Sebastian Michael's Blog: EDEN by FREI, page 37

Origin

I was born in Manchester in June 1964 into a Swiss family, and I have never been in any doubt that both these facts are of defining significance. Had I been born in Manchester into an English family, I would most likely have grown up either in Manchester or if not there then somewhere else in Britain, and if not that then at any rate in an English-speaking household. Had I been born in Switzerland or anywhere else, I might never have developed my powerful affinity to England, Britain and the English language.

As it was, I grew up as the ‘English Boy’ in a Swiss Family in Switzerland, because soon after my birth – a mere six weeks – I was carried aboard a plane in a red wicker basket and flown, together with my brother and two sisters, to Basel, where my arrival was greeted with jolly brass bands and a splendid fireworks display. It would please me to think that the good people of Basel were thus celebrating my homecoming, but it just happened to be Swiss National Day, 1st August; and also it wasn’t in that sense a homecoming.

Because although I was a fiercely patriotic child, my loyalties then were always almost evenly divided between Switzerland and England, with Switzerland slightly having the edge, and as I grew into my teenage years the balance began to tip in favour of England. But more important than that – and also perhaps more curious – although I had really done all my growing up (bar the first six weeks) in Arlesheim, a beautiful, picturesque and particularly peaceful and well cared-for village outside Basel, and in Basel itself, where I went to school, I never actually really felt ‘at home’ there.

I felt at home in London the moment I set foot in it when my parents took me and the younger of my two sisters, Christine, there, for the first time. This, I thought, is where I want to be. I was twelve. From then on I returned to London every year at least once, often twice, at first staying with a friend of the family, then with friends I made there over my visits, or at a hostel or a cheap hotel, and from as early as sixteen I started talking about moving to London.

I finished school, spent a year (two semesters) enrolled at Basel University, and then left. I took with me two suitcases, one black, one red, none with castors, then; and I’d wanted to buy a one-way ticket to London. The slightly bored – too bored, I thought: I’m moving to London! That’s exciting! – travel agent laconically told me she could sell me a one-way ticket, but that it would be more expensive than buying a return and simply not coming back. It irked me, but I was twenty-one and I had to make the money I’d earned as a security guard over the previous few months last a bit, so I opted for the more economical offer and bought a return, the outbound on the 1st August: Swiss National Day, precisely 21 years after I’d arrived in Switzerland. Of course, I didn’t use the return leg, I let it lapse: I did not go back. Not, it seems, until now, three years later, when my ‘Europe Tour 1988’ took me, after Edinburgh, from Grenoble to Vicenza back to Chur and then Basel, where I saw first my sister, then my parents, my brother Andreas and his two sons Alban and Benjamin (Benjamin my godson), my other sister, Katherine, and many friends from the then recent past. The way I talk about it all on the tape does not feel ‘recent’ though, I talk about having lived in London now for three years as a big chunk of my life, and it is a big chunk: it’s all of my adult life so far.

My delivery on the tape is measured, often very quiet (mostly out of consideration: I seem to be recording the majority of my entries very late at night; that’s one thing that hasn’t changed, my being a night owl…) and I choose my words carefully, though not always correctly. I refer, for example, to a part of the trip as being ‘exhaustive’ when I mean ‘exhausting’ and I keep calling things ‘well done’ when I mean they are either well made or simply good. I sound a bit bemused and a bit blasé, absolutely, and also a little in awe; I marvel but I don’t gush, I describe things as ‘fantastic’ but say the word as you would say the word ‘nice’, and often qualify things towards moderation. I sound to me now almost like someone who’s rediscovering his language, who’s searching hard, and sometimes finding, sometimes just missing, the right expression, who’s grappling, without really knowing it, for a lost code, but enjoying the process of slow rediscovery.

There is good evidence now that you pick up a great deal as an unborn child in your mother’s womb; you make out sounds and noises and you start recognising them and responding to them long before you are able to make any sense of them as a child. I always loved English as a child, and as a young teenager I became very ‘good’ at it. Though I also wildly overestimated my abilities. Perhaps – and I do mean this ‘perhaps’, it’s not here merely for a rhetorical purpose – the familiarity that nine months as a growing foetus and then six weeks as a newborn baby in an English-speaking environment provided had already firmly, irreversibly planted its seed. You have to, as an artist, aim higher than you can reach: that way you may in time extend your reach and eventually reach further than you thought you could aim. And you have to, as a young human, step into the world without fear; that way you may in time overcome your fear of becoming yourself.

As I listen to myself on the tape, I realise I’m listening to a young human who has fearlessly – much more fearlessly than I would ever have imagined I would dare – stepped into the world and is just beginning, just slowly beginning, to formulate in it a role for himself. And it fills me with a new sense of wonder…

∞ Pyromania

Morning crept up on Boscombe Beach like a girl, home late from a party: a little tousled, a little ablush; in the small hours, with a hazy memory at best of what had happened.

Andy and George had taken a boat from the boat house at Christchurch Harbour and tuckered out a bit to sea, not very far, just enough to get a good view. The completion that Stefano and Paul experienced on Studland Beach together in physical union, they, Andy and George, had on their boat in a serene, cerebral, perhaps even spiritual way: they sat next to each other, close, close enough to feel each other’s presence, but not holding hands or intentionally touching, just so close that what was between them was nothing more than proximity. And they watched in equal awe and wonder, equal to each other, equal to that of spectators elsewhere. They did not take pictures, or videos; they sat in the little boat they had ‘borrowed’, bobbing up and down a bit on the shallow waves of a calm sea with a subtle breeze coming in more or less from their left now, as they were facing the beach.

They knew they had done something terrible. Beautiful, outrageous. Gorgeous. And terrible. With dawn now creeping home on them too, George started the engine of the little boat and drove it straight to the shore where they landed not far from Boscombe Pier. Once again, nobody really took notice of them, two pale, dishevelled teenage figures, as they wandered along the beach, absorbing the gash of a wound they had inflicted on it: hut after wrecked hut, smouldering in the morning haze. The odd fire still burning. Water puddles from where people had attempted to extinguish a blaze. Ruined belongings. Melted plastic crockery and disfigured chairs. Exploded gas bottles and broken glass. Splinters of wood, singed at the edges. Blackened, browned. And every now and then, not often, but here and there, the blue flashing lights of ambulances and police. Surprisingly few fire engines. But ambulances and police. And yellow tape now, here and there, and blue and white tape too, and then, mixed into the smell of coal and sulphur and burnt wood and overheated metal, a different smell, an alien, unfamiliar one, sweet and pungent in equal measure.

Here is where George, instinctively, without noticing, took Andy’s hand and when they had been walking slowly before, they now moved with hesitation, caution, peering between the people who in places gathered, in places stood forlorn, in places comforted each other, surrounded by those now busy, answering the call of catastrophe: the rescue personnel, the life savers, the paramedics and the competent bystanders turned volunteers. A white-sheet covered body. A stretcher. A woman, terror in her eyes. The quiet, undramatic unfolding of disaster aftermath.

Moving through the scenes in silence, slowly, Andy and George, holding each other’s hand, began to sense that they had attained a kind of absolute: none, not one of the beach huts they passed was unscathed. All were damaged, most were destroyed. And the loss on people’s faces: they were only beach huts, that had gone, not homes, not schools or hospitals, not museums, temples or shrines. But for the devastation written on these expressions, it might as well have been all of those. Cherished these huts had been, loved. The few, modest possessions each had contained had meant more to their owners than treasures in a bank vault safe. To some cynic much may have been tat, to these people – honest, simple, unassuming people – they had embodied memories and harboured care.

Nothing epitomised their loss more poetically than a ceramic figure of a fat beach couple, grinning ear to ear, one bucket in one hand with a shovel sticking out of it, the other waving a little flag, both arm in arm, with their sun hats on, standing on a mound of sand with the omnipresent caption “life’s a beach” in thick letters embossed on it: its shards lay shattered on the ground next to the burnt shelf it had fallen from, and two disembodied chubby faces now grinned idiotically from among char-stained debris.

George and Andy walked along the beach for a while, then went up to George’s flat, where his dad was out – presumably, they thought, outside somewhere, assessing the damage, talking to neighbours; they didn’t mention it or ask – they went and sat on George’s bed. Then George lay on his back and Andy did so too. And Andy turned over to his side and rested his head on George’s shoulder. And George put his arm around him a bit and they fell asleep.

When they woke up it was four thirty in the afternoon, they had slept uninterrupted for nearly twelve hours. George’s dad sat on the sofa in front of the television, which had the news on, showing the scene no more than twenty yards from where he was sitting, only outside. George got up, used the loo, went into the kitchen, said ‘hi dad’ and poured himself a glass of water, took it back to his bedroom, where Andy now stirred. He gave him to drink from his glass and Andy now got up too and used the loo and then they both went into the living room and sat down on the other sofa, at a right angle to the one George’s dad was sitting on, and George’s dad looked at them both and said ‘are you two all right?’

Andy nodded and George said ‘yes’ and then they sat in silence and listened to a reporter from the beach not twenty yards from where they were sitting, only outside, and there remained sitting in silence as the reporter described the spectacular fire and confirmed that the number of casualties so far was twelve but could rise as there were some people missing and several were in hospital with severe burns and among the victims were two girls who were twins, aged five, and a picture came up showing two lovely, lively, smiling girls, aged around five, and there was also a dog that had died in the fires.

George’s dad was shaking his head in incomprehension and a nondescript anger, and Andy and George sat on their sofa at a right angle to him, and then George got up and went back to his bedroom and lay back down on the bed on his back again and Andy followed him and lay back down on his back next to him, and this time George turned over and put his arm around Andy and Andy turned towards him and put his arm around George and they lay there, not really sleeping and not really waking and certainly not dreaming, their foreheads touching and their arms oddly entwined, but in a comfort all of their own, and an hour passed, or possibly two, and there was a ring on the door.

78 Value

‘The concept of “making money”‘ – Sedartis postulates gravely, and wonders is it largely, in character, in origin even, American, although it has now so widely, so almost universally, it appears, so comprehensively, at any rate, on our little planet, been adopted – ‘is not only flawed’, (all concepts are flawed, he points out: it is inherent in human thinking that it cannot be flawless), ‘but fundamentally, principally wrong.’

I am glad to hear this, though I can’t be entirely certain why.

‘Nobody makes money, even the National Bank or the Federal Reserve or the Bank of England, or any bank anywhere in the world does not “make” money, and nor does any business, nor does any person, nor does any entity ever really “make” money, unless you are thinking of the actual physical process of printing notes or minting coins, but that, as we know, is not “making money” either, that is merely manufacturing its representation; in fact, nobody “makes money,” ever.’

I’m inclined to agree and instinctively it makes sense to me what Sedartis is thinking, though I haven’t thought it through myself, and I wonder if Sedartis really has, or if he’s just doing so now on the hop, because he finds himself once again sitting next to me on a train.

I like the way Sedartis takes his seat next to me, mostly on trains, occasionally on a bench by a lakeside, rarely though, if ever on planes, and never so far that I am aware of on a bus or indeed in a cab.

‘Money is not “made”, it is simply invented and agreed upon in a compact between people and then moved from one place to another, either physically (as notes and coins or cheques or other pieces of paper or some such material as may be deemed in this compact practical and acceptable) or virtually (as digital data), and no matter which way this happens, it is always symbolic: money is nothing other than an abstraction of “value” and that in itself makes it inherently problematic because how, pray, do you define “value” and, more to the point, how do you keep sight of your values when the abstraction of value, money, becomes so prominent in your culture that you perceive it as “value” of itself?’

I have no immediate answer to that. Sedartis is not expecting me to. 

‘And so, not for moral or political or ethical reasons, though possibly for these also, but first and foremost for logical reasons, any economy that is predicated on the idea of “making money” and any culture that embraces this idea as of value of and in itself is not only flawed (as any human economy will always be), but fundamentally, principally wrong. Whereas the moment we stop thinking of “making money” and start thinking instead of “creating value”, for which, in one form or another money may (or may not) serve as an instrument, as a lubricant, so to speak, as a convenient communication tool of quantifiable entities, such, as and where they exist, no less and certainly no more, as soon as we do that we can begin to aspire to wish to become able to consider ourselves an advanced society.’

I like the way Sedartis uses the first person plural when he thinks to me. It makes me feel we’re in this together, somehow, though somehow I’m almost certain we’re not; or rather, we most likely are, but not at the level, and not in the way that is obvious, but in a deeper, more meaningful, more universal sense; and in that sense almost certainly we absolutely are in this together. Are we not one?…

‘Creating value,’ Sedartis expounds,’ is no narrow concept, it applies, of course, but not only, to making things and inventing technology and imagining art, and it equally applies to providing a service, to accomplishing a task, to building a place or exploring a thought, in such a way that it is of some value to someone somewhere sometime, even if that value can not necessarily at the point of its inception be recognised or defined or possibly even imagined.’

That makes sense to me and strikes me as almost stating the obvious just a bit. Is it?

‘Thus, being a good waiter is creating value much in the way that being a good cleaner is creating value, as being a good musician is creating value, as designing a good app is creating value, as singing and recording a good song is creating value.’

Who can decide, I wonder – who can determine – whether something is ‘good’?

‘Nobody can decide or determine, of course, what is “good”, at least not in the simple, undifferentiated terms we lazily espouse. Yes, you can agree on “good practice” or define standards, but is a waiter who is slow and a little clumsy but extremely attentive and friendly and charming and perhaps a little flirtatious, just enough to send a delicious tingle down your spine each time he tops up your glass of rosé, any less good a waiter than one who is super efficient but essentially dead behind the eyes and just doing what he has accepted as his lot or his duty for the time being? Who can say what good writing is? Or good art. Or good music. Or good anything. Nobody can, it’s almost entirely a question of taste and the prevailing consensus: the current culture. But what you can say, because you know when you see it and when you come across it and when you experience it – all of which is the same, I’m only emphasising the point, perhaps unnecessarily – is whether somebody does what they’re doing to the best of their ability and whether they seek to make that ability in the longer term greater, or whether what they do is perfunctory or indeed – and that is by some margin the worst – they are only doing it to “make money.”’

I think along, and as far as I can, I sense I concur.

‘Ask not, therefore, how you can “make money”, ask how you can create value. Expect not to be valued by money, expect that the value you create is honoured.’

I’m about to interject an inconsequential and certainly not fully formed but broadly approving thought of mine own but Sedartis is not yet done:

‘Honouring value is not a narrow concept either: value can be honoured, also, but not only, in terms of money; it can be honoured in appreciation; in kind, in gratitude, in return gesture or service, in goods, in opportunity, in experience.’

Certainly it can. That, too, though, I reckon, is hardly new…

‘It is not, of course, new. It only is sometimes, too often, forgotten. Because it means by necessity that if you are doing something that does not create value but diminishes it – for example making and selling something shoddy that will make people angry because it is not fit for purpose, or taking advantage of somebody’s situation and taking more of their time, their mind, their emotion, their being, than you deserve, in return for less than they need – then stop doing that immediately: you’re not “making money”, you’re taking from somebody under false pretences or, perhaps innocently, feeding your incompetence off their gullibility. Either way, rather than creating value and enriching the world, you deceive yourself into believing that you can enrich yourself as you destroy value and diminish the world. You unbalance the universe. And the universe, in the long term, will not be unbalanced.’

We are nearly at our destination, I forget what it is. Sedartis seems much better now. His thoughts thus afloat, thus released, thus engendered, he inwardly smiles.

∞ Pyromania

The display on the night was magnificent. The dreadful beauty of destruction. Summer Solstice in Boscombe and Bournemouth would never be the same again. Some people, idiotically, would refer to it later as the Midsummer Massacre. It was, of course, nothing of the sort. But it was violent, catastrophic. And exceptionally elegant too. The people in Totland, on the Isle of Wight, probably had the best view, apart perhaps from some revellers who had gone down to the Needles and stayed there till sunrise.

But the subsequent notoriety of what George and Andy never gave a name to, what by no stretch of the imagination could be truthfully described as a ‘massacre’ – either by intention or by outcome – and what therefore, somewhat clumsily and by the uncomfortable default that envelops events that happen too quickly and then linger, became known as the Solstice Spettacolo is largely attributable to a couple of unassuming and in most senses of the word pretty average men in their thirties, Stefano and Paul, one Italian, the other English, who had decided to spend the afternoon on Studland Beach and – having previously been oblivious to its naturist stretch – found themselves teased out of their swimwear for the first time in a more or less public place by sheer opportunity.

Having brought along a picnic hamper and two bottles of Verdicchio (Stefano had insisted it not be Pinot Griogio, for once!) and gone through said bottles with unsurprising ease by the time it got dark, they had then felt comfortably relaxed but also just a tad horny, but not wanting to risk making a nuisance of themselves or incurring the wrath of other naturists, had withdrawn a bit behind some dunes and the long grass and no more than lain in each other’s arms and maybe fondled each other a bit and then, in the unusually warm air of the night – even for a Midsummer Night, on an English beach – dozed off. They had woken up again at what must have been some time after midnight, maybe close to one, and the alcohol having eased off but not so much their libido, Stefano had remembered that he may just have a tiny bit of M left in his backpack, from a session he had been to with a couple of guys a few months ago, which had been really rather enjoyable. This proved to be the case and although the little sachet he’d pushed down one of the outside pockets of the backpack at the time on parting and more or less forgotten about contained just enough for maybe twice two shortish lines, that was certainly enough to give them a pretty good time for the next couple of hours or so.

Stefano was in a blissful place looking out over the expanse of the sea upside down on the sandy slope towards the beach with Paul over him and inside him, the two of them so into each other, so in synch, so absorbed in their rhythm that nothing, nothing else mattered, that everything, everything was good and warm and I am you and you are me, and the way they were together they both got to the point where soon, but please not just yet!, but soon they both would erupt; and they built up to it and they moaned and groaned and called each other’s names and oh yeah and oh god and dio mio and not yet! and I want to cum, and me too and yeah do it and yeah do it and just as they did, Stefano a fraction sooner, which tipped Paul now over the edge too, just at that moment the sky and the beach and the sea lit up and their orgasms lasted and lasted and their happiness and their joy and their union was complete and a chain of lights adorned the coast, in explosion after explosion like gorgeous fire crackers in the distance, and blue flashes sparked and yellow flames rose and thick smoke rose in the purple red orange skies and both of them lost their minds for minutes and maybe for hours but for these moments they were it all and it all was they and that was the universe and the universe was wonderful and one.

There were maybe two dozen or so other nude people who had elected or ended up spending the night on the beach and none of them had really been particularly aware of these two. Sure, if those who had settled in closest had kept quiet and still for a while they would probably have heard, faint in the distance, the unmistakable noises of two people getting high on a recreational substance and on each other, but nobody did, because they had their own conversations, one small group even had their guitars, some had their whispers and others their quieter unions to celebrate and so nobody had minded or noted the glorious coming together of Stefano and Paul.

But now everybody was on their feet, by the water, watching the spectacle unfolding on Bournemouth and Boscombe Beaches, all the way from Sandbanks to Christchurch: it was awesome in every original sense of the word: awe-inspiring and profound. Stefano, still high as a kite, and like the the others on the beach largely naked – some, perhaps, had put on a shirt or wrapped a shawl round their shoulders – was in a Heaven all of his own exclaiming in Italian, ‘mamma mia! che bello! dio mio! che spettacolo! che spettacolo! che spettacolo’ and Paul, equally high but less Mediterranean in his expression kept hugging him and smiling and laughing and smiling and kissing him and then they just held hands and stood there, naked as the universe had made them, among the others who stood there naked and amazed and awed.

And so it came to be that by far the most vivid, most famous, most watched and most liked, most discussed, also, most shared and most, in its own peculiar way, cherished video of the most horrific devastation ever unleashed on the English Seaside was also and looked and felt and sounded and would be experienced for decades by people the world over as a fantastic, poetic, ecstatic celebration of humans just as they are as they are when in love.

{Closure}

Somebody I speak to at length on a regular if not particularly frequent basis and whose thoughts I greatly respect, not least because they are more abstract than any other thoughts I hear routinely expressed, plays through the possibility apparently inherent in the apparatus – if that’s what it is, I’m pretty certain she wouldn’t have used that term – of a Large Hadron Collider, such as the one operated by CERN, accidentally causing a mini black hole and thus precipitating and essentially causing the End of The World.

Instinctively, I consider the likelihood of this happening minute, but she holds my gaze a little longer than I expect and I read from this that to her mind – and this is one of the most intelligent minds, certainly in theoretical matters, I have ever come across – the probability is not so remote as to be dismissed altogether.

In a philosophical sense you could argue, and I possibly would, that no probability is so remote as to ever be altogether dismissed, but I’m a little startled that of all the people in the world she should contemplate this particular portent so earnestly.

I forget – as I do most things – our conversation momentarily, but then it keeps nudging its way back into my thoughts where, far from frightening or even greatly perturbing me, it fills me with a curiously warm feeling of comfort: If the world should end, I seem to feel (rather than think, because thinking this would to my mind in turn seem counterintuitive and quite irrational), then, no matter how likely or unlikely it may be, the idea of the world ending in Geneva of all places strikes me as strangely appropriate…

Divestment

I find a cassette tape, unlabelled. I’m in the process of divesting myself of accumulated clutter that has started to clog up my life, in preparation for a renovation of my flat, and most of the tapes are being at long last thrown out now. Some – those bought as cassette albums and undamaged – go to the charity shop, practically all the others, with the exception only really of some mixtapes, go in the bin: I hold on to less than half a dozen, which is me being ruthless. I reckon.

The unlabelled tape nearly lands in the bin liner unexamined, but it intrigues me as there are almost no tapes that don’t have anything written on them at all, even if on some of them the writing has long faded and become illegible. I take it out of its case and put it in the machine I still have. I hear a young voice with a not particularly strong but clearly discernible accent, a little measured, a little studied, a little over-enunciated, say: “All right, here we go: Europe Tour 1988, The Spoken Diary.” I’m listening to myself, nearly thirty years ago. And I hear myself say: “This is my first experience of this kind as well, so we just have to try it out.” My language has not yet acquired any idiom, and Germanisms linger, sometimes prevail.

“Nothing of what’s going to be said is going to be edited in any way, I promise myself that, so that when I’ll be listening to it in two or three or five years, ten years, I’ll feel genuinely embarrassed.” Not embarrassed, my friend, so much as astounded. I sound to me like any young man from the past. I recognise myself, but in the way that I would recognise a friend from that time, someone I knew, a little. Not someone I knew well, let alone someone I was.

I don’t remember the process of recording this, but I do recall having made the tape. The memory is curious, brittle, alien.

The ‘Europe Tour’, it transpires, will have taken me from Edinburgh, where the diary starts on Monday 14th August (which I pronounce Oggust, and that does embarrass me now, slightly, though it also endears me to me) at 2:15 in the afternoon, a time by which I declare, with a hint of pride lacing my tone, that I haven’t slept in about twenty-four hours. I’ve had a “very pleasant conversation” with two Americans on the train and upon arrival availed myself of the services of the Tourist Information office, who have booked me into this “guest house”. When I say “guest house” I sound bemused. Having settled into my room, which, apparently, has high ceilings and is also “pleasant”, I’ve been out and bought myself tickets to three shows, starting at 4:15.

“I’ve just eaten this strange, slobbery pizza, which was incredibly cheap though,” I note, and “people here have time and they let you know they do, which can be charming as well.” I describe with awe the light of the city, pulling out of King’s Cross Station at six thirty this morning, and describe Edinburgh as “wonderful” and unlike anything I’d seen before, but I also note that the drawback of this place is the weather: I’d already spotted someone wearing a fur coat at the height of summer, though I make no reference to ‘nae nickers’ so perhaps I’m not yet aware of the expression.

“I seem to be sounding a bit blasé, hearing myself over the headphones, but I’ll have to get used to that, I presume.” And no joking. I sound to me now like a young arrival’s idea of a latter day Noel Coward, and then it hits me: I still own the silver cigarette case I used to use at that time!

I resolve to listen to myself speak to me from the past, as there’s a fair chance now, I sense, that this might get me to know me better…

51 Indiscretion

The man who runs the studio where we’re filming has everything he needs to be happy today. A smoothie, the sun and a freshly cleaned lounger. His is an oasis of rare and extraordinary freedom, and encroaching on it, from all sides, is the capital, the investment, the development, the oppressive tentacles of material wealth.

‘Do you live here?’ I ask him.

‘Yes,’ he says. And then, after a moment’s reflection: ‘you know, if you’re an artist, you have to live differently, otherwise I’d be working for some client now in some graphic design studio.’

He reminds me of me when I was young, just as young as I was when I was sitting across from me at the Beyoğlu. Except he’s nowhere near as young. He’s maybe late thirties? The space where he has made his room at the back looks and feels like the kind of place that is about to fall victim to the machine that is parked outside the ramshackle rust-eaten gate. He keeps the gate locked with a chain and a padlock, ‘because it’s market today.’ But as we’re having a break, he unlocks it so those who want to can leave; and some do, while I’m having my lunch in a moment of quiet in the little courtyard, in the shade.

A young man with an oddly styled haircut confidently opens the gate and confidently crosses the yard. He has the knack: he has done this before. Confidently, a little, perhaps, cocky, he strides to the staircase that’s next to the door that we use and that leads up to the first floor.

Earlier on, our host had shown us a picture of the series he was taking this afternoon. It showed a man completely, fully encased in latex. Not some latex suit or fetish costume, but encased in a frame which was covered in latex, from beneath which all the air had been drawn. The man was at the complete mercy of our host and photographer. ‘I could kill him,’ he says, betraying no intention of doing so. ‘It’s incredible, the amount of trust.’ And it’s incredible, the amount of trust. Earlier still, he had been chatting to us about the gate and the need for keeping it locked, certainly on a day like today, when ‘it’s the market.’ Then he’d said, ‘I better get back, I’ve left somebody in there, he’s waiting now.’ 

That was earlier on. Right now, nobody was waiting, but the noticeably confident young man had stridden past me and our host looks troubled. ‘That’s not a good sign,’ he says, this time only to me, because there is nobody else around at the moment. We’d already been made aware that we needed to treat the ‘issue’ of ‘upstairs’ with diligence. ‘If there’s any issue,’ we’d been instructed, ‘tell me, and I will go and talk to him.’ The he in question was a gentle looking creature whom I’d briefly met, the day before. I had just arrived and was not quite yet in the process of setting up, when the door at the top of a short flight of steps inside the building opened and down came a young man who looked not unlike you’d imagine Harry Potter aged 23, sans scar.

‘Do you have a safety pin?’ he asked me, which I counted as one of the less usual opening gambits, but not without charm. He then proceeded to explain to me in terms almost apologetic that the top button of his shorts had come off, though I didn’t quite catch the actual circumstance of this miniature calamity. I could not, regrettably, help him with his request, but suggested that our host might have a safety pin for him, with which the young man concurred, wholeheartedly.

The next thing I heard was that there was always the potentiality of something of an ‘issue’ with ‘upstairs’, and I naturally assumed that this must entail some ogre, some burly old man, some exceptionally unreasonable and possibly violent landlord, and so I was not unsurprised to learn that the ‘issue upstairs’ concerned none other than this young and tall and a little lanky young man. By now I had met him a second time and enquired after his shorts, which he was pleased to inform me had since been mended. Again, I somehow did not quite catch everything that he said, so just how or by whom or when precisely the button had been decalamitised I still didn’t know, but I fancied it was a matter of not such great import as to warrant my further enquiry.

Now, through the arrival of confident lad who had crossed my metaphorical path in a striding fashion and who had responded to my ‘hello’ with a curiously curtailed, not necessarily curt, ‘hello,’ in which I detected not curiosity, not friendliness, but a perfunctory, it seemed to me, utilitarian tone that signalled the greeting was there purely because by convention it needed to be, while he, in his stride, cared neither for me nor for the convention. I’d thought not much more of it at that particular moment, because there is only so much significance you assign to a greeting, the greeter’s stride not so withstanding, but it had registered as slightly odd, slightly off, to be more precise, and so now it did not altogether surprise but nevertheless a little perturb me that our host had so quickly assumed an expression of quite so much worry. ‘That is not a good sign,’ he said and I could tell from the way that his eyes glanced t’ward the windows upstairs that he meant it. Still I envisioned the ogre; a hideous mountain troll.

‘Why,’ I asked, doing my best to sound light of heart, ‘is this not a good sign.’

‘He’s a pusher,’ our host explained unequivocally. That meant nothing to me. This must have shown on my expression, involuntarily blank:

‘Do you know what a pusher is?’

‘No.’

‘He sells drugs.’

I wondered – though only a little later, not right at this moment, because right at this moment my brain was still trying to process the to me as yet causally unrelated facts that a) there is an ogre, a cataclysmic beast of doom, living upstairs, and b) there is a ‘pusher’, somebody who sells drugs, with a strident gait, now up there with that Thing of Terror – why he was calling him a ‘pusher’ and not simply a ‘dealer.’ To me somebody who came to your house or your place of work or leisure delivering drugs would either be a delivery person, such as a courier, or a dealer, or a dealer’s courier, or maybe assistant. I had no experience of anyone ever coming around to my house or place of work or leisure delivering drugs and so I could not be entirely certain, but ‘pusher’ was a term I would have reserved for somebody who hangs around school yards and ‘pushes’ drugs on kids who would not otherwise want them.

This was as much an explanation for the perception, on the part of our host, of the circumstantiality of our shoot having acquired an additional layer of anticipated complication, as was for the time-being forthcoming; and he said: ‘I’ll give them half an hour until quarter past three, and if they’re still here then, I’ll go and have a word.’

What there might be to be said to the ogre, who surely by then would have devoured stride-boy, high on the drug same boy had delivered, I could not imagine but I let that be as constructive a prospect as was to be entertained for the while, and in any case I remembered clearly the serious counsel that we were not to – under any circumstances, as was implied – approach the upstairs den and who or whatever dwelt in it ourselves. And I had no intention of doing so, ever, under any circumstances.

At one point a little later, newly-buttoned-shorts man and the unlikely though strideous ‘pusher’, together with somebody I hadn’t yet seen or met, left the building, the delivery boy, to my mind incongruously, holding two cardboard boxes of a smallish-to-medium size, one under each arm. He looked every bit now the delivery boy, and whatever was in those boxes, I thought, if that’s drugs, then you three are going to have one hell of a Sunday afternoon.

The ‘issue’ had thus left ‘upstairs,’ at least temporarily, but when I told our host this, the next time I caught his attention, he was neither convinced nor impressed. To my ‘I’ve seen three of them leave, I think they’ve locked up’ (an impression I got from the fact that they took pains to put the chain and the lock on the gate upon leaving), he, our host, with that ominous glance t’ward upstairs, said, portent weighing on his voice: ‘they haven’t. They’ll have to come back.’

By now, I had me a regular mystery. Since mysteries, regular or not, can only be entertained for so long before curiosity gets the better of their recipient, I now asked him outright what the ‘issue’ was, with ‘upstairs’. Young Shorts Man, to me, I volunteered, seemed like a thoroughly harmless guy.

‘Oh he, is; he’s all right. The problem is just that he likes to get high,’ and then he revealed a personal predilection of the young man’s and what he enjoyed having done to him when high, over his desk, that didn’t shock me for being unusual, because that unusual it was not, but startled me a little for coming – after all the mystery – as a delightfully insouciant indiscretion, of the kind that plants an image in your mind that is maybe just a smidgeon too personal, too, maybe even, graphic, to entirely belong there.

It still took me another moment to compute why any of this happening ‘upstairs’ should, if it were to be occurring even this afternoon, be such an ‘issue’ for us: clearly no monster had there his habitat, just a friendly young man who liked to have sex at his place of work while on drugs. Until the penny dropped and it occurred to me that the ‘issue’ in question was entirely one of sound intrusion. And maybe a little bit of dust too, because the floor boards of the ‘upstairs’, which were old and creaky, were also our ceiling and we were shooting a dialogue scene of quiet intensity.

They didn’t come back, after all. Or maybe they came back later when we’d already wrapped. There was no ‘issue’, that afternoon, happening ‘upstairs.’ Yet still, the images linger…

∞ Pyromania

The Hut made the front page of the Argos. That in itself, George felt, was quite satisfying. He and Andy were already back in Bournemouth by the time they found out, online, that their test had become a local news item in Brighton & Hove.

It nearly didn’t. When they got to Brighton, exactly as planned and with no eyebrows raised from anyone, via Uncle Edward’s in London, they found to their dismay that Brighton beach huts in the main were bigger, fatter and squatter than those on Boscombe Beach and, more to the point, they mostly sat flat on the ground.

George’s approach had been – and to all intents and purposes still was – to plant a tiny charge of homemade explosive under each third hut and, considering the average distance at which they are spaced, hook three charges up to one kitchen timer. Preassembled and primed, it would then be possible for two people to, comparatively swiftly, place the devices in batches of three, in a relay sequence. Bearing in mind the overall distance to be covered, any obstacles and the need to remain inconspicuous, they had, he estimated, a window of opportunity lasting approximately three hours. If one person was able to plant one set every two minutes, then, allowing a margin of error of ten minutes per hour, the two of them would be able to plant fifty sets an hour, which would cover 450 huts. Times three made roughly 1350. That, George thought, was not quite enough. He had been hoping for about twice as many. But Andy was unperturbed:

‘You’re not thinking of the wind.’

That was true, George had not been thinking of the wind. Could he think of the wind?

‘We don’t know what the wind will be doing on Midsummer Night.’

‘It always does something, and it normally comes in from about there.’

Andy was standing on Brighton Beach, facing the water and pointing vaguely to his right. What was true of Brighton was also true of Bournemouth and of most of the English South Coast. The wind, mostly, came vaguely from the right.

That made a big difference. As George knew, although he had never expressed it and didn’t do so now, in the face of uncertainty, likelihood is your friend. And in all likelihood the wind on Summer Solstice Night would do on Bournemouth and Boscombe Beaches exactly what it normally does, come in more or less from the south west: vaguely from the right.

This could double capacity at a stroke. Maybe not quite double. For practical reasons, the individual devices within each set could not be spaced further than two huts apart, not least because George and Andy had by now started making them. But the sets themselves: they could be spaced out a bit. Perhaps as much as three huts apart. So George’s diagram in his mind now looked more like this:

Which meant one set of three could now cover a dozen huts. A hundred and fifty sets would now light up 1,800. That was a pleasing number, George thought, and Andy thought so too:

‘It’s pleasing,’ Andy said. And it sounded slightly odd, coming from a teenager barely the size of a twelve year old, but it was true. It was pleasing.

The project of getting hold of a hundred and fifty kitchen timers had started almost immediately, but the trip to Brighton, via London, proved instrumental, because there are only so many kitchen timers you can nick in and around Bournemouth before somebody starts thinking that’s weird. The field trip to Brighton via London though took in numerous household and hardware stores, DIY centres and ordinary larger scale supermarkets, in none of which digital kitchen timers were considered high enough value items to be individually tagged, with maybe one or two exceptions of the more ‘designer’ variety. George and Andy eschewed these and bagged the smallest and cheapest they could find, and before long their little suitcases were filling up with timers of every type, ilk and description.

Uncle Edward was oblivious to all this, as he was not the kind of grown-up to snoop into teenagers’ bags – or any of his house guests’, for that matter, of whom he had many. He wished them a good night out on the Saturday, when he was going to the theatre and dinner with a friend, and they headed down to Brighton. As previously agreed, they did not tell Uncle Edward they were taking a train down to Brighton, so as far as he was concerned, they were just heading out about town. They did not specifically tell him that’s what they were doing either, because it went against George’s grain to lie to his uncle, whom, after all, he liked, very much.

Following what looked like a potentially fatal setback of the ‘wrong’ beach hut design being prevalent on this part of the coast, the two boys – who here, among the curious mix of the youthful laid-back, the middle aged gay and the residual resident pensioners looked oddly at home – on their stroll happened upon a hut that seemed, and turned out, just about perfect: part of a group that looked a little older than the others, it sat on a low but accessible base, it was in good but not pristine shape and its location, towards the end of the beach, made it, if not exactly isolated, then still comparatively quiet.

With the temperature mild and just a faint breeze wafting in from, vaguely, the right, and the hour approaching midnight now, there were people milling about, but not too many and, as predicted and hoped, none of them paid any attention to the odd young couple among them. At this point, poised and calm, they didn’t look like juvenile arsonists, at least no more than juveniles do without meaning to anyway. They looked like any teenagers, one tall and languid, the other minuscule and mercurial, who probably should be heading home about now, and who might be doing just that, albeit slowly.

The deed itself was done in seconds and, within the specified minutes of deliberate delay, resulted in a resounding success.

{Preamble}

breakfast mojito

i had never had

a mojito

before but: why not?

i was on my last twenty pounds of which i’d just spent fourteen on breakfast, so 

a cocktail at noon

seemed 

apt

i’d got to istanbul on my own after christoph and i parted ways

back in budapest: he’d had enough and wanted to go home, i

wanted to see

amsterdam.

how i ended up in istanbul i’m not sure, i

suppose

i must have got on the wrong train

different train: what can be

wrong

about a train that takes you to istanbul, a train that takes you somewhere

anywhere

you’ve not been before –

he’d sent over the waiter. that

in itself

was

brazen

i thought. he looked maybe forty, thirty-eight, forty?

i later find out he was pushing fifty; i wasn’t meaning to flatter him though

i went across to his table and all the while he was looking at me the way your uncle who hasn’t seen you in years or a friend of your mum’s who remembers you as a baby might look at you: a familiarity that says, you don’t know who i am but i changed your nappies when you were little.

maybe

that’s why i accepted his invitation to

mojito

in the first place: he felt harmless. forlorn, perhaps, and a bit quizzical, but nonetheless harmless.

i sat down and he said: ‘don’t tell me: it’s george.’ and that made me wonder.

‘isn’t it?’

‘yes.’

‘good to meet you george, my name is sebastian.’

i’d always liked

sebastian

as a name.

he looked at me with his nearly-a-stare that spoke of

curiosity, even

wonder

i asked him: what are you doing in

istanbul?

if only i knew, he laughed, and there was a silence

how about you?

soon

the waiter

ahmed

arrived

with mojitos

109809803459080138948908093049693049609349601346940384 Theory

Sedartis sits and speaks to me slowly.

‘Let me posit that there is no conspiracy.’

Where did you get your name from? I wonder. I don’t ask. He composes himself. He has sageness about him. He reads my mind, listens to it, more like; feels it. I went for a wander, he thinks back to me, along a little lake. Little compared to the big lakes where I come from. Where do you come from, I long to know; he stays tuned to my thoughts and replies, without words, the other worlds are many while the same worlds are few. Of course you cannot know where I am from, even though you do. I am content with that, for the time-being, and so he continues:

‘I do not know whether there are any conspiracies or whether there are not, and if there are, who is within them, and who is without. There may be some; there may be many. There may be none.

But let me posit that there are none: let me imagine that what looks like people consciously, actively coming together to conspire is in fact no more, and no less, than a culture.’

A culture, I think, is a conspiracy.

‘Exactly.’

Let me posit that the conspiracy is no more – and certainly no less, which is more grave – than a culture. A culture is a conspiracy. It could be benign, it could be malicious, it is most likely something in-between, it may have, at the outset, no obvious value attached to it: but consider – Sedartis is now thinking harder – the good, the bad and the ugly: are they truly, are they sincerely, are they actually good, bad or ugly?

What of Mephisto, I think, less insistent than he does, is he not ein Teil von jener Kraft, die stets das Böse will, und stets das Gute schafft.

‘Exactly.’ Sedartis understands me perfectly: He wills me to think the thought further, think it deeper. I struggle. I get so easily distracted these days…

‘Consider people who do terrible things: murder children. Shoot boys and men. Rape women, girls, and boys and men. Devise gas chambers. Throw youths off buildings.’

My heart feels a hollow pounding: I don’t want to consider people who do terrible things; can’t we consider friendly people, people who may yet be friends, though perhaps they have not yet met? Are we to consider the worst that people do? Why? Sedartis thinks yes.

‘Consider people who do terrible things for some reason or other. Consider how in every single way they are exactly the same as you or me or our neighbour or our friend Jason, except in what they are doing at this particular time. Why do we find it so hard not to think of the other as other? Because it is exactly the same as us. The thought of it is horrendous, frightening. Of course it is true and you have to, you have to concede, though you don’t want to, that you could be that person, you too could be doing these things, you too are them as much as they are you, you are not separate, you own their horrendousness, and they own your love, and that’s what’s so hard not to be destroyed by: the worst thing that any human being is capable of, any human being is capable of; and it overshadows, for a time, for a period, in our eyes, the realisation, the hope, the belief, the truth that – is it not a truth? say it is the truth – that they, this self-same man, that identical woman, the person that is doing the worst thing imaginable is in the very same vein also capable of the noblest deed any human being has ever accomplished. The paradox. The infuriating, numbing, devastating realisation that the man who crushes the skull of a newborn under his boot is the same as the man who lays down his life so a stranger may live. It is not our nature to be one or the other it is only and only our culture.’

But we are not victims.

‘No we are not victims, not of our culture, we are the makers of our culture; that is the call: to stand up, to be tall, to accede to the duty of generating a signal, of being a voice in the wilderness, of saying: no. Not in my name. Of saying no, not in my name, when terrible acts are being committed; and of being first to hold up our hand and our head and say: I am here, count me in, when noble deeds are done. That is the choice: the choice is not between being born good or bad or potent or weak or ill or well or noble or savage, the choice is the culture we want to create.’

Sedartis is silent. The thinking has quite exhausted him. I want him to stay by my side. I feel his presence comforting and serene. So much have I longed for his presence, comforting, sage and serene.

‘Let me posit that there is no conspiracy,’ Sedartis speaks slowly, ‘let me assert that instead there is culture. And that the culture there is is the world as it is when we’re in it, and that being in it we are part of and therefore responsible for that culture. And when we give up our hope and say: this is just the way it is, we have already lost, we have failed, we have yielded in resignation to the bad things that happen, and when we throw up our hands in despair and say: that is them, they are like this that do these things, they are other, then we have not understood who we are, not grasped that we are what we see happening around us, that we own every last bit of cruelty as we exult every grand act of mercy; and if we say: they are powerful that have made the world such as it is but I am weak, then we give away what power we have and we empower those that we scold for wielding their power against us; and if we think they are evil that hold this power, we forget that we would have power if we hadn’t so feebly, so faintly so frivolously surrendered it. What is power, and what is it for: it is the potency to shape the world and what shapes the world that you live in: culture. Let me posit that there is no conspiracy, there are not categories of people, there are not those that are good and those that are bad and those that are ugly, nor are there those that are different, nor are they indifferent, there is your human conscience and there is the culture that we create.’

Now I would like an ice cream.

‘So would I.’