him if he was epileptic.
-’Nichan…’
He tried to stand. I put my hands on his shoulders and forced him down.
-Do you sell Mars bars in this country?‘
A blank expression from the waitress.
-’Snickers then? Sweets? Candy? Something with sugar in it, please.’
She ran into the kitchen and emerged a minute later with two ‘Fruity Pebble’ ring Doughnuts. I thanked
her and handed one to Michi.
-’Sit down for a while…What the fuck was that? Has that happened before?’
He took a small bite, chewed the dough methodically, then wrapped an elastic band around his piece of
paper and calmly walked to the exit.
Something had happened in there. Something had been in there with him. He could not tell me what it
was. He didn’t even know himself.
-’Michi?’
He said nothing. He had finished talking now.
The club was choking in a haze of Nag Champa and the vomitous odour of a thousand Red Bull
cocktails. Survivors sprawled over black imitation leather couches. Couples vomiting in sync by the rear
exit. Backpackers raising glasses and Zippo lighters for a Bob Marley medley. Michi cocked his head and
spat at their feet.
Redemption Song. Fuck Bob Marley. There will be no redemption. Not for us. Not for this Godforsaken
place.
I said goodbye to the barmaid in Vietnamese, snuffed out my cigarette and followed Michi across the
dance floor. I was weary myself now, piss drunk and ten years older. The doormen tried to heckle us
into a cab and handed us glossy leaflets for their nearby sister clubs. The taller one asked why we
weren’t taking any girls home, Michi flashed him a glance that almost stopped his heart. We waved
away the remaining tuk-tuks and marched out into incense, dawn and exhaust fumes.
Silence for a mile or two. There was nothing to say - it didn’t bear discussion. I stopped at a food cart and
ordered a fried lizard on a stick. I let a leg dangle from my lip and met his eye, and he chuckled for a
moment. We huddled into a convenience store and drank two warm European lagers in a deserted, tin
bus terminus. The light was blue, and there was no sound. He seemed brighter now, the fear had left
him. He grinned and shuffled and bounced on the balls of his feet.
As we passed the war remnants museum, Michi recalled stories about his Grandfather’s encounter with
the British at the infamous ‘Battle of the Tennis Court’ in Kohima, Burma. The was the high watermark
of the Japanese advance: grim hand-to-hand fighting, grenades hurled at point blank range, mountains
of fanatical Japanese soldiers left to rot in the Burmese sun, no evacuation for the wounded, corpses
burned to prevent disease. Apocalyptic horror.
He committed suicide in 1951 - unable to reconcile the shame of not dying on the battlefield with his
friends, he drove himself to Aokigahara Forest and never came back.
-'In Aokigahara the trees block out all the wind, and the birds never sing.'
He kicked up a cloud of gravel and muttered into the tarmac.
-‘It almost kill my Grandmother….He was an idiot….and what difference does it make?…It make none.’
I was drunk. I talk too much when I’m drunk. I talk too little when I’m sober. I tried to ask him about the
war, the royal family, Shinto, racial purity, Unit 371, the indigenous Ainu people - Japanese nationalism
had always fascinated me, and I had always wanted to ask him about it.
He didn‘t want to talk.
-’You can’t offend me, Michi.’
He smiled to himself and sniffed at the air.
-It smell like pancake now. Pancake and wet dog.’
-’Look, you don’t care and I don’t care. Tell me what your...take is.’
-’What difference does it make, what I think?’
-’None…so why not tell me?’
He stopped dead, turned to face me, and glared.
-’…We are the descendants of animal gods, destined to rule over all other races. You should bow at my
feet, foreign barbarian.’
I dropped my bottle of beer on the road, raised my arm and saluted him.
He chuckled and shook my hand.
-’You think too much, Nichan.’
Geordies
The next day was Saturday - I had had given myself the day off, and Michi and I decided to take a boat
tour along the Saigon river.
The view from the waterways offered a stark contrast to the chaos and gridlock of the city’s central
districts. Several new sights accessible only by water: Isolated canals, local neighbourhoods, rapidly
developing urban areas, traditional wooden boats from the Mekong Delta, families living on fishing
boats and huge sea fearing vessels rotting away in the old harbour. Vietnamese children clambered over
the wooden structure like Macaque monkeys - hessian sacks of nuts and bolts clasped in their teeth.
We had set out in the late afternoon, and lay on our backs by the old docks as the sun set over the vast
downtown skyline. It looked like Shanghai. An embryonic Shanghai.
A dense, nasal voice from the rear of the deck. Northern accents - Geordies discussing a punch-up in the
Norwich branch of Yates’s wine lodge. My meditative state shattered by a tangle of matted dreadlocks,
foul language, polyethylene bags of premium European lager and packets of Breakaway biscuit bars.
One of them turned to check the time and clocked my packet of Golden Virginia rolling tobacco.
Englishman.
He rose from his seat and approached me, jaws labouring on an apple chew bar imported from a North
Glaswegian Ebay vendor. They were a nice enough bunch, and of a similar age, background and means
to myself - residential care and social workers from Bradford fresh from a stint at an ‘intergenerational
co-housing community’ in Lancaster. We chatted for a while, and Michi rested his hands on his lap and
listened attentively. I told them about the company and the tours, my time in Japan and Shanghai, my
troubles in Thailand and Vietnam - we talked about flexible round-the-world tickets and debated the
price of a flight back home. They complimented me on my bravery - It was great that I’d left the rat race,
that I was doing something I really cared about, that I was sticking it to the man.
I didn’t see the point in telling them.
I introduced Michi and offered them a tour at a heavily discounted price. They accepted and shook my
hand before leaving for their hostel in District 2.
-’I like them - they are not like Hugh Grant either. Are all Englishmen like this?’
I met them at 8.30am - one hour ahead of schedule. I gave them all a cereal bar and relayed the relevant
health and safety information. Do not to interfere with the canal water. Do not accept betel nut or Viagra
from bloody-mouthed strip peddlers. Do not eat anything that moves. Common sense stuff.
We bought spicy food, wandered around the handicraft stalls, played football with a flock of truant
schoolchildren and chess with an ancient man in a turf-less public park. I decided to let the façade down
a little, and told them about our money worries and my reservations about the whole slum tourism gig.
Mike had fetched a litre of vodka and 12 Chang beers, and we took a break at midday to drink and
smoke by the new Rach Chiec Bridge - a huge new VND1 trillion development with a total length of 736
m, a width of 48 m, and 10 lanes of traffic. 37 years ago the old bridge had been of great significance
during Ho Chi Minh’s campaign to liberate the South - now it mostly relieved traffic congestion. Today it
played host to four sweating northerners sharing plastic bags of hard liquor and imported Sherbert
Fountains.
Do not bring dreadlocks to a subtropical climate - after a day in the sun they smelt worse than the
fucking canal. We took a train back to district 3, entered a modest western-style restaurant and tried to
decipher the local newspaper while sipping Vietnamese ice coffees. Mike leaned over the table and asked
to speak with me in private, his eyes pin-sharp and darting.
We crossed over the main street and searched for a cigarette vending machine. No 7-Elevens here.
Vietnam stands in contrast to Thailand or China, most stores and hotels here are Vietnamese owned, and
there are precious few branches of Starbuck’s or Wallmart. Encouraging to see a developing country
resisting multinational conglomerates, bad news if you are in need of decent cigarettes, antiperspirants
or contraceptives.
A secluded internet café.
-’Mate, I’m asking you this because you seem like an alright guy. I’ve got a problem with my passport.
I’m in big trouble.’
I am too polite.
-’…What’s the problem?’
-‘I need to get it stamped tomorrow or the authorities will kick me out.’
I must have one of those faces. Old people are always asking me for directions.
-’Why have you not had it stamped already?’
-’I’ve been ill mate, really fucked up - I think it’s Jap Enceph or something. I’ve been in bed for three
weeks, honestly. Look, I’m sorry to ask, but I’ve asked all my mates and they don’t want to risk getting
skinned by the police or whatever. You’ve got connections here, right? I can pay you.’
Daft fucking hippy. Avoid fuck ups.
I tipped back my glass and swallowed the ice. Cold-stimulus headache. Acute referred pain.
‘I’d love to help you, but I can’t. I’m sorry. This tour isn’t legit. If they so much as sniff at it I’ll be knee
deep in bollocks. I can’t go anywhere near the authorities. They kill people here, you know? You should
get yourself home.’
He stood and walked to the exit without saying a word. I followed him.
-’Look, you need to find a coach to the border. Get your passport stamped, and then come back in. It
won’t be difficult, but I can’t do it.’
A beige, withered hand broke my line of sight. A handful of split Betel nuts fell to the floor. Three
decaying teeth, pink and foaming.
-’Please, sir. Take.’
-‘No thanks. I don’t like them.’
I waved him away and turned back to Dreadhead. A glob of crimson phlegm flew across the table and
landed square on a laminated tourism poster. ‘Vietnam - Timeless Charm.’ The peddler stood in front of
me, rubbing his hands and grinning like an oriental Tim Curry.
-’You no listen. I can help you. Listen’
He slipped his salamander legs under the table, the odour of wet dogs and fish paste rising from his
torso. Dipping his hands into my tobacco pouch, he rolled himself a slug-like cigarette and
complemented me on my fair skin and rosy cheeks. He asked for a grande latte, and Dreadhead bolted
over to the cashier.
-‘You are beautiful guy. You have not been here for long. Soon you will look like me. Where you come
from, my friend?’
-’Manchester.’
-‘Ah! Manchester! Manchester United!‘
He smoked on the cigarette ravenously, dead smile sucking colour from the room. Hot latte washed the
betel nut residue from his foaming mouth, and he looked vaguely human now. I rolled down my sleeves
as the air conditioning fired up and strands of his hair hung motionless in the air. No real-time physics
model here - I have yet to see convincing CGI hair. An elongated torso - a 16:9 image in a 4:3 frame. He
mangled the froth from his fine white beard, tucked the cigarette end into his back pocket and told us his
story.
He had a friend. A friend with a boat. A boat which could take Dreadhead down the canal, out of Saigon,
and down the Mekong river to Phnom Penh. Dreadhead would give his passport to an official, smoke a
cigarette, buy a warm can of Tango and wait. The passport would be checked and stamped by ‘passport
control’ and returned with a fresh Vietnam tourist visa stamp. The process would take three days and
three nights. I’d done something similar in Thailand a few months ago and had found it relatively
painless. He gave us the address of his boat and asked Dreadhead to meet him there in a couple of hours.
He gave me the tour fee in cash and left to explain the situation to his friends
Chang and serotonin-induced stupor at the Rach Chiec Bridge. Four impassive figures and an endless
torrent of mopeds. We wrapped up the tour soon after - I left them at an internet café with a busy taxi
rank to the rear. I wished Dreadhead good luck, and stepped on to a big yellow bus.
The bus rattled back into town. I was in a sweat now. We took a hard right turn and sunlight illuminated
the carriage, revealing a billion fragments of shit hanging in dead air. Complex particle effects and bloom
lighting on the bus today. I was being pulled down, down to the ocean floor.
I have been too candid. I must be more careful. Don’t trust a soul, especially not yourself. It was a bad
idea. I knew it. I knew it but I didn‘t stop him. It isn’t my problem. It was his own fault.
A ten-year-old boy slapped a live chicken against a phone booth. Smiling ancient crones emptied buckets
of arterial blood into saturated storm drains. I sneezed and fingered my house keys, running the fatigued
metal over my forefinger. The skin buckled - I pulled out my hand and dangled my fingers in front of
my face. The blood must hit the floor. I have lost my faith. I need to know gravity again. I need to be
flesh. Flesh and bone tonight. I squeezed the base of my finger, and the blood pooled and hung
motionless at the tip, ten thousand minute polygons forming a complex wireframe model. I wiped it
away with a handkerchief, and it left no trace. The world was not real, and I knew then that I was
fucked.
Mental
I was due to meet Michi at Scott & Binh’s restaurant to give him the handover for the following day.
Hamburgers, White Russians, Bob Marley and Nirvana Unplugged. We drank and talked about silly
little things, and I urinated four times. His face was brighter today.
-‘I did not tell you everything still.‘
South-East Asians cannot make hamburgers.
-’What?’
He grinned and pushed caramel latte through his teeth - his upper lip inflated like a beating heart.
‘I was…worse than that. I was worse than what I told you. Later - my parents take me to the doctor
again.’
He ordered another coffee, and I listened.
The physician had diagnosed Michi with schizophrenia, and had requested full hospitalisation. His
parents were mortified, and opposed the decision fiercely. The physician informed them that he was
obliged to alert the health authorities about their son's condition - if the authorities decided it was
necessary to hospitalize, others would soon find out about Michi’s Hikikomori behaviours. They
eventually conceded. Michi didn‘t want to go. He kicked and cried and pleaded with his Mother.
He was taken into ‘voluntary hospitalisation’ and kept on a secure ward where the nurses administered
shock-therapy and anti-depressant drugs without his parent’s consent. After six tortuous weeks, Michi
persuaded them to request discharge, and they picked him up on a crisp Thursday morning, The light
was yellow that day, and there were isolated showers in the afternoon.
Michi tipped his coffee back and disassembled a Budweiser beer mat. I ordered a pack of dry roasted
peanuts.
-’H’ was the name they give me. I saw the newspaper.’
-’…How long ago was this?’
-‘Eight weeks.‘
-’…I don’t know what to say.’
The bill arrived. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a note. Something was missing. I emptied my
pocket and laid the items out on the table.
-‘What is wrong with you?’
I checked my coat and shirt pocket. I checked under the table. I asked the young girl at the bar.
-‘I’ve lost my passport.’
-’Hahaha, you cannot fuck with Michi. This happen two weeks ago. Fuck you, Nichan.’
-’No, I’m serious…somebody stole my passport…it…I know who it is.’’
I picked up Michi’s phone, ran the map application and entered the address that the tramp had given
me. A small town several miles south of the city.
-’Nichan…’
-’I’m going.’
-’You cannot go, Nichan. Very dangerous. Talk to the embassy.’
-’I have to. I have to get it back tonight. They don’t even issue passports here any more. I’ll be stuck here
for weeks. The Geordie‘s in trouble too. I’ll be fine. We’ll talk later.’
I threw a curled-up note on to the table and paced over to the entrance.
-’You are very stupid, Nichan.’
A dull, dense headache and a lungful of rotten fruit and smog. I glided down the strip, stepped into a
custom hot rod Tuk Tuk and slapped on the roof. We scrambled through rush hour traffic, past broad,
humming freeways, yellow canals, food markets and bars. The street lights flickered and moaned, and
the little paper people disintegrated in sodium light and cigarette embers.
We were forced to the curb by an enormous luxury tourist coach, and the driver leapt from his seat and
pointed across the street. I bowed to him, waded into a river of headlights, descended a set of wonky
concrete steps and skipped down a narrow dirt footpath. Dormant orange clouds, fluttering refuse sacks
and a number of docked Sampan houseboats. It was dark now - Dreadhead was nowhere to be seen, and
the water was still and silent. I kicked up a cloud of gravel and it hung in the air like snow.
Gone already. Dead. Face-down in the drink. Lungs full of industrial waste water. Sinking. Down to the
bed. Down to safety. I dropped a ball of fluffy spittle into an empty can of Chang beer.
Fuck it. Get to the British embassy. Call your parents. Get home. Cut your losses. Get clear.
I sat on a concrete bench and wrapped my arms around my knees. Six weeks, at least - and they might
find out about Michi. You can’t help him. He’s already gone. Sort yourself out. I formulated a plan,
making touch screen notes with my stylus and crunching numbers on the calculator.
Crack.
An engine creaked into life by a decaying stone bridge. A shadowy head rose from the hatch, looked to
either side, and untied the rope from the horn cleat. I threw my cigarette into the water and clambered
over the sampan - eight boats joined by broad wooden planks forming 100ft of continuous, ramshackle
boardwalk.
The boat drifted out in a languid motion, the man’s face obscured by a pearlescent flare of streetlight and
exhaust fumes. I yelled and reached into my pocket - a crack reverberated around the canal as my Zippo
lighter smashed into the boat’s rotting hull. The driver flinched, pulled out an LED torch and leaned his
head over the side. The engine cut out, and the boat reversed, little coal eyes catching the light as he
shuffled out on to the stern.
-‘…’
-’…I’m sorry.…are you…taking an Englishman to the border?’
His eyes narrowed, and his shoulders dropped.
-‘…No… I am not…Ah…My friend. He taking him.’
-‘I have to find him. I need to give him something. It is urgent. I can pay you. Please take me to him.’
I rifled through my money belt: 500,000 VND, £2.11 in sterling, one exhausted clipper lighter, half a pack
of Starburst, a receipt from Costa Coffee, and a black retro Casio watch. I reached over and offered them
with both hands. He accepted, returned to the cabin and checked the bundle over with meticulous
attention to detail - a jeweller looking for diamond flaws.
‘…I take you to checkpoint. You will find him there.’
I rested my legs in a plastic wicker chair. Three miles of skyline and concrete retaining wall scrolled in
parallax like a stripped down children‘s musical toy. Fifty foot advertisements over septic channels of
lapping industrial waste: Toyota, Microsoft, Gap. The same gig all over the world now. Cheekbones.
Liquid nitrogen cocktails. Taster-cups of Pecan and Maple liqueur. Topshop Scandi Military olive tees.
Sprawling Oxfam billboards. ‘Campaigning for a fairer, safer, better world for everyone.‘
One day we will all volunteer for community projects in African, millions of us clad in faux-tribal
wooden necklaces and boarding shorts, passing each other on the dusty streets of corrugated iron in
grief-stricken shanty towns, We will teach them to surf. We will buy their homemade wares. We will
barter for their fruit and vegetables. They won’t know what to do with all the money.
They will spend it. They will spend it at the new mixed-retail development. They will spend it on nachos
and bowling and cinema tickets.
I want to see billboards covered with images of deliberately maimed slum children. Bribed municipal
hospital doctors amputating pre-pubescent limbs. Cauterised arms of nine-year-old solvent-addicted
Laotians. Cooley hat full of Euros and stack of pirate DVD’s at the gangrenous feet of Mumbai slum
children.
My cigarette tasted like pear drops. The boat hummed on through patches of scrubland now, faint
orange outlines in aqueous ink. And then a phone call - ‘Chillout Drop.MP3’ silenced the jungle. Mating
Bullfrogs paused. The driver was alarmed, and turned to face me. We were at an impasse now. I put the
phone to my ear and heard a compressed little voice.
-’You need to get away from him. Get away from him now.’
Whitney.
-’Who?…Where are you?’
-’It…’
Cut out.
I slipped it back into my pocket and raised my hands. The driver lowered his golf club and settled back
into his chair.
We rattled through the jungle, beyond the city, beyond the canal. I was tired and frightened. Lens flare
from an isolated farmhouse security light. Scrolling parallax jungle, layer upon layer, foreground trees a
complex wireframe. I was slipping further. I tightened my belt, pulled out a stack of plastic cards from
my pocket and ran my fingers over the holograms and indentations. Barclay‘s debit card. National
insurance card. Photographic university I.D. Provisional driver’s license. I existed once, that is my name,
right there in raised print - vacuum formed, official.
The muscles in my wrists contracted. My knuckles were numb. I rubbed the back of my hand - cool and
dry like a sheet of fine washi paper. I shuffled back in my chair. Dead fingers in a big block fist. Pins and
needles. Leaden legs. Neck buckling under the weight of my head. Damp neck fusing with the plastic
fibres of the wicker chair. A Tiger Mosquito circled and landed on my index finger. Not enough fluids
today. Not enough calories. A heat stroke-induced seizure.
I Shouldn‘t have left him. I shouldn’t have come here.
Masses of floaters now. Aliasing and low resolution texture. Mode 7 graphics. Scaling. Rotation. I drifted
in and out. For how long. I looked out across the bow. The Vietnamese man squat on a nearby stool. I
think he was smiling at me.
And then nothing, but I can still remember my dream.
My mother and father’s house. I am asleep. My bedroom is very quiet. Strip of amber light trickling
down from the fireplace. It only comes at night. The curtains must lie right. This house was built in 1912.
A Bishop lived here. He had servants. His wife died during childbirth. She died in our bathroom. The
Clergyman’s daughter watched this same strip of light as she fell asleep. And then she woke up.
I am riding along in a big broken train. Through the Arctic. It is far away. I stoke the fires with a big
metal poker. I shovel coal into the furnace. I love it here. I am smiling. There are no passengers. This is
the roof of the world. It is always night here. It is dark but the snow is glowy and it helps me to see.
There are rainbows here. Big night rainbows you can watch all night. And there is a gas tower here. A
big friendly blue gas tower on top of a hill. Over a hill. It is sunny there. You cannot see it from here. I
am heading towards the gas tower. It is a long way away. When I reach the tower I will climb up it. It is
sky blue and a little bit green.
Care Home
After University my friends found work at estate agents and recruitment firms, advertising agencies and
high street bank call centres - my first job was working with young adults on the autistic spectrum. My
friends were appalled, and couldn’t understand why I’d done it - they aren’t into books and films and
interesting things - that was a job for illiterate old ladies and remedials. I’d never get a wife or a nice car
or a mortgage or my own office doing that.
But I never wanted my own fucking office.
I will never understand why people bother to climb the professional ladder. A management position will
net you £50,000 or so - you’re still a fucking peasant. You can do your main shop at Mark’s and
Spencer’s: upgrade to quilted toilet tissues, finest range mince pies and branded antibacterial surface
wipes. You may as well become a tramp - at least then you can be your own boss.
I prefer pleb’s jobs - they are undemanding, and efficient - you don’t lose a drop of yourself.
I saw some interesting things at that place: a twenty-two year-old boy with chronic diarrhoea dancing
around a plastic fire engine, vomit-soaked slab of fat and meat screaming like a burning child, autistic
boy ripping up toast and throttling himself with a rubber garden hose, mute boy staring dead-eyed at
some supernatural horror on his bedroom wall.
I have some fond memories, too: the non-verbal communication, the toy fights, the fits of rage at packed
supermarket checkouts. I learned a lot there - I saw beneath the veneer, beneath the offices and
supermarkets and motorways and Smartphones, the blackened coins and insect casings resting
underneath the floorboards.
When my shift ended, I ceased to exist - the service users couldn‘t even remember my name the next
morning. The speech and language therapist told me it was just a cognitive thing, but I wasn’t entirely
convinced. Everybody feels this way, though we are loath to admit it - we send people greetings cards,
we invite them for dinner and dancing, and we criticize them when they aren't present. The service users
were genuine, too genuine for their own good. Earnest and consistent really pisses people off - it gives
the whole game away.
Emma was one of the old guard: ex-factory worker, cleaner, fisher wife, scrubber, common-or-gardener
misfit. She looked really fucking weird: missing brain tissue, ears on the wrong way round, dead,
battered eyes all wonky and goosed. An under stimulated Border Collie, a retrained Welsh miner of a
South Wales Pot Noodle factory, fingers too fat and gnarled to operate the keyboard.
Wayward travellers, drifters and malingerers, and a handful of earnest, hardworking types who held the
whole stage show together. We came here for different reasons - they wanted to be close to people, and I
wanted to get away from them. I was always different from them - chatting to them while I waited for
the train, sharing a cigarette at the metro station. Always leaving, always on my way back home.
I like hanging out with the dumbshits - dumbshits are usually a lot nicer than real people. We lived in
the dunce’s corner and we tried to have fun - we laughed and we joked and I finally picked up some
good manners. I felt better under the table - away from the searchlights and the television commercials;
moving from shady spot to shady spot, ear flat to the turf, listening out for the satellites and police
helicopters. But it is inevitable - they will find me eventually, and then it will be time for me to move on.
I get tired of drifting sometimes - it really wears me out, but there is no alternative.
Later that year I started a master’s degree in Social work and completed a 100-day placement at a local
mental health charity. Wet Wednesdays in Crewe at the Lakeside Superbowl, mortified ten-pin bowling
with the mentally ill, Paul Young tinny on radio 2. Severe dependency issues here - 60-year-old ladies
asking permission to go to the bathroom - when I said ‘yes,’ they shook their heads and asked me to take
them there myself. My tutor told me it was Institutionalisation - most of them had been sectioned at one
time or another.
The chief executive was a bearded Metalhead anarchist - a fuzzy old man with tattoos and piercings and
big leather goth boots. An anarchist and alternative hippy Christian, he had spent a number of years in
psychiatric care himself and used to tell me stories about Hendrix and Miles Davis at the Isle of Wight
festival, 1970. He founded the organisation in the early 70s, and they operated as a compact team of six
for 30 years before the severe public spending cuts - the third sector soaked a lot of it up and the
company expanded ten-fold in the space of eighteen months. I felt slightly ambivalent towards him there are many insidious characters in health and social care, cluster bombs of elaborate passiveaggressive strategy.
I rented a neat little town house in Chester at that time - an affluent little city, but cold, always a few
degrees colder than the rest of Cheshire. I walked through four miles of monochrome council estate of
wet concrete, bus tickets and cigarette burn betting agencies on my way to work every morning. A
bizarre 1950’s Bungalow peered over the embankment as I approached the hulking, silent roundabout. I
hadn’t noticed it before, and it scared me a little. It didn’t belong in England - it was an element ripped
from of the set Edward Scissorhands: white picket fences, immaculate front garden, eight striped plastic
deck chairs in a chocolate lime colour scheme. A frozen image from the cover of some matte finish 1957
lifestyle magazine.
I stood transfixed and waited for the fantastical creatures within to stir - rustle the curtains, bring in the
milk, enjoy a serene game of lawn Bowls. They were in there somewhere - an elderly couple surrounded
by JML catalogues, dreaming of Caribbean cruises, Tatton Park Sunday afternoons, steady jobs at the ICI
offices, vulcanised rubber gardening gloves, plastic cups of Buck’s Fizz at Ellesmere Port retail park.
The suburbs are terrifying - they fill me with dread. They are slow death - protracted, indirect suicide.
Turn your back on life and drown yourself with marriages, car loans, and electrically operated Jam jar
openers. Something, anything, to drown out the voice.
Maybe they were better once, back when they offered everyday services: shops for food and basic
household goods, personal services, hairdressers, doctors and dentists surgeries, schools and places of
religious worship. Now they are filled with Space Raiders, dread, nausea, and empty packets of King
Size Rizla.
I will never know what the suburbs are really like - I don’t think I could ever really settle down. I find
people frightening - I hear them circling outside, prancing and cackling like packs of hyenas. A day is a
gruelling battle for me, and sometimes I get tired.
Authentic human beings are an endangered species - they are at a very high risk of extinction. I have met
only a handful, and you might never meet one at all. They spend most of their time underground, away
from poachers and natural predators. Sometimes they pop their heads up, sniff the air, and leave their
burrows to forage for food. East-Asia has a relatively high concentration of human beings - they are quite
common here, in fact. You see them walking down the street in broad daylight, their faces mild and
comely, set of antenna whirring away, minding their own business and trying to get by.
Authentic human beings are always passing - making the long, inexorable retreat back to sea. But there
will be no happy ending, no wistful Elvish island beyond the horizon - only billions of non-entities
passing each other in a planet-wide shopping mall. There will be much Mojitos and dip.
But there is one guarantee: soon the stage show will pop, and the void will swallow us all back up. It doe
not matter who you are or what you have done - we are all for the chop, ultimately. You cannot win - so
do not worry about shit going wrong - just go about your merry little day, skipping and sipping on
milkshakes, giddy as a little schoolboy.
I stand at the edge of the world, just close enough to eat my porridge, pay my rent, and buy 2 for £20
Blu-rays once a fortnight. I live with the peasants and tradesmen, shithead Joiners and coke-addled
electricians, common-or-garden arseholes.
Cheshire is laced with idyllic retreats, stately homes and green pastures - glasses of chardonnay at the
county show, big hats, spray tans, and short, wide men at the Chester races. I never liked it here Cheshire chokes on its own bucolic charm, suffocated by a dreadful, smothering quiet. I cannot move for
fear of waking them, and I cannot sleep for the sound of my beating heart. I need background noise. I
need cities. I need night time and neon and knives and rats. It is safer there. Safe with the lights out. Safe
where it’s dangerous. From here I can see around the corner. From here I can see the god-awful menace.
Here I have an early warning system. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
Western Theme Town
Disrupted REM sleep. Hot light, pressure, and roaring insects. The humidity was gone, and I could
breath.
I lifted my head and looked down at my legs - my feet were still attached, and a glob of hardened pink
phlegm had fused with my left Adidas Samba. Faint outline of the cabin, and a dark, sagging figure
hanging over me. My Mother’s face smiled as I lay in the recovery room. I winced and called out for a
bedpan.
The boat was empty.
I reached out, pulled my travel bag down from the hook and rifled through my trouser pockets:
cigarettes, keys, credit cards, lighter.
A featureless concrete slab towering over the cabin and a glassy, cloudless sky above - supersaturated
E130 blue. No mopeds. No voices. Dense forest sweeping out for miles at the far bank.
I clambered over the cabin - a flimsy vinyl tent stretched over five rusted iron bars. One side collapsed
under my weight, but the central pole held firm. An 8 foot concrete river wall. I reached over and pulled
myself up.
Depth of field. Shimmering heat. Fish eye lens effect. A freshly laid tarmac road and a big colourful
jellybean blur ahead. I threw my leg over the wall and hauled myself over - my hamstring winced, and
my knees popped. I stood, dusted myself off and walked through a row of uniform small brick buildings
- pristine, airy and glistening. I squatted on my haunches and battled with thirst and palpitations. No
movement. No people. No birds. I fingered my lighter’s gas valve and took a deep breath.
This is not Vietnam.
No way to place it: Victorian terraces in the classic English market town style, deserted new build
pagodas with sheltered seating, gardens and vegetation watered and well-maintained. Some fauxJacobean craft centre, a themed upper-class retail outlet, an evacuated faux-medieval Japanese theme
park. I followed the main street and passed tens of compact shop fronts with English signage. I didn’t
recognise any of the brand names - exclusive little independent jewellers, bakers and craft shops with
fully stocked display windows. Fresh tarmac and crisp yellow lines - I crossed the street and approached
an unmarked convenience store. The doors parted with a chirpy electronic jingle.
Empty.
I scratched the tip of my nose and waited for the shop assistant to raise his head. Rows of fully stocked
chrome fridges: BLT, Cheese & onion, Chicken salad, All-day breakfast triple. An isle of assorted bento
boxes, Californian sushi, semi-skimmed milk, chilled green tea, Coke zero and Pocari Sweat - a
transnational selection of snack foods, Slush Puppy machine whirring violently beside an abandoned
cash register, a single green digit updating for no one. A multinational range of cigarettes in an 8 ft tall
vending machine: British, American, Japanese, South-East Asian. Premium brands here: Marlboro,
Camel, Gitanes, Davidoff.
I rang the bell and called out for service. No reply. I checked for CCTV cameras, then unzipped my
rucksack and slipped a number of items inside: thick, sliced loaves of Japanese milk bread, three litres of
Evian, a 4x multipack of Snickers Duo bars, three assorted bento boxes and three BLT sandwiches. I
called out again, then zipped up my bag and crept back outside.
I had no way of knowing what day it was, but I was sure it wasn‘t Friday any more. I buried my hand in
a damp trouser pocket and pulled out my Smartphone. No service. I flicked out my wrist and consulted
my indestructible Men’s Casio Retro Alarm Chronograph Watch - Thursday 13th 9.23am. I had left Ho
Chi Minh on the 7th.
The road branched out at a miniature T junction 100 yards further inland, lightly wooded areas in both
directions populated by strange-looking trees - not subtropical, but not Japanese or European either. I
didn’t know a fucking thing about trees. I turned left, and decided that I was walking north.
Three uneventful hours through facsimile landscape: patches of emerald grassland and neatly arranged
roadside picnic areas. The trees grew dense and knotted, and the canopy blotted out the sunlight. It was
dry and still here, the humidity low, and the air far cleaner than the city. An immaculate road surface no peaks or troughs or potholes. The river bubbled faintly as I paused to wipe the sweat from my back,
scratch a raised bite on my forearm and rummage through my pockets for a packet of cigarette papers.
Gone - only a folded receipt from the Post Office in my denim shirt pocket. July 26. It had been through
the wash several times. I must remember to check my pockets first.
I rolled a crude cigarette from with three pinches of dried-out rolling tobacco, sealed it shut with saliva
and secured the seam with my index finger. It burned beautifully, but got a little harsh as I neared the
filter. Faded dot matrix print - ‘Please retain’ on one side, and ‘Thank you’ on the other.
Dusk.
Still no birds - the river choked and gurgled now, and sibilant wind disturbed a billion wireframe leaves.
The road snaked on through the wood, and felt familiar somehow - like the Toys R’ Us advertisement I
had seen as a child. Geoffrey the anthropomorphic Giraffe waited at some dim forest clearing, beckoning
me in to a superstore filled with toys in their millions, all under one roof. I frowned and tipped back a
can of Pocari sweat.
The trees thinned as I moved further in and a rich grassland clearing opened out into a barrage of
bullfrog mating calls. The heat and moisture lifted, but my legs were heavy now - I leaned against a
solitary maple tree and unfurled my racing green monsoon anorak.
Rice paddies nearby. Threat of mosquitoes and Japanese encephalitis. I must reach Toys R‘ Us before my
brain explodes.
Mother promised to take me to the superstore on Warrington retail park as a boy, but she never did - she
found navigating the ring road absolutely terrifying. I have only ever been the Toys R’ Us superstore
twice in my entire life, and I must go again. I want to buy myself a Lego Snowspeeder. That would be
nice.
I covered as much exposed skin as possible, closed my eyes and drifted into a light sleep. Waking at 6am,
I gnawed on a Snickers Duo bar and checked my limbs for fresh bites.
Another supersaturated morning. I was utterly lost, never to return, but I felt no sense of urgency. I felt
happy, relieved, and I didn’t even want to know any more. I could have stayed there forever.
I decided to start out early - it gets hot quickly in these parts, and I didn‘t have much water. My phone
was useless now - I wished to God that I’d decided to bring a compass, or a pen, or a length of string.
Burger King
At 9am I was passed by a midnight blue Daewoo saloon with two-tone tinted windows. I didn’t
recognise the plates and wasn‘t yet desperate enough to try and flag it down. The wooded area was far
behind now, I ate half of a BLT sandwich and walked with renewed purpose.
11am.
A block of anonymous suburban homes resembling the bizarre new-build satellite town I’d visited in
southern Shanghai - vacuum formed Lego homes and KFC restaurants surgically implanted in the centre
of a billion square miles of black, grieving marshland.
Beyond the concrete underpass a vast, featureless plain of grey and dying straw opened out. The scale
was incomprehensible - I’d never even seen an unbroken horizon before. No trees. No peaks. No
elevation. No frame of reference whatsoever. Only the road, and a big smudge of concrete and light in
the distance.
A sweeping left bend and an elongated LCD road sign indicating three upcoming turnings. I approached
and studied it carefully - the text was East-Asian, but not Vietnamese or Korean; I could never really tell
the others apart. Familiar logos in the top-left hand corner: Burger King, MacDonald’s, Ikea, Uniqlo.
Another 300 metres - New Heights Kingdom Retail Outlet - 1.3km →.
I brushed myself off, folded the monsoon anorak into my rucksack, and slipped under the faux-gilded
entryway.
Silence.
A vast expanse of concrete and dense cloud. Superstores the size of aircraft hangers. Thousands of
sleeping uniform hatchbacks. I could have been anywhere: Stockholm, Dubai, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur,
Crewe, Widnes. A colossal, anonymous retail park.
I circled the car park twice before cutting my losses and walking towards Burger King. Superior flame
broiled beef patties, personalised selection of condiments. Nothing untoward here: immaculate
flowerbed, jumbo inflatable crown, signature red and blue neon.
The doors parted, and I wiped my shitty trainers on the doormat and sampled the air. All the familiar
trappings here: meat, bread, antibiotics, soft serve ice cream, brown plastic trays with menu sheets,
revolving plastic straw holders, western-style toilets, beige and black uniform with nametag and
matching cap. But the people, the people were different: comely and mild, content, the inverse of the
rough-hewn, mottled faces of Shanghai. Well-to-do Asian families eyeing precarious Zinger Tower
burgers: immaculate schoolchildren clad in Gap and H&M, fathers in modern business casual dress,
pleated khakis, polo shirts and brown slip on Hush Puppies. Weekend retreats to themed holiday
villages. Vanilla shakes, ten-pin bowling and heavy contract-grade carpet tiles at the mixed-use retail
development.
Flawless youths in winkle pickers and fitted plaid shirts made merry with a set of plastic Super Mario
figurines. Three girls and three boys yelped and giggled and filmed an epic Bowser Vs Toadsworth
melee with tablets and ice-white Smartphones.
My shadow crept over the table, but they pretended not to notice. I wanted to speak with them, but I am
too polite - I turned away and walked over to the counter. No English here - a dense block of
impenetrable Asian text with western numerals. I scratched my chin and ordered a No.4 - a Large
Whopper meal with Diet Pepsi. They refused my handful of Vietnamese Dong, but she smiled when I
offered pound sterling. I wondered if they’d accept my credit card and laid it out flat on her palm. She
studied it for a moment, shook her head and placed it back on the counter. I looked at her again and
shrugged my shoulders - she smiled, reached under the counter and pulled out a sealed plastic card with
Visa and Burger King logos and a magnetic strip on the reverse. I slipped it into my back pocket,
nodded, and found my way to an unoccupied window seat. Some kind of fast food loyalty card.
Whoppers always taste the same - from Milton Keyes to Paramaribo, beef patties are almost beef, lettuce
and tomato and sliced (not chopped) onion. Whoppers are consistent, and dependable, and that is why I
love them.
The shock had left me now. I was able to breath. And to think.
Someone must be making a quick buck out of this: some bent Vietnamese government official or some
gold-toothed bastard Chinese snakehead. No, this is the wrong way round - they’re supposed to sneak
poor people into rich countries. Maybe I’d pissed someone off - maybe this is some botched extradition, a
way to get me out of the slum. I‘d left the legal side to Michi - I didn’t even know if we were registered
with the authorities. Maybe this is their way of dealing with foreigners: don’t complain, don’t make a
scene, just make them disappear, now. The police will be here for me soon - a kilogram of heroin sewn
into my rucksack: firing squad, lethal injection. I will be famous for a fortnight, and then everybody will
forget.
I stepped into the bathroom and washed my hands thoroughly with anti-bacterial soap. Rub hands palm
to palm. Right palm over the other hand with interlaced fingers and vice versa. Rotational rubbing of left
thumb clasped in right palm and vice versa. Dry thoroughly with a towel. Duration of procedure: at least
15 seconds.
I studied my face in the mirror: healthy glow, full cheeks, bright eyes. The midday sun hadn’t yet robbed
my skin of its natural oils. I looked good - I hadn’t looked this good in a while. I plunged my head into
cold water and dabbed my face with a coarse paper towel. There must be a phone around here
somewhere.
The students had left now - a solitary Mario figurine butt-stomped the lid of the empty straw dispenser. I
lifted him by the moustache, ran my fingers over the matte finish PVC and checked the soles of his feet
for a trademark stamp - ‘Made in China.‘ The familiar face of Mario - the character cake my sister made
for my thirteenth birthday: bespoke Victorian sponge and a litre of black food colouring. I had green shit
for 72 hours, but it was fun all the same. That was a good day.
The doors parted. A row of beaming Burger King crew members grinned and waved in unison.
-’Bye bye!’
I tucked the figurine into my shirt pocket, crossed the threshold and turned east towards the Gap
superstore. Mario seemed happy now, bobbing and rattling away merrily as I walked. I lifted him out,
flipped him over, and saw a speaker grille and a plastic button on his back.
-‘Let’s-a-go!‘
A shadow enveloped my forearm. And then my shoulder. It bled over my chest and stole all the colour
from the world. I turned East to face the sun. And then I stumbled backwards. The figurine fell to the
tarmac and rattled in a knot of compressed sampled speech.
A gargantuan black monolith. Eight miles high.
I cupped my hand to my forehead, gawping in a fat and sugar induced stupor. My pupils dilated.
Flocks of dormant hatchbacks waited for their owners in funereal silence.
Six desaturated JPEG photos of a serrated glass and steel skyscraper. It’s too fucking big. It’s too big to be
real. Taller than the Burj Khalifa, taller than the Bottle Opener back in Shanghai. Two-dimensional,
overproduced - a cheap C.G render or artist’s impression, not glass and steel and concrete - the
promotional poster they paste around the building site.
I massaged my neck with both hands. I had walked right under its wing and hadn’t even noticed it. I will
never know how. The image still haunts me - 500,000 tonnes of glass and steel blooming silently as I
chewed on my flame grilled quarter-pounder, a vast strip of green card suspended in sodium silicate
solution, a paper tree in a salt crystal garden.
I turned away from the Gap superstore, walked back across the car park and studied the building from
the main entryway. Several miles away still...3.…4. I peeled myself away and took photos of the signage
and the road signs dotted along the freeway. Conscious mental notes now: landmarks, the relative
position of buildings, patches of vegetation, recurring combinations of numbers and text. I pulled out my
notepad and sketched out a rough map, and then I started to walk.
Two hours buoyed by salt and fat and sugar and panic, and there was weather now: streaks of brilliant
whipped cloud hanging motionless like egg white in water. That is a weather system. I am still on Earth.
I am still located. I felt better.
Immaculate flowerbeds lining the central reservation: palm trees and bleached walls - gated apartment
blocks in the Dubai-style. I counted the number of palm trees and noted their position on my map. I
stopped at the seventeenth and pulled off a leaf - treated, varnished, made out of wax. I circled around identical from all angles like some high resolution bitmap.
I walked for 57 minutes and 34 seconds. Unfamiliar vehicles coasted by: Limousine-hatchback hybrids,
updated mid-80’s style family station wagons, yellow facsimile MG-style convertibles. Homogenous
Asian pedestrians with intelligent faces, tiny shoulders, subcutaneous facial fat and feminine grace.
Smart casual dress: fitted checked shirts, rich brown corduroy trousers, royal blue polo shirts.
Cheekbone women in Gap knee length foldover skirts nibbling on snack-sized packets of seaweed
peanuts, MacBook Airs tucked neatly under toned forearms. A thousand postgraduate design students.
I wanted to ask for help, and approached a slender young man in a retro Hulk Hogan tee and Ray-Ban
Blue Fades. We almost made eye contact, but then he lowered his head and crossed the street to avoid
me. I am too polite. I didn’t ask anyone else.
Huge chrome structures visible through the palm tree canopy: cylindrical, sleek, narrow. Glass and air
and polished steel. Cycle paths running alongside an enamel blue canal - an enormous faux-moat
looping around a crystalline city. To my left a set of large irrigations channels and emerald green
pastures.
This is converted farmland.
Tetris Valley
15 ft high marble effect security gate. Two chain-smoking blue collar security guards dropped their fags
into a smokeless ashtray and waved me in.
A clean smell, like new plastic and bathroom cleaning products. The central strip a mile long canyon narrow and vertical and highly concentrated. A huge monochrome game of Tetris, tower blocks shifting
and rotating as I moved further in. Electric trams gliding silently from high street bank to shopping mall.
Messenger bags. Ringtones. White on-ear headphones. And a great and terrible chattering.
Anonymous office space, multinational retail megastores, compact fashion and jewellery retailers. I’m in
a Renault advert - that’s where I am. I am accompanied by an impeccable French house track. Beautiful
cheekbone ladies exit vehicles in tight yellow dresses, and a thousand coloured perplex cubes glide from
a high rise penthouse.
I must find Wi-Fi. Or a telephone. An internet café a real anachronism here. Starbucks. I darted forward,
scanning the dense, branching avenues for the familiar green logo - a technique perfected while
searching for my mother through supermarket aisles as a boy. She bought me Rhoal Dahl audio books
and Sonic the Hedgehog comics. I handed them to the sales assistant along with my pocket money, and
she smiled and accepted. Sometimes she patted me on the head, and sometimes she didn’t.
The side streets ran for several hundred yards, eventually meeting a 6 ft high natural polished stone city
wall. The northern security gate was visible from the central strip’s mid-point. A full complement of
multinational brands concentrated into 15km2 and arranged in the orthogonal style of a traditional
Chinese walled city.
Starbucks. Unintelligible East-Asian chatter - vaguely Cantonese, a regional dialect maybe. I emptied my
pockets. £17.28 cash. I would run out of money soon, and then I would be in real trouble. I shuffled my
cards and bit down on my lower lip. The cashier smiled and noticed my Burger King loyalty card.
-’Ah!’
She tapped on the hologram with an immaculate plum coloured fingernail and flashed me a coy little
smile. I released the card and she ran it face down over a contactless reader. A high frequency beep - she
nodded and directed me to the seating area.
I had paid for my drink, but I don’t know how. I hadn’t given them my bank details.
Three sachets of saccharine sweetener and two wooden stir sticks. An inconspicuous rear-facing table
with faux-leather couches. I pulled out my phone - No Service. I sipped my coffee and scanned around
the room: uber trendy identikit Asians tickling ice white Ultrabooks, falafel and espressos, minimal
house music, ludicrously expensive Magma design books. A young male browsed the internet on a small
glossy tablet device: Wikipedia, CCTV.CN, incomprehensible Asian Google equivalents.
I would like to buy a new Netbook, but everyone says they‘re obsolete - most places don‘t even stock
them any more. My old Netbook was matte black, and I always liked matte black, but you can’t really
get it any more - now all is piano black, all is hairline scratch and fudgy fingerprint. I will be buried in
piano black. Please do not handle my casket, but if you must, polish me with Brasso and a micro fibre
cloth once a year. Bring spectacle wipes to my funeral and bury me with 5x multi-pack yellow dusting &
polishing cloths.
My phone would die soon, and I had no charger. I wiped the iridescent finger smudges from my
wristwatch - a billion hairline scratches on my indestructible 80s vintage Men’s Casio Chronograph
Watch. My brother once ran over it in his car, and still it lives. This is a good watch, and this is a cheap
watch.
I hadn’t seen any payphones. I tipped back my latte and approached the cashier - she caught my eye and
smiled cautiously. I cupped my hand to my ear and mouthed ‘telephone.’ She collated for a second, then
consulted her colleague - a shake of her head and a wave of her delicate hand.
-’…English?’
She shook her head, softly now. I didn’t want to push. I am too polite.
I was tired and dirty and scared, and I had to find somewhere to rest. Sleep, eat, and take a hot shower my acute psychotic episode would have to wait until morning. I found an internet cafe ¼ of a mile
further along the strip - here I could sleep and use the internet. Tomorrow I would find a working
telephone, or an English speaker.
Heavenly Place Café.
A flock of homogenous white collar workers getting their MMORPG fix and a cheap meal away from
their families. Clean, light, glossy - no live chickens here, no teenage couples having sex in the private
booths.
Imitation mahogany desks, subtle LED fluorescent lighting, black leather reclining office chairs, British
racing green signage, cream anthropomorphic canary logo, Eras Demi Ict font. I’d used one of these
places in Japan: private booths, reasonably priced fried chicken, Playstation 3.
Playstation 2 was better - the greatest back catalogue in the history of video games, though it pains me to
say it - I will always be a Sega man. Playstation 2, Summer 2005. I’d planned to fly to Europe and drift
about like a modern day Lao Tsu, working odd jobs and writing my picaresque masterpiece. Don’t plan,
feel, flow through the world, no rhyme or reason, the answer will present itself in time - all that Tao
bollocks. I spent most of my time curled up in a duvet eating packets of mustard and playing Pro
Evolution Soccer 5. Eight weeks imprisoned in the cramped single bedroom of a pissy shared flat, dusty
afternoons clicked away in a deserted internet café: smoke a few cigarettes, post a few desultory job
applications to themed Italian ski resorts. I needn’t have left home at all - I ran up against the exact same
brick wall, the same blank expression in the mirror.
I bowed to the assistant. She reciprocated, waved her hand and led me around the café. Modern desks
and booths, showers and coin lockers, hot towels and bidets, vending machines selling European lager
and Duracell batteries. I waved my credit card over the reader and climbed into an extra large private
booth with a reclining leather office chair and a piano black desktop computer. I ordered a croissant and
an English breakfast tea, then reached under the desk and hit the power button. Two anxious minutes.
One cigarette smoked.
There.
Some odd bespoke search engine pop-up: ‘Kaleko.’ Google search blocked. Google maps and street view
blocked. Yahoo E-mail blocked. Download proxy server. Download link blocked. A billion blank pages
with a single line of blue Asian script. Barely any Romanised characters whatsoever. The internet was
completely crippled, just like Shanghai.
Fuck it.
I lit a cigarette, waved to the waitress and pointed to the food menu. Chicken burger, sesame seed bun. It
arrived in two minutes flat. The blood rushed to my stomach, and my heart laboured.
Sleep now. And I did.
Home
I was the only white man in town: a rogue cell, a pariah, a foot taller than anybody else - and no one
seemed to notice, not a single raised fucking eyebrow. I yearned for the hostility of hissing Japanese
salarymen, the inferiority complexes of overweight Malaysian office internees. They didn’t even seem to
speak with each other here, just pawed away at ice-white 4G tablets, plugged their ears with audiophile
IEM headphones and buried their heads in slim line matte finish E-readers.
I began to introduce myself to pedestrians at random, but none of them would talk to me. They turned
their heads, ducked around corners, hopped onto buses, raised their Smartphones and stormed straight
past. The following afternoon I tried to surrender myself at a Koban-type police box, but they refused to
arrest me. The constable shooed me out of his office while forcing an inch-thick wad of tourist leaflets
into my coat pocket. I almost wept at his feet.
I was the schizophrenic now - the wide eyed cat lady. The vociferous tramp pausing to rub his back, rest
his eight shopping bags of Heinz Baked Beans on the pavement and scream at the unfeeling concrete.
I woke in terror at 5am sharp. Michi’s polygon head, my mother’s voice and the blooming crystal
skyscraper. I ran through the café and out of the front door, clattering the panel into flimsy brickwork as
the night staff shuffled Ghibli-themed playing cards, completely oblivious.
A crisp morning, dry and cool - my breath almost visible. Delivery vans and newsvendors, the smell of
freshly baked goods from a thousand new convenience stores, candy coloured neon diffused in fine mist.
I bought a pack of cigarettes and walked towards the north gate - a tram glided silently by my left ear as
schoolchildren dangled fleshy shins from the metro stop benches.
The north gate was closed. An ancient security officer rose from his stool, stamped out a king-size
cigarette, and the gate hummed outwards. He seemed to exhale forever as he saluted me and lit another.
I followed the road for a mile or so. The mist lifted and the palm trees thinned as I neared the off-ramp a sweeping right bend feeding into a vast multi-lane expressway. Eight empty lanes and LED panels
offering traffic updates to no one.
I walked for five hours. 5 x 4 = 20 miles. Three cars passed me on the way: two chrome station wagons
and a sporty black convertible. Blisters bled, back, calf and core muscles winced, and my legs finally
surrendered.
Nothing. White sun and piss-coloured Siberian steppe.
I turned to my right and waded off into the Feather Grass, my sense of scale obliterated by the
unfathomable expanse of featureless space. A million miles of low, spiny shrubs: no landmarks, no
punctuation - a monopolised narrative of Sheep’s Fescue and Japanese Quails. I laughed hysterically and
fell to my knees. Gently rolling hillside to the East appeared off-kilter somehow - a low polygon render
with indistinct grass textures. The warping textures of some shit mid-nineties 3D videogame: ‘Tunnel
B1.‘ No anisotropic filtering here. Distortion of linear texture mapping. Hardware incapable of per-pixel
perspective correction.
This world is much bigger than I am.
I filled my memory card with photos, then hauled myself on to my feet and walked back.
Shard
My socks were saturated with blood, and nobody cared. I fell to my knees at the entrance to Harvey
Nichols, and nobody came for me. I clambered into a public hire taxi, and the driver had severe cataracts.
He didn’t talk much, but he was a very nice man indeed.
Benign indifference. Faceless dandies shuffled from station to station. Multinational coffeehouse to Imax
cinema. Super-club to Mediterranean Grill and Bar.
Heavenly Place. A look of mild concern from the duty manager. I was pale and stooped, and I smelled
absolutely fucking horrendous. I sipped on an ice coffee and coughed, all teary-eyed and wasted.
And then.
A shaft of silver light from the bay window.
The skyscraper.
It had been muted all day - a vast shard of black ice casting beams of three dimensional shadow through
the fine mist. Now it gleamed once more - white light attacking my retina like a mid-winter sun. It
wanted me there. I dropped my coffee spoon, crumpled my disposable polystyrene cup and ran to the
entrance.
It was so simple - I would take the elevator to the highest viewing platform and look out over the plain. I
could see for miles from up there - 30-40, maybe more, depending on visibility. A frame of reference, a
forest or mountain range, some gigantic, buzzing airport on the horizon, a great, terrible smoking
Chinese megalopolis. Something.
I had to pay £6 at the front gate, and a small man in a fluorescent vest waved me in to the lobby. Preshow promo video - ambient electronic music and generic cartoon characters flitting over a rotating 3D
model of the building. I squeezed myself into the elevator with a group of conservatively dressed office
workers and pale tourists with matching imitation leather bum bags. I leaned back against the door and
stared into the polished chrome panel. A pallid face made eyes with me.
We ascended for eight minutes. Floors rushed by on the LCD panel. 8. 13. 26. 42. 76. The music
accelerated as we neared the summit. Generic house. Generic Dubstep. 3D projection light show dancing
over the walls and ceiling. Pungent tea breath. Sweat lifting from starched collars. Elbows buried in
kidneys. Clusters of anonymous junior managers.
The observation deck was filled with light, mirrors and translucent Plexiglas floor panels. 30 metres in
length, a viewing panel overlapping the floors below - a dense chrome underworld of escalators, beams
and bridges. Identikit families raiding the overstocked gift shop. Minute Asian schoolchildren dancing
over the deck - sunhats, lunchboxes and little rubber legs, diminutive light-up sneakers squeaking over
12 inches of Plexiglas. At the northern tip a vertiginous view of the city below. I sank my nails into my
right thigh and lurched over to the viewing panel.
A walled octagonal grid plan city. Nine main streets criss-crossing in a grid pattern. Gates on all four
sides. A retrofit ancient Beijing.
I gritted my teeth and lifted my head.
There.
Spirit level flat and near-featureless. An endless plain. There was no city, and there was no airport. The
expressway cut a channel through the plain and dissolved in a distant, hazy wash of electricity and
pollution. The river snaked away to the north and split into thread-like tributaries which petered out as
they met the horizon. It was much smaller than I remembered.
I slipped back into the elevator and descended to the ground floor. The pallid face made eyes again - I
counted the capillaries in his right eyeball, and we shared a little joke at my expense. The humble man
with a fluorescent vest patted me on the shoulder as I exited through the front door. I think he was
trying to console me.
Möbius strip
I wandered through town aimlessly for days. Days felt like weeks.
It didn’t even hurt anymore, The anxiety was gone. I was resigned to my fate. I couldn’t leave the now,
even if I found a way out.
I started to think seriously about killing myself. I started making notes and weighing up my options: run
in front of a tram, compress my carotid arteries with an Ethernet cable, set myself on fire and run
screaming into Nando’s on a Saturday night. They were all good ideas, but none of them stuck.
No. That’s not the way to do it. You must jump. You must jump from the shard. Do it. End it. It felt right.
It was symbolic, or something. An empty sack of exploded white man fused to a gleaming polished
stone sidewalk. No one knew who, and no one knew why. They would soon forget.
No. Not here. Impossible. You cannot commit suicide here - some Honda Nismo anti-gravity system
would catch me mid-fall and propel me into the nearest plush microfibre Starbucks couch, Caramel
Frappuccino in hand. I was fucked. My luck had finally run out.
It happens to everyone eventually. We are all born to lose, I never thought I’d make it this far anyway.
This is a good place to die, all things considered. Stuck inside of my own dream. It’s just what I always
wanted. Everybody gets what they want.
I couldn’t think of anything to do on the eighteenth day, so I decided to go shopping. I toured the
department stores and independent electronics retailers and bought useless trinkets with my new credit
card: an upgraded Smartphone, a set of audiophile wireless 2.1 speakers, and a pair of premium noise
isolating headphones. The sun kissed the back of my neck, the wind blew through my hair, and I felt
happy. Shopping gives me a rush.
The receptionist woke me at 9am with a complimentary tomato and beef on rye sandwich. No
mayonnaise. Vacuum sealed. I smiled and bowed. Sunlight illuminated the veins in a slice of beefsteak
tomato, and I felt happy. It was sunny and cool that morning, and I decided to go for a walk. I hadn’t
seen all of the city centre yet, and I wanted to get a good look at the moat, the east gate, and the Northern
Quarter. I followed the strip east for half a mile before hugging the city walls to the north. Today they
were glistening - at some points they were quite cool, and at others they were hot to the touch.
The Northern Quarter: a cluster of coffee shops, live music venues, expensive design bookshops and
trendy vintage clothes stores. I looped around the block three times before stopping for lunch at the
‘Green Apple Café:’ jazz and folk and ambient house, falafel and green tea and organic wholewheat
bloomers. I picked up a menu and ordered by sight. An enormous bowl of homemade pumpkin soup,
home-made cakes and cookies, Chinese red sausage and a cup of black tea.
A conspicuously high concentration of design students here: checked shirts, canvas high top trainers,
round frame vintage spectacles. I scanned the room, searching for a familiar face in the crowd: an old
friend to tap me on the shoulder, a policeman to bend my arm back and cart me off to the station.
Anything.
The music stopped, and the crowd hushed. A waif-like lady with a battered old acoustic guitar walked
on-stage, removed her threadbare donkey jacket and turned to face the audience. I nearly flung my soup
across the room - she was Caucasian. A faint ripple of applause from the crowd.
The gaunt, windy face of an authentic folk musician: purple split-end hair, ashen skin and deathly pallor.
Born under an ancient dead Oak tree on the North Yorkshire moors, under a flagstone in a council estate
in deepest, darkest Northumberland. A million, billion miles away from here. On another plane of
existence.
Intro. 4/4 time signature. I waited for a haunting voice. Something maudlin. Something melancholy. But
she didn‘t even sing. Immaculate finger picking - the opening phrase of Bert Jansch‘s ‘Angie.’
All the sickness left me.
This is a moth’s life - a week on the inside of a windowpane.
The impeccably mannered student audience cooed and whistled. Three teenage boys with emaciated
arms asked for an autograph, and she waved politely and smiled like a good sport. Her set had finished
now. I walked to the stage and opened my mouth.
‘Excuse me.‘
A short, wide security man with a Billy Ray Cyrus mullet approached me, and I called out to her. She
glanced and smiled cautiously as a troupe of moth-eaten roadies grabbed her by the shoulders and
shuffled her off stage.
-‘Please...‘
The security man put his palm to my chest and forced me back to the door.
And then she was gone.
That was my last chance.
I raised my hands and lowered my head. Please have mercy, I have lost my way. I tried to talk to them, I
tried to beg, but they didn’t speak any English. They didn’t even let me finish my pumpkin soup.
I sat on the curb for an hour or so. Five cigarettes and a can of Apple Tango from a chattering vending
machine. Young mothers with aerodynamic pushchairs crossed the street to avoid me - I looked like a
bum. I was a bum. I stood, walked to the end of the block, and headed west along the wall. Sleek, dark,
expensive natural stone. I walked for twenty minutes before hitting the intersecting western wall.
The north-west corner was different - free from the city hum and rattle, secluded, leafy and hushed. A
different crowd here: silent veiled mothers and the pattering feet of immaculately turned-out toddlers. I
passed over a red wooden bridge guarded by two stone Lions and entered a large, sheltered bonsai
garden filled with shadows and pomegranate trees and a giant stone sundial. The path ran through a
circular stone entrance, and I emerged by a large, round lotus pond surrounded by coniferous trees.
A handful of tourists danced around with their children, and a cacophony of iPhone camera shutter
sound effects reverberated around a tall stone and glass mobius strip - a core of dramatic stone ribbons
wrapped in iridescent etched glass twisting upwards from the centre of the pond. I moved forward and
ran my hands over engraved Buddhist iconography: Lakshanas, lotus flowers, the Wheel of Law. A
contemporary Buddhist temple.
I entered the building through an elliptical stone archway, the faint rattle of my chest amplified by the
cavernous main hall. A hollow space shifting gradually from a low to high elevation with no stairs or
steep slopes and no clear distinction between ceiling, wall, or floor. Natural light danced over steel and
glass and a tiny stone altar in the centre of the room. A row of offering cups, flowers, incense, and a little
red scarf. I searched through my pockets for an offering, and pulled out a cellophane wrapped biscuit.
Buddha loves an almond Biscotti.
The outer garden was deserted now, and I counted my footsteps as I crossed the courtyard. An unearthly
bird song as I reached the Japanese-style wooden bridge. I turned and caught sight of a lone figure tiptoeing over the uppermost ribbon: faint and dark and slight. gliding over the polished stone like a
Maglev train. I turned back again when I reached the entryway, but it had disappeared.
Sideways
I found a Tower Records superstore that evening.
The Beatles - Rubber Soul. The Fall - Live at the Witch Trials. I flicked through their manuals, sniffed the
glossy paper, ran my hands over the embossed print and read the bullshit Mojo magazine retrospective
essays on the inside cover. Familiar images like intimate family photos now: George Harrison’s drawn
cheeks, Charles Font’s warped typography, purple ink stain Cheshire trees.
They made me feel ok, for a little while. I’d listened to them both a thousand times, but they sounded
different tonight: flat, hollow. The content was the same, but the music didn’t belong to me any more.
I spent hours looking sideways,
to the time when I was sixteen,
‘Cos I’m in a trance,
Oh and I sweat,
I don’t want to dance,
I want to go home,
I’m frightened.
This is a joke. A cruel joke. An elaborate Chinese psychological experiment.
Find the white man‘s breaking point. Exploit his inferior resolve.
Short days passed. I was a vagrant. An immaculately turned out vagrant. I’d lost body fat and muscle
mass, and my baby cheeks looked like used pyramid tea bags. My Converse Hi-tops were falling apart,
and no one carried my shoe size. I was suffering from chronic jock itch, and I couldn’t read the labels in
the pharmacy.
Stomach cramps, insomnia, loss of concentration, abdominal pain. All the music had been beaten from
me. I wanted to confess. I wanted to repent. I knelt at my desk and prayed to God. I have never prayed
before, not properly - I had never needed to.
I dreamed deep dreams. I dreamed about the end. And when I woke up, I remembered. The freeway.
The sun. The steppe. The neon shit haze. I wanted to walk out. And never come back.
I shuffled into another internet café, dutifully now. It was hopeless - I would never find out where I was,
or why I was here. I would never be able to leave this town. The staff relocated me to a fully enclosed
room the following morning, free of charge - Heavenly Place’s generous customer loyalty policy.
Fragrant, air conditioned, spotless and soundproofed - my PC upgraded, my ashtray smokeless, a
modest private bathroom - but I could not stay there. My brain skipped about, and silent people shuffled
around outside. I heard things I didn’t want to hear. I rose at 3 and rocked back in forth in my chair for
an hour or so. I held my knees and closed my eyes and prayed for morning to come.
A firework screamed and popped over head.
I walked over to the window and looked out on to the street. Beneath a Perspex Metro station a tearful
little boy cowered from a relentless volley of Chinese fireworks. His young mother cradled him in her
arms, whispered in his ear and rubbed his back in a circular motion. Maybe she was trying to explain the
purpose of fireworks.
The barrage stopped, and the noise evaporated. She loaded him onto her back and they stepped onto the
train. I didn’t want them to leave. My brain filled the vacuum with small thoughts and binary code. I
blew on the tip of my cigarette and twisted it into my forearm. Good. The pain was good. Brain
defibrillator.
I made a fist, wound my arm back and drove my fist into the wall. Good. Cheap two-coat plaster. I
raised my left and punched again. And again. For half an hour. I took off my shirt and shuffled around
in a spastic little funk dance.
Good.
The plaster flaked away and exposed the brickwork. I cut my hands to ribbons, and in the morning I
found myself a new spot. Within two weeks the wall was brown and hard like old leather.
I studied my hands: blunt trauma, blood and broken skin, raw knuckles, fluid rushing to damaged
tissue, dramatic bruising in my wrists and knuckles, blood leaking into muscles, tendons and soft tissues.
My heart beat nice and steady, and I could breath again.
Self-harm works. It is effective. This was a regimen now. It had given me structure. It had punctuated
my day. Liberated me. Arbeit macht frei. I cut myself with Boot’s miniature traveller’s medical pack
scissors and made a tally chart: a notch for every day.
Ritual. It was always there - always a whisker away. I was painting myself blue, praying to the river god
like some pale Neolithic animist on the Orkney Islands.
Self harm and retail is a potent mix. Neatly bandaged hands and outrageous shopping sprees: Levi‘s
jackets, electronics, Vodka, Diet Coke, Kahlua and milk. A £500 daily limit, and then my card would be
declined. My room was filled with toys. Christmas morning every morning.
Wake at 8. Shower. Stomach crunches, bicep curls and presses. A two hour walk. Videogames. Read.
Masturbate. Get drunk. Talk to myself in a white Russian stupor. Hit the wall. Eight hours sleep.
No one knew me. No one expected anything. No one cared who I was. I was free. I was invisible. Stuck
in an endless nightmare. And the fear had left me.
I felt almost content.
Dutch Kinetic Elite
Mark’s & Spencer’s Simply Food: I hadn’t seen a complete paragraph of English text for weeks. I studied
the tag on a 4 Pack of Authentic Stretch Cotton Assorted Briefs intently. The list of ingredients on a tartan
packet of shortbread biscuits made me sob like some poor, forgotten grandmother. Egg sandwiches,
tiramisu cheesecake and 2 litres of mineral water - a picnic on a Summer‘s day.
I left the northern gate and followed the waterfront boardwalk, tracing the crystalline moat around the
outer city walls. I sat on a bench for twenty minutes, then entered the Eastern gate and sliced through the
narrow public park before meeting the shaded pavement arcades to the west. To the north the geometric
grid gave way to a warren of alleyways resembling a traditional souk. LED streetlights purred - white
light and multiple shadows.
-Improved Community Safety.
-Reduced Energy use and Light Pollution.
-Even Light Distribution.
-Reduced Risks to Motorists.
I sat on an aluminium bench and ate my sandwiches. People bought things, ate nice lunches, drank
caramel macchiatos and then went home. And they seemed to know something. It was a nice little day,
and now it was time to leave.
I returned to Heavenly Place, drank a sweet cup of tea and followed the freeway East.
The security men smoked hungrily and waved me through with illuminated nightsticks. I walked for 2
½ miles along a broad, two lane stretch of featureless highway, smaller in scale than the multi lane
northern freeway. Relatively rugged terrain here: a smattering of light hills, palm trees and yellowed
grass. The sky was overcast: dense, milky and still. I was passed at a bridge by a troupe of Lycra-clad
cyclists - shard office workers on a company away day. They waved and shouted something friendly as
they passed.
Late afternoon.
An unmanned faux-traditional Chinese gate. Hanging lanterns and a blood red colour-coated steel
archway. Birds sang. Strange birds that sounded like children. I emerged in a huge, incomplete
residential development. Months. Years. Subtropical vegetation forced its way through cracked paving
slabs. Marble effect fountain covered in algae and concrete dust. Small piles of neatly arranged bricks
and building tools. Vast sheet of blue tarpaulin stretched over mountains of solid cement and stacked
steel girders.
Four shrink-wrapped ten story apartment buildings. Featureless plaster and imitation marble. Bamboo
scaffolds and green nylon sheeting. Dubai wrapped inside of Hong Kong. I cut a hole in the netting and
peered through the window. Numberless apartments lining a dim, uncarpeted corridor. Dust and jagged
shafts of light and silence. I ripped the net apart and stepped into the porch. Keypad mounted on the
wall at my right. Six missing buttons. Insulated wire poking out from the grille. I pressed the red ‘call’
button six times. No response. I grabbed the steel handle and pulled firmly. The door swung open in a
cloud of flaking paint and concrete dust.
Echoes, and the smell of sawdust, paint and wood varnish. Half finished light fixtures, wiring poking
through rough holes punched through plaster. Dust swirled around my shoulders as I laboured up eight
flights of stairs and looked out over the city from the balcony of apartment 916. An unfamiliar building
to the south-east - a stepped glass structure with a turf coated rooftop. Futuristic Japanese driving range
meets ancient South-East Asian rice terrace. I drank a full can of Lilt and stubbed a cigarette out on the
back of my hand.
An exit on the ground floor opened out into a broad courtyard and garden. White plastic tables and
parasols streaked with dirt. Sacks of hardened sand and cement. Flowerbeds of tangled weed and dead
leaves. Rusting exercise bicycles, monkey bars and manual treadmills. I clambered over a low wooden
fence and found a compact resort-style golf course. Sand traps without sand, overgrown greens
pockmarked like a cooking apple with a worm infestation. I removed my jacket and lay down on the
turf. Sweet tea, shortbread biscuits and egg sandwiches.
The sky was overcast, and humidity was low - a little patch of open glass sky to the west. I took a sip
from my Thermos and pulled out the copy of Edge magazine I’d bought at the airport before leaving for
Hong Kong. I had read the articles hundreds of times before. It was like resistance training.
Significant videogame releases of the last 20 years. 1996 - Nights Into Dreams. I was 9 years old. That
was the year my brother went to study at Blackpool College of Technical Illustration - we went to see
Star Trek: First contact at the cinema that Winter. January or February? I can’t remember. The Borg gave
me nightmares, and I remember the horrible wind that day - my Mother’s earring blew away down a
side street. We searched for an hour but couldn’t find it. The earring was amber, and my father had
given it to her at Christmas time. 2004 - Knights of the Old Republic 2. I had just started at university. I
read a review while waiting for a train at Chester station. I was excited, but it was bitterly cold that day.
There was nothing on the platform. My duffel coat helped to break the wind.
A shuffling of feet from the adjacent apartment block. A group of tall, upright silhouettes huddled
together by the wooden stables. Sunhats and chino shorts, straight backs and bloated calf muscles. They
turned and glided over to the deserted club house. I tipped back the rest of my tea, picked up my
rucksack and walked towards them. I could heard one of them talking now. - European, Germanic. I
kicked up a cloud of gravel, and a startled middle-aged man turned towards me. He was Caucasian.
I paced towards him - salivating, rabid. He tapped his wife on the shoulder and they turned to face me
like some Aryan barbershop quartet. Two young males in their early twenties stepped out to defend the
family unit: folded arms, deep-set eyes and matching golf outfits: Nike Tech Core Stripe LC Polo Shirt,
Ping Collection Golf Purify Trousers, Adidas adiCOMFORT 2.
I didn’t know what to say. I stopped and stood motionless. My shoulders were hunched. Defensive. I
straightened out my back and crossed my arms over my chest. Mirroring. I relaxed and let them hang
loose at my side.
Introduce yourself.
-‘H…hello.’
I remembered to smile.
-‘Hello?’
-‘…I…haven’t seen any westerners…for a long time…here.’
Pause.
-‘No, my English is not too good, yes? I am Dutch…we are all Dutch. Can we help you?’
-‘…I am a little lost today. Could you please tell me where I am?’
He glanced at his wife.'
-‘…..Oh, but you cannot be lost at all. Look, there is the city right there….You cannot miss it if you take
this road over here.’
-‘Yes but…..I am lost…I mean I…what is this city called?’
The younger men stepped forward - I was being flanked. They looked me up and down and sniffed the
air.
-‘…I don’t understand.’
-‘I mean I don’t know where I am. I don’t know what country I am in...Is this Vietnam?’
-‘…No…Well, I am soon to be starting a job in Hong Kong. It’s….how you say….Engin...Engineering.
Emirates National Oil Company. They send me here to find a home for my family and I...’
-‘Hong Kong? Ok. Where are we now though?…We’re near Hong Kong?
-‘It’s…um…well we transferred directly from the airport. It…we are going to live here soon. My job
begins in the next month. We came to look at this…development here….Please excuse our attire, we
knew there was a golf course here and so we brought our things with us. We did not know the course
had not been finished so you see….Hahahaha…………All dressed up and nowhere to go, yes?
Hahahah….’
-‘…But you don’t know where this place is?’
-‘I…the company sent me here. They said it was a nice place…and brand new. It cannot be too far from
Hong Kong. We did not fly for too long, I think.’
-‘….Do you have anything…do you have a mobile phone or anything to…I need help.’
-‘Oh, but of course. I…here, you can use mine.’
He passed me a Smartphone. I handed it back.
-‘No signal.’
-‘What?…Well…you can see that this is a new development. Maybe they don’t have the
uh….infrastructure for this network yet….’
An unmarked chrome saloon glided down the driveway.
-‘Ah! I am sorry. We must leave now. Our cab is here.’
They dropped their bottles of Yakult and slipped away. I ran after them.
-‘But…please….could you give me a lift to….’
The older boy turned and raised his palm.
-’Please…’
Hostel
That day was very odd.
Last stand. Gambarimasu. Mountains of coffee and cheap fags. A meagre line of reconstituted MDMA
crystals. Eight hours of relentless clicking. A splitting migraine. I macheted through masses of dense
Asian text. Chinese pop stars. Japanese anime porn. Bearded rioters with shoulder mounted rocket
launchers in far flung sandy countries. Two hours burrowing through slick pan-Asian news websites. I
will see you in the next life.
Low-res image of a faux-Jacobean stately home - a gaggle of purple rinses eating Salmon sandwiches by
an ancient oak door. I recognised it immediately - Parrox Hall in Blackpool, Lancashire. I browsed
hundreds of images: family weekend retreats, weddings, children‘s birthday parties. My heart slipped
away. I’d been to Parrox hall as a nine-year-old boy. I played on the monkey bars at the adventure
playground. I met one of my best friends there. The blood fell out of my head. I slipped out of the chair
and collided with the floor.
Back curved. Head bowed. Foetal position on vinyl Zebra pattern floor tiles. I rolled up my sleeves and
studied the scars on my forearms. It is impossible to keep a cigarette burn clean.
I shifted my weight. The optical mouse fell from the desk and lay helpless on the tiles, casting a net of
infrared light over my face. I picked it up, cradling it like a newborn as I looked up at the monitor. A
monochrome image of the mass suicides in Demmin, Germany, 1945. Blackened corpses drifting face
down in the Peene river. A satellite map of Northern Germany. I rubbed my eyes and clicked. The map
scrolled to central and Eastern Europe. I clicked again: Cardiff, South Wales. I rolled the central wheel
back: mainland Europe.
A frantic drag to the East: Okinawa, southern Japan. Left. Down. The Asian continent. Highly
compressed image. Twenty seconds to upscale.
An animated pinpoint hovering over the southern coast of China.
Zoom. Hong Kong island. Drag left. Cursor bobbing. A couple of hundred miles to the west.
An island.
I didn‘t know its name. I didn‘t care. Tens of flashing icons now: cities, towns, airports, hospitals. I
tracked a multi-lane freeway north. Airport on the southern edge of a big blob amoeba city. G224. 100120 miles north.
I threw my ashtray across the room and called out my name.
It was 5am. The café was closing at 9.
Tomorrow.
I copied the characters from the address bar into my notepad. Tomorrow I would print off a map.
Tomorrow I would walk north. To the end of the Earth. My mouth was dry.
I ran to the convenience store: cigarettes, coffee and Baijiou. My notepad attracted the attention of three
elderly ladies resting on a park bench. I hadn’t seen a paper notepad since Vietnam. I rested at the metro
stop and scribbled desperately: name, date of birth, first pet, primary school teachers, favourite TV
shows.
100 miles. 25 hours. Fuck it. I would walk until I fell over, then I would get up and walk some more. I
would collapse and die on that endless, desolate steppe. At least I wouldn’t be here.
I searched for a modestly priced hotel. Eight Holiday Inns. Ten Holiday Inns. I thought about sleeping at
the metro station. A broadsheet newspaper and a Thermos of Yorkshire tea.
An old dead skin man called out to me, 100 hundred yards shy of the north gate. Foot-long silk beard.
Skin like dead leaves. 150 years old. Poor migratory farmer. Hyper-rapid urbanisation. He didn’t fit. He
waved me into his improvised corrugated steel hostel. Physical keys. I hadn’t used keys for a long time.
Bunk beds held together with string. No en-suite bathroom. No air conditioning. Smell like old cloths,
mildew and wet paint. My room was turquoise. I liked it there.
It rained that evening. I watched from the window. Rain and no people. Silence. Molten glass and steel.
Flecks of neon burning up on impact. A solitary monk in coolie hat rattling a tiny bell and gliding over
the empty scramble crossing.
In the morning. I’m out. This is the end.
Bulk SMS
Air and sunlight. I plunged my head into a basin of cold water. It felt like lead.
The morning was clean and fine and smelled like mowed lawns and freshly baked pastry products.
Happy people chattering. Dogs barking. I wanted to feel happy.
I opened the notepad and ran my fingertips over the characters. Faint ball point indentations. Rough
texture of ground wood pulp. I wrote my name at the foot of the page and read it out loud. I smudged
the ink across the page with my fingertip. Good.
The streets were thick with small, happy faces, tinted spectacles, denim shorts, fine black hair and Ecigarette vapour. Students bathed in light on the brilliant turf of the central square. Pretty girls read
novels and flicked through design magazines. Love shy boys fiddled with Iphones and watched Premier
League Soccer on vast LCD panels. Smiling Tibetan Mastiffs lapped at the illuminated LED fountain.
Tranquil hum of passing metro trains. Today is a good day. This is a nice world.
An old lady wobbled at the apex of a miniature Japanese garden bridge. Her dog barked. I started to run.
And then an unholy noise.
Compressed high frequency audio. A sibilant mess of garbled electronic noise. Classical music. Snatches
of Dubstep. R&B. Indie. A thousand stunned faces. Static. The metro train stopped. The sunlight dipped.
Fifty thousand mobile phones chiming simultaneously.
And then silence.
A dog barked. Faint bells from the Buddhist temple. A Mexican standoff.
Elderly man reached into his pocket and pulled out a matte plastic relic with squat rubber aerial and a
monochrome screen. He prodded the keypad deliberately. A midi jingle echoed around the square.
People waited. And then his face dropped. He looked at his feet and shook his head.
The others dug into their pockets and buried their heads, neotenous features bathed in rainbow OLED
light. They knew it was coming. They checked their watches, consulted one another, and calmly filed on
to the metro train. The dogs barked. The park creaked back to life. But it was different now. Preoccupied.
A bulk SMS. A mass text message. I will never know what it said.
I followed them onto the train. The carriage was damp and still. No Manga or handhelds or video games.
Anxious faces. Heads buried in apps and text messages. Something was coming.
The train pulled in. I stepped out onto the strip, and it was different. A layer had been stripped away.
People made eye contact. People moved quickly. A group of young people jostling by a capsule toy
vending machine. Screaming. Shouting. Gesticulating. Goat-eyed middle aged lady smashed Gundam
gashapons into ganguro girl’s orange head. Mob of thin schoolchildren jostled with staff at the
coffeehouse. 14 year-old knee smashed a store assistant’s ice white tablet. Acne ridden friend slugged a
waiter clean in the kidney. Frothy latte macchiato bubbled on the patio.
Hundreds of them now. I’d never seen them so animated. Nine-year-old girls mashed mobile phones
with their baby teeth. Lost grandmothers circled imitation palm trees, muttering and staring into space.
Lone policeman left his koban and stood motionless. Wide-eyed. Scratching at his scalp. I offered him
cigarette, and he accepted. His walky-talky bounced off the concrete.
I arrived at the café at 11am. Busier now - a pack of young professionals sweating and grimacing over a
workstation. I swallowed an Ibuprofen, maximised the browser and cross-referenced my notebook with
the characters on the keyboard. It took ten minutes to complete the address. I hammered down on the
return key.
A Blank page. Single line of blue Asian text. Refresh. Internet down. I shifted chairs and tried again.
Dead.
LCD panel refreshed. I rested my nose on the screen and swam through a galaxy of pixilation and haloed
desktop icons. This monitor is set to the wrong resolution. That never happened with CRT. They worked
with pretty much anything. CRT is superior to LCD. It gives you a headache. That is a good thing.
No map. No map for me. I would have to find my own way. Good.
I lit a cigarette and bit down on my fingernail. A weight had been lifted. I placed my notepad on the
desk, closed my eyes and slept. Twenty three hours. I sank without a trace. Down to the ocean floor. I fell
so deep I must have died and come back. And then it was dark outside. The café was overflowing. Office
workers smoked hungrily. A bookish young lady filled her mug at the hot chocolate machine.
I checked the monitor. Dead. No wireless networks detected. I slipped on my jacket and walked to the
entrance. A room of pensive faces and scrambled Word documents. Mountains of paperwork sprawled
over faux-mahogany desks. Passports. I.D cards. Accommodation contracts. Job applications. Staff
members loading armfuls of paper into exhausted printers.
The street was silent. And there was nowhere for me to go.
I circled the square three times then headed north along the strip. The clouds spat. Odour of wet clothes.
Faint metallic hum like electricity. An empty foil packet of Pocky biscuits circled my feet and zipped off
down a flight of stairs. The escalator to the underground. I descended.
Platform 6. White marble effect. Yellow trim. Shimmering chrome. Embedded OLED panels. Trailers for
Chinese period martial arts movies. Incomprehensible info burst news reports. Solemn young mothers
exchanged polite compliments. Flock of drunk salarymen flooded the stairwell. A stampede as the deep
tube train emerged from the tunnel. I jostled through a sea of small, unpleasant people - pack of angular
young males tracking me like Praying Mantises.
The metro looped around the city. Clockwise. A sea of anxious faces. Carriage saturated with old men,
influenza and aftershave. Shoals of commuters at the East gate exchange.
A city of this size has no need of an underground. No substantial residential districts here - the populace
sardined into minute glass and steel downtown high rise flats. A 15m2 metropolis. They could walk
anywhere they wanted in an hour or so. They should use rickshaws. Orientals find walking distasteful.
Two coal eyes partially-obscured by the writhing mass of commuters. Glimpses of an ancient, gnarled
postal worker perched on the opposing bench. By some sinister stroboscopic effect he appeared to
oscillate through the carriage, the twitching arm of a coverless hard disk drive.
The train pulled in at the next station. He wound his watch and scribbled frantically in a bound paper
notepad, paper skin illuminated by abstract blue and red fabric pattern upholstery. A flood of
passengers sucked the remaining air from the carriage. The train squealed, and pulled away.
The old man placed his messenger bag on his lap and clutched it tight to his abdomen. Rifling through
its contents, he shirked as if finding a severed body part wrapped in cellophane. I lowered my head and
reached for my Smartphone. Most of my favourite apps dead now: E-mail, multiplayer, high score leader
boards. Dead. Disconnected. He wiped his spectacles with a micro fibre cloth as his delicate hands ebbed
and flickered. 50hz refresh rate. Dot crawl. Composite video input.
He pulled a battered hardback book from his bag and rested it on his lap. A hacking cough as he scanned
through the table of contents. Scratching the back of his neck anxiously, he put his finger to a page and
unfurled his lips. His brow flexed as he lifted his head and looked at me again. I wrestled my eyes to the
floor. He frowned and opened his mouth to speak. But the words wouldn’t come. He curled his arms
around his knees and gently rocked back and forth.
The train pulled up at the north gate. When I looked back, the old man was gone. The carriage was
empty, and the little book rested on the vacant bench, a slip of yellowed paper hanging over the armrest.
I whirled around to face the window - a deafening squeak of Hi-top trainers on imitation marble. And
then nothing. The doors closed, and the train pulled away.
A leathery hardback with a single golden character. Japanese or Chinese - I couldn’t tell the difference. I
opened it up and pulled out the slip of paper. Childlike handwriting. In English.
And street to street, and lane to lane flung back,
The one unvarying cry.
I got off at the next stop and handed the book to the ticket booth clerk. She accepted with both hands,
bowed and mouthed something incomprehensible. I think it might have been a question.
Fire in an unlicensed Asian internet café
Heavenly Place.
The lights were out and there was no music. I tried the door.
Concrete dust settled on my tongue. The lights fizzed and flickered as fine smoke rose serenely from the
NBA-themed waste paper basket. Air still and damp. Odour of urine and hot plastic. Hot chocolate
dispenser upended. My feet peeled away from the carpet as I walked. Mountains of charred paper.
Computers dead. I stepped into the booth and pulled an embedded 10” nail puller from the desk.
I stroked the hood of my monitor and pushed the power button. Green lights and dry heat from the vent
filters. The OS booted in seconds. I sat in my office chair and opened the browser. A faint mewling from
the next booth. I stood cautiously and peered over the wall panel.
Vomit, sawdust, and a contorted little face. She was pretty, and I thought I recognised her. A bright light.
And then I couldn’t see anything.
Tinnitus. Disorientation. My eyes felt like ice and burning.
The pressure was gone, and a faint breeze lifted my fringe. Smell of piss, burning hair and rubber. I was
looking at the ceiling. I reached down to my feet and pulled a three inch shard of Perspex from the soul
of my trainers. Shirt torn across the chest. Minor lacerations to my wrists and forearms. Fragments of
desktop computer sprayed across the shop floor. Charred widescreen monitors twisted and fizzing. I
peered out under the wall panel.
The windows had been blown inwards. Shimmering fragments of hot glass embedded in cheap two-coat
plaster. Charred remains of a compact city car swaying gently over a flattened streetlight, melting plastic
and imitation leather pooling and bubbling away on the asphalt.
A number of raised, nasal voices from the far end of the room. I pulled my head back inside, lifted
myself on to my haunches and forced the door open. A group of young men crawling on all fours from
the unisex bathroom. Their faces stood out a mile in this town: tradesmen, joiners, electricians, plumbers,
gardeners, manual labourers.
An angular boy in his late teens met my eye and rose to his feet. After consulting his friend, he smiled
and waved at me with a bloodied wood chisel clasped in his teeth. I turned to run. The older man flicked
out a cable knife and staggered towards me, grinning and salivating and drawing an imaginary knife
across his throat. Pausing for a second, he opened his mouth and pointed to a heaving, formless sack
hanging motionless over the front desk.
I picked up my rucksack, opened the door and walked back to reception.
The strip lighting crackled and strobed, the lifeless sack’s form shifting with each plasma discharge. I
moved closer, gagged by the odour of gas and burnt hair. The men crossed their arms and chuckled in
unison.
The fluorescent lamp clicked, and silver light filled the room. The concave head of the sales assistant,
body doubled -over and broken, patches of straw-coloured hair missing from her scalp. I reeled back,
stumbled on a loose floor tile and fell to my haunches. Droplets of saliva hit the back of my neck as I
slammed against the desk and turned. The old man rose up, screamed like a wounded samurai,
smashing a bottle of Appletiser over the arm of the office chair.
The others approached from the rear and circled around me, all giggles, flashes of teeth and heavy trade
and DIY tools. An impact at the back of my knees. I hit the floor and curled into a ball.
I felt no pain.
Rakish young man with mod-style parka and immaculate mod bouffant dropped to his haunches and
mumbled softly in my ear. I lifted my arms and closed my eyes as he tore a long strip of steel from the
floor tiles, raised it over his head and shrieked.
And I felt no pain.
My eyebrow was warm, and my vision pink and clouded. I wiped the blood from my forehead, crawled
to the front desk and dug into my trouser pockets. The others watched from a distance, grinning and
rubbing their delicate little hands together.
There.
The boy approached me, wrapped his arm around my neck and forced my face into an ashtray of handrolled cigarettes and dried-out kernels of sweet corn. The strip lights dimmed, and the desk lamp
flickered and failed. I whirled around, gripped him by the throat and lunged at his face with my keys.
He recoiled and laughed hysterically, cupping his hands over his face as I gripped his head and stabbed
at him again, dragging the fatigued brass across his smiling cheek.
His mouth met his earlobe. It didn’t bleed at first. And then it did. The others stood in silence. I sprinted
over to the entrance, tore the shattered door panel from its hinges and scrambled outside.
The world was on fire. The air stung my face. Particles of ash kissed my forehead. Fire and brimstone.
The city writhing in static, bloodless faces. Smoke billowed from a Tesco superstore - steel shutters
blackened and bent, automatic doors closing repeatedly over a toppled vending machine. A burning
moped fell from the sky, pirouetted over a ray green Suzuki Swift and screamed hysterically as it came
to rest in the storm drain. The men watched from the café widow, smoking hungrily and mouthing dire
threats in some private, schizophrenic language. I turned and ran.
North.
Mardi Gras. Whistles and neon and music. Teenagers smashing up public internet booths with mangled
folding bicycles. A gang of ten-year old schoolchildren hurling park benches through a health food store
display window. A blast rang out from the far end of town. A ribbon of smoke rose from the top of the
electronics department store. I put my fingers in my bleeding ears and ducked as comets of hot metal
and plastic peppered the Perspex metro stop. Teenage cosplayers launching clamshell mobile phones
from an 8th floor electronics store. I ran north and waded into a smoking, rainbow nebula of flares and
neon and Parisian house music.
The New World Department Store. A rainbow façade of 4300 mounted LED discs, dichroic foil cladding
casting a dancing mother of pearl lightshow over a bleeding sidewalk. I trotted down the side of the
building, choking on the vapour of burning plastic and cleaning chemicals.
There.
A gang of pig-tailed silhouettes dancing like Navajo around a smouldering camp fire. I lowered my head
and approached them - ‘Sailor Moon’ schoolgirls taking purikura photos and giggling hysterically. The
pretty one caught my eye and waved to me as the others ripped low hanging discs from the rainbow
façade and flung them at a low-lying target. I moved closer, and as the smoke cleared I saw a miniature
handbag dog hanging lifeless, strapped to the street light with duct tape. The girl smiled at me, and
offered her hand. I lowered my head and walked past her, groping at the wall until I found the metal rail
of the main service entrance.
Mall
Piss, burning plastic and reinforced concrete. Boiling cooking fat, industrial drains and electrical wiring.
The staff car park and service entrance. It felt like an air raid shelter. Relative safety here. Faint battle
cries above.
Now the façade had cracked and peeled away. Eight solid weeks of glass and chrome and white - I’d
forgotten that nuts and bolts even existed. I smoked a cigarette and watched maggots writhe in
industrial waste disposal bins. I saw a rat dragging a half-eaten chocolate bar into a drain pipe. Good to
see muck and shit again. Like shaking hands with an old, estranged friend. I routed through a stack of
discarded packaging, pulled out an 8 foot cardboard box, and made myself a shelter by a nest of C02 fire
extinguishers.
My watch insisted that it was Sunday. But it felt like a Friday night. And I had decided to go home early.
Bed before midnight. I felt safe. It was peaceful here. Here in the womb of the mall.
I dropped my rucksack, routed for free range egg sandwiches and sipped sweet tea from a tartan
Thermos flask. And then I closed my eyes.
If I could find the far exit I would find myself a few yards short of the northern city gate. And then I
would walk north. North until I fell over.
I put my elbow through the safety glass and pulled out a large fire axe.
But I need to make it through here first.
I climbed the staircase and slipped through the fire exit.
Ground floor. White coordinated walkways and ceilings. Louis Vuitton. Prada. Bulgari. A hermetically
sealed shopping arcade.
I moved through the hallway, sheltering beneath plastic trees and ducking into store entryways. A
babbling chocolate fountain at the luxury pâtissier’s. Naked silver mannequins watched indifferently.
The storefronts completely undisturbed - locked, shuttered and dormant. But the mob was here
somewhere, waiting.
Follow the bend. Down the escalator. Straight up. Past the magazine racks. Past the interactive touch
screen maps. The exit almost in sight.
I looked to both ends of the corridor: over the upper tier balcony and the cavernous, Titanic-themed food
court. Finally I turned to the north.
There.
A buckled, shattered doorway: shit streaks, blood and burger fluid rolling down the Perspex. Faint
outline of the northern gate beyond. I dropped my fire axe and ran.
North.
The screech of rubber on marble. Little voices reverberating through the food court. I turned and ducked
behind a plastic Montgomery palm tree. Faint smell of urine and cigarette smoke. I crept forwards,
hugging the flimsy gloss wall panels and peered out over the dining area.
Silence.
No voices. No movement. I lifted a deserted jacket potato from a vinyl 4-seater table. It smelled new, it
looked fresh, and I put it to my mouth.
A can of Mountain Dew fell through the atrium like a dead leaf and rattled down the escalator.
Shuffling feet and laughter on the uppermost balcony.
I looked back to the exit and inhaled.
Run.
A red flare flew past my shoulder, skipped over the scaglia floor tiles and set fire to a stack of glossy
magazines at the foot of the doorway. The sprinklers kicked in, the street obscured by a raging heat haze.
Hundreds of clammy feet and hands burst through the ash and neon and rapped on the Perspex.
Baseball bats, hammers and bleeding fists. Laughter and screaming behind me - I turned and ran back
down the hallway as hundreds of teenagers flooded the escalator: distressed jeans and expensive hair,
armfuls of consumer electronics and bloodied trade tools.
Run.
Row after row of boarded up shop-fronts. Electrical fires in fast food restaurants. Naked mannequins
pirouetting through display windows. Charred self service checkouts sliding along the hallway.
There. Sanctuary. Topshop.
I burst through the door, scanned frantically for a fire exit and ducked behind a rack of expensive Union
Jack denim shorts. A bright flash, and a whistle from the far end of the hallway. The crowd turned and
ran, and the noise grew distant once more.
The lights were out - the shop floor partially lit by ebbing checkout- mounted LCD monitors. I hauled
myself up, lit a cigarette and searched through the store for a back room or private staff exit.
Row upon row of ripped skinny fit jeans, distressed boyfriend tees and casual safari shirts. A faint
murmuring from the cardigan aisle. I ducked into the changing room, pulled the curtain across and held
my breath.
Heavy breathing, creaking rubber and rapid, high frequency marsupial squeaks.
I parted the curtain and peered through.
Emaciated girl with four inch neon nails and catastrophic ginger mane - bright orange boy with crushed
velvet jacket and four Pyrite gold necklaces. A spray tan Ganguro couple fucking on the floor like two
raging demons, copulating mountain witches of Japanese folklore - Sunakake Baba. I took the last drag
of my cigarette and chuckled to myself.
She caught my eye and screamed. The boy pulled up his vintage diamond pattern trousers, turned and
waved a 24” adjustable pipe wrench over his head. I tore the curtain down, turned and sprinted back to
the entrance. The security gate screamed as I bolted through the checkpoint with a Dark charcoal
Kangaroo Hoody tucked under my arm.
The public toilets were wide open. I threw my weight against the door, wedged a mop against the
handle, and waited for five frozen minutes.
No easy way back to the exit from here. I put my hood up and pulled on the drawstrings tight to my
neck.
Dripping. A faulty tap at the far washbasin. I walked to the mirror, rested my hand on the wall and filled
the basin with cold, cloudy water. Garbled songs of unfamiliar birds from the open window.
Compressed, lossy songs - songs with no end and no beginning. I checked my head injury - the blood
dry and brittle now, paint-like flecks lodging themselves in my fingernails as I ran my hands over a
dramatic rectangular swelling. My hairline just didn’t look right.
My face was ok, apart from the swelling: no egregious puffiness, no pale skin or dark eyes. Slightly dry
skin, and my forehead was beginning to flake a little. I hadn’t even used moisturiser that day - I always
use moisturiser, moisturiser with a slightly oily quality, preferably. My skin is short on oil, and it can get
a little chapped at times.
I looked good, all things considered, but my hair was getting too long - I couldn‘t really look cool with
my hair in that state. I can find some clippers somewhere - plenty of electronics stores around here. I
sucked in my cheeks and took a monochrome photo. High quality - potential profile picture.
Look at you, you’re finally in your own movie. The masterless samurai - the solitary tiger in the jungle.
I turned and hopped up to the open window. A white sky over a featureless grey courtyard enclosed on
all sides by high concrete walls. The inside of a cooling tower - not a shrub or blade of grass, not an
ashtray or trash can, not a single distinguishing feature. I hauled my legs over and forced my shoulders
further into the gap. Five shades of grey concrete. An utterly useless space. Not part of the shopping
mall. Not outside of the shopping mall. A liminal space.
There.
That was where I needed to be. This is what I have been looking for. Through all the barren years since I
stood up and got off the boat. Since I cracked the mirror and crawled off sideways. Neither here nor
there.
I felt an overpowering urge to sit cross legged in the centre, unfurl a tartan blanket and drink Yorkshire
tea for the rest of eternity. They could find me here, and it wouldn’t matter. I would be happy die here to turn blue, mineralise, and flake away in the acid rain.
Home didn‘t even exist any more. Not after today. But here, here in this courtyard. Here I could stay
forever.
The anxiety fluttered away, diffused in millions of tonnes of condensed milk cloud above this grand,
reinforced concrete atrium. I tried to wriggle out, but my shoulders were too broad to pass through the
frame. I smiled to myself, and I felt happy. Not for me. Not for such as I. I can only go forwards. I can
never be.
A wet object slapped against a hard surface. High frequency noise as the door creaked open, then
slammed shut. I wrenched myself out of the window and dropped back down to the tiles. A slab of red
meat slid down a cubicle door, meat juices and plasma pooling on the floor tiles. A faint shuffling of
limbs from the cubicle. I opened the door. A naked man curled in the foetal position, head pink and
shrivelled like a newborn baby. Not a trace of body or facial hair, or eye brows. I took a step back and
lowered my bag to the floor. He shifted his weight and fluttered his eyelids, pink eyeballs burning in
harsh, fluorescent light. He squirmed and moaned and reached out to me, meagre wrists and ankles
sealed with sticky tape.
His eyes were unmistakeable.
-’Michi.’
The murmuring stopped, and he glanced at me with tired eyes, dilated pupils and crude, bump-mapped
features. I shuffled over to him and dropped to my haunches, tearing the tape from his wrists and ankles
and lifting him on to the toilet seat.
-’Michi.’
No response. I dragged him to his feet and waved my hand across his face. Nothing.
-‘Come on.‘
I put his arm around my shoulder and led him to the exit.
The hallway was clear now, but a pair of rakish teenage sentries with cricket bats, air rifles, and
presidente cigars guarded the route to the main exit. We would have to circle the ground floor and cross
back over the balcony.
The escalators were dead. We scurried down to basement level and walked west through rows of
burned-out shop fronts and ransacked promotional marquees. Disconcerting whoops from the upper
levels - I grabbed Michi by the shoulders and pulled him into an undisturbed Levi’s superstore.
Clothes.
I rifled through the racks while Michi watched with a cat-like indifference, yawning, studying his hands
and picking at a dried-out scab on his ankle.
Pale blue workshirt. Brown boot cut cords. Suede leather sneakers.
I waved at him and pointed to the changing rooms. He stared blankly, eyes smiling at a little blank spot
on the wall. I put my hand around his waist and led him into a cubicle. He sat and lifted his arms as I
slipped on the shirt and trousers and checked over his meagre frame for obvious marks or bruising.
Spotless - as if he’d been wrapped in bubble pack and stored in a metal canister.
-’Michi.’
His eyes convulsed like a fibrillating heart muscle. A charge passed through his limbs, and fluid leaked
from the corner of his mouth. An absence. A seizure. He lifted his head and reached for my face with
origami fingers. I looked away and nodded towards the exit as he struggled to his feet and stepped out
of the cubicle.
The downlight struck as we neared the security checkpoint, brilliant LED light casting dramatic shadows
over his face. Some chiselled GQ cover model now - all cheekbones and panda eyes, clad head-to-toe in
Levi’s new Autumn/Winter denim range. A clone reared in some underground lab in the bowels of the
mall - the ultimate product of the shopping arcade, gliding through its sacrosanct scagliola hallways
with the grace of some supercentenarian Shinto priest.
Out of the shopping mall he stepped. The prodigal son. The storm would calm only for him.
We passed through the toy and sports superstores, crossed over the balcony and arrived back at the
opposite end of the food court. The mob had ransacked Spudulike and smeared hundreds of Tuna &
Sweetcorn Mayo baked potatoes over the bay windows. We helped ourselves to Summer Size Classic
Coca Colas and perched on the leather barstools of the faux-traditional Irish pub.
-’If we ever get out of here, Michi, we’ll move somewhere remote. I’ve had my fill now. I don’t like it any
more. We’ll live like priests. Somewhere cold and dark. The arse end of Russia or something. Siberia.
We’ll never have to speak ever again. What do you think?’
No response.
I rose from my stool, kicked at a vending machine until a packet of cigarettes fell out, then leaned over
the bar and poured myself a pint of Beamish. Too much head.
His eyes were glazed and empty, but he seemed strangely content.
-‘Is that you, Michi?…..You know who I am, don’t you?’
He looked down at his feet, laughed to himself and bit down hard on a trembling right hand. Selfstimulatory behaviours of low functioning autism.
A harsh, nasal cry reverberated around the acrylic stone interior - I stood, tapped him on the shoulder
and paced back over to the entryway. A clattering of tables and chairs from the far side of the hall.
-‘We need to go.‘
He turned to face me, coughing and staring straight through my head.
-‘Now, Michi.‘
No response.
I pulled at his arm, and he would not move. I shouted in his ear, and he did not flinch. His eyes were a
vacuum. And I was frightened.
Shrill howls diffused into grand, ethereal chanting. A white vinyl highchair glanced off the bay window
and cart wheeled past the saloon door.
I took a final look at Michi, bolted through the fire exit and scurried over to the huge floor standing
speaker of an electronics store display window.
A terrible clinking and shuffling of feet. More this time: tens, hundreds maybe. They were close.
I peered over the speaker stand. Michi circled the artificial flowerbed with his head tucked into his chest,
clicking his heels and humming a pretty Japanese folk song.
-‘Sakura, Sakura,
noyama mo sato mo,
mi-watasu kagiri…’
A pair of willowy legs fluttered behind the cosmetics marquee as a metallic howl exploded overhead. I
stood and called out to him as a little girl with gigantic dark eyes and long silver fingernails raised her
arm and pointed towards us. A crowd gathered behind - raised arms and teeth and giddy laughter. And
then they ran.
A hale of projectiles: drinks cans, plastic drain pipes, chrome fibreglass arms of quartered store
mannequins. Armfuls of improvised weaponry: sharpened aluminium chair legs, jagged metal panels
ripped from steel shelving units, burning table leg torches wrapped in Prada denim jackets. At the back
of the group the Koban policeman swung his neon truncheon and grinned like a little boy at a paddling
pool.
Michi turned and shuffled calmly into the nearby music megastore, oversized suede sneakers clopping
over imitation marble. I called to him again, but he was gone, absorbed by the LED half-light. They were
too close, too many. I sank behind the speaker stand, bit down on my tongue and rocked back and forth
on my haunches.
Smashing glass. Dense smoke. Screams and laughter. A terrible shuffling of limbs and clothing.
A single, inhuman shriek, and an almighty thud like a ten tonne car door slammed shut.
Then silence.
A dense cloud of concrete dust billowed from the entryway. My heart laboured. And my ears sang.
A gas explosion, or a bomb.
I checked for signs of life, then crept over the hallway and slipped under the ebbing neon signage. A
willowy teenager emerged, sobbing and clasping his hands to bleeding earlobes. I caught his eye as he
turned and lurched away down the corridor. My lungs were overwhelmed as blankets of concrete dust
rolled under the security shutters and escaped into the food court. I ducked under and saw a charred
rack of molten compact disks and smouldering glossy booklets. Warped steel girders, steel bars jutting
from reinforced concrete pillars, smoke and darkness and the stench of burning hair and plastic. Smoke,
but no flames.
A cylindrical music player came to a rest at my feet as I passed the DVD and Blu-ray section. Fluorescent
strip lighting fizzed once, twice, and filled the room with searing light. I forced my eyes shut and flapped
at the smoke with my jacket. And then I could see.
Blood. Meat and scraps of clothing rolling off the walls. Formless sacks of flesh littering the floor space,
piles of broken limbs and fabric and fragments of bone. A scalp resting on a black leather messenger bag.
A tuft of black, matted hair fused to a 6 CD Genesis box set. 25% off - Blue cross sale. I don't like Genesis.
I passed through the DVD section and stood in the open area at the centre of the floor space. The lights
dimmed to a muddy amber haze and recessed floor lights illuminated a promotional marquee draped in
red velvet fabric. I heard coughing and faint, melodic humming.
There.
A tiny bald figure kneeling in the centre of a 3m sphere of undisturbed floor space. Not a speck of blood,
smoke or debris: pristine, glossy, factory sealed. A pink neon nightstick lay by his side, resting in a pile
of expensive Cambridge Audio Blu-ray players. He whimpered faintly and clasped his hands to his ears
as tears patted the tongues of his brushed leather sneakers. He lifted his head and sobbed on my
shoulder - I pulled him to his feet and led him outside.
Outside
The mall was dead.
Malfunctioning children’s helicopter ride sang and whirled away by the unisex restroom. Thousands of
abandoned half-eaten burgers and plastic cups lay dormant on the dining tables. Extra large burger and
fries meal lay undisturbed on a brown plastic tray at the counter. We sat on a plastic mushroom-themed
table and gorged on fat and salt and antibiotics.
I am sure he recognised my face. But his eyes had gone. He was elsewhere. My face held no meaning for
him now.
He had seen something.
-’I want a clean life, Michi. I’ll live like a fucking choirboy from now on. Do you think God will let that
happen?’
He laughed and gently patted my head.
-’….What…happened there. Michi?’
No response.
I leaned him against a plastic palm tree, rummaged through my back pocket and separated the rough
pencil map from the spine of my notepad. He scanned the paper and gave me a cracked, happy smile.
There was only one direction now - north.
We circled the balcony and made our way to the exit.
The mall's shimmering, silver façade was now a sea of swirling rainbow LED. We trotted over the car
park and through four blocks of charred, dormant retail developments. Few signs of life now - the rioters
had been satiated.
The apartment blocks twinkled like fibre optic Christmas trees. Dim silhouettes twitched behind pristine
tie-back curtains. Dim embers illuminated the pepper pot wheels of an upended white sports
convertible. The chirpy jingle of an abandoned pedestrian crossing reverberated through the block, the
benevolent animated man flicking from red to green for no one. We circled the block and emerged on the
main strip.
The Shard’s uppermost stories were fully illuminated, hundreds of senior staff members garrisoned in
the viewing deck. The silver spire pierced through low lying cloud, oblivious to the suffering on its
pearlescent streets.
A baby cough from ground level - four terrified schoolchildren huddled together behind the metro stop
advertising board. I approached the head boy and offered him my hand. Michi trailed behind, running
his hands over his scalp and swabbing at dark, swollen eye sockets. The child lifted his head in a
staggered motion, then screamed and bolted towards the vacant central square. The others followed suit,
leaving a pile of identical Totoro rucksacks abandoned on the tarmac.
We circled the building and took the road north, arriving at the gate a few minutes later. Packets of
cigarettes spilled from the vacant mobile office, but the structure seemed completely undisturbed. Michi
tied the laces of his brown leather sneakers as I crept towards the barrier, put my hand around a manual
lever, and pulled. The gate moaned and yawned back. A mash of blue and red in the distance, and white
light spilling in from the freeway. I put my arm on Michi’s shoulder and led him through.
Airport
Ten minutes of silence. A deafening roar of crickets and Bullfrogs as we passed through an automated
toll booth. Feather grass frozen in LED light to the west, a vast wall of pitch darkness to the east. Red and
blue horizon pulsed and vibrated. I stopped for a moment and listened.
-’Michi. Get off the road.’
I pulled him over to the western embankment, and we lay prone behind a small raised patch of turf.
A fanfare of sirens, colour and speed. A fleet of riot vans, police cars and fire engines roared by as a
police helicopter pierced through dense cloud and circled overhead. Blinding searchlights rolled over the
eastern embankment, tracked an emaciated fox as it bolted across the freeway, then climbed and banked
away hard to the south.
Then silence. Then insects.
-’Come on.’
We walked north for three hushed hours. The light turned blue and the air thinned.
Muffins for breakfast. Marks and Spencer’s Finest Range English Muffins. I couldn’t afford to buy these
things back home - Finest Range English Muffins were a luxury in my former life, but I will never go
back. Michi ate three and I ate two. We sat in silence on the raised turf, dangling our legs over the baking
asphalt like a pair of truant schoolchildren. It was bright and dry now, and the cloud had finally lifted.
The freeway swept out far to the north and dissolved in a mess of light and shit and heat shimmer.
80 miles.
We could make it in a couple of days.
I stood, turned to the west and looked out across the plain. Perspective errors thrown in to relief by
morning light. A low-polygon mesh hillside to the far north west, the grassland beyond an oily mess of
aliasing and low-resolution texture. No anisotropic filtering here.
Michi was watching me. Cross-legged and perfectly still.
-’Michi.’
He shuffled backwards and turned to face the freeway.
-’Michi.’
I put my hand on his shoulder.
-’…What…..is...’
He leaned forward, raised himself onto his haunches and traced a circle in the grass with his fingertip. I
didn't understand.
I wrapped the last muffin in cellophane and lowered it in to my rucksack. Two Tesco whole roast
chickens and six litres of warm Evian - two days supplies. I pulled out the Thermos of tea and presented
it to him with both hands. He shook his head, coughed and then flicked his head.
A faint hum as a lone vehicle glided in from the south. A jet black limousine with smoke tinted
windows.
-‘ What is it?‘
He scratched at his neck and made eye contact, flashing me a faint, cautious smile and mouthing
something incomprehensible. The hazard lights blinked, the break lights lit, and Michi turned and bolted
away across the plain.
The driver’s side window rolled down.
I turned and sprinted after him.
We ran for miles through flickering clipmap grass, stretches of up-resed hillside dilating and scaling as
we moved further in. Michi pulled away, pinhead eyes fixated on the crest of the hill as he cut an arc
through the scrubland like some wild amphetamine Gazelle.
The scrub grew coarse and yellowed as we approached a steep incline - patches of dry, pock-marked
topsoil punctuating an endless blanket of feather grass. Bitmap Japanese Quails tracked me like
Mantises, hopping up and down in unison. We were moving uphill. My legs grew starry and flaccid. My
blood vessels laboured under a thick coating of mucus and tobacco tar. I stalled for a moment and
looked out across the plain - the freeway like a strand of silver hair now, threading its way north-east
into a dense wash of piss and heat and movement.
The city.
I called out to Michi - he flinched, arced towards a knot of small pear trees and slowed to a walking pace.
The heat was oppressive, but he smiled and shuffled himself under the canopy. I staggered towards him,
leaned my backpack against the trunk and dropped onto my haunches.
He had barely broken sweat.
I lifted the cellophane-wrapped roast chicken from my rucksack. Plasma ran over my fingers as I tore off
an undercooked leg. Lukewarm, dry, tasteless. Michi smiled, raised his arm and pulled a round, copper
coloured fruit from a low lying branch. I took a deep breath and rolled a cigarette. We had come a long
way.
-‘Nichan.’
A tinny, compressed rustle - a gust of wind sent up a cloud of dried copper leaves.
-’Michi…We need to get to the airport.’
He looked back to the crest of the hill and took another bite of his pear.
Pool 2
It was cooler now, and the humming had stopped. The sky was orange and black, and the tree was
stripped of its pears. I stood and backed away from the tree.
Michi was gone.
I picked up my backpack and walked to the crest of the hill. Facial edema and blurred vision, but my
legs were stronger now. Metallic clouds, trees and narrow pathways crude bump maps over a complex
mesh hillside. I bit down on my lip and walked. The crest of the hill scaled out as I moved further in,
gargantuan shit haze blooming to the north. Airport framed by a mass of tiny paper pixels - white and
red and green and blue. I hauled myself over, blind and salivating. My leg clipped a loose section of
limestone and collapsed under me. I held out my arms and steadied myself.
I looked down over the hillside, and saw a dark, flickering figure looking out over a vast black lake.
I shuffled downhill.
The surface of the water caught the light. Metallic ripples broke around his brushed leather sneakers. He
looked happy now - at journey's end. He reached into his pocket and unfolded a crumpled sheet of scrap
paper.
On a journey, ill;
my dream goes wandering
over withered fields.
We sat cross legged on the bank, and I offered him a wholemeal free range egg sandwich. My Thermos
of tea wasn’t hot any more, but he didn‘t seem to mind. We shared a crude, slug-like cigarette and he
wrapped my coat around his shoulders. I lay back on my rucksack and dreamed of my parent’s house of early August sunshine and sky blue gas towers.
I awoke to light and birds and new grass.
Michi was hanging from the pear tree.
City
His face was slim and pale. I unfastened the belt and lay him out flat on the bank. He weighed nothing.
I lay next to him all day. The sun moved from east to west and the clouds passed overhead. It rained in
the afternoon, and I covered him up with my jacket.
The boy was all split up and broken. Light through a prism. Everyone talked about him - some people
loved him, and some people hated him. He was all and none of those things.
That won’t do for them. They won’t let him rest. They’ll draw a line around him. Dig him a grave. Bury
him with a suit and a Wallmart discount coupon.
I won’t let them do it.
The lake was black. Like the beginning of the world. He was on his way home now. And everything was
fine.
I held his tiny shoulders and slipped him into the lake. His head melted like honey as the water folded
into his clothing, every conversation drowned in an artificial Chinese lake filled with piss and cold and
mercury.
I was nervous with you today, but it doesn’t matter now. We were the only ones who heard it, and you
don’t exist anymore.
The tip of the spire reflected in the water - a crude, pixelated silhouette studying the back of my head.
I think it was the inevitability of the whole thing which got me so upset.
I picked up the belt and folded it into my rucksack. The cloud had cleared, and the feather grass waved
to me as I reached the crest of the hill and looked north. The airport poked through the smog and shit,
the cityscape beyond all neon and cigarettes and dancing girls. I picked up my bag and walked.
North.
Though the march is hopeless. Into walls of Russian wind. There is much work to be done.
Nightclubbing.