In The Night Factory

The two Steves have moved in and now there are three. The fridge is full and the rooms seem to be packed with the presence of people. The Moths are hitting the lampshade again. Clothes clinging like polythene, arms sweating beads, the pen slips from between my thumb and fore finger. The dark brown interior is holding off the bright light from outside for as long as it can and it still feels dull around the house. We now have an upturned bed standing eccentrically on it’s end piece. Big metal bars and springs facing you as you come out of the kitchen. The mattress lapsed in folds at its feet, exhibiting its lack of sturdiness and bounce. It obstructs my Picasso painting so it has to go. Brown in colour of course, it emits the kind of depressing aroma that you find often in industrial wastelands. It is part of the house that has become dislodged; old and tattered, a chucked out piece of furniture that nobody wants. I write with my back to it but still I feel its oppressiveness. The air has changed and something awkward looms at head height that constantly reminds me of living now in a house that is shared. The chair is here too, from the next room; a pink oddity with a small bottom and a scoop for a backrest. All covered with that crinkly pink felt the colour and kind that you can only find in second hand markets. I can no longer stand it down here. I have to go upstairs and to my room, I feel as though I’m in a strange cave with monsters that I don’t know.

# posted by Neil @ 9:56 am

The Landlord’s dog ‘Jones’ is a little muscle bound bull dog type, tree brown and short legs. It takes tremendous force when pulling on its lead to stop it going where ever it wants to go. I run around the house going to and fro, following the scent of food scraps hidden in places only dogs would put their nose. It runs around like an iron ball in a pinball machine. At certain points it has weird fits of sobbing and then suddenly recovers!(emotionally unbalanced). It does not have fur or hair but sand-blasted skin, stroking it is a kin to running your hand over those miniature landscapes they make the model trains run around. Unnaturally hard and solid, he is a constantly moving, tightly knitted bundle of meat and bone chugging like an engine. His mouth pattering hot air mechanically across a leather like tongue, frontal section dipping along floor level to lap up sweet corn hiding behind the legs of the sofa. I hesitate to pull harder on the lead in case I block its air valvs. Landlords wife says; “He’s lovely with the kids.”

# posted by Neil @ 9:24 am

We are camouflaged by the long grass walling the sides of the square sleeping bag and the shade from the trees and the movement of the washing creating dots of light massaging our bare legs and feet. I lie this way, she lies that. The ruffling of the leaves making a convenient block to the rattling of voices next door. Waves of cool wind flow over us. A plane glides over as if to nowhere in the clear blue sky. Tiny creatures are swarming through the tall stalks of grass. Ants are ascending the highest peaks, attempting the toughest angles. Several wasps hover over and then disappear.

The spots on the concrete mark the rain and the peach colours dim as a dark cloud threatens above. Ann is talking about ladybirds or something; laying down on her multi-coloured sleeping bag, moaning because she has discovered she’s brought out the wrong ‘What’s On TV’. She goes in and comes out with her wonder lust book, turning about uncomfortably on the ground and then settling her self down to concentrate on the soap page. She quickly gets fed up with this and folds herself up into a legs-folded position, her shoes with the ventilation holes placed on the concrete slab next to her. She now gets up and moves the sleeping bag so that it folds up the wall and sits, arms folded, with her back against it, knees together, bare feet out. We sit, I in my chair, she next to me on the ground. The plants growing tall between the rectangular slabs, a whole catalogue of types, some spindly, some with leaves spreading out and folding over the edges like open pages.

Next doors lawn mower has broken. The old lady has broken the blade on the edge of the lawn. This leaves me in peace only leaving the light sound of shears now skimming the grass, a blessed relief! Now erupts an argument with the old man. She kneels complaining of the effort; “Where’s the little shears?”. The old man is deaf as a post. It’s as if they are talking to themselves. I’ve just noticed our bush or hedge or something is getting rather high. Soon it’ll be encroaching on my window space and I’m on the second floor. The loose branches wave around in the breeze. The school across the road is dead for the summer. Their grass has been cut by one of those cutting machines. It has changed now from an untidy ruffled mess to a smooth green square edged by wall and wrought iron gate which is always kept locked with a bolt.

# posted by Neil @ 9:13 am

God it’s muggy! I keep the window open and have to suffer the odd wasp wandering in. I think back, I don’t want to write anything that could be titled memoirs or anything. But I did go through an interesting patch a while ago. Something I should put down here should it loose itself in time as I grow older and out of reach. I hear a bird or animal or something making an odd noise outside, like I’m in the tropics or something. I can hear cars roaming around the house on all sides. Somebody clipping a hedge. Not ours, you can’t get out of the front garden now; The hedge has now covered the entrance and is poking into next doors garden. If the neighbours knock I’ll just give them the landlord’s phone number, let him sort it out.
I live here in a house left to its own; all of the bushes and trees in the garden mingle into clumps and the grass has started growing its own assortment of weeds and dandelions. The cats flatten deep paths in it and you find little nests hidden in corners where a feline has curled up. Neighbours hate it of course. I don’t pay it much attention; all shared houses are like this I find. Ann’s is the same. Nobody really wants to bother, least of all the Landlord. I have no utensils to mow it, no shears to clip the hedge. I just have to breathe in to squeeze past the narrow gap in the hedge every time I want to leave the house. It’s a bind. I look at everything around me as if it is somehow distant and unreal. I just exist and these things happen around me of their own accord. I have no power over them.

You can’t help but develop a kind of morbid curiosity for it all though. It’s like an adventure when you’re a child and you take over a derelict house and make it into a den, a secret place. You put up with hardships, lack of certain luxuries. It’s all part of the spartan existence that you lead when you’re an outcast, on forbidden territory, hiding out from the police. Making maximum usage of the interior space, watching out for the other side. You go out occasionally hunting for food, suss out the locals, blend in to the environment. You could be an outcast of the avenues, a true introspective voyager into the tribal territories. The battered wall outside seems to have had things done to it that no other wall has had done to it; Concrete spread over it so that it can be chipped away. Bricks of different shapes lodged in at various angles with thick pastes of concrete spread over in selected areas. Somebody at some point has had the exiting idea of making the house into a sculptured shape using concrete and then had second thoughts.

The paint stops on the edges of the window frames as if applied with one stroke all the way round.

The paved part of the garden looks like it’s been used in one of those disaster movies where earthquakes up heave large segments of motorways. It is crumbling away with large fractures defining the angled shapes, broken earth underneath swelling up like welts of molten lava.

The bin bag sits patiently awaiting its removal. Cold rainwater dripping in spots from the harsh sheen of its surface, creating a strange kind of order, or lived in quality amongst the catastrophe of the garden. The actual bin which stands close by is frozen solid with concrete for some unknown reason. It merely exists to amuse visitors and is too heavy to move. This is a non wheelie bin area so I have to shift the bin bags on a Thursday to the outside of the back garden where everybody else lines theirs up. I have to wade through the grass to do this. Thick grass with unwieldy knots you have to pull yourself out of.

Large exotic looking weeds thrive happily and seem to have been around before the concrete was laid. The builder has left convenient spaces for those octopus type things to prosper and little channels for the ants to run along. It is an environment made to measure for wild overgrown plant life and all kinds of insects and small reptiles. Not for humans at all. A safe-house for all battered plants and unwanted carnivores. A small haven in a cruel world and I am its warden, flailing my arms around to fend off the bands of flies. I throw the odd bowl of dirty water in the general direction of the garden feeding several plants at once. Stroking cats who guard the fences.

The shed in the corner looks as though it was used in the same film as the concrete patio. Squares of orange fluorescent paint mark the areas on its moss green wood ridges where I’ve been spraying my work. A great place for hamsters to live in but I’m afraid not much use for anything else. It looks as though it fell from the sky to this exact spot, plus everything in it. A thousand miles up and it came down spinning and with luck hit the ground on it’s base. Nothing inside of any use whatsoever, regardless of what the Landlord says, it’s all a load of junk. They must have been flying batches of sheds full of useless garbage over-head and one fell out. I’d better report it to the lost and founds. It looks like a boxy shaped jumble of nothing specific, with shed looking bits leaning against four sides.

Something inside my stomach is rebelling. It's creating all sorts of problems for my system and I feel pains building up as if vital fluid is squeezing itself past an obstruction and then bubbling into a vacuum. In my mind I’m running through my daily diet. I’ll spare you the details. My dinner plate lays before me; burnt bits of dinner lie in a group on a section of my plate where I have moved them, unconsciously nudging them to this particular spot as I shovel and slice through my meal at the centre, leaving at the end a fascinating complexity of marks with the left over source that went with the space shapes. Left on the side like industrial waste discarded on the edge of a network of motorways. My knife and fork lie regimentally across the middle forming a kind of bridge structure.

# posted by Neil @ 11:51 am

He said with great pride that he was in the sniper core. In and out like a flash and run off into the hills, loose himself in the deep forest or bushes. Couldn’t say where, couldn’t say when. Sworn to secrecy. Much better than building ditches, rebuilding houses. Snipe from a distance. Magnify to that fine point. The pointed crossed circle, gliding, roving amongst the camouflage jackets and black boots, take aim, fire sounding like a soft thud. Much more respect. “You know you’re somebody. People treat you with a bit more, you know - you ‘re different.” Pushing his chest out and broadening his already broad shoulders.
“You should join the army” To my friend Patrick sat opposite. Trying to be overly polite. Keeping him cheerful and at the same time being strangley interested, like reading a trashy war book and ‘seeing what some people read’.

The young man breaking into our just begun conversation.. Sidling into the chair with soft violence. Shaven headed young boy sitting snug, talking about his all consuming subject. He offered us fags: “Take one go on” as if we had to.
”No I don’t smoke, never have sorry.”
Patrick takes one after being forced to a few times by a shoved hand and an open packet, the tubular orange tipped bullets poking from the neat folds of their silver and white encasement. Forcing a peculiar brand of army bonding upon us. Crude but direct and we were trapped. Netted for that brief moment. Reluctantly in his world looking for quick exits. A closed world of structured togetherness and a long string of activities. Having to do them in order to form mates and not to be ridiculed and left out. On the whole a method imaged by ranks above, a reduction of individual worth to fit yourself like a mechanical glove into the hand of her majesties regiment. Held out to shake. Just as he, this prematurely bald chap, held his hand out to grab ours and our arms jogged with his, with our polite smiles, occasional glances at each other and then to the ceiling. We had to be on our guard. A young naïve saddened man/boy clinging on to probably the only structure that he has had in his short life so far. Talking like a mate, quickly initiating us into his nothing world of guns and bullets, threats and bullying. Even though the camaraderie on our part was forced, one could easily imagine him close within his regular platoon enjoying pints and handshakes, sniggering at jokes, talking about women as if they were toys along with Mechano and train set, Action Man and Dare Devil Doll. Women would have awkward bendable arms and you could say anything you liked, swear, chat it up and then fling it down on the carpet when bored. “Ere love what’s name?”
“Anne” she says, surprisingly.
“Anne, do you want to sit with us, come over here. I’ll buy you a drink, me and the lads here.” No response.
He then turns to us lads;
“Are you sure you don’t want a pint? Have a pint go on! I’ll get you a pint.”
“No, half a lager shandy will do me fine.”
“A lager shandy?!”
“Oh, and some lime to top it up, thanks”
He shrugs and gives a look of irritation. The glasses he insists on keeping on the table when we’ve finished “so that we can see how many we’ve had”.
“That’s five shandy’s so far, hmmn”
I tried to physically melt into the wall, to disappear. Trouble is he was squashed in next to my thigh. I was as near to him as a squaddie in the locker room. I now knew what it was like to be in the army. In the army. A cold shiver ran through me.
A small room crowded with shaven heads, the noise of heavy metal belt adjustments, the loud clicking of equipment. Then they, and I, pile into the back of a helicopter carrier and fly until a dot in the pale blue cloudless sky. Crowds of blokes ruffle about inside. Knocking over each other trying to get parachutes on. A jumble of khaki and black shiny boots. And off we fly into the distance towards the target. I missed the exit training at Head Quarters on the Saturday and my body flies out like dirty washing inside a machine swirling about in the sixty mile an hour wind. I find myself tangled up in my chute, flinging about in a desperate attempt to unwind the death grip the cords have on my neck. Ahh, al last I wind free, I check canopy and all is inflated. Floating like a toy action man with parachute, chucked from the second floor window of a little boys house. The patchwork quilt of green, brown and yellow squares below me quickly reduces to one brown one and I land in it, legs flailing about in the mud. The canopy drags my body like a plough turning the wet soil, gradually grinding to a stop due to the fact that my head is stuck into about three feet of manure enriched top soil. Back at base they’ve got me down as a fatality due to the lateness of the canopy opening. Lifting my aching, mud caked body I attempt to pull at the heavy wet material like a drunken puppeteer pulling at his strings. Suddenly the wind takes hold again and I am forced to wind surf across the sea of mud, finally getting stuck in the hedge running the side of the field. Enduring the pain of thorns digging into my flesh I somehow manage to stagger towards the target in the next field. The circular markings faded by the tramplings of standard sized service boots.

# posted by Neil @ 6:38 pm

I answer the door and let them in. What can I do, I have to. They will start pestering me by bloody email if I don’t. Do I need to have my flat inspected all the time, I don’t know? They sometimes catch me by surprise. Not having time to pile the dirty dishes in the cupboard and throw clothes under the mattress. They pass by my book shelf rolling their eyes at the dust piled up on the ledges.
"How much do you pay rent again...and you chose those rugs?" Expecting a tour around the rooms they cringe at the chaos of the work area.
"Oh, comics? How do you find time for that!?"
"Er, it's taken me ages to get that far, I do bits when I can."
"How’s your job? You do still have a regular job don’t you?"
"Yeh, fine yeah, I’m enjoying it at the moment. The students, you know, they’ve got exams coming up, very busy."
"You are doing a worthwhile job and getting paid - excellent"
"Yeh."
She marks it down on a bit of paper.
Mr No:"We will keep checking up on you at regular intervals, we know what you're like. Listen! You mustn't go back to your old ways, hear me! It makes us worried, and we get headaches, especially when you waste time on all that arty stuff, yes! You must be seen to be doing your share of proper work."
Mrs No: "Nice to see you’ve made an effort with the toilet this time" while peering behind the shower curtain. A glance to the right sees Mr No pushing the bedroom door open! I duck my head in and try to explain. His lips curl in horror! hurrying to the corridor: "We have to go now don’t we Mrs No, things to do?" They then begin whispering and taking notes while standing in the middle of the living room. I busy myself by turning on the oven. I think I could eat it all myself if they don't.
Mr No brings his new digital camera out and starts pointing it into each of the rooms. "We need to collect some reference material?".
"You have technology? I have technology too, lets talk about technology, we can talk about that instead?" I say.
"Why is there all this hair on the floor?"
"I don’t know, it just comes out of my head."
Their bodies deflate in a long sigh, both now sitting near me on the living room sofa.
"Stop that, get off. Bloody hell!" Mrs No irritatingly rubbs off a mark she has found on my sweat shirt with a piece of tissue paper, getting her guey salivor all over me. I am playing with toy cars in the corner and chopping spiders up.
"Mmn…that's better!"
"Did you have to do that?"
"You must look presentable. We don't want you looking like a tip?"
"Right that'll do." Says Mr No still writing down in his book.
"Something to eat then?" I say. I catch them briefly exchanging glances.
"Er, now we best be off. Time is getting on. We desperately need to get back to the safety of our road vehicle. We are so used to the air conditioning you see, and Mrs No's cooking of course."
Mr No hands me a note: "Here is a list of things we feel that you shouldn’t be doing and on the other side things that we would prefer you to do because that makes us feel better, and how do you survive otherwise I can’t understand. This to back up the subliminal messages I have already imprinted on your mind hopefully." Turning towards His wife: "Do you have the planned route map love?"
"I have it, it’s in my handbag somewhere." scrambling furiously inside her shoulder bag.
Mr No: "You can’t go anywhere without your printouts. What you have to understand you see Neil, is that there is no such thing as freedom. Ha Ha Ha. Yes. It’s in your own interest to follow procedures as best you can. You'll soon begin to realise this yourself. And we wouldn’t want to get Mrs No upset now would we?"
"Er, no, of cause not Mr No, no never."
"You need to get a file started which we will expect to see next time we come. Perhaps a desk as well with a comfortable chair to sit in so that we can go through it properly. There is a big inspection coming up and you’ll have to start getting your paperwork ready. Just treat it like a driving test, it'll be fine. As long as you do what is expected everything will be cosy."
"Can you give me a template to work from, I’m not sure…?"
"Don’t worry. Don't worry, although, it might be best if you get rid of any evidence of the artwork and um just as it says there, on the list(pointing to the list), yes, number three: Show evidence of having a job and display more optimism when talking about a life of employment, yes. Special attention should be given to the getting married and having children section naturally. Mrs No often gets upset about that one, mmn. Anyway I’m sure you’ll feel much better once you’ve attended to the list. I know Mrs No will be pleased and of course, then I'm pleased too, you see."
He stands resting his large bulky frame against the side of the front door, one arm rested on top: "Neil, you know, I would like to understand you better but under the present circumstances, well, I’m afraid it’s just not possible. But you know it's only for the best, don't you. We have to go now because we have a whole list of people to cover today. The station is hectic at the moment! Come on Mrs No, lets get to the car."
Mrs No turns towards me: "Neil, you must listen to what ‘prompt payment’, I call him that, it’s kind of a silly joke really, listen to what he says! He knows best. He’s been in the army after all, therefore he knows a thing or two about these things, right. OK then, we must get going, the people at the hospital are expecting us at 5.00pm for the special injections and shock treatment ceremony, you can come along too if you like?"
"Er, no, think I'll give that a miss. Just resting from work at the moment, you know."
"Well, see you then, bye, bye, Say goodbye to Mr No Neil."
"Bye Bye, see ye...bye Mr No".
"Careful how you go." They wave. Mr No jumps up and flies over the car floating like a bird through the roof window in one smooth motion, landing comfortably strapped and snugg, opposite the front console. Mrs No starts crazily slapping the sides and top of the car, shouting "thank god! thank god!" Her body crawling over the bonnet and roof, then being quickly sucked into the front side door, slamming it shut with supernatural speed. The windows mist up and the moving figures inside receed in clarity till they become siluetes and then slowly fade away to white. The suspension raises the car into action. The wheels crunch and spit stones as the Ford Mondeo roars away towards the motorway slip road.

# posted by Neil @ 2:59 pm