Newham Writers Workshop Anthology 1998

		Belgin Durmush I write as a hobby and have been doing so for three or four years in my spare time. I find it quite easy to slip out of the habit of writing so attending a writers' workshop acts as a good reminder. Darkness As I sit here, I note with boredom the fact that there is nothing to see. Or maybe I should say there is everything to see, but no light with which to see it. We have lost light. I cannot tell you where it has gone for I am not an expert and even if I was, it is too dark to look for it. All I can say is that one cold, bright day, a day which is now a dim point in the past, I was walking, trying to avert my eyes from the dreary buildings and the littered streets when suddenly it all disappeared. I tried blinking rapidly and squinting and rubbing my eyes, and all those things you do automatically when streets disappear from before your eyes, but nothing worked. It was only after the people in the street began to collide and bounce off each other that I realised that I was not the only one who had experienced the vanishing High Street. Light, it seemed, had vanished into cracks and crevices. Or, perhaps, it had seeped into the ground, or was sucked into a hole or drained into the soles of our feet never to be seen again. One day it may seep out from where it is hiding and blind us with its glare, but for the moment it is blinding us by its absence. All I have is the memory which shines in my mind, so I paint pictures that no one will ever see and sweep away the darkness of my surroundings by shining the bright ball of imagination into it. I like to discover more than is actually there, for a mind bereft of stimuli can easily go stale. He is a constant reminder of this, for it is so that I do not sink to his level that I must keep probing the great depths of my darkness. The alternative is that I sit with him and stare; our heads nodding in unison, our mumbles lost in the space which divides us. As I visualise the secrets which lurk beneath the black mist, the sense of intrigue lifts me high where I can peruse the contents of imagination at my leisure. Of course, I cannot really look at anything without light, so, as I fall over objects and lose myself in dark corners, I have learnt that the trick of living in a pit of darkness is not to stray, but to stay still as long as possible and then to charge at ones destination noisily, in an effort to alert whoever might be around to get out of the way. Each detail of the vision I have conjured is vague and flickers uncontrollably like a failing image. The pictures are drab and lifeless but that is perhaps because we are drab and lifeless as we sit at the table, like dummies in a shop window. We mimic dinnertime as if from a scene in a play. Our faces are expressionless, our spoons poised. Still as two corpses in the night we sit, until I feel that the tension will snap me in two and, to revive myself, I give myself a violent shake of the knees. It leaves me tingling and reminds me that I have not yet sunk into this chair and formed a part of its frame. I am still half alive even if sometimes I feel like I have been swallowed by darkness and sent to wander, disembodied; a shadow looking for a shell. I must remember that this numb mass that I carry with me is a part of me. I must dispel this peculiar sensation that I may mislay this body if I do not stop and pick it up. Darkness plays tricks on me, for I almost believe that I have become a part of it. I do not know where I end and it begins, but I am determined to try and remember by shaking myself so hard that I feel the edges. I know I am somewhere in this room, sitting at the table facing this way or that. I cannot tell whether I am at the far end or the bottom end of the room or even if I am in the right house. When the violent shaking of the knees is over, I may stamp my feet like a furious dancer just to stop me melting into the walls of darkness. But, I do not stamp my feet too often, for they are sore from stamping and his throat sore from complaining. He complains that I distract him with the noise I make. Distract him from what? What is so interesting about sitting in the dark wallowing in the blank images of nothing. What is there to be distracted from? I sometimes wonder what he is looking at. Do we share the same room? Or is he sitting at the edge of a lake facing an oasis, while I, on the other side, am sinking head-first into a sand-pit. Is it possible that I see mere pebbles where he sees precious stones? As a mark of protest against this idea, I stamp my feet, and his reaction is, as always, sharp, his anger penetrating the darkness as it hurtles towards me. "Shut up, you noisy, insolent pig-faced rodent!" He settles back into silence as his words linger in the air. I shuffle in the restricted space of my chair suddenly finding that I am unable to get comfortable. Suddenly and overwhelmingly I feel the need to stand on my head; to chase the cobwebs away by tipping the blood which curdles at my knees, into the brain. I never did understand why the brain is up there, struggling against gravity. I find that I cannot help the old brain since direction and balance are things of the past. I wouldn't know which way was up if I didn't fall down! I make a point of falling down regularly just to make sure that gravity is still present, but falling down makes him shout and he sounds odd, except that I know that he was never interesting enough to be odd.. He complains that I am too noisy. I only make enough noise to make the toes tingle. But he doesn't understand the toe tingles or the feet stamping or the knee shaking. He thinks I make noise to annoy him, but it is difficult to hear the noises I make, muffled as they are by darkness, so I repeat myself and wait for the echoes and vibrations in this dim hole. It helps sharpen those ears. He does complain a lot. He moans about my sculptures which also double up as landmarks in the dark. He calls these death traps, but that is only because he has not learnt to avoid them. He is always tripping over and yelling, but, as I have told him often, it is better to trip over a familiar piece of furniture, which fills you with a sense of intimacy, than to bounce off dark corners and fall into holes. I used to dangle from the ceiling, but then the chandelier crashed. It is now a landmark on the floor, helping me to remember where I am. As I trip over the chandelier, it brings back fond memories of how I used to leap up and swing from the cable, flying as if the restrictive borders of darkness had suddenly lifted. Never again will I swing from those crystal threads. But I console myself: at least I now have my sculptures, which I prod every now and again to check that they are still there. Since I cannot tell any other way whether everything is where it should be, I find that I prod and poke quite often. I also prod him quite a lot, just to check if he is still alive. As always he reacts with a lot of yelling and cursing. Once I have prodded and poked everything, I make a list. Everything I expect to find in this room is on that list, including Him. Every day, after I have drunk some stale water and eaten some boiled mushrooms and potatoes, I put a tick beside where I think each item is listed on my note-pad. This is not as easy as it sounds as it involves a lot of careful finger measurement and then a sharp decisive tick. My list helps me to remember what I have around me, or, when memory fails me, helps me invent lavish new items which I can add to my list. Otherwise what is the point of all this darkness if I can't invent my very own taste and fortune? Anyone who doesn't believe that I have expensive furniture will simply be referred back to my list as proof. I tick Him off my list as well, not because I am ever likely to forget him, but simply because he has to be tracked and tagged like anything else. I fall down a lot, mainly because I forget that I have moved certain landmarks around. Last night I moved the table. He yelled a lot when I did this, for he was leaning on it at the time, but I needed to fill an empty gap with a new landmark, and the table was the only large piece of unbroken furniture. Today, I fell over where the table used to be, and for a moment I was lost in oblivion. I heard him shuffle around the room again. At first, he was cautious, crawling around like a scared mouse. But then I detected a boldness in his stride, and that is when he fell over one of my ingeniously placed landmarks, the coat-stand which I propped between two chairs. He crashed to the floor and yelled a lot. For ten minutes, the air buzzed with energy and expletives and the place almost lit up, which would have been quite stimulating for I would have been able to see his crumpled body on the floor and his little beetroot face alive with anger. The whole thing was very entertaining but painful on the ears. His voice has a tendency to climb to such a pitch that it reminds me of a chorus of skinny cats. I have tried to instruct him to leave the high squeals or, as I prefer to call it, the voice shredder, to those times when panic is the only course of action and a shrill uncontrolled scream the only fuel under which panic will thrive. He bellowed uncontrollably the day I crashed the chandelier, and it was like the skinny cats had graduated to Opera. Ever since I killed Tiggles, twelve years ago, he has been sulking in his little corner, a scream sitting on his lips ready to be propelled from his mouth. I remember that day on the chandelier. Perched, precariously like a happy robin, I swung with reckless joy. He was yelling again as the cable strained and creaked while I flew backwards and forwards. His voice was straining badly, and I wanted to tell him to be silent and rest his tired voice. I can still remember how distracted I was. All I could think about was that the pitch was all wrong, that there was no impetus, no direction, no form. With his voice in my head I flew higher. The swinging chandelier creaked under my weight, strained, then snapped, and I flew, perched on the chandelier as if on a magic lantern, watching the world beneath, except that it was in a veil of darkness. As I headed towards the floor I anticipated the thrill of the landing, imagining a fanfare of smashing and shattering objects. I waited for the wonderful, loud thunderous noise and felt the excitement tingling in my fingers. But, it never came. A quick spurting squelch filled my ears as the noise that I was expecting was absorbed by Tiggles the cat. Tiggles was dead and, as his bellowing came to an end, the heavy silence which suddenly hung in the air told me that he knew it. I was cautious and tried to break it to him gently. "Do you remember how Tiggles used to be flabby and round?" I said. He did not answer, so I went on. "Well, he's not so round anymore. In fact you won't be able to call him flabby tabby anymore." I paused. Still no response. "I don't think I sat on him too hard! He's probably got a bit of concussion," I added, feeling the warm furry substance underneath. He was quiet, very quiet, almost like a cat about to pounce on its prey. Then the quietness gave way to heavy, unsteady breathing, as if he had just remembered to breathe again. Then came the sudden outburst in his customary screech. "Concussion? Does concussion give you a flat head?" "Well he's not totally flat, just a bit. He may blow out a bit once he's over the shock. He's probably just playing dead. He's pretending." "Pretending? To be flat?" A sob echoed in the darkness. "You've squashed my cat." It was a statement of realisation. "My beautiful, round cat, squashed," he sobbed. "Not squashed, not totally, just a bit dented. He'll soon snap out of it." "Yes, of course. Come on cat, jump to it, don't let a little thing like flat legs stand in your way." ".....he'll be rolling around like a plump, round cushion, once he's eaten a few rats." "That's right, scrape yourself off the floor and pounce on that rat in your new two dimensional form." "He'll soon pick himself up and do whatever it is that cats do. He's just sleeping it off." "Sleeping it off, yes," he echoed, before falling silent. "Cats have a tendency to bounce back!" I said enthusiastically. "You have to be round to bounce!" he said, bitterly, breaking his silence before lapsing back into it. His presence seemed to slip away into the darkness leaving behind a sinister silence which hung heavily over me. I tried to see into his thoughts and to understand what it was that he most cherished about the cat. Images of a plump, silky fur cuddling up to him came into my head. The simplicity of his needs struck me: all he wants is something plump and hairy to cuddle! I thought, fully inspired. It does not have to make noises or run around. Plump with fur, that is all he will miss. All I have to do is re-fill it and stick the torn flaps together. Much like fixing a puncture. He'll never know the difference. It will simply sit on his lap and he'll caress it as he has always done. What difference can it make whether it is a dead or a live round cat, as long as he can bounce it on his knee and stroke its lumpy fur? I picked up the cat by the scruff of its neck and walked in the direction of what I thought might be where I had left the cupboard. The cupboard was no longer standing upright against the wall as it used to, for I now remembered that I had turned it around and crashed it to the ground to create a huge landmark; a patch of wood, signalling the approach to the left wall. I remembered this, for as I came to it I fell over and found myself sprawled across the different compartments with my face in a pair of chicken legs. This was a promising sign for it meant that the chips were not far away. Swinging the cat in my left hand, I sniffed hard trying to gauge a clue from the smells which lifted into the air, but all I could smell were musty, stale odours. I had to find the chips, it was either that or bits of broken splinters of furniture, which I thought were not a good idea as bits of wood might pierce his skin as he tried to stroke the cat. The chips were almost as hard and sharp as the splinters except that there were soft bits lurking inside. I knew that I would be putting them to good use inside the cat and thought that if we ever did grow desperate for cold, brittle food we knew where to find the cat. I found the chips in a pile in a little compartment, near the bowl of dead goldfish, or, as we used to call it, in the fish and chips section. They were cold in my hand and I felt a sudden urge to pop one in my mouth. It was disgusting, like eating hard rubber. I took another handful and stuffed the cat with it. It was not as easy as I had thought: instead of a round cuddly cat, the thing in my hands grew into a deformed lump. Brittle pieces were digging into my hands while other bits bulged out unexpectedly. Another small group tried to escape by splitting the sides. The more I tried to pat it into shape, the more I realised that this grotesque lump was not so cuddly. But, it was the best I could do. As I edged my way towards him, I tripped over the coat-stand. Picking myself off the ground, I crept towards him, feeling him closer now, hearing his slow breath as he sulked in his corner. I almost imagine that familiar, morose expression plastered across his face, for it is always there when he shuffles in his seat, as if attempting to extinguish an invisible flame which makes him grind the hinges off his chair. When I got within a couple of feet from him I aimed high and with an underarm pitch, threw the stuffed cat into his lap, then ducked for cover. The chair stopped creaking, but only for a moment. The chilly pause was followed by a bellow from a terrible voice. It was a voice so rich with rage that I hid underneath the table and waited for the solace of silence. I crouched low as objects flew and chairs were smashed. Gasps thick and heavy reached me as I ducked further under the table, but then flew out from under the confined space in a desperate bid to escape. As I did so, I felt a slap on my head as if a heavy cloth had fallen from above. I checked to see what had landed there. It was the dead cat perched like a cap on my head. Ever since that day he hasn't stopped screaming. It is true he always used to scream. He has always been volatile, his temper always exploding in a screech. I do not mind the unpleasant noise as much as the piercing of my ear drums for I refuse to be deaf as well as blind. Even Tiggles screeched with more dignity. Tiggles now dangles from the ceiling and brushes against my face as I get up to go to the bathroom. "Good cat," I whisper as I pat its head, for it reminds me how useful things become after the trivialities are over. I am often reminded of this for one day HE too will be a useful landmark, perhaps hanging over the banisters, showing me the way upstairs, for it is true, stairs are always difficult and I need all the help I can get.