Self published, 2011.
Edition of 1000, FREE.
if you would like a copy please e-mail: patrick@patrickgoddard.co.uk
excerpts from:
STATES OF EXCEPTION:
and vulturous boredoms.
There is a type of rodent deterrent that emits a very high pitch scream that is inaudible to our ears but to a mouse is so excruciatingly annoying that it will abandon its nest. It does however, have one major flaw and that is that if a mouse has a new brood of babies it won't leave. The new batch of baby mice are born into the scream and as such can't hear it, or at least never notice it. As a part of the only world they have ever known, its presence isn't registered. I can't draw a parallel from human life but that isn't to say that there isn't one - its just I wouldn't know about it.
Perhaps if someone were to turn this machine off the young mice would be so disorientated in their painfully quiet world that they would crave its return, conversely they may experience a bewilderingly profound peace.
When I was twenty I had a job handing out newspapers in the mornings. A woman called Maive used to come and start conversations with me; she had a thick Cork accent and must have been around eighty-two, although I never asked. She wore a plastic triangular scarf over her hair to keep it dry even when it wasn't raining. When it was gently spitting once she recommended that I get one and the next time I saw her she gave me a spare, telling me that she had plenty at home.
One day she invited me for a cup of tea, which I declined, and went on to invite me to come round to her house whenever I was free. I said I might do and she then gave me her address. The next day she appeared surprised and slightly offended that I has not come to visit her the night before. She invited me again and not finding it in my heart to refuse I visited her that evening.
Her small flat was full of Irish Catholic pictures and trinkets primarily depicting The Virgin Mary. I smelt the presence of an otherwise forgotten cat which lingered with the predictably musty odour of an old person. She made me a sandwich, which she watched me eat. One slither of ham and an excessive amount of butter was squashed between two pieces of white bread. It made me feel sick. It was a short visit but I ended up agreeing to visit her every Tuesday.
On the fifth week she baked me an apple pie in her faulty oven, which only ever reached radiator heat, I suspected it had only been put in the oven upon my arrival. We sat side by side on her sofa as she liked to do when she started fondling my hand and holding it to her chest. I looked straight ahead. She said I had small hands, though I don't, especially compared to her tiny and toad like ones, I thought. After a few teasing remarks she let it go as suddenly as she had seized it and looked away flustered and with an air of shyness. I asked, 'What's wrong Maive?' After she encouraged me to coax her further she replied that she had been having 'feelings for me' and that she thought that we really got on and had a laugh together. I felt like I was about to have a nosebleed as I lied and said that I had a girl friend. She composed herself, forced a carefree smile and pretended like nothing had happened. I suggested we go and check on the apple pie: it wasn't ready so we had another fifteen minutes awkward conversation. She wouldn't let me leave until I had had a slice. After fifteen minutes I suggested we go back and check on the pie again. It was still not done. I insisted it was done and that I would love to eat it now. She said she didn't want any but eagerly watched me eat the raw pastry. I felt sick and told her I was late meeting some friends to see a film. She wrapped the remains of the pie and put it in my pocket and reached up to hug me as I left. The last few visits she had pecked me on the cheek but on this occasion her kiss was aimed at my mouth. I turned at the last moment and her wetted lips caught the corner of mine. She imploringly made me promise to come again the following week but I lied and have never seen her since.
At a recent protest against government spending cuts I, with another thousand or so demonstrators were 'kettled' by an army of police for nine hours. Kettling is where the police forcibly detain a large group of people under threat of violence and arrest. In mid-November the boredom and cold of these impoundings is numbing.
Crouched on the curb, chain smoking - I don't even smoke - I became the silent partner in a one-sided dialogue with a sincere, but otherwise charmless man. As he spoke such a fine mist of spittle sporadically sprayed from his mouth that, as it caught the light of the sun, there appeared the briefest of miniature rainbows. Keeping a distance from his enthusiastic and salivating mouth, whilst being duly engaged through politeness and boredom, he told me about Torches of Freedom.
On March 31, 1929, Bertha Hunt and other female friends, stepping through a throng of pedestrians in New York on what was called the Easter Parade, simultaneously lit cigarettes. At this time it was not considered socially acceptable for women to smoke, especially in public and, declaring them as Torches of Freedom, the pseudo suffragettes proclaimed the act a social revolt in opposition to sexual inequalities. Promoting the protest as part of the fight against sexual taboos the press were, naturally, already there having received a press release from the group beforehand.
The women's employer and the instigator of this stunt was Freud's nephew, Eddie Bernays; an early developer of Public Relations and advertising techniques that incorporated psychoanalytic theories. Working in America and on the payroll of one of the biggest tobacco companies of his age, he was instrumental in popularising cigarettes amongst women.
This was one of the earliest instances of cigarettes being linked to concepts of freedom, and was later to be developed beyond the discourse of women's rights to other, less defined notions of freedom.
As it started to get dark I could smell my own breath repugnant from chain smoking and a lack of water. Disgusted and dejected, the police finally released us at nine o'clock and I stiffly began my journey to my evening job, for which I was late.
When I was three my parents found a very small poo in the corner of my bedroom and asked me if I had done it. I told them 'no'. A week later they found it again - a small amount of poo in the corner of my room next to the bed. They asked me again - 'did you poo in the corner of your bedroom?' I again answered 'no, I did not poo in the corner of my bedroom.' This happened a third and fourth time over the next few weeks. Finally, after persistent questioning and softly spoken accusations I answered - 'yes. I have been pooing in the corner of my room.' They punished me, not for pooing, but for repeatedly lying.
At this time we were forced to live with an old lady. Mrs Green, whom, until writing this sentence, I had never considered must have also had a first name, was what is called a sit-in tenant. My parents bought our house cheaply on the condition that she could continue to live on the first floor. She was old and, as I realize now, senile. She owned a black and slightly mangy cat that hissed at me from the bottom of the stairs, and would prevent me descending from my bedroom to reach my parents in the event of a bad dream. A week or so after my punishment my dad caught the cat pooing in the corner of my room; he was so angry that he grabbed it and ran to the top floor of my house. He threw it out of the fourth story window. The cat landed in a small shrub and walked away apparently unscathed. A few months later my dad got a cut on his shin whilst skiing and developed a blood infection. Complicated by his diabetes he fell into a coma and died of a heart attack eight days later.
Mrs Green lived till she was ninety-nine. Having lost track of her age, she was expecting the letter from the Queen that is traditionally sent congratulating one-hundredth birthdays. Her cat outlived her, but I don't know where it went after she died.
I live on a council estate in London. Beneath me live a couple that scream at each other constantly, although it is primarily the woman I hear. I have never heard the work 'fuck' used so regularly and with such little imagination. The word stands in for or emphasises her punctuation but occasionally she uses it as a tmesis or an expletive infix. A tmisis is where a word is inserted between the syllables of another word. For example, one day at exactly nine o'clock in the evening I heard the door slam beneath me and a blood-curdling scream promptly emanated from my floor: 'it's fucking nine O'fucking-clock'. The second 'fucking' in the sentence creates the tmesis, it is also expletive.
Because I could not hear the reply (if there even was one) from what I presumed to be the woman's characteristically mumbling partner it kind of felt like the scream was aimed at me; a dreadful reproach from one of the Fates. In Greek mythology, the Fates are three goddesses: Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, usually depicted as women of advanced years, who were believed to decree the events in, and duration of somebody's life. That scream left me with a throbbing sense of foreboding even though it was easy enough to invent its probable cause and recipient.
Recently, the man, whom I only ever knew as a lamenting murmur, seems to have moved out. Although the shouting has decreased in frequency, the woman, whom I now know is called Candice, has doubled her efforts at shouting at what she calls her two 'barking fucking dogs'. Not that her dogs fuck constantly whilst barking, I know they are both bitches, rather they are staffy/pit-bull crosses that happen to bark a lot.
I thought the prime barker was called Tina (incidentally my next door neighbour's name) but she is in fact called Peanut - it's just that a fast screech through concrete floor comes out sounding like a 'Tina' at my end. Candice's shouting principally consists of her telling the dogs to stop barking but her command is delivered in the identical screech that she uses to tell the dogs to: lie down, go into another room, or, to 'leave me a-fucking-lone'.
On the one occasion that I have seen one of the dogs out of the flat, on the square of grass in front of the redbrick, four-story council block, Candice was actively trying to train it to bark at both sounds and people.
There is a moment, not a nightmare as such, but the uncanny moment at the cusp of waking where the real world takes on dream world qualities: irrational connections, surreal realism and absurd narratives. Coleridge wrote that it is not the images in dreams that are the cause of our emotions, rather it is our emotions that are the trigger for the dreams: we do not feel horror because a sphinx threatens us; we dream the sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.
This morning saw me plagued by the unfounded sensation that I had stepped in dog poo. Constantly checking the soles of my shoes, I walked up the Old Kent Road aimlessly, feigning an air of purpose. By a big area cordoned off by police tape I stopped to ask one of the loitering policemen what had happened. A few were discussing something, there was also a huddle of firemen a bit further on.
I often ask what has happened when I see police blocking off an area; maybe it's through a morbid interest or through an urgent sense of personal relevance - I'm not sure. The policeman I asked told me nothing had happened. I walked off and asked the last policewoman in the cordoned off area what had happened. She had brown hair and reminded me of a woman I haven't seen for years, but who always had the ability to make me feel out of place whilst being painfully polite. I was out of sight of the original policeman and would have been embarrassed if he had seen me asking the same question. The new policewoman, however, answered the same. I quipped that they were just doing it for fun, but she sternly replied that they were investigating. Asked what they were investigating she replied 'nothing'.
I crossed the road, checking the soles of my shoes on the opposite pavement.
Malaparte tells of how the Hitler youth were made to gouge out the eyes of live cats in order to get them accustomed to the suffering of others.
My eight-year-old nephew had been staying with me for a few days and occupied his time playing unknown games in the garden whilst I spied on him from the window as I pretended to work upstairs. He had been trying to tame a blackbird that was hopping around some recently dug up earth where presumably some insects had been exposed. He seemed enchanted by it and tried enticing it closer with worms. Never acknowledging him and remaining out reach, it gave the impression of flirtatiously taunting him. After lunch he was back in the garden playing around with a pitchfork, the blackbird had also returned and on its recognition Hugh, who is named after my father, clumsily threw the pitchfork in its direction. It missed its mark by a few feet, but scared the bird into flight and the handle knocked it out of the air dead onto the lawn. I think his throw was just an effort to try to get the bird to acknowledge him and not meant to be sinister. Shocked and looking around guardedly, he picked up the bird with the pitchfork and threw it over the garden wall. He played with Lego for the rest of the day and didn't mention what had happened and I didn't tell him I had seen it.
There is a bar that used to have a little hole in the corner of the ceiling where some old plaster had crumbled away. Above the bar is a creepy, old, unused flat and, on more than one occasion, a mouse has fallen through this hole landing behind the serving area beneath, next to the glass washing machine. The mice are still alive but crippled and in these incidents it is up to the least squeamish of the bar staff to humanely finish them off. On the last occasion this task fell to Tim, an ex-art student with a First World War style moustache. Not having the nerve to stamp on it, which I think is the most efficient suffering-to-effort ratio, he opted to drown it and thought it might ease its passing to drown it in wine. Pouring out half a pint of the house red (Malbec), he picked up the crippled mouse in a bit of blue tissue and plopped it in the glass. After an initial sink the mouse bobbed back to the surface and began frantically paddling. With a hesitant glance around the bar Tim realized the torturous flaw in his plan but, too late to undo, he thought the best thing to do was to take a teaspoon from on top of the coffee machine and hold it under, which he did.
I work in this bar, but was not the witness of this event.
all writing copyright Patrick Goddard, 2011.
