Jerusalem

  Below, invasive species move from continent to continent, from chair to chair, according to the music of an altered climate. Avocados thrive in tropic London. The percussive clash of particles is registered in delicate quantum cartographies, ferns of explosion and decay, beautiful spirals to annihilation mapped through concrete time. Everywhere information, seething as it nears the boil. The U.S. president George W. Bush and prime minister Blair discuss their deep fraternal bond, admitting errors in their handling of Gulf War II. The disagreement of Megiddo percolates through every culture and in Palestine the car belonging to Islamic Jihad leader Mahmud al-Majzoud erupts in lethal traceries of hurried metal and projectile mortal splinters, disassembling the insurgent along with his brother Nidal. Black and red, such are this spring’s prevailing blossoms, vivid scarlet hearts in petals of oil-coloured smoke or bruises offset by an open cut. Cross-fade to vehicle interior.

  The shadowy Ford Escort rocks and squeaks in hateful parody of Marla, kneeling in its back seat with her red mac and her halter top pushed up to show malnourishment-honed shoulder blades, the micro-skirt that’s rucked about her waist worn as the black belt of an inverted karate, an exacting martial discipline of victimhood. Her self, the kicked-in and fragmented personality she’d thought she was, is frozen in proximity to her approaching end, frost-welded to this unrelenting moment, her last wretched stretch of here-and-now before a terrible big baby staves her skull in and ends all of her, stops the whole world forever by eliminating that pathetic and pained little rag-end of it which she’d stupidly assumed was hers. Her future has always been such a miserable and stunted thing that she’d thought nobody would bother taking it away from her but now it’s happened, now it’s happening: his pudgy cock-stub punches up inside her dry hole from behind in a ridiculously hasty silent film staccato so that she’s afraid she’s going to start a kind of hideous and open-ended laughter. Marla’s seen his dead-eyed cherub face. She’s seen his license plates and knows this is her finish, with her bloody forehead bumped against the Escort’s right-side rear door by each angry thrust, every resentful bayoneting. This is the worse-than-nothing that her life’s amounted to, the thing she’s always dreaded, always known would happen and she only ventured out tonight to pay for rock. She’ll never have another hit now and she doesn’t care. It’s not important, never was important and she’d give it up without a second thought, she’d go and live back with her mum if only that meant that she’d live and not be killed in this garage enclosure, whimpering and paralysed on her arrival at the universal terminus. Nothing she ever wanted as a child will now be hers; no one will ever say she’s special, just another shitty story in the local paper, one more useless scrubber nobody will miss, raped and, what, strangled? Oh, no, please not that. Just one blow. One blow to the head and this is over. No last drink before the gallows, no last cigarette before the squad start firing. Blood and snot, she understands, will be her only balm. New point of view.

  Dez Warner stares, his eyes those of a hot and snorting horse, at tonight’s catch with his magnificent erection going in and out of its mud-coloured cunt. He’s sizzling like a god or an unstoppable machine and the all-powerful chemistry that’s in his head reduces everything to this, the back seat of his motor, to this situation he’s created. When he’d driven into this enclosure it got worried, didn’t it, and started all that stuff trying to make him see it as a person. Telling him its name was what had got him started with the smacking and the punching, all of that. If you don’t know the name it could be anybody, couldn’t it, the one off Countdown, anyone at all. It could be Irene. Even on the wedding night when both of them were pissed she wouldn’t let him fuck her tits, she wouldn’t suck him, nothing like the stuff you get in mags or DVDs, nothing like that. Nothing like this. All his awareness centres on that tingling last inch of his mighty ramrod, squeezing up inside a frightened fanny, feeling so electric that it must be glowing like the sticks they have at festivals or like a red hot poker when the end bit looks translucent. He can smell the sex, the fear, the tangy and exhilarating soup of it, oh yeah, oh yeah. He’s crossed the line with this and can’t go back, he knows that, but this new thing, this is everything that he was always meant to be, not marching into banks with a crash helmet on and strongbox handcuffed to him, trying to look like Terminator for the girls behind the counter, that’s not him. This, this is him, the king of night, the king of fuck and it’s so easy, why don’t people do it all the time? White noise behind the eyeballs, there’s a sort of faulty strip-light flicker and he’s still got pop-up phantoms at the corners of his vision but he doesn’t care. He owns this creature’s life. He can do what he wants. It’s like a doll, it’s like a fly you’ve caught but better for the crying, better for how scared it is. He’s stiffer than a bolt, never as big as this before and pumping up and down like mad. He can’t remember the exact point when he’d made his mind up to put it out of its misery when he was done, or even if there was an exact point. It’s more of a continuum, to be fair; a sliding scale where he’s not come to a decision as such but he knows it’s going to happen, definitely. Just the thought of it excites him and he’s banging harder but his nerves are kicking off like popcorn and he’s trying to shake the feeling that there’s someone else there in the car with them. The window-glass is grey with scalding breath. Dissolve to satellite perspective.

  Underneath its shredded wedding dress of cloud the naked globe sweats electricity, stale beads of light most concentrated in the armpit cities, trickling thin in breastbone valleys. Limned with glitter the black map below persists in its unhurried process of evaporation, borders that were only ever topographical conveniences made irrelevant by new communications media, an ongoing negation of geography with threatened and belligerent nationalism churning in its backwash. Gym-fit viruses take longer run-ups to the species barrier. Unkempt taxonomies of novel and more finely graded madnesses are diagnosed, while in Berlin, Chancellor Merkel’s wrapping up the opening ceremony of the Hauptbahnhof as Europe’s biggest railway station when a stabbing rampage is commenced in the attendant crowd, more than two dozen persons wounded and six of those critically so. It’s discovered that one of the earliest knife-victims is HIV positive, to further complicate the tally of postponed fatalities. Newly accreted islands of volcanic matter rise unnoticed. Insert footage, black and white.

  An angry smudge of chalk and charcoal, Freddy Allen draws a line across the street plan with his passage. Streaming in a dishwater stop-motion queue of doppelgangers the indignant spectral tramp splashes unnoticed through brick barricades and bollards, through the gaseous blur of fleeting automobiles and the ground-floor flats of the disabled, a fog bullet, die-straight in its murderous trajectory. Evicted in his flickering wake the dislodged ghosts of fleas seek new accommodation, vampire jumping beans in search of other unhygienic apparitions, plentiful in these parts. Raging thunderous and splenetic as he stumbles, even in the muffle of the ghost-seam his unbroken howl of ghastly epithets and curses is the unrelenting rumble of a derailed freight train hurtling dirty through the sleeping district, dragging a funereal scarf of smoke and spitting hot sparks of pejorative. With panting locomotive rhythm Freddy damns the lot of them, rapists and rent-collectors, councillors and curb-crawlers alike, all vicious fishes circling the depleted bait-ball of the neighbourhood. The anthracite which keeps his fury stoked, he knows, is mined from bile directed at himself and the appalling thing that he once nearly did, the guilty weight that keeps him mired in this monochromatic wraith-sump and eternally unworthy of the colour-drenched emporia Upstairs. He fumes and fulminates in an expletive storm-front, rattling amongst the sulking residential slabs named after saints and over atrophying streets sealed off from traffic to deter the sex trade. As a ragged chain of paper dolls cut out from folded newsprint Freddy is reiterated in school classrooms, in conspicuously shriek-free moonlight corridors, exploding from prefabricated walls adorned with genial crayoned grotesques to surge down Scarletwell Street in an avalanche of countle
ss flailing limbs and spite-contorted faces.

  Cutting off the blunted bottom corner of Greyfriars House he’s like another line of grubby washing strung across the empty court within, flapping and damp, and in his billiard projectile rush he at last understands the full weight of the Master Builder’s loaded gaze, earlier on at the ethereal snooker parlour: it’s him, Freddy. He’s the trick shot, the archangel’s cannonade, skittering on the Boroughs’ dog-fouled baize, the full force of that mighty circumstantial cue propelling him, and all to save this skinny little girl? She must be so important to the play, a black or mistily-remembered pink at least, but why would he, would anyone suppose she wizn’t? That’s not right or fair, dismissing her because of what she does, because she’s not a doctor’s daughter. Everybody wiz a baby once and innocent of all their future. Trembling ectoplasm born of wrath and tenderness wells up in soot-creased sockets as the long-cremated indigent swirls into Lower Bath Street, rippling like eyestrain through pitch dark a foot above the sagging tarmac and, as ever, with no visible means of support. Stretched silver beads pass through him like neutrinos as it starts to rain. Resume full colour and cue montage.

  From this vantage, features of the natural landscape have been superseded by abstraction, where the spooling ribbon rivers are replaced by fiery canals of routed information, sluicing from one lock-gate server to another and oblivious to mountain, ignorant of sea. Data that previously drizzled escalates to an extreme weather event. The fathomed knowledge rises past its hastily-drawn plimsoll line and populations find themselves out of their depth, clutching for straws of dogma or diverting novelty as they commence their surface struggle at the rim of an e-maelstrom. Seen in overview Warsaw’s Pilsudski Square is an old-fashioned colour blindness test card, swimming with pale tinted dots despite the pounding rain. Fledgling Pope Benedict the sixteenth makes his first major appearance in the homeland of his predecessor, tannoy mutter sputtering against the downpour as he references Pope John Paul’s prayer of some twenty-seven years theretofore, asking that the Holy Ghost descend and change the face of Poland, this plea widely held to be more instrumental in dismantling the Soviet Union than the acted permutations of the world’s implacable equation. Species disappear and new discoveries are introduced with the breakneck turnover of soap-opera characters. Newfoundland crows develop secondary tool use, implements for modifying implements, and on Kilimanjaro’s slopes uncounted lightning bolts sow precious tanzanite, fulgurant echoes in a cobalt glass. Conflicts move on from place to place like homicidal drifters, changing names and altering appearances while yet retaining signature brutalities. Theories proliferate. Repeat interior, night.

  Rotated slowly on a spit of wakefulness and perspiration-glazed, Mick Warren is a hominid kebab that slumber has regurgitated in the dreamless gutter-troughs of an unending Friday evening. Game-plagued as he flips his pillow in a vain search for its fabled cool side he has now progressed to a consideration of the playing card. Before the board games with the satisfying creak of their unfolding or the mystique of their top-hat tokens, cards had been the staple recreation of his childhood in St. Andrew’s Road. At some mysterious adult signal, passed between his gran, his parents and such aunts or uncles as were present, it would be decided that a round of cards was called for. The white tea-time tablecloth would be replaced by the far cosier deep rose one which was Mick and Alma’s favourite, and then from the sideboard drawer that was its ritual resting place the battered and revered familial deck was next produced. He realigns his problematic knees and tries to conjure up a tactile memory of the talismanic pack, the waxy box worn by the handling of at least four generations and declining like the then-traditional extended family unit inexorably towards disintegration, folds becoming perforations. Like the converse of the weathered pasteboard tiles inside, this fragile packaging had been predominantly purple on a ground of twilight lilac, where a silhouetted schoolgirl in a long Victorian pinafore-dress bowled her wooden hoop among midsummer poppies through the gathering violet dusk. Beneath the child’s capering shoes this image was inverted so that for some years Mick had been under the impression that it was the ingénue’s reflection in a puddle at her feet, before he’d noticed that the lower girl was running in the opposite direction. Even as a maroon outline she’d looked pretty, and with hindsight Mick supposes that she might have been his first crush. He’d been faintly anxious for her safety, he recalls. What was she doing out so late to make her race home under darkening skies, across the overgrowing summer meadow? He knows that if she’d got into any trouble, if there’d been somebody waiting in the tall mauve grass for her or for her bouncing, trembling circlet he’d have wanted at the age of five to rescue her, this being then the limit of his amorous imagination. Ninja-quiet in his determination not to puncture Cathy’s well-earned rest he shifts once more onto his back, face up and freshly dealt. New angle.

  Supine, the chalk-outlined posture of a Cluedo victim, he remembers Alma telling him about Viv Stanshall from the Bonzo Dog Band, stretched out flat on stage before an audience and talking to the rafters: “Hello, God. Here’s what I look like standing up.” It strikes Mick that imagining ourselves as seen from some superior elevation, some projected and omniscient point of view, is probably as old as literature, old as civilization; Harryhausen’s Greek gods at their fatalistic chessboard peering down through tattered cirrus. Perhaps modern scepticism and the consequent dieback of deities is what has made surveillance cameras necessary, to preserve a sense that our performances have the attention of invisible spectators now that God’s gone, to sustain the notion that our arbitrary acts are validated by unseen authorities sat at their screens or at unearthly gaming-tables, looking down upon the play. Mick rests a blond-fuzzed forearm on his brow and shimmering amongst the shoal of slippery night-spawning ruminations in his catch there is a fugitive impression of how everything is flattened when perceived from overhead, from the perspective of the player. Fleetingly he wonders if these hypothetical celestial gamblers would see everyone as being two-dimensional, as hieroglyphs with no more depth or substance than the inversely reflected royalty compressed onto the court-cards, but the thought melts to the slap of trumps on a red tablecloth. The things they’d played down Andrew’s Road were exercises in precisely regulated tedium – Whist, Sevens, Draw-the-Well-Dry – though he’d found them all sufficiently engaging at the time. Just as each wireless, motorcar or socket seemed to have a face, so too had every card possessed its own distinct charisma, from the almost military formation of the fives to the precariously stacked crates of the nines. The aces, in their abstract grandeur, had been the four archangels or maybe the quartet of fundamental forces constituting spacetime, spades bewilderingly singled out by an impressive Gothic filigree. This attribution of a personality to each design reminds him of the tarot images his sister maintains both precede and serve as basis for the ordinary deck, the stack of archetypal bubblegum collectables that Alma drags to Mick’s house every year at Christmas dinnertime so that she can read Cathy’s fortune or at least pretend to; Hanged Man, Chariot and all the rest of the unsettling crew, as if that’s any sort of proper seasonal tradition. To hear his crow-scaring elder sibling tell it, Draw-the-Well-Dry is derived from divination while all board-based pastimes are descended from those tricky magic squares where all the rows and columns add to the same number, as though every innocent and commonplace pursuit were only a degenerated form of sorcery. She has a wilfully Carpathian worldview, Alma, although now he thinks about it games might well have had some metaphysical or more important human function back at their inception, judging from the terminology found everywhere in language. Hunting some animal down and killing it, that makes it game. Being prepared to carry out some act is to be game. Something that offers easy opportunities for exploitation is regarded as fair game and then of course there’s prostitution, going on the game. Game face, game on, game over, plays of light and sports of nature, Einstein making out God does not dice with matter. Mick’s not sure about the las
t of these, suspecting that not only do the powers that run the universe do a fair bit of shaking, rattling and throwing, but that generally they do this so the die end up behind the settee and you have to take their word about the double six. With a dismissive grunt directed at the certainties of physics and religion he elects to take another punt on slumber and begins to gradually roll the bones onto his left side, facing Cathy’s curled back. Come on, come on, just this once be lucky. Insert jump-cut sequence.

  Spread below, an oriental carpet realised in fibre optics, there are causal curlicues; there are affray motifs. In Scotland a humanitarian award commemorating Robert Burns is given to a youthful relief worker in Baghdad, albeit posthumously. In Peru a clash of adversarial supporters at the run-up to elections ends with injury and gunfire, and in Hereford West Mercia Police appeal for witnesses after a man is violently assaulted by a group of teenagers. With Mandelbrot self-similarity, structures repeat at different scales throughout the system and there remains ambiguity regarding whether harm is percolated up or else decanted down. Wrath boils and steams, where soon thereafter cold and ruthless condensation is precipitated as a trickled legislation. The resultant culture, internal combustion driven, is a clown car only jolted forward by a series of explosions, without any linear progression and no entertainment value save in the anticipation of the vehicle’s inevitable knockabout collapse. A pin-mould creep of neon media adorns the planet’s carcass ideologies, metabolising incoherent chaos into palatable narrative, an edited awareness of experiential deluge. In near-extinct newsrooms still perfumed by cigarette smoke, telephone calls of the newsworthy are intercepted, victim’s family or adulterous celebrity alike, while in the Congo brutal territorial disputes are waged over the mining of the necessary tantalum required by every trilling mobile and, like Tantalus, the world discovers its anticipated banquet future disappeared. Predators more accustomed to the higher reaches of the food chain are compelled to shin down several blood-oiled links in search of alley-scraps. Zoom in through icy flight-paths and cop-copter altitudes on Lower Bath Street.