I am going to tell you a story, which may or may not be true. It's a story I know only too well and you'll soon see why. So park your lard in your favourite chair and just listen.
Darker Killingbeck for the uninitiated is where creative people go when they die.
A gigantic city of dark tower blocks, multi-ethnic districts and a fully functioning underground metro system. Angles, shapes, concrete, glass and miracles of engineering and architecture. It's where, I suppose, I've always lived. Where crowds of people, cars, traders, the homeless, weirdos, geeks, anoraks and trainspotters live cheek by jowl. A suicidial world of life rushing past as the rest of us standstill - now this is beginning to feel a bit like a poem - so let's conjure up an image.
Let's say I am having a coffee at my favourite organic cafe 'Dare' In Byers Road. It's a sunny day, so I am sitting at a table on the pavement. I am enjoying an Americano while doing corrections in my black book when a woman approaches from the harbour.
"You’ll have to excuse my lateness" She smiles "I’m just back from hauling my twin baskets of peat and silver darlings across the har covered sheiling. My tartan skirts muddied by the glaur, my oiled wool shawl about my bony shoulders, my clay pipe firmly in place in the corner of my old crone’s mouth.....Uh-huh."
"Uh-huh" I nod. "Have you read Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveller?" She shakes her head. "Invisible Cities? The Castle of Crossed Destinies? Cosmicomics, perhaps?"
"Are you taking the rip?" She says glaring at me and then suddenly pulls a Beretta Storm Rifle from her basket and points it at me.
I panic, knock over the table in my haste to get away and run for cover. A car flashing its lights heads directly for me, I turn, see the woman from the harbour lift the rifle and aim. Glance around in time to see the car bearing down on me. The door of the pub - The Wind That Shakes Barley On a Very Cold Night In April - straight across the road from the cafe opens. Hard-Fi's Hard To Beat blasting out momentarily.
Leaves me thinking I always imagined I'd be part of a car crash.
The guy in the car - young and flash character, with a poor excuse for a moustache and sporting an Adidas baseball cap - is listening to Tupac Shakur on his stereo. He is glancing toward his pinhead girlfriend (blonde hair, overbloated,thick make-up and Burberry scarf) when, at the last minute he sees me, but forgets to brake and pushes hard on the accelerator instead.
"What the f... git oot o' the way, ya maddie, whit's he daein man aaaaarrrgghhh!" The driver screams.
"Look oot Brett yer gonna hit...aaaaaarrrggghhh!"
To be continued.
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2 comments:
Hate to say that I like this a lot. Haunting feeling and atmosphere, reads well with anticipation.
I like the blog too.
Seryozha, loved this! I’ll expect my cheque in the post! Yes?
How very Royston Vasey but also, I’m reminded of Mr Gaheris’s tale from Neil Gaiman’s “World’s End” (The Sandman graphic novel series, vol 8). Gaheris is one of several travellers (from across time, imagination, myth...) stranded in the World’s End inn – at the “vortex of a reality storm” – who sup together and tell tales to pass the time. It’s all very Chaucerian, only with the eclectic mix of characters (humans, a centaur, a necropolitician, Titania’s faerie envoy, a Hindu goddess…) that’s so very typical of The Sandman (Dream, the Prince of Stories, our collective subconscious?).
Anywho, the point I wanted to make is that Sergio’s imagery for Darker Killingbeck – final place of repose for tellers of stories and other creative types – is for me very evocative of my own sense of al
most existentialist bewilderment with life – the “waking world” that is. Artwork and visual imagery is (obviously) intrinsic to The Sandman, and it radically changes from story to story, just as the representations of Dream change depending on who perceives “him” – he may be an Elizabethan courtier, an African warrior, a Japanese shogun,…a cat (!).
In Gaheris’s tale the art apes the naïve effect of wood cut prints – perfectly matching the sparse, linear narrative, with its sense of isolation and alienation.
In the story within the story (within the story) a shattered figure moves through a city’s dream, finally emerging only to abandon all vestiges of the urbane, fearing not his return one day to the dreams of the city but rather, “…that one day the cities will awaken. That one day the cities will rise.”
(“If the city was dreaming, “ he told me, “then the city is asleep. And I do not fear cities sleeping, stretched out unconscious around their rivers and estuaries, like cats in the moonlight. Sleeping cities are tame and harmless things.”) For what if the cities should awake? Awake and…
Sounds naff I know but as a comment on our kollektive consciousness – “Los Angeles is not Vienna. London is not Moscow. Chicago is not Paris. Each city is a collection of lives and buildings and it has its own personality…” and the Kafkaesque alienation of modern urban life we may experience as a result of this – it’s quite good fun!
This is hardly classic literature. Not like wot Sergio reads (and writes!) but it’s certainly a cut above your average Marvel comic. No offence Dark Knight groupies! Literary and culturally referrals abound – Gaiman sources everyone and everything from Marlowe to Aeschylus; William Blake to the Book of Genesis; Shakespeare to Caesar Augustus. And, as the kollektive well knows, our Sergio is not above making the odd “cultural” referral in his work!
Axasha.
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