There was a woman who would sometimes find herself alone in public. On one such occasion, she found herself in a pub, drinking a pint of beer and reading a book. It was quite a good book, and it was a pretty nice beer. Even the pub wasn’t too bad.
“Look at her,” one of the arseholes on the next table said. “What the fuck’s she doing?”
“She’s reading a book?”
“In the pub!”
“On her own!”
Shrieks of laughter, incredulous, a hint of disgust.
“Why would you do that?”
“You think you’d do it at home.”
“Hey! HEY! What are you reading?”
More laughter.
“Is it gooood?”
She looked up, just a quick glance, then back down to the page. But it was too much. It had been seen.
“Let’s have a look then, love. Let’s have a read.”
Out of his chair and in her face, snatching the book from her hands, “Let’s see what’s so bloody good about your fucking book then.”
And then he began to read, right there, in the pub. She could follow his progress by watching the movement of his lips.
the woman who was sometimes on her own in public there was a woman who would sometimes find herself alone in public on one such occasion she found herself in a pub drinking a pint of beer and reading a book it was quite a good book and it was a pretty nice beer even the pub wasnt too bad look at her one of the arseholes on the next table said what the fucks she doing shes reading a book in the pub on her own shrieks of laughter incredulous a hint of disgust why would you do that you think youd do it at home hey hey what are you reading more laughter is it gooood she looked up just a quick glance then back down to the page but it was too much it had been seen lets have a look then love lets have a read out of his chair and in her face snatching the book from her hands lets see whats so bloody good about your fucking book then and then he began to read right there in the pub she could follow his progress by watching the movement of his lips i dont get it he said whats it about i dont know i havent finished it yet are you taking the piss is this taking the piss he waved the book in front of her face before throwing it contemptuously back onto the table i dont get it was it about me was that me he shook his head and wandered back down to his table sat back down in his chair dyou read her book then what was it about i think have you ever have you ever thought about what were doing what were saying what why we do what we do are you okay mate why do we do what we do its just a bit of banter mate a bit of a laugh are you sure youre okay yeah its just that book she was reading i think it might have been about us you know like fucking us and that the dirty cow nah about how we act about how awful we look to her i knew she was a fucking dyke he laughed no wonder shes on her fucking own they both laughed anyway its your round mate hurry up when they started throwing peanuts at her a few minutes later she decided to leave
“I don’t get it,” he said. “What’s it about?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t finished it yet.”
“Are you taking the piss? Is this taking the piss?” He waved the book in front of her face, before throwing it contemptuously back onto the table. “I don’t get it… Was it about me? Was that me?”
He shook his head and wandered back down to his table, sat back down in his chair.
“D’you read her book then? What was it about?”
“I think… Have you ever… have you ever thought about what we’re doing? What we’re saying?”
“What?”
“Why we do what we do?”
“Are you okay mate?
“Why do we do what we do?”
“It’s just a bit of banter mate. A bit of a laugh. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah, it’s just that book she was reading. I think it might have been about us, you know?”
“Like, fucking us and that? The dirty cow.”
“Nah, about how we act. About how awful we look to her.”
“I knew she was a fucking dyke!” He laughed. “No wonder she’s on her fucking own!” They both laughed. “Anyway it’s your round, mate. Hurry up.”
When they started throwing peanuts at her a few minutes later she decided to leave.
__________
Notes:
1. Written on June 17th, 2014
2. An amalgamation of events
3. That occurred
4. For me
5. And for others
6. At various times
7. That week
8. And every other week, no doubt
9. Before
10. And since
11. While we were on our own
12. Somewhere
13. In public
14. Trying
15. To exist
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I got home yesterday and we had a new front door. Not a replacement front door but an additional front door. Two front doors.
None of the other houses had a new front door. Also, none of them had no front door, which I thought maybe was a possibility, as if front doors were migratory and one of them might have decided to stay here for the summer instead of somewhere colder further up the road.
But front doors don’t work like that, I understand that now. Then again they shouldn’t work like this really either, whatever this was.
I entered the house through the old front door, but when I turned round to look at the new front door it wasn’t there, even though it should have been there, according to all the usual rules of doors and walls and space and sense. I went back outside and the door was there and then went back inside and the door wasn’t there and so on for half an hour or so, just popping in and out and staring at the door and staring at the no door, all the while a look of bogglement spread across my increasingly perplexed face.
I wondered what my neighbours thought of my behaviour. I could see one or two of them around, possibly watching while trying to look as if they weren’t watching, which is how I would have watched one of my neighbours if they kept popping in and out of their front door for half an hour in the middle of the day without letting them realise I was watching, which would have been rude.
Maybe they thought it was normal, for me. Maybe they couldn’t care less. Maybe there was no subterfuge to their not-watching stances at all, because they really weren’t watching me at all.
Maybe they were jealous of my two front doors.
All the while I was wondering about appearances, I was also thinking of ways to test the existence or possibly non-existence of the door. My main avenue of thought was of erecting an elaborate series of mirrors so I could stand outside and see inside (or stand inside and see outside), enabling me to look at the door and the no door at the same time.
Perhaps this simultaneous observation would cause the paradoxical door to collapse down to a single consistent state of either two doorness or one doorness, but I didn’t hold out much hope. If a paradox exists unobserved than surely it would also exist while observed. Otherwise it wasn’t so much a paradox as an unprovable delusion.
Anyway I didn’t have any mirrors handy, or at least any mirrors which weren’t attached to walls. And although might have been desperate to solve this mystery I was not quite desperate enough to enter the shed where the screwdrivers lived. You never know what you might find in the shed, nor, more commonly, what you might not find, and how long it would take to not find it.
Eventually I tried using the key to the old front door on the new front door. I’m not sure why this plan took so long to formulate but it did. When you’ve discovered a new door on the front of your house maybe I’ll accept your criticism but until then you should just accept that this whole door adventure was strange enough to slow even the sharpest of minds let alone my near useless heat-shrunk brain.
Also this plan would have been a good plan if the new door had a keyhole exactly the same as the old door, but it didn’t. It didn’t have any keyhole at all. It didn’t even have a door knob. All it had was one of those elaborate knockers you see in horror films where a big round ring made of some impossibly heavy metal is held in the mouth of some grotesque mythical beast, which in this case was a lion, if lions can be considered mythical, or beasts.
I knocked. The knocker made a heavy thudding sound that sounded like someone had banged their head on the hull of an ocean liner and then banged it again and again but slightly softer each time as the echoes vibrating through the door and the house and my heart and my skull eventually faded away to nothingness and left behind them a moment of silence as profound as a epitaph.
The door swung open and reflexively I stepped through.
It was my house inside, but this time with this new front door in the porch rather than the old front door. And also it was haunted.
You could tell because it was haunted in all the ways you’d expect a haunted house to be haunted. The curtains were closed and everything was gloomy and the air was still and cold and dusty and dead. The flowers were rotting in their vases. The eyes of the people in the photographs on the wall followed you as walked past them, and the people in the photographs were older than they should have been, gaunter looking and much more obviously dead, and even beyond that somehow more horrifying than you remember even your great-grandparents ever being.
Blood seeped from the radiators in the hall and it leaked from the fridge in the kitchen and it bled straight out of the taps. I picked up an orange from the fruit bowl and it burst like a water balloon in my hand, but a water balloon that was filled with blood and also possibly some bits of flesh and I think perhaps half an ear.
On the mantelpiece in the living room there was an eerie faceless doll that nevertheless watched me as I approached and then stretched out its arms towards me like a grotesque parody of a baby. A baby that was sat on the mantelpiece and was wearing a dress and had been left in my house for some reason that was impossible to fathom.
The stairs creaked as I climbed them and carried on creaking even after I’d stopped climbing them and was stood on the landing, the floorboards of which also creaked and moaned and undulated slightly as I stepped on them. The walls here were so thick with cobwebs they might actually have been made entirely out of spiderwebs I don’t know I didn’t touch them.
The bathroom was even more blood-filled than the kitchen and worse than that there wasn’t any toilet roll left or I suppose technically there was a toilet roll left but none of the paper, and someone had left the cap off the toothpaste and the toothbrush was on the floor and the soap was all broken and embedded with teeth.
I really needed the toilet and had done for a while but I’d been held up due to the door conundrum and then the haunted house experience, and I probably shouldn’t have tried going while I was in a haunted house even if it was still my house but I only needed a piss and so I had a piss and then almost immediately wished I hadn’t.
The blood in the toilet bowl was completely clotted and the piss started filling up the toilet and considering the rate it was filling up I was sure I was going to keep pissing until it spilt over the top and onto my shoes but luckily in the end I didn’t piss as much as I that and the toilet didn’t overflow at all but that was the only lucky thing because the toilet wouldn’t flush possibly due to the clotted blood but also definitely because it didn’t have a handle to flush it with and when I took the top off the back to manually manipulate the levers within I discovered that there wasn’t even any water in the toilet, just even more blood.
Always, everywhere, blood.
It was kind of monotonous really.
Also I’m sorry for going on about piss so much.
When I went back on to the landing there was an old lady floating away from me and through a wall and some red eyes glowed out of a dark corner and growled at me and a bat fluttered about and scratched at my hair and when I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror on the wall my reflection was out of sync with reality and also the writing on the t-shirt I was wearing in the mirror was forwards rather than backwards and said “FAT” on it in big letters in a really terrible font, even though the t-shirt I was actually wearing didn’t have any writing on it at all, it was plain, like all my t-shirts, because the idea of having writing on a t-shirt disgusted me on some level I could never really hope to explain.
The door to the airing cupboard swung open all on its own and inside I could see the towels in there writhing with maggots. The thermometer on the boiler said the water was still cold even though I’d put the water on before I’d gone out and also anyway, although I couldn’t tell for sure, I expect the boiler was filled with blood rather than water, filled to the brim with thick, cold useless boring old blood.
You couldn’t have a shower in blood even if it was nice and hot.
I closed the door and walked towards my bedroom. The radio was playing and the DJs spoke backwards and their words were like screams and the music they played was music I didn’t really like and slightly out of tune.
The display on the radio flashed like it did when there had been a power cut and so the time was all wrong. It said it was 00:00 (it wasn’t 00:00) and also I realised that that’s what it says when the power has gone off and only just come back on again but as the radio was on all the time the power couldn’t have gone off and I suppose perhaps the idea was that the radio had been playing powerlessly and that was supposed to be scary but to be honest it wasn’t particularly scary at all.
On my desk there was a suicide note written in my own hand detailing what a pathetic man I was and all the reasons why I deserved to be dead and from the light socket in the ceiling a noose hung down but on closer inspection you could see the rope was all knotted and frayed and which would, if I’d used it, definitely have snapped before I’d died, no doubt leaving me lying there weeping on the floor, not just alive but even worse deeply ashamed that my inadequacies extended now to a failure to kill myself and this shame I expect would have been even deeper and more encompassing than the shame I already felt during every moment of my life so far.
My bed was neatly made and completely empty but the quilt heaved slowly up and down as if there was something under there breathing or pulsing or both breathing and pulsing all at once. I thought it would probably be my own head under there, severed and eyeless and dead, or perhaps another one of those faceless dolls from downstairs, or maybe a tidal wave of rats would come spilling out, or there’d be a torso of some sort in there, or a coconut (I’m quite scared of coconuts), but when I finally pulled the quilt back there was nothing under there, not even a bloodstain or a piss stain nor one of the more shameful stains. There wasn’t even a cat under there, which would have been nice, and what I was secretly hoping for, as finding a cat under a quilt is one of life’s purest pleasures. But then this was a haunted house and a haunted house isn’t the place for nice things it’s evidentally the place for tiresome things and tedious things and terrible things and also blood and other seepages.
I went back downstairs disappointed at the lack of a suitably climactic denouement and went to the front door but now there was no front door and a hollow laugh emanated from everywhere in the house and laughed on and on but the back door was still there so I went out that way and climbed over the fence and went round to the front. The haunted front door was still there but I ignored it and went through the old front door and sat down in the living room and watched the end of the tennis, which wasn’t very good and went on forever.
Today when I got back from the shops I found four front doors, two garage doors, seven new windows, a couple of extra drains, and 43 new recycling bins, one for every possible variation of drinks carton, and a couple for discarded hats and old abandoned shoes.
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If you like the things you've read here please consider subscribing to my patreon or my ko-fi. Patreon subscribers get not just early access to content and also the occasional gift, but also my eternal gratitude. Which I'm not sure is very useful, but is certainly very real.(Ko-fi contributors probably only get the gratitude I'm afraid, but please get in touch if you want more). Thank you!
I was walking in the park with my dad when my shoes broke. The whole heel just snapped off. I picked it up and it was made out of bread. Really dry stale bread.
“Why are shoes made of bread, daddy?”
“Why are your shoes made of bread?” he said.
“What?”
“No one else’s shoes are made of bread. Only yours.”
“What?”
“We thought it’d be funny. We can’t believe you never noticed.”
“What?” I was almost crying now. “Why? I don’t understand.”
I sat down on a bench and pulled the rest of the shoe off. It was all bread. The whole thing was bread, except for the laces, which were made out of liquorice.
“I bet your shoes are bread as well,” I said.
My dad just chuckled and pulled off one of his shoes and showed it to me. It wasn’t bread at all it was leather on top and rubber underneath and laces made of lace or whatever it is laces are made of.
“Didn’t you ever wonder why your shoes came from the bakers in a brown paper bag rather than from the shoe shop in a shoe box like everyone else’s?”
“They sell shoes in woolworths.”
My dad just look confused and I was too distraught to explain why that was a justification of any sort and then he laughed and there was a crowd around us now and they all laughed too.
“He’s only just noticed he’s been wearing bread shoes all these years!” someone said and more and more people came over to look.
I jumped off the bench and tried to run away but the crowd pushed me back and I fell to the floor. My dad stood over me and started to crumble my broken shoe over me and then he pulled the other shoe off my other foot and crumbled that over me as well until I was covered in bits of shoebread. The crowd started shouting “BREAD! SHOE! BREAD! SHOE!” over and over again, and some of them started throwing bits of bread at me that they’d brought with them in bags to feed the birds on the pond but the birds would just have to go hungry today there was more important things going on.
I sat up. I looked at my dad and wept his name as he strode toward me. He picked up his shoe from the bench and hit me with it, right across the cheek. There was a cheer from the crowd and then they started taking their shoes off and throwing them at me as well and I collapsed to the floor and gave up any attempt at resistance.
In the distance like a dream I could hear my sister saying, “Mummy, mummy, come and look David’s just found out his shoes are made from bread!” and I heard my mother laugh and the pair of them hurried over but by the time they got there I was buried beneath a great tomb of shoes and there was nothing left to see.
__________
Notes:
1. Written on February 8th, 2017
2. This never actually went on the undex because it was dead by then
3. But it was supposed to go there
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Yeah, I’ve never done this before. I‘m fucking terrified. I was terrified before, for weeks, and I was terrified earlier, out the back, waiting, trying to relax. And I’m terrified now, standing here on stage behind this mike. Holding on to this lectern as tightly as I can for courage and trying not to look any of you in the eye. In case I see your disgust, your anger. Your boredom. Or possibly worse, your delight and amusement. So I’m going to concentrate as intently on my notes as I can, pick them up, and start to read.
“Yeah, I’ve never done this before,” I read out loud, word for word from the page. “So, um, sorry. If it’s, you know…” I give you an amiable shrug — at least I hope it’s amiable — and then finish my sentence… “if it’s a bit shit.”
A couple of you laugh. Not many, and not for long. The audience equivalent of a polite smile.
“So anyway,” I say, “I hope this is okay.” A slight pause before the next line. “I’ve been dreading this all week.” And I try to say that, I mean to say that, with a laugh, but at best I manage a sort of forced unnatural looking smile.
Do I tell you, I’m wondering, when I’m practicing this at home, how at first, even in an empty room, I can’t speak. That I’m so self-conscious I can’t even overcome the horror of public speaking in private, to no-one. And not just on the first day of practicing this performance, but every day. Every time.
But I decide it’s probably best not to say a word of that to you. It’d sound needy, pleading. So I go back instead to hoped-for charm of admitted first-time incompetence instead.
“This is…” I start, looking down at my script, flicking through the pages nervously before putting it back down. I start again: “Sorry, I should have said thank you all for coming. And I hope the book’s not a disappointment. Well, I hope tonight’s not a disappointment either, as you’ve all made the effort to come down here and everything. But especially the book…”
Is this silence that follows as uncomfortable for you as it is for me? Is my voice as inflectionless, as emotionless, as I always fear? Does it sound as awful to you as it always sounds to me when I hear a snippet of it on tape, in the background of some video I’ve recorded on my phone? Or in my dreams.
I read some advice somewhere about how it’s best to never, ever, think about the sound of your voice, not when you’re speaking, when you’re giving a speech, but I’ve started now and how to stop? It’s like being told at the dentist or wherever not to swallow — you’re told not to swallow and you think okay, I won’t swallow, and then, only then, do you realise how desperate you are to swallow, how you’ll choke if you don’t, and you can feel your tongue absolutely huge in your month and if you don’t swallow you’ll fucking choke you’ll choke on your own tongue you’ll forget how to breathe you’ll fucking die.
I’m trying not to think of the true sound of my own voice and yet I have to speak. I have to just close my mind to it and carry on and read.
So I go back to my notes. I read. I speak.
“This first story — it’s not the first one in the book but it’s the first one tonight — it’s called The Reading, or Performance Anxiety.”
I’ve printed these stories out quite big, so the letters are nice and distinct and the lines are all clearly separated and everything’s nice and easy to read, but now this massive font I’ve used gives all my words the appearance of a children’s story, some sort of Ladybird learn to read book. Or the eyesight test lettering in the opticians.
Actually I think they probably most closely resemble the look of a note in a film, with everything printed in big sparse letters and held in shot long enough so even the slowest readers in the audience can read them. Now I’ve seen this similarity I can’t stop seeing it, and it gives my words a weird and unwanted sense of unreality and artifice, undermining everything I’ve written.
And without belief in what you’ve written your words are nothing.
But finally now I’m on to the story, past all my introductory messages and the title and onto what you’ve come for. Onto what you’ve paid for. I discard the first page, place it neatly to the left, and find my place at the top of the second page. And finally now move onto the first story.
“The Reading, Or Performance Anxiety,” I read out, word for word from the page. “Yeah, I’ve never done this before. I’m fucking terrified.”
It all sounds so hollow, limp and dead on my tongue, disconnected from any real feeling. Not just from feeling but disconnected from each other as well, as if they weren’t even sentences, but instead a collection of unconnected words in a line, and now, as I say them, everything begins to fall apart.
“I was terrified before. For weeks. And I — sorry — I was terrified… I was terrified earlier. Out the back. Waiting. To relax. Wait — I was waiting, I was trying to relax. I…”
I turn the page and during this tiny pause someone shouts ou-
—GET ON WITH IT!
Er, yeah, thanks, like that. Exactly like that.
So I say, “Yes,” back to them. I say, “Sorry.”
But now when I look back at the page I can’t even read the words. My heart’s pounding like I’m afraid I’m about to get hit. I can feel the tears at the edges of my eyes. Not quite tears actually, not yet, but that hot feeling across my face and that… that pricking sensation you get when you can tell that they’re just about to form, when you know that you might still be able to hold them back but once they start they’ll just flow and flow.
That shout, that one single shout.
It feels like being told off at school, never wanting to admit it hurts but it hurts. Being shouted at, being mocked, bullied, abused. And the years of hardening yourself to it, hardening your face so it’s a case of studied blankness even though inside you’re in fucking turmoil.
Please let me still have that control.
“I’m. I’m…” I stammer. “And I’m terrified now, standing here on this stage — ”
— WELL GET THE FUCK OFF IT THEN!
You all laugh. I can hear it and I can see it and you don’t even stop even though I’m looking at you, pleading with you with my eyes, my face, my slumped shoulders, to just
not
laugh
— YOU’RE FUCKING SHIT AT THIS YOU KNOW!
“I’m sorry you think that,” is my, well, my rather lame reply. I’m defeated and I know it, but I try to hold it off, if only for a second. “Sorry, the lights — I can’t see anything — who am I talking to here?”
— EVERYONE!
You laugh and you laugh. The whole room full of you laughing, at him, at his words. And at me, and mine.
“Can you just… Look, can’t you just let me finish. Look, I’m sorry, sorry everyone, maybe it’ll be better if I start again.”
I turn the page back.
“The Reading,” I repeat. “Or, Performance Anxiety.”
I see him getting up, the heckler, out of the corner of my eye. Hopefully he’s leaving and we can all get on with this.
Get through this.
“Yeah, I’ve never done this before. I’m fucking terrified. I was terrified before, for weeks, and I was terrified earlier — ”
— Give that here.
A hand – that hand, there, this hand, his hand – reaches over the lectern and grabs at my papers.
— I bet I can do this better than you anyway. I could hardly be worse, could I?
He laughs. You all laugh.
I look up. There’s a spotlight — that one there — that’s shining directly into my eyes and I can only see this person, this heckler, this intruder, I can only see him as a shadow. The audience, I can’t see the audience anymore, I can’t see them at all. It’s only you now, whoever you are, you. A silhouette, a suggestion — you’re everyone and no-one, you’re looming aggression and dominance and contempt and
I shove him out of the way, two-handed in the chest and he stumbles backwards and, in his surprise, trips. People behind me cheer and I take his place on the stage, turn my back on him and turn round to the room and look at all of you here in the audience. I can see the relief on your faces. The anticipation, the strange vicarious joy.
I begin to flick through the pages of his story, discarding them one by one, passing through the words you’ve already heard and the things you’ve already seen, until on the fourth page I find my place, find the here and now.
I begin to read.
“He sits there at the back of the stage for a moment, too dazed to stand, and listens to me speak. I read his words, shout them out confidently as if they were my own. And I speak them with a clarity, with a conviction, that he could never match. As if the words are mine, now. As if they have always been mine, always will be mine.
“He can’t bear to watch, can’t bear to watch me, my performance, my… usurpation, and he crawls behind the curtains, gets up and stumbles his way down the passages to try and escape. To get away. Away from the stage. Away from all of us. Away from his embarrassment. His failures.
“He opens the fire escape and there’s a sudden rush of silence as the freezing cold air hits his face and he imagines me stopping, triumphant, as I reach the end of his story. He pictures me bowing slightly, taking his applause, the pages of his words littering the stage around my feet. I step around the podium and I hold my arms wide and I bow again and smile and wave and your ovation grows and grows and then finally begins to subside.
“And now his tears flow.”
__________
Notes:
1. Written on March 19, 2016
2. This was performed at a liars league event in London on November 8th, 2016.
3. Where it was performed by the wonderful Peter Kenny, as can be seen below:
If you like the things you've read here please consider subscribing to my patreon or my ko-fi. Patreon subscribers get not just early access to content and also the occasional gift, but also my eternal gratitude. Which I'm not sure is very useful, but is certainly very real.(Ko-fi contributors probably only get the gratitude I'm afraid, but please get in touch if you want more). Thank you!