She’s somehow in the ambulance, motionless in the rain-lashed close outside. Her nephew Mick is with her while the funny modern doctor in his green work-jacket presses down repeatedly upon her chest. I can see Alma Warren there beneath me, stood some yards behind the modern fever-cart upon the spattering tarmac drive, soaked through in just her vest and jeans, watching the bobbing medic through the vehicle’s rear window. Her messy hair is plastered to her hollow cheeks, to her bare shoulders, and she seems to tip her head back and stare up into my eyes as I strike with my cue’s blue tip against the great ball of the world. The black mirror of night is shattered and, for but an instant, in the ravelling cracks and fissures can be seen the sky’s half-silvered backing. With this sizzling flourish I conclude Louisa Warren’s painted swoop. Seen close it is a mark, a daub, but oh, when we step back and see what it is part of …
Some leave with the thunder, some with trumpets, some with only mother silence.
And now Michael Warren swings the hammer down through its foreordained arc onto the dented cylinder, a giant metal lung that flattens and expels its final withering breath into his face. The hammer falls upon the drum, the hammer falls upon the drum, this single act relived, resounding endlessly in a reverberant space-time and become an almost musical crescendo, a percussive storm that wells from thin air, a dramatic and hair-raising punctuation in the symphony: BDANK! BDANK! BDANK! The hammer falls upon the drum, the hammer falls upon the drum and from its threaded throat it coughs a tightly-crinkled cloud of orange poison that expands, unwraps itself, unfolds to fill the world of Michael Warren’s breath and vision. A cascade of half-dimensions, the unfurling chaos of its shape contains, just for an instant, every fugitive and frail line from his sister’s future paintings. He inhales the imagery that he spits back across the table at her now, now in the Golden Lion’s Saturday-night limbo and she wipes it from her face and smears it on her canvasses, just like the ambulance-light and the rain upon the night when her Aunt Lou dies in the thunderstruck rear access-way. She wipes it from her face and smears it on her canvasses. The hammer falls upon the drum. I am a builder, and with each new course my swift trowel catches up the surplus flab of mortar squeezed from in-between the bricks. I build the centuries, I build the moments. I am following the diagram. All of the weight is carried at the centre.
I am sighting down my straight cue at a rounded life, precariously at rest on the world’s baize, and in its glaze the dancing highlight glint of soul. I knock the reason and the colour both from Ernest Vernall’s head. I squeeze May out into a gutter and send fever-carts to carry off her firstborn daughter. I cram Snowy’s mouth with flowers and I throw the poison dust in Michael’s eyes. I bank, roll into the high thermals. Majesty and rubble in the dive, the tailspin. Whooomff. Whooomff. Whooomff.
Of course we know pain. We know cowardice and spite and falsehood. We know everything. I call my brother Uriel a cunt. We punch and gouge each other in the town square and the wind raised by our feud alone blows ghosts halfway to Wales. The repercussions ring across the Earth. He blacks my eye and China’s great leap forward carries it into an economic abyss. I collapse his nose and Castro comes to power in Cuba. From my split lip dribbles structuralism, rock ’n’ roll, and hovercrafts. We pick the golden clots before they’re ready and the Belgian Congo blooms with severed heads.
Of course we stride among you, thigh-deep in your politics and your mythology. We wade through the pink map-scrap petals of your rapidly disintegrating commonwealth. We march in a black tide on Washington. We juggle satellites and Francis Bacon. We are builders. We build Allen Ginsberg, and Niemeyer’s cathedral in Brasilia. We slap up the Berlin Wall. Clouds pass across the sun. We’re with you now.
Of course we dance on pins and level cities. We deliver up the Jews from Pharaoh, unto Buchenwald. We flutter tender in the first kiss, flap in agony above the last row in a draughty kitchen. We know what fellatio tastes like and how childbirth feels. We climb upon each other’s backs in shower cubicles to flee the fumes. We are in the serene molecular indifference of the Zyklon and the dull heart of the man who turns the wheel to open up the ducts. We are forever standing on those bank steps in Hiroshima as the reality surrounding us collapses into an atomic hell. That moment when you reach your orgasm together and it is the sweetest, the most perfect instant that you ever live through, we are both of you. We keep slaves, and we write Amazing Grace.
Of course we shout. Of course we sing. Of course we kill and love. We cheat in business and we give our lives for others. We discover penicillin and we dump the children we have strangled in back alleys. We bomb Guernica just to create that painting, and the bursts of smoke and scream beneath us are our brush-marks. We are from the realms of Glory; we are from the nursery, the school, the abattoir, the brothel. How could we be otherwise? You fold up into us. We fold up into Him.
We are in every second of a billion trillion lives. We’re every ant, each microbe and leviathan. Of course we’re lonely.
Everything swirls in my eye. If I but blink, all of existence breaks down to an alphabet of particles and thence to only numbers, to an endless sea of values circling in radiant symmetry about their axis, which reside between the figures four and five. When multiplied with their resultant digits added, these reflect each other perfectly, as do the three and six, the nine and zero, ten and minus one, sixteen and minus seven, on to positive and negative infinity alike. There at the centre of the numerical hurricane I stand. Its eye is mine. I am between the four and five, where is the pivot of the universe. I am revolving slowly between mercy and severity, between the blue shift and the red. I breathe in and the stars tumble towards me, toppling back into a single white-hot quark, into the minus numbers. I breathe out, an aerosol of black, exotic matter, galaxies and magnetars: positive sums exploding from my lips unto the cold and dark extremities of time.
I am too often angry, cleaving more toward the five, the fingers in a clenched fist, than towards the four, the ones clasped in a handshake, those extended in a stroke or a caress. Too often am I inclined to severity, towards the red, rather than to the cyan of forgiveness. This, then, is the reason that we keep our cue-tips blue: as a reminder of compassion and its weak force, so that even as we smash the balls towards their predetermined pockets we bestow sky-coloured kisses of eternal grace and mercy, made from billiard chalk.
I see Marla Roberta Stiles, aged four, arranging daisy-heads on miniature pink plastic plates for a tea party to which she’ll invite her teddy and her mother, the two soft toys that she loves best in the world. She pours a cold infusion of fruit pastilles in tap-water into tiny cups and takes it both ends in a spit-roast with her pimp Keith and his mate Dave just thirteen years later. Marla asks her mother if she’d like a dried sultana as dessert and spits out semen; scolds the glassily impassive bear for falling off his chair as she sucks up the crystal smoke. She calls sultanas “tanas”, and a rosy-cheeked father of two punches her in the face and rapes her in the back of his Ford Escort, and I love her.
I see Freddy Allen stealing pints of milk and dying underneath a railway arch. I see him as a younger man, waiting in Katherine’s Gardens for the doctor’s daughter that he plans to sexually assault upon her way to work. I’m running with him, weeping with him as he flees the scene in horror at himself, the deed undone. I see him sleeping in the weeds, I see the grey trudge of his afterlife, all Freddy feels that he deserves. His guilt has turned to anger, resonating through his days so that he has no hope now of release. The loaves and bottles are all gone, with the doorsteps they stood upon. Nothing can ever be put right.