Snow

The phone woke me. It was winter, I think, and the beginning of the night. I climbed from the bed. I couldn't find the phone, I couldn't find the light. I knocked over an old chair, it banged. Good old wooden floor. I tried to follow the sound. I stalked around the room, upsetting ashtrays and piles of books. It continued to ring for a long time and I started to hate the sound. I pawed and dug, sifted and sorted. I'm probably going through the same things over and over again, I thought, not sifting or sorting at all but making it worse. I'm kneeling in the dark, ruining things. And the phone has been ringing for too long. Is there another phone, and who would call and what can I say? I don't know the things to say and it's probably plugged into the wrong thing. No one is there. It's a joke. It's the company calling to say everything must be torn down, torn out, torn- there! There. I found the phone, growling underneath an old coat. I hit it. I spoke carefully. I don't like speaking on the phone and when this call came I hadn't spoken to anyone for a long time. I can't come to the phone, I'd shout from the top of the stairs down to no one at all.

- Hello? That was the correct word.

- Hello. A girl's voice. I coughed. I walked around the dark again. I fumbled for the light, tapping and striking at the wall. Thuds, buried sounds, hollow groans and hisses from the pipes. She started to speak in a rehearsed voice. I thought of an actress talking to a mirror.

- It's Alice. We need something for the new book.

I found the light. The bulb faltered and then flickered on. Weak yellow light filled the room. My stomach hurt. I wanted to smoke. Alice is a browneyed name. I remember her- partially a bird, soft as a seal pup, smoking in the corridor, sobbing on the phone, sitting on her father's bed.

- But I don't- I shoved some bad work off the desk, looking for cigarettes. I gutted the old coat. I gutted another, found something in a pocket. I don't work anymore, I can't work anymore, I said. I had my cigarettes and my matches. I tilted the phone to strike the match to light my cigarette. It was disgusting.

- That's what Max said. I still don't know who Max is. But please, she said, her voice softening. The mirror disappeared. It can be very, very short. Tiny. A bit of a dream flickered behind my eyeballs: a river, a long black river at night, full of sludge and muck. This is my fallow period. Smoke poured out of me. I rubbed my eyeball into its socket. It began to hurt.

- Shhh.... she said.

I felt the river against my legs. And I think I hung up.

It was snowing. I rummaged through a few bags. No biscuits left. And no drugs left. My shoes will fall off in the snow, I thought, and my coat isn't thick enough. I remembered a film about an orphan dying in the snow and then someone coming and stealing his shoes. The light still worked, glowing happily in the ceiling.

It was freezing outside. Rubbish lined the streets- heaps of swollen black bags that no one can collect. Men with kits and masks came to my room after I refused to remove my rubbish. I was lying down and there was no reason to move. I told them to fuck off. I won't pay the fine, I can't. I'm poor. They took my TV which I didn't care about and wanted to get rid of anyway. When they came for my electricity and gas I moved into another room, which was empty, and stole that tenant's light and heat. Then I started moving all my old work into that room. I left my clothes because the other tenant had kept his there. If I'd moved into a woman's room I'd probably put on her clothes and swan around as a woman for a while, until I was beaten up or raped or bored. I could probably move from room to room forever and no one would know. I like my room so much, though, and I told Alice whenever she rang that all I wanted was another room, more rooms, bigger, smaller, emptier, older.

I walked to and from the supermarket. I only ate biscuits and I only drank milk. I really liked meat but I hated my kitchen. I watched endless sties of bacon sizzling in the pan and then, close to a seizure, hurled it at the window where it would settle, sticking because of all the grease. I like oil, too, I like the way it crackles. One of my shoes came off in the snow but I carried on trudging, holding it in one hand, watching my poor foot turn red and then eventually blue. I had no idea where my post-box was. I muttered like a character in a film, I know it's somewhere around here. I wondered if it was on the other side of the woods but then I started worrying about crows and ravens and wolves. If I walked through there, animals would devour me whole- at least, the little of me that was left. Snow made it impossible to tell where anything was. A blank, dead world, silent and without light, the sky and the earth the same colour: the earth of the sky entirely grey.

I think I was blind for a spell- the snow kept falling and swirling and went in my eyes. When my sight returned I was still struggling along the road. The light was no different and the snow went on swirling and falling. I staggered around, pausing to be sick and then to smoke and then to be sick again. I dragged my black foot through the snow, holding onto my shoe, and then fell down again. This went on for a while. Then the snow began to thin and the light weakened but I could walk again. Soon I found the building where my post was kept, a building exactly like mine. I trudged towards it but there was a hideous white dog blocking my way. It started barking at me, its teeth, all yellow and bared, barking over and over, sounding like the phone, a horrid black fuzz around its mouth and its useless eyes working back and forth. So I kicked it. It snarled and then started to quiver, as if it was plugged into a machine. It crackled. I walked forward and it leapt at me. It held onto my arm, making a very low throbbing sound. I struck it with the shoe until it fell away and then kicked it in the stomach, all the time very sad because I never wanted to wound a dog, even if it was white and hideous. The snow continued to fall. I stood there and smoked.Then slowly, softly the dog came to its feet. It rose like a marionette. It stared me. We entered the building together and fetched my post. I threw the dog a black biscuit and then, under the cold grey light, took a large, delicious dose. I like to feel the drug settling in my stomach, falling on me and slowing me down, wearing me out. Alice sent me a photograph of a chair. I walked back with the dog. I have no idea how long it took.

For the next three days I sat in my room and finished the package, gorging until it was impossible to move. My face and legs were totally numb, the light was dead and I was permanently half-asleep, caught on the narcotic drift. I would walk to and from the window, watch snow settle on the road, see the men work hopelessly at it with shovels, listen to the television talking in other rooms and count the red lights as they glimmered and danced in the dark. I would stroke the dog and let the room slowly fill with ash. The snow didn't stop and soon, the windows were impossible to open. Frost etched on all the glass. Children singing songs would drift past my door and I would climb back into my nest and feel myself floating on the big black broken glass of the sea. I can still hear the waves.

Eventually Alice phoned again. I surfaced, the drugs gone, the biscuits eaten, to that horrid skinny ringing sound. The dog feasted on the stuffing of my old chair as I sifted and sorted again, my feet tarred and sticky from all of his shit. I found the phone.

- Hello? I said, rubbing my foot into the wall which groaned.

- Hello. Do you have any work?

- No, I can't work. I kicked the dog to stop it stuffing itself. I was worried he would eat until his seams split.

- That's what I guessed would happen which is why I sent you the chair.

I muttered something, watching as the dog ate and ate.

- I'll interview you in my building. I can pay you.

- I only want another room, I said, again. A little room, a space, a kennel, because it's impossible for me to work anymore.

- Do you think, that old crackle covering her voice, you'd ever be able to work again?

- No, I'm finished. It's over. I read, I sleep, I eat, and all of that's hard enough, I can fatten up if I want. I can die. I don't want to work.

I hung up.

She still sends me photographs, cuttings and cassettes. They are in a heap next to the dog which ate until it was stuffed. She sent me a photograph of herself and sometimes I think about her, or masturbate, or she's the subject of an uneasy or desperate dream but it passes. We're always by that river, walking quietly, the cold tightening around our bones, our bodies shutting down. I closed the blinds and removed the lightbulb. Now I lie in the dark and smoke. I'm quiet. The snow continues to fall.

Disappearing

What I'd like to say now, in my angelhood, beautifully-fledged, pearls for teeth, gold dust for breath and absolutely NOTHING between my legs- a void, a hole, an exit, a nothing, sweet nothing at all- is about before, when a sickly slug shrivelled against my cold thighs.

That is the pretty way of saying I am a transsexual, of saying they took my head and made a nose from it, took my miserable thigh muscles and made shy, withered tits and- yes, yes- tore off my cock, cut and shaped the poor servant into a pleat and took all its roots and goo and all the red, foul, filthy shit inside it that I wanted to cut off at birth with the doctor's grinning scissors and then tried to bite off with my milk teeth in the bath with my sister (I had void envy, penis anxiety) and, yes, they disappeared it. It's a decommissioned spy, dead, once lurking in a space above my intestines, incubated in my bloated guts, long abandoned, now gone, gone, gone. Allgone. First thing I ever said but it took forever-ever to happen.

What a grand entrance, oh, flashbulb burnt out, honey. Look how I ended up uglier even than before, a swollen, bleary-eyed beast caged in a high-rise, fucked and drifting down the infinite green gloom of the hallway, hunted by gangs of anaemic skinhead children smoking cigarettes and pretty girls throwing glitter in my face as I sob, poor tormented Tiresias, oh, yes, the tower block's anguished, ancient Orlandon't, expiring, tears echoing down the stairwell. No, but you would've seen seen me on a late night broadcast when you were stoned, nodding out to soft jazz and Ceefax, badly made black n' white freeze-frames of my face (that hideous, miserable couple, before and after) cut and rushed between footage of a riot in Chicago in 1994 or slow motion CCTV shots of kids on methedrine stealing cars. And I would have a pseudonym: become again, another, finally, unfussily extinguished phoenix, I would be Girl A, no, no, Patient A, never Girl A, no. I need a pseudonym, like one of Warhol's girls. Be like Holly Woodlawn, trilling on the big black telephone, snorting speed off silver foil for breakfast as Bobby D. stares at the camera, hollow-headed Dylan scoring horse on the fire escape before walking to the cemetery with Allen- Edie, Edie, babe, you seen my copy of Time? (And one of us crows, 'Yeah, it wounds all heals!') Oh, but we pity Edie, stroke and mother her, our poor androgyne, emaciated speed freak, cooing, coming down, lost on a pillow in the kitchen. Poor little rich girl. Our walking abortion. But all that glory is gone, lost in that terrifying lap dissolve into the '80s, girls clinging to the ghost of an image, disappearing, fading into bad blood, New York winter, taking new names.

I wasn't ghost-written or imagined by a phantom. I'm not hiding, fake, finished like a book. Neon and ink names are nothing against flesh- the skin, bile, tissue and bone in everything. Girls name themselves after birds and famous tigers: no name reaches for the beauty of flesh and its soft, slow decay. What about my condition's name? I reach for the textbook and I shudder. Did I have dysphoria? Oh, yes, a million times yes, a brain in a unfamiliar skull and eventually, a dead shell. But look, look out the window! 'Condition' is inadequate. It was not a particular 'thing', or a singular residue, trauma or bruise that caused me to sob, shriek and tear at the skin which I just bragged about. There was nothing about me, howling, helpless in my hair-shirt, that could be fixed and corrected in a shot. Look out the window, over the car park: see the family in coats, cold, holding each other, walking to their car. And nothing else around at all. I don't know their names, I can barely see them, can't feel them, and if I spoke- I wouldn't, I wouldn't. It is exactly that. I was disconnected from everything: nothing had the right name. Existence is the condition and the root, the home of the disease and the sickness. Nothing else at all- all inside burned and buried. Ashes.

Fourteen Howls

First howl begin like this: Say I wasn't even tired, but louder like faraway, I wasn't even tired- howl- so skinny, gaunt, a ghost, yes, louder, first howl ends like that.

Second howl is an image: Starlight scarred across the glass. Girl flinches against the light.

Third howl on tenth floor: Miserable juveniles stealing from refrigerators, fucking on freezing floors, still scared of dogs. A howl echoes at that height. Sleet or frost on window. If you fall from the window you become an angel.

Forth howl is American woman howl: 'If it wasn't for bad luck I'd have no luck at all.'

Fifth howl responds: 'Huh?' The rabbit scratches his head, slumps against the kerb, slurps his milkshake and gives the ground a good thump. The rabbit tells someone his mother died. Listen: the silver crackles around Cassiopeia, the smog groans through the trees, and gradually all the light is exhausted.

Sixth howl is a separate howl, it concerns everywhere I have never been: Borges' house, Auschwitz, a school in a devastated district of Detroit, that abandoned room full of children's things in Bristol, Cemeterie Saint (I forget) in Paris, a television studio, various relations' graves and the woods. Where are the woods exactly? And I have never been to Kent. This list would go on forever.

Seventh howl- the halfway through howl: Two wolves have a conversation near a supermarket.

-Have you ever tried to kill yourself?

- Yes.

- How?

- I know it was tranquillisers but I do not remember so I guess really I do not know but the records say that and when I woke up there was this growling, grumbling low in my stomach that really hurt and the postman came, no, the doctor came, and said, That is because of the pills. I nodded, I did not want to speak, I was sick of words. I'm so anxious about words.

Interference: The wolves didn't say anything, they can't. Well, they can but we don't understand. I saw a wolf at a zoo once and she did not howl at all. Her eyes were pinned like they were marbles. She didn't produce a breath. Perhaps it was a model I stroked and not a wolf at all.

Eighth howl is from a starving body: Not- I don't, I didn't- I practised fasting because it's howling- it's holy. I was never, um, diagnosed an anorexic girl, and I never said anything- but I felt there was a hole there- a big, black hole, and I thought starvation would block it. Plug it. I didn't- it... and now the whole is bigger than it was, before.

Ninth howl tells a lie: Certain swans are richer than the entire Danish royal family because swans have their own economy based on things children forget in the park.

Tenth howl takes MDMA: Look at that light falling. I don't want it to stop. Oh, there's another wave. Yes, yes. Shhh....

Eleventh howl from a mother: Please, come home, come home, come home.

Twelfth howl is silent and allows for peace between the calls and lets us observe the inclination and the glittering of our stars.

Thirteenth howl is from Robert Wyatt, 1990: 'There's a lot of words that don't exist yet and I can't be bothered to wait for them to exist.'

Last howl end like this: Children always play angels. Are we anxious from them to die? So we pretend they're dead, or faraway, archived in the sky, at work in the huge black void, the great, cold night? All angels once were drowned girls, overdosing Ophelias- teenage suicides- miserable, brittle boys who faded out in cold bathrooms or stopped, asleep, and felt their voices disappearing in the dark, or exhausted their veins in flats, leapt from roofs, sick from paint, starved, collapsed, crashed, cracked... yes, last howls late at night. End like that.

Rabbit and Bear on a Rock by Paul McCarthy and frontispiece to Alice's Adventures In Wonderland by John Tenniel. No copyright infringement intended.

Failure (of a tree)

'If I say 'tree' you think of branches, leaves and perhaps, the things which might pause upon a branch or pass through the leaves like pigeons or a torch beam or the breeze and then you might imagine the surface of the trees, their skin, which is normally mutilated by men, with woodsmen, those people that tear open a wolf's stomach in your childhood, cutting cavities into the tree's side or children carving messages with little knives, as if the trees were writing to each other, saying I adore you, I fuck you, you hurt me, and you imagine all the sounds which have drifted through the tree and coiled around each branch- all the sirens, all the shouts, all the sad songs of the rooftop wires and the sobs of the distant ships- and all the animals which bristled against the bark- the stray cats, starving foxes, soaking, startled dogs- and all the trees constructed from the fabric of sleep which contain dead children or strange voices, or aren't trees at all but only smoke, only light, only something slowly exploding, coming out as rain, emerging as a star, emitted as a thought, as a spike, a strike against the black, shutdown sleeping surface of your eyeball, before I mention their territorial purpose, their transformation into fire and their gradual manipulation into a material, like fur or straw, for housing, and ask what voice would a tree have and how its speech would begin and question what exactly it would mean to have roots, what exactly it would mean to have no voice at all. And you might think of night in the space of imaginary trees, our arboretum bordering the city park, stained with light, the sky swollen with smoke, and everyone all around, following the falling sound of the television, hunting through the feverish dark, monitored by owls, fleeing the fire. Nothing at all is lost, trudging through paths and hollows and patches where the branches conduct voices like there is a choir, half-asleep, and as if every branch and voice there were only part of a phone-call, occurring each cold and lonely night.'

What I would call a failure, others never even described.

Beautiful Sheffield by Tacita Dean. No copyright infringement intended.

Ennui and Malaise Episodes 5-8

The second series of the programme famously attacked by mainstream media as 'a toxic mix of drugs, drones, deviant sex, anti-social behaviour, pointless hedonism, hopeless 'lefty' politics, leaden symbolism and teenage decadance'.

Continental philosopher, guest star and fan Slavoj Zizek wrote about the series extensively in a monograph called 'Black Milk: Television and Toxicity' published by a small Belgian press.

'Whatever one might like to say about this series- that it is indulgent, that it is pretentious, that nobody does anything but take drugs and have sex and so on, should reconsider their interpretation. The series does not say 'This is the Real', it is against the Real. Everything that happens in Ennui and Malaise is a projection of fantasy so that the person denying these images is immediately disavowing their own fantasies which involve exactly the same exhaustive explorations of sexuality, destructive devotion to libido and stuff like that.'

Episode 5: The famous New Year episode. Alex and Sophie endure the first hour of the New Year at their friend's massive townhouse in Wimbledon. Sophie sits watching hip hop videos with a pair of oversize pigeon wings tied to her back, icicled cocaine and snot hanging from her pretty nose. A gang of underfed art-school girls who talk like they're performing Einstein on the Beach make intimations of boredom throughout. Meanwhile Alex lies in a bath wearing a plastic crown, fucked out of his face on 2-CI and repeatedly touching his hands and the pale surface of the bath while someone with a megaphone recites the lyrics to Respect by Biggie Smalls. Fox, that triumphant homosexual, returns, makes a joke about getting his own spin-off on the annexed tennis courts, does a bit of coke and then gets his 'Alf' sucked by a ataraxic blonde girl who bobs her head to the rhythm of Ivor Cutler's mournful harmonium. Soundtrack: 'Heartbreaker' Maria Carey and Jay Z, 'Heartbroken' by T-2, 'Well Tuned Piano' by La Monte Young and Gruts by Ivor Cutler. Subtitles.

Episode 6: While playing The Game of Death one Saturday afternoon Alex and Sophie decide that they wish to be Situationists. They record an episode of Ren and Stimpy which they then talk over, transforming Stimpy's destruction of the lummox's hang nail into a scene where the sleeping pig of bourgeois territorialism is being slaughtered for his sins. Frequent shots of the skinny couple bathed in cold, ghosty TV light. Soundtrack: 'Broken English' by Marianne Faithfull.

Episode 7: Sophie's sister, Alice, returns from Iceland. The girls flick through magazines, smoke weed, meet Fox at a Kingston underpass where he is snogging a soldier, walk near the sea, go charity shopping, get fuzzy on the kerbs, score some drone shortly before it is illegalised and then try and sleep in the cinema. Fox gets arrested for holding a policeman's cock during an interview while Sophie and Alice climb out a bathroom window, squelch across the winter earth, finish a joint that crackles like glass, steal bikes and sleep in Hyde Park. Alex is in Bristol, shooting heroin, convinced he is dead. Soundtrack: 'Ari's Song' by Nico, 'Too Many Creeps', The Bush Tetras, 'Beat Bop', Rammellzee and K Rob, 'Christmas Time Is Here' by Vince Guraldi. Subtitles.

Episode 8: Reading their dialogue off cue cards held by a skinhead, Alex and Sophie have an argument which often falters or fails entirely. During these frequent silent passages Alex re-enacts Tilda Swinton's breakdown at the end of The Last of England, each time more and more distressed. They conclude the argument eventually, undress, bite, spit, suck and spank each other. Sophie feeds Alex honey until he throws up. She tongues him desperately straightaway afterwards. Soundtrack: Ravi Shankar's work on 'Alice in Wonderland'. Subtitles.

Images: Chloe Sevigny photographed by Terry Richardson and Franny and Zooey poster by Will Holden.

The Screen Test

a) Before the screen test comes the test-card...

The projector kicks in. Light flickers onto my eyeballs, at the second kick, I wake up, and I'm in the cinema again, nothing but nothing but dark, dead light. Why would I dream about Charlotte Gainsbourg in an abattoir? A little girl, soft as fox, sleeping in a freezer on a bed of cold meat. Charlotte is grown up now, recording brain-scanners in California, having long abandoned her experiments in Ada-land, stopped fooling and being silly with all her lemons, libidos and 'in-zest' and settled down in the forest with a smart psychoanalyst. The foxes are talking outside, sneaking over the wintry earth in their little white shoes. They are on their way to the train station because that's where all the best rubbish is kept.

'A mistake on video is forever. All the other mistakes can be crossed out...'

I wish I was a Fassbinder-Fox: no sleep ever ever! Awake the whole time with my dick out the whole time, banging against my fat, mottled thigh, this way and that, while I bomb coke in my Munich bathroom and make phone calls to all my lovers, all suicides, all dumber than I am. I forget I am indoors and mistake the toilet for a train station bench and two criminals come and steal the Nikes from my feet. I am on the phone... 'This is not a cry for help. Darling, liebchen, I am desperate. Please, please, come over and let me touch you, only once.' A muddy residue collects around my nostril, my eyes turn into bloodshot puddles and my cock grows, swollen like a supermarket bag, as I stare at a light fitting. 'Listen... fucking listen to me!'

I am no longer Fassbinder, I am myself again and sitting in my bed in the soft and silent dark. The television snores- LIGHT- and emits a low drone, saying I'm awake. Ceefax jazz and pixellated stories about children drowning then that little girl with her blackboard and clown. What kind of lesson would she teach me? Test-tones underneath: we must make sure all the frequencies are fit and ready for consumption. I guess all the day's programming is put together behind that little board. As soon as it disappears the programmes play out from another screen underground in London.

'Just a small fix, I feel, would recreate the strewn ramparts of Jericho'- Trocchi

While we are talking I'd like to show you a picture of Fassbinder. There he is, poor Rainer, talking very eloquently, slightly subdued (he might be numb from medication) and probably bored. He went all beastly, Fassbinder, by the end, and started to look like a wild animal dressed in leather.

OK, I confess, I was never awake or even alive at the time of the test-card. The most I can claim is being drugged and hallucinating that her image was projected against a flat block wall. I think it was a drunk bird. I ache for all the technology I never experienced or only experienced as a consequence of adult nostalgia. The subject of all poetry is being born too late- too early- or not being born at all.

b) Screen tests. (Because you love quotidian things and the test is the most ordinary, unavoidable thing you can imagine. The test hurts the star, makes them quotidian. In my art I'm making beautiful things quotidian and I'm making quotidian things beautiful, but I think this is really because I'm in love with that particular word. I'm in love but it is a very ordinary kind and a very tedious feeling.)

BOB DYLAN SHOT BY ANDY WARHOL IN 1966.

'I asked [Robbie] what ever happened to that Elvis painting that I gave Dylan because every time I run into Dylan's manager Albert Grossman he says he has it and Robbie said that at some point he traded it to Dylan for a couch! (laughs)' Warhol, in his Diaries.

Dylan by electric moonlight....

After copping speed on the Factory fire-escape from Billy Name, Bob is told 'the light is ready' by Gerard, at which he cracks a joke, sounding like a cross between Groucho Marx and the European weasel. Bob finds the experience tedious and, near its end, disquieting. He complains to Edie, later that night, in her dirty, inherited brownstone that 'That whole thing was bad, man, it's just creepy in there anyway. I don't care about being photographed but-' Edie nudges him with her skeletal arm in a sisterly gesture, moving her head against the pillows and asks, 'Where's the rest of Billy's speed?' Bob imagines that gold-clawed mirror is a camera. Cocteau has already written on the glass. 'The ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face.' Queer what a camera does.

What I mean

is actually really unimportant.

All you need to know is that I want

you to misunderstand.

DONT LET ME BE UNDERSTOOD

I care deeply about being insincere.

I say, all my life I have suffered from a mental dysphoria-

I always wanted a different mind

But if you read me carefully enough

you'd know I'm a very good liar

and in art that is enough.

KATE MOSS MODELS FOR L'OREAL

You can be beautiful, too. Don't be silly, you're not ugly at all. All great models come from public housing like animals. The dirtier, dumber and scummier you are, the more beautiful a bird you can become.

1. Ikonika- Red Marker Pens

2. Y Pants- Favorite Sweater

3. Johnny Depp and Kate Moss- Morning Interview, 1994

Images of Test Card Girl, Charlotte Gainsbourg aged seventeen, Fassbinder in interview available on Criterion edition of Berlin Alexanderplatz, Bob Dylan in D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back and Kate Moss auditioning for L'Oreal hair products in the early '90s. All images are used without the desire to hurt anyone and in this case that means really without intending to incur a hefty fine which we couldn't possibly pay anyway because, duh, we don't have any money.

Test 1/ Salvaged

we kissed delicious on a brown iron rust boat

we kissed delicious on a brown iron rust boat

test two- test two- test two

Poor Rabbit Alice, I crackle in the cold

test one: Poor Rabbit Alice, I'm uncertain in the cold

[dubbed on 1/2 inch tape from original acetate before the fire, started by an arsonist in Chicago, a black separatist.]

test a- reprise: We kissed- delicious- on an iron rust-brown boat.

test d- lovers fleeing the capital under the archived sky/ the similarity of love and drowning.

'I took photographs in college but nothing particularly serious: old trees, dead machines, party wreckage, stray women, lakes where children had drowned and river banks where their raincoats were retrieved.'

intercepted phone call: 'I tell you, you leave pills on the table, they'll get snatched; you leave any substance anywhere and it will go. Weigh it, it'll come up light and then what? Forget it.

test two (attempt six): Can we finish this before we lose the light, please

test 9 (chem. 5) A skinny girl playing the fiddle in a 1956 Hungarian production of Romeo and Juliet. Photograph shows performance's conclusion in Juliet's mausoleum. Exegesis: Tableau alludes to the contemporary situation in Hungary, i.e. a state of not-death/ not-life, a stagnation and still-birth resolved in slaughter. Exegetical failure: Tableau identical to ending of production staged in the 1820s to mollify the King, a die-hard fan of tragedy. Consequent exegesis: Tableau suggests corrected history of Stalinist purges and echoes the alterations of art brought on Stalinist interference.

test 12/ test 12/ test 12: first pressing

I was used.

I was used

I was used to this happening

the familiar tickle and the weird ache

my stomach swirling with the gloomy green sea

fattening and thinning. We kissed, delicious, delicious,

on a brown iron rust boat.

O-, a most stunning oratorio, Kleinman; quite the most magickal Event of this- or Any other- Season.

1. Blur- You're So Great

2. Serge and Charlotte Gainsbourg- Lemon Incest (file removed)

3. Cocteau Twins- A Kissed Out Red Floatboat

Arthur Rackham's Alice. No copyright infringement intended.

Discourse On Modern Living

1. Fire is not a friend

2. Nightly dose of nitrous oxide, nicely, icily, into my lungs

3. Virginity is lost in a park

4. Nervous in churches

5. Things always already over or ending.

6. Supermarkets are comforting

7. Smog is the new rain

8. The absolute minimum all the time

9. There are too many questions, there are too many sirens, there are too many illnesses

10. I discover, I devour, I desire, I discover, I devour, I desire

11. 'Is it real or is it Memorex?'

12. Matthew Broderick in War Games is the ideal man

13. You kiss like a washing machine

14. The culture of smoke, the culture of water, the culture of mud

15. 'It's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism'

16. There are too many quotations, there are too many sciences, there are too many revisions

17. Discontent, dissent, descent

18. Disc content, assent, ascent

19. Cravings

20. Fridge noises

1. Donna Summer- State of Independence

2. Four Tet- Angel Echoes

3. Cluster- Fur Luise

Witches

I asked him, Please remove your straw from my milkshake, your strawberry froth will ruin my fur coat.

He asked if I had carried on acting and playing the violin since we last spoke.

I told him No, no way. Not since I auditioned for Tamora.

Theatre was boring anyway, ever since all those overcast afternoons in primary school, putting together thorny crowns for the prop department. It wasn't a department at all. It was that woman with the terrible neuralgia whose son died in the faraway country. Is she dead now? No one told me what neuralgia was. Someone said it was like the cow illness only longer. I found the condition in a red library encyclopaedia and there was a picture of a neuralgic patient: he had lightning striking his face and he was screaming and he was screaming until the encyclopaedia thudded shut.

A splotch of milkshake kisses fake fur.

Violin? He prompted, rustling through some broken biscuits.

Calluses, I said. Each finger like a winter branch.

I asked about all the afternoons we had spent holding hands by the river, all that tar and fire and sickly sun and nights with sore skin on our lips. He said we wasted them. I didn't say Yes, we did. He was always scared of the river anyway. He was frightened of falling. When we went to the river it never looked particularly strong. The last thing to drown in that river was a witch.

Whatever happened to witches? They probably still exist but we are looking in the wrong places. Where would witches live today?

There, he drew.

Slow afternoon light.

Christian Marclay in 'Ghost (I Don't Live Today)'. No copyright infringement intended.

Fosterchildren

A sad midwinter afternoon... frost scrawled all over the windows as we do a dance to a sonata as delicate as children's hands, the gradual oranging of the afternoon, and the slow construction of a sickly moon (that wasn't meant to rhyme).

Once, when we were kittens, me and Hazel were told to paint. The teacher is a ghost now, but she said to paint 'home' What does home look like, she said.

(This is the only way I can write.) What colour is home? And we both drew anonymous buildings like factories, like churches, like prisons, like offices in thick smoggy grey and licked our fingers because that made the clouds more life-like.

Our bodies later found in empty baths. Sophie playing piano in a half-empty room for an asleep audience. Out in the woods in a world full of rain... dense greenery spangling over my eyes like (I don't know how to finish this bit) dense greenery scattered over my eyes exploding here like a dirty heap of stars. When I was younger I thought it was pronounced frosterchild and now I find this very difficult to say. All the other children, like cats, prowling.

My mattress, muddy, on the kerb.

Two accidental orphans and a sonata like water down the plug hole.

(I cut this out, I black this out, I forget this)

1. John Cage- Music for Marcel Duchamp

2. Nico- Ari's Song

3. Hood- In Iron Light

Photograph of Kim Gordon onstange in Holland in 1991. No copyright infringement intended.