I am a builder. You’ll appreciate that this entails a lot of demolition work. Your world, the way you think about yourselves and your most fundamental notions of reality are the result of unskilled labour, cowboy workmanship. There’s bad subsidence; dry rot in the moral timbers. This will all have to come down, and it’s not going to be cheap.
Does the phrase “clearance area” mean anything to you?
Ideas of self, ideas of world and family and nation, articles of scientific or religious faith, your creeds and currencies: one by one, the beloved structures falling.
Whooomff.
Whooomff.
Whooomff.
A COLD AND FROSTY MORNING
Alma Warren, barely out of bed and naked in the monstrous bathroom mirror, staring bleary at her sagging fifty-three-year-old flesh and still fancying herself something rotten. She finds her enduring vanity almost heroic in the scale of its delusion. She’s prepared to face the facts, safe in the knowledge that the facts will only scream and run away. All things considered, she’s a funny piece of work.
The big square bathroom with its plaster-rounded corners is a blunted cube of grey steam rising from the eight-foot chasm of the filling tub, an ostentatious lifeboat made from tide-lined fibreglass. Subjected to this sweltering rain-forest climate every morning for at least ten years the chamber’s blue and gold-veined lining paper has begun to droop down from the ceiling’s curve, a wilted winter sunrise. At the bottom of the giant bath itself there are the studs of an unused Jacuzzi fixture, gilt flaked off to show the dull grey metal underneath. Alma has never really had the knack of keeping something nice.
She picks a bath bomb from the green glass fruit bowl on the counter, Fairy Jasmine from the fragrant branch of Lush down in the Grosvenor Centre, lobs it casually into the deep hot water and takes childish pleasure from the scum of blue metallic glitter that seethes up out of the fizz and foment. She’ll have sequinned cheeks, hands, hair and sheets for a few days but, on the plus side, will be living in the early 1970s. Alma climbs up onto the near end of the boxed-in miniature lagoon and strikes a pose like a high diver, squinting down into the steam until she can imagine that her bathtub is a massive reservoir as seen from several hundred feet above. She makes as if about to execute a swallow dive but then appears to change her mind and steps down carefully into her bath in the conventional fashion. This strange pantomime is something she does each day without having any idea why. She only hopes that nobody ever finds out about it.
With a pig-pink soap-bar redolent of Woolworths’ Pick’n’Mix she lathers herself everywhere then sluices it all off, relaxing back into the heat and suds until only her face is visible above the surface as a floating mask. The long hair drifts about her outsized skull like waterweed, becoming sleek and saturated as she listens to the ringing underwater noises that her bath makes inadvertently, the peeling gold tap’s rhythmic dripping and the amplified scrape of a toenail on the long tub’s moulded sides. Alma feels comfortable, reduced to nothing but a bobbing face with all the rest of what she is concealed beneath the bubbles and the drifting clots of iridescent blue. This is essentially the strategy with which she faces life, believing that it lends her the advantage of surprise: there might be anything beneath the suds and sparkle, mightn’t there?
After an amniotic minute of submersion she sits up, hair a lank comma dribbling between her shoulder blades, and scoops a viscous palm-full of her lime and sea-salt shampoo from its pot, rubbing the gritty slime into her scalp. The product promises its user traffic-stopping shine and volume, although Alma is unable to remember the last time that she’d stopped traffic in a good way. Moulding her hair forward in a lather-stiffened quiff that sags towards its dripping tip a good eight inches from her forehead, Alma mumbles “Thang yuh verrah much” into the humid fog, then rinses it all off using a peeling golden shower attachment. She is, she likes to believe, the spitting image of the King if he’d lived to be an old woman.
Once the strands are squeaking like violin strings, she turns off the nozzle and lies back, her sodden head draining into the folded towel that she’s forethoughtfully placed on the long tub’s pointed end. Stretched out full length and motionless, a dead Egyptian monarch whose sarcophagus has first been flooded and then strewn with glitter for unfathomable ritual purposes, Alma reviews her thoughts, such as they are at this time of a Friday morning. Near the surface, a storm-layer of nonsensical rage and resentment is subsiding gradually into this foamy interlude between her breakfast Shreddies, her sensible daily aspirin and her bio-yoghurt drinks, already wolfed down, and her first joint of the day, which is still yet to come. Beneath this scum-line of residual anger is a tediously efficient secretary-strata, listing everything that Alma has to do today, Friday, May 26th, 2006: finish the Chain of Office picture, pay her treacherous bloodsucking council tax, go to the bank, visit the little day-care nursery down near Doddridge Church to see if everything has been delivered safely for tomorrow’s exhibition. Oh, and shop for food in town, because there’s nothing in the fridge except for weird, exotic relishes and dips she’s bought while in an altered state. Perhaps she’ll pop her head into the Grosvenor Centre branch of HMV to see if the new season of The Wire is out yet; maybe trawl the local-interest shelves at Waterstone’s, looking for photographs of sepia barges on a brown-ale river; lemming-waves of kids in 1950s swimming costumes running at the camera, splashing through the shallow end of the Midsummer Meadow lido.
Down below this relatively-tidy organising level are the ceaselessly-rotating cogs and flywheels of creative process. These are anxiously reviewing minor irritations in completed works – the central white-haired labourer in Work in Progress for example, looking back across his shoulder at the audience with eyes perhaps too stern and frightening – or else are sifting patiently through possibilities for paintings yet to come. She has a nebulous idea that involves tracking down the sites depicted by great, bygone landscape artists, recreating the same view in the same medium, with all the car-crammed motorways and modern alterations rendered classically in lustrous oils with patient glazes, freezing a degraded present in the unforgiving gaze of a more able past. There’s something in the notion that appeals to her, but it’s too glib and obvious in its present form. Besides, she’ll have had five ideas as good or better before she retires tonight. Alma’s attention skitters over this and other fledgling projects pretty much non-stop, even while other areas of her awareness are engaged in pressing matters of their own, such as pretending that whomever she is talking to has her complete attention.
Under this productive and untiring shop-floor of the mind we next encounter the vast, monitor-lit basement complex of a super-villainess, where part of Alma’s too-elaborate personality sits in a swivel chair amongst the shifting screens and contemplates deranged agendas. These include affecting the development of culture by the subtle introduction of extreme ideas, which, if pursued, will almost certainly precipitate widespread apocalyptic psychological collapse. This will fulfil Alma’s ambition, having first gone mad herself, of taking everyone else with her. Then, of course, there’s the ongoing scheme to argue her way out of death, which is progressing rather nicely. She sits swivelling and chuckling in her imaginary lair, but does not stroke a cat, having anticipated that her stature as a villainess would be severely undercut by the predictable and obvious sexual pun. Instead, when circumstance requires, she strokes a raucous and red-crested cock.
Descending further there are Jungian catacombs of alchemy, kabbalah, numerology and tarot, paranormal residues resulting from her still-current preoccupation with the occult. She decodes the day around her in accordance with the correspondence-tables of Cornelius Agrippa, Dr. Dee, Aleister Crowley, all the other occult heavyweights. Today’s a Friday, Freitag, Vendredi, day of the planet Venus and the number seven, a good female day in all. Its colours are three shades of green with amber as a complement. Its perfume is attar of rose, its metal copper. This specific zone of Alma’s consciousness allows itse
lf to be productively distracted by the tangential idea of roses, following a fragile thread of free-association starting with Diana Spencer, “Goodbye, England’s Rose”, Taupin and John’s camp Monroe eulogy refitted for another blonde girl dead of cameras, misplaced ambition, and betrayal. The funeral cortège that Alma’s brother Mick had watched, bringing the body home along the summer motorway, thrown blossoms wilting on the bonnet, vivid on the dull gunmetal of the casket. Utter silence from the crowds beside the road. Northamptonshire, Rose of the Shires. The rose originates in Turkey, only red or white varieties available, and it is introduced in Europe by returned crusaders, many of these coming back here to the town where their crusades had started. Proving popular, the flower, in its two distinct shades, is eventually adopted as a symbol by the Houses of both Lancaster and York, with their subsequent conflict settled at the Battle of Cow Meadow, between Beckett’s Park and Delapré across the river. Blood and roses, a repetitive motif across the printed fabric of Northampton’s muddy skirt.
A little further down are Alma’s feelings, her emotional component, a far sunnier and less nightmarish pasture than appearances might lead one to suppose. In this enclosure, all of Alma’s friends and pets and family, alive or dead, frolic amidst enactments of her treasured moments. These might represent a dream, a first kiss, or that funny afternoon when she’d been nine, taking a long-cut home through Greyfriars flats down Scarletwell Street, noticing the bush, the single dangling caterpillar. All of Alma’s positive experiences are rerouted here for long-term storage. All her negative experiences are fed to an appalling thing with turquoise eyes, kept in a pen behind the recreation area and only taken out for walks upon special occasions.
Under all of this is Alma’s soul, the Real of her that cannot be expressed, which is a lovely and ingeniously fashioned artefact, if possibly a little showy and impractical. Essentially, it is that of a serious-minded yet imaginative and very clever seven-year-old girl, and at the moment is dissolving blissfully into the jasmine-scented, sapphire-dusted currents of a scalding hot bath.
When she starts experiencing pangs of proletarian guilt at her minor-celebrity indulgence, which takes only a few minutes in a tub of this preposterous size, she sits up suddenly and pulls the plug out. Leaping from the bath, she tries to dry herself and get her clothes on before all the water has drained gurgling away, a habit that she used to think of as simple efficiency but has since realised is just part of her quite ordinary individual madness. Finally, triumphantly, having completed dressing while the last few nebulae of foam and glitter are still circling the plug’s black hole by the simple expedient of not bothering with any underwear, she slings her robe over the banister and thunders down the stairs. It’s half-past seven in the morning and time to commence her hectic and demanding schedule of attempting to intimidate the planet’s other occupants. It’s not that Alma finds this wholly self-imposed task difficult, especially. It’s just that there’s so many of them, and so little time.
Downstairs, amidst a clutter of rare book and uncompleted canvas that is only reassuring to Alma herself, she fills her space-age kettle-jug and switches on its eerie blue light before settling into her armchair and beginning the construction of her first jazz cigarette. These ostentatiously long items, accurately labelled as “nine-inch Gauloise dick-compensators” by her one-time visitor Alexei Sayle, are a leftover from her younger days when she still went to parties and contrived a reefer long enough to still have something left for herself after it had circumnavigated a room full of people. When her partial deafness and increasing weariness with alcohol led to Alma foregoing parties and most often smoking on her own while working, she simply forgot to modify the length, that’s all. It’s not that she’s a drug-glutton or anything.
When all ten Rizla papers have been glued into a white flag of surrender and the filling of tobacco added, Alma cooks the blunt end of a bar of hash over her Zippo lighter. This current variety, which as a teenager she would have recognised as coming from Afghanistan or Pakistan, has more than likely been renamed Taliban Black to suit the present situation. She reflects upon this as she crumbles the still-smouldering resin into the tobacco, burning her almost entirely nerveless left thumb and forefinger in the process. Next there comes a scrabbling carpet-rolling motion and a swift pass of the gummed edge across Alma’s tongue, a twist at one end and a neat insertion of rolled cardboard at the other, all before her blue-lit orgone-kettle in the kitchen has stopped bubbling. She pours the boiling water, spattering, into a horribly discoloured BEST AT EVERYTHING mug, guides the sizzling torrent so that it falls on the centre of the circular grey teabag and inflates it satisfyingly into a pillow of trapped heat. Mashing it up against the cup’s side with her spoon to squeeze the last drop of its vital juices out, she flips the spent and steaming carcass into her conveniently open pedal bin. Foregoing milk and sugar – she prefers her beverages “black and bitter, how I like my men” – Alma transports the brimming mug back to her living room, her armchair and her waiting contraband cheroot.
Behind her chair there is an arching stained-glass panel where gold stars mark the positions of the kabbalistic spheres against a deep royal blue grading into aquamarine. The low sun through the room’s rear window falls through this and drenches Alma in cobalt and yellow radiance as she lights up the cigarette. The painted stars break eggs onto the cyan glaze of her wet hair. She holds the smoke in for a moment and then sits back and exhales into the gathering indigo, luxuriating in her own identity, in the incessant fun and mostly-pleasant strain of simply being her.
As the cloud-chamber of her consciousness begins to warm up, turbines whirring into life as it approaches normal operating speed, she reaches for the nearest page of print to give her rapidly engaging mental processes a point of focus. This turns out to be the latest issue of New Scientist, dated May 4th, open at an intriguing article concerning Alma’s favourite science philosopher, the beautifully-named Gerard ’t Hooft, whose criticisms of string theory she’d been so impressed by. It seems that ’t Hooft has formulated a hypothesis which would, if proven, finally resolve the quandaries of quantum indeterminacy; would resolve them right out of existence, if Alma is reading it correctly. The philosopher apparently suggests that there’s a deeper and more fundamental level, as yet undiscovered, underlying the mysterious quantum world. ’T Hooft predicts that once we have developed tunnelling microscopes that can reveal this previously unsuspected layer of reality we’ll find that Heisenberg’s idea of particles existing in a wide variety of states until observed is an illusion based upon misunderstanding.
Reading all this between alternating sips of tea and smoke, Alma allows herself the guttural chortle of an ogre who’s just realised where the schoolchildren are hiding. She can spot a well-constructed dangerous idea when she sees one, and ’t Hooft’s proposal strikes her as one of the most ingenious conceptual land mines that she’s ever heard of. The idea’s attractions are immediately apparent. Quantum indeterminacy is the stumbling block preventing any easy resolution of the vast discrepancies between the quantum world-view and the classically-constructed universe of Einstein, Newton and the rest. If tiny subatomic particles behave according to the Lewis Carroll laws that govern quantum physics, then why do entirely different laws govern the stars and planets? The attempts thus far to reconcile the quantum microcosm with the classic macrocosm have led to such mind-wrenching extravagances as string theory, notions that require extra dimensions, ranging between ten and twenty-six, before the mathematics will make sense.
That’s not to say that the string theorists might not be correct, Alma observes, but simply to suggest that to her ear it all sounds rather messy and unnecessary. If ’t Hooft is right, however, and there is no quantum indeterminacy, then the problem vanishes to leave a unified field theory which accounts for everything without resorting to exotic explanations that can often raise more questions than they answer. She can see how many scientists would find ’t Hooft’s hypothesis hard to resist, but t
hen there is that other shoe to fall: if there’s no quantum indeterminacy, then there’s no free will. That, right there, is the problem, and in Alma’s estimation it has the potential to make all the other current disputes between Christianity and science pale by comparison.
That’s why she’s laughing as she reads. It’s all this free will business and the way that everybody gets so jittery about it, even thinkers that she has the greatest of respect for. Alma, having worked all year upon her brother Warry’s near-death vision, has grown very comfortable with predetermination, with the idea of life as a great recurrence that we re-experience, unvaryingly and eternally. During this time, though, she’s learned that both Nietzsche and one of her idols, the Brixton-based artist and magician Austin Osman Spare, have previously formulated almost the same concept but then shied away from it because of the implied negation of free will.
Alma can’t see what all the fuss is over. She’s convinced that no one really needs free will as long as there is a sustainable illusion of the same to stop everyone going mad. It also seems to her that our perception of free will depends upon the scale at which we view the issue. Looking at a single individual, it’s obviously impossible to accurately forecast what will happen to that person during, say, the next five years. This would seem to support the argument for free will and a future that is not yet written. On the other hand, if we consider a large group of people, such as the few thousand souls inhabiting the Boroughs or an average modern sink estate, then our predictions become frighteningly easy and precise. We can state, near enough exactly, just how many people will get sick, get stabbed, get pregnant, lose their jobs, their homes, have minor triumphs on the Lottery, will beat their partners or their kids, will die from cancer or heart failure or sheer blind accident. It strikes her, sitting in the rich blue light and finishing her smoke, that this is the same quandary faced by the physicists, translated into a context of sociology. Why is free will, like quantum indeterminacy, only evident when we look at the microcosm, at a single person? Where does free will disappear to when we turn our gaze upon the larger social masses, on the populations that are the equivalent of stars and planets?