The first words I heard Ted Hawkins sing, it was a song called ‘Sorry you’re sick.’

Good morning my darling, I’m telling you this
To let you know that I’m sorry you’re sick
Those tears of sorrow won’t do you no good
I’d be your doctor if only I could

What do you want from the liquor store?
Something sour or something sweet?
I’ll buy you all that your belly can hold
You can be sure you won’t suffer no more

Immediately, Hawkins hooked me in. I can’t remember ever having been so struck by a voice. It’s grand, simple, witty and tragic, all at the same time. There’s absolutely no pretence or pretension. Somehow this voice seemed very important, and I wondered why I’d never heard of him before.

Because of the lifestyle he chose to lead, not many people seem to have heard of Ted Hawkins. He lived from 1936 to 1995, and recorded a total of nine albums. For much of his life he was in and out of jail – as a teenager he served three years for stealing a leather jacket – and was addicted to heroin and booze for long periods of time. He was a drifter, a vagrant, a busker, a bum, with little genuine interest in self-promotion. He alternated between being a fairly well-regarded performer in Europe and an anonymous street musician in the States, and never really enjoyed recording or even performing indoors. He died of a stroke at the age of 58, shortly after the release of his first breakthrough recording, The Next Hundred Years.

Alcoholism is one of the major themes of his lyrics. He doesn’t revel in being an alcoholic – nor does he romanticise being a drifter – but acknowledges and accepts the fact. He tells the story of his life with frankness, directness and simplicity. His lyrics are wry and slightly self-effacing, as if he’s always smiling with one corner of his mouth. But he maintains great dignity.

There stands the glass
That will ease all my pain
That will settle my brain
It’s my first one today

There stands the glass
That will drown all my fears
That will hide all my tears
Brother, I’m on my way

Another common theme is loneliness, loss. There is genuine tragedy at the core of his songs. But somehow they are not introspective, and Hawkins never wallows or plays his sadness up. In the best tradition of the blues, he just tells it how it is. His voice is the voice of someone who’s spent a long time observing the world, and accepts its sadness as a fact.

There’s often an invisible other person, a woman or a drinking partner, whom Hawkins addresses in his songs. They never talk back – they might be drunk, in tears or walking out of the door – and the experience of hearing this yearning one-way conversation is like eavesdropping on a private moment. His songs are short scenes of his everyday life, and remind me a lot of Raymond Carver’s short stories.

These words are from a song called ‘Stop your crying.’ Whether sung or written down, I find them heartbreakingly sad:

Are you crying?
I thought you was laughing
Hold up your head, baby
And let me see

If you want me to go
Why are you weeping?
Stop your crying, darling
It’ll be alright

Honey, you know that I cannot stand to hear…

But Hawkins miraculously avoids being bleak or miserable. His music has too much warmth for that, and the lyrics are full of charm and humour. He manages to maintain a kind of noble alcoholic’s sadness while never taking his sufferings too seriously. There’s a brilliant song from his first album ‘Watch your step’ that shows him at his least serious. It’s set in a swinging party – one of the rare songs on the album accompanied by a full band – when suddenly Hawkins interrupts, yelling:

Wait, hold it, hold it, hold it, stop the music! Stop this music!
Who got my natural comb…?

Who got my natural comb?
Who got my natural comb?
I ain’t got no comb to comb my hair
(hey hey hey)
Nobody seems to hear a word I say
(hey hey hey)
You know what I’m talking about –
Don’t make me turn this party out!
That’s what I got to do!

Who got my natural comb?
Who got my natural comb?
Who got my natural comb?
If I don’t find my stone comb,
Ain’t nobody going home!

I broke two of those other kind of funny combs
You know the kind I’m talking about
My hair wouldn’t stand no foolishness –
Like me, it’s much too stout (ow!)

It’s just a brilliant image, him storming around the room, threatening to throw out all his guests, furiously demanding his favourite stone comb, which presumably one of his boozy buddies has filched.

Ted Hawkins is a truly wonderful man. I recommend you listen to his music.

By Under Scrutiny for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 0 comments

Amazing Magic Shop

Heavens, I thought, what a stupid idea. And for once, my usually limp curiosity got the better of me and pushing the greasy door open I stepped over the threshold with a shiver and entered the shop.

The door jingled shut behind me and my nose started uncontrollably wrinkling. Then, a hunched little man hobbled out from a monstrous heap of tennis shoes. From where I stood at the front of the shop I could make out some of his features through the interminable dark: entirely bald except for a knotted little rat’s tail of old hair on the back of his head, bent at the shoulders as if he had lost a fifty year long drunken bet with gravity, unconventionally topless from the waist up and hardly better down. The remaining wrinkles of his modesty were covered with a tea stained sarong. Rubbing his eyes he addressed me,

“Ah, you are evidently surprised by the smell of my amazing magic shop. Does it not smell of sugar candy canes, rainbows and memories of the merry giggles of a children’s playground?”

It certainly did not smell of such things; the shop smelt of bodily odours and shit. With the noise of a fluttering pigeon he sprang onto a stack of rotten paperback novels, then again an alarmingly agile leap took him closer to me via a soot black chandelier. From a half squat behind a poorly painted copy of a Delacroix he leapt finally over more unlisted tat to stand some two feet in front of me. Understandably shocked from his display of indecent athleticism and gagging a little from the stench I lost my bearings and fell back against the opaque door. It jingled again and I felt the thin layer of filth impress itself onto the palms of my hands.

“Do my amazing abilities of transport impress you? Would you not say,” he asked following a slanted pirouette, “that you are in an amazing shop of really good magic?”

Words continued to fail me. It distresses me to tell you that so horrific were the poorly lit displays of unnatural physics I was witnessing that I could not return my face to a look of civility. Disgust had settled on my face with all intentions to permanence. Rocking his bodily weight from one foot to another to hypnotic effect, he reached into his waddling and produced a small ivory box from just to the right of what was evidently and abominably some kind of penile erection. He held the box towards me.

“The greatest trick of them all!”

I stood and waited for him to continue, which he finally did with annoyance,

“The greatest trick of them all and the reason why you have come here and I have waited for you for all eternity and why I will and always have waited for you!”

He pirouetted again, this time breaking wind. Again was the box in his withered hand, held up for me to take. In the panic my heartbeat went up-tempo.

“The greatest most amazingest trick that both the devil and the god and the hairy little angels ever did create and will create and always have had created before and beyond time itself and why I have waited and waited since and before and after eternity in the space between spaces above and beyond the call of heavenly and hellish duty tinkering and having been tinkered to and with in my amazing magic shop of many amazing magic items while I waited and dreamed and desired and cooked dinners for myself and waited for you to come and claim it, yes!”

Having lost track of the middle bit of his conversation a certain amount of boredom has aroused me a little from my appalled stupor. It was clear to me that both the terrible creature and I had started to realise there had been some kind of misunderstanding.

He tucked the grey bone box back into his now deflated loins. With a flick of an extended ancient finger he paranormally channeled one of the old tennis shoes across the room and into my forehead. His mouth opened, horse teeth exposed:

“Fuck off.”

In agreement I left that charming and truly magical little man and four days later drowned myself off a bridge.

By RobotDan for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 0 comments

By Bonnie Doon for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 5 comments

By Johannes for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 3 comments

At five she rose in order to shower, drink coffee, and still make the train that wound south for an hour before leaving her on the beach. Through that hour the train passed the roofs of too many buildings to count, strung too far to see the end of them, and on the raised platforms people stood in black coats.

Work happened between the low gray ceiling and the hard yellow floor. Box fans were whirring, no matter the weather, blowing the papers off the desks. The window at back of the long room, no matter the weather, was always open. The sea air came in; she put her knees against the space heater under her desk. The office helped immigrants from Russia and Ukraine, and most of the words shouted over her head or into her ear were in languages she did not know. Neither did she know why her supervisor sneaked up behind her to read what she was typing or to snatch her chair from under her when too many clients were standing.—If you hate me, Mrs. Boyko, just say it.

But the work was done, and she wound her scarf tighter against the ocean wind; the sky had held the same dark since three o’clock, and others were just getting home to their radiators and ovens. It would be long before she was home; no one else would be there, no heat turned on; the rooms would be dark and cold. Children ran by with their coats opening behind them like wings. How did anyone grow up here? She didn’t mean only the weather. Everything was—she avoided the word ‘inhospitable’ because that would be admitting that she did not belong, and not belonging was the fear behind every smile that was not returned. Now at the subway she hurried underground, hoping that down there could be better endured.

Like most of the young, she believed in a secret of her inner life. This was an assumption and not conscious, but when she was riding the train between the sick and hearing a cough that twisted like a dead branch, she felt close to the secret, and then it was a spirit without a tongue of fire. On certain nights the urge to live in her secret disturbed her until she turned the lamp on and walked out on the fire escape in pajamas as if she didn’t know it was winter. Had anyone called her? Or did the voice only say, ‘Samuel’?

Her outer life might have taken a shape; she did have friends. But contact was infrequent (against her choice) and ended in goodbyes so prolonged (by her choice) that she felt she was begging for love. The guilt of this need was both pronounced and unrecognized; she expressed it such aimless habits as eating chocolate until she got an ulcer then pressing the sore with her tongue. In the same way—even the same time—she thought over the most humiliating moments of her first love affair, moments when she begged him with tears to strike her, and not for sensuality but because she deserved it. The guilt and the man who did not strike her because she was not worth even that—these were the matters of greatest unconscious concern—after her secret, invisible and always first.

The public library was no favorite place; in dark cafés she could not sit still; the parks, those green mazes of vine and staircase, got her lost. She took walks instead, favoring neighborhoods built along water, and as she walked it could seem that what she had been was leaking away. She remembered sharing a house with the man: his boot-steps on the wood and his figure at the corner of her sight while he ate cold cereal or looked for a record or some other task that took importance over her homework because he was real. If once she had been able to live from him, then she must be able now to live from something else. This need to live was always present but never encouraging. Instead it was a terror that chased her out to the piers where the cranes looked a hundred times taller than she; she smelled it in the office stench of borscht and vareniki; she saw it in the darkness of the morning apartment that she was so frightened of leaving too late; and when she was waiting in the smallest corner of the farthest station, it was standing beside her and waiting too.

She had today off, but where was her strength? Outside was cold, getting colder; inside was warm, but everything inside had been thought already. The apartment had a dim bathroom mirror, the sort that always makes you ugly, and into this she stared, counting the times that she had made a particular mistake. Some mistakes became habits; others were once for always. To admit the second kind of mistake was to know that you were changed. Even your body was different; things smelled, looked, and tasted different, even though your reflection had not changed.

She was opening her chopsticks. The TV was in Mandarin, and the patrons were laughing at it, but their own conversations were Cantonese. Between the five tables, two waiters stormed to and fro with bowls that smelled of eel and coriander. Through the window in the kitchen door, an old man pulled dough and slapped it across a counter. She had the table farthest from the window. Her hands were not better at this; she expected them to be, but each time she tried chopsticks again she realized that months had passed since the last practice, and the pieces of noodle, bok choy, and fried egg dropped noisily back in the clear soup. A black parka took up the chair beside her. Its hood bent over the table and gave the impression of smelling her food, and it was the reason she had come downtown. Finishing, she waited a long time for a waiter and finally walked to the register apologetically and paid there and left too large a tip.

Downtown it was impossible not to feel so much looming overhead, as though the builders had left arches in the sky with people standing on them. And the crowds knew you had a failed love story and a friend who was gone, and they rushed faster toward you for it, and because of it they were more forceful in resolving not to look at you and never to return your smile. The woman at the shelter said, ‘Yeah, you can just leave that here.’ So she left the coat there and went through the five o’clock dark. Two men at the corner bar followed her with their eyes, but she didn’t notice; she was choking with hatred of her own good deed. If she was not good, she could not become good through actions. Because something was wrong beneath the actions. Because her love was a consuming greed.

She entered a park. The branches were black cursive sentences for many truths that someone had told her about herself. Beneath one especially critical line, a man was doing something that could not be real. She saw it then only thought she saw it and looked again and saw it and it was real. When she got home later she was still thinking of it as she ate avocado and tofu on dry bread, and when she sat on the toilet after that she thought of two choices, each absolute. And during her shower she chose the second choice. Dry and in pajamas now, she found a blank postcard and filled in an address she had not written in one year; she remembered it all. But before she wrote the message she looked around at her mother’s dresser, her brother’s vases, her grandmother’s music box. She expected that any of them would shift places suddenly to warn her, ‘No!’

She wrote:

By Johannes for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 2 comments

All of Jack’s girlfriends have something in common, though none have realised it yet. Actually, they have two things in common. First, they are all cyclists. Jack is also a cyclist. That isn’t unusual. It’s almost expected. Cyclists will naturally cleave to one another, craving the warm reassurance of flesh as a counterweight to those lonely, whirring wheels, that too-perfect point of balance. Also, cyclists go to cyclist parties, where they meet and make bike-talk and fuck.

But Jack doesn’t meet his girlfriends at parties, though he does attend them, sometimes. Jack despises the cyclists who meet their girlfriends at parties. Perhaps despise is the wrong word. Jack doesn’t really despise other people. More, he looks down on them. For reasons both tactical and aesthetic, he spends a lot of his free time on the balcony of his seventh-floor flat, overlooking the towpath of Regent’s Canal. He is used to looking down on people.

Jack has had a lot of girlfriends, certainly by pedestrian standards, but never more than one at the same time. Whatever else Jack might be, he is not adulterous. Adultery doesn’t come easily to cyclists. Cyclists do things in ones. It’s different for pedestrians, strolling along at lovers’ pace, hand in hand or over shoulder, bound to their walking partner. It’s possible to walk while fully embracing. It’s possible to kiss-walk. It’s even possible to walk and have sex, though not particularly pleasant. But cycling is a singular activity, even when you are in love. Even when free-wheeling side by side – down a slow hill say, when the leaves are falling – the tips of your handlebars almost touching, spokes whirring the same tune, you will still be cycling alone.

Flirting is a different matter. Cyclists flirt well. Jack’s father liked to quote from cyclologist Howard Rhineshaft’s seminal study In and Outs of the Cyclo-Sexual Revolution: “The acts of cycling and flirting are virtually indistinguishable. In essence, cycling is flirting, in and of itself.” The words impressed Jack from an early age, and in subsequent years he discovered their truth. Weaving in and out of parked cars, playing hard to get and doubling back, sketching invisible lines in the air that tangle around one another in a knot that tightens and tightens towards its own centre, drawing two spheres together. Cycling is the purest form of flirting, purer – or so Jack likes to think – than the mating rituals of birds or Argentinian tango. Ordinary, non-cycling people could no more hope to understand this than a mole could hope to understand the sensation of flight.

Jack flirts on bikes, but for him this comes later. For Jack, the flirting comes after the event.

Cyclists have an inexorable quality. Physicists have remarked on this. They are like water slipping through pebbles, the slow creep of a glacier’s melt, filtering through solid surfaces, always seeking the path of least resistance.

It is amongst this amorphous tribe that Jack goes looking for love.

Doubtless it will happen at one night’s party: two girls searching for unused glasses, pausing to comment on the Marmite-covered helmet or the bike pump stuck in the pineapple. They gently collide with one another at the sink. The usual ways into conversation. A prior connection, a mutual recognition, or perhaps something triggered innately that sets off the siren of shared experience, that uncanny cyclesense.

“So who do you know here?”

“I came with my boyfriend. He’s over there somewhere, he’s the one wearing the fluorescent top hat.”

“Oh, you’re going out with Jack?”

“You know Jack?”

“Sure. I haven’t seen him in a while. We went out for a couple of months, last year.”

“You did? You’re not Caren, are you?”

“No, I’m Jenny. He never mentioned me? Doesn’t matter, it wasn’t a very big thing.”

“We haven’t been together that long. So, how did you meet?”

“It’s a pretty funny story, actually. Not your usual introduction.” Jenny pauses and smiles, thinking back. One of those tales you are used to telling. A requested favourite amongst her friends, even if events ended badly. “I was cycling down along Regent’s Canal, going under all those low bridges. You know there’s not a lot of space to pass. Suddenly I just saw this guy come veering the opposite way towards me. We were both going a little too fast. We swerved the same way at the same time. I couldn’t get out of his way…”

“That’s… weird…” The girl narrows her eyes. Suspecting a lie. A joke, a put-up. But the other girl, not noticing, rinsing out a smeared wine glass filled with chunks of fruit and fag ends, innocently talks on.

“…and we weren’t hurt bad, we didn’t really crash crash, but I had a scraped-up elbow, a bit of grit stuck in there. He was really nice. He apologised, though it was my fault as much as his. You know, sometimes you’re just not looking. Anyway, because he lived nearby, he invited me back. To get cleaned up. Does he still have that flat, actually, up on the seventh floor…?”

“Um… yeah. But… this sounds really weird…”

And from here, slow disbelief will unfold as the second girl stumblingly echoes the first. But it can’t be… It must be coincidence, surely. Ridiculous, mad to imagine that… They will stare at one another in dawning comprehension – “But… Jack’s so good on his bike. Have you ever seen him in another accident, even coming close?” – the incredulous widening of eyes that have seen a thousand roads rolling towards them, ticker-taping concrete miles. Fume-stinging, road-hardened, cyclists’ eyes, searching for explanation. “A scraped-up elbow… a bit of grit stuck in there…” Both girls now rolling up their skin-tight sleeves to reveal – like something from a horror film – the healed-over scar on the forearm or elbow, the almost identical markings…

And if Jack saw this, would he try to stop it? Would he try to break in? Would he leave the room? Or would he just stand there and watch events unravel, that inscrutable smile playing on his lips, his upper face lit by the fluorescent glow of the ridiculous top hat perched on his head, like a boy with buttercups under his chin?

Only Jack knows that.

In any event, it hasn’t happened yet. It may one day, but not now.

“All women know cyclists are good in bed. Good cyclists make good lovers. Same goes with cooking. Women go for cooks. If you can cook and you can cycle, you’ll never be lacking for ladies.” Jack’s father told him this when he was fifteen. Some years after the birds and bees talk, the tactical advice began. “It’s about speed, smoothness, control. The same qualities count in all these things. Rhineshaft drew the comparison first in Cyclo-Sexual Revolution. And there’s risk in these things too. You learn to love that risk. But you have to have smoothness and control. Remember the perfect line?”

“I know, Dad. The perfect line.” Fifteen year-old Jack, taking off his cycle helmet. No girlfriends as yet, can hardly cook a boiled egg, but already with a decade of cycling experience under his reflective belt. Frustrated by his father, but in thrall to him still. “You never shut up about the perfect line.”

“It’s important, Jack. Say you’re travelling at speed, rounding a corner, coming down St. Michael’s Hill. The perfect line is the optimum point achieved between speed and bearing. It’s mathematical, Jack, but you could never calculate it. You know it when you feel it. When you hit the perfect line, you’re existing in the moment. It’s the only pure state of being. The perfect line extends to all things: cooking, making love, anything. But cycling is where you feel it most. A state of absolute balance.”

Jack’s father had started him cycling young. He saw it as the next stage of walking. He tutored him in every aspect of cycling philosophy, tuning and honing his son’s abilities with the same dedication in which he tightened his spokes. And when Jack once lost the perfect line and went over the handlebars down the road, landing on the back of his head, staggering shocked and hurt back home, it was his father who patched him back up, sponging the blood from his matted hair, teaching him to be strong once again in the world.

You could say his father was somehow responsible for Jack’s singular approach to relationships. Something his old man didn’t teach him, however, was how to meet girls in the first place. This lesson, Jack had to improvise for himself.

Sometimes they last for a couple of months. Sometimes, only one night. The longest relationship Jack’s ever had was three months and a half, but this was less to do with love and more to do with his bike being stolen, putting a halt to his towpath prowling until he had built a new one (Jack only rides the machines he builds. To travel on a pre-made, shop-bought bike would be like using chat-up lines looked up on the internet). Jack’s restlessness, this itchy, selfish streak, must correspond to some fundamental boredom deep inside his being. But it dovetails also with the cyclist’s instinct, the impulse to jump a glaring red light, to take shortcuts down steps and over pavements, to cut across taxis with seconds to spare – the insatiable urge to pedal on, carving up the hills.

He sees them coming from a distance, far down along the towpath. Advantages of the canal include an uninterrupted line of view and limited space to manoeuvre. He uses his seventh-floor balcony to accustom himself with the regular commuters, getting to know their comings and goings, familiarising with their cycling styles, their legs, the colours of their helmets.

He doesn’t believe in accidents. Not after the first time. It happened about two years ago, the night he learned how to break through. Bleak Jack was pacing it down the main road, going nowhere in particular, thinking violent and gloomy thoughts, as he had a tendency to do. Jack was a miserable bastard back then. All he did was fantasise and complain. That night he was obsessing over the lines: not the perfect line of his father’s lessons, but the binding lines of his supposed independence, which hemmed his ambition and imagination on all sides. He was brooding on the white lines on the road that separated that stream of traffic from this, the yellow lines skimming beneath his front tyre, the cyclists squeezed into their own narrow line – a flashing neon circus parade – between the cars and the kerbside. The cyclist’s loneliness stung his eyes. Everyone tracked into parallel lines that ran alongside one another without crossing. An incessant current of lives skimming past, missing the connection.

He made a sharp turn down a left-hand street, and she was coming the other way. All he saw was a blur of girl, mounted on top of a royal green racer, heading so unmistakably for him they might as well have crashed already. He didn’t react. He just squeezed up his face. He caught the shocked intake of her breath as she swung her front wheel and missed him by inches. His body felt an impact that never occurred. And a second later she was gone again, whipped into the traffic on the main road, and he was halfway down the street, still travelling at speed.

Once, as a teenager, he’d been on a train and witnessed a reassuring thing. Just as the train pulled away from the station, a woman had yawned on the platform. A few seconds later, the man beside him, sitting by the window, also yawned, and Jack had witnessed that same yawn passed down the carriage from one seat to the next, propelled away from its originator into far country fields. Perhaps it would even reach the next city, and conquer that in turn. It gave him the sense that strangers were connected. An early notion that there might exist ways to hop the usual strictures.

And that’s when it occurred to him, as he pedalled on through the East London night, still heading nowhere in particular but carrying a startling new idea. The simplicity of it terrified him. That’s all it would take. All that was needed to break those lines, to cross the parallels. The slightest shift of his right arm’s weight on the handlebars, the merest redirection of the bike’s front wheel, and two lives that could have been apart forever would come together for a while.

There are meant to be six degrees of separation between every living person in the world. With cyclists, there are no more than four. This is partly because cyclists travel faster than ordinary people, laying themselves open to more connections. But also because bicycles act as a third agent. They allow the cyclist to jump two degrees, which is, in essence, all Jack does. Bicycles cut through the barriers. Bicycles are an arrow into the heart.

His father explained him the four degrees theory. He got it from James P. Valdek’s renowned Probability Studies in Bicycle Physics, another of his favourite books. Some of the things that Jack knows he learned for himself, and some of it came from his father. His father crammed him with so much bullshit that sometimes he can’t remember whose knowledge is whose.

Aged seventeen, Jack and his friend Saul took two weeks off from their summer jobs to ride four hundred miles down to Cornwall. They slept on beaches, smoked cigarettes in fields, and engaged in some minor but satisfying acts of vandalism. They rode down steep country roads and over farmland, forded rivers and penetrated forests, rode their bikes drunk, naked, and, as an experiment, blindfolded. Jack was experiencing freedom from his father, yet at the same time following in his tracks, obeying the call of the open road and the poetry of the whirring wheels to which his father had dedicated much of his life. And when he came home, his bike loose and rattling, his father was patiently waiting. They embraced each other briefly, drank a cup of tea, and together began the process of light repairs.

Jack’s flat, up on the seventh floor of a 1970s ex-council block, looks like the inside of a bike repair shop. Frames, spare wheels, brake cables, inner tubes, tyres hanging from nails in the wall, encrusted cans of WD40 and vulcanising solution. But there are green plants here too, watered faithfully every two days, stacks of books, CDs, old videos, bits of furniture he’s picked up on the street or dragged home out of skips. His tiny kitchen is well stocked with food, garlic and dried chillies hanging over the door, fresh herbs, spices, assorted cooking oils, a whole shelf lined with opened bottles of spirits. There is always a saucepan of soup on the stove. French onion is one of his specials.

Jack’s bed, surprisingly, is small: a single mattress on a squeaky frame, the sort of bed a child would have. Most of his girlfriends complain about the bed, but Jack has become attached to it. His bicycle and his bed comprise the twin gravitational centres of his life, and Jack, like many cyclists, is superstitious of change. In a small wicker bowl beside the bed are some condoms and a puncture repair kit. There is no decoration on the bedroom walls apart from a hanging tatami mat and a couple of framed portraits of horses he found outside a pub.

The bathroom is even smaller than the kitchen. Here, alongside a selection of toothbrushes of all different colours – toothbrushes he could probably match, if he wanted, to the mouth of one girl or another, just as he could match discarded clothes to departed bodies – he keeps the selection of Band Aids, gauze, cotton wool swabs and bottles of TCP necessary for patching up, after the event.

He doesn’t enjoy this part, however. Don’t go thinking Jack’s some kind of pervert who gets off on seeing girls scraped up. Whatever else Jack might be, he is not an injury fetishist. He does all he can to minimise damage, both to the crashee and to himself. It’s a calculated and controlled collision, executed with skill. And is it really much different, he asks himself, to feeding someone booze or amphetamines, half a pill here, a line of coke there, a dab of MDMA on the gums, in the hope of jumping those two degrees of inhibition that way? Intoxication does more lasting damage than a minor collision on bicycles. A grazed elbow or bruise on the shin heals quicker than killing your brain cells in job-lots of several million at a time.

Only very rarely has a collision resulted in either party actually coming off their bikes. Most often, the front wheels glance off one another, bringing them together in a mesh of parts, the tightened knot of handlebars and limbs. Ideally the girl will even grab his arms to steady herself as she totters. And the way Jack swings it – this is his talent – is to make it appear as if the fault was entirely equal to them both.

“Are you OK..?

“Shit, that was close…

“Are you hurt? You’ve got a scrape on your arm…

“You can’t see people coming around that stretch…

“Was that spoke bent like that before?”

The natural reaction is shock, then relief. Jack forestalls anger through apology, which leads the crashee to apologise with equal insistence. They will laugh, because that’s what you do after shock, and the exhilaration of the accident will induce a slight euphoria. They will disentangle their bicycles – an act of surprising intimacy – and drag the machines to the side of the towpath to let other cyclists pass.

“You’re bleeding a bit. You need a plaster on that…

“That wheel needs resetting. I could do that in two minutes…

“Look, do you live far away? Because that’s my flat, you can see it from here…

“My name’s Jack, by the way…”

And he will point to the tower block over the canal, the seventh-floor balcony. If you look hard you can see the little flag, the old wheel wired to the railing.

But Jack must possess some species of magic. For once he’s got the girl up there, cleared the clutter off the flimsy table and set out a pot of tea and first aid kit, he doesn’t have to do anything else. He doesn’t need to sleaze or seduce, there is no shock and awe to his methods. He doesn’t say very much at all. The risk has been taken, the danger point is passed. From this point, Jack becomes quite shy.

“Um, are you hungry? There’s some soup on the stove. Might be good for shock…

“It’s French onion. I make a lot of soup. This one’s pretty good.”

And so together they’ll spoon soup and sip tea, and chew energy bars for dessert. He’ll deftly fix whatever damage was done, both to her and to her bike. She’ll say she needs to go, but will be curiously unhurried. The light will change outside the window. She’ll glance over his cluttered shelves of books, and find several titles she knows. They might have a glass from the half-empty bottle of wine on top of the fridge. Before long they’ll be laughing together, delighting in an unusual experience shared. They’ll converse in the secret language of cyclists, a tongue as alien to pedestrians as their preferred style of outfit. And sooner or later, she’ll reach out for him. This is the way it goes.

Of course, he’s tried meeting girls the other way. The normal way, as if it’s ever normal to assume intimacy with a total stranger in the hope she’ll come home and have sex with you. He’s tried at the parties, the pubs and the clubs. He’s struck up conversations at private views, exhibitions of awful political art at squats and social centres. But it just doesn’t carry the same exhilaration. Those girls look right through him. Out there – in the pedestrian world – Jack is a non-entity. He may as well be one foot tall. No-one notices his qualities. When he speaks his words are eaten by static, rendered unmemorable by background noise. No-one can quite remember his face. But in the cycling world, it’s different. He hits the perfect line.

He’s dabbing at a girl’s sore arm with TCP-dipped cotton wool. He’s stretching out a limb of his own for reciprocal first aid. His wry apologies, tempered by that smile, embody the shyness and the arrogance only cyclists can combine in such perfect proportions that sometimes you don’t know if you’re making love to a twelve-speed Raleigh or a person. He’s tuning the brakes, wrenching a bolt, resetting the wheel that was knocked off-kilter. And those dimples either side of his mouth act as a further incentive, somehow, to prolong his smile, to make him laugh, to peel back the secret of his sense of humour, which, like much of what Jack does, is particularly hard to fathom. In the cycling world, Jack becomes someone else. He transforms.

Jack is a believer in secret powers. Force fields, rubbery and resistant, that surround our daily lives, silently repelling potential connections who might become detached from their tracks and wander onto our own. But Jack has discovered how to break the lines. A way to make trains jump tracks. The only force strong enough to propel him from his own life into somebody else’s.

That’s the only way Jack can do it. The only way he knows how.

But Jack’s been having dreams of late. It’s been happening for some weeks. He’ll be asleep, entangled with the latest crashee – the bedroom floor littered with reflective garments, cycle-wear, bike clips, clip-on lights and other accoutrements discarded in passion – when suddenly he’ll shock awake with that same vision in his head: the terror, the red streak.

It comes so fast it tears open the air. Always from just outside the periphery, the vulnerable blind spot. At first it’s a sense, then a sound, then a fear. The Terrorcyclist.

“I was about your age when I saw him, Jack. It’s something I’ll never forget. One spring morning, just after dawn, at the White Tree Roundabout.”

They were down at the end of the cul-de-sac, practicing slow turns. The aim was to ride as slowly as possible without toppling over: a tactical discipline, recommended in Rick G. Smith’s Bike Physionomics, which strips centrifugal force from the equation and teaches the mind the quality of balance.

“What did he look like?” asked Jack, concentrating hard.

“That’s hard to say, Jack. That’s very hard to say. The only way to ’see’ the Terrorcyclist is by stopping time itself. Have you ever watched the clothes spinning round in your mother’s washing machine? It’s all a blur. But if you focus on one item at a time, you can make out the shape of a sock, or a shirt.”

“Yes, but what did he look like, Dad?” Ten year-old Jack, impatient already, orbiting in wobbly circles around the fixed post of his father on a grey suburban commuter town afternoon.

“A black man. Rippling with muscle. That’s how he manifested to me, anyhow. His torso was clad in skin-tight Lycra, red, the colour of new blood. He wore a pair of tiny red shorts. A red helmet, streamlined to a needlepoint. There wasn’t a single hair on his body.”

“How do you know there wasn’t a hair?” Jack asked, “if he was going so fast?”

“Hair doesn’t grow on men like him. Hair just doesn’t grow.”

Jack’s father was teaching him of the dangers. This was the other side of the coin. The death-flip as your bike cartwheels when a clumsy pedestrian steps out in traffic, the mindless brutality of motorcyclists who mimic bicycles for convenience but retain the relentless, mechanical souls of cars. He had told of the blindness of double-decker buses, explained how to navigate your way through corridors formed by the steel walls that open up between their hot flanks, and can close to smear you to pulp without even noticing. But Jack had never heard his father say anything like this before. Frowning Jack, already cynical at ten, reluctantly thrilled at the tale.

“Hair can’t grow, in wind-speed like that. Besides, he had stopped beside me, Jack. I was waiting at the lights.”

“So you did see him, then?”

“He saw me. It froze me to the core. There I was, just waiting for green – about your age, on a bright spring morning – stopped at the White Tree Roundabout. I looked round, and he was there beside me. I knew it was him instantly.”

“But what is he, Dad? Is he a ghost?”

“He’s the Terrorcyclist. That’s what he is. And I hope that never in your cycling days does he cross your path.”

Jack’s dad took a swig from the Lucozade bottle he habitually carried with him. As usual on his weekends off, he was dressed in black. Black leggings and a black fleece jacket, black rubber shoes, black bike cap. The only non-black thing on his person was his hair, auburn, like Jack’s own. A restive, obsessive, rangy man, beginning to put on weight. Back then, the absolute centre-point of Jack’s lonely and determined life.

“His body was so streamlined, the light slid off him. Every muscle honed. His face, it was like the nose of a plane. His chest rising and falling inside that skin-tight red carapace. But his leg, Jack. His leg. I’ve never seen such an engine. It was a perfect hydraulic machine. Have you ever seen a carthorse?”

“I don’t know. Which one’s a carthorse?”

“It doesn’t matter. A carthorse’s leg couldn’t come close to doing justice to the leg of the Terrorcyclist. You’ll notice that I only said leg. Singular. Did you notice that? The Terrorcyclist has only one leg, Jack. One leg. Imagine.”

“How did he lose the other one?”

“Well that’s certainly something I’d like to find out. But I hope I never do. Torn off by a bendy bus? Wrenched from its socket by taxis? Caught in the spokes of his own machine? It’s not for us to conjecture. He just had a smooth, shiny brown stump, sticking out of those red Lycra shorts. His single foot was stirruped in one pedal. He was looking at me, but I couldn’t see his eyes behind those wraparound sunglasses.”

“Suppose he didn’t have eyes, Dad?”

“Jack, don’t be thick. Of course he had eyes. Otherwise, how would he have looked at me?”

“But you don’t know he was looking at you, if you couldn’t see his eyes…”

“No, but I could feel them, Jack. When he looks at you, you can feel it. I could feel those eyes upon my leg.”

“Your leg?”

“That’s what he wanted, Jack. He wanted my left leg.”

Of course, Jack and Saul had laughed about this after. Saul chased Jack across the park, hopping and swinging wildly with a stick. But then later Saul had said with a frown, “I guess it might be true. There’s some scary freaks out there.” And those words had made Jack feel very strange. Slightly sick, despite himself.

And after that, he’d not told another person. Kept it to himself. He kept quiet about a lot of what his old man said, having long since learned that it tended to raise eyebrows in normal, non-cycling company. Pedestrians just didn’t get it. Pedestrians didn’t get a lot of things. Even his mother, she didn’t understand. In fact, she actively discouraged… Of course, Jack didn’t swallow it all. Not every notion his father had. At least, he didn’t think he did. But he never got around to mocking it, either. It seemed bad luck. He couldn’t say why. And Jack tended to mock a lot of things.

Cyclists generally do.

It jars him, waking up in the night. It interferes with his focus. He wishes at times he was alcoholic, to have the satisfaction of knocking back a midnight shot of whiskey on the balcony, looking out over the darkened canal and the streetlights glimmering dirtily in the water. Occasionally there come the flashing lights of late-night cyclists, a flowing, disembodied pulse, like schools of those phosphorescent fish, passing with no sound. He would like to stand there and get drunk and watch, waiting for sleep, or the dawn. But he’s never gone in for alcohol much. Mostly he keeps it in the flat because his girlfriends seem to like it. So when he wakes in this red sweat, in lieu of a satisfying swig, he goes to make some repairs to his bike, tinkering, fine-tuning. It concentrates him, quiets him down. Forces him to focus. Sometimes a crashee will come looking, brushing sleep out of her eyes. Frowning into the bright lights of the room.

“What are you doing? You’re working on your bike? Now? It’s half past four.”

“Woke up. I couldn’t sleep.”

“Are you worried about something?” Draped in his thin dressing gown, or a waterproof poncho or something like that, her bare legs strangely flat in the light, a sticking plaster on her knee.

“No, it’s nothing. Something woke me, that’s all. Don’t worry. I’ll have a cigarette, be back to bed in a few minutes.”

Sometimes Jack wishes he could just tell them. It would be nice to tell. A relief to get it off his chest, for once. To explain, to reveal something. Not necessarily about that nightmare, that red apparition. About other things. Himself. His father. Anything. It wouldn’t matter. But how can he tell a word of truth now, when everything he says is a lie? It would involve an unravelling. Tugging himself like a ball of wool. There’d be nothing left.

So he performs his punctilious chores, tightening every point. Doing the rounds with the wrench and the Allen key. Lefty-loosey, righty-tighty, a nursery rhyme more imbedded in his childhood than fee-fi-fo-fum, Jack and Jill go up the hill… Each affirmative turn brings things closer together, shores up all the fixings. It makes his mechanism stronger, faster, more efficient in its function. Speed, smoothness and control. Back on the perfect line.

And besides, how could he bare his soul? He hardly even knows the girl. He gets confused between her and the last one, or was it the one before? She won’t even be around for much longer. Maybe another week, maybe less. The exhilaration has died already. The itch is back under his skin. The urge to jump the glaring red light. To weave through standing traffic. So many other connections are slipping past, he cannot keep pace, he has to keep moving. How, in this velocity, can he allow himself to rest?

Sometimes, in these midnight hours, Jack feels bad.

“So… what happened, Dad? What did he do?”

“The lights went green. Not a second to spare. I put down my foot and took off. Never pedalled so desperately in my life. And he was right behind me.”

Jack had stopped his circling now, was resting on his bicycle to listen. Afternoon lengthened in the cul-de-sac. The ugly cars hunched in their driveways. His father had that look on his face, the look that had followed Jack his whole life. That bleached intensity of the eyes he’d come to recognise since in his peers. The concentration, the hungriness. The courier’s hundred yard stare.

“I felt his greed. He wanted it so badly. It was like his eyes had already taken hold. I could almost feel the skin of my leg tearing, the joint popping out… Around the roundabout three times, faster and faster, pushing thirty, forty, he gained on me at every turn. All I could see in my mind was that leg, pounding behind, churning round and round. A terrible swooping, chuffing sound, the scream of the air being ripped apart, he was travelling that fast. We were going at a truly awful speed. You know the way your mother beats eggs, Jack? That same ferocity…”

“How… how did you get away?”

“That ride was the first true ride of my life. The first time I saw how it counted. Fear does things to a man, Jack. You’ll learn that for yourself. I reached the point when I couldn’t go faster – when my body had become one with the bike, flowing down through the frame, the gears, the chain, into the surface of the road – and at that point, I broke the line. I swerved, I swerved. I felt his front tyre clip my back, I skidded, crashed, took my skin off on the tarmac – but he zoomed right on past me. A flash of red. And as I watched, his body thinned, until it was no wider than his frame, no wider than those red racing tyres. Then it was just a vertical red line, dividing the air in two. Like a crack travelling through a glass pane. And that red split narrowed even further, and then… he was gone, Jack. Gone.”

Jack’s father took a gulp of Lucozade and grinned at his frowning son. He put one hand on Jack’s handlebars and the other on Jack’s shoulder. Jack knew that underneath the black leggings, tucked at the ankles into black sweat-proof socks, the flesh on one patch of his old man’s left calf was hairless and strangely smooth. Skinned. Road-burned. His old war wound.

“There’s a moment when pretence disappears. You are being pursued. You must get away. That’s the ultimate truth, the certainty. There is only pursuit and escape. Speed or death. I don’t know what he’ll look like to you. A black man, a white man, Chinese, whatever. But he’s out there, Jack. And he wants something. He wants something of yours. And if he catches you… Don’t let him catch you, Jack… Remember, speed or death…”

“Michael,” Jack’s mother said quietly, approaching from behind with a plate of cheese sandwiches, “stop telling Jack about the Terrorcyclist. Stop telling him. Stop it. Please.”

He didn’t believe, even at age ten. But still, a bad feeling remained. It became conflated with the smoothness of the calf, the smell of his father’s clothes. Beneath that fixed and steady smile shrieked something red and terrible. He imagined it there, inside the skin. It went beyond mocking. The need to get away. It had got stuck somewhere, imbedded somehow, he couldn’t quite shake it off. Even at this velocity… It remained lodged, a totem. The inherent superstition of a cyclist. Cyclists are the most cynical yet superstitious people in the world.

Jack hasn’t seen his old man in two years. Not since his last major problems. He’s written to him at the new address, and received answers both from his father and his father’s carer. In their letters, of course, they talked about bicycles, the only thing they ever really shared. Not that his father rode much anymore. He didn’t seem to get out very often, though sometimes they let him go around the grounds on an old mountain bike. He seemed fairly content. Keeping busy, in his way. He said he was working on some kind of book, a history of cycling and war. The clinicians had encouraged him in this. They said it kept him focused. He’d included an extract in an early letter:

“There’s a clear evolution from the helmets of knights to the cycle helmets of today, via the tin hats of World War One, the mechanisation of warfare. I believe an ancestor of mine rode with the 3rd Infantry Lowriders that broke the German line at Ypres. They had fortified tyres to repel barbed wire, and were experts at sharp-shooting with one hand and steering with the other…

“The Japanese made use of cycle cavalry during World War Two. General Kojo’s 6th Army conquered much of South East Asia with extensive networks of cycle-paths, and when defeat became certain in 1945 they were known to sever their brake cables and hurl themselves towards enemy positions with no possibility of stopping…”

And all that stuff was interesting, sure… and at least his mind was keeping active. But the letters have grown less and less frequent, especially in the last twelve months. Jack tried to write on a regular basis, mostly at the instigation of his mother, who said she was taking a break from contact for the sake of them both. But Jack grew reluctant. The weeks went by. He missed one reply, then another. Then his father mirrored his infrequency. Eventually, the letters stopped. And now it seems too hard to go back to it, Jack can’t summon himself. His father’s problems seem too far away. Once he’d lived in East London past a certain point, in that flat above Regent’s Canal, everything else began to feel distant, indistinct, unreal. Embarrassing, somehow. He doesn’t want to think about it. He is past the saturation point of guilt. To start again would mean a whole new Jack, an empty vessel in which to pour new guilts, new binds, new urgencies, drop by bitter drop.

But why is he having these absurd dreams now? Why, when he never did before? His father had kept the story going for a couple of years – the terror, the red streak – always the same tale of the White Tree Roundabout, with a few variations over time. And then Jack had told him to fuck off. One of his first small rebellions. He said he was too old for that crap now, and his father had blinked, and grinned, let it go. And after that, he never mentioned it again, which was slightly unusual for him. The Terrorcyclist went to the back of Jack’s mind. And had stayed there, until now.

One night, recently, Jack opened his eyes and saw nothing but red in the room. The blackness of the night – the window faces the canal, not many streetlights down there – had turned to red, a neon intensity, thrumming and buzzing in the air. And another time, Jack woke up clasping his cock, as if it was that that he wanted. He was sitting bolt upright, sweat running down his back. He had been woken by a swooping sound, like a train pushing the air before it as it rushes through a tunnel. He listened, in the gaping silence of the room, as the sound pulled rapidly away from him, sucked into its own vacuum. He closed his eyes and breathed hard through his nose. The girl beside him never stirred.

In the cold light of day, of course, these anxieties are subdued. Jack’s a habitual early riser, crashee or no crashee. There is good coffee from the deli on Broadway, eggs to be eaten, things to do. He is able to concentrate on his pursuits. Everyone needs a hobby.

It isn’t true, necessarily, that girls aren’t beautiful off bikes. But bicycles make girls beautiful. This is a verifiable fact, almost universally accepted by anyone who’s ever studied the two. Researchers have shown impartial volunteers two photographs of the same girl, one on a bike and one off a bike, and in 96.2% of cases…

Pedestrian girls just don’t come close. They can match neither danger nor style. There is something patently ridiculous about them, their bodies just going up and down, first one foot and then the next, clumping along mechanically, like those nodding donkeys in American oilfields. Cycling girls achieve natural lightness. They exist in another element. The perfect balance between speed and bearing. Cutting across the hard edges of the world, guiding their destinies between their thighs. And the thrill of taking a corner fast, leaning into the air just so, into the centrifugal wind… to Jack it’s like the moment in sex when time disappears, your body is tuned to the only note, the only note that counts. There are many parallels. If he wasn’t thoroughly saturated with his father’s intellectualism, he could write a book. The un-oiled chain rattling through its gears, clattering dryly over the cogs, is as profoundly uncomfortable to him as the failure of natural lubrication. And the flat front tyre, when the bare wheel knocks on every irregularity in the road, has long felt to Jack like that bump against the pubic bone when the angle isn’t quite right. He can’t help these observations. He can only see things through the eyes his father gave him.

“Every cyclist is a rebel. Cycling is a revolutionary act.” A line from another of his father’s books. Karlov or Seagram, he can’t remember which. One of several volumes he’d received on his sixteenth birthday. “Every female cyclist is a feminist. Even conservatives are breaking their own rules. The act of cycling is a gesture of defiance.”

He thinks about this now, down on the towpath, as he goes along the edge of the canal. It’s five thirty-five. He’s in position for five forty. His mind races strangely in these waiting times. His brain turns up all sorts of things. Sometimes he thinks about Saul, or his mother. Bits and pieces of life before London. Sometimes he thinks about things he learned in school. Electric circuits in physics. This time, for some reason, he thinks of that book. Cycling and Syndicalism, something along those lines. But defiance against what, exactly? What is there to rebel against now?

He’s not been observing her for long, the girl he’s in position for today. Last week was the first time he saw her. She’s a newcomer to the canal, having clearly only just woven this route into the fabric of her days. She must have started some new job, somewhere in the East. She travels from East to West every evening, coming around that bend, on average, at five forty by Jack’s sports watch, emerging at a smart pace from beneath the dripping archway of the bridge. Normally Jack waits a little longer than this. A couple of weeks, at least. He’ll try to gauge reaction and character from each potential’s cycling style, so that when he makes his move he’ll be most assured of success. But with this one, he feels more hurried than usual. Anxious she might slip away. There’s something particularly fleeting about her. He’s scared about missing the connection.

She has a capable bicycling manner, a confidence and smoothness. A telling sign is the way she rounds the bend. Most of them slow down on that corner, wary of oncoming traffic – but this girl, she speeds up. Leans into the curve. Her eyes flattened against the wind, her lips stretched into a smile. There is evident pleasure in the way she rides, and Jack finds this exciting. He only has to see the way she takes that curve to know she’ll be wild in bed.

She wears a green sleeveless windcheater jacket and fingerless gloves on her hands. She wears a pair of gold leggings and high black felt boots. Her wide sleeves trill like the fins of a ray, undulating in the air. Her hair whips itself into her slipstream. She doesn’t wear a helmet. That’s another obvious parallel, of course. A girl who doesn’t wear a cycle helmet is a girl who will fuck without a condom.

Jack waits at the top of the slope that leads onto the towpath. He’s always found this a good starting point. It looks as if he’s just turned off the road. He checks his watch and fixes his gaze. The regular commuters go by. He regards the rubbish strewn down the path, the fume-withered blackberry bushes. On the grass verge an old lady is patiently waiting for her dog to finish sniffing a wine bottle. The canal is flat and very brown, the consistency of gravy. A couple of moorhens slide over its surface, making noises like party toys.

Jack’s face is inscrutable, but his body is filled with a tense elation. The feeling is so familiar to him, yet always so thrillingly new. He’s about to break through. To make trains jump tracks. It’s what he imagines a man would feel on the point of stepping through some kind of vortex, into another world.

And everything goes to plan, at first. At five forty-three by the sports watch on his wrist, the girl with the gold leggings speeds out of the tunnel. Takes the curve beautifully. Levels out for the straight, her unprotected hair flailing behind. One hundred metres along the towpath, Jack glides down the slope. Puts his foot to the pedal. Picks up pace. He keeps just left of centre on the track, with ample readjustment capacity. The girl with gold leggings is fast approaching. Her wheels weave between a row of iron bollards, the ones the narrow-boats tie on to at night, a display of spontaneous playfulness that suggests all manner of foreplay. Jack almost grins. She is heading right for him. He sets his course. Centres his front tyre. Positioned just right, the perfect line. They are like two particles shooting towards one another inside a Large Hadron Collider. All that remains is a shift of weight, the slightest tip to the right hand side, and in that moment their lives will combine. They will come together…

And then, everything goes red.

It swoops up behind him, a hurricane wind, gobbling up his slipstream. The sight of the girl speeding into convergence – five seconds away, four seconds, three seconds, two – is engulfed by that shrieking vision, streamlined to a needlepoint, bearing down on his youth, his bike, his soul. There are no seconds left. It seems to happen slowly, in neatly sequential segments. Perhaps this is the way time stops. Like riffling the pages of a flip-book and finding your thumb has stuck. His feet are in the air. He has left his bike. A jangling, reverberating clash like two supermarket trolleys. He sees the girl’s face track past, the pink inside her mouth. Then the gravel-grey road swings up to meet him, he’s on the ground and actually aware of sliding along on his chest and legs. His head rebounds off something unyielding, and it does not hurt. He feels the impacts of water and grit on the skin of his arms and face.

And far away, it seems to Jack as if he sees it, then. Swooping off along the track, under the low bridge. A narrowing split in a glass pane, slipping between the atoms. Thinning into nothingness. That red crack in the air.

“Are… you… are you okay?” A felt boot has appeared by his head, like something being lowered from the sky.

“Can you hear me? Are you… shit, what a mess.” A pair of gold leggings bending at the knee, a face blurred beneath unprotected hair.

Jack wonders if his skull might be cracked. And if it is, would it matter? Lefty-loosey, righty-tighty. Fee-fi-fo-fum. Riding without a helmet… wild in bed…

“Hello? At least tell me you’re still breathing.”

He’s lying on his chest in the middle of the towpath, one leg somehow folded beneath the other, the front wheel of his bicycle still spinning. The texture of the path, up close, looks like the surface of a planet.

“Yeah…”

“Can you get up? Is your leg okay?”

“Um, I think,” he says.

She helps him to his feet, supporting his arm, and it doesn’t feel so bad. But then the various centres of pain start making themselves known to him, like lights blinking back on after a shutdown. His leg, for a start. And his chest feels crushed, like he can’t get the air in. His hands are hot, his palms are on fire. By contrast, the girl doesn’t seem to have a scratch. She regards him for a few hard seconds with pigeon-flecked grey eyes.

“What the fuck were you doing? You went right into me.”

“I’m sorry. It wasn’t… I mean, I didn’t…”

“You hit me head-on. In the middle of the path. Don’t you know how to fucking ride a bike?”

“Course I know… I’ve been my whole life.” But he can’t get all the words.

“I mean, fucking Christ. What were you thinking?”

“I’m sorry, I said I’m sorry, okay? I can’t… what more do you want me to say?”

“Alright, alright. I guess it’s not your fault if you were born an idiot. Christ, you came off pretty bad. You’re not badly hurt? Nothing broken?”

“No. I don’t think… Ow. Oh, shit.” Jack looks at his hands, getting hotter by the second. He can see the shocked blood bulging up. His palms look like they’ve been sandpapered. And his leg, his leg really stings. It makes him hop from one foot to the other, a ridiculous little hornpipe of pain which, he knows, is fast undermining any chances he might still have…

Chances for what? He can’t think, for the moment. Can’t see past the pain’s ridiculousness. Jack doesn’t like to appear ridiculous. Cyclists seldom do…

“You should get that looked at,” the girl is saying, gazing down at something.

“What?”

“That leg.”

Jack looks down. His left trouser leg has almost torn right off, hanging like a limp triangular flag. And above the knee, a large patch of skin has simply disappeared. He feels the breeze on his tongue as he stares. The flesh underneath looks like a strawberry, even down to the little white dots.

The girl eyes it disapprovingly. She has taken a packet of Drum from her pocket, and is digging around for a filter. “That’s a pretty nasty scrape,” she says.

“Had worse,” grunts Jack, trying not to flinch. But he hasn’t had worse, not in a long time. His initiative is shot. There are suddenly tears in his eyes.

“You need to get something on that pretty quick. It’s going to sting to buggery. Do you want to go to A&E?”

“No, no, I’m fine. Actually, I live… I live pretty close. Just up there…”

But her eyes don’t follow the direction of his gesture. She carries on regarding him, tongue poised on the licky-strip of her cigarette paper.

“Have I seen you before?” she demands.

“I don’t think so… No. I guess you might have done.”

“Did I meet you at a party somewhere?”

“I don’t know. Ow. No. I don’t think so. Jesus, my leg really hurts.”

“What’s your name?”

“Jack. Jack Peeterhoff.’

“No good, I don’t remember names.” She finishes rolling and sticks it in her mouth while she fumbles in her pockets for a lighter. Three grazed knuckles on her right hand. Not entirely unscathed. And her fingers are shaking, he sees that now. “Never mind. Fuck, I need a smoke. Do you want one? Might be good for you. I guess I’d better roll it for you, you’ll get blood on the paper.”

They sit on a wooden bench facing the canal, their bicycles dragged up behind. Jack picks bits of gravel out of his palms and tries not to look at his leg. He feels sick. His hands are also shaking. The singing pain has subsided a degree, numbed by the coldness of the air. A low throb starts up in its place, jungle drums beating in the flesh, pounding some livid message. A jinx, a totem. A cyclist’s superstition…

Jack misses his father.

“So what’s wrong with you, Jack, if you don’t mind me asking? Got things on your mind?”

“No, not really. Why do you say that?”

“I saw your face, right before you went into me. You weren’t even looking. Like you’d forgotten you were even on a bike. Are you high? What’s wrong with you?”

“I just… lost concentration, that’s all. Just for a moment. Like time stopped…”

“You could kill yourself. Or somebody else. You know, you should take care.”

“I don’t… I don’t want to kill anyone,” he finds himself in the middle of saying, mumbling at his hands. “I just want to be a part of something. Or everything slips past…”

“What is it, girl trouble?”

“Bike trouble,” he says, and for some reason this makes her laugh. At the sound of her laugh, something opens up. Or at least, it almost does. He glances sidelong, desperately. But she isn’t looking.

“You seem like a pretty confused guy, Jack. There’s something about you that’s all wound up. Relax, okay? Take care of yourself. And learn how to bloody ride a bike.” She is standing now. “Look, I’ve got to go. Sure you’ll be alright?”

“Yeah, fine,” he says, though he doesn’t quite know what gives her this impression. “I’ll be fine. I don’t live far… just up there, the seventh floor.”

“Right. Well, perhaps I’ll see you around. Hopefully not so extremely. Your front wheel’s all fucked up, by the way. Don’t even think about riding home.”

He sees her go with a sudden disinterest, pedalling cautiously at first and then easing into speed. She doesn’t look back. Her form diminishes, shrinking and shrinking towards the point by the low bridge where he saw the red crack vanish, sucked into the air.

His palms lose their heat. His skinned leg throbs. Jack closes his eyes for a moment and sees all the cyclists of London evaporated into a gaseous cloud in the sky, seeking the path of least resistance to whatever it is they crave.

Further reading

• Karlov, Claus, Cycling and Syndicalism, Redlit Press, 1973
• Peeterhoff, Michael J., The Charge of the Bike Brigade: a History of Cycling and War (unpublished)
• Rhineshaft, Howard, Ins and Outs of the Cyclo-Sexual Revolution, Dalston Publishing, 1979
• Roman, Bertie & Appleby, Norman, The Cyclo-paedia Brittanica, Swann House, 2003
• Smith, Rick G., Bike Physionomics, Hamminton, 1983
• Valdek, James P., Probability Studies in Bicycle Physics, East Anglia Press, 1955

By Under Scrutiny for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 7 comments

By alabamaradartowers for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 0 comments

They are going on to a better life in soup.

By No Neck for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 2 comments

By alabamaradartowers for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 1 comment

Q: What is DUMBO?

A: DUMBO is an acronym for a trendy neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, USA. It is best described in Matthew Zapruder’s Twenty Poems for Noelle: “nothing better than quiet talking / in the garden with Marie / and the ghost while down under / manhattan bridge overpass the rich / carefully lick each other in their lofts” Find the acronym!

Q: Do small robots share our concern about maintaining a constant, somewhat removed, hipness?

A: Absolutely not.  Small robots like to eat oil, buzz around, and open doors with thier little key-hands.  They are concerned about their friends’ well-being.

Q: What was the robot doing in DUMBO?

A: He was carried there against his will in a satchel.

Q: Why would any kindhearted robot photographer submit her small friend to such a strange trip?

A: What a nice bridge! Can you find the name of the bridge? (hint: it’s in the acronym)

Q: How can I make friends?

A: Pliers are allowed, and store-bought wire is allowed, but none of the other parts of your friend may be purchased. Your friend must come into your life organically, perhaps as you travel. This is not to imply that you need not exert will in order to make friends (ref: the pliers).

Q: What a delightful robot!

A: Yes, thank you very much. Truly he is the vital spirit of our heart.

By No Neck for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 10 comments

By alabamaradartowers for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 4 comments

By RobotDan for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 0 comments

By RobotDan for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 1 comment

An Eco-friendly bin-bag
A sardine
A dead wasp
Organic pea seeds
A temporary tattoo
A poppadom (with recipe by Jamie Oliver)
A poster sized sudoku
‘Paxman’s Maze’ - a maze puzzle by Jeremey Paxman
The abridged Bible
A charity poppy
A Lenny Henry mask
A DVD-R
Throwing stars
A complete set of cutlery, over a week
A peacock feather
Five nails
A whoopee cushion
A satsuma
A zinc tablet
A scouring pad
A weed from Jamie Oliver’s garden
A drawing by Jamie Oliver’s children
Slug pellets
A collapsible paper top hat
‘Scratch and sniff’ Oscar ceremony photo
A random tarot card featuring Christian Bale
Four sheets of baking paper
A 6×10 grid of cheap condoms
An unabridged transcription of an episode of ‘Friday Night with Jonathan Ross’
Mein Kampf
A poster of Jamie Oliver in Sainsburys
A re-usable chip cone
A sherbet dip-dab
A pair of black socks
Carol Vorderman’s guide to long division
A night-bus timetable
A map of Peru
Some onion powder
Some itching powder
Five jokes by Paul Daniels
A cheap flick-knife
Dax
The first 60 minutes of The Breakfast Club on DVD
A painting by Martin Scorsese of Kate Winslet on a horse
Fleet Foxes reading today’s news on an mp3 CD
A plastic compass for navigating Sainsburys with Jamie Oliver’s face on it
‘A Little Wizard’s guide to Ron Weasley’
A glossy photograph of Jude Law’s hands
Rizlas
Fresh basil leaves
A Tetley tea bag
‘Obama Biden 2008′ bumper sticker
An afghan scarf designed by Jamie Oliver
Charlie Brooker sings Johnny Cash
Glow sticks
Blueprints of building work planned for Paddy Considine’s bungalow
A poster of the aliens from the Smash advert
Che Guevara poster
Che Guevara poster with Alistair Darling’s face photoshopped onto it
Bob Marley poster
Bob Marley poster with Barack Obama’s face photoshopped onto it
Poster with Mitchell and Webb on one side and Morecambe and Wise on the other
A recording of moorhens chirping
George Monbiot’s exercise regime
A vanilla pod
Basil-leaf print tea-towel
A piece of toast
A mousetrap
A sachet of brandy
Some news

See the Guardian’s celebrity Christmas wrapping paper designs.

By Bonnie Doon for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 1 comment

By RobotDan for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 0 comments

By RobotDan for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 1 comment

In the gin-soaked London of the 18th century, the mass produced spirit was known as Madam Geneva, Mother’s Ruin, The Makeshift, and (really) King Theodor of Corsica. Here are some more names it’s likely that they didn’t use.

Elixir of Strife
The Worktime Whistler
Blind Genie
The Curse of King George
Pumpson Ginson
Old Spiner
The Trouser Purloiner
The English Lenin
Jarvel’s Cocker
The bone-cleaner
Google Delight
Brigadier Bender
Baby’s Boom
The Antidote
Professor Bubbles’ Medicine
Sleepy Babe
Santa’s seed
Cry me a riverbed
The Curse of Botham
Wikky liqs
Weepin’ Molly
Betty’s Droop
The one-hump knight knobbler
Ring-a-ring-a-rogues
1914
Sit-and-spin
Yellow Bile
Quinine Dream
Orphan’s Courage
Moonjuice
Funk-Lime
Horsebalm
Snootch
The Chinese Perambulator
Tregard’s Tipple
Shame of the barrow
Tears From Heaven
Pilgrim’s Peril
Mollywoddle
Chimpswater
The Dipshit Sherlock
Dutch Glug
African Ape Paw
Quincey
The Gutcracker
Salvation’s Sponge
Princess Orson
‘Kiss Goodbye’ Jemima
The Nawab’s Revenge
Rat-alley rain
Joi de Grief
Rabbi’s Rascal
Prossie’s Progress
Granny’s Trotter
Isle of Cocks
The Multiple Heckler
The Erect Gypsy
Inside Slinger
Tooth Tasting Timothy
Spin Dick’s Lament
Satan’s Milk
Cream o’Cohen
Rot-fuck
Testimony Juice
Swishtinker
Pantry Soup

Main image: detail of Hogarth’s Gin Lane.

By RobotDan for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 2 comments

For three hours - that’s half the exam already - I have been looking for a specific button on my scientific calculator. I remember that pressing it was vital. I was taught this in a lesson I had some time ago at night school. It was orange, definitely, and there are four orange buttons on the calculator.

“Mind if I ask a personnel question? OK. How many persons are employed in your organization?”

That had been in my head since I drove to the interview. After I heard myself saying it I laughed aloud. They laughed too. Especially the fat one who’s name I probably misheard as Ham Stanley.

“Hah, that’s too personnel a question for us to answer! Get this, Baker, he’s a funny guy.”

The other man with the sloping forehead and hairy wrists was Glenn Baker. He didn’t say much but you could tell he liked my joke. I saw him wink in approval. Stanley continued,

“We like you and we want you to join our astronomic exploration agency. You, Glenn Baker and me will get in our astronomy suits and… uhh,” he shifted on his hands a little, “we’ll go up there, into space and explore the universe. Us three.”

Baker fished out some papers from the disorganised desk. They were the wrong ones, so he carried on looking. I checked the plastic clock hanging over their famous astronauts calendar, and twiddled my thumbs. With a look of satisfaction like that of a dog’s that you are spooning food out of a tin for, he pulled out some papers that had been stapled together. I recognised them as my application form.

Stanley gave them the once over and pursed his lips. “Seems you’re not cut out for mathematics.” He rested the paper and looked serious. “Math is very important to exploration. Calculation. Formula. All of these things. Glenn Baker is a good mathematician. A great one. I’m not.” He held up two chubby pink fingers. “And in a three-man-team you’ve got to have at least two people who can do one job. In case anything happens to one of us.”

That was pretty much the end of the interview. For the nine months since I have been going straight from the store to the local college, taking a math course. Three days a week. Baker sends positive emails to the store’s computer, and last week he even handwrote a letter telling me about the starship.

They picked me up this morning and drove me the fifty miles east to the hall when the exam is taking place. It’s not just me and the math exam. There are people from all over the state in the hall taking exams for many subjects. History, science, biology, medical exams, languages, french, arabic, animal studies, chemistry… you name it. Stanley told me Baker’s enthusiasm is contagious. “It’s like it’s airborne!” he said, creasing up over the steering wheel.

I don’t know shit about math. Not just in general, but right now; even after nine months of night school. I chew my pencil and look at the four orange buttons to see if the letters on them remember me the one which would help me answer this question. Some of them aren’t even letters I recognise. One orange button has a curly little x on it. It’s under a thin little line strut, like a half done game of hangman.

I try to visualise what the room the night school lessons took place in looked like. I heard this can jog the memory. I try to visualise the teacher. About 30 years old, with a brown beard curling under his neck. I see his mouth moving - he’s saying the name of the button at me - but I can’t hear anything but the silence of the exam hall and the shuffling of chair legs as other people try not to fuck up their exams too. Three bits to the word. Syllables. His mouth opens three times. mo-mo-my. pro-mow-myy. proto-my? Proto-christ?. He’s angry at me now.

And if I did remember which button to press, would it help me answer the questions? Show your workings. OK. What if the button wasn’t orange? There are literally hundreds of buttons on my calculator. Imagine living amongst the stars… There’s an infinite grid of buttons. My stomach shrinks just looking at them. Want to see the celestial, astronomic universe? I turn my calculator around in my hands. There’s nothing on the back. No battery. It’s solar. Imagine us flying in space like angels. Exploring the burning suns and forgotten planets. Send a pre-addressed envelope for more information…

I stand up from my desk and the exam adjudicator looks up at me. I start to make an excuse, then realise I can see - now that I’m standing - the two men in the lot outside. Still in the driver’s seat is Stanley. He sees me and, overjoyed, slaps Baker in the shoulder and points. He gives me two large thumbs up. Baker grins too, showing his little teeth. I have very good eyesight. I turn back to the hall. The exam adjudicator looks at me sternly. Please, I am disturbing the other examees. I sit down again.

Show your workings. I place my calculator in front of me, on top of the blank question paper so that it’s exactly in the middle. I think of the stars, and Stanley and Baker. I think of the three of us in our suits, waving out of the starship like we are waving from the inside of a snow globe. I press randomly one of the orange buttons.

By RobotDan for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 1 comment

Every slight as her face. She smiled at me.

I watched her hand pull away and hold out the slimy yellow stuff.

Each time she pushed and pulled her hand in and out of the giant pan,

she laughed. She laughed hard.

As she pulled out her hand for the last time, she smeared my face in curd.

I began to laugh, I laughed hard.

As the next tourists walked in I was dancing my hand in and out of that giant pan.

I lifted my hand at a young girl and smiled.

By Salman Hushdie for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 2 comments

By RobotDan for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 4 comments

By RobotDan for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 0 comments

Earlier on the iGod site:

Me: Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away, now it looks as though they’re here to stay, oh I believe in yesterday.

God: How many do you have?

Me: Suddenly, I’m not half the man I used to be, there’s a shadow hanging over me, oh yesterday came suddenly.

God: I am glad to hear that you are not half the man you used to be. There is a shadow hanging over you. Oh yesterday came suddenly.

Me: Why she had to go I don’t know

God: Why did the robot cross the road?

Me: She wouldn’t say.

God: Oh I get it. She would not say.

Me: I said something wrong

God: What did you mean by it? What?

Me: Now I long for yesterday.

God: Why now? Interesting gossip.

Me: Yesterday

God: That recently?

By Bonnie Doon for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 4 comments

By Bonnie Doon for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 2 comments

By Bonnie Doon for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 2 comments

By RobotDan for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 1 comment

By Under Scrutiny for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 2 comments

enjoy

Follow the parts and watch them all, its great!

By Salman Hushdie for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 0 comments

By Morton for alittlepoison.com | Permalink | 8 comments

Part Four

Bruce wakes up, he is covered in spiders, all down his body. Small ones. Some trying to get into his mouth. The batman costume has gone, he isn’t tied down. He stands up and starts brushing the spiders off.

He realises he is in a field. He can see the mansion a long way off. He shake his head and realises he is completely naked.

He begins to walk toward his mansion and spots a figure in front of him in the dark.