In The Night Factory

The things that I pile up in my secret place are not saved for just anybody to look at I now realise. It is clear that many people do not appear to see the things the way that I see them. I have in the back of my mind, whilst keeping myself busy and occupied with important work, really, sub-consciously I mean, I have been marking time, waiting for a certain innocent and not too critical person with a sufficient left of centre turn of mind and an inclination towards the outlandish, the type with a good appetite for rummaging and digging discriminately through all things obscure. They will come in and inspect my mountain of things, dig out the hidden collectables that I have piled here with me in the grotty chambers.

Whether my things are suitable or not, about the right subject or not, contain decipherable language or turns of phrases to the prospective viewer or not, I can only guess at. All I can say is that I have collected and stored these things here and I continue collecting them, not unlike the way a small furry animal scuttling across the forest floor searches for correctly shaped sticks for its artfully sculptured dam construction. For then, when the visitor comes, a visitor that dreams of good stuff and intelligent finds, then I will be able to rest and relax, sit and read a paper, let them climb up my mountain, inspect the hills and just generally wander around while I glance over pointing towards them now and again.

Each time I complete a section I sit gazing at the vast accumulation of items, wondering if the mole will come and if not that's OK because I have all these wonderful experiences to look back on, don't I.

I have all sizes, all shapes and colours, you’ll see, some so obscure so that you will no doubt disparage me and maybe take offence. Pick one up and I will tell you all about it. If you were to open one up and look at its various sections you might find your imagination drifting, your hair loosing gravity and falling to the ground, but that’s OK. You will then ask me questions about where to go now and what happens at the end? Don't worry about that I say and urge you to pick up another one and another.

When you come back down from the mountain I will introduce myself, and then you will to me and after these preliminary rituals we can engage in a proper conversation. We can return language back to itself. We can feverously prepare words, make up sentences and pour the finished lines into our hungry mouths. We can find the best words and mix them together. We can take the best sayings and keep them for ever. We can dive around in search of the correct responses. We could travel years and not be bothered, cross the continents with not one penny on us!

Caught out as if I were the fake that I feared you thought I might be, I then begin grasping at straws, fighting against a slippery bank. My feet slide on a large rock and wash me down into a vast river stream, the current taking me away into a deep blue sea. I swallow gallons as I try to scrabble up the slopes of the ocean floor. You cry out that you don’t understand, drowning, hands thrashing about in the murky water, twelve fathoms down and away.

You hand it to me and I hand it back, insisting, earnestly pointing to try another instead and this time with great reluctance you peal off the seal, open it up and look in. It would greatly satisfy me to see you flipping through the pages with a frenzied curiosity, but instead your claws rasp at the edges with sudden animosity.

# posted by Neil @ 7:39 pm

A long white sinewy fluffy cloud reaches over the hillside opposite, endless in length, it slowly slides through the background of a framed panel conveniently constructed by the criss-cross of the curtains and a horizontal section of the lower window. The upper section of glass rises up to the top and is covered in a smooth glaze of frost, broken in areas by branches of dribbling condensation.

The red blocks that are the curtains squeeze the daylight towards a thin horizontal strip, floating out a line of golden shapes on the hills of my lower half, swimming as I am in layers of bed covers, swirling about in a spaghetti of orange loops.

The creases of the hair encrusted mattress-cover are gently flattened as I slowly steam roller my body across to the left. I meet the plug socket as it peers over from the wall, its switch like nose angled now towards me as if staring. These things have utility without question. A quiet nothingness without concern. They are just things but exist and hold no anxiety or aspirations. They are made, survive and are replaced at the end of their use. That is that, no quarrel, no argument as to the meaning of it. They need no looking after.

# posted by Neil @ 7:15 pm

I lie in bed listening to shot guns firing off at random intervals in the distance. Are they people attempting to kill themselves every five or ten minutes as you imagine people doing if you believe what the papers say, or even sometimes in unison, missing each other just by seconds, the noise coming from various directions. Either that or city types visiting to register their country squire credentials, taking pot shots at the astoundingly numerous, strangely doped, awkwardly moving wildlife that are kept in stock throughout the year by locals, regardless of the season, changing the landscape into one gigantic firing range.

I open the curtains and the cool afternoon light brightens the pages of my book and catches the side of my head when it stoops to read the first paragraph. I am of course instantly spotted by a resident through a window across there up the hill opposite, on Crown Crescent; he is frowning at the irritating sight "What's that man doing up there lazing in bed looking at a book, he's reading of all things, struth!" rushing straight out to flick the safety catch off his Kawasaki two thousand hedge trimmer and pointing it up at me. I see no hedge to be trimmed. I have to lie down and wait untill the drilling sound stops.

Post drops like rubble down a hillside and through the letter box onto the hall carpet, triggering my movement across and into the hallway to sift through it, sorting the fifty percent junk from the bills and chucking them in a box next to the heater. After the drilling has stopped I get down once more on my bed and resume reading, more tentatively this time. I think it is OK, I have escaped notice.

The light streams through the gap in the curtains once again. Somebody is out there in the fields creeping between the weathered old trees; no dog on a leash so he must be wandering, enjoying the country smells of pesticide and the strange dung droppings that you can find here abouts. The shapes of modern estate homes with their jigsaw of angular roofs contrast sharply with the industrially scoured hillside rising above. What is left of the trees look like rows of old used mops thrown into the ground upside down with some of them having missed and fallen out. The grey clouds drift towards the right side of the sky as if burning oil wells were sending smoke up from behind the horizon. Telephone posts are stuck in like pins and spun with a web of wires linking the numerous towns, villages and cities.

A waste land, seeming empty and open, is in fact clogged with artificial manure and glutted with rows of irrigation channels, the wildlife being stocked as if it were a free range larder of meat ready for the chopping and the packing.

A wandering deer, lost in between two forests that are now as small as country home back yards, rips its hide over a thorny hedge; its hooves scrape across a road, narrowly avoiding a passing car, headlights reflecting in the animals uncomprehending stare.

The white frame of my window gets whiter and the cold hillside opposite darker, under the shadow of a now smoke filled sky. I close the curtains and turn the light on, picking up the book once again, the continuous mad cries of the birds effecting my concentration; I fear they could crash into my room at any moment.

# posted by Neil @ 2:17 pm

- Excuse me Doctor Caverley but I haven’t been feeling like my self lately, I feel cramped and claustrophobic inside, I am having strange headaches, a constant unsettled feeling you know, as if I’m somehow being watched all the time, I know it’s silly but, hallucinations I think as well, look, look, over there, tell me what you see.

- I see just a normal car, what do you see?

- I saw a flash just when I turned around by the settee, at this point here. Like that with my arm over the top like that. What do you make of it?

- Er, any other symptoms?

- Yes, sometimes, in the morning, I find a figure at the end of my bed, and then as soon as I look away it, he, disappears, sort of floats off into the air. I thought it was like an angel but it’s not..

- Do you experience these, these apparitions regularly, I mean every hour or only at certain times of the day?

- No it can happen at any time doctor. They seem so real that sometimes I feel that there is another element in space and time that I am tapping into, things that are really happening but we can only rarely experience them, like a switch flicking the brain onto a different stratum of reality. Our senses are so annihilated by society’s media bombardment and um, well, I don’t know it’s just that I can see these things. Perhaps I am gifted with some extra sensory perception, what do you think, in your professional opinion?

- Well, Hmmn… (tapping shoulders and knees, checking heartbeat) there are no physical signs that I can see. Stare straight into this please?

- Physical signs, what, do you mean it could be something that affects my body!?

- We have been given new guidelines as to how to deal with symptoms that are similar to yours, look here and here, good.

- Anything wrong? I know somebody who swears they can see lazar beams coming into their living room, and they say they need several layers of curtains to protect themselves from the floods of people distracting them in their living room. If people in the street can just walk in then that leaves you nowhere to hide. Perhaps I need one of those safe rooms where I can be me and have no distractions.

- How would you say these ‘experiences’ are effecting your daily routine Mr Biggs?

- Well, I think it could be affecting me at work. There's a figure that I see every now and again, a man dressed all in dark walking past my classroom window, and then he stops to drink a cup of tea out of a saucer and while he is drinking the tea from the saucer he slowly gets down to sit on the pavement slabs. He sits there all day, until I go to the car and then he walks over with me. When I’m inside he’s gone, I look around, he’s gone. When I get home I find him laying about reading in the lounge or sometimes painting on my cushions. It’s very unsettling.

- Yes well, would you now please put your arms out to full stretch please against the wall over there?

- What, what’s this all about?

- Just do it would you. It’s a normal procedure, back straight, head up, that’s it. (Takes measuring tape out of coat pocket).

- And anyway when I look into the mirror now I don’t see me, I see him.

- Doctor Caverley stops suddenly and steps back a pace, looking Harry in the eyes. “Him, what do you mean him, did you get a good description.

- You know, the guy I’ve been talking about all along, dark hair, thick set, um I think he has like quite deep set eyes, frowns a lot.

- Did he look like any of these (flips open a string of I.D. photos from his wallet)

- Umm… no, the one of the left look slightly like him but no, sorry. I mean I come home, turn the television on and he’s there, sitting next to the television, looking at me. I tell him, what the hell do you think you’re playing at. Get the hell out of my flat. He does go, but then he comes back again. I’m resting on the sofa and there he is again adjusting the settings on my drawing table.

- (Doctor gets out notepad and pen and starts writing) Alright, carry on.

- Sometimes, when I look out of the window I could swear I see him hiding in the red Renault over there, underneath that clump of clothes lying in the back, spying me, and then as quickly as the idea arises I dismiss it, I mean, some things are ridiculous, aren’t they.

- Well Mr Biggs I recommend that you take a break, you are obviously under some stress and I believe a term in say a rest home may be what is called for. I will arrange everything. Some people will visit in the morning and give you a lift to manor park rest home. It’s over the hill there. Pleasant and peaceful, it will give you time to wind down and then we’ll take it from there, all right, Mr Biggs.

- Do I need to wear anything special?

- No, you'll be fine as you are.

# posted by Neil @ 2:10 am

I wandered, crunching through a hundred thousand pebbles.
A ships purple silhouette drifts silently by in the suns haze.
Froth is accumulating at the rim of a wide ocean.
Single mothers and children cover themselves up and atempt to throw their hair back against the unfettered wind.
A life float sticks up like a lollypop amongst clumps of seaweed, tied to a crumbling post, viridian waves lapping at its feet.
Tankers curdle their way back and forth through the water, back and forth, to and fro, from various buildings that seem to be constructed on tiny stilts. Openly they deliver their goods in full view of the people strolling along the shore having their day out, walking their pets, not embarrassed at all by their bulk nore their mysterious cargo.

Just a short swim away and the steel vessels barge their way through the water, moaning like whales as their vertical fields of rust scrape against the concrete legged platforms, water swirling around, gargling and swelling with the physical efforts of the two metal dogs fighting blindly for port space, their sonic reverberations echoing down towards the depths.

Some look like rockets, some like big fat thatched cottages, making up a series of small communities facing inwards from the sea, forming a circle. It seems like the more the midday haze lifts the more the city of forms becomes clearer.

# posted by Neil @ 10:18 am

I live in a hole in the ground together my dog Petre, and jimbo the cat. Never in the time we have been living down here have we thought about or been interested in contacting those above ground. This explosion of blogs that you talk about has given me the chance now to pass coded messages to the populace at large, regardless of the ever present fear of being caught for all my previous acts of disloyalty that I shall not mention here. I will chalk you up on the wall here so that I remember. Petre says hello but Jimbo has gone to fetch wood for the fire and he says he'll be back soon. It gets very cold down here when the iceman visits and I'm constantly scraping the window. Please don't come too close, that's right just there, where I can see you.

# posted by Neil @ 11:56 am

There once was a man who lived in the loft and I could always hear him walking about at night; his feet thundering across my boards and I would sometimes see him in his hobnailed black boots and diamond patterned socks, walking close to the wall, half enveloped inside his shadow and he never once looked up to greet me. Every time it was along that wall and around that specific corner I would see him, always in a hurry. I never once noticed him either coming in or going out of the loft itself but I knew it was him; the boots, the coughing, the snoring through the floorboards at night, the glimpses of his great bulk slumped on the floor and not on the bed through the gap under his door. Did he sleep like that or did he just drink a lot, I sniffed the air - no alcohol. The snoring had been coming through like a low drilling sound, warbling through the hollow boards; I'll have to do something about that monster rolling about on my roof, I thought. What was he doing, what had he done and what was he going to do now I wondered as I peered through the gap beneath his door, dressed only in my night gown? There, he is in, he is in, I see him, his shadow moving. I hear the clump of his boots as they pace towards the door. It opens. I stood there looking up from the steps, I could see right up his hairy nose. Hello, um, sorry to bother you but you don’t happen to have a coin for the meter do you, only I’ve, you know, ran out. “Um no, I have no money on me right now, and whom might you be young fellow?” By the way I live down stairs, below you, so, nice to meet you. I did not lean forward to shake hands. He did not lean to shake mine. He stood and knocked his boots together, I supposed because of the cold. His ragged none-descript clothes gave him the air of one who does not wash or buy new, nor care what other people think or do. I wanted to know what his interests were, why, oh why did he live in this way and do the things that he did. What were his friends and where was his family? He walked a pace forward and gestured towards me. No’ I’m OK here. He had his, like marching music on in the background or something. In my self interested way I asked him what his interests were, was he interested in art, he must have an interest as everybody has an interest, interesting. What sort? “In art. Er…” he says and picks up a book from a small shelf, here look, a book on Monet. Ah yes I said. “Yes” he said, flicking through the pages and finding the picture with his broad thumb. “Look!” The picture was of a train in station, one of a series, by Monet. “I like trains”, he said, moving his head in circular shape and It was then that I noticed the posters, cards, stickers and other railroad memorabilia exhibited around and about. Any other artists at all? He looked at me and shrugged. What do you do? I asked as if he had to be doing something, in his long walks out, he had to be going somewhere, to do something, an occupation of sorts? I can’t remember the details… just a job. What did he say - underground?; he went off mumbling about something; Divorced… err… split up… with his wife… he had sons… England… somewhere in England… lived for two years around the area of Manchester… rough. Oh yes I once had a friend who lived in Manchester - rough! Maybe that’s why he sleeps on the floor…oh and of course the bed is too soft, so he‘s not used to it, that must be it. This must be like paradise compared, with these nice smooth boards. Taking time to acclimatise, getting himself used to life outside of the Men’s hostel or maybe he was in the army, the Queens royal railway division or something, and it was disbanded because of the privatisation so he found himself a nice loft room, on top of me. He stood there and I stood down at the door. He let off wind, like it was just another occurrence, every hour, even minute of the day and he just carried on and I tried to prevent my nose from showing its consternation with rubbing my hand on it, and cleaning and then I noticed that he had a combination, of clothes on and his bed had no covers and no duvet so I briefly muttered that he could borrow my futon, as a kind of good will gesture, similar to being on the ground but more comfortable than the wood, for you to sleep on? I think he took it quite well, it went down well, but said no. He started towards me and I said to him that I did art in my room and it’s in a bit of a jumble at present, space at a premium you know, otherwise you could come and err…visit, maybe…yeah, later maybe, not now though, not now.

# posted by Neil @ 4:59 am