The Witnesses Are Gone

by Joel Lane

The fact is, reading those stories was exactly like losing concentration on the towpath of some disused Black Country canal and scraping your bike along a brick wall on your way home in the dark. It had that same heart-stopping quality, the sudden lively twist of the handlebars, the over-correction, the dirty water that, previously beside you, now lies in front. You wonder about someone who can give you that sensation.

After twenty years of rented rooms, I had the chance to unpack all my boxes and survey all the pieces of my life: books, letters, records, souvenirs. Maybe I can be forgiven for assuming that the pieces would fit together into some kind of meaningful pattern.

Alcohol often filled Judith with a kind of defiant idealism, a sense of transformation being a part of human nature. If she’d been drunk all the time, she could have joined the SWP. Sober, she chipped away at ideals until they collapsed.

Horror films confronted the ordinary with the strange and terrible. A film that made the ordinary appear strange and terrible wasn’t horror. It was realism, of a kind that focused on the intrinsic misery of life. A dream was realistic in the same way.

I felt inspired by that tidal sense of purpose that comes from being a part of something much bigger. But as soon as I stopped moving, the stone landscape made me think of decay. The smell of ashes from a burning flag choked me.

I found Lovecraft’s aversion to seafood as hard to understand as his fascist sympathies, though somewhat easier to condone.

A blonde girl in a leather jacket and skirt beckoned to me from an alley; then she unzipped her jacket and ran her fingers over the broken ribs that protruded from her flesh. Whatever her heart might cost, I couldn’t afford it.

Perhaps it’s this: if the truth of our lives is nothing, then the only reality is the one we bring to life. After all, our cities – our tower blocks, our bridges, our streets – are human constructs. They didn’t come from nature. Why should our dreams, desires and fears be any different? Whatever we make in our lives – love, violence, hope or betrayal – is the only reality that won’t fall down overnight.