A Story in Several Parts; Part Three (by Matthew de Kersaint Giradeau)

This is the third part of A Story in Several Parts, by Matthew de Kersaint Giradeau, the first and second parts can be further down the page. (The painting is by George Shaw and is taken from here;http://www.ikon-gallery.co.uk/online_shop/ikon_catalogues/artists_monographs/item/what_i_did_this_summer/image/806/ )

Alex is in town with his friends when he sees a woman with no legs in a wheelchair. He knows that he is meant to look in her eyes and not at the stumps where her legs end. He looks away and then stares at her face, trying not to see her eyes. She does not notice him looking.

Alex is walking home from school on a wet, rainy October day when he sees his mum walking quickly towards him from their house. She meets him and takes his arm and walks him quickly home. She says that they must get home before the big storm comes. Alex likes the rain. He likes how when it is a Saturday and normally his friends come round and ask him to come and play, but when it is raining they don't come round. He can watch television or read, or just lay on the floor with his face pressed against the window watching the rain make holes in the mud of the front garden. He can sit by the heaters in his house, which aren't radiators, but a ventilation system that judders warm air around the house. His room doesn't have a heater, but the landing does, so when it rains he lays by the heater on the landing, trying to look inside. Then his eyes get hot and he has to close them.

But on a school day, the rain is different. It is cold and your trousers get wet on the bottom. Then your coat gets wet outside and it is hard to take it off without getting your arms wet and then you have to sit in the classroom in the afternoon and you have wet arms. So when Alex's mum comes and meets him on his way home from school, Alex is wet and annoyed by the rain, and the news that there is going to be a storm doesn't excite him. He just feels annoyed that his mum is hurrying him and holding his arm.

Alex's parents are worried about the storm. It will be the worst for years and if the river near them breaks its banks then they might flood. The storm doesn't seem that bad to Alex, and when he goes to bed, he is enjoying the sound of the rain, as though it was a Saturday. He sleeps peacefully.

When he wakes up it isn't raining any more. The house isn't flooded and his mum and Dad are leaving for work and don't mention anything about the storm. When he leaves the house he walks the back way to school, which means going through the woods. He sees the big tree, which is a big tree in the woods that he and his friends often climb or make dens near. It is laying on its side and its branches are sticking out at angles; some cruel violence. Alex is annoyed, it was his favourite tree. He looks around the woods and notices that other trees have been forced to the ground by the storm.

When Alex and his friends are older, no more kids play in the woods. Years later they tear all the trees down and begin to build houses but after six months the building work comes to a halt. Recession tears through the industry and Alex's school friend who is now a carpenter tells Alex in a London pub that he was meant to be working on that site, but he now scrapes a living doing private jobs, which are less secure and don't pay as well. But he doesn't pay tax, so it is not so bad. When the building trade collapses, archaeology comes to a halt, because most archaeological digs happen before a new build can happen.

He takes a detour to the last den they built (they only build dens in the summer, when the time is long and violent, and Alex wakes early and bored, and the rest of them wake late and slow, and the grass and nettles in the woods are wet, and they lay ferns down to sit on, and choose sticks as weapons and sit and peel the bark in silence) and finds it overgrown with brambles and two trees, fallen one on top of the other, lay across what was the entrance. Alex is angry. He picks up a stick and hits the brambles, and then the fallen trees. He makes little impression in either. The ground is muddy and pathetic. He stamps in it, and his shoes are splattered and his trousers are splattered too. He throws the stick like punching a friend in a dream and it bounces without sound off another tree and on to the ground without satisfaction. He stands for a minute in a trance, excited by the time slipping past him. He is not late for school yet, but he will be. The future is present and he may as well not even exist, but he does, so he takes down his trousers, all the way, the way he did when he first used a urinal, and he pisses, and he spins round while he pisses and tries to piss on the stick that he has thrown and piss goes on his shoes which has the odd effect of making them cleaner and then he pisses in the mud till it forms a little puddle and then it spreads and mixes with the rest of the wet ground. He finishes and stares again. He hears a dog bark in the distance which brings him to his senses. He pulls up his trousers and walks out of the woods and on to school.

A Story in Several Parts; Part Two (by Matthew de Kersaint Giradeau)

This is the second part of A Story in Several Parts, by Matthew de Kersaint Giradeau, the first part can be read here; http://thefoolscapjournal.posterous.com/a-story-in-several-parts-part-one-by-matthew . (The painting is by George Shaw and is taken from here; http://www.ikon-gallery.co.uk/online_shop/ikon_catalogues/artists_monographs/item/what_i_did_this_summer/image/806/ )

 

 

Alex has a friend called Gemma. She is a tomboy. Gemma goes to a different school to Alex and Shamim and she has two brothers who beat her up. A boy at her school dislikes Shamim and comes to her house with his friends in half term to ask where he lives. She tells the boy, because she fancies him, even though later in her life she will not find men attractive. When the boy and his friends knock on Shamim's door it is only early in the morning. You would not knock on someone's door as early as the boy and his friends knock on Shamim's door if you were an adult. When Shamim opens the door, the boy does not say anything, but simply punches Shamim in the face as hard as he can. The punch knocks Shamim out and he is unconscious for about thirty seconds. He wakes up and the door is open and the boy and his friends have gone. Shamim tells this story proudly.

 

Alex and his friends are at Gemma's house. They are so nasty to John that John leaves goes to sit in a tree on the field opposite the house. There are red ants in the tree. At first everyone is being nice, especially Gemma, but even the boys are trying to say sorry. John likes the attention and the boys slowly turn on him. They laugh at John scratching his legs, and at how he does his laces up on his shoes really tight. Alex thinks that John is secretly attracted to Gemma. When John is older his mum kills herself. John and his brother move into the flat in which she lived after her divorce from their Dad. All through her life she has terrible tinnitus and depression.

 

Until John is older, his mum lives at home with him, his brother, and his Dad. Alex walks past the house when he comes home from school. John's mum sits in the front room, looking out of the window. Alex thinks that if he doesn't look at the house then he won't have to smile and wave. She looks like a ghost. Her face is strained, and the television is on but probably doesn't stop the ringing in her ears. They don't have any net curtains. Alex's house has net curtains, but Alex's house is closer to pavement than John's house. John's Dad has an old Porsche with a personalised number plate. One day, when John and Alex are at secondary school together, John's Dad gives them a lift. John's Dad gets angry at Alex about having Tesco value orange juice, saying that it is just as good as normal Tesco orange juice and that it means that the family can drink as much orange juice as they like and they like drink a lot of orange juice.

 

Once John and his brother move into their mum's old flat, John completely abstains from sex. He is a fairly asexual adolescent and as he gets older he is unable to find anything attractive about women or men.

 

Before all of this, when he is young, he is attracted to Gemma, because she is the only girl he knows. Alex doesn't find her attractive, though he doesn't know why. He has known her longer than the other boys, and notices how they try and impress her. Sometimes Gemma's older brother comes in when they are playing computer games and is nasty to Gemma. Then he is nasty to everyone; accusing them of being gay, or fancying his sister, or both. Gemma's older brother is the reason that Alex and his friends are so nasty to each other.

 

Alex is on the bus to his Grandad's house. His Nana is dead and sometimes Alex talks to his Nana when he goes to the toilet in the house. The house hasn't been decorated since the 1960's and has brown, floral wallpaper on one side of the living room, and stone-wall cladding wall paper on the other. There is a three bar electric heater in the front room, and no heating in the rest of the house. When Alex is older and has finished university, his Grandad dies, and his family sell the house. Alex and his sister are both given one of their Grandad's rings, but lose them.

 

When they were both younger, Alex's mum would wait with Alex and his sister at the bus stop until the bus came. Now Alex's sister is a teenager, she takes Alex to the bus stop, and watches him get on the bus. When the bus gets to where it is going, Alex's Grandad is waiting and waving.

 

When Alex talks to his Nana in the toilet, he knows she isn't really there. She is dead and rotting and looks like the dead fox that Alex and his friends found in the woods. When she was dying, Alex saw her in hospital, and this is how he remembers her. She has big black eyes, like she has been punched, and she looks like she is wearing a wig. She drinks a chocolate drink and Alex asks for some but his Nana says that it isn't very nice. He knows now that she had cancer, but when she died he did not really understand what was happening. Hospitals are in between places. Everyone is waiting to leave.

 

Alex tells the rest of his friends that 'The Shawshank Redemption' was written by Stephen King. They laugh at him and tell him that it wasn't and that he is stupid for thinking that it was. Alex knows that he is right, but the more he says it, the more they laugh at him. They are playing football. The football pitch is next to the woods and sometimes older boys watch them and shout and it makes Alex nervous. The older boys want to play on the pitch because it has proper goals and white paint markings. There is only one set of goals and Alex would rather they just used a jumper and a tree for goalposts like they used to. He doesn't want to get beaten up by the older boys, or have them shouting. Alex knows that he is right about 'The Shawshank Redemption' but it doesn't matter to his friends. They don't believe him. He wishes he had never said it, but he can't take it back. Once you have said something you cannot take it back. No matter if it is true. No matter whether you wish you had never said it.

 

A boy appears from the path through the woods. He is on a bike and he is called Lloyd. Alex used to live in the house next door to Lloyd, but doesn't remember this until he is older. Lloyd is a weirdo. He plays alone and doesn't go to school and rides weird bikes and scares people. He is being chased by Gemma's brothers and Gemma's brother's friends who are shouting and running. Lloyd doesn't look scared or angry. He just rides over the football field and for a moment everything is quiet. Alex and his friends move out of Lloyd's way, and he moves past them, without looking at them. He is graceful and stunted. Alex is scared of him but grateful that he has quietened the laughter. Lloyd moves away from them and does not look back. Gemma's brother and his friends slow down to a walking pace and carry on shouting at Lloyd. They say that Lloyd is going to fucking get it and he better fucking watch out because they will fucking kill him when they see him. Chris tells Gemma's brother that Alex thinks that 'The Shawshank Redemption' was written by Stephen King. Gemma's brother starts to laugh.

A Story in Several Parts; Part One (by Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau)

This is the first part of A Story in Several Parts, by Matthew de Kersaint Giradeau, the following parts will be posted in subsequent weeks an appear above. (The painting is by George Shaw and is taken from here; http://www.ikon-gallery.co.uk/online_shop/ikon_catalogues/artists_monographs/item/what_i_did_this_summer/image/806/ )

Alex is short, but his friends are older than him, so compared to them, he looks even shorter. He gets migraines, but later on in life they stop. Alex is a strange child, but only in the way that all children are strange. He spends a lot of time alone.

Some days he forgets how old he is, but if he thinks about it he remembers. His parents love him and are nice to him. Sometimes he forgets what they look like and he gets scared.

Alex is bright and gets bored at school. He has more friends outside of school than he does in it. He gets on with people at school, but is sometimes laughed at. Mainly for being slightly weak, and too clever.

After school Alex sometimes plays in the woods. Sometimes with his friends, sometimes alone. With his friends, he builds dens, and plays man hunt. He gets scared by man hunt, there is something about it which scares him. It is the competitiveness inherent in such a game, though he does not know that. All he knows is that he can't be caught first, but he doesn't want to be caught last. He sometimes plays man hunt with his friends on the estate where he lives. Sometimes he plays football with them on the field next to his house, though he probably wouldn't play football if he had a choice. He gets bored watching television and playing computer games. He doesn't like repetition, but he doesn't know why.

Alex goes to the petrol station at the end of the main road into the estate. He borrows money from John - who always has money - and buys sweets. He eats them quickly and then regrets buying them. He hates how John always eats his sweets slowly, and saves Polos in his pocket. John is a vegetarian and is annoying. He only started eating Polos when they stopped having gelatin in them. You can't taste gelatin, and John doesn't particularly like animals. Alex knows why this annoys him. They all laugh at John for using Tommy Girl perfume and going to the willy clinic. Neither of these things are really true. John actually has Tommy Hilfiger perfume, but he is smug about having designer perfume, and everyone knows it. He did have to go to the willy clinic, but Alex and the rest of them only know that because John's younger brother told them. Also, he only had to go to the willy clinic once.

The wood behind Alex's house is not really a wood. They call it 'the woods' because they have no other word for it, but it isn't really a wood. It is the land left over from the woods that were cleared in the sixties to make way for the housing estate that now lies on it. Older kids go there to smoke weed and drink alcohol. Alex and his friends occasionally find blood stained knickers in the thick brambles that grow in the woods. Shamim and Alex once find some pornography and Shamim reads the story out loud while they walk along the cycle path. Shamim takes the pornography home.

It is summer and one of those days that only children have, awake so quickly and early. The sky is already blue and it is quietly hot by nine in the morning. Alex walks to Shamim's house. They are going to see a film. It is a terrible film, but both Alex and Shamim will think that it isn't. There is no wind and wearing shorts makes no difference to how hot Alex's legs feel. When Alex gets there, Shamim is crouching down outside his front door. Shamim is burning ants with a can of deodorant and a lighter. Alex burns some ants too. When Shamim goes upstairs to get ready, Alex is left with the ants and the burning. When the ants burn, they don't just burn, they melt. They melt on to the concrete, and on to the metal door, but they melt the best when they melt on to the leaves of the plant. When they melt on to the leaves, their legs melt first and then their bodies and finally they stop moving and their heads pop and melt. Alex thinks it is disgusting, and feels a bit guilty, but they are only ants. It is hard to justify feeling guilty when you kill an ant.

Shamim comes downstairs and tells Alex that he has had an idea. Alex and Shamim pick up some ants on their fingers and then put them into ice cube trays. They wait till the ants drown in the water and then, once they have enough ants and water to fill a tray, they put them in the freezer. They leave Shamim's house and walk up to town in the dry morning heat.

After they see the film they walk around town and talk about it. They re-enact some bits of it; funny lines, the best stunts. They also laugh at some bits which were bad. They walk back to Shamim's. They eat Solero ice creams in his back garden and talk about girls that Shamim knows. They almost forget about the ants, but just before Alex leaves, he remembers the ice trays and goes to the freezer to get them out.

The water is frozen, with the ants caught inside the ice cubes. Alex turns the trays upside down on the garden table and pushes one of the ice cubes. He watches it slowly melt. Shamim has turned on the television but comes outside as the ice cube turns into a pool of water. When the ice has melted, the ant starts to twitch. It moves more and more until it is able to walk, and then begins to walk around. If it is possible for an ant to look dazed, then it looks dazed. Shamim and Alex are amazed, they shout and laugh. Shamim says that they are Gods and that they have just brought something back to life. They try it again with another ice cube and the same thing happens. They are elated. They forget why they put the ants in the freezer in the first place. Whatever their original plans were, they forget them now that they are Gods.

They tell their friends that they can bring ants back to life. Their friends scoff in the distrustful way that children scoff at each other. They never repeat the experiment; it remains a singular action. There is a reason for the ants coming back to life, but Shamim and Alex don't want to know or need to know. In reality, Alex knows that it must be some odd truth of nature. When he is older, he hears about people freezing bees, and then tying string to them while they are frozen. Freezing doesn't kill the the bees, it just knocks them out. When they wake up, they try and fly away, but they just fly in circles. Alex never tries this trick, but when he hears about it, he remembers the ants and how they woke up. Little lives outside of his understanding. A whole world that he will never comprehend.

When the ants come back to life, neither Alex nor Shamim watch the ants for any more time than it takes them to regain consciousness and start walking. If they followed the ants, then they would watch them find their way back to their colony. Or maybe they would watch them stumble around the table and die again. Alex and Shamim never find this out because they never watch the ants for any more time than it takes them to regain consciousness and start walking.

The Dog (by Michael Lawton)

The evening had started like so many other Friday evenings that summer, with us in a pub drinking to forget the week’s work. We finished half and hour early and started; which is earlier still if you think that this meant we finished at two-thirty. We were onto our third pub and were still only 900 yards from the student halls that we had spent our summer cleaning. For all three of us it was a temporary job, work to line our pockets before we re-entered into a notion of where or what our lives were going to be, money to keep us going and to keep drinks in front of us.

It was now six-thirty and I’d guess you’d really say that our evening had started in the afternoon when we’d had our first pint. It was certainly colouring our experiences now as the normal, usually jovial, dissection of our colleagues’ flaws had drunkenly turned nasty and was making me feel a little uncomfortable.

On any other Friday we would’ve gone our separate ways by this stage but the normal plans to meet other friends or girlfriends had disappeared and this big slab of Friday night-time had opened up in front us, we had decided we were going to fill it by getting shitfaced together. It was a decision I was now regretting. Normally I drink with them for a couple of hours before cart-wheeling into town to meet my other friends, my ‘real’ friends; men I was at school with. People I’ve been friends with long enough to be able to know enough of the scars, mental or physical, to make drinking with them easy. With Jack and Marvin there is that male one-upmanship over knowledge and ownership, be it of women or music or experience or anything, every point has to be seen and raised within its context. You do it so rabidly you don’t notice the tedium.

Jack and Marvin were younger than me and in my mind it showed. They had that outspoken confident sheen that extra years tend to dull on most of us. This was particularly true of Marvin, and he was the one sticking the knife into the ladies who cleaned with us.

‘She’s a right fat bitch her. Telling me to do things when all she does is stand there sucking on a tab.’

After every point like this he’d stare at Jack or me as a way of underlining his opinion. I’d stare back, daring him to shut up but he wouldn’t.

‘Shall we move on?’

Jack said. A better way to cut this conversation short; to hopefully leave it with the pub we were leaving. It worked to some degree as in the next place there was a pool table that was keeping us occupied until a big group of lads tipped up and we got involved in a fifteen man group of killer with them. I overheard Marvin relaying his grievances to a couple of these fellas but I was just glad to be out of it, engaged in a mindless chat about football with another member of their group.

The whole lot of them were a sports team, out celebrating the birthday of one of their number. The man in question was already half-gone. Every shot he took splurged away from the pocket as he complained of double vision and that ‘these bastards’ had forced shots of tequila down him in every previous stop on their crawl. He had one of those faces that you knew would look soggy, baffled and desperate before slipping into unconsciousness in the corner of the nightclub while his mates grappled after girls.

 The night slipped away from us and after following this group on two more of their three stops we found ourselves huddled around short drinks, swimming in a sea of our own overindulgence. I glimpsed the shore and went for it.

‘Right lads I’m off.’

 I said declamatorily downing my glass and wincing as the whisky burned my throat.

‘I’ll come with you.’

Jack followed suit. Then:

‘Hold on.’

 Marvin matched us and we stumbled onto the pavement. Three boorish musketeers and I certainly wasn’t for anyone but myself at that stage.

‘Hold on- I think she lives round here.’

‘What? Who are you talking about Marvin?’

‘That fat bitch. She told me she lives on the same road as this boozer.’

It was a short road and sure enough in under a minute we’d spotted her car with its crass bumper stickers.

‘Let’s see what she’s up to.’

And with that Marvin dived into the driveway, disappearing into the blackness beside her car.

Jack and I looked at one another. I wanted nothing to do with Marvin or being in someone else’s back-garden but some sort of morality meant I had to drag him out of there. The two of us headed in after him.

We found him hovering at the end of the tarmac drive where it met the back lawn.

‘Alright ladies, you took a while. I don’t know why you’re worried. She told me she was going out tonight;

‘Then what are we doing here?’

‘This.’

He said with a smirk and we watched dumbstruck as he lifted up a plant pot, pulling a backdoor key from underneath it. He slipped the door open and a friendly looking Labrador trotted toward us.

‘Hello fella.’

Marvin said rubbing the dog on the muzzle. He lead it into the back garden where it plodded around, sniffing the grass while Marvin locked the backdoor. Jack and I looked at one another again. I saw in the bewilderment on Jack’s face the sickness I felt in my stomach.

‘Here boy.’Marvin went over to the dog. A security light flicked on, but Marvin ignored it. He and the dog cast thick shadows on their lurid green stage. He went over to the dog. Stroking it, petting it, moving around it until he was stood astride it, his legs either side of it. He ruffled its ears and then in one fluid movement he’d stamped on the dogs left hind leg; pinning it down and he’d clamped his left hand around the snout of the dog pulling its head back while his right hand whipped a knife out of his pocket and ripped its belly from crotch to neck. The dog squirmed, whimpered, frothed. Its innards slipped out like a thrashing newborn foal. Its innards slipped out. Pink snakes, wet, warm and watery, looking exactly as I’d expected them to look and completely different at the same time.

I heard Jack vomiting beside me, the splash of the vomit on tarmac contrasting with the silent  wet thud of the dog’s insides rolling onto the grass. I looked at Marvin. The blade sticky in his hand as the dog cried between his legs.

‘That’ll teach the fucking bitch.’

I looked at Marvin, I looked at the empty sack of the animal at his feet, lying on top of, outside of, its insides. I looked at Jack coughing his own insides onto his laces.

I allowed myself to breath for what felt like the first time in hours. Then I ran. As I carried myself down the drive I heard the sirens, cutting through and doubling the tension. Without knowing what else to do I threw myself into the hedgerow at the top of the street and waited. I couldn’t believe what was happening, wondering what to do next, I couldn’t believe what the fuck was happening.