The Trip (fragments)

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Safe

Near the rewilded shopping centre a man called Frank Robinson was sitting on a small folding stool of the type fishermen use. He had a rubber headed mallet with which he played a undecipherable tune on a colourful toy xylophone, or metallophone to be precise, while members of the public took turns to throw axes over his head and into the shop behind him, where, if they were thrown correctly, they ended up stuck in the wall. This was entirely safe and the shop owner had a framed certificate saying so. It was a popular activity for stag nights and fortieth birthday parties. Frank Robinson plinked and plonked and the axes flew through the air with a whoosh, some of them missing and landing on the floor. Eventually one ended up buried in the head of the poor xylophone man, but he didn’t die, he just carried on. Someone said he looked like a living Halloween costume, with the hatchet sticking out of his skull and the blood dripping down his face, and he said yes, I saved a bit of money there, I never like to pay through the nose for fancy dress. Then he fainted and was taken to hospital

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Networks

The news came round and stayed forever. It followed me into the bathroom. His tangerine hairs in the toothpaste, the peppery tongue of his cologne slipping inside me like a larval xenomorph. I ran into the shower and looked for an escape route. The plughole was the only option. I thought of the miles and miles of hair that would be down there, a long trailing plume I could climb down like Rapunzel. Down down, I would go, down, down, down, deep into the bowels of the earth where fountains of dead hair from all the showers in the city had linked up to form a communication web so that our showers could share news of danger or exciting innovations. And as I descended through this butcher’s gallon of holy soap and wishing water, I would feel the decades go by and I would think, you know what? Make the most of it; because soon it will be illegal to communicate using underground networks of dead hair.

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Cattle

To determine the social class of an artist ask them this: what did your parents do when you were young? My mother stared out of the window at the moss encroaching on the path. My father heated a pan of spitting lard over an open fire. They used to dance together in a velvet room with spinning silver while a limpid organ played. I never heard them disagree, and I used to wonder whether waltzing was a form of arguing, all that pushing and pulling, all that maneuvering. What were the skies like? In one sky my mother worked for DEFRA on the cattle passports. In another sky my father was a security guard for a thermometer factory while studying for a Phd in Hauntology. Turn it upside down they would call to him across the floor, then shake it. Did your father become a practicing hauntologist? Sadly, he did not, despite it being his dream. But he taught the subject for the rest of his life at a prestigious college for further education in west Cumbria.

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Stamp

The buffet car man had introduced a roving microphone in each carriage so that people could interact with his announcements. Most people asked him things like what flavour crisps do you have, but a woman in my carriage who was reading a book called Why Don't Cows Have Smartphones picked up the mike and said, Jason, when you say the word cake why do you sound so depressed? Are your cakes so disappointing? There was a pause as the buffet man thought about his reply. Faint feedback whistles and the sound of his breathing. Not all cake makes me feel that way he said finally. It’s just the chocolate cake. I don’t like the fact that once the chocolate has been added to the cake, you can't take it out again. It becomes part of the whole thing. This reminds me of the way I’ve been feeling. A bit down, a bit gloomy. I thought that these negative feelings would eventually lift, but now I feel like they have been baked in permanently. Theres no part of me that doesn't have these feelings, from my fingers to my toes, no way I can remove them. We have biscuits though, he added, and they don't make me feel like that. Well, said the passenger, why does your state of mind have to be represented by that sort of cake? Your depression could be the blueberries in a muffin. And you can pick those blueberries out, throw them on the floor, and stamp on them. Everyone on the train clapped their hands at this and some stood up and cheered. I wondered why, when offered a microphone and a chance to address all of the passengers on the train, people didn't just sing a song, and I began to look up lyrics on my phone.

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Ballad

Once the pond had been reconstituted, the women in the ocelot stole gave me an old-fashioned heavy diving suit and instructed me to go down into the pond and see if I could find anything of use that I could take home with me as a reward for the work I had done. It was murky down there but after I had stood still for a while, the silty water cleared and I saw many things lying on the pond-bed. I saw lumps of lead, chunks of iron, a dozen pieces of woolen cloth, eight ship’s anquors, twenty barrels of tar, two hundred and fifty swords ( my estimate) thirteen chests of silver bars, seven intricate lacquered screens, a few bolts of golden cloth, hundreds of slender rattan canes, and a consignment of coral. I saw thousands of pieces of porcelain stacked in eerie columns, the wooden crates that held them having rotted away. When I came back to the surface with one of the rattan canes in my thick glove she handed me a mandolin and insisted that I sing a ballad with her. That’s what they used to do when they had discovered treasure underwater. Even if it’s in your garden pond. We sang and sang well into the night and after we could sing no more we agreed that we would establish an immersive story telling venue at the bottom of the pond for local children to enjoy. We had become characters from the Chuckle Brothers’ extended universe.

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