Peeping Tom 2-1-3-4 [2]

1-2-3-4 → 2-1-3-4 → 3-1-2-4 → 4-1-2-3

Window 2

The woman enters the bathroom and pulls down her skirt, smooth along her vase-like hips and thighs. She sits on the toilet and urinates, her arms cupped around her knees. She sits there awhile, tilting her head until it hovers above her legs—a difficult bowel movement? Soon she starts to shake . . . it becomes clear she is shaking with emotion. The window is open. A few minutes pass and she responds to an outside noise, a knock at the door, perhaps? She rips some loo paper, dabs herself then shimmies up her skirt: for a second her genitalia is exposed, buried in a shrub of ginger pubic hair. She dabs her eyes then checks her perfect face in the mirror, steadies her enormous rock of hair.

It’s her from the flat opposite: what is she doing here? Her bland shiny face, as though smeared in Vaseline, withers beside the soft skin of the woman, the lady. Both are in the bathroom now, talking. Now she’s sobbing again and her next door is consoling her, kneading her greasy fingers along the lady’s sensuous shoulders, muttering things. Manipulating? “He doesn’t love you. Why don’t you leave him?” Or: “You’d be better off without him.” Soon it makes sense: she’s a lesbian. “Why don’t I move in for a while? I’ll help you through it, honey, I’ll always be there for you, unlike him.”

Peeping Tom 1-2-3-4 [4]

1-2-3-4 → 2-1-3-4 → 3-1-2-4 → 4-1-2-3

Window 4

Some dude with a trendy haircut—sort of wavy sides and spiky slicks, half-army half-punk—stands cutting a carrot, bobbing his head to music coming from the white rectangle tucked into his belt. Behind him a pot bubbles over quite quickly, sloshing hot water down the cooker and onto the laminate floor. The dude chops rhythmically, pleased with himself. He reaches for his belt and pushes a button to skip a track. The water pools around his feet and he looks over at the pot and shouts, clearly: “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

He minces around the monster pot, still spitting water, grabs an oven glove and lifts the pot off the hob. He turns his head and shouts something into another room, reaching for a dishtowel to mop up the water. As he bends down, the white rectangle drops out his belt and dangles from the headphone cables in his ears, saved by a swift grab as he stands up again. He tosses the dishtowel in the washing machine then checks the pot. He calls through to the room again and pokes the contents of the pot with a wooden spoon.

Peeping Tom 1-2-3-4 [3]

1-2-3-4 → 2-1-3-4 → 3-1-2-4 → 4-1-2-3

Window 3

A child in a room with three lamps—big bright bulbs in each—sits on the floor before a video game. On screen, a car zooms around corners faster than the eye can process, but the child takes control and passes a big blue bumper car. A young girl walks in with a teddy bear clutched to her chest, fiddles with her long brown hair. The boy shouts across to the girl, his sister? Could be: “Get out, I’m trying to concentrate!” The girl, to her brother? “Can I play?” A car streams ahead as the track straightens out towards the finish line. The race ends, the boy seems distraught and throws down the pad.

He’s furious, kicking his legs and shouting. The girl backs out the door, upset but gone before the tears start. A minute later a tall mother(?) in a business shirt and skirt towers over the boy, switches off the console and wags her finger. The child sits and sulks, the mother repeats a question: “Is that clear? Do you understand me?” A little nod of the head. The mother leaves, he sprawls across his Spiderman bedclothes and buries his head in the pillow. Is he sad at being told off or upset that he didn’t save the game?

Blog Carnival — Come Ride My Elephant

I struggled with this ‘language’ prompt for several weeks—all good writing to me makes language intrinsic to its purpose, how could it do otherwise? Then I thought about amusing misunderstandings had with people from different countries. None. All the people I’ve met from Italy, France, Africa, America, even Wales, have spoken clearly and without fault. My own incompetence with identifying accents is slightly amusing—I once mistook an Englishman for an American (hahaha) and corrected a French Jehovah’s Witness’s grammar for a ten minutes (hahaha—priceless!) OK. Not that funny.

Instead, this post is about unspoken languages, conversations we have with people in our heads that comprise an entirely subconscious system of communication conducted with ourselves that we hope other people might share and respond to via telepathic intuition. This will make sense as the piece progresses, I hope. If not, think bad things about me.

1. Librarians

I have a telepathic communication system with librarians. The books I withdraw are usually ultra-cool, intelligent and amazing. That’s how I roll on the book front. No harlequin robots in Indian climes for me. Whenever I bring four or nine books to the counter, I absorb the begrudging respect behind their noncommittal glances. Each stamp, scan and swish I know means ‘what a cool guy, he’s withdrawing books I’ve never read, and I’m a freaking librarian!’ And when I return these books a week later and send them trotting off to fetch my reservations, I know they secretly rub the books against their crotches or press them into their skin so their essences waft at me from the pages. I know.

2. Pavement People

I have the most sorted walking style in the world. Instead of weaving all over the place, making way for others, letting old women or wheelchairs pass, I am the city stealth cruiser. Here’s my secret: I always walk extremely close to buildings, until I’m practically brushing against the walls. This gives walkers the impression I am forever about to turn into a shop, giving me right of way at all times, allowing me to walk in a straight line on crowded streets. Whenever I pass people, I see a gleam of admiration in their eyes, wishing they’d been so ingenious as to think up that foolproof way of never getting out the way. (Note: This technique works only if there aren’t things in way, which there often are).

3. Shoplad

When I lived in Edinburgh, I used to have problems at my local shop. There was a teenage boy who worked in there who, one night when I bought some spaghetti and Fruit Pastilles, remarked on the oddness of this culinary choice. At first vexed, I then realised he admired me with burning love. The next night I returned and bought rice and a bag of marshmallows. His little eyes swelled up, bursting with pride at such unconventional choices for supper material. Later, I blew his tiny mind when I went in there and bought a Mars bar, some hummus and a lemon. He’s a chef now, working under Heston Blumenthal.

4. Girlfriends

I’ve developed a form of reverse polarity with girlfriends. I will interpret every direct command as a plea for me to do the exact opposite. Whenever a girlfriend tells me to stop reading so much and look at her for a few minutes, I bury my head in a book and rarely acknowledge her existence. She tells me to go out and get some exercise, I lock myself in and read four books back to back. She tells me to stop recommending books to her because she doesn’t read, I tell her to read Alf MacLochlainn, Ewa Kuryluk and Micheline Aharonian Marcom. She tells me never to critique her writing and I give her detailed notes and watch as she storms out the door calling me an arrogant ballsac. Girlfriends!

5. Christopher Allen

When Christopher Allen reviews my stories, we have a secret understanding. When he tells me to move certain lines after dialogue one or two lines down, I delete the comment and then drink some cider. When we read pieces we’ve made notes on in print and we notice NONE of our suggested changes has been implemented, we cackle and drink bottled water. That’s how we do things in our crazy writing worlds. Thank you for reading and please check out the other posts in the carnival!

[Part of the Blog Carnival, hosted by Mister Christopher Allen at I Must Be Off!]

Peeping Tom 1-2-3-4 [2]

1-2-3-4 → 2-1-3-4 → 3-1-2-4 → 4-1-2-3

Window 2

A man and woman in their late thirties early forties, one sits on the toilet, another the bath’s edge, backs turned. The end of an argument? The man sits in a white vest and blue shorts, the woman a black nightdress. For ten seconds their bodies remain still, no fidgeting or shuffling. The man moves his lips, mumbling. Perhaps the woman is speaking? “Yeah. Hmm. Yeah,” the man seems to be saying. He gazes into the street, his look one of profound boredom. Is she going on too long? Her head bobs, she turns around.

The woman is beautiful. Wide, passionate eyes and hair like flowing magma. The man is, frankly, lucky to have her. She twirls her knees out the bath, shuffles along the tiles and rubs the man’s shoulders. The man resists her touch then loosens up and turns to her. If this were TV, he might be saying: “I know, honey, it’s just so-and-so.” Or: “I’m scared, baby, scared about such-and-such.” The woman’s long fingers knead his bony shoulders like cooking dough, swaying gently as they lapse into silence.

Peeping Tom 1-2-3-4 [1]

1-2-3-4 → 2-1-3-4 → 3-1-2-4 → 4-1-2-3

Window 1

A short fat man, thinning on top, sits in an easy chair flipping channels and eating kettle chips from a funsize bag. From the precision tilting of his chair and the cushions at his back and bum, one might assume he suffers from lumbar discomfort, brought on by too many nights before the TV in stiff-backed chairs or upright leather sofas. And to counter his back problems, he chooses to perpetrate the very act that brought him the pain, oblivious to the irony as he pops open a Coke and stuffs in more kettle chips.

Then a woman walks in, younger than him by twenty years or so, greasy skin and overalls. A daughter living with her father, or vice versa? Soundlessly, she pegs her pinny on a coathook and glares, hands on hips, accusatorily. One can imagine her thoughts: “Still sitting there, you fat slob? Why don’t you get some exercise, fatty?” Her body language shows disdain: stepping around his carpet crumbs, over his fat ankles and into a chair. She reaches for the remote then makes a face at his greasy fingerprints all over the plastic. The image on-screen changes to a singer “pumping the air.”

The Peeping Tom Project

I started a novella inspired by Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual a few months ago—a grand statement about the importance of collaborative and fragmented narratives in a virtual world (a statement a decade or two out of date, since we’ve been living in that world since I was a zygote)—but my ambitions crumbled under their own weight. A sub-OuLiPo extravaganza was the plan, to be authored by ten or so different writers. Each writer would play a voyeur observing various shenanigans in a tenement block opposite, the purpose something to do with focusing intently on the minutiae or boring bits of life to achieve a more transcendent narrative (cribbed from David Foster Wallace). This despite the fact each paragraph was plump with unusual or suspect antics: a series of interlocking narratives with manic plots, like what standard fiction is sometimes, so not particularly original.

The novella had its own complex structure where the narrator(s) would describe the actions in each window in groups of four (each group standing for 24hrs). I added a further complication by making each group include a character from a different window in the sequence 1-2-3-4 at all times. So if the order was 2-1-3-4, a character from window 1 would appear in window 2, a character from window 1 would appear in window 2, and so on. Already, you see the utterly unnecessary complications involved, and I’m not sure I understand them myself. The map looked like this:

Story Map

1-2-3-4 → 2-1-3-4 → 3-1-2-4 → 4-1-2-3

1-2-4-3 → 2-1-4-3 → 3-1-4-2 → 4-1-3-2

1-3-2-4 → 2-3-1-4 → 3-2-1-4 → 4-2-1-3

1-3-4-2 → 2-3-4-1 → 3-2-4-1 → 4-2-3-1

1-4-2-3 → 2-4-1-3 → 3-4-1-2 → 4-3-1-2

1-4-3-2 → 2-4-3-1 → 3-4-2-1 → 4-3-2-1

This unfinished piece seemed like a shoo-in for a brief blog series. Hence my plan to stuff this blog with regular excerpts from the permanently unfinished novella. I don’t expect anyone to read this (people reading stories on blogs? don’t be ridiculous!), but it’s either on here or in the wastebasket. I only completed the first four sets up to 4-1-2-3, so that’ll be our new story map. If I upload one window per post, I can generate sixteen posts over a few months. Go me! I hope these posts don’t upset my one reader. Love you Joe xxx.