O:JA&L Experimental Fiction (XP)
Adam John Wilshaw
PODCAST ICARUS
No escaping the fact it was the washing machine which got me to the so-called guard rail of this hydroelectric dam, C, where billions of sewing-needle pines are gas-hob sterilized for splinters and the riverside amputrees are mirror-wrinkled all along the white lonely lines of the white leather river. Got me to this stolen laptop’s fly-eyed screensaver of the cat we called Snowballs, apparently stone-dead on a toasted lawn, belly up, hieroglyph tempered, all three paws weighing a dilated July moon, showing how cats do absorb middles in stillness, even as name-day revellers dictate curses like arch-traitors with sparklers nearby. Got me to the dawn formality of dawn parental corpses and Leila, the very pregnant undertaker, pencilling in surnames and insurance numbers. Got me to one clear blur, the choice of choice, to meet height or not. Got me to those borrowed heirloom teacups in that borrowed removals box and this picture-frame landscape-viewer pulpit and the last bottle of 1985 in the secret drawer in my brother’s robbed family vehicle and much greylight oozing in the one-way varicose windscreen through an overdrawn valley morning like this one. Got me to maybe I’m here because I won or earned thirty-three bottles of pedigree black wine and have been caning a jug almost nightly and smoking three-skin biftas on the quarter bells, listening to space rock and free jazz and plainsong. Got me to the Claret-denimed phoney-aristocrat trainee mechanic backslider who did the downtown raffle, who was pitched into bitter moods every Friday when his application to the central office estate agency training division was rejected, every week just after the raffle sub-committee splinter group had broken up their powwow under the leaky awning where the seafood market used to be, rejected as a spalpeen twerp like him must have known it always would be, and him then advising me to respect wine as he dragged to my door a schooner-load, the man’s face cheeks like old Christmas tree baubles if the maroon and Martian lacquer on the baubles had been jostled for one generation in an under-stairs bag until the baubles were lizard-scaled. The ice of a melting frozen planet after an expensive century is what his amphibian-blooded face reminded me of, C. And it’s not about the peaks this tourist vista map here now once urged me to identify. Nor the pretty ghosted miles and arrows on the diagram for the landmarks of the city state. Because when I found myself here in this exact same spot last July, a year ago, and all that time passed away without my really knowing it, this pulpit was innocent and primed. When
we were here together, C, that’s how it was. But now, this morning, it is ruined. Ruined by acrylic psoriasis and doodles of penises, with the penises lasering out space-invader hyphens and the scrotums boasting three hairs each, and pipe bang-out scarring. I think fragile minds and their guy ropes are under too much strain and so or but maybe historical pain got me here too. I don’t know. I mean this is what I feel I have been made to do or this is how the world has made me and what will it do to you now after today is something I don’t want to think about. Because: tourism historical memory sideshow, guys. That’s what our stand-in social studies teacher alleged and he was a man who enjoyed his allegations. But he was also a grief-slapped dipsomaniac who alleged there was Darwinian inheritance even in landscape formation, in the factories of the pharaohs, or the tech wizards, in the clouds, and so we should think about human society and individual life in terms of useful uselessness, you know, and also that clowns were the ultimate opportunists, and what could be more of an opportunity than a sideshow, and BTW don’t use that word, which word, that word, sideshow, in your exam, or what about flags and fracking and maybe these too are like and that doesn’t answer the why question either. Now this morning there is a shut-up campsite, its disallowed rebel flags still frying on weekend barbecues, and a carp pond marbled with two-stroke and a bench paid for by a dead woman’s dead lover before his lover had died, and a belly-twangingly nostalgic coin-operated telescope, and what must be a lot of stoats. Lots of stoats down there for a switch of water so contaminated. A right mob of them, C. And they aren’t why I am up here, either. Or why nothing I am wearing or about to use is proven. Or why a hellish desiccating gale must not at any second funnel northwards without notice into this rude and petrified depression. We used to joke that dawns like this are like the piano lessons when every note is second-guessed by Mrs German’s Alsatian, J.S. Bach, and you’re just too wary to appreciate all the implications of J.S. Bach, composer or ex-police dog, what with the worm-gut panting on your ungraded fingers, and always an off-key plink at the end of the run. If I’d been on drugs I might have coped with the dog. Yes, look, stoats, maybe weasels or mink. I don’t know. I hadn’t been thinking, C, about how the screws could be tightened, how the emergency could become more emergent, about how the other world only needed one more soul. I mean I don’t think I didn’t think like that when I was
with you. Every night we slept together in that room out back and in the window you could see the dry hills and hear the fountain in the courtyard. You told me you could only fall asleep when I had been there. I don’t know. Yours truly hadn’t been thinking about a washing machine, is the nub. I’d just been moiling away in the curfew catalogue shop, barred as I was, owing to certain family connections, from any of the elite roles in estate agency or hairdressing or mechanics or the like, and it sure was a merciless job for a man my age and with a deep connection to an active safehouse, with an active lover in an active safehouse, trying not to act again on any useful dreams, obsessively dialling the odds of what would do me in, if it wasn’t you, in the end. I don’t know. If inaction woke me from the dream, maybe. Or maybe liver cancer, like which graved Father. Who knows? Or liver failure, like which sent Mother orange as marmalade to the conveyor belt, then oven, or option X, etcetera. Never put etcetera in your essays, the teacher told us. I don’t know. Etcetera is pretty useful in this sort of predicament. Off-key plink at the end, the small rodents leaping among the froth and filth, plink, dog-breath. Taking off these tennis shoes. Taking off the army surplus jacket. I am here, doing these things, knowing that I had not been thinking about washing machines or how the other world needed another soul, least of all the one I suppose I have inside me, I don’t know, and but there it all was, C, two long nights ago, when you were on a shift and we could not see each other. There it all was, while I dozed painfully in my kitchen-dining-living-bed-room: a complete and instant physical and intellectual understanding of how to repair an off-handedly uncooperative, spindle-bent, and bearings-grenaded Louer x32 turbo front-loader, Old French model number C0679238X32, complete with schematic, serial numbers, tool requirements, costs in three likely currencies, including dark digital, and bookmaker-style odds-of-ease at every snarling junction. Important to state, here in recordable space, at this sensitive location, not least for any future investigators, picking up the breadcrumb trail, depending on altitude and velocity or collisions, not that I’m expecting collisions, I don’t know, that I do not and have never used a Louer x32 turbo washing machine, preferring, if anything, the stolid and anti-superstitious Lutheran reliability of a Bosch, since I was asked to immediately leave the male safehouse three years ago, horrifyingly in love with a certain woman or not, just before I was kicked off the mechanics course, and, as far as I
know, I had never even heard of such a Louer model or seen one in person, as it were, if we think of washing machines as robot personalities, as I have very much tended to, now I mull on it, watching the tennis shoes fall, aerial-bomb-like, there she goes, laces fluttering, watching the jacket flap and sway as it falls, farewell old friend. I like the feel of rough concrete under my bare feet; it reminds of me of swimming pools. And after the funerals on consecutive days, Mother’s at the suburban capsule-coffee-serving Low Modernist church, whose glass efforts were modest, to say the least, where she would have liked the quietness of the radiators, and Father’s at the suburban humanist plantation compost depot, where the bookless vicar pretended to be godless, and where Father would not have liked the presumption of the wormy Siamese queen lolling on the tombstones whose inscriptions years of acidic rain had turned to nonsense glyphs, I let the liver charities take our household belongings, things like wardrobes and crockery and screwdrivers, but I kept a photo-crammed picnic hamper I still haven’t looked in, especially after my trainee psychotherapist, Amanda, asked me if I wanted to look in it. Amanda asked me: why do or don’t you want to look in the pic-i-nic hamper and why do or don’t you want to answer this question? Yes, she said pic-i-nic, like Yogi Bear. And of course I gave away the cherrywood barber’s chair which belonged to grandfather when he lived abroad, when he did not work for any of the major or minor or non-existing intelligence bureau, I don’t know, I don’t care either, and one folding gateleg table, old ash, apparently, and the bone China teacups I remember drinking cold milk out of all throughout the summer I was not able to reveal I had been dumbstruck, who can say why, and the dentist assumed I had a brain bleed after the gargoyle had clouted me on the head with a staplegun, I only winged the little bastard, she told my mother, and that doctor makes my therapist look ascetic, which is saying something, and the 20,500 music and audiobook discs I tried to file into the robbed family vehicle around 01:00 last night this morning. My dear bite-rich ego-maniac estate-agent fortune-teller brother said he wanted to keep nothing, absolutely fucking nothing, and I told him he was welcome to that. Leila, the precise and officious undertaker, who gave birth to dead identical twin boys the next day, told me I could meet my obligations in instalments, calling instalments chunks, BTW, which almost made me blow, which I was planning to do anyway, whether the undertaker liked it or not
(pay in instalments, not blow chunks; this clarification does not in any way diminish or belittle or shit on the solidarity I feel with the undertaker in the aftershocks of her personal tragedies). And this is before I even got to the useful dreams, C. The tennis shoes are not moving or they are moving and the world has stopped moving. I think they, my tennis shoes dozens of metres down there, are caught by two countervailing forces. There is something alarmingly precise about the flow rates needed to operate a dam of this size. The jacket has gone under, into the mud. You know, C, of course that we, I say we, don’t sell the big white goods, things like washing machines, at the central downtown catalogue shop in the pissiest alley off the Madruguda Square. Neither have I ever repaired a washing machine, or any other machine, C, not so much as tickled out a petrified rubber door-seal or re-funnelled a drain hose, and have, correction, had, almost no idea how washing machines operated, other than a thing span on some type of wheel thing and water piped in and out and they were bastard tricky for an amateur to mend. My father, who, let us not forget, earned a living as a supermarket captain, a fully hostaged and midnight-clock-obsessed Cap, just as the supermarkets became fortified warehouses, was always in unique and unexamined control of anything related to washing or machines in our house when I was growing up, what with my mother’s disabilities and so on, although she had clarified opinions on plumbing and drainpipes. But then instantly and comprehensively in the dream there it all unquestionably and falsifiably was: the runic double-cross screws only get-at-able if you knock the mainframe upside down and rock it away from you at an angle of 42 or 43 degrees and use an obscure tool with a right-angled shaft, and beat the 50-1 ease-odds; the concrete ballast; the arteries’ clogged seasons of minerals and seeds and hair-cotton-soap; the LED panel and its holy retinal wires, the labial rubber seals and their metaphysical steel clips with 100-1 correct reattachment odds, everything nosing significantly of deterrent and the highest summer ditches of cross-country school racing; there it all was; how to unhitch the strain of the tub from its muscle springs, which look like something Isambard Kingdom Brunel might stand in front of for a portrait; the semi-castrated bearings which must be smashed out with a certain heavy-duty stonemason chisel after the drum has been wrestled and clawed out of the tub; the eccentric orbit of the belt and the ground-metal-shavings-dusted wheel, half-rusted in place, the
cock-eyed spindle; the canals of doom; and the best way to soft mallet in new bearings with a velvet pad to prevent any shatter; and the best way to realign the spindle and wheel and drum and tub and new seals and belt and springs and weights and door and heating element and motor and electrics and drainage and inlet pipes and runic screws without anything going oblate in the wrong way or cracking, even a fine whispering fuck of a hairline; and how to reassemble the whole of this cheap one-way washing machine in exactly seventy-seven chess moves, as lunar cycles come and go, so it all works again, and a grand exit starts to feel as everyday as the poetic-algebraic implications of quantum physics and the Louer X32 “turbo supersmart” doesn’t just sarcastically clonk its barrel four times and then halt, to sulk, lobotomy-grinning, as you weep silently into your oily gelid tool-bloodied fingers. There it all was. I knew from the dream how to do it. But I was not going to do it, is the crux, C. I was not. After all the other factually useful dreams I have suffered in recent months, I had gone immediately to test, or at least investigate, the usefulness of each useful dream, but now I would not. I would not try to find and fix a washing machine which had weathered twelve seasons of daily weight overload, especially on beach towel days, until starting to rattle the notorious death drill of the bearings-grenaded washing machine, and whose entropy had been ostrich-headed in its owners’ routines, creating a further high-rpm mangle around a feeble budget-market spindle which was irredeemably scowled the day it left the factory. No way, Joseph. Instead, I was going to kick open my brother’s dockside garage and steal his 20-year-old untaxable family vehicle and then load it hard with what I needed for this gig, and the mechanisms I’ve been gathering in the living room, and then risk the shifting-sands refuge pass in the lifting fog to get to this hydroelectric dam, where the CCTV is vandal-struck, the barriers are more a gymnastic aid than a deterrent, and where the balance is not in favour of waiting for any more revelation. To get to here. To claim these bones and this brain and that innocent drop, which is just fifty metres to the pebbles, and nations of waterlice under that. To press ENTER. To notice how we look forward to, and how gaming an illusory self with mood-altering chemistry is not a well-thought-out method for avoiding the punch and triangle and swell of getting to be. To that thirsty chameleon river and a licking breeze which makes the river’s skin leather, and which couldn’t possibly become a
horrible gale, according to the radar on the weather app, and the trees down there pollarded so they look like planted bones. I don’t know. Maybe they are planted bones and someone forgot to tell me about it, C. Did I come here to look at this screensaver of the cat we called Snowballs under a great end-days heatwave and to think the morning’s pines and needling might flabbergast all these birds and all the sun-blazing facts all around me? I don’t know. But four months ago on a Monday in November, no way I can forget any of these details, at two in the morning, the clock said two, I had just had a totally vertigo-inducing dream, C. Not because it was dream-like, elusive, inexplicable, time-space non-conformist, emotionally untouchable and emotionally lung-collapsing at the same time, category-mocking, misaligned with numerous mammal realities, florid, a recurring reconfiguration of every street and schedule you know but without perfumes, ignorant of what you think of as your desires, verbose, petulant, cruel to the point of self-abusing, as ambitious and fatalistic as a naive medieval fisherman, an obviously metaphorical shuffling of the previous week’s general anxieties, some iteration of a digestive malady, listing, not sucking up to its audience’s laziest babyish demands, Venn diagram baiting, loopy and stock reductive, deathly subtle, playing to the gallery of actors we think we want to want to impress which might be our self if our self might be said to exist lucidly among a usefully instructive dream state, real, cracked jug spout muttering out the side of its mouth, alone with the horrible rubber gloves with eye-tears or leaf sap on the limpid hairpin bends, much surreal, full of horrifying and yet alluring sex and composting, etcetera. No, it wasn’t that. It was vertigo-inducing, C, for one reason and that was because the dream contained only one event and that one event was a detailed and factually-accurate demonstration of how to make a perfect French consommé, as in soup. You know consommé, the soup, is a dish which is a notoriously tricky dish to German, even for la or el experts, I guessed I would soon learn from the spice rack of a few top-salt chefs, some I knew I would contact online through marketing and press officer bullshit babblers and some I would buttonhole during flora prep. There are enough of these people in the old town to go around without attracting too many pings and pricks from the estate agents keen to deny me a lease on a small apartment, deposit or no. Easy to get wrong: that’s what typifies your hard cooking. Important to state I was and am and have never been no
cook. I might boil an egg, fry a potato, construct cheddar pickle toasties, spoon pineapples out of a tin to suckle on with yoghurt, or patronise the cantina at the end of the street for tortilla curry kebabs and ginger beer, at least before all this shit started. You know all this, C. Yes, I can shift kilos of honeyed nuts, especially during a bifta jag and I open cans of organic dogfood, how can we know it’s organic, for my pointer. I don’t know but I think it might help to record here, quite near to the beginning of my voice recording, for any backroom failed semi-secret autopsy-heavy investigation which might only be permitted based on the potentially paranoid assumption that a person like me, with so many unexpected skills, was some kind of foreign or internal agent, jumping the fence, that when I was six-years-old, my father, who had recently been given managerial culpability for an eighth failing supermarket warehouse curfew fortress, whose carpark had been bordered with police tyre-slicer chains in a last-ditch bid to repel coupon hoarders, announced he really and certainly did not want our family cat, Snowballs, a white Angora queen, to ever stroll into the house via the front door, because he didn’t want her to get all uppity, him mistakenly thinking cats were pack animals like dogs, or caste animals like sapiens, and so every time he had to leave the house, and Snowballs was primed to jump commando-style off the wall and skitter past him into the house like a cloud on three well-oiled casters, which was always, because she liked nothing more than to be on his broken record player, which she broke, he would crouch so his face was at optimum cat-hearing altitude and growl softly, like a dog, through the door, to make Snowballs flee, which she always did, and my dad continued to crouch and growl softly like a dog every time he had to open the front door, even after Snowballs died on her back in the heatwave, ten years later, and for the rest of his life my father could not open the front door of his house, or any other house, or, let’s be honest, any door, without leaning over and growling, and sometimes yapping, very much like a greasy-necked terrier, first. I don’t know. So if you had asked me before lights out how to make a simple minestrone, a soup my mother used to make, reasonably badly, or reasonably well if you consider the limitations of both soup and woman, the results would have been un-delicious, never mind as accomplished as those of a flow-happy Michelin-starred restaurateur. My father made soup on name-days but always with the joy-killing salt and subtlety puzzle, which I’ll have to mediate on
soon, and for sure before the big launch. And yet there it was, C: the definitive knowledge, practical and intellectual, with a taste-able savouring of experience and many pitfalls flagged in the territory around, that this is precisely how you make the most gloriously life-enhancing and perfect and correctly accented French consommé. So I went off to the cringing middle-class supermarket to get the ingredients to test this silliness out, not even a google first, just a one-skin bifta and a mug o’ wine. You were working all the time by now, and I could hardly see you at all, plus you wanted to keep your social credit score at least mediocre, what with your connections at the safehouse and so on, and you knew that associating too much with a man who worked in a stockroom of a catalogue shop in the suburbs would dent your numbers, which was too much of a risk-o-rama. All I knew was a perfect French consommé soup is not something I could make, C. That night I was slated for the night shift in the catalogue shop’s Emergency Anti-stockpile Essential Items warehouse, but I called in sick. The Crag, my very taut and very frayed manager, was in the maze of unloading products from the filthy meagre cages when I rang, which is when his Chardonnay hangover is at its most ideological, so he only offered his routine battle-yell in teeth-clenched downtown, there is going to be a fucking murder, before hanging up, and I shoplifted the ingredients from the recipe in my dream, ingredients scritched, for some reason, in the factual dream, with a pressure-cracked fountain pen on the back of a pocket-furrowed supermarket receipt, and I followed the instructions as they had appeared to me, expecting a joke to be somehow explained, that this was another normal delusion, C, or my gall bladder telling me I needed to think about, I don’t know, nutrition, but no sir, the consommé soup looked and smelled and tasted unfathomably good, as in its deliciousness was almost without a floor on the depth angle, and I almost forgot the only woman I had ever loved was kind of refusing to see me much and I had something city-wide important to rely. But as I pondered on all the implications of this, counting up and lining up the meds and the glass tumbler and the bifta skins and candles, the question could not be avoided: what did or do I really know about French soup? As our stand-in social studies academy teacher put it, all those years ago, how can I trust what I know I trust, or know, or trust to know, just because I know I know it and I know I know I know to trust I trust it, was one of his frequent morning questions during the trolling
roasting segment of his lesson plan. I don’t know. So I took some of the consommé soup in the plastic box I have used for honeyed nuts to that creep who works in the accounts depot at my father’s final-year supermarket warehouse and he said, even at blood temp, it was the possibly the most sublime and evocative French consommé, yes as in the soup you fucking cretin, that he had ever encountered, like the soup was a yeti or a famous murderer, and did I not think I was a bit long in the dentures for this type of caper or prank, and did I expect my social score to go up doing this kind of shite, and did I think I was some kind of fucking comedian now as well? This man had apprenticed as a chef in famous restaurants but maybe he was blunt, or fibbing, or had a spreadsheet-aggravated sinus jam, so I took some of the consommé to that new 1970s dining-room in the bunker by the swamp, not too far from the biggest glass dockhouse refurb, this is just before the latest emergency curfew, and shit they were testy about me appearing in the flail of fauna prep, and stressing about some mad wedding demand, and everything had to be lasered with a stencil-type image of a dead baby’s face, as it was before, you know, before, but I insisted and got the same result, this was pro work French consommé, even from a questionable plastic box, and they said I would have to make it again to prove it. So I did. There and then in their kitchen. And, if anything, it was even better the second time. Never write about your boring stupid dreams, was another thing our lit teacher told us, but I don’t know, because I am having to ignore that advice, now I am up here, and I can tell you that my diary, which I have with me, for the record, C, tells me the next one came on a Tuesday. The next useful dream came on a Tuesday just after three in the morning, and it wasn’t about cooking this time. Instead, in that living moment, I had the vivid certainty I could have picked up a traditional Spanish guitar and played any number of intensely complicated songs in the style known as Flamenco. Music drifted and the smell was spruce and cypress and shellac and nylon. I had never played a guitar and I knew this knowing was completely ridiculous. Complicated broth is one thing; difficult-to-master high-wire-act folk music just like another. Yes, at school I enjoyed the triangle as much as anyone but I have no musical aptitude or training. Remember I only lasted seven hours with Mrs German and J.S. Bach beating the high end like a canine metronome. So I guessed my brain had been tricked by the odd fluke of the consommé French soup into thinking it, my
brain, could do it, act successfully on the factually impulsive reality of an instructive dream state, again, as in the feel of it, the that of it, the this of it, and I was just like, come on, fuck off, this is a bit cute, but just for larks I decided I was going to neck a strong and calming prescription dose and stroll over to the shop called STRINGS. I messaged my brother, just to double-click I was in fact awake, always worth checking, and he replied saying something typical-for-him and holier-than-thou, like: human beings have always had useful dreams; you’re a fool; the definition of a life well lived is such-and-such, blah blah blah. And by ten the next morning I didn’t know what to write which just didn’t sound loco, C, so I just crept along the facts, trying not to dislodge any loosened reality cliff pebbles. As planned, I strolled casually over to STRINGS, which is opposite the catalogue shop’s main downtown hygiene products public-facing official outlet depot, wearing my pampas rancher’s felt sombrero and not taking the pointer, who might have identified me to any onlookers, not by pointing, as is his genetic warrant, but he is a distinctive fellow, and the only one of his type in this part of the city whom I know of, and in STRINGS I asked the assistant, whose name-badge just said STRONG without further framing or justification, to try out what looked like a top-notch amber-gold Spanish guitar hanging up beyond the plectrum cabinet. The assistant, a wise old beard, told me this instrument my eager young friend was created by a proper German luthier, in a quite famous workshop, exclusive, and then he made me sit in a threadbare paisley-patterned armchair, musos like that sort of thing, and watched me like a working-class jewellery shop owner watches an in-his-opinion-too-young bride-to-be finger a diamond padlock ring, while I took the guitar, after it was offered like a weapon-dealer might offer a new type of high-powered sniper rifle, and him, this STRONG wise-beard, telling me this guitar was a work of art, not just a music machine for rock stars, my young friend, him maybe knocking on for eighty-years-old. I told the STRINGS guy I couldn’t play a guitar, at all, but I was thinking about taking lessons, if he knew anyone cheap and local and extremely patient, as in Buddha patient, and these two fingers haven’t worked since I slammed a Volvo door on them when I was eight, my tongue now card-dry from the dawn bifta, the 1985, the lying, the gaze of STRONG, the varnish reek of STRINGS, and all the meds tooling around my blood highways, not to mention some of the recent love-related events. So the
shopkeeper in STRINGS did not respond to my query about lessons; instead he shot me the only-just-patient sympathetic look all musicians give all non-musicians in all musical contexts and then he went to half-heartedly tune up a drum-kit, still very much within catching-a-baby-from-a-burning-second-floor-window distance, while a middle-aged man with tide-out but long hair, who used to drive the fizzy pop lorry, played the most sunlight-blocking songs on an electric organ, in chimes mode, maybe zither. First thing to note was that holding that guitar did not seem as bestially strange as I had predicted; it felt like carelessly throwing an arm around an old friend who had moments earlier returned from the evergreen Augustan retreat, dappled and loose with Grecian routine, barefoot, a bit dusty, but well treated by love, you know, all this while I considered how to make the strings make a noise, I knew you had to attack them in some bold and yet controlled manner, with energy and pressure and yet without the aim of destruction or pain, shifting the flea chair’s high shoulders away from the window in case any of my catalogue shop colleagues, Fuckhead Richard, in particular, just so happened to stand on the toilet seat in the stockroom pissoir and press their ugly face sideways to the eight-inch space of the opened PVC WC window, I now noticed my left hand pressing shapes on the fret board, as they call it, attractive designs, and my right hand, there it was, plucking. Playing and plucking without harm or pain. Classical Flamenco. I knew this was some kind of corny trick, like STRONG had wired a speaker to the guitar as a sweet joke for the kids finger-cracking at the music academy around the corner, but no. No joke. No trick. I played on and it was me. What I did made music and soon I was flying at altitude, locked in the midnight heat of an Andalusian dirge about a brutal forest of smouldering oak ashes and a lovesick green-skinned girl strangled to death with her own scarf only for taking acorns to cook for a breakfast from a murderous landowner’s woodland, and the acorns were for her starving beautiful mother, who had also been abused, and was also green, also in response to alleged acorn theft, and there was another verse I didn’t get to, but it wasn’t going to end too well for the beautiful young girl. The manager of the music shop STRINGS, you know his name, turned sarcastically away from the snare, yes easily done, drum key up like a dainty pencil, and his facial expression was like: how droll, oh, I’ve never been hustled like that before by a pro, get a life, pro. An old sports car braked with a
hideous catty squeal in the rain at the light outside and the kid at the wheel looked like she had just stopped weeping. The pop man was trying to buzz it on the snare but his timing was years off and I could see his black teeth fillings as he closed his eyes and tipped his head back and kind of snarled in concentration, something he needed in his mitochondria just out of reach for the millionth time and time running out in four-four time. And as I walked past a harp, exit-bound, I knew I could play that too. Later that night I drank another bottle of the 1985 and smoked three or four quite powerful two-skin biftas and had no contact with another human, as far as I know, and before I went to sleep I became very much too aware of the pink rubber gloves on a head-level shelf, droplets on their curves, horrifyingly dead and alive, leaking fleshly udder hands. These rubber gloves, this fake hand skin, seemed to contain some side-alley relevance to the story of my life, even though we all know my life is not a story, C. Then, feeling not at all healthy, a week before the main festival, not long after midnight, I found myself in a classroom, somewhere in a foreign land, not in this city or nation, somewhere older and more crazy, maybe, old and crazy with forming geography, with new methods of agriculture and family policy, and I was cross-legged on what I believed was a reed-matted yoga roll-mat, and a forty-one-year-old foreign man, sorry I can’t be more specific, was teaching me, partly in a foreign language, how to become a grand-German of the ancient boardgame known as Go. This teacher or master or magician was sporting a snug tracksuit with sleeves and trouser legs rolled up to elbow and knee accordingly and he looked like a serious freeform gymnast professional. Vitamin B12 and iron supplement pills are lined along the Go board and I’m skinning up a three-paper bifta and inhaling ludicrously expensive black wine out of a bone china teacup with an illustration of a poet’s country cottage on the bulge of the cup, but the cottage has been turned into a grotesque tourist trap and pleased suburbanites are lining up to beak around the cottage in the powder blue etching. I understand that the word “go” in this game called “Go” is to be understood as an imperative, as in “go away” or “go on”, both imperatives being designed to both inspire and terrify the novice pupil. It is raining heavily on the vegetable fields outside and muddy water is running in streams past the opened sliding door. The teacher, who has no face, is using a pedagogic method I can’t describe in this language here, except to offer a sketch for a
future Venn diagram: there was sign language, pressure-point finger-pinch, blink (the section of his face where eyes might be slightly folded, or frowned, and this I took to be a blink), sigh, meaningful beer sip (the section of his face where a mouth might be stretched as if in yawning, and no beer went into his face), draft, send, sent. As I said, can’t really describe the activity entirely accurately, C, some of this might be what the nerds call subjective experience, and he’s wetting his lips (the section of his face where a tongue might appear on lips moved and pulsed in the manner of this action), the Go guru, from a bottle labelled with some polygon symbol I don’t recognise but which has feathers in its origin. There are scientific illustrations of brassica seeds and onion bulbs on the gymnasium wall and something about this drinking helps us both, the Go guru and me, comprehend the flatnesses of times and spaces and how we can measure or not those flatnesses, and what happens to a stone when you throw it into an unmoving pool of water, during a time of drought and emergency, in a secret forest location. And he keeps telling me wings can be made or you can inherit wings, remember that. Just remember that for the future, he says. For the future. Okay for this move kid, he shouts over to me from the other side of the launch bars, calling me kid even though we’re both centuries old, over from where he’s warming up or down, you really do need to know about elastic points and what recurs, is what he shouts. I’ve never heard of the game called Go before this lesson but now I know I can become, if I act on this dream, C, a national, possibly world, champion of this venerable tooth-grinder of a sport. So, by ten the next morning, after a malformed breakfast I won’t go into now, but you know how I liked to breakfast, I had just got off the screen with the international Go federation, West Division, where their HQ receptionist was not unfriendly but gave me the impression he or she was not energetically interested in the tentative queries of a dream-taught non-pro novice. There are no local squads here, and she didn’t like the disdain in my tone when I described the diacritics in my various real and nick names, but there is a regional contest next month, she says. The GF, WD emailed me the matriculation forms. I then only had to wait for the tournament, have myself whipped to humiliating defeat by Go experts, and then stop all this silliness. But while I waited, other dreams interfered with my routine. You know I hated maths at school, can barely do the times tables, and yet before sunrise on big fest day (vegan curry,
flat ginger beer, no 1985, just a one-skinner) I knew all about the abstract algebra, and about the cracked plastic jug spout chatting away, talking out the side of its mouth when you pour the 1985, decanted like the fake-lord estate agent told me. Again, there was something relevant about the gloves, C. Around midnight on big fest day I called in sick again to the catalogue shop. The Crag told me he was putting me on shop probation, there was going to be a fucking murder, etcetera, and then I spent four hours looking up abstract algebra on deep maths websites, and it turned out my understanding went past the basics, as in gliding through basics passport control with hardly an official’s glance at my moody papers, then onto a thousand-mile 4×4 carnival ride across a hilly conflict-smashed wilderness, safely away from the basics of all compassion and merriment, among some ideas of nations, where scorched earth is classed as a smattering of laconic generosity, and then jolly deep I travelled into a landlocked sea in a lightless submarine whose only real mission is the comprehension of the most abstracted algebra. I emailed a maths pro at the university with a snap of various solutions and suggestions only an abstract algebra wizard deep in the landlocked faraway lake could appreciate or hear in tune. You can only get this pro’s email address if you solve a cheesy and slightly passe spy-flavoured abstract algebra teaser on his website. He pinged back a few correct answers, CC-ing a couple of other algebra door-slammers, and I knew they were sound, but he had been using a computer to save time, he told me, and I had already written the answers on the wall in my kitchen, I told him. My increasingly unnerving daily routine continued more or less unchanged for many days (which felt like centuries) except for my new abilities until one fever gale Sunday when I was looking at the catalogue shop colleagues’ dinner non-themed gala menu, ETA march, which was drawing-pinned next to where the orders from the showroom downstairs get printed out for us on a miniature roll of serration-divided paper, very like a toilet roll for a class of terrifyingly small backsides, perhaps cruelly-trained zoo lemurs, when Fuckhead Richard came a-chewing at my shoulder asking me what I was going to have then, you dick. I told him for starters that I didn’t like pate for starters and he nose-laughed scornfully and told me you don’t pronounce pate like that, you pronounce it to rhyme with late, not okay, you dick, and he told me was having the pait, not the consume, which isn’t real soup, it’s some horrible slurry,
shouldn’t be allowed, should be banned, and then chicken and then gat-oks and they give you a free bottle of vee-no, so we can all get spannered. Is it really free? I asked, perhaps rhetorically, which twanged off more chewing-gum clacking scorn from Fuckhead Richard, whose grimy stumpy fingers it’s not too hard to imagine whittling away an eighteen-monther among cocktail-stick villas in a medium-crime prison cell, quite guiltless in his own mind on the sex assault charge, he was only watching after all, and then I made the reckless accidental pointless error of telling him rapidly about my useful perfect French consommé, as in the soup, dream, with the implication I was boasting or winding him up. So he bent laughing up the toy aisle, barking nasally about my dick-ness to the other stockroom temps and conscripts, who were busy throwing boxes with FRAGILE stamped in red capitals on every side out of cages or holding cruelly-trained lemur zoo toilet-paper orders in one hand while looking open-mouthed at league upon league of shelf, the printer was going full-smoke with sales order tickets and the tiny lifts, which Fuckhead Richard claimed he had once travelled in, although he was petite, so maybe, were waiting open-mouthed and I ripped off a couple of orders for things like clockwork pet feeder, feeling both sympathy and despair for the invisible person downstairs who wanted to buy a clockwork pet feeder. Now I’m fragile and terrified Fuckhead Richard is on to me and about to start gossiping to the boss that maybe there’s something wrong with me. I know what this might do to you, C, if I lost my job, and so I don’t want this craphound to know about the dreams, and start to wonder if I can make myself have a dream in which I can make myself stop Fuckhead Richard knowing what I think he knows about what I know I think I know about the useful dreams. And I thought I’d like a clockwork feeder for my own self but loaded not with food. And don’t forget that in the stockroom the goods are organised under a Dewey-style number system, so you can get to think of kitchen goods as, say, autobiography. You can’t easily smoke a bifta at that place, even on the fire escape, even though there are unrecordable spaces, but you can see the famous tower and the glass docks and the highest wall, all of it through the one-way double-glazing and the country folk power-blasting soupy-looking bingo keg spatter off the road when you beep in, and off. It might be blood and teargas they’re hosing down, in their minds, is what I want not to remember, now I’m up here, ready to meet height. So after the algebra and my
stupid revelation to Fuckhead Richard I was having at least one useful dream every night, sometimes more, until I soon knew how to navigate the old tax and social security system without getting violently nihilistic or taking crowbars to good furniture, how to nicely retool a pair of running spikes with shark line and staples, how to build toothbrushes and use them without leaving splinters in my gums, how to make a working laptop from moonlight landfill flotsam, how to pack fireworks enough to woo the most jaded New Year’s Eve addict, how to properly do classical dancing, how to deal with a bank with a straight face and the displayed attitude that I don’t think they are scum-sucking parasites, how to clean a budget-price twenty-year-old and limescaled if-it’s-yellow-let-it-mellow family toilet bowel/bowl so it looks like it’s been cleaned, how to communicate verbally and with body language when I am sober to a certain catalogue shop manager in a way which does not give the catalogue shop manager the suspicion I am somehow keen on second-guessing or undermining the catalogue shop manager’s genuine beliefs or social status or iron-cast commitment to the platinum standard of the very best of senses of humour, how to understand how people don’t care about understanding the algebraic implications of quantum physics, which was easier done than said, how to be emotionally interested in the wars of succession, how to craft from a rough timber shipwreck a large and elegant folding gateleg table up to fifty metres in length even with unimpeded competition from big hungry flying ants who are so big they have personalities, how to successfully do multi-sleight card tricks while circled in a hot bunker by a quorum of sceptical and veteran stage magicians, how to totally understand Mandarin grammar, how to brew drinkable pale ale in small batches in a damp cupboard without becoming a self-righteous twat, how to remodel old bicycles without at all weeping or near-weeping, how to put the fancy in fancywork ceiling plaster jobs, how to be the only foreigner working on a supermarket checkout in a geology-cursed and dour nationalist flag-waving town during the latest state of emergency without adopting the grin-braced posture and POV of a POW, how to change an automatic transmission on a range of fiendishly obsolete new solar-powered bus-cars, how to raise giant sunflowers in a gale pandemic, how to do a hilarious and well-received stand-up comedy show to a mean and starving offense-primed crowd in a second language at three in the morning while suffering from gastroenteritis and acid
flashbacks, how to thrive in a host of both desert and jungle-located emergencies during a guerrilla war including with plastic landmines and severe yellow fever and drone pranks on all horizons, how to correctly perform the most crack-singeing movie stunts without thinking about insurance premiums, how to be a decent politician during many pre-ordained electoral campaigns without succumbing to cancer or addiction or simple madness, how to cheat human clocks, how to live graciously in a moon colony, how to be an estate agent by choice while thinking with a straight face that being an estate agent is something on a par with being a nurse or a cleaner or a biochemist, how to write a peach of a three-minute pop song, all these things, but I did not learn how to cope with being woken in the middle of a dream, useful or not. Being woken in the heart is always the worst, C, because the dreams and their stillness and separateness and soul are what thicken the angles and unknot the fog. We need useful dreams for the same reason we need love, my older brother, who’s oiling through the functionary crowd to some future-assumed position of power and control and wealth, told me on the phone, when I tried, for a minute or so, to explain, having already decided on this plan for the podcast series and flight. I went to the go regional Go Olympiad and I won second prize, which was half-price entry to next year’s national Go Olympiad, and after a calm logic-chopped complaint debate about illicit moves, and the potential distraction of my tracksuit and stocking over my face to neutralise my features and framed pictures of onion seeds and parallel lines of vitamin pills, a re-judging had me given the main trophy, and quarter-price entry to next year’s international Go Olympiad. And so now here I very much am. Here I very much was always going to be. I drop a teacup. As a test. Like with the shoes and the jacket. To see how the teacup reacts to the fall. I wait for the distant smash. Knowing I don’t need to drop any more. I don’t know. It’s 5C and I’m sweating cobs. You know I was always like this, C. You know I have to do it like this. This is me. The helmet mic is synced to the dictation app and I see the laptop screen in my handheld relaying panel. All of this will be on the podcast as soon as I launch. There shouldn’t be any delays between before I launch and after I launch; it will just sound to the listeners as if there is no break, no pause. You know how sometimes people sometimes say, wow, that’s just brought my dream back to me and how that means me back to me, me back to me, which means there is no escaping the fact
it was the washing machine which got me over the so-called barrier of this hydroelectric dam and up here with this aluminium frame and the sprockets and levers and carbon rods and the washing machine tub load-bearing springs, and the strongest elastic in the world, they promised, and no going back if they’re wrong and down there, look, my brother’s shambling thug of a motor, all its sport seats tabby with beer spills and an eczema of blimhole, and that dulcet fusting of a last summer’s incense, all those times I robbed his family vehicle while he was giving emotional shoulder massages to the shithead on the next step up. You want stories where someone learns something, is the cliche, my brother told me on the phone, and now I understand that being good or happy is less useful than being brave and being honest and it’s as known as all that. I don’t know. I mean, C, that if you can do one useful thing in your life, just one useful thing, like love the woman you love but who does not really love you so the woman you love can love you back, well your life has not been worthless, even though it makes no sense at all. I don’t know. But I like watching the teacups fall into the reservoir. Look at the glowing splinters, the cracked spindles. I can still see the feral cats on the roof of the historical memory shed. I can see my mother on her deathbed deckchair, whispering past the tubes, no, she’d never dreamed it would be like this, or that, no, no, no, and why did I never complain, then, about the Alsatian or the piano, and if she’d only keened along with me when I was a whingeing baby, and Jesus Christ I was a shouting whingeing baby, harmonising my natural emotional tests, it might have been wiser for the both of us, but that was later, son, after your breakdown, and beyond the pule, and by then I was quite the expert in knowing how to hide knowing how to forget and how to be almost self-solving in a calculus of embarrassment, and 340-degree dishonesty, because there’s always a blind-spot, escape hatch, and knowing never to answer rhetorical questions. I don’t know. But it was the washing machine which got me here, C, and that’s that. I’ve strapped the last bottle of 1985 to my left arm with Velcro, and taped a long straw to my possibly-redundant bicycle crash helmet. Sound up here is like it’s in a next room, like a noise of a person routining a life, the moving this and that to here and there, or a regular thunk, an irregular past thought, in a room not where you are, beyond curtains and layers of paint and brick. My love too, I am ashamed to say, to tell you, is receding down there or on one of the ripples. May you be free of
suffering! I’m not even joking now! Just come home, you might say, C, joking, as you tend to. Or they’re good enough wings, you might say, C, if you would speak to me. If only you could see me now! Up here in a time without instruction as I watch the shape of the imprisoned water fifty metres below, eighty metres below, a hundred metres below. As I line up with the amputrees along the chameleon river, heading south to the city, based on the co-ordinates I have tried to study from a dream, not entirely choosing the compass aspect of this journey, what with the sudden hellish gale, and I remember my father, and the soup he made on name-days. So can you taste any salt in the soup, boys? Dunno, we would reply. Seriously, boys, any salt at all can you taste in there? And we would say, maybe no?
About the writer:
Adam John Wilshaw studied English and American literature at the University of Manchester (UK) and has enjoyed careers as a newspaper reporter and teacher of English as a foreign language, in Spain. His recent fiction has appeared in journals such as Press Pause Press, Litro, Propagule, and a Salt anthology.
Image: Air Waves (AI-assisted digital image) by O:JA&L staff creative. 2025. Public domain via Midjourney AI.
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