'A Real-Life Ghost' - Draft extract

A Real-Life Ghost

Jackie lay flat in bed, sniffing the air urgently. She had just finished watching a horror film: a young woman called Joan is robbed of each of her five senses, one at a time, by shape-shifting poltergeist with white gnashing teeth. In order to claim Joan's sense of smell for its own, the creature transforms into a tiny red ghost beetle (with white gnashing teeth) and burrows deep into her nostrils without her immediate knowledge. This modus operandi proves so effective that it is recycled later on in the film, when the demon-beetle burrows deep into the Joan's eyeballs (to her full knowledge), and absorbs her facility for sight.
            Jackie was concerned. Szymon, her landlord, had knocked sheepishly on her door earlier that day to issue fair warning about the jellied fish he was planning on cooking for his parents. All day the pungent odour had stuck in the back of her nose and throat. Now she smelt nothing. She pinched her nose hard, just to be sure, and then burst into tears.
           It had been thirteen years since Jackie had watched a scary film. The last time - and every time before that - had been with Lisa, in her boxy teenage bedroom back in Glasgow. They used to lie on their stomachs on Lisa’s bed, bitching languidly about their other friends and various family members, until Lisa deemed the summer air outside her window to be dark and dense enough for the main event.

‘Do we have to ?’ asked Jackie one week, knowing full well the futility of her appeal. Lisa, a force to be reckoned with since birth, had become fixated on the gory, sexy 90s horror films she saw advertised on her cable TV – Scream, The Craft, Se7en, Sleepy Hollow, Scream 2 – and the focus of her adolescent world for the past several months had been to get her underage hands on all of them, by any means necessary.

‘Of course we have to,’ came Lisa’s mumbled tones from under the bed. She was hunting around for her latest acquisition, bare legs and feet waggling around above deck near Jackie’s face. ‘Hit the jackpot this week. Managed to smuggle it out of Oxfam with a dress I bought.’

‘That’s terrible!’ screeched Jackie too loudly, attempting to delay the inevitable. ‘It’s Oxfam!’

‘I put £2 on the video shelf,’ muttered Lisa, emerging red-faced, blinking and victorious from her scrabbling. ‘Look!’

Lisa looked. A shiver prickled on her neck before running, appropriately, down her spine. The video case showed a ghostly white bathtub with a woman’s disembodied hand clutching at the rim. Jackie didn’t like the look of that bathtub, or the hand. They meant trouble. They meant sleepless nights for the next three weeks, or until Lisa’s next score brought fresh nightmares.

‘I don’t like it,’ said Jackie. She turned the case over in her hand. A good-looking middle-aged couple peered fretfully out at her above the blurb.

‘You will like it. It’s Harrison Ford. Look at him.’

‘I am looking at him. I don’t like him.’

‘He’s FIT.'

‘He looks like your dad.’

Lisa laughed very suddenly and very loudly. It made Jackie jump.

‘My mum fucking wishes he looked like my dad.’

‘Who’s the woman?’

‘Who’s the woman!? It’s Michelle Pfeiffer. My mum wishes she looked like her. Now move up. We’re watching it. If you don’t like it, just pretend you’re a reeeally scary ghost yourself. A real bad-ass. That’ll be me soon. A real-life ghost.’

Jackie didn’t like it when Lisa made light of her illness like this; it was morbid and irreverent, and it made Jackie’s chest ache with pain, but she knew what was expected of her.

‘Do you think you’ll be a good ghost or a bad one?’

‘Bad one. Oh yeah, fucking definitely! I’ll get into bed with Harrison Ford when he doesn’t know it.’

‘Gross.’

Jackie giggled, then went quiet. She knew her friend was right. Even in death, she’d be braver than Jackie was.


                                                                                                              TBC...

                                                                                                          

29 July 2017

I know nothing stays the same

but if you’re willing to play the game

it will be coming around again

Carly Simon - ‘Coming Around Again’

          Something is rotten in the bin in the kitchen. I smelt it yesterday, when I pressed my slipper down onto the pedal too hard and the lid swung back further than I used to let it. I can smell it now, even though I’m in my bedroom, on the other side of the flat, and all the doors are closed. I press my nose into my pillow. The sweet, putrid odour mingles with another; one I have, until now, been only half conscious of in the gathering weeks. It is intimate and bodily. It has been lurking in my bedclothes, subtle yet malevolent, since R’s departure.

I know exactly what it is. The thing that’s rotting in the bin, I mean. It’s the tuna tin that I cut my finger on last week. I’d dared myself to do the dishes, just to see what would happen. When I did the dishes with R, we always put the radio on. He was baffled when I knew all the words to the old songs.

‘You know all the songs. How do you know all the songs?’

 He said it every week, the same words, in exactly the same way. It always made me laugh, how impressed he was. I felt proud, as though I’d written the songs myself. Without R, without the radio, the tuna lid sliced right through the skin, and into my nail, too. I looked down in surprise. It seemed strange that pain could be so physical; so sudden and sharp. I was surprised, too, at the brightness of my blood. I watched as it swilled in with the remains of the tuna. I watched for five minutes, maybe twenty. Maybe forty! Until a noise like a gunshot made me jump in the air. A forgotten carton of orange juice, swollen with gas, fizzed quietly at the end of the kitchen table. It smelt like Bucks Fizz. I dropped the bloody tin into the bin, without pressing the lid down, like you’re supposed to. It was still full of tuna, and me.

       Project for today: take the rubbish out. Not because of the smell. Just as an experiment. Do things as I might have once done them, even though it’s all absurd now, living properly. I smile to myself, nursing the thought of my little excursion, and only admitting defeat when it crosses my mind that if my tears become any thicker, I could choke to death.

* * * * *

             ‘Ow, you fohcking COHNT!’

R and I used to laugh a lot when the men came to collect the bins. We both had Thursdays off. One of the men is Geordie, and always swore because Mrs. Munro fills her bags too full, and they would always split. Mrs. Munro is in her seventies, and unwell. Nothing about the situation was very funny, but R did a good Geordie, and we were smug about being able to sleep in. Sleep together. ‘Nice cohnt,’ said R afterwards.

            One week, R got up early, went down into the garden with a binbag, and divided up Mrs. Munro’s rubbish for the bin-men. It was discovered that the Geordie’s name was Mark. He was from Gateshead. His twin brother had been a mountaineer. When Mrs. Munro got wind of the bin-bag conspiracy, she came down to our door, prodded R with a bony finger and told him not to be such a ‘fucking sap.’

It must be Thursday today. It is ridiculous to me that Mark is down there now, doing his swearing. I think of John Hannah in ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’. ee cummings. Or was it Auden? Stop the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the Geordie bin-man from swearing when I’m here on my own. He was my North, my South, my East, my West. He was the only one who could make me come with his tongue. He was twenty-nine. I’m only twenty-two. He was going to show me how to be an adult. I’m not old enough to be in so much pain.

Outside in the garden, Mark’s cries of anguish have not dissipated into the morning air, as they usually do. They are growing louder, and more urgent.

‘JESUS FOCHKING COHNT. SHE’S SLICED ME FOHCKING HAND OFF.’

My heart gives a strange little flutter as I remember. Yesterday, maybe the day before, Mrs. Munro knocked on my door. She didn’t say a word when I finally let her in, just waddled into the kitchen and began to wrestle with the rotting rubbish. I hunched against the wall and watched as the potion of tuna, fermented orange juice and blood dribbled onto her dress. The smell, now that the bag was released from its metal container, was truly horrendous. I felt no embarrassment; I didn’t apologise, or move forwards to help her, or take the burden off her frail hands. Eventually, she was forced to wrap both of her arms around the heavy plastic sack. When she got to the door, she looked back at me.

‘Get the radio on again,’ she said.

‘THAT FOHCKING SILLY OLD BINT’S NOT DONE HER TIN UP; IT’S SEVERED MY FOHCKING HAND,’ bellows Mark presently.

I creep to the bedroom window and fix my eye to the crack in my shutters. Mark’s hand shines with bold, bright blood.  

 ‘Fuck mate. That is vivid,’ says the other bin-man.

Mark looks up at him, clearly furious at the lack of gravity his colleague has attributed to his condition. Then, his face splits open into a grin; he throws his head back and laughs. It’s the loudest laugh I’ve ever heard.

‘Vivid! Yeah, it is that, mate! Vivid! It is that, mate, aye.’

* * * * *

The air in the garden is heavy with July. Vegetation and rain. It thunders down and soaks me.  My bare feet slither over my flip-flops and touch the gravel on the path up to the dustbins. When I left the flat, the easy-listening DJ with her smooth Galaxy chocolate voice had just put on an old Carly Simon song. I set myself a challenge: sing the song under your breath while you take the bin bags out, and if you’re in sync with Carly when you get back into the flat, tomorrow will be a good day. I hurl the bag into the bin, and run back onto the grass to avoid the putrid puff of air when the lid falls. I don’t want to go back into the flat yet, so I lie down on the soaked grass and close my eyes. There are sounds on the air. They float to me from my open kitchen window, two floors up. It’s Carly, and she’s singing along in time with me.

Review: Baker and Bergoch's 'Tangerine'

☾⋆

Shot entirely on iPhone 5s devices, Sean S. Baker and Chris Bergoch’s Tangerine (2015) presents a Los Angeles that pops and shimmers on the screen, all sprinkled donuts and neon retail signs. It’s present-day Christmas Eve, yet the backdrop feels humid and close; there’s a sense that if you stepped through the screen and pressed a piece of bubblegum to the concrete pavement, you’d hear its sticky sizzle. The opening sequence introduces Sin-Dee-Rella (Kitana Rodriguez) and her friend Alexandra (Mya Taylor): two transgender sex-workers with conflicting opinions on best to spend their day. Sin-Dee is ‘back on the block’ after a month-long jail stint, and in hot pursuit of the cisgender woman her pimp/boyfriend has been sleeping with in her absence. Alexandra attempts to reconcile two disparate efforts: quelling her friend’s violent resolve, and flyering for her own singing performance at a club later on.

Rodriguez and Taylor take their lead roles with a raciness entirely befitting the clammy vibrancy of their terrain. The opening sequence is a tour-de-force of quick-fire oaths and increasingly inventive insults (‘his breath always smells like he been eating ass for days’), woven with glimpses of the exquisite fragility which so haunts their respective characters. At some point, Sin-Dee’s mission finds her strutting precariously down Hollywood Boulevard: cue flashbacks to the girls of Pretty Woman jostling amiably for their space on the block, while a smooth synthy score worked tirelessly to ensure that 80s audiences of a more delicate persuasion would leave theatres with all their sensibilities firmly intact. Tangerine has no such cotton wool padding (though I can't vouch for a complete absence of synths. Nor would I ever wish to).
 In one scene, a cisgender woman attempts to turn tricks on streets that are traditionally populated by transgender workers, only to be shoved and reprimanded by a shaken customer (‘What the fuck is that? That corner’s not for pussies’). In another, Alexandra’s client fails to become erect during a transaction, and withholds payment in a chilling display of careless misogyny. Alexandra’s indignation is fierce, yet there is a childlike triviality to her objections which doesn’t marry with the brutality of the episode. Her defensive mask is hardy, and many years in the making. It appears to radiate inwards, too; preventing her own mind from fully digesting the true damage and sorrow of repeated abuse. And yet, despite the heady pace, the film knows when to slow down, and never to greater effect than during Alexandra’s singing performance, through which her alienation is laid beautifully bare.

The denouement will remind everyone of something. As Tangerine’s various faces and voices are brought together under one roof (Donut Land, Santa Monica blvd) we’re offered an almost Shakespearean blend of tragedy, farce and chaos: Much Ado About Nothing, perhaps, though the film offers none of the cohesive resolutions of Shakespeare’s play. In Tangerine, nobody is innocent, yet as the characters go their separate ways, the audience are left to ponder who might shine on, and who will fade into the night, like the various fates of the Christmas Eve stars above the City of Angels, where Baker and Bergoch laid their scene.

                                                                                                by Rosa Barbour

Scent story draft

When Paul’s face appeared, hovering anxiously at her hospital window, Jessica was very annoyed with her mother.

            ‘That poor boy. Look at him. He loves you.’

            ‘Send him away, mum.’

            ‘I can’t understand it,’ said Susan.

            There was no easy way to explain her rejection of Paul, the father of her unborn child - who loved her - to her mother. It was all tied up in orgasms.

Whenever Jessica visualised her orgasms (as she often did, subconsciously, and usually at the moment of their occurrence), she thought in colour. Each one was a mass of pink and red, like the glow in front of your eyes when you close them and turn your face up to the sun. As she drew close to the edge, a tiny white circle of light would appear in the blush. In order to achieve the fleeting stabs of pleasure that were the top prize of each frantic endeavour, it was necessary to touch the light at exactly the right moment, with the correct amount of pressure; in doing so, the spot would grow brighter, more focussed, and eventually split the rosy haze.

When she met Paul, Jessica had made the unpleasant discovery that it was possible to have an orgasm that was devoid of any pleasurable sensation whatsoever. Paul never touched the white light – never came close - but sometimes, when he was especially diligent in his efforts to stimulate her, Jessica would go suddenly numb; the orgasm had come and gone without announcing itself, and the little white spot would pale and fade as soon as it had appeared. No screams. No light. No relief.

There wasn’t much worse. 

The unbearable frustration of it all aside, Jessica was squeamish, and the thought of these phantom climaxes made her uneasy. When she slipped on her underwear soon afterwards - as she always did with Paul - she could not bear the feeling of the thin net material against her. The skin that covered her engorged clitoris felt thin, stretched to the point of translucency. She would be spent for at least three hours, and yet had been robbed of the heady dose of dopamine and the pleasant smarting sensation that accompanied her real, blinding orgasms, which had only ever been achieved when she was alone. When she went for a pee after sex with Paul, there was always a twinge, at exactly the spot he should have hit. By pushing harder, she somehow hoped to trigger the lost throes. Eventually, she’d give up, pissing out yet another near miss.

At length, after Paul had been dispatched, Jessica’s baby fell out of her. He was vividly coloured: red and yellow and blue, but quiet. Jessica, delirious and exhausted, giggled up at her mother as a doctor whisked him away.

            ‘Start as you mean to go on.’

            Susan stared down at her daughter tremulously.

            ‘What do you mean?’

            ‘Another night owl. Sorry mum.’

Jessica slipped out of consciousness for a moment. When she woke, she cat-called the midwife in her lairy Friday night voice.

            ‘Let me have him! I don’t care about the slime.’

            Looks were exchanged. Pros and cons weighed up in seconds. This happened sometimes. They were used to it.

Eventually, the tiny purple body was placed gravely into Jessica’s arms. She held him happily for a moment, before her head rolled back, and she fell into a deep sleep. Susan caught the baby just in time. She threw up bile into the bedside sink as she imagined his head bruising, or not bruising. She wasn’t sure if you could still bruise when your heart had stopped.

In her dream, Jessica is about twelve, on holiday with her mother and sister. She lolls around on a jetty, jutting out from the sand to kiss a glittering pink sea. She is bored and too hot, in her mother’s huge white pants. She jumps into the water, and cuts her foot on a stone. It's sore, but there is something pleasant about the way the blood feels, flowing freely from the puncture in her heel. Lots of it. Enough that the water around her foot feels warm. Her head feels warm, too. She has never fainted before. She wonders if you can faint in water. Her mother and sister’s voices bleat down at her. She leans her head back, and lets her hair billow around, like the blood. As consciousness drains from her, she pictures herself in a film, camera below her, picking up the beautiful colours of her mermaid body.

            When she wakes up, she is being held aloft by strong arms. They lay her down onto a terracotta floor. It is porous and warm, as though it’s been sucking in the sun all day. When she opens her eyes, they are met with the steady, calm stare of a man. Above his head, the sun splits a rosy cloud. She smiles, and stretches her arms up to him. She feels that if she is taken away from him, away from the terracotta, she will be cold, and unable to warm up again. She feels a woman’s hand on her face; it is too thin and feminine for this moment. She brushes it away. The man reaches down, and places his own hands on her temples, and holds them there. No one, not her mother, could ever protect her like this man.

She gurgles happily, and rolls over on the terracotta, so that her cheek can rest against it. The tiles become spherical; she wraps her arms and legs around them. The dream landscape shifts; she is older, back in her hospital bed. She clutches the terracotta sphere to her stomach. It changes; becomes skin. Her skin. Her bump. The man who pulled her from the Spanish water stands over her.

‘I’m all sweaty,’ she says, holding her arms up to him. She likes the way she sounds when she says it. He puts his hands on either side of her head, at her temples, and holds them there.

'The Whole of the Moon'

There were no pictures on Google featuring these particular words, so I made one myself (click to see the whole thing!) From one of the best songs ever made: lyrics that have comforted me since I was a kid. There are many theories as to who or what this song is about, and it means different things to everyone who loves it. I first heard it when I was about 13, and spending lots of time on my own (sometimes content in solitude, sometimes not). Occasionally, I felt ashamed that I did not spend as much time in the company of my peers as others of my age seemed to.

This song helped me see that it's great to be active, and surround yourself with people (if those actions are meaningful, and the people are kind and good, and healthy for you), but that it is also okay to spend time alone, and to be introspective and reflective. Introspection is often associated with loneliness, and it's true that too much of it can take you to a lonely place. But you can also learn many things this way, not just about yourself, but about the whole world and everything in it! ('every precious dream and vision underneath the stars!') Self-awareness, empathy and insight are rare gems. They make for the best art; they create CONNECTIONS; they make the world a less alienating place. Let them glitter and flourish.

I'll sign off with what just might be the most magical video on YouTube: Mike Scott and Vinnie Kilduff playing 'The Whole of the Moon' for an audience of schoolchildren in Connemara, Ireland, 1987.

'Dulce Ahumado Vaina'

‘‘Dulce… Dulce Ahumado Vaina,’ this one’s called,’ says Matthew. ‘You know, for simplicity's sake.’

            The label, etched in monochrome by a local artist, bears a sturdy vanilla pod, held like a cigarette between painted lips. Jessica unscrews the lid. A sweet, humid smell pools into the air around her. It is the smell of her mother, before Jo. It is the smell of Matthew’s fingers on the beach, when he leant over and painted a neat strip of tanning oil on her nose. And something else, much further back. A sicklier odour, with the same mingling top-notes:

Corinne, four months pregnant and still nubile on the floor of the girls’ changing rooms at secondary school. ‘Impulse’ body spray – the yellow one - cloys with the smoke hanging limply under the skylight. Corinne cackles as she takes her cigarette between her toes; angles her leg high to take a drag. Jessica stares in muted fascination as a tiny yellow thong disappears between stubbly, razor-burnt labia.

‘You looking at my cunt, cunt?’

She wasn’t. Well, not really. She was looking at the thong; imagining the thin material snaking its way up into Corinne’s stomach, and winding around her baby’s tiny, frog-spawn throat. Billie, it was to be called. After Billie Piper. Didn’t matter if it was a boy or a girl: Billie either way. If Billie died early on, thought Jessica, maybe Corinne wouldn’t bleed as much as her mother had.

‘It’s tobacco. And vanilla. Like the Tom Ford,’ says Jessica presently, turning the bottle over in her hands.

‘There’s nothing on the back. No list, or… ingredients.’

Matthew saunters. Hands on her waist.

‘Ingredients? Well, no, my pleb. You’re in darkest Bohemia.’

Jessica lolls against him: indignant, delighted. Matthew, with all the confidence and radiance of immense privilege. He smirks lots. Too much. He is downright filthy. But his eyes are clever and warm. It is love.
He consults his phone drunkenly, chin on her shoulder: Pedro Ximénez. Fortuna.

‘Here we are. Dulce Ahumado Vaina. Translation: sweet... well, I knew that. Sweet, smoky little pod.’

He looks at her. ‘Little pod. Just like you. Pea-pod. Cardamom. Vanilla.’

‘I’m not a pod,’ says Jessica. 
Jo and Billie. They had been peas. Seeds.

‘Well, anyway,' says Matthew. ‘I’m buying it. Te amo, etcetera.’

For a week, the scent takes on new shape and depth. It changes. It mingles with their skin, with carotene and sea salt. With week two comes the morning sickness. Vomit, bile, ‘Dulce Ahumado Vaina,’glass, Matthew’s cigarettes - all but one – straight down the sink.