Non Fiction
Issue #1
Five Sounds
You keep the radio on if you're staying up all night working or something. You like to have another human voice in the room with you, which you cannot get from CDs. The radio keeps you company with whispered inanities until the sun rises and the work is done. The music gets stranger and stranger until it drifts back into normality again and you can be shocked at news items and hum to the songs as you slowly turn down the sound over the hours so as not to disturb the neighbours.
The rustle of covers and half moan or sigh as the person sleeping beside you rolls over in bed. You cannot sleep. Perhaps their elbow knocks the wall. The murmur or moan and you listen to half sounds until you drift off.
It seems that you can never escape the humming of electricity. When you were younger you used to sneak out of your house at night, walk through the dead streets of your town and you would notice the low buzz of the generators when all was silent. Even now when you turn the plug off at the wall you can still hear the hum. You wonder if you would still hear it even if it stopped. It was quieter in the graveyard. You went there to do a rubbing of a stone in purple crayon then the clock boomed midnight and you ran away.
Your mother worked out pretty early on in life that you could recognise the sound of her keys. The jangle they made on their heart-shaped fob always alerted your sister and you to the fact that she was coming to pick you up from a friend's house, or about to walk out the door. She could get a Pavlovian response from you, say, if we were out of sight. She could just shake them and the two of you would find her. Still works even now.
Waves on a beach can sound very different depending on whether the beach is sand or pebble (whispering or clattering) whether the sky is clear or overcast (the rain makes it echo) or whether you are happy or sad (childhood holidays or alone). You were sat on Brighton beach with your weekend bag on your shoulders, waiting for the rain and listening to the waves washing in and out and feeling very small indeed. Like sitting by the river, waiting for the bottle to pass by with a lucky in hand, feeling perfectly calm and once in a while noticing the sound of the water below. You perhaps thought to yourself how nice it would be to just slide into it and down, wrap it around me until you fell asleep, how pleasant it would feel.
Five touches
Skin. You pick at yours. You chew at the sides of your fingers until they are rough and bloody. You fuss at your back and scalp. You like the feeling of your face, freshly washed and powdered. You think you like hers better. Downy soft, but smoother, but warmer, but more human. You can feel her beneath it. You like the bit on her neck that makes her shiver. You don't tell her where it tickles. She must find out for herself. Now cool in the sunlight, now warm and shining beside you. But smooth though. Very smooth.
The cemetery stones get warm in the dappling light that makes it through the trees. You feel very comforted by it, a glow that travels up your arm and gives you an Easter feeling. The cats like it too.
You like to run your hands over things when you're walking. Railing and walls mostly. You get into trouble for touching up the sculptures in galleries. Once you brushed your hand along a box hedge and felt the prickles and scratches and tingles wake up your nerves. Felt how you'd expect it to. You brought your hand back covered in blood. You had only scratched it lightly but the movement spread the blood out. It stung terribly when you washed it though.
An egg is a very beautiful thing. Smooth and cool and symmetrical. It settles beautifully in your hand and the weight feels pleasant. It's nice to contemplate for a moment that this thing was born, not sculpted, before you smash it against the rim of the bowl.
It was hot and at this point you didn't have a single pair of shoes that didn't make your feet bleed. The cheap sandals you had bought had broken and you were keeping to the shade because you couldn't afford sunscreen. You were red and sore and peeling on your chest and nose and shoulders. At a certain point you just stuffed the shoes into your bag and felt the surfaces on your soles. There are many different sorts. Road tarmac is painfully rough. The bumps for the blind at crossing can hurt if you aren't aware of them. The pavement is often scored which makes it cushiony. You don't see much of a view on account of looking out for spit and cigarettes and chewing gum. Still, it's a freeing feeling. A light and pleasant one.
Five Smells
The girl sitting next to you in the theatre today was sucking on a strawberry lollypop. It smelt like you imagine all candy does. Nothing at all like strawberries. Thing was, it made you feel like a kid again. You wanted to lean over and kiss her, in the middle of the theatre, in the middle of the play. Feel her sticky strawberry lips on yours
Things don't just smell damp after rain. Rain has its own scent and you can smell it coming before it starts. It smells a little like the taste of blood in your mouth from a split lip or torn gum. A rust scent, but sort of fresher, cleaner, or pregnant with cleanliness. The knowledge that that layer of grime is shortly to be cleansed from the sky and brought down on your own head. It does make you wonder if the rain always smelt the same. Why should water in the sky have any scent at all?
You would often come home from school, or stagger bleary-eyed from your bedroom in the morning to the scent of something cooking on the stove. Often it was a comforting warm smell of, most likely, stock, which smelt like it should be dinner. Rich and complex with bay and carrot slices and onion, it didn't bear any resemblance to the grey and greasy bone-filled liquid when you raised the lid on the pan. You remember the smell of pears pickling. You knew before you ever saw them that they were purple in the pan. Must have been the red wine spreading its sleepy mist across your brain. Exotic spice and warm cinnamon masking the sweetness. Drunk on the odour.
People. People smell of their shampoo, conditioner, washing powder, sprayed fragrance, their sweat, house, whatever they are thinking, what they've been cooking, what they have eaten, the person they have been holding for what seemed like all day, the warmth of bodies and the sun outside glows brighter in the summer. You love how people smell.
The smell of burnt clutch is to you possibly the most repulsive one in the whole world. You're not sure if it's because of pubescent years being dragged out to race meetings of classic cars (it always either poured with rain or burning sunshine) and catch that perverted bonfire toffee odour that caught blackly in the nostrils and would not give up its hold for ages, in spite of you sticking your nose in the coleslaw or tupperware of home-baked brownies. Burnt clutch makes you imagine a haze of mauve smoke even where the car no longer is, even if you never saw it. It doesn't matter what car it was, because that scent forms a pattern in your mind of a clapped out plum coloured Ginetta, desperate not to come last this time. It puts you in mind of sunburn, shirtless old men smeared with oil being passed flasks by supportive wives and fibreglass shards under the skin.
Five Tastes
Cigarettes. Tobacco smells sweet before it's lit, and you get some of that as it wisps momentarily across your tongue on route to push its toxins through your fragile little lungs. A very different one from the sour taste you catch in the moment before the next drag. It's a stale, dead taste, the one that follows you after you have stubbed the damn thing out with your heel, a bitter tang that makes you crave for a lump of chewing gum. The grey taste of burnt cells.
Chocolate. Sweet and spicy and full and melting. Everywhere and always.
Decent roast chicken, something that isn't some poor beakless bastard creature born and raised in a shoebox-sized cage, really does seem to melt on your tongue. The flavours seep in like caramel as it starts to soften and seep. Maybe there is a garlic richness or lemon tang, depending on how bothered you or your mother could be with pasty unwieldy thing. The skin is the nicest part. A moment on the lips...
50p lemon ice lollies that make toxic-looking yellow goop down your 7-year-old face on a summer day out at one stately home or another. Tastes of summer. Turning the stick to catch the shards threatening to hit the gravel. Swallowing the fizzy zest-flavoured water and reading the joke on the stick.
Gin cut 1 part to 2 with orangina and drank out of both bottles on heaving, living streets where music is pouring from every bar and church and corner. Doesn't quite knock off the dust that catches in your throat and leaves some kind of negative flavour, but the bubbles do enough to compensate with a glorious artificial clean. By now you are drunk enough to take off those bloody painful shoes that are making you cry and smash bottles in the square.
Five Sights
Coming home with a bag of market goods, you found that the apartment wasn't empty for once. The TV had been removed from the wardrobe and placed on the burnt blue lino next to the lump stone wall by the window and set up to view what was this year being called the Tour de Lance. Over the bare plastic curtain poles two wet bed sheets, one pale green, one yellow, softly mediated the beaming august light. In this glow an eighteen-year-old Scottish girl, not yet in control of her coltish limbs, stood by the bathroom sink in bra and skirt and attempted to make her hair the blonde she wanted it to be. Apparently oblivious to her was the homeless English boy with drunkenly cut blonde hair and the clothes of the last month sitting on the L-shaped blue sofa cushion on the floor and watching primary coloured figures flash by the screen again and again.
Figs in a bowl. The richest shades of green and purple and tiny specks of gold on their bell-shaped bodies. Some of them have been ripped in half to reveal clusters of sticky pink-red innards surrounded by a white pulp.
You seem to see an awful lot of dead birds lying around. Mostly pigeons squished and bloody in the middle of roads. Looking down from a church in Venice, the tops of some ancient pillars were scattered with the corpses of birds, eyes rolled back blankly, in various stages of decomposition. Some were no more than bones. You saw tiny scattered bodies around in the fields and woods by your house since you was a child. Poisoned fox cubs, puff-eyed rabbits, yet another stupid bloody pheasant, mice, voles. The stink is awful. You don't mind so much when they are nothing but bones. These things are beautiful, sculptural and impossible to connect to the living creatures they once were.
The boy you see on the bus is possibly the most beautiful creature you have ever seen. Amazing brown eyes. He carries a skateboard under one arm. You feel disgusted at yourself for appraising the looks of a child of no more than fifteen when the Mexican girl turns to you and says, "Isn't he the prettiest thing you ever saw? I can't take my eyes off him."
Your face is sort of heart shaped, quite round but with a small chin. Your nose is small and nicely rounded, but is slightly turned up. You have a mole above your lip on your left hand side. Your mouth is small and your lips are slightly pouted, but not noticeably. The lower one is darker, which may have something to do with it. You had a lot of dental work, but you still have prominent front teeth, which chip easily. You currently have the remains of the spot on your chin, which you just kept fussing over. Your eyes are almond shaped and quite large. They have dark circles underneath which you dislike intensely. The irises are a colour which some people say is blue, some green, you settle on grey. They have a dark blue ring around the outer edge and a dirty orange burst around the pupil. Your eyelashes are long and you like them a lot. Your eyebrows are fair and undefined, frequently messy. Your forehead is perhaps slightly large and if you pull back my hair you can see the widow's peak you inherited from your father. Your earlobes are joined to your head and are pierced twice. Your skin looks rather red and blotchy today, suggesting you've reacted to something and you always have blocked pores, but some days you can't see them so much.