Invisible Cells. Part 2, 2020

Chapter 1. "Tell we've got JJR in our blood."

"Can't go another year like last year."

"What another year of stale ideas?"

"Can't do it."

"Well, everybody else will, why not us?"

"Give us a kiss, Jilly!"

Jackie leaned over the bar table, put her arms around Jilly and gave her a big, slobbery kiss. The Crescent was beginning to buzz as the hour approached midnight.

"This year it's got to be more a landscape of the spirit." Jackie's eyes brightened as she announced this.

"Spirit?" Jilly buried her smile in her 100 mls.

"Yes, you remember! The thing we're all born with, that gets knocked out of us. We've got to rediscover it. Unfetter it," she waved her arms imitating a bird "think afresh! Remember Dad reading Beatie's part in Roots, to us?"

"Sounds marvellous, sounds exactly what I want - to think afresh. I'm sure people don't know how dead everything's become, I mean I don't."

"You're dead right there luv," a lurching bystander, overhearing, butted in for a moment.

Through the mega satellite screen came the announcement "15 Minutes to Midnight" flash... flash. There was a predictable stirring of expectancy.

Over the increasing noise Jilly shouted "Well, for one thing, I'm not shagging anyone tonight. Every New Year you finish up shagging someone, like it's an offering to Old Father Time, although Old Father Time's all we're likely to be offered."

"Come on then, let's split, let's go down the beach and look at the sea. And shout our fucking heads off."

"Ok, you're on. It would be a start. Better than linking hands with a roomful of strangers singing Auld Lang Syne. Does anyone understand what they're singing?"

"More to the point, does anyone know what they're feeling?" Jackie stood up making a move to go.

"We're just people Jackie."

"Yes, but we're becalmed. On your feet young Jilly, before the booze stops talking. Let's see if the spirit is still there, if it's still possible, or if it's gone forever. Are we possible vessels? Do we still have sails for the wind to billow? The Force!"

Jilly staggered to her feet, pressing her mouth to Jackie's ear. "What we going to do? I've forgotten already."

"Nothing very much, just try to improve our conversation. After all we did go to university."

"Yes, it should have been something. Why wasn't it something?"

They stumbled through the throng to the door, plunging into the night. In their Save A Soul plc overcoats, they whirled down Denmark Terrace, as fast as their podgy, middle-aged legs allowed, to the seafront. Coming out on the prom. Twin Piers were shafting the sky with audible lasers. The eternal constants remained in the background, subdued and sullen, waiting. The moon was out and the tide starting to turn.

"Everyone's got the same idea," an ironic smile spread across Jilly's face.

"Yes, have you noticed, whenever you get an idea it seems to pop into everyone's head at the same time? I remember thinking that, one morning, in bed, when some guy was telling me about the word 'breakfast'. This was years ago. He was saying, when the word was first invented people must have been eating all the time if they thought going the night without food was fasting, and I thought I bet there are lots of people all over the world having exactly the same, silly conversation at exactly the same time, all thinking they are sharing something really exclusive."

"You know Jackie, when I'm having a shit or a fuck, which these days is not as often as I'd like, exactly the same thought crosses my mind, which only goes to prove your point. Mind you, people are copycats. You have to keep ideas to yourself if you want to own them. Repression is autonomy!"

There were a number of bonfires on the beach. The two women approached one, linking arms and staring hard at the flames.

"Any ideas for making money this year?" Jilly asked.

"Money, money, money. We make money don't we!"

"I mean more money than the money we make."

"I did have this idea about reproduction sculpture."

Jilly looked massively puzzled, her fair eyebrows coming together.

"The history of sculpture in plastic or porcelain or stainless steel. Remember an old dickhead called Jeff Koons; I wonder whatever happened to those things. Anyway, my idea is for miniatures you can keep in a repro china-cabinet. A china cabinet full of works from the world's major galleries. A bit of class. From the Venus de Milo to Porangi. What do you think?"

"It's not original, Jackie."

"It is. I mean a truly comprehensive history, taking in all Post-Brit Art, Wank Art, Pre-Wrinklies. But you're right, in business you don't just sell ideas, you have to have the means to make your ideas your property and, if you do this, you might become richer and others become poorer, well generally."

It was now midnight, and the group round the fire joined hands breaking into Auld Lang Syne. Jackie and Jilly, despite themselves, were pulled into the circle. By the time the ancient ritual was concluded they felt quite exhilarated.

Later the beach was empty. The women remained, slumped in the pebbles, hands held out to the warmth left in the fire, looking out to sea.

"I'm trying to imagine out there is Galilee, but it's difficult." Jackie was still in an apocalyptic mood.

"Can't see any poor sod coming out of that rough blackness to invite us to go fishing for human souls."

"Yea, but we ought not to be waiting. This is what they were all doing in the year 2000, but nobody came. Well unless you count Bin Laden."

They fell into a cold silence, but Jackie dragged them out of it. "You remember how Modernism fell into decline and how it was all Post-Modernism, all art in quotation marks, like for a certain group of people art became reality, so when they made art their art was about art?"

"I remember, I was there." Jilly looked bemused but shaking off the effects of alcohol decided to contribute. "But those people, my big sister, didn't have any other reality, art was what happened to them in life, before the second coming of the Moors."

"True, but I don't think anyone understood Modernism, the great good news it contained. Theoretically, Picasso, Braque, Kandinsky, Pollock, Abstraction, destroyed art."

"Rubbish, they were the ones who made art more of an icon than it had ever been. This is what they told me on my course, but, like everyone else who pretends to know something, haven't checked the references personally."

"Listen, the Modernist released art from the figurative. Figurative painting is a skill, a trade, threatened by photography, but there's still a market for it. Abstract, expressionist painting doesn't require skill, anyone can do it, but this is not a bad thing, it's a wonderful thing. There's no language of expressive marks, so there's no right or wrong usage, no standards, no reasons for galleries of excellence. The individual who makes the expressive mark knows what it is. Modernism invented a way for everyone to express the life they live, it sort of democratised philosophical detachment. I believe in philosophical detachment, in knowing I know."

"Well wasn't it the dealers, Kahnweilers, Gimpels, making out Picasso deserved a fortune. I don't suppose Pablo thought what he did was more meritorious than marks made by children or primitives, I think he was all for lunacy. Easy to be seduced by the money rolling in though. I know what you're saying, you're saying this is an example of what we can do for ourselves, we don't have to wait for one who walks on water."

"Tell we've got JJR in our blood."

"Our father!"

"Who art in cloud cuckoo land."

"Must have been a madman. I could do with him tonight, and Mum. I hope they would have liked us."

Chapter 2. "Debt is for a lifetime."

It was 2020. Capitalism was the only extant, economic system. Long ago it had "outed" itself, coming out from behind the flag of freedom, which had been its disguise. Capitalism was freedom. Any criticism of it was met with derision. Everyone wanted to make money, especially those without any.

All was not well though. The economy continued failing to deliver a better material life. A universal, indigent majority lived alongside the self-styled "hardworking", "deserving", wealthy minority. Monopoly and centralisation dominated political organisation. What had been the late twentieth century lament about society becoming more violent and criminal now extended to international affairs. More and more the rich man's club had become world policeman, trying to control ethnic and religious theft and violence. Criminality was the medium in which everyone lived. And, despite all the changes and crises to come, this basic social structure remained in place for another millennium. It was a Leviathan. There was no way out. It was the reality. This the Redmans believed.

As dawn broke to greet 1st January 2020 the two sisters remained huddled together on Brighton beach. When the warmth left the fire they had taken shelter from a sharp, winter breeze beneath a derelict groyne. As Jackie opened her eyes she was aware of Jilly's head on her shoulder. Jilly was still asleep. Jackie's gaze swept the beach, there was no cause for alarm, everywhere deserted, not even the usual stray dog scavenging the litter. Feeling in her overcoat pocket she was reassured grasping the butt of the gun, it was only an air pistol but... "if aimed correctly, powerful enough to put out an eye!" Immediate anxieties removed, her mind wandered to more abstract possibilities. Was poverty the way? She thought poverty isn't a way, poverty is poverty. Of course, her spirit was with the poor, how could it be with any other group? There was no value she wished to attach to poverty but it was something she was content with. It was only a matter of desire, but this desire was not ascetic. She wished to get pissed, stoned and more actively to fuck, "still!" For some of this you needed money, although she believed naturally fermented alcohol preceded primitive brewing, but this was another of her purely theoretical considerations. Why had she said "landscape of the spirit"? She was surprised she remembered the phrase. The word "soul" was one she could not use, she was not going to return to mumbo jumbo like everyone else, and "mind" was too one-sided. She needed a word taking in the whole person, mind and body, living flesh. "Character" and "personality" were words for others about others and even there deadening. "Psyche" was technical with connotations of disturbance. "Spirit" then was not bad.

What was needed was a reading of the word which negated the religious and promoted the alcoholic side. She decided her theme for the year would be the spirit contemplating poverty. This was the problem to solve, how to retain one inside the other.

"Mild, isn't it? I thought we should have migrated with the birds, but I think we're going to be alright." Jilly was awake.

"You were sleeping soundly, my girl."

"I was dreaming. Dreaming about the winter, more, remembering, I suppose. I'd gone back to the snow of 85, when I was at school. Roddy had taken me for a walk in the snow and he asked me where I would sleep if I were homeless and I said a telephone kiosk. Later we passed one and he pointed out it was vandalised. Then he told me a lot about the British miners' strike and I remembered I cried, but he said the time to worry for them would be later when they were paying off all the money they'd borrowed. I wonder if the young ones, then, are still paying, debt is for a lifetime, as they don't say, and diamonds are forever."

"Not much's changed, has it? Apart from everything getting harder and the winters warmer. Do you remember how proud we were when we became property owners! Within two months of each other, that was a false dawn that was."

"We've still got the van and the mobile, we've still got some of our stake money even if we missed the jackpot."

"Only because no one wanted trailer-parks after oil-fired, global hurricanes started stalking us. Talking of money, I've decided to deface the currency. You see graffiti everywhere, nowhere's sacred, but what do you find on your paper currency? Sometimes a bank teller's mark. All the cemeteries are vandalised. You can tell where god resides these days. It's a perfect vehicle, it's a form of circulation in which even the destitute participate. Illegal? But so are foreign and forged currency and they circulate. So what's your contribution to the day?"

Jilly let out a fart. "That's better. Sometimes I think farting measures everything. I would like to be able to produce one utterly foul fart, a fart to pollute the world. A smell no one could get rid of and no one could get used to. An expression from myself, of myself and about the space into which it wafted. There ought to be a room or a vault somewhere, where the most foul smells on earth are all stored together, in one abominable mix. Once in everyone's lifetime they should be asked to enter the room."

By now the sky was quite bright. Life was stirring on other parts of the beach. A radio was playing. Jilly climbed to her feet, doing a little dance to the music.

Jackie rummage in her bag and pulled out her purse. She took out a 10 Euro note and smoothed it against a large flat pebble. "Hardly worth anything!" Next she took out a pen. How should she write it? She marvelled at the good condition of the note. There were not many things passing arbitrarily from one person to another that fared as well. Small but precise was how she chose to write it, around the empty margin of the note. She wrote without hesitation, BEWARE THE PIGGY IN THE MIDDLE! to form a border. Jilly stopped cavorting to see what she was doing.

"Looks good. Well it really changes the look of the note. What's it mean?"

"Once upon a time there were these royals, queens say, who could settle of an evening, or any time really, and call upon minstrels, players, poets to amuse them. Queens would not have felt debased by this, they would have sensed their power in it. To call up a minstrel, to dismiss a minstrel! The queen's state was the easier, all she had to do was sit back and enjoy. It might seem now we can all do this. Like queens we have music on tap, many taps to turn on and off, but something goes wrong. We don't sense our power in it, and although the queens' players were poor and ours rich, they still have terrible lives. Our players struggle and compete, careers on a knife edge, they nearly all are on hard drugs, and there's suicide and murder, but unlike the queen I'm not responsible. The responsibility lies with the pig in the middle. So BEWARE THE PIGGY IN THE MIDDLE. The trouble is you don't see the piggy, so I'm drawing attention to him...or HER."

"Throw it to the wind then. Garbage!"

Jackie put the note back in her purse. If she traded it for a commodity she could be sure it would circulate which was quite different from recycling it. She said, "Let's go and find the van."

Chapter 3. "Who's there?"

Heavy rain set in. The sisters' caravan was set off the coast road between Brighton and Newhaven. They had bought it years before with what they had salvaged from their repossessions. Jackie set to work on her origami cards. She was working on a new design depicting anal sex, strictly heterosexual. She was homophobic about erotica despite the market. Jilly busied herself with the email ads awaiting them when she switched on their old system.

Despite the booze induced euphoria of the previous evening, Jackie knew some days in the life of the spirit were blank. There were many days when she questioned the small area of positive things which she had found to cling to. She wondered how people made so much out of their existence. Was it carelessness? She looked at the preoccupied Jilly. Desire between persons was ended by death, if not in other ways. Those left to live, how could they? She knew people did, and that they tried to make something out of what was left, but how careless that seemed. Nothing, not even herself, would have been cleaner. Infuriatingly though she could not get her mind around the possibility of nothing at all. How could that be? Psychologically how could there not be death. Could anyone go on, even with what they cherished most, forever? Could anyone mean 'I will love you forever'? It was a strange balance, loathing life because of death but not seeing how life was possible without it.

Her concentration on the representation of human orifices led Jackie to consider the uterus as anal. This disturbed her. Perhaps expulsion in childbirth was like passing a difficult stool. Neither sister had ever risked conception. Jackie knew the uterus had spasms but the demands of the anus were at time irresistible. People said 'shit' a lot but they never thought about it. She concluded the vagina was more comprehensive flesh than either the mouth or anus. Its positive reflexes included both consumption and expulsion. The rain wiped away their glimpse of the sea and, anyway, condensation was beginning to build on the small windows. Her hands continued cutting and her mind continued to wander.

There was no value beyond what was desired. This was an axiom. What was desired was of value to the one who desired. From this axiom she was free to deny good and evil, right and wrong, rights and duties. The moral vocabulary referred to nothing real. There was only the diversity of desire. That morning she had decided her desires were with the poor, but the poor often had desires indistinguishable from the rich. Was this a problem?

Jackie knew the old, empiricist story about how we function. She had been over it years before with Roddy. The story said we simply find ourselves with specific passions, desires, wants, like we find ourselves having eyes, skin, hair of a certain colour. These passions direct us to the world. In addition to desire we have reason. If we want to fuck reason enables us to find the means. Reason cannot by itself create ends, only passion can do this. Jackie did not see how this story would enable her to distinguish between deranged and other behaviour. Derangement concerned ends.

Jilly raised her head from the screen to announce a girl had been strangled on the coast road two nights before. Jilly had moved on to Local Crime Update. The murderer had used a piece of rope.

"Jilly, do I explain the murder if I tell you the murderer wanted to strangle her and realised he could achieve this by getting a piece of rope around her neck and pulling on it very hard? If that's all that passed through the mind would it be irrational?

"You'd want a motive, like sex or jealousy or something."

She remembered that some other stories supposed it was possible to act against all urgent desires, as when one acted out of a sense of duty. Perhaps without rational desire or moral obligation there was the absurdity of 'I want to rape her', 'I want power', 'I want to kill', I want to torture', 'I want everything'. But why absurd? Some did want to murder, gain power, violate the defenceless, and have everything. The human species was hardly the last word on evolution. She felt no loyalty to her species. Other animals appealed to her more. Human history was full of those who, in the name of reason or morality had splashed about in blood. Others had existed by not being noticed. This last thought made her feel different, as though the earth had moved a fraction. Better than sex.

There was no possibility of proving ultimate ends, although of those tried experience disproved some more conclusively than others, but the way of the unnoticed was a way against all the ways. Jackie did not know how she could determine if it had always and everywhere been possible. It was the way of the rabbit and the rat. It was not the chosen way, because those whose way it was lacked the freedom to choose. It was the way she wanted. The world was a prison, it had always been so. The problem of how to free the prisoners had to be abandoned. Jackie would preach against the kingdom of heaven on earth, or elsewhere. She started to think out loud.

"Most of the poor have family histories rooting them in poverty. Generations of have-nots. How do you think any of them come to have ambition? To impose on people what was imposed on their parents and their parents' parents, ad nauseum. Whatever suffering we have to endure it can hardly be more than what has already been endured.

Jackie's outburst stirred Jilly. She turned from the screen. "There was a time when I thought everything was contained in the notion of the Buddha person. I thought that was wisdom. Buddhism teaches you to cope without the world no matter how indifferent it appears. I used to admire that."

"But you don't now?"

"You stop thinking about these things."

Jilly considered, then joined in again. "It's because the Buddha sees everything in the same light, that's why it doesn't really have desires. When you think about it desires are rooted in perception. There are very few innate desires, if any, needs maybe, but not desires. To get someone to desire something you must produce in them certain perceptions, and perceptions can be correct or incorrect and desire can arise from either. If you correct an incorrect perception you can change the desire. Perhaps, this is how to take away from the murderer the desire to murder." Jilly rubbed a hole in the condensation and peered out, it was eerie.

"Killing is easier than you know if you have not killed. When I was in London, with the Underthings, I was really into it. In the subways, late at night, cold air streaming through the tunnels, being the hunter was exhilarating. Turning Johns into the hunted. You feel powerful, strong. You seethe with the crowd, lose yourself in it, part of a great wave, apocalyptical movies made real! But even in the thick of the hacking I could hear my own voice calling for blood. Separateness is the correct perception. It took a lot of human history for separateness to emerge. The idea of having an identity in yourself, detached from any social role. Dad was keen on Marx. Marx saw other people as the fulfilment, not the limitation of yourself, but, for me, the world works without cohering and the social is the medium in which I preserve myself for myself. There is a romantic longing for togetherness. That's what it was in London. I suppose that's what it is in us finding each other again."

"As they say in the soaps you can't escape family. Look how maudlin we've become celebrating the New Year, wanting Mum and Dad, clinging to our fanciful stories about the family history. We love these identity myths."

Jilly was quite wound up now, sitting on the edge of her computer stool, her eyes bright and fingers pulling at the yellow strands of her hair. She continued to talk of murder.

"Why not murder someone though? Murder them for their money, or better just to deprive them of life. See how low they will stoop to save their miserable lives. If you don't lick my ass I will murder you. 'What will you do?' I'll murder you, I'll pull the trigger, the barrel right up against your eyeball. Or. I'll cut off your testicles, or your tits, leave you to bleed to death. Or, I'll keep you in a bath of freezing water or boiling water. Is there nothing attractive in this? I'll rip out your throat with a sharp knife.” Jilly went over to the sink and picked up the bread knife. “So what will you do for me? Will you say foul words to excite me? Will you deny your children? Be unfaithful to everything you hold dear? Will you beg for your life? Grovel for it? 'Oh, yes anything. I'll even eat your shit if you spare me.' I'm sorry, I can't. I have this mission. I must push this red-hot poker up your ass, until you die. Is this madness? What are they saying when they say murder is evil? What else could it be?" Exhausted by the effort, Jilly dropped back to the stool, limbs spread-eagled, tongue sticking out.

"What does it matter whether one is free or a slave in this vale of tears."

"Who said that?"

"JJR, who else? I think he was talking about Christians and how they feel, which paradoxically, is how I feel most of the time. Life is something to be put up with."

" But there are those who say life has so much to offer."

"I never desired killing, not really. All I've ever wanted has been intoxication, orgy, sunbathing, idleness and some means to express this. Experiences of losing oneself. We need to admit this, those of us who feel this way. The problem is getting through life with the least fuss. As though life is an inconvenience. Most of the universe doesn't have it. But am I wasting my life? Wasting my energy, my drive, my creativity."

"What though of happiness?" Jilly remembered, from somewhere back in her education, that even those who didn't believe in anything much, apart from human desire, nonetheless believed in the pursuit of happiness.

"Wandering through the long grass on a summer morning, perhaps with a lover, hand in hand, full of energy and purpose and warm feelings towards the world. Do you remember Lara's note to Zhivago 'I'm mad with joy!' Lara also said 'This is a terrible time to be living.' And it was! In those absurd circumstances people were occasionally mad with joy. Is this a plea for personal lives? I certainly see the point of those who, in 'Zhivago', said the personal life was over in Russia. The tragedy of history is the repetition. What did it matter if, in trying to put things right some private persons were prevented from living out their romances. The class and not the individual was the building block. When conservationists try to save a species the rights of individual members of the species are unimportant. But revolution is not deliverance, and these days, conservation needs conserving."

Jackie was surprised she had so much to say, but she was not much clearer. One thing she was hanging onto though was that there are always the poor and the problem is not how to change this but which side are you on.

Suddenly there was a heavy thud on the door. Jackie tried looking out to see if anyone was there, she could see nothing.

Jilly called out, "Who's there?"

Nothing happened, no further noise apart from the driving rain on the roof. They waited. Nothing. Jilly, still with the bread knife in her hand, decided to investigate. She opened the door. Jackie reached for her pistol. The light was fading. They could see little, but the door was indented, and below it, in the mud, at the bottom of the steps was a sodden log of wood about the size of a police baton. Jilly bent down to examine it. There was something tied to it. She recognised through the stains and the wet a pair of knickers. There was not much to them.

"Maniacs!" Jilly called out, her voice not carrying far in the wind, and then, from over her shoulder, came Jackie's contribution shouted louder, "Assassins!" But there was no opportunity to use their weapons.

Back in the mobile, screen-saver was advertising live chat and lingerie, and you had to put up with it.

Continued at XBOX

(Copyright theasif.info 2008)