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DREAMSLEEP. TRAVELS IN ANOTHER WORLD. He woke like a flexed springboard, his brain screamed TIME! He looked down from the bed when he heard his socks talking to him. He went to the fridge to look for some ice for his head. The fridge wouldn’t give him any ice. He went to lie down on the sofa. The sofa wouldn’t let him. Not until you’ve said ‘Good morning’, said the sofa. He did all of his thinking in the bath. His brain lived there amidst the steam and limescale and charmingly emptied ashtrays full of grey death and lipstick-stained stubs haphazardly deposited in the thoughtfully provided wastepaper basket, the thought presumably having been: put your toilet-roll tubes and tampon cellophane here. It seemed to take an inordinate amount of time each day for him to bathe, shit, shave, shampoo — although never in that order. He followed an unchanging ritual. He hated the thought of inhabiting this tiled sanctuary when someone else might want to use it. He shared accommodation. THE OTHERS always wanted to use IT at the same time, or so it seemed. He despised himself for polluting ‘their’ atmosphere with his molecules, for leaving an indelible image on the mirror, or athlete’s foot spores on the bathmat. He felt that he had probably been born with a mission but one he had never been wide-awake enough to metabolise. It was a ‘feeling’; exempt from tax and not assessable in the normal way. For a flash or two each day before shaving he imagined he had come close to a sensation of comprehension. It soon passed. Ablutions completed, he would sit in front of the box, big-haired and perfumed, flickering madly in its voodoo glow. He was unemployable. No one seemed to mind. The benefit trickled in sporadically. There were plenty of jobs; he saw them every day in the previous day’s papers. Jobs for people who hankered to sell durables to people who didn’t want them, to sit in front of boxes absorbing radiation playing with green numbers. Brain cells were too precious. To allow them to die without the dignity of a good hard hangover was tantamount to murder. He had often been drunk — often drunker — vomit was his calling-card. Each time, his father’s bloated words came back with bitter taste and bulging eyes: hangovers get longer as you grow older. Like coverage of state funerals on the box, he remembered. How unbearable Churchill’s had been as a four-year-old! Having sworn that there would be no next time, next time he would drink more. Alcohol kept reason occupied while the family jewels were being burgled. Drunk, incapable of taking those precautions recommended to drunkards, he fell asleep crumpled, crapulous, flatulent, parched as the house-plants; hell-mouthed, open-jawed, bare-ass naked and bare-face cheeked until well past lunchtime. He shared his accommodation with working people who went ‘out’ to work. By the time he felt clean they had been ‘out’, come back and gone ‘out’ again, and there was just enough time for a THOUGHT FOR THE DAY before retiring to his books, his sock bag, his carpet fluff, his single bed. The THOUGHT was: don’t forget to turn off your set. He always tried not to, although the set was rented. When he stood up, he stood up too quickly and something rushed to his head. It caused the world to soften. He supposed that this was his blood circulating but it seemed hard to believe. This was the closest he came to fast living. He convinced himself that NOT WORKING had provided him with ‘solutions’ to the world’s problems and this made him feel like Jesus. In fact, NOT WORKING had provided him with very little. NOT WORKING gave him time to raid the fridge, to worry about nutrition, to write facetious poetry about vital issues, to pollute the atmosphere with molecules of undigested food while THE OTHERS were ‘out’ working and to worry about being so bloody self-conscious. His Jesus-complex shared accommodation with parts programmed to perform a mindless array of circus acts in resilient loops; like ironing creases in his shirt sleeves and trying to hide his spots. You see, you could do just so much worrying before you burst, as the young lady with the moped had said, and why didn’t he just give all his money to the Ethiopians if he felt so strongly about it. Or let his mind go free and be as a Buddhist forest pool, a still calm place where many wonderful, brightly-coloured animals would come to drink. Buddha was beyond him. Even meditating on his own corpse seemed a disturbingly trivial form of recreation, not spiritual commitment. Tomorrow he would go ‘out’ and draw from his building society his RENT, that abstract quantity which he would then pay to his landlord, without first meditating on the equation that money equals food equals life. He would feed the fish and see THOUGHT FOR THE DAY before bedtime. At night in the dark hours he was a wordfreak, a glum bureaucrat; lists and trivialities a speciality. He had a novel. It was half-finished but he could not let it conquer him now. A half-written novel is a terrible thing. Even if you don’t look at it for months it’s there, gnawing at you, leaching you, prodding at you, day and night. Blank pages like unhatched eggs in the dark, sucking you dry without pause wherever you go. You cannot escape from a half-written novel. A clot, a clerk, obscure and prone. He was a latter-day Gordon Comstock and he didn’t even know it. Like THE OTHERS his life was as a grain of sand in a shifting, boundless desert. But what did this mean? It was hardly a lifestyle but a means to an END. He prayed for an emphatic conclusion and a grand unveiling of clues. He trusted in the Supreme Being — The One who gives us our daily bread and our natural history camera crews. Unlike THE OTHERS he fell into places but not into place. He bought things he could not afford for that reason. He was young and frequently penniless and therefore some sort of... But socialists were surely extinct! Obsolete and in danger of lapsing. Middle-age was a disease of the right-wing — stocks and piles and a gout of shares. He wanted his share and he wanted it now. He wanted a share for everyone and was no longer sure that it was necessary for anyone to be anything in return, just to do. And he would start doing very soon. But there was that note again: the high-pitched whine to remind him he had forgotten to turn off the set. -0O0- (A Glum Bureaucracy first appeared in print in Axiom magazine, issue 3, 1995, Wales.)
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