For all that it manifests materially in castles, hospitals, sofas and atom bombs, the world is founded in the immaterial reaches of the human mind, is standing on a flimsy paradigm that has no actual substance. And if that foundation does not hold, if it is based perhaps upon a flawed perception of the universe that does not match with later observations, then the whole confection falls into an abyss of unbeing. Both in terms of its construction and its ideology, the world is far from sound. To be quite honest it’s a creaking death-trap, and there are all of these health and safety regulations. I don’t make the rules.
I am a builder. You’ll appreciate that this entails a lot of demolition work. Your world, the way you think about yourselves and your most fundamental notions of reality are the result of unskilled labour, cowboy workmanship. There’s bad subsidence; dry rot in the moral timbers. This will all have to come down, and it’s not going to be cheap.
Does the phrase “clearance area” mean anything to you?
Ideas of self, ideas of world and family and nation, articles of scientific or religious faith, your creeds and currencies: one by one, the beloved structures falling.
Whooomff.
Whooomff.
Whooomff.
A COLD AND FROSTY MORNING
Alma Warren, barely out of bed and naked in the monstrous bathroom mirror, staring bleary at her sagging fifty-three-year-old flesh and still fancying herself something rotten. She finds her enduring vanity almost heroic in the scale of its delusion. She’s prepared to face the facts, safe in the knowledge that the facts will only scream and run away. All things considered, she’s a funny piece of work.
The big square bathroom with its plaster-rounded corners is a blunted cube of grey steam rising from the eight-foot chasm of the filling tub, an ostentatious lifeboat made from tide-lined fibreglass. Subjected to this sweltering rain-forest climate every morning for at least ten years the chamber’s blue and gold-veined lining paper has begun to droop down from the ceiling’s curve, a wilted winter sunrise. At the bottom of the giant bath itself there are the studs of an unused Jacuzzi fixture, gilt flaked off to show the dull grey metal underneath. Alma has never really had the knack of keeping something nice.
She picks a bath bomb from the green glass fruit bowl on the counter, Fairy Jasmine from the fragrant branch of Lush down in the Grosvenor Centre, lobs it casually into the deep hot water and takes childish pleasure from the scum of blue metallic glitter that seethes up out of the fizz and foment. She’ll have sequinned cheeks, hands, hair and sheets for a few days but, on the plus side, will be living in the early 1970s. Alma climbs up onto the near end of the boxed-in miniature lagoon and strikes a pose like a high diver, squinting down into the steam until she can imagine that her bathtub is a massive reservoir as seen from several hundred feet above. She makes as if about to execute a swallow dive but then appears to change her mind and steps down carefully into her bath in the conventional fashion. This strange pantomime is something she does each day without having any idea why. She only hopes that nobody ever finds out about it.
With a pig-pink soap-bar redolent of Woolworths’ Pick’n’Mix she lathers herself everywhere then sluices it all off, relaxing back into the heat and suds until only her face is visible above the surface as a floating mask. The long hair drifts about her outsized skull like waterweed, becoming sleek and saturated as she listens to the ringing underwater noises that her bath makes inadvertently, the peeling gold tap’s rhythmic dripping and the amplified scrape of a toenail on the long tub’s moulded sides. Alma feels comfortable, reduced to nothing but a bobbing face with all the rest of what she is concealed beneath the bubbles and the drifting clots of iridescent blue. This is essentially the strategy with which she faces life, believing that it lends her the advantage of surprise: there might be anything beneath the suds and sparkle, mightn’t there?
After an amniotic minute of submersion she sits up, hair a lank comma dribbling between her shoulder blades, and scoops a viscous palm-full of her lime and sea-salt shampoo from its pot, rubbing the gritty slime into her scalp. The product promises its user traffic-stopping shine and volume, although Alma is unable to remember the last time that she’d stopped traffic in a good way. Moulding her hair forward in a lather-stiffened quiff that sags towards its dripping tip a good eight inches from her forehead, Alma mumbles “Thang yuh verrah much” into the humid fog, then rinses it all off using a peeling golden shower attachment. She is, she likes to believe, the spitting image of the King if he’d lived to be an old woman.
Once the strands are squeaking like violin strings, she turns off the nozzle and lies back, her sodden head draining into the folded towel that she’s forethoughtfully placed on the long tub’s pointed end. Stretched out full length and motionless, a dead Egyptian monarch whose sarcophagus has first been flooded and then strewn with glitter for unfathomable ritual purposes, Alma reviews her thoughts, such as they are at this time of a Friday morning. Near the surface, a storm-layer of nonsensical rage and resentment is subsiding gradually into this foamy interlude between her breakfast Shreddies, her sensible daily aspirin and her bio-yoghurt drinks, already wolfed down, and her first joint of the day, which is still yet to come. Beneath this scum-line of residual anger is a tediously efficient secretary-strata, listing everything that Alma has to do today, Friday, May 26th, 2006: finish the Chain of Office picture, pay her treacherous bloodsucking council tax, go to the bank, visit the little day-care nursery down near Doddridge Church to see if everything has been delivered safely for tomorrow’s exhibition. Oh, and shop for food in town, because there’s nothing in the fridge except for weird, exotic relishes and dips she’s bought while in an altered state. Perhaps she’ll pop her head into the Grosvenor Centre branch of HMV to see if the new season of The Wire is out yet; maybe trawl the local-interest shelves at Waterstone’s, looking for photographs of sepia barges on a brown-ale river; lemming-waves of kids in 1950s swimming costumes running at the camera, splashing through the shallow end of the Midsummer Meadow lido.
Down below this relatively-tidy organising level are the ceaselessly-rotating cogs and flywheels of creative process. These are anxiously reviewing minor irritations in completed works — the central white-haired labourer in Work in Progress for example, looking back across his shoulder at the audience with eyes perhaps too stern and frightening — or else are sifting patiently through possibilities for paintings yet to come. She has a nebulous idea that involves tracking down the sites depicted by great, bygone landscape artists, recreating the same view in the same medium, with all the car-crammed motorways and modern alterations rendered classically in lustrous oils with patient glazes, freezing a degraded present in the unforgiving gaze of a more able past. There’s something in the notion that appeals to her, but it’s too glib and obvious in its present form. Besides, she’ll have had five ideas as good or better before she retires tonight. Alma’s attention skitters over this and other fledgling projects pretty much non-stop, even while other areas of her awareness are engaged in pressing matters of their own, such as pretending that whomever she is talking to has her complete attention.