Raw Material
I am 6 months old and sitting in a pram on the tube. I’m 2 years old and struggling with the mechanics of the toilet seat. I’m 4 and getting told off in nursery for cutting plasticine with scissors. I’m 6 and I have a football shirt on for the first time and the excitement of this story is blemished with any family retelling that becomes tantamount to fake news. I’m 9 years old and the Queen had just celebrated 25 years of being thrown on the throne. No hang on… I’m 11 and Margaret Thatcher has become Prime Minister. Or was it… when I was 18 and my new jacket, that I had for 2 days, got stolen from a nightclub in Cardiff. I was 26 and living in The Netherlands or 28 and cleaning caravans in Dawlish Warren. I was 32 and had just got married… to everyone’s surprise. I was 37 and walking out of a full time paid job. I was working 3 hours a week. I became a vegan, a bad vegan who cheats on his own dietary requirement. I was 40, 50, 60… I was passing through a portal to another dimension. I’m in bed with a secret lover and we’ve eaten a hash laced rocky road between us and I can’t feel my face… I’m dead and lying in a coffin and you don’t think I can hear you. I’m floating in a tank, I’m in the air, I’m being sucked downwards and it doesn’t feel good. I am fucking scared and there is no one to remind me of what it says in the Tibetan book of the dead. Which door do I take?
I’m sat on the sofa. It’s early evening or midnight. It’s dark and darker than I have felt for a long time. It’s now and then. Now right now… and then, back then. It’s here in front of me, eating me, sucking me fucking dry. And there it was, the truth. The truth appeared in front of me and the vacuous-ness of every thing was revealed. You’d said ‘everything is insignificant’… when I said look down there… when we where on Ysgirid Fawr… look how insignificant everything looks… you said ‘that’s because everything is insignificant’… you said that. And I agreed… with greed and delight I retorted that back at you and we swam in its nothingness.
I was watching football. One team of very expensive and well-paid players were playing against another team of less expensive and less well-paid players. It looked fairly even for a while and then the better-paid players seemed to remember that they were better off and acted accordingly. This seemed to allow the less well-paid players to understand their fiscal position and they accordingly relented and allowed the team of the well paid to score and score again and finally score once more. Everyone seemed happy. The outcome was as predicted and those that had predicted it took great pride in under lining their predictions. The playing surface was equal, the ball was neutral and the markings seemed suitably square. The officials were officially appointed and the crowd stood in partisan groupings. There were cheers and jeers, whoops and boos. The soundtrack was as expected. The result was expected. In truth… It was a dull affair.
And I kept asking…
What do you want to buy now? You bought a football team and the adoration of its fans. You bought them all and they paid you the dues you wanted. What now? Do you want to buy a government? Or did you do that already? Is it less satisfying watching the well paid politicians from upper class backgrounds rally their theoretical ramblings against the well paid politicians from middle class or working class backgrounds. Is it as cut and dry as that? Is it as cutthroat as a pirate’s cutlass? Are you the owner of the winning team? Do you want to be? Win, winning, winner… let’s get prizes, contracts, peerages, knighted… lets be on lists and listed, noted and lauded.
Am I a pleb?
No one answered. There was no one there. Just me. I was 54 and alone, or 52 and feeling lonely and relieved. I was falling in and out of love. I was losing something special and I let it go. I was 69 and I’d just paid off my mortgage. I dropped dead the next day. Stone cold dead. Dead. Me. Debtless and dead. 69 what an age. Not many ages allude to sexual positions but here it was stretched across my face, etched in stone and me cold in the ground or more likely blasted into tiny bits and kept in an urn that had the number 69 in gold letters emblazoned upon it. Some nervous young relative has me on their sideboard or in a cupboard under the sink. The 69 makes them feel ick when they read it…. It blinks a wrinkled ugly wink and reminds them of the loose skin that amasses at the back of the head of old people. The thought of drooping faces licking and sucking each other is repulsive to anyone under a certain unspecified age. I want to put myself together and climb out of that urn and shout I didn’t choose to die at this age, I can’t help your bashfulness at the thought of old people engaged in simultaneous oral sex. It would be a miracle. An anatomical A-TOM-IC impossibility but to see the look on that young awkward face would make it all worthwhile.
You got to smile… I hate been told what to do. Even dead and in pieces I resent the powerlessness of this situation. I’m 79, 89, 99…. Do you still have me or did you scatter me in a cow field full of fresh dung and orange flies? Did you?
I am invisible now. I’ve gone to a better place. He’s better off – they’ll say. He’s not suffering anymore. He’d paid his mortgage off. He’s better off out of it. Who was he anyway? Poor sod. I’m not even a sod. I’m dust, ash, frazzled bits. I am smaller than when I was two months old but more of a mass than when I was three months in the womb. When little me grew from a magic bean and grew all the right organs and bits to be whole and holy yours. Inside you is where I started, deep inside and then you had to push me out. And I never asked to be born. And I never asked to be dead. And I never asked to be read. That was your choice.