5 Monologues by Charlie Price.
Take them or leave them; take two and leave three; leave or take them all...your choice.
Happy listening...
Content Warning:
Strong language, strong sex references, horror
5 Monologues by Charlie Price.
Take them or leave them; take two and leave three; leave or take them all...your choice.
Happy listening...
Content Warning:
Strong language, strong sex references, horror
Five Monologues
I
It’s more real than what’s in front of me. I keep seeing it. I know that it isn’t there in my memories, my memory, nowhere to be found within that great, messy, and disordered store. Memory is a shed, a cellar, a pantry, a cabinet. Blunt implements, dangerous things for trimming hedges lie horizontal, with rusted blades. So many books and DVDS gather dust, the corners of old LP album covers get chewed by silverfish. It’s not there, anywhere amongst the mess, I simply don’t remember it and yet I am able to see it. Or should I say “them”. I simply don’t remember them, and yet I’m able to see them. Instructions: plural. It always struck me as odd that instructions are a plural affair. I consider them one entity: one task whose summation, or completion, is promised by those many steps taken in sequence, by advice heeded in a particular order, to one end. It’s peculiar.
I can’t see these instructions any time I chose, or please. Particular conditions are necessary in order to achieve the necessary clarity, a clarity that I can only characterise as miraculous. Illumination depends upon the establishment of the requisite state, which in this case is orgasm, the verge of it, the last point of no return. That feeling of exceptional imminence, whenever achieved and whatever the potency (invariably low at present), enables me to remember something I thought I’d forgotten. Vision transcends the boundaries of my memory, my brain has somehow worked out how to do so, it’s irritating actually. To put it simply, whenever I’m about to come, alone or accompanied, I see a set of instructions.
These instructions are from my childhood, they build something I used to build. I used to follow the instructions, in effect. Actually, I was totally oblivious to them but I only did what I was told to do by the supervising grownup, and he observed the instructions religiously. So, I read them through him and resultantly followed them through his intermediary efforts. In fact, I’ve never laid eyes on them, not on the real pamphlet. It was my grandad I used to build with. He loved instructions, he revered them as religious text.
It’s not a greatly pleasurable thing to see, on the verge of completion. A set of Meccano instructions does little, as an image, to enhance the sensations that both feed and are fed by the act, the seed’s eventful release. Catholicism calls the relinquishing sinful if it is unreproductive; and desire, whether onanistic or carnal, disordered. But, for what today will be an entire month, the usual disorder to which I am used, the disorder of memory that is, the impressions half-formed, curtailed, and ill-recalled, have been replaced, transcended by a peculiar, chaste, and sacred clarity, a focus.
On that stultifying brink, a hand turns the pages of the instructions, and offers them to me, to gaze upon. I see my grandad, his bald head, his braces, his singular tremoring slouch. It is confusing to meet my grandad in such a place, to lay eyes on him while my mind is preoccupied with such mental exercise as that which summons sperm. But thankfully his appearance is merciful in its brevity. I don’t think he is the one turning the pages of the instructions: I know that I would recognise those hands, the once-deft, practiced, but long-insecure digits wrapped in red, wrinkled skin.
What are they for, these instructions that I keep seeing whenever I am on the brink of orgasm (never at any other time)…? Well, the answer is: a little solar powered windmill. The solar panel is almost exactly the size of a credit card. Fix it to the structure, leave the little windmill in the sun, and the vanes turn. It is a satisfaction adjacent to magic. I know that there is science behind the turning of those four crossed blades, and yet it still seems to me an improbable miracle. There is a great satisfaction to be found in my inability to understand the conversion of solar energy into motion: what is called kinetic. Once built, I used to carry the little Meccano windmill back and forth, inside and out, just to watch, more feel than watch- in my small, avid hands-, the cessation of the sails once indoors, and the swift, inevitable reanimation once outside. I used to try and stand in front of the sun, but I wasn’t tall enough. Even clamping a hand over the solar panel didn’t really work, the sunlight found a way in. I can’t remember whether or not it worked on days when the cloud cover was weighty and considerable. Probably not, I’m inclined to think.
Putting my hands, similarly, to use, but clasping flesh rather than sections of stainless steel, manipulating rather than constructing, I investigate what my mind shows me, what my hand calls up out of my brain. It’s more real than what’s in front of me. Arousal- plateau- pre-orgasm, refractory slowing. I can see the images, the rivets of a toy tower, those sections of steel with holes, the different sorts of screw required. The words beneath the pictures seem harmless at first, sterile bursts of prose describing the insertion of particular bolts, which nuts, which minute octagonal rings go where, on the ribbed ends of what screws. Most recently, I keep seeing crossings out in black marker, and exclamatory phrases like Help Me! and Get Out! and Have Mercy! penned in red biro. And if I look up from the instructions I see my grandad, and his head is cracked. He is smaller than ever and should he reach for me, plunge his hand through my aghast eyes into my brain, I am able not only to see that his hands are rotting, but I am able to feel what it feels like to rot. The instructions can’t help me but I can’t stop summoning them, and the horrid disarray, that huddles around them, and out which their apparition appears.
This morning after masturbating in the shower I looked down and I found that there was a little Meccano solar powered windmill on the porcelain floor of the bath. It stands, unjostled by the milk white waters, and the vanes are somehow turning without the of aid the sun. Then I looked in the cabinet mirror, having sought and found my Sertraline with instructions included, and I saw my grandad’s face.
II
Friday, we have a customer come into complain. Or rather it seems, at first, that she has come to complain. She hasn’t, it turns out. Not as such. The woman is very courteous. She happens to have dwarfism, and a small facial disfigurement I find it quite difficult to characterise…a small but noticeable enlargement of her right-hand cheek. I am in charge of my father’s pizza business, I have been the sole manager for a month now. He is, at last, too ill to work. Two months ago, mother died. My father carried on working, his apron messy, his sleeves spotless, his wet peach rag of wont slung classily over his shoulder, his forehead ever glistening with the heat of the oven and the sweat he spends over the dough. He never wanted to retire, work was life to him, nd beyond the threshold of this building was where he knew himself to be most alive. We cease at different rates, it takes us all different lengths of time to accept such a cessation as retirement. After a month of locking away his grief, struggling on through it like a truck in a snowstorm, the windscreen wipers of sanity going and going and going like mad, something gave, finally snapped, and he just sat down in the back office chair before the accounts, the pen in his hand, and he hasn’t moved since, not in one whole month. He has withdrawn, he has retired, he hasn’t got up and the pen is still in his hand. His inactivity and stasis is day by day emaciating him. He is immovable and unreachable. He’s still there.
The woman who comes to complain first flats her face against the glass of the shop façade. She looks in like a ghost, a phantom whose affect is curiosity not fear, a ghost with the desire to learn not terrorise. She enters, the overhead bell tingles upon entry, she is carrying one of our boxes. She got her pizza delivered, I don’t remember her collecting. I would have remembered her if she had.
“Hello,” she says.
“Good evening, madame,” I reply. “What can I do for you?”. There is little parlour activity. The number of diners is diminishing. It is deep into the evening but it is not terribly late. The first of a nocturnal hush is beginning to settle upon the customers, upon the floor.
The woman bears a big pizza box, one of ours. I recognise, immediately, the red-haired siren on the front of the box. She places it on the counter. I open the lid. Within, the box is empty and spotlessly clean.
“Well?” she says.
“You’ve polished it off well and good. From the looks of things you enjoyed your food,” I say.
“It was beyond reproach,” she says.
“Well, what is it you want? If you’ve come to return the box then that’s very kind but I’m afraid it’s against the law to reuse vessels…”
“No,” she interposes, with certainty, saying “It’s my boyfriend”.
She is, of course, short. Her torso and head are of adult proportion but her limbs are child-sized. I can’t help noticing that she is, in her not terribly usual way, a rather attractive woman. I find human beauty the most difficult of all beauties to describe. There is something stylish about her. Her hair is light brown, shoulder length, her two large, inquisitive, greyblue eyes perfectly symmetrical. But no such symmetry shows in her cheeks of course, because of the little disfigurement, the subtle inflation of the cheek on the right, her right. I imagine her boyfriend. I attempt to determine, by psychic means, whether or not her boyfriend shares her proportions. It is anyone’s guess.
“Is he unwell? If one of our pizzas has caused illness because of, say, allergen contamination then we have a refund and compensation form you can fill out…”
“No, it’s not that,” she says. Then she says “You’ll think I’m nuts”.
“Try me,” I say.
“Erm…” she pauses and looks about for the right words, as though she has dropped them on the floor, at her feet, in order to begin picking them up again.
“He’s turned into an angel…because of your pizza, I think”.
“He’s a…an angel?” I echo, not confirm.
“Yes,” she assures. “He’s turned into a shimmery white…entity…with wings. It looks like him, but better.”
“Is that an issue?” I ask.
“Issue…?” she echoes, incredulously. “He flew off out the door into the night sky.
He was off like a shot, back to his fancy woman, or heaven or something…”
“Probably heaven, if he’s an angel…” I consoled, or thought I consoled. Heaven is a notion I subscribe to, not out of any kind of fervour, it is simply a necessary credential of authentic pizza artistry, evidenced and declared by the Catholic crucifix and the Pope Pablo picture beneath, like a food hygiene rating number five.
“Well…yeah, whatever. Anyway, your pizza did it so I think you should make up for it…”
“How do you mean?”
“Come to this address on Monday morning, 9.30 am,” she says, handing me a little square of card with an address written on it.
“For what?”
“For the interview. To be my new boyfriend,” she said. “It’s the least you can do.”
I don’t know what to say so I deflect.
“Why have you brought the box back?”
“I don’t really know. Bad memories, I suppose,” she says. “Put it on display. Hang a plaque. Explain its significance.”
I receive the pizza box without enthusiasm. It strikes me suddenly that all the while we’ve been conversing I’ve chosen to believe her story without good reason to. But when I look up from the box, and address-card between my forefinger and thumb, the woman is gone.
I shrug and carry away the pizza box that housed the angel-making boyfriend-robbing pizza. A little post-it note names and describes the order: Religious Symbols Rustichella, a special, with lots of chorizo slices cut into crucifix shapes and parma ham cut into Virgin Mary apparitions on a bed of rocket. It is even censed in the kitchen before it is sent out, to table or order address.
I take the address card to the back office, to pin it to the notice board. All the while, I’m pondering my Monday interview with this woman, what I will say to her, how I will sell myself, my best qualities, whatever those are. Financial security, good at listening, fairly big penis… but I’m ejected from my own head by a shocking surprise. A little angel with dwarfism, climbing and jumping and cackling like an undiscovered species of ape, is attempting to heave the body of my father, still catatonic and sedentary in the back office, from the chair in front of the accounts up to heaven.
“Stop it!” I cry out. “He’s not dead yet.”
The angel is spectral, glowing, shrouded in a glow of white, newly winged, clothed in celestially soft cloths. But there is something frightful in his eyes. I approach him without fear, but prepared for violence. I dislodge him from my father’s back with a broom. I discover that he has removed and consumed an innutritious chunk out of my father’s gaunt back. The angel lunges at me, and bites the skin off both my kneecaps. I use all my strength, and all the ferocity I possess, to get the better of him, claim the upper hand, and eject him from my establishment. He flies away into the night like a desperate and confused pigeon, deranged and yet suddenly thrilled by his restored freedom, rediscovering flight like any native instinct.
My father is unchanged by the experience. About half an hour later, the little angel comes back, flatting his fearful, pale face against the façade glasspanes of the restaurant, looking in, with great bulbous eyes. It’s a slightly rough area, we have been bothered before by kids, street people, drunks, even Jehovah’s Witnesses and doomsday cultists, but never an angel. I phone the police, explain the situation. The ghostly glare continues to look in at the window. He pulls frightening and grotesque and comic faces in the glass. The police tell me that they don’t have the resources to arrest, survey, or even caution an angel. Still, life goes on. I close up at 10.15, though we’d usually remain open until 11 for delivery and takeaway.
III
A month into the first semester of my second year at uni, my birthday comes around, my twenty-first. On the morning of my day and month of birth, two girls, Natasha and Pauline, the most confident and superior of all the residents on the eleventh floor where I flat, knock on my door and inform me that it’s my birthday. I know, I reply. What I don’t know is how the girls have obtained this information. I certainly didn’t tell them, and no-one in the vicinity could have done so. They must have asked at reception and charmed the receptionist into giving them the information. They tell me that I am having a party, the party will be in the eleventh-floor kitchen at 7.30. My attendance is compulsory. I can’t help feeling that this gesture, charitable as it is, is against the law, and in violation of my rights. But to no defence do I have recourse, I have simply no means of evading the party that will be thrown for me; at me.
After a disappointing day, I climb the stairs up to my room with a tremendous feeling of dread. I don’t enjoy parties at the best of times, and, as it is, I am rattled and scared and depressed at being away from my family. It feels almost as though they have been killed in a terrible accident and I am the sole survivor bearing the surname Fish. I feel like I have been seconded to an orphanage, the juvenile penitentiary of growing the fuck up.
At 7.30 I enter the kitchen which is dark. Strange. I am grumbling because I was looking forward to eating my favourite top of the range oven-cook jalfrezi but the party has interrupted my plans. I console myself that the oven is so huge that it takes a long time to reach temperature, which is a constant pain. I turn on the lights, having struggled for about half a minute to locate the switch, just planning to sit around waiting for the party to start, but as soon as the lightbulb pings alive, I discover that they are all there already, all of them. A whole bunch of people, most of whom I don’t know, jump out at me from a state of concealment behind the kitchen curtains. Natasha pops open a champagne bottle, setting free a fizzy stream that springs the cork at bullet-speed into the ceiling lampshade; the cork then ricochets around the room quite unpredictably for about five seconds. Pauline blows up a balloon and ties its end: the balloon has a picture of a big, poisonous woodland mushroom on it, a toadstool. Someone presses Shuffle and then Play on a pre-bluetoothed device: a, to my mind- or perhaps ear-, incredibly eerie, slow cover version of The Teddy Bears’ Picnic begins sounding from a little speaker that looks like a square strawberry. Natasha and Pauline laugh like hyenas, devouring the champagne voraciously, wetting and frothing themselves savagely in the bottle’s sparkling contents, as the other invitees begin swaying and rocking and gyrating, unenthusiastically and yet lewdly, as I hear:
If you go down in the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise,
If you go down in the woods today, you’d better go in disguise
I don’t know what to do, nor where or how I should move. Two guests are suddenly in front of me, as though a puppeteer just dropped them in position by their string. The lights are lowered to a dim, sultry shimmer. One of the guests has a party horn, or noisemaker my mother used to call them, taped with gaffa tape and stapled bloodily to both his upper and lower lips. Each faint wheeze from his gullet sounds a baleful squeak, flaccidly half-inflating the blower bag. The figure beside him says:
“It’s going to rain shortly.” And then “It’s going to thunder shortly. The rhetorical device is called anaphora.”
The one who speaks moves his gagged friend along, away from me. Natasha and Pauline, who are both sexily dressed I cannot possibly deny, moist all over their mouths and bared cleavages with champagne, continue to laugh manically, dead-ly, at nothing it seems. Are they laughing at me, I can’t help but ask myself. Are they laughing at my tragic and glum existence? They dance with me, they paw at me and grind against me. Summoning, channelling, managing desire: calling it into being, then keeping it at bay, their dancing is fluid and vivacious, but so unrelated to the slow measures of the music that their energy is spooky and disquieting. It strikes me as not the sort of music the young normally listen to, dance to, make out to.
See them gaily gad about
They love to play and shout
The music pulsing in death-like, premonitory booms from the strawberry speaker is slow and sustained. Discordant alterations to the original chord progression cloy in the accompaniment of tuned percussion. The voice is soft but high, plaintively piercing, a woman’s voice, haunting, even a little curdling, a decrepit singer of nursery rhymes, a childhood sound staled. Filling each gap that she takes between lines of lyric, a stratospherically high violin titters with a spidery tremolo.
Not unlike the constituent layers and parts of this music, no-one seems connected, everyone in the room seems to be apart from one another, and the music does nothing to join them. Rain begins, it doesn’t begin teasingly, its first assertions are immediately aggressive and ungentle, an evacuation of weighty liquid quantity as though of waste. Thunder mutters and then booms more provocatively, its nocturnal and skyish curse more lasting, far away enough that its vastness tells, but close enough that the feeling of threat is penetrating and palpable.
“Your oven is massive,” someone I don’t know, female, says. “I’m from floor six.”
I don’t know what to say. But I notice the oven is on. I reach for the knob to turn it off but Natasha stops me, distracting me with her body.
At six o’clock their mummies and daddies
Will take them back home to bed
‘Cause they’re tired little teddy bears
Pauline and Natasha look freakishly identical as they move, writhing like two heads of the same serpent. They darkly prance and even weave their waving hair, those silken spasms, into the chthonic gravity of their dance. Weave, weave the moonlight in your hair, I rhapsodise. Behind them, the faces of the other attendees are pale and struck with something like traumatic awe. The party blower squeaks from somewhere in the room I cannot see. The rain is still pounding on the windows, a forceful and urgent presence in the city night. The sound of the noisemaker never changes, its sharp note is only ever altered in duration and avidity. The one to whom it is attached seems to say Help Me, his meaning trapped behind the blower’s squark.
The song continues to go on, its affect unchanged, its phantasmic intensity unalleviated by any sort of melodic or textural brightening on the track. The girls, the ball’s two belles, joined and serpentine, approach me. I am the birthday boy after all. I know that certain privileges fall upon me.
If you go down in the woods today, you’d better not go alone
The voice wheedlingly floats its warning to me. People sway, little more than shadows. But Natasha and Pauline are all flesh. Pauline is my favourite, though she and her girlish partner in crime are so alike. Pauline touches me, I keep catching her eye and she comes over and dances with me, impressing her body. The distance between us is small and yet difficult to cross. It is alive and deeply felt. She is good: good at something, not at dancing, but something. I know she doesn’t even particularly like me, I know that her flirtations are a pretence, but it is a clever and skilful edifice she constructs and wafts in my direction. She feigns receptiveness, vends reciprocity whorishly but deliciously. She knows it will awaken me, and once I am awake, she has her intended audience, captive, and bound, and able to see everything.
It’s lovely down in the woods today but safer to stay at home
My inevitable erection, undeclared and disguised- but extant and so part of the room’s composition, fills me with sadness. I notice but do not ponder why two men, as burly, sober, and unparticipating as bouncers, have entered the kitchen with an enormous trough. It doesn’t seem to be an empty vessel, judging by the effort it takes of them to carry it. I dimly observe that it is full of pale putty, what I learn quickly is dough. The two men who entered with the trough depart. No-body registered their presence; no-body reacts after the fact.
I am very close to Pauline now. Close enough that I can smell her breath on my face. My arousal is my problem to deal with, my urge to manage, but she seems to register it in such a way that she makes it her responsibility too. Natasha, additionally, unites herself to our duet, making flagrant advances towards me, the third voice in the trio. The rain remains torrential. I have a very strong urge to touch the girls. I have the very distinct fantasy of grabbing one of the four arms curling about before me and running my tongue up and down its entire fragrant, pale length. Natasha is a little brown, brown as in tanned. Pauline is alabaster. I find that they are guiding me. I’m being pushed back, made to step in a direction I haven’t chosen, but I am servile and needy. Sensing proximity to the achievement of my goals, I do as they say. I find the feeling of exposure mortifying, the way I know that I must look but I refuse to flinch. I will touch some part of you, I am intimidating, I will choose to touch a part of you and I will do it, I will choose which part of one of your two bodies I touch.
There is new music on the speaker.
Manamana
Doo-doo do do-doo
It sounds unbelievably odd. The tempo is slowed about four times. Strands of atonal musique-concrete like shards of ice drape the familiar melody, unmistakable in its contour and lyric. Melodised voices are haltingly made to sing while, backgrounded in the discombobulating texture, voices whispering obituaries and what sound like police radio calls perplex and disturb as they quietly, busily ramble.
Manamana
It sounds like mama. A slow, bleak, bestial monster curled up in the earth, grouchily demanding his mother. I want my mama, I cry but not aloud. I fall because I am pushed- or tripped, I can’t tell which. I end up in the dough, in the trough. I feel the cushioning squeeze, the heavy hug of the dough around my body as Natasha and Pauline fold me in. They do so, not only with alacrity, but in a manner that is dance-like, choreographed, music-wise. The party guests start cracking eggs on my head and Natasha and Pauline continue to take the lead, but not unsupported, in their efforts to enfold me entirely in the dough. Someone shoves a knob of butter in my mouth. I find myself straitjacketed by the mix soon enough, unable to struggle, and yet I never struggled in the first place. My head still sticks out. I am just a head in the moist, sweet, blobby substance of an uncooked cake. The guests carry the me-cake, at Natasha and Pauline’s instruction, towards the great kitchen oven which we always remarked was much too big. The heat strikes me immediately. The oven is preheated. The glowing bars on the upper surface of the black interior come towards me. It takes considerable effort on their part to push me in. In the process of heaving the trough inside, the trough, on the lowest level of the oven, has turned, and I am facing out towards the room as the door closes behind me. Pauline and Natasha kiss the door, their lips moistly flat themselves upon the glass and look like molluscs or sea-stars. Then they wave goodbye to me and carry on dancing.
IV
Something rather upsetting has occurred. I hear confessions in the cathedral most days. Today was no different. We call it the lunchtime confession slot, from 12 until 12.50. According to procedure, I exited the sacristy by the Lady Chapel door, and went into chamber two. I took my seat in good time. It’s uncomfortable and tedious work. It is a joyful thing to absolve the sins of them that are penitent. Occasionally, it is even thrilling to hear of great transgressions. But most of the time people’s infractions are boring. Satan does most of his work through tedium, subtle and creeping despair, rarely does he resort to grand acts of depravity.
I began to pray a decade, meditating on the mystery of the crown of thorns. I had just about finished pronouncing the seventh Hail Mary when the chamber door opened, before I’d even switched the entry light to green, and I was almost startled out of my skin by the sharp jagged creak of the door and the sudden shaft of light thrown upon the dusty, dark, red-brown interior of the box at whose central and dividing grate, my face lay pressed. The penitent was kneeling, his face pressed against the same glass, the other side. Though his entry was premature, I didn’t dismiss him.
“In the name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy spirit,” I said, suiting the expected action to the words. The penitent followed suit.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, it has been…” I couldn’t see much of the person who had entered but the voice sounded damaged and aged to me. I was able to see an outline, a figure in shadow. Yes, an old man. The old man contemplated the time since his last confession, so he could continue: “…I can’t remember how long it’s been, Father,” he concluded, unable to arrive at a figure.
“Tell me your sins,” I said.
“Well, it all started when my wife removed the bookmark from a book I was reading. It’s a novel called “No Other” by Stanton S. Wickford. It’s a very good piece of work. Essentially, a depressed bisexual academic has two affairs simultaneously with students in his class, one with a female student, one with a male student, as a social experiment, to see which one is more fulfilling and lasting. Meanwhile, his wife who is institutionalised for depressive psychosis begins having sex with a male nurse…”
I interrupted him at this point. “Please, sir, get back to your sins if you would, there are others who wish to avail themselves of this sacrament. Let us not take up any more time than we have to.”
He continued: “Well, one month ago, my wife removed my bookmark from this book and, er, she threw it away,” he resumed. “I lost my page, I lost my bookmark. I was furious. So, to get back at her, I made myself a new bookmark- but I made it out of her pet canary. I ran it over beneath the wheels of the car until it was flat. Discovering what had happened, she decided to poison me- I have coeliac disease, Father- speaking of which it’s an absolute fucking nightmare getting gluten free host in this place, and what’s more whenever you bring it up with the welcomer he acts like a massive prick about the whole thing…
“Excuse me,” I naturally interposed, “Please refrain from foul language in the confessional, if you’d be so kind,” I said.
“Sorry, Father,” the man said.
“Please also respect the sacrament’s stipulation for concision and clarity,” I further counselled. The sacristy bell rang at that moment and the choristers and celebrant priest marched in, to the measure of a jaunty air upon the chamber organ. I felt at that point, quite palpably and incipiently, that I’d far rather be out there than in here, vested, within the hushed golden glow of the Lady Chapel’s domed and spacious apse, before the Marian centrepiece, the vile serpent fleeing away, in affrighted coils, down the tree of Jesse’s tendrils, and the choral scholars quired before the small number of gathered congregants, and penitents awaiting their respective release.
“Sorry, Father,” the man said. “Anyhow, erm, after she poisoned me…and you know Father I have tried to persuade her to visit the confessional, how I have tried, but between you and me- and where else other than the confessional does the phrase “between you and me” feel so perfectly appropriate, between you and me, Father- hm, I don’t think ever used that phrase while at confession, funny- anyway, between you and me,” he further relished the phrase before continuing after a pause in which I heard urgent, deliberate footsteps approach my confession box and stop by it. No window allowed me to survey my immediate surroundings. My penitent continued “…she’s a fairly diabolical woman my wife, and an atheist to boot I have become convinced, I mean she calls herself a Catholic even though her father was a Methodist and he despised the faith, absolutely despised you lot, ever since the day he was forced to convert so he could marry the woman who turned out to be my mother-in-law who was of Irish extraction but her mass attendance became pretty sloppy as she entered the flabbier precincts of late middle age just like Joan…”
“Please stop talking, sir,” I had to say. “I’m going to eject you if you don’t get to the point. Do you want to ask absolution for turning your wife’s pet canary into a bookmark?” The absurd words sounded even more ridiculous in my mouth, the second time they had been spoken, than they had in his, the first time.
“No,” the man said, having thought about it for a second. “My father’s Italian, by the way.”
“I don’t care,” I think I said. “I think you’d better leave actually, sir.”
“Suit yourself,” the man said.
“I will have a word about gluten free hosts being made more readily available,” I remember calling after him.
“Thank you kindly,” the man said, and then he disappeared. All was dark. I heard footsteps hover near the confession box and then depart. I switched the light on the roof of the chamber to green, an invitation this vexatious, loquacious, and unabsolved penitent had not waited for. A splash of light hit me through the open door as a second, far more usual and well-behaved penitent entered.
I heard confessions until 12.55, five minutes beyond the timetabled time. Lips moved in the screen of the grate before me, in the proximate glare of a small, trite crucifix…the lips told of masturbation, both male and female (that’s the really good stuff in my opinion- unless they just say I committed sins of impurity, father- which always strikes me as a disappointing and cowardly cop-out), and one person came who had engaged in protected sex nineteen times in the last two weeks. The confessing lips told, additionally, of rages, of fights, even battery, arguments, of thefts- more often than not of the strangest items- of venial infractions, masses missed, prayers not said, and meat consumed on Fridays, and lies, lies and lies and lies, you had to wonder if the penitents were lying about what they had lied about. Days taken off work deceitfully, under false pretexts. I just keep pulling sickies, I think I’m an addict, that particular woman said more than once. Addicted to what? I questioned. The rush I get from the deception, from getting my way.
I switched off the green light. The confession box light, its alteration between green and red, puts me in mind not of traffic lights but lavatories. I would be deeply wounded and yet not altogether surprised to discover a Vacant/Occupied dial upon the roof of the confession box. And I the human mechanism within, ordained to make the toilet work.
But I had to wonder, who was the old(ish) man who had entered the confession box first. Why were his testimonies and stories so strange? Was he an eccentric, lonely, in need of someone to ramble at, had he invented his sins, his wife’s sins, had he invented his wife, had he invented everything: was he a fantasist, a cokehead, a schizophrenic, a borderline personality, a grifter?
At any rate, when it was all over, and the box was practically humid, redolent with all the sins heard throughout its just-ended session of sin-saying, and I had prayed a further decade of the rosary- to the scourging at the pillar this time- (I always pray for a brief time after I hear confessions), I was ready to leave. But the door wouldn’t open. I was able to ascertain immediately that it wasn’t simply jammed, or accidently lodged in the jamb: human deviance had locked, taped, clamped my only door of exit. And entrance. I tried to force the door open but to absolutely no avail: it wouldn’t budge. I began to pound and hammer in great desperation upon the door of the confession box in the hope of attracting attention. It was surprising to me, with what immediacy the situation became intolerable and horrid.
“Let me out! I’m stuck!” I cried. Peril robbed me of all serenity and grace.
I began sobbing and weeping. Such entrapment, such claustrophobia, such a barricading in a vessel whose small, constricting capacity could not, with the best will in the world, be called a room. A vertical coffin. An Emily Dickenson poem calls the grave a “ferocious room”. The phrase came to me and seemed quite appropriate.
Nobody heard me. I made the light show green, to invite in a penitent whom I could possibly ask for help. One woman entered, a pregnant woman. As soon as I asked her for help, her face turned, fell, and she withdrew, perturbed.
After hours of clamour, giving up in despondency, then resuming clamour for help, for emancipation from this musty tomb, the cathedral cleared of worshippers, laity, religious, and clergy, the enormous doors shuddered shut, the fat iron lock clanged through the antechapels and chambers and flew like a spirit over the vast holy surfaces of intricate stone. From the threshold of the entrance portal, by the stoops of holy water and the big, baggy font, across the dizzying lengths and widths of pew, to the tabernacle of Christ’s dwelling in the blessed sacrament chapel, to the domed sanctuary and apse, the great pillared façade over the altar, the altarpiece of the ascended Christ enthroned in His glory, and the Christ crucified, dangling in massive, red, tortured, hoisted, central spectacle. At last the soft, deep boom of doom slept, and I was sealed in the vast, highly-strung silence of the slumbering cathedral. Ravens circled the highest tower. I heard a distant croak, and then a few answering shrieks, and finally the small unmanned bell sing out a ten PM.
“Fuck!” I cried out at last. The feeling of the word in my mouth was new, unfelt for years and years. Trapped within the uncapacious confession box, it did not fly free bout the cathedral. But I enjoyed it, nonetheless, I found, to my surprise, that I had missed it. Knowing that no-one would hear my shouts, I cried the word aloud again, for no-one but me, no-one’s ears but my own. “FUCK!” Then I did the same again. I was incensed but also giddy. “FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!”
You get the picture. But my jocund fanfare of Fucks, from within so incongruous a place as the confession box of a great city cathedral, seemed to attract the attention of somebody, many bodies. Soft footed spirits, reprobate entrants, anti-worshippers congregated like a shadow congregation. I could hear the footsteps of those that stepped, the whispers of twenty, thirty, a hundred whisperers. The whispering grew louder.
A murmur, not the tiny unintelligible murmur of a penitent in the confessional, but the growing murmur of a whole cathedralful of people began to slosh in waves around the grand interior. Who were these nocturnal visitors, did they have a right to be here, what were they, what did they look like...? They hadn’t entered. They were already inside, waiting to be summoned. Then a boom-box, the soft but rising thrum of urban house music, began to pulsate from somewhere, the low, musical thump of the bass response rattling the frame of the confession box, in which for whatever reason I had been sequestered. I was growing weary of my continuing to remain thusly trapped, weary of the apathy outside the box, weary of the deaf ears upon which my perfectly audible, adequately forceful petitions had landed, up until that point.
“Let me the fuck out of here!” I screamed. My voice had grown hoarse. “Please!” If this had been someone else, one of my parishioners, the pity I would have felt would have been killing. My state brought tears to my eyes and the dishevelment of weeping to my voice.
I can’t account for what happened next. But the entire confession box was lifted up. I felt the strain of hands and arms, and I heard the tense steps of what must have been thirty carriers, carrying the confession box, with me in it, through the air. The great doors of the cathedral were opened onto the city, the night, Cardinal Square, and I felt immediately the cold whoosh of the air entering the nooks and crannies of the chamber’s fairly thin oaken panels. It was cold in the church, but the chill of the nocturnal city air was so much the greater. City sounds, street sounds, drunken sounds, honks of horns, the rumble of a tube in the floor, raised voices, madness, bursts of desultory and tuneless song, drills in the asphalt, an electronic voice I could not understand and whose source and purpose I cannot identify.
I protested all the time, clamoured, stamped, pounded. But the door into my side of the confession chamber had been sealed by some force which could not be defied and whose sealing was definitive and unalterable. After a while I gave up. Five minutes resigned to whatever fate it was awaiting me, the dark, empty penitential box on the other side of the transparent grate staring back at me without consolation or conscience all the while, I felt myself airborne. I was rising, I knew I was rising. The upholding force changed, the upholder changed as I changed hands, from human hands to the palm of the air. The time had come! I was being lifted to heaven, by heaven, nothing able to possibly defy its pull. My caging, my being thusly borne finally made all the sense in the world to me.
But a moment later I realise that my upliftment, being effected by so secular a force as a crane, is without the significance I first attributed to it. It is just the mechanical hook and pulley at the end of a crane arm that I have felt, that lifts and drops such crude masses as concrete pipes, and vehicles ready for incineration, and bulk parts for building office tower-blocks.
I am lowered. Around me, the earth seems to churn. I am in a vast grave, a gaping wound in the black earth. Tremendous drumming drums on the roof of the confession box. The hole is deep, the smell and tickle of the air is different in a such a deep, soily hole. As I am separated from the night’s coolness by thick layers of piled earth, the pressure of the air changes. I swoon. I clamour for the last time.
I see the face of a rotten badger in the glass grate. He makes the sign of the cross with a literally skeletal paw, and asks to hear my sins.
V
While Katherine reads my manuscripts downstairs, which she does often, I like to go upstairs and put on a record. Not just downstairs…down-down-downstairs, at a level quite a way down does she sit, and read, mark up. While I await her verdict, the casual crimes of her editorial pencil- what I will later regard as ointments, remedies-, I like to send my mind somewhere else.
There’s one particular record I like very much. The Kodilak Sonata for Solo Cello, played by Nathan Wood, who is gorgeous and upon whose image I have a crush. I habitually lick his little face, his beautiful crop of curling, golden hair. It is a decorated 1975 recording. I inherited- I did not purchase- the turntable upon which I play my records. Many of the records I have also inherited, from the same source as the Hi-fi. But the 1975 His Mistress’ Voice Kodilak Sonata is my very own. I bought it second hand but it is mine, for the duration. I am inclined to think that I will not allow my records to change hands, the collection shall die as I die. I’ll have them incinerated or immolated or thrown in landfill come the time that my expiration draws near. The sleeve is very typical of classical records from the 1970s. The performer, in denim, sprawls, in a supposedly candid way. That’s on the front of the record.
On the back, the liner notes are so delicately written, they somewhat fustily but meticulously, and with a curious affability, describe the circumstances of the music’s creation, and the structural principles that govern its composition. If you really listen, you can recognise musical figures, subjects, motifs from the descriptions that they are given. But it’s difficult to render a musical phrase descriptively, its true self simply remains unsaid, until you hear it, wavering with great, melancholic intensity in the Wood-commanded gut strings, and horsehair bow.
Once both sides of the record are played, I put a stop to those fertile revolutions. By the time only a dusty scratching is sounding from the central groove, I am ready for feedback. I make tea and plate biscuits around a small bowl of soup. The passage I have had Katherine read is the latest in a novel about the travails of the female middle child of a family of displaced Irish travellers…I believe it is marvellous. I take down her sustenance on a tray. I have to put down the tray in order to unlock the new security metal door, with a lock and two padlocks, three separate, requisite keys. As I descend to subterranean depth, with the tray, I smile a lovely big smile, a smile big with the belief that what I have created is magnificent.
I set down the tray before Katherine. The fattening manuscript is before her. She is rereading something with keen interest. She looks up from the manuscript, and tells me that the handcuff by which she is connected to the basement radiator is too tight around her left wrist, and chafing. I loosen the cuff a little. The length of chain between each cuff can be altered too: I lengthen it a little. Her free right hand has been inactive, the pencil I gave her is lodged lazily between forefinger and thumb.
“What did you think?” I ask.
She grunts a pensive noise of vague approval. Her ambivalence is verging on antipathy, something has prevented her from submitting to the spell; she can’t allow herself to be carried along by it. She was dishonestly complimentary in the beginning, because she feared me. Now she knows that I expect, and can bear the truth. The truth tells clear as daylight to me, I know when I am in its holy presence. It was the falsehoods that maddened me, the lies that caused me to hurt, and to do hurt.
I howl as she breaks the news to me, as I first lay eyes upon the giant, square crossing out of a beloved, a particularly beloved, paragraph. It will need to be rewritten. I howl.
All along she has been telling me that my choice of subject matter is flawed, that the work has been cursed from the outset: I don’t know enough about the community I have elected to portray. I can smell horseshit, but so can she: it tells in my pages.
Katherine doesn’t seem to have much interest in the tea, and the soup, and the ginger biscuits. She has other things on her mind. A question widens her eyes, causes them to glisten, makes her partly absent as she goes about informing me of the mediocrity of what I have done. It’s been a month since I put her in this place, she tells me, since I followed her home from the publishing house, since I accosted her, bagged her, gagged her, drove her away in the back of my van.
I can’t lie to her so I tell her that I will have to keep her here until the novel is finished. I break the news to her that I’m going to change direction, thematically speaking, and she howls, as I just howled. I leave the tray within consumable distance, climb the stairs, lock the iron door, thrice.
I go back to my room, console myself with the Kodilak Cello Sonata. But when I pick up the album cover in both my hands, handling it carefully to preserve that which is already well-preserved, wondering what it would be to be on the front of something, to have so entirely and so completely made something, I notice that Nathan Wood’s right arm is raised. There can be no doubt about the meaning of his raised right arm, the salute he shocks me with is unambiguous, as is the little growth of square moustache between his upper lip and his cute little boy’s nose.
As I reposition the stylus on the circumference of Side A and re-listen to the sonata, it becomes clear that it can offer no respite: there is next to no refuge from the howling in the basement. I know that I can’t write under these conditions; but I am beggining to learn that no conditions are of any help to me, in some sense I am beyond aid. The fat, unfashionable monitor wheezes, the screen tremors while it waits, the cursor blinks on the loaded document. The printer sits, a mouth.
“Put it down! Put it down!” I think I cry aloud. “Put it down!”
My spittle, a biproduct of fervency, cannot help its wet release, all over Nathan Wood’s pretty face and his golden curly hair.