Lactic acid blocked veins in Patrick’s arms. Glowering yellow spores coerced blood cells, murmuring in chorus, ‘hurts, hurts, hurts’. Ascent halted. Nodules mossed. Decussated limbs gripping the escarpment face, Patrick hunched against a lactic pain ceiling.
His lolled head saw floodwater still rising beneath his heels. He hoovered the surface for objective relief: thatch, foliage, carts, were tissues torn angrily; baskets, fresh produce, foals, imperceptibly dipped into froth. Above him, ten more yards of limestone to the escarpment edge.
Patrick roared against the rock face, for oxygen was everywhere! He swatted his cramped fingers towards a jutting ledge.
But the ledge disintegrated. Patrick’s lactic pain ceiling marked a gulf beyond which the last portion of escarpment was suspended. The pole of time that prised apart the guilt of his betrayals and the problem of his survival collapsed, and clattered into the floodwater. Patrick was exhausted. Lactate lowered: ‘hurts, hurts, hurts, hurts’.
Crushed, the weight of his body hanging from his stiffened fingers, Patrick’s arms began to tear. However, at each torn tendon, Patrick was able to fold his newly dextrous arms upon each other to distribute better the weight of his despondent mass. His platted arms frayed into more and more platted threads, pinching veins, cutting off cells, and… at last, appeasing lactate. Bliss streamed in from fissures in the rock face, as his arms became insensate and strong as silk, and he relaxed under the support of his beautiful silk cable. For it was Spring! Birds nested where his hands had been, and Celts jostled him playfully, he heard the shrill cries of children at play, and fescues tickled his feet. The floodwater stilled and glistened.
Patrick sunk blindly into his fibrous cocoon, his temple leaning against its warm interior, and he fell into a deep sleep…
He would leave for Scilly at first light, and return at the end of the war. He looked out of the conservatory onto the privy: box and aromatic herbs comprised knotted lines, framed inside four square quadrants. Through the mist of his condensed breath, these lines described the course of an enormous, circular river, with people strewn along it placid as cows, blushing with gifts. The water’s flow stopped and banged as the river’s mouth accumulated at its source, flooding the base of the higher ground. Shocked and fearing, his breath deepening against the glass, the furiously rising floodwater burst into the conservatory. Patrick hurled himself forward and burst through the glass into the garden. Patrick was a butterfly.
……………
Bursting his cocoon, his fritillary wings turgid, Patrick ascended effortlessly over the escarpment edge, into view of a grass plateau with children playing unattended. The children were feral and illiterate. They shrieked and ran in knotted lines just like those in the privy, in patterns that conjured more and more children, each more feral and illiterate than the last. They were hunched, and weak-kneed. Their hands were sore, palms like copper mines, fingers like rice. They waved oily clumps of wool, pieces of yarn pricked with teasel, crooked wheels, and shortened stools. Patrick noticed their abandoned homes – rallies of cottages on the slopes of surrounding valleys, their tenterhooks rotting, their front gates pivoted, their streams overflowing with grime. A few simpler children still spun threadless wheels or carried empty bags downhill. In the sky, parachuting parents negotiated apprenticeships for their children with the owners of the mills.
Glad, Patrick fluttered forward to reassure those older than six of their immanent return to employment. But, meeting his bulbous eyes and his ribboned thorax, the children turned, deaf to their raised shrieks, and ran away as fast as they could to the valleys below. As they ran, their toys one by one rolled from their contracted hands. Hammer water, Patrick flinched, as their toys hit the grass. Leaks, pollution, ‘your things…’, Patrick muttered, in the wake of the children. He tried to blow the useful downhill to be put to use in the mills. It horrified him, this escape from improvement, this opposite of survival. He felt a mob assemble in his chest, a mob of disdain; clap-hearted disdain; disdain, disdain, disdain. Disdain for the litter.
The children fell like denser air. Patrick stood and watched, as their little legs, green and cambered, carried them like weft threads through the slope’s sieves of homesteads and cottages. They skipped over sleeping sheep and softly guttered streams. They brushed slivers and spinning wheels, and spokes of water machines. They saw quills and handlooms saved from others’ schemes. They dipped rotting tenterhooks and sallow horses’ knees. They left the grass for carding bats, and saturn wire teeth. And they called to the children still working.
For Patrick, the flaming metric of elevation burnt up such puerile settlements and packs. Patrick and the gradient were its sole expression. He was a straightened stream, a sudden descent dragged out in time by molecules and consonants. He was the rest of an end, the obliteration of tributaries; pampered solitude. For disdain now reigned in him. Pixelated disdain. Neuromatic disdain.
In a downslope cascade, Patrick kicked at springs and splashed water. He destroyed the gelatine glow of curtained homes. He expended gardens and caused insects to fight amongst themselves. He discharged tools behind their spurious assurances. At the valley floor, canals and the landmass were fixed in atomic stillness, and parents, owners and doctors smiled vacantly as they ushered their children into the mills, misting unperturbed on the percept of Patrick, a cloud of rural debris, hurtling himself towards the rising sun.
Patrick was triumphant and unable to stop. Now on level ground, it appeared to him that his initial descent from the ridge above was a mere rehearsal, a fireman’s pole, for a much deeper descent, beyond and below the parochial dimension of terrestrial height, his sense of elevation now extending beyond and below the line of the horizon, beyond and below the curvature of the earth to arrive at itself as both ridge and valley, in a space without height, where depth is measured by the mottles and scars of skin on bodies, by hunger and disease. And thus, his corresponding call to gather water became more than merely to straighten streams: he would realise the river of his conservatory dream, whose buttressed mouth would gush out at its detonated source; a centripetal jet of burning water excised of sediment and air, contracted out of hammer water, spanning the longitude of a planet broken from orbit, and lined with embankments and bins…
“Ere! Gi’ owma moy! Akh akh akh!” A bubble popped, and through the hot, sullen air that beset Patrick suddenly rose a scent so acutely putrid that, like the rest of his suddenly still surroundings, it dissolved the delicate pigments of his fantasy. Protruding before him was a cackling hag, floating unmoored on a makeshift raft of roped upholstery, coffined husbands and missing teeth, across the bubbling surface of a filthy brown liquid, accreting against her raft stained rags, poisoned reedheads, upturned rats, foxtails, slag spoil and bottles, bumping between composite beams supporting stacks and rows of scrap-panel galleries that cast shadows of houses and streets feigning residence to the filthiest scum, who, lurching out of shattered windows, spilling décolletage over balconies, pressing lidless eyeballs against woodworm holes and avoiding employment like birds on an ait, joined the hag in her hilarity as she rose to her feet, clutching her flabby belly with one hand, and with the other, stumped at the wrist, pointed at Patrick who had ground to a halt, sunk to his chin in the riverine slime burying this ramshackle floodplain town.
A well-formulated question alighted from the busy train of proactivity onto the empty platform of Patrick’s consciousness: How, after so many children, so much equipment and so many walls, had been sympathetic to his flattening charge, had he found himself grounded, sunk, stopped, in this rancid sludge? He felt his hind legs twitching, his abdomen mired in vacuums of foul alluvium. Behind him, shacks he had collapsed were being rebuilt ungrudgingly. In front, the sun no longer beckoned curvature as his distant task. Instead, it emitted heat, punishingly, from directly above his head, a terminal pestle beating onto flat mortar, grinding choleric growth into silt after weeks of poisonous precipitation. It was Summer.
Spent with insults and emptied basins, the dwellers’ attention turned from Patrick to a high gallery above a cluster of roofs. A novelist on a police boat drew up next to Patrick. Now silent, they and the scum discerned drunken growls emanating from a large greatcoat, which hunched over a quivering pauper orphan. Through the window, Patrick recognised the orphan’s latticed hands: a mill runaway, a downhill child. The child held out a woollen toy, its fine structure owing to the mill’s more exacting napping machines, its segmented legs to the weakness of teasel inflorescences against the fixed positions of the mill’s iron drums, its pincers to the redundancy of teasel bracts. The child surprised Patrick with its eloquent diction and deft rhetoric: “Please sir, I wanted only but a drop of some cleaned water, not for my swollen gut, but for my dear earwig’s tiny thirst. I am sick with cholera, and water would do little to abate my impending demise. And, just as the tiny satiation of my dear earwig’s thirst would grant it a long life full of happy and healthy crawling and predating, my dear earwig has the light of my love to live for, while I, an orphaned pauper, would die unloved and forgotten”. But such eloquent diction and deft rhetoric was no defence against the fist that rose from the greatcoat and gripped the child by its cranial mouth, thumb and forefinger closing through the child’s ill-fitting cheeks, lifting the child by the midface and shaking it like a crummy bag. And, as the principal signals and fast swelling organs broke apart in the child, as life fled from its rags like a swarm of disturbed flies, and as the child was folded at the pelvis and thrust hip-first through the window like empty packaging through the aperture of an enormous, inverted bin, Patrick roared in approval with the police boat and the scum.
They cheered, as the folded orphan slumped through the glare, unfolding and refolding at each adjacent rooftop, its femoral sockets like the decisive lines of cracked card. But only Patrick noticed the woollen earwig: it too had fallen out the window from the child’s dead hands. Now lost of its owner, of its recreational use, it had been transpossessed, finished, its tussled husk and broken legs now no more than litter, litter – Patrick would have hastened to add – for its own bin. For it had not been decidedly thrust as such; it had not had designated for it the spatial mortality of its own albeit inverted bin. Watching the earwig bounce from rooftop to rooftop then onto the slime, Patrick saw shatter the dustless vitrine of civic decency, and as the toy landed on the brown in stark view of the yet distracted crowd, its obscene bulk, its not-being-in-the-right-place, its litterness, caught the light of the midday sun like lacerations on his civic sense. Disdain, regaining again, like a protégé pushing his way through the insouciant crowd towards our winged hero. Disdain! For brackets, and slack hands. Disdain, for mixtures and thanks, disdain. Disdain! Disdain, disdain for the litter.
The litter was multiplying, as the droplets of crude oil that held together the composite parts of the orphan’s woollen earwig disintegrated in the dirty water. Patrick lunged forward, to grab the litter before it sank irretrievably from sight, but his wings, torn and sodden, were buried in silt. The last of the litter disappeared from Patrick’s view, and with that the sole condition of its passing to its proper place. Worse, with the loss of the litter’s visibility came the jeopardy of the safe management, indeed of the proper burial, of the irreversible exclusion from the space that he occupied, of the vastly invisible – the jeopardy of Patrick’s ocular displacement of psychic control. For this litter, sunken out of sight, was now the invisible’s exhumation, its terrifying and untraceable entry into and scurrying across a space that was the same as his own.
Panicking Patrick had to get out. He would trust the silt as his makeshift bin, an emergency relief force of unaffordable expense. He would gift to the silt his lavender wings, the shrewd offering of a prosecuted sycophant. Out of court, enzymes dissolved his middle lamellas, his thorax cut from his wings, and as his abdomen floated upwards, he edged forwards, riverwards, to wider springs. He passed beneath the gallery. He would escape litter. He squeezed the scales of his submerged back. He brushed an arc of waxed yarn... Seized by terror, Patrick knew at once that what had touched him was the antenna of the sunken woollen insect. It was there. Sunken. Squirming. Everywhere in the deep, lightless river’s sludge: the extended invisible space, his overturned psychic space, swarming with flashing projections of former lustre. Sunken, squirming, the litter was the river. It spread across it. It navigated it perfectly. It sensed his every move. It carried and rocked him. He was panicking. He stretched backwards. He packed his cracked porcelain. He paddled abstractly, plucking wilted grapes. He projected municipal lines onto the sky, desperate attempts to reverse the collapse of light-retinal breaks into memory banks, to save his brain with fortified recycling panicking stacks. But the woollen earwig was there too: the sky was crawling with it. And into its black depths the litter pulled every cloud, gallery and peering face, and popped them back out, polished with litterine glare. And all of it sank into the river, crushing Patrick into the silt. The sun, utterly indifferent, turning away, jolted madly, from gallery to gravel terrace, collapsing day into night after day into night, collapsing his only resource, his short, suffered life, his small diamond mirror of litter, light, space and psyche. A constellation without stars. He had reached the end of his lifecycle. It was Autumn.
……………
The landscape drew its former minors. The new low sun steadied behind a former cloud. Estates and umbel silhouettes slipped like dawn feathers beneath verisome views. Numbers, prostrate among monocots, blankets, the last of the of rotting loads. Bronze bracken, split dye, the groves’ unpopulated edges, grounding appliances in taciturn mounds, stiles. Notices, residual hedgerows, the successful cartilage of lice. Small pieces of metal, plaster matted and cracked over air gaps, sullen semi-evergreens. String netting, caught on parsed branches of elm trees, with lead silhouettes of birds, with silhouetted signs, abandoned paintings, and leaf fall curling on compacted ground. Anything, in this surrendered light, in this immeasurable isolation, with its own dull and palatable lustre, its own invisible litterine glow. Anything its own litter and litter to another, distorted by an older dream-work, shrouded by an Autumn sepia mist. Patrick’s corpse, wingless, drifted downriver.
But just as this landscape of litter precluded the installation of bins, just as it levelled their Parmenidean logic into its groundless nominations, its arbitrary enthusiasms, its infinite undulation of litter’s crushed husk, so too this sudden surge of autumn-death precluded death’s giving over. For litter’s primacy and ubiquity had been established at the first attempt by Honourable Commissioners to pick it up, while death had been incorporated into life as soon as life, born as Patrick was born at the foot of an English escarpment, concentrated only on its own improvement. Disdain pleads for litter. It constructs its waste management systems only to destroy them. It completes itself only when it irredeemably fails. Death had been incorporated into Patrick as he shunned it, propping him up throughout his life with its proxy form. And now, the same corpse lived on, preserved. Hence Patrick drifted, embalmed in grime and silt, now stirring with a lighter disdain.
Indeed, it was as if Patrick’s project, to cut the river across the entire circumference of the globe, had all along been the project of the river itself in secret collusion with his corpse. The river was litter and disdain incarnate: as each item of the landscape withdrew into its own dead and undying isolation, the river could accelerate towards its own dead and undying end, undisturbed by children and toys, while begetting litter as everything beyond its straightened banks, and dragging it all into itself as their universal metaphor, like tiles slipping onto scrubland off a pregnant skip. As for Patrick, well, he was free. Free from memory and guilt, drifting calmly through an infinitely benign and recurring dream, like a crinkled photographic film registering simultaneously the movement of the river’s flow and the sun’s rays against the tilted earth.
After many nights, the morning sun had risen not over Patrick’s hind legs, but to his side. The river was not yet straight. It was flowing south-east, on a stretch that comprised the near side of an enormous meander. But the river’s correction of its course, its undoing of its meander, was already underway. Patrick and the river’s items were drifting at an angle acute from that of the river’s sides. Thousands of vindictive particles, raised in erosive array, braced to be repeatedly and relentlessly driven into the near bank of the meander. Braced to accelerate. Braced to chip a bit of rock off the river cliff. Braced to drive water onto providential water in a roaring, victorious gush. A recumbent bell rushed past Patrick, buoyant for the loss of its tongue, a silent portent for the meander’s desolation. Its rim slashed against the exposed clay. Then its leather handle and a tuft of uprooted grass did the same, tearing at vulnerable grains. Then crumbled mortar, wrapped in silk from unadaptable outhouses, hollow stems of spurious perennials, glass and iron frames with small hinged doors that once housed and magnified oil lamps, too gathered in the river’s steadfast current. Basins, split panes, tap roots, turned wooden pieces stained with gratuitous turquoise and countless glass jars muted by river weeds. Terminal clusters of bright orange berries, authenticated specifying documents, adventitious stems, keratin feathers and cold stones, crustacean shells, ground elder, corms, glazed ceramics with departed infections, sweet chestnut burrs and aerial roots, as the force of the river’s surge increased. Scuffed gate wood, hessian sacks, premature sallow buds, tilled clods and stalled metabolisms, driving relentlessly against the meander wall. And then, a towering wave of water as meander after meander gave way upriver, growing larger and larger as its foaming crest piled every object that had clung to the river’s miserable basin: shank wool, brambles, flying shuttles, small wet clothes, tenterhooks, torn manes and gutters; mill bricks, scoured thread, swift rollers, basket cylinders, cables, red hair and canal banks; hags, snapped beams, intoxicants, the novelist’s manuscript and the folded child, all unwritten and recast as litter incarnate, surging with the cumulative force of a country in decline, raising Patrick onto its face and crashing against the last stand of the meander wall. Soil ripped from soil from the last of flailing, flaccid roots. Exposed fixings of dismembered infrastructure beat against the composite floor. Metal and glass grazed wood, clay fragmented, vegetation rubbed and snapped, the remains of sensory organs were pulped in the muffled cacophony of dark water; everything was expressed in its mode of attrition. The bell rang with silt in the furious water. Distinction was withdrawn. Advanced technologies renunciated the future as they rammed against their predecessors in an utterly useless bric-a-brac of right angle joints and segments of wheels. Patrick spun violently, as the mass of dead litter rolled in directionless turbulence. Atoms, strutted suddenly with a strange sense of privation, tremored in this final and original expenditure of energy, and burst in a violent prising of narrative time from their stuffed repose into irrecordably shrinking flurries of quantum energy in a sudden regression of matter to its most primordial state.
And through and beyond Patrick the water would rush. Its force would be unstoppable. It would charge over and beyond the petty horizon to dredge its planetary trench, breaking meander after meander, rallying oceans littered with whales and coral, drowning cities fatigued by war and rinsing images of seasonless shade. It would carve its trench deeper and deeper into the earth’s crust, sculpting the planet into one continuous spherical valley, its ridges as single points on a spinning-top hourglass packed with rock. Its undying circularity would be complete, just as every diffuse and unnameable object racing along the river or rolling softly on its silty bed would never be used up or decompose.
However, as the river rushed on, water that had been passing along the outer edge of the meander at the moment of the bursting of its bank had found itself suddenly cut off from the river’s flow. Motionless, this water deposited its miscellaneous objects, which still resembled their former use, and still registered, therefore, as litter. The river’s new banks closed, and what remained of the meander’s curve was enclosed in the shape of an arched pond, annexed to the river but unable to slip into it: the undying river’s double, the corpse’s corpse. Who could have foreseen this omission? This water without course? This leather bow in a desert of former pasture? This litter’s litter? Protruding from the sand, a mote among grains; its own incompletion a cog in the river’s wheel, the river that would pass it indefinitely, the river that had cut it off. A spasm, a strangled meander, in the U-turn of cosmic time. The return of repression itself. The persistence of the litter’s glare like the daily rising of the sun.
There on the bank of the ox-bow lake lay Patrick, overturned, shorn of an abdomen, torn from legs, silt tears rolling from his gouged sockets. And above him, thousands and thousands of woollen litter insects, fashioned in the cosmic tumult of the river’s straightening, the great reconfiguration of matter, out of dormant plants, industrial machinery, parent rock and frayed yarn. Compound eyes made from chipped steel, mouth parts from the congealed adhesive, legs from reinforced straw, heads, thorax and abdomens from wool fulled into coal ash, wings dug out of the silt. They flew, crawled and swam, indifferent to the cold nights, darting at Patrick’s corpse.
Disdain, poor Patrick, wept disdain.
