Novel D
The so-called main room of Cleopatra’s house was adorned with an ancient wooden table. While this description might commonly be used in fiction to mean a historic Oak diner, the table in Cleopatra’s house was almost completely different.
Quite to the contrary, this was a standard kitchen or dining room table acquired from towards the end of the 20th century. Bought at a reduced-price, high-quality market many years before it arrived at Cleopatra’s house, the table had been passed through numerous hands, most of which at some point stained the furniture.
The ‘high-quality’ in the description referred of course to the longevity of the product. Truthfully enough, the table still performed its necessary function on four legs every day of 2014, as it had done since it was constructed many decades earlier. The durability provided in the creation of such a simple table was clearly admirable; this work effort was all the more admirable for the poor appeal of the table; for some creator to make such a standard table with such a long-lasting build was certainly worthy of praise.
In terms of aesthetic appeal, however, the item was distinctly lacking. When constructed, the dining space was the one blank colour of cheap wood. But for the uneven layout of the formative tree’s rings, there was no noticeable pattern or texture to the product. By the time it arrived in the possession of Cleopatra, however, it had the very clear pattern of a long time spent in use but with no care.
Cleopatra had forcibly explained her ‘Bohemian’ lifestyle to the friend (a friend whom, in the minutes it took to divulge Cleopatra’s personality, rapidly became an acquaintance, and who now listed Cleopatra as a stranger), and commented that this worn-down table perfectly suited the atmosphere she hoped to create in her home.
When the table arrived in Cleopatra’s house, it had merely been marked by rings of condensation – the result of many years of cool glasses left without coasters – and a few misplaced brush strokes by an aspiring painter. In the view of the original owner, this table was ruined. By the night of December 31st 2014, however, this initial state of acquisition by Cleopatra was factory freshness; over the years and across the parties, drinks of every colour in the rainbow had been spilt across the surface, and the stains had reached the intensity and concentration that any sign of the pale brown of the wood which lay underneath seemed out of place.
The table had a few puncture wounds, of course, from the nearby dart board. Though nobody would deny the two items were near each other, the proximity was not sufficient to justify collision. By this ratherly scholarly description, spectators can attempt to dismiss the fact that it was simply year of dangerous clumsiness as the cause of dart-holes in a former dining table.
The darts board itself was so chipped and perforated that the original markings were unclear, and were anyone to play darts any more, there would surely be debate into where the boundaries for each score zone were.
Cleopatra hoped that somebody may mistake the board for a Jackson Pollack painting, round and observant from her wall. Nobody ever did, but this belief was what kept Cleopatra going some days when there was no company to be seen.
Of course, Cleopatra was far from the sort of person to pretend she had these thoughts. It was her perceived personality that she lived on the whim of the moment, never thinking or caring about how she may be construed. She spent more time dwelling on how people might engage with her persona than anyone who met her ever did engage with her persona.
In the minds of many of Cleopatra’s admirers, she was a somewhat ditzy woman. The art Deco of long-extinct rocker bar rooms betrayed, she felt, a sense of individual expression her friends (or perhaps patrons) could only dream of. In actuality, visitors to get house frequently looked down on her apparent lack of adult development.
In advance of any social gathering, it is customary for the host to examine the designated partying area to spot for any failures in presentation.
For example, a woman who has organised a party in her living room would ordinarily rush around frantically in an attempt to clear up any mess: any pieces of rubbish lying around would be binned; stains would be cleaned if possible or covered up if not;
Instead of this cleansing ritual, Cleopatra devoted herself into dirtying her house anew. It was the centrepiece of her aesthetic that the building was unclean.
Maria was a 34-year-old Londoner who had made her way 'up north' (but in reality almost exactly in the centre of England) in the hope of finding a tranquil, pastoral retreat; only when she arrived did she discover her friends thought of Fichleke as the centre if the world, and London as a distant replica, in the same way Las Vegas recreates cities in hotels, and filmmakers poorly adapted well-known works as ill-founded publicity stunts in an effort to show their own supposes depth, but really exposing the distant ignorance of so many blindering imbeciles.
Maria sometimes liked the obscurity of Fichleke; it was of vital importance that she leave the city; the sight of the so-called Big Smoke became a tiresome vision every day. The same dull world preoccupied solely with its own existence.
As is often the case with smoke, people choke on the bigness of London.
Try as they might, builders could not change London; despite the constant creation of new skyscrapers and destruction of old landmarks in the city, nothing ever really changed; the tabloid press constantly proclaimed the success of capitalism alongside lamenting the loss of a supposed utopia of Dickens's London; in fact, it was the aim of every novel from the pen of Dickens was oppose the corruption of London and the devastation caused by the elite; the tabloids may claim that London was no longer recognisable, but in actual fact it always stayed the same.
The main problem Jean-Luc faced was logical incoherence.
—Notice how the revolutionary books of the past were of no importance in their own day.
Matt was baffled by this.
—There are plenty of books which were popular in their own day.
—That's not what I'm saying. My problem is that so many books are unpopular because they're uninteresting. Then the passage of time allows people to retrospectively claim they were representative of the time, when in that time people found them dull.
Matt had sipped a few too many pints, and was struggling to keep up with what Jean-Luc was saying; or why it was being said.
—The public are sick to death of their own time. Everybody seeks to avoid the place they’re in.
—I suppose I see your point.
—Gatsby talks about how technology is advancing. The people reading books at the time were sick to death of hearing about the problems of technology.
—But don't you think people like social commentary?
—But it's not social commentary. It's all very shallow.
—Really?
—Yes. The Great Gatsby features a few references to emerging technology: the fancy cars, the intercontinental travel, and the ease of electrical commodities. But it offers no insights. It does nothing to reshape the way people think about these technologies. It’s shallow.
—So what do you want?
—All I’m saying is that books should talk in depth. Making meaningless analyses is without a serious point.
Matt was still somewhat hesitant to accept this extreme view of literature.
Richard and Sam, meanwhile, were engaged in a similar, but distinct debate.
—Really, we are all trapped in a rut of nostalgia.
—How do you mean?
—Everything we do is a reflection of the past.
—I see what you mean. I think it’s more about artists.
—Yes, artists always write what they know. They may try to be different, but artists invariably write what they know.
Richard was largely in agreement with Sam on this.
—And the problem with this [said Sam] is that no-one really becomes known as a writer before the age of thirty.
Richard began to think of names, when he suggested a number of writers who were known early on, Sam abruptly stated
that Richard had completely missed the point.
—Take sitcoms, for example. Sitcoms are largely written by people a generation above their target.
—Really?
—People are rarely able to attain a position as a screenwriter until their thirties or forties, by which point their audience (predominantly teenagers) is a generation below them.
—What’s your point?
—They fail to accurately address the feelings and thoughts of the people they are addressing.
—I know what you mean. [said Richard] Like race problems. I’ve never seen race realistically captured on TV.
—Yes! [exclaimed Sam, thankful that somebody had finally understood one of his many ramblings]
—People who grew up in a different time always write about race in the wrong way. Almost every sitcom features an example of an uncomfortable white guy finding it impossibly difficult to talk to a black person. Growing up as a white guy, watching programs where people find it difficult to interact with non-white people, all this stuff just makes me realise a lot of comedy writers are out of touch.
—But now you and people like you have started to question whether or not it is supposed to be difficult to talk to black people. I didn’t think about people being black or white when I was younger any more than I thought about people being ginger or brunette.
Although Sam had more to say, Richard enthusiastically chipped in.
—And now I think about it all the time. I see someone who is black and their race is the first thing that pops into my head. And now, because I’ve grown up watching TV shows where everyone is uncomfortable talking to those of a different race, that’s what I think when I talk to someone of a different race.
The dancefloor was disappointing to any who looked into its aesthetics. Dancefloors, as a western, US-American inspired commodity, were generally supposed to be flashy stages whereupon lovers and artists could express themselves through the developed medium of body motion.
As in Saturday Night Fever, the general conception was that a dancefloor must be a large glass stage, consisting of endless tiles of glowing, underlit chunks. Since this style of dancefloor required great expense to be payed both in terms of manual labour and monetary cost, Cleopatra was unable to purchase such an advanced movement arena.
Fortunately for the dancefloor itself, should we suppose it to possess a mind of its own, none of the partiers accommodating Cleopatra’s main room were sober enough to notice its many inadequacies.
The floor was peeling, the wood would be splintering were it real and not shoddy vinyl.
There were two beaten up, broken down, stereo speakers sat hugely at the side of the formerly described dancefloor. Their small shadows covered all light from the toes of the people jiving on the edge, but went ignored as the overall dimness of the party environment allowed these small shadows to quietly blend into each other before merging with the generic darkness which encapsulated the whole area anyway.
Upon the floor stood a few drunken figures – men and women in their twenties and thirties who knew how much ethanol would get them dizzy, and drank too much anyway. They took no note of who was surrounding them.
These swaying bodies crashed carelessly into each other and battered everyone in the vicinity. Provided the victims of these clashes were sufficiently intoxicated in and of themselves, the effect of the alcohol wholeheartedly removed any problems associated, and a large collective of humans swayed and clashed and crashed with no care for how many violet bruises would erupt across their skin come morning time.
The music was inconsequential; though it was commonly claimed that the music was the reason for the dancing, the reality was quite the opposite; the music happened as an excuse for dancing.
A song emerged; words familiar to every British denizen; it was quite simply the case that in order to fully experience the turn of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, one must familiarise oneself with the music that the British public had deemed perfect.
As the drunken buffoons stood around, stuck together for fear of falling down, words of contemporary classical poetry burst forth from the edges of the room.
Don’t stop me now
Because I’m having such a good time.
I’m having a ball.
Around the time these words entered the room, every member of the house of Cleopatra had a fluid rush of neurone activity; as the familiarity of the music and lyrics combined with the lowered inhibitions from ethanol damage, the party-goers took it upon themselves to exhaust the air from their lungs in order to make apparent their knowledge of commonly played music.
All the bodies began jumping and singing to the tune of the great Freddie, crushing each other’s toes and apparently lacking in knowledge of how they were hurting themselves and each other. The only relevance was the sound, the feeling, the time that was here so temporarily and temporally, and would soon be gone.
The many reaches of the house, in the mind of Cleopatra, added to the mystery of her very existence; a dirt-soaked corner negated the need for a corner itself; either the mind figured a corner must inherently be present in order to be dirty, or else a new concept emerged; an area of the house so unimaginably different from reality that dirty was attracted towards the patch as a form of automatic metaphysical censorship.
—The main problem is multiculturalism.
—In what sense is that a problem?
—I'm sick to death of multiculturalism.
Richard was baffled by this proclamation; he had been raised on the doctrine that everyone should be treated equally; multiculturalism was, as far as he understood, the concept of society surviving with people from all around the world co-operating.
—Do you hate foreigners?
—No, but I'm sick of everyone talking about multiculturalism. No-one seems to know what it means And everyone seems to be talking about it.
—I wish we could just co-operate. Just look at Vaclav. He came from the Czech Republic to here and now he's a good friend. We can get on with people across Europe.
—The EU is allowing us to move around with the freedom of the Americans.
—Do you really want to imitate the USA?
—No. The USA has its problems. We need to create a free continent with the unity of the USA and Russia but without the corruption of either nation.
—Do you think that’s really possible?
—Of course.
—But Europe’s not like that. Europe’s completely different.
—That’s only because you’ve grown up in this version of Europe that you think that. Europe could be different. Europe could be better.
—We don’t even speak the same language. We’re not like the USA.
—Maybe we should speak the same language. People in different parts of Britain used to speak differently languages, but now everyone can communicate using English.
—So you want everyone to speak Espéranto?
—No. [she said, but she wasn’t sure what language she would prefer]
—He’s called ‘Vaclav’? [asked Sandra] I thought it was…
She proceeded to announce her interpretation of those same vowels. Notably, she made the unintentional but controversial move of getting both sounds of the name wrong. For the former, she believed ‘Vats’ (as it was pronounced) to instead be a proclamation of an abundance of body mass; for the latter, she believed ‘slav’ to be almost identical in pronunciation, but for the last sound, which she replaced with a G.
The exchanging of a Slavic C for a TS was understandable; such was the way the Czechs pronounced Vaclav. Her other misunderstandings were not so forgivable. Quite how she mistook the letter V simultaneously for an F and a G was not so clear.
—Sandra, that’s not a very pleasant way to be talking.
—Really? [Sandra said] What’s wrong?
Sandra did not really care for Cleopatra’s response; she had consumed so much alcohol that she was in a world of her ow
n values.
As Cleopatra and were discussing this temporary misunderstanding of Vaclav’s name, the Slav himself stepped up and said hello in the polite manner to which he was accustomed at the beginning of every sentence.
—Hello. [said Vaclav] What is it that you are talking about?
—Oh, hello, Vaclav. [said Cleopatra] We were just having a careless talk.
—What was the topic of your talk? What also made your talk careless?
—Oh, it’s nothing. [said Cleopatra, in an attempt to end the somewhat rude discussion of other houseguests; Maria had no such qualms in addressing the topic at hand, and so interrupted Cleopatra mid-sentence] We were just having a girly chat about nothing in particular…
This was the point at which Maria interrupted.
—Your name. [burst out Maria] You see, Sandra thought you were called something else.
Cleopatra saw a problem about to emerge.
—Oh, Maria, I don’t think it’s really appropriate to talk to Vaclav about this.
Maria continued anyway.
—[Vaclav asked] What did Sandra think my name was instead?
Maria foolishly told Vaclav. Against Cleopatra’s best wishes, the party had gained a sour taste owing to the presence of a misogynistic linguistic confusion.
—I am not sure what that word means. [said Vaclav]
Cleopatra hushed Maria; closing the mouths and minds of unpleasant talk was the bleak reality of an adult party; this was not a place where teenagers could throw insults around without feeling; if somebody took offense at this party, the horror stuck; the house itself would be tarnished with the memory of Maria calling Vaclav overweight and promiscuous.
—It’s not a nice word. [said Cleopatra] That’s all you need to know.
In fact, Vaclav was taken aback by this dismissal of his needs. Had he known the true meaning of the phrase for which his name had been mistaken, he may have been somewhat disheartened; but still the fear inherent to Cleopatra of her party falling apart caused her to stir up a much greater issue; Vaclav was primarily annoyed at being denied the acquisition of knowledge; albeit, insults relating to body mass and sex lives were not his primary concern; but still, his purpose in moving to Britain, besides finding work, was to advance his understanding of English culture and language; in her haste to censor the party’s linguistic discourse, Cleopatra had insulted the very person she aimed to protect.
As Retina ascended the staircase she heard noise of general unpleasant nature emanating from the lavatory; as was the essence of Retina's curiosity, she could not help but take the opportunity to seize upon interest and enquire; as the woman had observed from other human beings, there was the great British tendency to ignore the concerns of those around; it was more than likely the case that attendees of the party had previously passed by this door without asking into the behaviour behind the door.
It was clear to tell what was occurring within the room; the bathroom was occupied by an unwell person expelling fluids and solids in like manner; a lot of the content in the audio sphere was the retching of a sickly stomach.
—Retina. [said Capacity Evans; this was said as though it were a question]
—Yes. [came an unpleasantly positive voice during a break from vomiting]
A party is a place for people to brag about the eccentricity of their allegedly radical ideas, under the guise of being an interesting individual.
—I don’t think people should be allowed to read poetry aloud.
This was one such claim. The claimant believed that making this statement openly would merit her a great deal of appreciation.
This was when another partygoer came up to her and refuted this belief through their own personal experience.
—I watch poetry online.
—Really?
—There are endless channels on YouTube of people reading their passionate lyrics in a way that makes me want to cry, die and fly.
—Do you like that poetry, then?
—I hate it.
—Do you like that you hate it?
—I hate it because the audience claps. I hate that people sit there watching a figure reading their suicide note on stage, and then have the audacity to applaud. I want to be there, in the room, as Neil Hilborn screams that he hates me; and then – when the poem ends – we’ll sit in silence as he glares all the evils in the world into my eyes and I offer him a hug, which he never accepts or rejects.
—I can’t use an internet browser properly.
—Why not?
—I never close a tab; I only open new ones endlessly.
—Why do you call it an internet browser? Most people just say a browser.
—I have to say the full title, otherwise you won’t believe me.
—I do believe you.
—I don’t believe that you would believe a word I say.
—I don’t read books by men.
—Why not?
—Because reading is so intimate, I can’t enjoy the voice of a writer I wouldn’t want to make love to.
—You’re a lesbian?
—I’m a realist. I’ve heard about heterosexual relationships, and they never seem to work out. They all have affairs on the side, with filthy secrets, and the illusion of life in their passionlessly demising eyes as their stare at their supposed lovers closing the door with the romantic goodbye which is really a knife in everyone’s back.
—But don’t you believe in love?
—Oh, I believe love is the only truth in the universe. But it’s so painfully rare in If there’s even a slim chance you might cheat, there can never be love. Love – the unbreakable, artful love – the ultimate force. I believe in love, but I’m not sure if it’s happened yet.
During the winding thoughts of the night, Lisa had the most absurd dream.
In her dream, she was wanted. She was beloved by all those around her. She was the source of gluttony at human life.
Lisa imagined a world where she was the subject of Cleopatra’s attraction. Lisa imagined that she was beauty, and that Cleopatra could see into her mind. Lisa imagined that she was the only thing that occupied Cleopatra’s world and that she and Cleopatra lived in a world of their own.
Vaclav awoke, sprawled out on the old table. He was uncaring of the various. As he slowly regained consciousness, he looked around the room and saw only the bleak faces of his companions.
—How did you enjoy your party, Cleopatra? [he asked]
This was a question Cleopatra could never answer. How was her party? Did she get what she intended? Did she get anything?
She would never know.