The Oeuvre

by Greg James

  Shooting gallery punks grease their hair with green spit. Taking aim.

  This gathering of shadows and deliverance is for you. Gunshot blue meat settles in the hole. Charred pieces crumble through. Scattering cooked blood grains to the wind. She’s at your side. Her fingers in there with the bullet. Working it deeper. Making sure you’re well dead. Long gone silver.

  Slower and slower flow the browns and the blues. Suns set, a million vanilla pods rain down and burst. Dry, you could murder a drink – but she murders you too cold before you do.

  The office walls are the colour of pale protein today. Everyone’s in convulsions, well-hidden, wiping brows and tapping fingers. Readjusting collars and tugging at white-light bracelets, soundless systems of stress and grief show themselves, braille pimples nestling in cleavage, protoplasma gathering in custard flecks, edging lips shapely, shapeless and thin. The Redundancy Packages have arrived.

  They’re in Reception.

  Sweaty gelignite, brown-taped shut, awaiting collection. No-one volunteers. No-one wants to go down there and see if their name is on one of them.

  Someone, not one of us, has already been claimed.

  It’s a sad apocryphal tale. He was an agency temp, he didn’t know what he was doing, communication breakdown, too much static, the Greenhouse Effect air stops words carrying, becoming clear.

  He didn’t hear that there is One Rule when it comes to Redundancy Packages.

  You handle your own. No-one else touches it.

  The Package does not care if it gets things wrong so we have to be right.

  Everyone knows the One Rule.

  Except, sadly, for the temps.

  Youth and efficiency are expendable. He’s not the first one to be snacked on by a Package and he won’t be the last to have the marrow corn-holed from his breaking bones. There’ll be more whose cells will scream like decompressing space chambers, dying with the coda of an unceremonious belch. No-one ever sees it happen. It always happens when our backs are turned but, when we look back at where our colleague once sat or stood, there’s nothing left but the open Package. Whatever is in there, it eats everything you are. Heart, body, soul and credit history. No trace is left and the memory soon fades.

  The Packages sit in Reception. Hissing, burping, peeling boxes. Occasionally, rustling, overtaken by jumping fits as evening draws in.

  No-one has been near them and this is pissing them off.

  They are here for a reason, a purpose.

  People are not needed here.

  Need to make them redundant.

  Ex-employees.

  Ex-people.

  Ex-mortis.

  The boxes stutter and bang about, shrieking cardboard zoos. Tantrum fluid trails running down their sides, making the uneven strips of brown tape lose their adhesion, come unstuck.

  The Receptionists run for it, for the sliding doors. The boxes burst, splattering creamy sewage everywhere. It goes slipping down over everything, big teeth eat through what’s left alive, spasm spurts, ejaculation screams. Bleeding bareness melts away, evaporating and the hard white lips of air conditioning slits drink it all in. Reception stands empty but for the blood-soaked shoes of the Receptionists.

  They didn't make it.

  We can all go home now.

  The season we're in is one of dying. The sere leaves hanging out the office window turn brown, yellow and gold. Their edges are curling, vegetable skins wrinkling into resemblances of witches and warlocks. The wind strikes and snatches them away and I feel like crying. Winter is less a season, more a wilderness between autumn and spring. A fallow emptiness peopled by vague impressions of blood loss and arcane patterns painted on glass in the silvers of cold. Autumn is the disillusion before death, the wearing away of hope, that’s why America calls it the Fall. It is in the rhythm of the seasons and winter is where it all will come to an end. And it's only at this time of year that I can sleep well, well, a bit better.

  I’m in a limestone square laid out beneath swirling gasoline streaks of sky. The air is thick with the swamp fever tang of an oncoming storm. I need shelter and I need it now but there are no doors, windows or recessed spaces that I can see, only this agoraphobic desolation that is both utter and complete. Sheer walls that lead to gravity-bending cones of leaden density. Opaque wings rearing from what should be diagrams of architecture but instead are architecture itself. The blandness, the flatness disturbs the blind worm gnawing at the root of my soul. The cluttered warehouse of my consciousness upheaves, tumbling its contents, sending them to scatter and then crawl, wounded, into corrugated corners.

  There, I feel them suckling at the holes that harm done.

  So many years of my life spent seeking the exit, blindly fumbling my way through auditorium space, stumbling on seats, barking my shins, dodging and diving, getting myself away from the ever-vigilant penlights of the usherettes and here I am, wanting to get inside.

  The red numbers, in my head, bleed heavily, scarring the sky, wounding the city. People walk on by with heavy red bursts for eyes, cauterising, rising in scabrous relief, I see the calculations spell themselves out as I walk into work this morning. The sums that I’ve corrected are there. The erroneous financial records I’ve solved. We are long past the age of blood-soiled altars, cowled monk robes and vaulted arcane chambers. The tools are different these days and so much more cosmically hellish they make the streets bubble with cancerous boils that spit and cough like perverted old hags.

  It is called the Exit Interview.

  That is what is happening to me right now.

  You can see the desire to inflict, abuse and dismember crawling about underneath the settled, somnambulant faces of the Panel before me, the way their eyes don’t meet with mine, don’t understand me, not wanting to.

  Outside, sick ecstasy washes through the building as the tannoy announces that I will be going soon. Feet beat out a tattoo under desks, hands rattle fingers and bang soft fists on the wooden surfaces, caught up in the disgusting undercurrent of cruel emotions, I join in even though the frenzy is in my name.

  So many believing the need for gossip, continual bombastic and substanceless chatter and now I know that I am one of them. I have to be. You have to be. We all have to be. That is what stills us in the end, not apathy, not despair, but knowledge of how alone we are. We have dug in so deep that we are choking on our own shit.

  So, we sit and we work as you do, listless and numb.

  Spending holidays in rooms where the curtains remain drawn and the beds hot from consistent hours of unsatisfying sleep, marking time through life’s tedious hours. The vault of the sky is the singular gaol enclosing us and we dwell in our smaller gaols, our homes, our offices, our jobs, to give ourselves the illusion of there being space outside. There are more and more of us, these days. Dark, echoing caskets for the buried wights of our unlived lives - did they not say it would come to this before? Why did our grandparents and our parents not see? Why did they not forewarn and forearm us?

  Because they got to them first.

  We are the empty, waiting to become sculptures of ruin upon which black, winding vines will blossom and grow to choke this heartless world to death.

  Straight shot into the muscle tissue. Steal a grin from a sweet dead girl when the spasmic writhing starts. Like sex but without the rush. Like masturbation but without the melancholy hurt. Sexual functions regress to the unknowing before-birth brands. Where fingers find their way without the glossy lips and tanned over-big breasts as impetus. The sexual asexuality of our lost sugared childhoods. Busted knees. Nettle stings. Scabs and sticking plasters. All our favourite things.

  The red numbers are like tuberculosis, you see. They come to me in trickles, early in the morning, after which there is a deluge, a scarlet gush, mosaic tsunami. I feel the need to disperse them through torn fabric, the limpid, nestling eyeball in an arsehole that winks through the pussy film of its knotty eyelid. Lex talionis spatters the walls of worship with blood and guts. Intestine
s droop in sad, silty heaps. Gouge and tear, kick and fight. For a few gold teeth, willingly die. Capillaries burst. Cholesterol veins go into strain. Freezing, starving, so cold on the inside despite this sweaty, feral rutting heat. I am at the heart of a massacre crawling through a dripping, murdered forest. The eyes of which wink at me. Their lipless mouths drawn back over blood-runny gums. Skin is tight on the bone. Tongues loll, sore with death and laughter. The vicar is being raped in the aisle by the boys of the choir. Jesus Christ hangs over it all with gore speckling his brow, his palms and his toes. The bronzed head creaks and rears around to look at me.

  I look back at Christ and smile, for we are brothers insane and loving it.

  It closes in on me, the black fog of the jobless, an envelope of struggling, shrieking things with puckered eyes that tell me I failed. It’s like fighting bees and wasps, they crush and crunch in wet clusters underfoot. My balance goes and so does my breakfast, running down my shirt, milkfish phlegm staining deeper than it should.

  I have to stop, come to a halt.

  My orders have changed.

  There has been a disordering of the day.

  Without a job, what am I to do?

  I count myself lucky that I was not consumed by a Redundancy Package after the Exit Interview. This is no longer the beginning, the morning, the start of it all. This is actually the end, look at that sky, drunken wine pouring out of cut clouds across the rooftops of the darkening buildings. How the shadows move in a different way, going back on themselves, swallowing in great seismic gulps, taking the light back to terrible places where hollow cracked temple bells ring.

  You need a room with a view where masks and puppets pirouette on dazzling winter strings.

  Part Two: Play

  The city is rotten. A decomposite thing, like me, separating into component pieces that bitch and argue and complain. There are bright spots, ebola worms of homosexual pink and syphilitic green and these hang over the door-free entrances of the Soho Ghetto where cum runs as clotted cream from the keg-taps behind the bars. Burnt-out haloes frame the turnip eyes that hang over gnawing cold turkey teeth. Tongues loll, in wait, torn from the spectrum catching the black rain that falls here. I don’t know what the year is and none of this lot care. Needle holes glimmer, set into the dead veins under their cocks. They watch the ceaseless pacing-pacing of the military guard, shrunken heads bobbing, useless, on invertebrate necks, sucking on the ropes of their own drool.

  These ones we call the bottom-feeders. Anal vampires with no bones to speak of. Their gums show, black rancid slices with cheese-coloured splits. Get too out of it, too down with it and they’re on you. Those broken lips puckering onto the ripe brown lime hole of your rectum, swallowing what you got, all you got, getting their high kicks off excreta and semi-digested process. They lie in wait, wiggling and coarse, draught excluders of the sewer streets. Everyone done by a bottom-feeder dies with a hard-on and wet rictus smile on his stricken face.

  You’re all worn rubber and wilting foetus cack.

  It’s pissing it down.

  Hope dissolves in rainstorms.

  I duck inside for some shelter, shaking hair that should have been cut a month ago. A sodden dog hunching my way through, paying a quid at the kiosk. Momentarily blinded by the brilliance of chipped nail varnish, ignoring transsexual purrs, nothing’s so sweet, I go into the cinema, smirking to myself in the shuddering dark. Single man in a long, water-soaked overcoat, in a seedy cinema that smells of old spilt seed. Heads, I assume, dip in and out of view. The lukewarm screen is masturbating and flagellating itself with a vinegary vigour. I feel a faint stirring in my loins but it soon leaves me alone. If only I was here for the usual clichéd reasons. No, sadly, I’m here because I have nowhere else to go, nowhere but the places where no-one alone goes.

  I smile a little. Nearby, I hear a motley sigh, followed by a wet fart. A stark litany of swearing mutes the crackling bacon of the film. The sound of blows being dealt out, sobbing, effete, tender and meek. A male couple leave me behind, one leading the other, hand in hand.

  Ah, love.

  I watch the hazy unfoldings onscreen. Feeling disinfected and sterile in this place, limbs and seashell openings thrash and dance in quickening frenzy before my eyes. There’s anxiety, desperation and terror running through their blood. Wild sudden escape bursting across faces that betray them.

  It’s what it’s all about really, isn’t it?

  The moment when the illusion breaks, the crack in the glass, the draught tickling your ear’s lobe. The silence in eyes that meet and do not move on when the dense struggling coils of this world loosen on us. Then we sink back down again. Readjust, straighten up, act as though nothing happened.

  The morning comes and the bedding I have rented is cold and silent. Emptied hours ago whilst you were snoring, dreaming dreams of a future that’s no more than an echoing hall reverberating with the teasing calls of childhood fantasy-fare. Sweetness and light will soon enough fade. Faces will line, knuckles will become raw, muscles will waste, you will sit alone and see yourself as you sit alone. See where all that time went, what it was all spent on, being spent, being used. And, by this time, something else has crawled from the wreckage, handless, legless and sexless, a coarse tissue spectre that talks with a voice composed of your late-night ejaculations, declarations of love made to vanishing space, bitter swallows that left a hurt, which weighed heavy in your throat for years afterwards.

  Yes, this is the point where things change when we see what’s not meant to be. Grubby, unloved feelings take on new meanings. The emperor sheds his skin for the clothes of a long-buried liche - such strength in deformity.

  Such power is held in the fastenings of repression.

  The world is mine enemy, I shall not want. I shall make them lie down in desecrated pastures. Strangle their children in the night. The last song is playing. The last song ever made. Exit music for the world, the people in it.

  Lights go up.

  No angels, no rapture.

  No hell and damnation.

  The film ends.

  With it, so do my fantasies.

  I leave later and go for a wander and watch the streets coupling in the rain under colourful memories of rape.

  The sky over Soho Ghetto is bruised to the colour of a dead man’s cock. I don’t like looking at it. It hides the stars, hanging down, so ripe and pregnant.

  I wonder if that smell comes from it.

  Welcome to the Meat Market proclaims the morgue-sheet sign done in jokeshop smears, dangling over the gaping dental mortar of tenement space. Butchershop collages of faces and limbs drape the upholstery in here dripping beads of fatty blood onto a squeaking wipe-clean floor. Chopping boards are made old as the choicest cuts are cut up and served. A slice of liver. A tasty little rump. Chewy jerky strips of smoke-cured cunt. In the far, far corner, unlit, a few leathery patrons snack on soft popping bones, sucking tendersweet brains out through the rubber of eye sockets, their plate congeals with the licked-clean leavings of freshly-boiled baby.

  I gag and hold my breath.

  So many scents colliding, intermingling in the rich underground air. Regulars see me, smirk and laugh. They were once like me once; curious students, mere voyeurs.

  Their eyes betray the state of their souls as I look from carcass to carcass. From meat that walks to meat that lies and bleeds - it’s all served up here to the pounding copper beat of industry, a sub-genre of suffering where you are what you eat and what you eat, you fuck hard first. Imported jars of Charlie Manson eyes clutter the shelves, their gluey contents guzzled down by suicidal girls who live-feed their orgasms to runaways sucking in their daily cathode-ray diet of state-sanctioned rape, beamed in from Kosovo and Guantanamo, beamed in straight to their youthful, well-salty cortices. The television they gather around is a burnt-out hole, crackling and sparking.

  I pass amongst them like Peter Sutcliffe’s ghost.

  A Yorkshire Ripper in Olde London Towne.

 
; Unsterilized, dirty needles plucked from sewer gratings are the best; well-used, well-loved, dirty brown, cracked and shitty. I use them to lance and drain my boils, my budding collection of abscesses. The habit-forming mode has always been strong in me, one with so little strength and control over the world about him, the puckered irises of arseholes contract like a junkie’s infected eyes.

  Tonight's whore went to the bathroom with a syringe in her hand. It was antique with rust, the needle broken, inside, whatever it was, was squirming with a limpid life of its own. The bathwater is tepid and scummed with pipe-silt, beneath its surface, she lies. An urban mermaid, her eyes are cum-pearls, her teeth and nails are crumbling street-coral. The red marks under her arms are trailing wispy blood-tentacles.

  I wished her no harm so I spank her soggy arse goodbye.

  Lifting her out from the bath, I feel her crumple. Treacled viscid deposits plop out of her body, sinking into discolouring bathwater. Whatever was inside that syringe did this. Inside, she is melted, gone to mush. I lay her down, cut her open, wash her inside and out, scrubbing hard. The clean skin is then cut some more with hot scissors. By evening, I have curtains for my conspicuous windows. A belt of nipples, tongue-steak and toe pads. In the corner, a well-scarred lampshade mottles the room sepia, scarlet and brown. There was a little meat left of her but it was famished, stringy stuff. Best smoke it until it’s jerky. I hang it out in strips to dry.

  Feeling brittle and wild, I go outside to take the night air.

  We are the photographs of our disguises; suits concealing astronauts, train drivers, fire women and exotic dancers. We talk and type in a language that masks itself in a scrambled verse of tedious objective transience. The worlds we saw as children are failing. Give them room. Undo their priestly starched collars. Give them some air. The ambulance will be here soon.