4.27.06
Pond Scum: I Invented You, So Shut Up and Live With It
By Steve Finbow
-------------------------------------
Sitting three seats in front of me, on the noon train out of London King’s Cross to Edinburgh, is a large balding man. What is left of his hair is crew cut and brutal. He looks like a football hooligan. His age? Hard to tell. His complexion is bubblegum pink, skin stretched tight over layers of fat and retreating muscle. He is dressed casually – black polo shirt, black and white tracksuit bottoms, grey and blue trainers of dubious branding. The train is busy and I cannot hear his accent but I bet he gets off at Newcastle. As he raises his arm, to get yet another can of beer from the luggage rack, I see a name tattooed on his arm in what looks like Lucida Blackletter font. The name appears to be Steve Gobbling. Maybe it is his lover’s name. No. The guy is as straight as an architect’s penis. The only conclusion I can draw is that it is his name. He raises his arm again and I see it reads Steve Gibbons. Is there anyone famous with that name? I know someone who knows someone who had his arm autographed by Samantha Fox (huge-breasted ex-glamour model) and then had it tattooed over in indelible black-fading-to-green-as-you-age ink. Why have your own name tattooed on your arm? Chronic amnesia? Acute forgetfulness? Alcoholic blackouts? Is he a fan of the film Memento? Hold on a second. Something or someone is really annoying me.
By Nicholas Allanach
Pontificating in the four seats opposite is a twentysomething man. His audience is a Glaswegian woman in her sixties and a political-science student who is cradling a maroon cushion in her substantial lap. The twentysomething is a solicitor. I know this because he has told his captives repeatedly. He is from Edinburgh but his accent is more Tony Blair/Gordon Brown than Francis Begbie/Mark Renton. This is what I have learned so far on the journey – and we are under an hour in – Singapore’s climate never changes. Yes, it does. I have been there. It changes from lung-scorching skin-becomes-its-own-vindaloo heat to storms with raindrops as big as a budgerigar’s head. London is a dangerous place and the people there are miserable and rude. No, it is not. More dangerous are the satellite towns of Disturbia where kids have nothing better to do than re-enact the more tramp-heavy sections of A Clockwork Orange. As for miserable: Londoners’ sarcastic one-off quips delivered at speed are some of the funniest things I have heard. My friends from Feltham – Brian, Dean, and Paul – are experts at this type of humour and my jaw aches from laughter after five minutes in their company. Rude? Who are you calling rude, you ginger-haired Sweaty?*
Simultaneously writing this bi-week’s column and a short story about my trip up north is an exercise in memoir and fiction. Dialogue, events, people encountered and observed may make it into my short story. I will embellish facts with fancy. I will make real my imagination. We splatter people we meet with the territorial spray of narrative. Take the three people opposite. The twentysomething has ginger hair, the honeyed and oily swagger of a public schoolboy, and his opinions are the opinions of his parents and their parents – I dislike him. I caricaturise. The student is spoiled, baby fat all over the shop, her cushion annoys, its colour irritates. She will be the hero. She will dislike the twentysomething. The woman sitting across from them is a dour 60-plus Glaswegian. Her rosy cheeks glow with under-the-sink supermarket-brand whisky; her varicose veins pulse with deep-fried Mars bars; her kippered fingers match her smoked-mackerel lungs. Why do I think of all women over the age of 60 as Flaubert’s Felicite? I have constructed these portraits out of the building blocks of prejudice and envy. What if I did the same with my short story?
Writing a short story about my trip to Newcastle and Edinburgh before the actual event is an exercise in time travel. Will I influence occurrences by fictionalising them? I have come to Newcastle to visit friends and my story will bear no resemblance to actuality. But maybe it will. Maybe I will not tell the truth. The story is about a man who tells his wife he is visiting Newcastle on business and there he will have a job interview. It is the end of their relationship. He knows. She knows. They are cowards. Him more so. He is really visiting his lover. She has been waiting for six months to see him. They text. They e-mail. They talk occasionally. Desire, heightened and maintained by distance, travels. While in Newcastle, he spends an evening with a woman with whom he once had an affair. Desire trembles still, like skin in the aftermath of a chase. Then he spends a day and maybe a night in Edinburgh with another woman he has only just met and who is interesting because of that – he does not know her, not now, not yet. How much of this is true? How much my own experience? How much more real is it than creating personas for strangers on a train? Oh, do shut up!
Apparently, Newcastle was a Hittite town before being invaded by Genghis Khan, his consort Mamie van Doren and a troop of kiddie-fiddling macaques; the dodo was wiped out by Venusian avian mange; polar bears are white because their fur is made of toothpaste, lilies, and broken tea cups; the best topping for a burger is naked mole-rat placenta; and the bleached cheekbones of a Nubian princess make excellent bookmarks.
We invent people whether they exist or not. The book I am reading on this trip is John Haskell’s American Purgatorio – it is very good. Oh, and Steve Gibbons did detrain at Newcastle.
*CRS: sweaty = sweaty sock = jock = Scotsman.
An apology: in my last column, I said I had no idea why the word Ophelia was on my phone. Well, I know now. Do I. Lo reminded me, with Harpie-like insistence. She played Ophelia in The Hamletmachine and I watched her rehearse it many times and why can’t I remember things like that and…. You get the picture. Maybe I should get my name tattooed on my arm.
