Night Of The Long Posts

Upon Cycling In The Rain Without A Rear Mud Guard

Upon cycling in the rain without a rear mud guard, one's bum becomes disproportionately wet as the rear wheel flicks up water backwards, towards the seat, almost as if it was designed to.

And not just wet, but dirty too, as the wheel is flicking up water from the road at your bum, rather than the nice clean water from the sky that your head is getting covered in.

All day, after you've got to where you are going - the office perhaps, or a pub or something - you'll have a dirty streak of wet up your bum. It doesn't feel nice, and is embarrassing.

If you sit down, to hide the dirty streak of wet, the cold dank material of your trousers will just press closer to your bottom and, while no-one will know why you look so unhappy, everyone will think you aren't very nice for being so grumpy for no apparent reason.

But if you stand up, everyone can see it.

It can't be very attractive, to see someone with a dirty streak of wet up their bum, and I find myself self-conscious around women.

Then I realised that I can't be the only one to have cycled in the rain without a rear mud guard and that I should be looking for a woman with a dirty streak of wet up her bum, for I would know how she felt, and we would have a connection, and I could give her comfort.

But she probably wouldn't be feeling very romantic, if I met her, because she would have a wet bum.

CRACKPOT DOCUMENTARIES FROM THE 70’S AND EARLY 80’S

Hi, i’m Andrew Clarke, the famous but down-on-his-luck actor, and i’m speaking to you in a low, authoritive voice while walking around some scrubland in Southern California.

I’m going to tell you about a shocking threat to humanity that could send the world crashing into the dark abyss of silence known as 'extinction'*.

A threat so huge, so horrific, the very thought of it may sound ridiculous to you, sitting comfortably, safely at your home, or in your office. But, just imagine for a moment, what if... what if these threats were true?

The mainstream of society ignores them, forgets them, hides them away - but is it out of embarrassment...or fear?

The warnings are growing, out from the past in the lost prophecies of those they would dismiss as lunatics – psychics, mystics, members of a small film-club that puts on regular nights in London Pubs – but soon the warnings will be so loud even SCIENCE ITSELF must accept the threat of:

CRACKPOT DOCUMENTARIES FROM THE 70’S AND EARLY 80’S

I’ll be back, talking in a low authoritive voice, towards the end of the movie because the makers only paid me for 1 day of filming.

In the meantime good luck and remember: is it a fool who believes, or a fool who ignores the terrible threat of:

CRACKPOT DOCUMENTARIES FROM THE 70’S AND EARLY 80’S

Yes, so I went to a film-night this week run by The Duke Mitchell Film Club (find them here: http://www.facebook.com/thedukemitchell). They put on regular themed nights of trailers, shorts and features, usually involving rare, forgotten and otherwise decidedly odd films.

This month it was a style of conspiracy and doom-laden pseudo documentaries that had their cinematic hey-day just before the explosion of home viewing with the birth of VHS in the 80’s (coincidence or conspiracy? YOU DECIDE).

These films are glorious.

Here’s a link to the trailer trash section of the night put on by The Duke Mitchell Film Club:

While they covered almost all paranormal subjects from ghosts to ESP to the Bermuda Triangle, they found their strongest subjects in ancient prophecies of impending destruction. Watch the second trailer in that trailer trash clip – the Orson Welles narrated THE LATE GREAT PLANET EARTH – for a good look at the style.

 The feature presentation was THE JUPITER MENACE, a 1982 movie about ancient prophecies warning us about how a planetary alignment will cause unprecedentedly destructive worldwide earthquakes in the year 1983.

Here’s a four minute preview:

The glory lies in how incredibly straight-faced and self-important they are while portending doom in some future year that passed us in the real world by decades ago. The audience on the night was in constant fits of laughter, and a good time was had by all.

THE JUPITER MENACE is a pretty good example of the genre, and benefits from being well paced, having some decent production values and for being a brief 80 minutes long.

The film follows the classic template fairly well. The formula is this:

Introduction By a Famous Actor: This time around it’s George Kennedy, a respected character actor (though admittedly I only know him from AIRPORT 1980, a film marginally more silly than AIRPLANE!). These actors are familiar, respectable, trustworthy, therefore what they say is too, right?

And watch him work it in the above Vimeo clip, despite the thin material. His hitching up of his trousers as he leaves the jeep is just great character work. Alternatively it’s proof that the film-makers did everything in one take. YOU DECIDE.

Completely Earnest Tone: There can be no winking in these movies, or the aura of documentary authority would be lost. If the film invited you to laugh at any point, the spell would be broken.

Melodramatic music helps greatly here. (http://www.allmusic.com/album/jupiter-menace-original-motion-picture-soundtrack-r108658).

Trustworthy Experts: Middle-aged, dignified looking, often priests, doctors or scientists, all talking calmly to prove they are confident and trustworthy. After all, if a doctor says something, it must be true, right?

Watch this clip from THE SILENT REVOLUTION OF TRUTH, a more modern take on these documentaries that is actually painfully dry, but features an amazing extended sequence where an ‘expert’ tries to convince us that a bunch of UFO pictures and film are un-faked and believable. The calmly delivered arguments layered on top of the nakedly terrible footage is a masterclass in brazen straight-faced bullshittery. And yet I dare you not to pause for thought at least some of his assertions.

Here is the link:  (it should start at 47 mins and 49 seconds).

Hypnotic suggestion and repetition: Partly this is just about saying ‘earthquakes’ and ‘Jupiter’ so many times the audience starts believing in it. But there is also a lot of statements that start with admitting these theories may seem crazy, or cannot be proven with reason, but then asking the viewer to ‘just imagine’ if they were true, to ‘consider the impossible’, or to ‘face your worst fears’.

Schizophrenic Attitude Towards Science: On the one hand, science is constantly belittled for its dismissal of the ancient prophecies, with plenty of references to disasters destroying the works of modern, scientific man but that were accurately predicted by the wisdom of ancient mystics. But on the other, the films constantly turn to science to add weight and respectability to their claims. The documentaries will constantly cut to beeping instruments or men in lab-coats as a shorthand for ‘real evidence’.

If you want a modern example of this, check out the early seasons of THE X-FILES. They are very anti-reason while dressed up in very pro-scientific clothes.

Re-Enactments: Ah yes, the re-enactments. The kitschiest parts of these films, certainly, but dramatising events, however poorly, gives an audience the sense

memory of those events, thus making them more believable. When a ‘scientist’ refers back to those made up events later in the movie, the audience will use memory rather than reason to recall them, and so they take on the aura of a real, past event.

Towards the beginning of THE JUPITER MENACE, there is a scene where an early Christian missionary talks to some pagans worshipping an idol. The scene ends with the missionary shooting MAGIC LASER BEAMS out of his staff. Godly.

Constant use of terms like ‘immediate’, ‘near future’ or ‘the day after tomorrow’:

The point is to make the threats seem very present but the side effect is, of course, that you can’t disprove things that happen in the future. In the scientific logic of these films, ‘not being able to be disproven’ means ‘absolutely true’.

THE JUPITER MENACE predicts massive earthquakes in 1983, leading to twenty years of worldwide turmoil until there is a ‘pole-shift’ in 2000, leading to an instant-ice age, the sun moving the opposite way across the sky, the Earth ‘falling through space’ and the death of everyone, mostly.

And that’s it. Do these things, and you too can make a documentary predicting the end of the world, perhaps by means of ants, or quantum wobble.

Being evolutionarily advanced space aliens from the year 2012, we can look back and scoff at this seemingly naive fear-mongering, and treat the overly earnest tones of these movies as comedy gold.

But there was something in THE JUPITER MENACE that stopped me laughing, and made me deeply uncomfortable.

Yes, perhaps buried deeply within the of wild ravings of CRACKPOT DOCUMENTARIES FROM THE 70’S AND EARLY 80’S there are genuine, hidden prophecies of imminent doom!

Well, maybe.

Look:

About half-way through, the film shifts from endless cod-science about planetary alignments and vector-graphic simulations of earthquakes, and turns to how people are dealing with this threat of destruction.

We have scenes of survivalists out in the forests of the Ozarks, doing endless military training to defend their lives when society breaks down, and keeping their young children in rundown compounds to keep them away from the decadent influences of the towns. They are ‘on a mission from God’, they say, as they pose in camouflage jackets and rifles.

Then, as proof of the mainstreaming of these beliefs about imminent destruction, the film shows a sermon given by a pastor in a Californian mega-church. This is genuine footage of a real sermon, in a real church. For five long minutes he compares the predictions of one Jesus Christ to recent events: the destruction of temples, famine and starvation, political unrest, business corruption, increased wars and the rumours of wars. On and on, standing high on his pulpit, arms spread wide, using the authority of the God his massive congregation believe in to lend his words the weight of Truth.

Leaving aside the heavy irony of a wealthy, overweight white American male preaching on the horrors of inequality and capitalism, the sequence brings home the unpleasant realities of these pseudo-documentaries.

THE JUPITER MENACE may be peddling nonsense, and the makers may well have been entirely and cynically aware of the emptiness of their claims, but the point is the intended audience is supposed to believe it is real.

My joy at the brazen falsehoods fell away. While the content is false, the fears, ignorance and superstition the films rely on for their power is entirely true.

And the result of these fears is men dressed up like soldiers, hiding their children in military compounds, pointing loaded guns at their neighbours.

THE JUPITER MENACE actually ends with a rousingly apocalyptic quote from Luke’s gospel about destruction, horror, the end of all things and how only looking to the one true God will bring salvation.

The frightening belief underneath all this doom-talk is that not only is this imminent destruction inevitable, it is desirable.

If you watch the trailer trash segment above, you’ll see that the trailers are cut with endless shots of explosions, natural disasters, bombs, devastated cities and human suffering.

Trailers are cut to be as exciting as possible. This is disaster porn.

Right through the bluster of pseudo-science or claims that ‘all religions are false’ (a standard position in these conspiracy theories), is a very reactionary Christian morality – that man is evil, that the world is corrupt and un-saveable, and salvation will only come after death. 

Spoilers for a horrible film: In the 2005 film KNOWING, not only does the world explode at the end, but it kind of suggests that man is so corrupt and venal that it is a good thing it explodes. The innocent, pure children are saved by distinctly angelic aliens.

And this desire can also be found both in the belief that the extremely silly THE DA VINCI CODE is based on fact, or that noxious guff like the 9/11 conspiracy movie LOOSE CHANGE speaks the truth.

The point being that, as ridiculous as THE JUPITER MENACE, and all of its genre, is, it speaks to a fearful superstitious need that is very much real and surrounds us every day.

So if you see anyone, Religious or Athiest, left or right, talking of collapse or destruction with the tiny glint in their eye that suggests they might be excited by the idea you can look at THE JUPITER MENACE and perhaps not find their arguments so persuasive anymore.

Hi, i’m Andrew Clarke, the famous but down-on-his-luck actor, and i’m back from my hotel and speaking in a low, authoritive voice as we come to the end of our journey

I’d like to thank The Duke Mitchell Film Club for putting on an excellent night of deeply bizarre film. They have a Trailer Trash night coming up on Feb 5th, dedicated to showing only the rarest, oddest and hopefully most depraved trailers known to man, and their next regular night will be dedicated to... the Bollywood Bruce Lee.

If you live in London, I highly recommend you check these nights out. Find out all the information here:  http://www.facebook.com/thedukemitchell

And so I leave you with this: I won a DVD just for answering a question about UFOs at their night, which made me very happy. Now I am writing a blog post all about how great their night is.

Coincidence or conspiracy: YOU DECIDE.

* actual quote from THE LATE GREAT PLANET EARTH 

Vampires

The Machine Of Death was an excellent collection of short stories, crowd-sourced from an open invitation for submissions, that went to No 1 in the Amazon book lists, beating Glenn Beck’s most recent book in the process, and getting him all angry. Read the whole story here:

http://machineofdeath.net/about/

So the Editors decided to do another volume, sent out the call for submissions again, and I answered. All the stories share the same conceit:

“The machine had been invented a few years ago: a machine that could tell, from just a sample of your blood, how you were going to die. It didn’t give you the date and it didn’t give you specifics. It just spat out a sliver of paper upon which were printed, in careful block letters, the words DROWNED or CANCER or OLD AGE or CHOKED ON A HANDFUL OF POPCORN. It let people know how they were going to die.”

The rules are that the prediction must always be accurate, the prediction must always be the same for each individual and that the predictions must be derived from a blood test. Oh, and that the title of the story should always be the ‘cause of death’.

 You can read the first collection, in its entirety and for free, here: http://machineofdeath.net/ebook

My submission didn’t make it this time, for reasons that I can only assume revolve around it being far too awesome, so I present it here. I called it ‘Vampires’.

Vampires

“Vampires!” cried Mr Wintergreen.

“Vampires?” inquired Brian.

“Vampires,” confirmed Gareth, reading the card.

“Give that here,” said Brian. “What does it really say?”

Gareth held up the card for Brian to see.

“It says ‘Vampires’. See?”

“Vampires don’t exi...oh.”

The card read, in neat black lettering, ‘Vampires’.

Brian traced his hand over the light, unique embossing of the card, and ran it under the scanner just to be sure, sighing as the machine buzzed green. He looked up apologetically at the small man standing at the back of the office.

“I’m terribly sorry, Mr Winte-“

“Vampires!” cried Mr Wintergreen again, who threw his arms up above his head.

The office of the Machine of Death moved very quickly at the news. They had a crisis meeting where they tried to decide on what to do. The Machine of Death was never wrong in its predictions, and it had predicted Mr Wintergreen’s death be by ‘Vampires’.

“The Machine of Death is never wrong,” said Gareth.

“But ‘Vampires’,” said Brian.

“I know,” agreed Gareth.

“It’s obviously broken. Take it off line. Open it up.”

So they did. And it was fine. They administered tests involving ten monkeys and an electrified cage.

‘Electrocution’ read the card for Monkey number 7 and, on pushing the button, yes, it was indeed the monkey in cage number 7 that was electrocuted.

Mr Wintergreen, sat opposite them in Brian’s office, arms folded tight. “Well, what do I do?”

“Go home, have dinner. I don’t know, what do you usually do of an evening Mr Wintergreen? We’ll run some more tests. I wouldn’t worry about the card. I mean, hey, maybe it’ll be worth something in a few years. You know: ‘Vampires’.”

“Ha, yes. ‘Vampires’,” though he didn’t sound convinced.

Mr Wintergreen went home. In the morning his housekeeper found him lying on his kitchen floor, all of his blood gone from his body, and a disappointed look on his face.

“VAMPIRES!” yelled the headlines.

They worked hard all week at the office of the Machine of Death to keep the prediction officially non-existent. The excitement passed soon enough and who pays attention to newspapers anyway?

“Uhh, Brian?” Gareth said as he walked into Brian’s office at the end of the week.

“Yes, Gareth?”

Gareth motioned to the lank haired young man standing behind him with a huge grin on his face. The young man held up his freshly printed card and said:

“Vampires.”

They kept a very close watch on the young man’s house and, a week later, PI Dunst, upon returning from a toilet break, saw three figures running from the back door. He gave chase and managed to catch the slowest, though the others escaped. The young man was found inside his bedroom, drained of all his blood with a bewildered look on his face.

They brought the captured figure to the office, and cuffed him to a chair in the secure rooms. He turned out to be a soft-spoken man in his fifties called Arthur Malten. He seemed in very good spirits and asked for a cup of tea.

“My card said ‘Lymphatic Cancer’,” he said. “I had late stage lymphatic cancer, quite inoperable, and a couple of weeks until terminal, so the doctors said. Then a few of us in the hospice had this idea.”

“Vampires.”

“Well, everybody knows how your new machine works. Blood test and all. I say, could one of you uncuff one of my hands, my tea is getting cold.”

He seemed quite friendly, so they did.

“Oh, that’s a lovely cup of tea. Thank you so much”

“So, you thought you’d swap your blood out with someone?”

“I was in a terrible amount of pain. It seemed like something to do.”

“Biscuit?”

“Oh yes, please. I’ve had poor Mr Wintergreen’s blood in my body for two weeks now. It’s been simply marvellous.”

The intercom buzzed. Brian clicked it.

“The re-test on the original sample is back, Brian. ‘Lymphatic Cancer’, and in red. The machine thinks this man is dead.”

They looked up at the man sitting opposite them, who smiled cheerily back.

Brian put his head in his hands.

“Vampires, “ he said, quietly.

Not really knowing what to do, Brian ordered Arthur Malten tested again, with his new blood. Brian ordered him tested three times in total, but every answer came back the same.

They stood in front of Arthur Malten in the secure rooms and presented him his card. He took it and read it.

“Ghosts?” he asked.

“Ghosts,” said Brian.

“Really?”

“Ghosts.”

 “Should vampires be scared of ghosts?”

“Well, you’re going to die of them, apparently,” said Gareth.

“I’m sure i’ll be fine. Vampire, you know.”

“How’s the tea?” asked Brian.

“Marvellous.”

Over the next week, while kept under close guard, Arthur’s behaviour began to change, with his previous cheeriness replaced with bouts of confusion and intense nostalgia. He would speak at length and in detail about his childhood in Scotland then would become terribly anxious over whether his sister was called Agnes or Carol.

“Arthur,” began a visibly weary Brian again. “If we could just go back to your childhood.”

They had given him physical tests and psychological tests. They had looked into his background, his family history and his police record. Brian had all the papers in front of him on the table. He had been up all night reading them. He had not wanted to start this meeting.

“Arthur, I’d like you to tal...”

“And on Sundays we would walk back from church, over the fields of Farmer Tavistock...”

“Yes Arthur, but if we could just...”

“...and out in the middle of the fields you couldn’t hear any cars or machinery at all, and you could hear the rain falling on the far side of the hill, slowly getting closer...”

“That does sound lovely Mr Malten but...”

“And we’d try to outrun it, me and...and...” but tears were in his eyes and he stopped.

“Arthur.”

“Oh what was her name!”

“Arthur, please.”

“How could I forget such a thing!”

“Mr Malten. You grew up in East London. You’ve never been to Scotland.”

The small middle-aged man looked up at Brian then, unable to speak, his brow wrinkled in confusion.

“Mr Malten.”

“I...”

“Mr Malten?”

The man gave him a blank look. Brian sighed deeply.

“...Mr Wintergreen?”

“...yes?”

Brian pushed all his papers to the side.

“Mr Wintergreen you were killed two weeks ago by a Mr Arthur Malten, who drained your blood and put it in his body, which is currently sitting opposite me now.”

The small middle-aged man lifted his hands to look at them as they trembled.

“Mr Wintergreen’s sister is called Carol. Mr Malten had a sister called Agnes, who died four years ago in a car accident.”

“That...that is a very sad thing.”

“Yes,” said Brian. “Yes, it is.”

And the small middle-aged man took the spoon from his tea cup and stabbed it into his heart, so all the blood came out.

“Ghosts?” said Gareth, after they had cleaned up.

Brian shook his head. “Ghosts.”

Ghosts.

“You know, this really isn’t how biology works,” said Archbishop Montgomery, sitting in the secure rooms of the office. Large in the chair, he spoke with the slow, gently descending cadences of a teacher explaining things very patiently.  A very great deal of communication had been passed back and forth between the office of The Machine of Death and every conceivable authority in the days after Mr Malten’s death, all very quiet and distinctly private.

“The machine is never wrong,” continued Brian, in the calm monotone of someone for whom explanations used to answer things.

“But vampires are fictional creatures designed to explore our anxieties surrounding our sexuality.”

“We had one where you’re sitting just two days ago.”

“But he’s not here now, I see.”

“No, not anymore. He was killed by a ghost.”

“Ghosts are myths to explore fears around the permanence of death...”

“The reports we gave you were very detailed.”

“Yes, but...”

“When the machine was built, Archbishop, this became a world where our defining existential question now has a provably certain answer.”

“Yes, but...”

“Vampires.”

“I know, yes...”

“And ghosts.”

The Archbishop sat up very straight in his chair then, to give himself height, and to give his diaphragm enough room to let him speak most clearly. “These predictions of your machine have no basis in reason, sir,” he declaimed. “And your machine does not accord with sound scientific theory. It is broken, or it is a construct of fantasy. That is all.”

“I notice you have not been tested, Archbishop,” said Gareth, standing at the back, mostly to give Brian some slack.

“That is right?”

“Fancy a go?”

“Well...”

“What’s the harm?”

So they gathered in the machine room and administered the test to Archbishop Montgomery. The machine clicked and whirred for a few moments, and a small card appeared in the dispenser.

The Archbishop brushed passed the others and picked up his card, looked at it, turned it over and back, then handed it to Brian.

“Is this some kind of a joke?” the Archbishop asked.

Brian looked at the card, absently fingering the tell-tale embossing. He sighed.

The card read: ‘God’.

Brain said: “Oh come on.”

The machine buzzed.

On Watching Police Academy

So this weekend I may have watched Police Academy, the 1984 American hit comedy about misfits training to be police officers, famous for being so bad that, in a world where everything has a cult following, it doesn’t have a cult following, and for having six sequels that are even worse.

I justify my actions thusly:

1: There is value in revisiting films from your childhood, especially for people who define themselves a little too much by the pop-culture they consume. Separating our memories of a film from our current reactions to a film helps us recognise how we have changed, accept that growth and, in a very real sense, become better people.

2: I was drunk.

3: Awesome theme tune: http://youtu.be/4qHngXMfO0A

4: No seriously, there is gold in them there shitty mainstream films from previous decades. No, seriously. Mainstream films are filled with pandering to the social norms of the time. The good ones weave the panderings seamlessly into interesting stories such that we do not notice or, at least, mind. The bad ones however, have all that stuff hanging out like loose ends for all to see: the values, the political subtexts, the assumptions. You want to know what an era was like? Head straight for the bad films.

5: Boobs.

So how was it? For the first hour, tragically, not that good. There’s joy at the end of this, I promise, but let’s deal with the basic set up first:

It starts with a text-on-screen preamble:

‘On March 4^th this year newly elected Mayor Mary Sue Beal announced that she was changing the hiring practices of the city’s police force. No longer would height, weight, education, or physical strength be used to keep new recruits out of the Metropolitan Police Academy. Hundreds of people who never dreamed of becoming police officers signed up immediately.

Naturally the police completely freaked.’

Now, you can tell that it wants to take the side of the underdogs in this, what with using a slang term to describe an official reaction.

But mixed with the mocking of establishment as rigid and old fashioned, it equally makes sure to characterise minorities and progressives as weirdos and freaks.

The introductions to the characters bear this out: We have the army-obsessed gun-nut depicted as actually mentally unwell, we have the big black man everyone is scared of, the bullied fatty, the neurotic nerd. These characters are all reduced to lowest common denominator, one dimensional punch-lines. Weirdos. Freaks. Jokes.

 It does make a few attempts at being racially progressive, but nestles this in with plenty of casual racism. Its attempts at depicting strong, independent women are undermined by lots of scenes of boobs. It doesn’t even attempt to have a sympathetic homosexual character but has plenty of gay panic jokes, even entire sequences dedicated to OMG Gay.

And this is the general tone of the movie. Too chaotic and scattershot to hold an actual idea in its head for more than a scene or two, it becomes a random assembly of people being stupid. It’s certainly impossible to draw any coherent political position out of it.

And for those arguing that perhaps I shouldn’t be looking for political subtext in a comedy, you need to look at the Slobs vs. Snobs template of films like Animal House, which have a fierce class-war energy behind them. The Blues Brothers is set quite clearly against a backdrop of the collapse of the American manufacturing industry. Compare Eddie Murphy’s homeless guy in Trading Places to ‘Guy Who Makes Funny Noises’ in Police Academy.

So, sadly we’re left with little but a film that functions as a mean-spirited pantomime, mixing playground-level sensibilities with adult content, its tone defined by callousness, laziness and nastiness. The hero of the piece, usually an anti-authoritarian whose dickish behaviour hides a heart of gold, is now reduced to a smug, selfish prick.

Perhaps this can be used to reflect on a culture that treats empathy as weakness, but even this feels like a bit of a stretch. Mostly the film feels too ill-thought through to be actually evil.

But, right near the end, a full-on inner city riot breaks out, our plucky trainees are called into active service, and the film turns into pure gold.

You see, confined to the hermetically-sealed environment of the academy, there were no real stakes to the conflicts, and characters could act terribly or callously with no real repercussions. But the climax of the film moves the action into the real world and suddenly all the chaotic nastiness described above takes on new associations.

The trainees all dress up in riot gear. The music becomes insistant, the jokes dry up, the smug looks turn stern: this is a serious threat. Our heroes have to save the day. We are supposed to be on the side of incompetent, racist, psychotic, undertrained police trainees dressed and armed like soldiers being deployed in an urban area against civilians.

With the London riots only a couple of months ago, and the spectacular police response to the ‘Occupy’ demonstrations, especially in Oakland, the imagery is potent and unsettling.

The riot is essentially a huge crowd of people running around shouting things like ‘It’s the police! Let’s get them!’: basically a faceless mob. What was simply reducing characters to lowest common denominators in the rest of the movie suddenly becomes a large civilian population being depicted as ‘the enemy’.

The police trainees, shown being armed with loaded guns, are ordered to protect the city from the people that live there.

The scenes are reminiscent of the riot scenes in Death Wish 3, the most psychotic entry in an already ugly vigilante justice franchise. Death Wish 3 had the basic decency to pretend to be a dark, serious state-of-the-nation thriller. Police Academy is supposed to be a comedy.

In the most gloriously uncomfortable scene, the overweight guy (shown being bullied by thugs at the beginning of the movie and vowing that ‘he’ll show them’ by joining the police force) uses the power and weapons of the police to beat up those same thugs. It is revealed that those thugs were in fact simply protecting their own property from the rioters, so showing that this police violence was unjustified. The film depicts the scene as an empowering victory for the overweight guy. Brutal police injustice depicted as punch-line – go!

Also, and i’m aware it is depicted in a deliberately cartoonish style, the riot is started by one of the police trainees.

You can provide the social commentary here, you’re smart people. My reaction was mostly one of transgressive thrill. It is physically exciting to see such unpleasantness on screen. Much like the exploitation and grindhouse films of the 70’s were filled with moral lassitude, drugs, violence and sex to offend and titillate the good people of America, films like Police Academy are exploitation films for liberals, filled with rancid and, above all, casual, depictions of racism, sexism, homophobia and tacit acceptance of authoritarian control.

“Ugh! This is disgusting!” I say. “Show me MORE.”

Death Wish 3 remains the high point for this sort of thing – it is a truly repugnant, not to mention mostly incompetent, film that becomes almost transcendent when seen through a liberal (or hell, basically humane) filter.

A good modern example is, strangely, the Transformers franchise, where our heroes the Autobots are depicted as savage, murdering psychotics.

It is quite often astonishing to see such adult content in a giant robot film aimed at kids, just as it is astonishing to see an adult rated film like Police Academy aimed so directly at the sensibilities of an eight year old.

Also terrible, but when has that ever stopped you watching trash?

So let’s not say that lowest common denominator comedy must be done away with as, if nothing else, that doesn’t sound like fun. Let us say instead that it is an extremely blunt weapon who’s main tactic, of reducing humans to punch-lines, can be extremely destructive if wielded by the lazy and careless. Stupid comedies should not be made by the stupid. Thank god we’ve come so far:

Shit.

Full disclosure: I laughed at the bit where a man's head gets shoved up a horse’s bum.

Streaming, Sofas And The Stone In Your Shoe

I wanted to dig up Christopher Nolan’s first film Following, a zero budget British Indie made in 1998. I looked it up on my LoveFilm account (A British version of Netflix oh heathen foreign types), and had it delivered to me within a week. Nice!

This wasn’t really possible a decade ago.  And streaming entire movies from the Internet is only really now becoming feasible for most of us normal types as broadband speeds increase.

Before all this fancy Internet stuff you got your movies at the cinema, on TV or from whatever bricks'n'mortar shops like Blockbuster decided to stock.  Before that we had no way of owning copies of these movies and relied entirely on TV and cinema – on people deciding which movies got shown, when and where.

But, and here’s what I want to write an article about: I keep hearing stories about how wonderful those times were.

Rob Zombie, who used to make novelty metal songs and now makes what I hope are supposed to be novelty horror movies, talks with pride about the time he cycled all day to get to a Dawn Of The Dead screening.

Anyone my age or older will talk fondly of scouring the listings magazines for a midnight showing of some old classic, or extreme horror movie, or foreign-film-with-boobs-in, secretly staying up to watch it, face inches from the screen so the volume wouldn’t be loud enough to wake up the adults.

Here’s  Milos Stehlik, founder of Facets Multi-Media: ‘ For me, a great film always took effort. Sometimes I traveled far or sat on the floor of basements watching rickety 16mm or beat-up VHS copies’.

I even have my own story: I spent years trying to hunt down a copy of The Exorcist, as it was officially banned in the UK until 1993. I read all about it I could. I visited every video rental store in my area, I hung on every word of those shining souls who had claimed to have seen it (though probably hadn’t, and anyway claimed it was boring, the fools), spent money on an American VHS that led me to discover the tragic difference between NTSC and PAL formats when all I saw were fuzzy lines when I loaded it up. I dreamt about the film (though these dreams usually ended up involving spaceships and action sequences). The film had magical powers simply for being unavailable. My teenage years had mystery in them. Secrets to be discovered. Buried treasure to find.

I still remember the first time I saw it, and it was glorious.

Now the DVD of it sits in a wallet buried under books, nestled next to DVDs of A Clockwork Orange and Zombie Flesh Eaters, all unwatched for years. I can be watching it in about five minutes if I click the right link.

The argument hiding behind all these fond reminiscences is that something has been lost. That things have gotten worse. This culture of instant access that streaming and services like Lovefilm give us is leading to bad results.

Check this article, i’ll be referencing it a lot: http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-convenience-trap-what-the-changes-at-netflix-r,59829/ **

(this is where I got the Stehlik quote from, btw, research fans)

The argument seems to go, both from the article and from me reading far too much of the Internet, that making watching films easy has made them disposable. Film is now a commoditised medium, sold by the month, not by the unit. The culture of film watching has changed in several, negative ways:

The apparent infinity of choice can overwhelm, and so the viewer retreats back into the familiar, making the breadth of their actual cultural intake narrower.

Or how about, as the article states, if one film is unavailable, you shrug and choose another, just as if you ask for a Coke and the bar only has Pepsi.

‘Underground’ or ‘cult’ movies have essentially disappeared as instant access renders everything mainstream, in the ultimate co-option of the Alternative.

Equally, having one’s movie-watching tied to an Internet connection makes uninterrupted movie watching basically impossible. Even if you turn off your chats and your Skypes and your message notifications, who can say that they don’t flick open a tab the second a scene isn’t immediately gripping? Such distractions destroy the art of slow, atmospheric films such as the mentioned Uncle Boonmee***, while encouraging the watching of less demanding entertainments such as TV programmes.

The respect for movies has gone, apparently, along with the ability to really engage with them, as ‘ease’ comes to define not just delivery but content.****

It doesn’t sound nice, does it, this new world of disposable, interchangeable media being drip fed to cows and drones sinking in to sofas across the world.

It’s also a scenario that fits ever so terribly neatly into the narratives of nostalgia and conservatism. And any argument fitting so neatly to a narrative of ‘things ain’t what they used to be’ should always be questioned.

So: Really? Really?

All these stories about great movie watching experiences all emphasise the experience surrounding the watching, not the movie itself.

The power The Exorcist had over me came from it being denied to me, creating mystery. The same trick could be pulled by denying access to any film. One could argue the trick was pulled with the equally banned, and deeply tedious, Zombie Flesh Eaters, but to each their own, I guess. The power came not from the film, but from the denying of it.

The sadness over the loss of ‘underground’ or ‘cult’ movies is based being outside the mainstream, of knowing things most people do not. The appeal is in the secret nature of the film, not the film itself.

In each case, it is an attendant experience surrounding the film that is fetishized – the difficulty in finding it, the transgression of seeing the forbidden, the thrill of discovery and so on.

If scarcity becomes a mark of value, the cultural worth of films are being judged on the entirely free-market idea of supply and demand.

If the difficulty of seeing becomes a mark of value, as in the stories of pilgrimages Rob Zombie took or the penitent suffering of Mahlik, then films are being placed in a bizarrely puritan religious frame where pain equals worthiness. Lars Von Trier says film should be 'a stone in your shoe'. Perhaps he would have us all wear sackcloth too?

And, finally, in every single case, the argument rests on defending a paternalistic system of film distribution. Controlling the distribution was a way for the corporation to retain control of the market. Creating false scarcity is a standard means of creating false value. There’s nothing natural about the way things were before streaming technology, it was just a business plan to maximise profit. And it’s this that is being defended? This is the source of a film’s value?

We are being given the keys to the kingdom or, at least, far more of the kingdom than ever before. We can be lazy about it, and choose ease over adventure, but we are also now free to seek out rarities and oddities quickly and easily. I would have found it next to impossible to track down something like Following without Lovefilm and the Internet.

Change brings loss, but also opportunity. This particular change puts choice into our hands far more than at any point in history.  The responsibility to use this newfound access is ours.

But rather than face that responsibility, we would rather give the keys back, and return to childhood and the safe control of a father. We mourn the loss rather than embrace the opportunity.

This is not the way forwards. Especially as ‘reckoning with [a film’s] way of understanding the world’, as the article states we are losing the ability to do, involves nothing more than having the gumption to not check your email for two hours. It isn’t that hard.

Film is a technological medium, and the history of film is one of constant technological change. If you rail against this change then congratulations, you have just discovered your very own generation gap. Welcome to old.

* Torrenting and piracy is certainly linked to this, but the ethical issues it raises will distract from the specific argument I want to follow here, so i’d rather just lump it in with streaming (which is awfully similar in functionality anyway) and keep legalities out of this discussion of access.

** very quickly, the article also makes claims that this newfound access isn’t true access. The article’s argument about the loss of heritage because these streaming services don’t carry every rare film rests both on the entirely unproven assumption that streaming will not only become the only source of films, but will also stay at its current level of coverage AND on the idea that getting access to rare films was easier back in the day, as if what was shown back in the day in film-school screening rooms is somehow relevant to what is now available to every single person with an Internet connection. The argument, I feel, wobbles.

*** which is a lovely film that I watched at home on my sofa. Though if anyone wants to explain to me exactly what it is about, they’d be more than welcome!

**** there’s more too, like the loss of great communal moments in film-watching like when the entire girl population of England went spontaneously Grease crazy just because the BBC happened to pop it on one wet Sunday afternoon. Or the sense of films becoming ephemeral now that you don’t have a real, physical copy in your hands. But how long do you want this article to be? Sheesh!

Super edit linky addy: A New York Times article about people who are keeping the flame of VHS alive: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/movies/horror-film-goes-back-to-vhs-tape.html?_r=3&smid=tw-nytimesmovies&seid=auto

Sample quote: “VHS is cumbersome… You have to maintain it. It has to fit on a shelf. You may have to dust it off. But you also get to interact with a piece of art on a personal level.”

Thank you to www.badassdigest.com for pointing me at it.

James Bond And The Problem Of Evil

So Quantum Of Solace, the latest Bond film, is kind of a crummy movie in that it amps up the bruising action and reduces everything else to practically nothing, leaving Bond as a charm-free and humourless thug.

This was an attempt to update Bond for the new era of action movies which, for better or worse, the Bond producers decided was defined by The Bourne Trilogy, a series of films notable for popularising the shaky-cam approach to fight scenes, wherein a hand-held camera is really close to the action and wobbles about all the time because OMG the excitement.

Quite apart from not being able to tell what the hell was going on in most of the action scenes (quite apart from not really caring), another major criticism is that the Big Baddie is a wuss. Played by Mathieu Amalric, he is a corporate executive for a secret, and evil, conglomerate of secret, and evil, business people, bent on taking over the world by means of manipulating politics and buying water. Or something. Anyway the point is, it doesn’t involve giant space lasers or armies of metal-toothed mutants: our bad guy is a bureaucrat, an advisor, a business-man. In other words: a wuss. In no way a physical match for Bond. Part of the finale involves him making some sort of mewling noise while struggling to hold up an axe.

The film was criticised for this. However, this was in fact the only good idea in the movie. It is also the ultimate reason why this attempt to update Bond failed, and possibly terminally.

See: they didn’t make the bad guy a great fighter, or a big man, or a great leader. They made him the faceless functionary for a corporation. The problem with this is that you can’t have a satisfying fight with a faceless functionary at the end of the film. The problems posed by him can not be solved by punching hard enough.

So it is not the endlessly sexist portrayals of women, nor the old colonial belief in the superiority and relevance of England in world affairs, nor the romantic notion of the gentleman spy, nor the boyish superheroics of a protagonist who is an expert in everything that ultimately renders Bond old-fashioned.

It is that, as Bond is the hero, the problems his world faces must be ones that he can defeat personally, by punching it, or shooting it or exploding it. Whatever really, as long as he makes a quip afterwards.

This implies a world who’s problems come from something specific that can be removed from it. Which is to say a world that is basically good but has the odd bad apple in it. But the evil admitted to in Quantum Of Solace is a systemic one. You can’t punch a system. There’s nothing physical to hit.

Bond can punch his way through any number of Mathieu Amalrics and nothing will change. He might as well punch a famine victim to cure world hunger.

By admitting that the evil is at a systemic level, the Bond franchise renders its hero, and thus itself, powerless.

While a neutered Bond may make an interesting movie, it would not make a Bond movie.

So Bond must stay in his fantasy  world forever, as his power relies on that fantasy of a ‘good’ world - equally because his films would stop being fun, and because placing the ‘destruction-as-solution’ narrative into anything close to a real world makes a character like Bond a monster – and how would we feel when we are shown, in our capitalist, corporate world, that our heroes are really villains?

The End

When the end came it took everything. Every city went. All the books and televisions and cinemas went. The schools and the universities and bunkers built deep underground protected by steel enforced ferro-concrete to keep the rulers of the countries safe went. Some 80% of the population went within three hours. More went later but no-one knew how many because all the computers went. Like that.

Those that were left did not know what to do. Their parents went. Their teachers went. Their friends went.

Pets went.

           A generation or so lived on what was left but that went too so eventually everything really was gone.

The Earth was quiet for some time. Then a group of those left got together and said:

“We can not let them win. We owe it to our lost ones to preserve our way of life. We can rebuild. We must rebuild!”

They had to start right at the beginning, because everything really had gone. They all sat around a clearing in the woods and hit bits of tree with bits of rock.

“Fire!” said one.

“Excellent! What’s next?”

“The wheel, I think.”

And it went from there.

They had picked berries for food right at the beginning, then one of the boys stepped on a rabbit. They cooked the rabbit on the fire and ate it. Then they killed another rabbit and cooked it in a sauce made of the berries.

They began herding the rabbits. Bigger animals came to eat the rabbits. They herded the bigger animals.

One of them stopped herding and cooking the animals, and began making things from wood and stone and the hides of the animals. He then swapped these things with the people who had been herding and cooking the animals for some of the meat, because the herders really needed those things but had no time to make them, what with all the herding and cooking.

A few days after that they had a musician, a comedian and a maker of ornamental vases in the town.

The one who had originally come up with idea of rebuilding hurried round saying:

“Excellent! Excellent! Hurry up now; what’s next? Quickly, someone invent socks.”

Everything was going really well.

The next day they decided they had enough meat and things so that they could all sit down and have a really good think about why things were like they were and who made things originally.

By nightfall they had had come up with three fairly distinct concepts of an omnipotent God, along with a handful of non-theistic philosophies, one who said nothing meant anything really and one who had decided to worship the rabbits.

They split themselves up into different religions and started arguing with each other over who was right.

“Marvellous!” said the leader. “Now: has anyone done anal sex?”

They made such a great deal of everything that they had too much for themselves and decided to see if the next town over would like some of it if they, in turn, would hand over some things they didn't need. The first handing over was a clay cooking pot for an embroidered shawl.

One of us said that this would be an excellent basis for modern society.

Another said that no, to be really fair, everyone should, by rights, own everything and so everything should be put in the middle and things can be handed out to people as and when they needed it. This person tried to take the clay cooking pot and put it in the middle.

"Oi!" said the one who was holding it. "It took me hours to make that. Gerrof!"

The two struggled with the clay cooking pot.

"Umm, I think we're getting ahead of ourselves," said the leader, looking at a clipboard he had just had made. "Could this wait a week or so?  Ever so grateful."

Things moved forward.

Every time they came up with something, the leader, or one of his aides, would tick the appropriate box on the check list.

An artist tried to give a pot maker a small painting in return for a big pot. The pot maker looked at the small piece of paper, then at his big pot, and punched the artist on the nose.

The leader heard of this and talked it over with some of his advisors. He had the artist put numbers on these small paintings and told everyone that this was 'money' and it was worth the number it had painted on it.

"OK," said the town.

The arguments over whose concept of God was right turned into scuffles, then fights. The town split itself up into areas where only people who agreed with each other about these sorts of things were allowed to go. Every so often one section would head into another and hurt or kill some people from that other section. Sometimes they would just break things, or paint significant symbols on the buildings.

This was because they had spent a whole week-end coming up with these symbols and they were very proud of them.

After one particularly bloody fight the leader gathered the religious leaders to him and explained to them how they could make loads of money if they spent most of their efforts controlling their own followers instead of killing their rivals’ followers. The religious leaders were very impressed. After that they kept their followers in order and their followers gave them lots of money.

If the followers got out of hand, the religious leaders killed them themselves.

Every month or so they organised a holy war, just to remind the followers of how important it was to be loyal to their side.

The leader, sitting with his aides, nodded, and ticked another box on the check list.

A few weeks later the leader was sitting in his hut looking at a series of reports.

"Yes, sir;" said one of his aides. "We arrive in a new country, claim it for our Queen, and assume administrative control. Then we can take all its riches and stuff."

"And the natives?"

"Well they've never claimed ownership of the country, not in any officially sanctioned court, so its not rightfully theirs. They just happen to be living there, sir."

"Terribly clever. And how soon can we implement this?"

"Almost immediately. We just have to invent the concept of trans-continental travel."

"Hmm, are you sure? I was hoping to be able to cut down on the heretic burnings by the end of Saturday."

"Well sir; until we can guarantee the ushering in of a new golden age of prosperity…"

"Hmm."

Just then a man rushed into the head hut. “Right,” he said, and got his breath. “The world is actually spherical, it goes around the sun, the sun is just one star out of billions of stars which is what those dots are at night, all that magic from heaven is something called electricity which we can harness to turn night into day, cold into hot etc. oh, and there’s no God.”

“Right, kill him.”

He was dragged off.

A group of people ran in ten minutes later. They said: “Actually he was right.”

“Marvellous! Gather everyone. Renaissance!”

He told all the women to put on about twenty pounds, he told all the artists to paint them, and all the men to go off and seek their fortune by means of flags and the exploitation of indigenous populations.

Time went on and everything was going well.

Sitting in his new office, the leader was looking at reports.

"Yes, sir," said one of his aides. "Everyone seems to be getting along fine. We're coming up with new stuff everyday."

"Hmm," said the leader. "Everyone seems happy?"

"...Yes? Pretty much, sir."

The leader sighed. "All right then."

The leader had them paint black crosses on one fifth of the population. “Right," said the leader to the people with the black crosses on them. "We hate you. Wash our floors.”

Things moved along.

Sitting in his office one day, looking out through double glazed windows, worrying about his mortgage, the leader sifted through junk mail.

A senior aide rushed in. “Look! Brand new!” the man handed him a white envelope

In large gold lettering on the cover it read: ‘You could have already won £1,000,000! You are a guaranteed winner!’

“Excellent.” He said blankly. Then he threw it in the bin.

An aide ticked a box.

Another aide rushed in. He was out of breath. “An atomic bomb just blew up part of Russia.”

The leader looked disheartened. "Oh dear, this is no good. This isn't right at all." He looked out through the uPVC windows. "Anyway I thought you said this morning that this whole atom-business was going to revolutionise our power supply so we could stop chopping down our forest."

“Sorry. We'll get on it." The man turned to leave. He stopped and put his finger in his ear, listening intently. "Oh, hold on, we just blew up the Bikini atoll!”

“Excellent!" cried the leader, swinging round in his chair. "Now we’re really getting somewhere! Now; go and make female bathing costumes really small. Hurry!”

Things were moving very quickly, yet there grew a sense of unease, a sense that they weren't really getting anywhere at all.

"I'm just not sure we're actually moving forward. Do you see?"

"Yes sir.  Double-choc mint chip?"

"No, I don't really think it’s me."

"Roast hazelnut and almond cluster?"

"What about vanilla and pistachio swirl?"

"I don't know. What does that flavour say about me as a person?" said the leader, looking out of the window. "Anyway I filled up on strawberry and fruits of the forest cheesecake delight."

"Tasty," said one of his aides.

"How many types of coffee now?"

"32 sir."

"Not different types of bean?"

"No. Same bean, different coffees."

"Well I suppose that's something." The leader ticked another box in his personal organiser. "But I just don't know if any of this really means anything. You know?"

A junior member of the staff came in and said. "Sir? Page 138, sub-goal 3a?"

The leader flicked through the pages and his eyes lit up. "My word! Post-modern ennui! This is just incredible!"

He ticked another box.

Everything was good.

They felt they were very close when they achieved Harry Potter. It felt like things were coming together. Everything was meeting up.

They had computerised the check list last week to cut down on the building full of paperwork. The computer crashed on Thursday and all the information was lost. They were employing temps to re-enter the information. The temps were not being paid enough and were making lots of mistakes and taking long lunches and sickies.

The supervisors did not trust the temps.

The managers of the supervisors did not trust the supervisors enough to give them larger budgets.

The executives in charge of the managers were always at lunch, and could never be reached.

Things were moving apace.

One week later, the leader, the man who had first had the idea to rebuild everything, summoned a meeting of all the politicians, religious leaders, CEO's and selected royalty at his offices.

They all sat in the meeting room of the Governing house. They sat at a huge table and looked out over the huge lawns, gardens and sweeping roadway that led away from the Governing house to the city in the distance.

"People. We have come a long way. We had a dream. A tiny spark in the darkness. We thought we could rebuild. We though we could have it all back the way it was. Well here we are. I would like to raise a toast to a complete success!"

"Hear! hear!"

All the dignitaries proceeded to give their own toasts, and to congratulate each other on a job exceedingly well done.

While they did this, they did not notice a low rumbling sound building up outside the meeting room. It started off very quiet and small, and then it got bigger and bigger.

An aide came up to the leader and whispered in his ear while a fat politician was talking. The leader looked out of the window. He stood up.

"Sirs," he said.

The room fell silent. The rumbling could be heard quite clearly by now.

He pointed out of the window. They all looked out of it.

"My god." Said the politician. "What is it?"

The leader turned and said. "The end."

The rumbling grew to a roar.

Music Video: The Last Drink

I directed the music video for good friend and fellow musical ne'er-do-well Marmaduke Dando's song 'The Last Drink'.

The song is taken from his album 'Heathcliffian Surly', available here: http://www.marmadukedando.com/album/, which I highly recommend.

The Man Who Walked Into The Sea

He stood with the sea at his ankles as he looked out from the shore towards the edge of the world. The water was warmest here on the South Shore and the surface was smooth in the night as the moon turned the deeps all to surface. He took another step and the water lapped above his knees.

He had walked away after the fires and left his clothes on a tree. He had made fresh prints on the damp sand that traced a straight enough line from the trees to the shore. Two prints stood together a stride away from the water where he had waited for a time. In time he took another step.

And with that step he could feel the tug and tarry of the water around him and he let himself sway on his feet. He dropped his hands down and kept them still, letting the water move between his fingers. There were the sounds of insects from the trees and the sounds of sand being moved by sea and the sounds of water itself; small low lollops of water dropping onto water; huge high shrulls of foam far away. It was then he noticed the ocean had risen above his waist and the top half of his body was cold.

So he dropped to a crouch and his head went beneath the surface. He held his breath and squeezed his eyes and pushed away from the bed, launching out and swimming hard. At the end of his breath he stopped kicking and his body slowly dropped to the vertical. He turned and saw the shore dozens of yards away, dark and round. He looked down at his feet which swayed in a slow, pale treading motion above absolutely nothing. He looked up at the round white moon, took a deep breath and turned himself upside down.

All the sounds of the world disappeared with a rush of bubbles until the sea closed in around his ears. He moved down into the water. The water all around him was still massively, silently dark. As the surface moved it formed accidental prisms shooting the moonlight in shafts down past him into the water. The shafts formed endless architectures that swayed and changed with the movement of the sea. He became still and watched the cities collide.

His lungs urged him up and when he broke the surface all the sharp wire-wool of noise clangoured at his ears. Water splashed in his eyes and he spat the salt out. He took another breath and dived.

He swam deeper this time. He swam between the shafts of light and through them, sweeping water away above him whenever he felt his body lifting. He looked down and now, at some specific place in the sea not far from him, some things were returning the light.

They hung peacefully there, vague in the distance and the dark, like mist. He swam down to meet them. They gave their light out in pink and yellow. The motes and algae moved away and towards and around these lights. He swam in closer.

There were many of these things, in a cloud, hanging simply between the bottom and the top of the sea. They tapered at their bottoms with frilly tendrils that were happy to sway with the movements of the water, and they moved the light with them, making it throb. At their necks they had dresses and looked like mushrooms, covering their complicated centres with coyly rippling glimpses. They made no sound the man heard.

He was among them now. The tendrils reached out like puppet arms on strings and where they touched he was warm. They were about him then, all the mushrooms and the ribbons and they were draped over him like a half-opened present. All his body was warm and then hot and the dresses squeaked as they rubbed against his face. Then everything was sharp and the air in his lungs was pushed out in bubbles that lifted the dresses and all the detail inside pressed onto his face.

When he was still, they let the man go and he drifted down out of their light, down to the seabed, very far away.

"I’ve found his shirt!" cried Clara.

"Where are you? Clara? Come back here!" Voices from the trees.

"On the South Shore!"

"Come back from there! Right now! Clara!"

Clara hoiked her skirt and ran back to the paths. "It’s hanging on the tree. He

must have taken it off."

"Don’t go running off," said Magdelene appearing around a bend, "come here."

Clara ran to her and hugged the woman’s leg. "You stay with me. These aren’t games."

"OK!"

The others rounded the corner, keeping pace with an old woman with clinking necklaces.

"Where’d you say i’was?" the old woman grumbled. Clara peeked out through skirts.

"She said she found something on the trees by the south shore," Magdelene replied.

"The littl’un, eh?" said the old woman, giving a squinty eye at the girl, who buried herself deeper in Magdalene’s skirts.

"Heh." The old woman re-arranged herself around to look up at the goldening sky. "Best you stay ’ere," she said. "Robert, ‘elp me."

The man gave his beating stick to his companion as the old woman took his arm and they left the path.

"So that’s where he went, right?" asked Clara, watching the old woman waddling determinedly off. "We can go find him?"

"Let’s wait here, wait until Maura comes back, yes?"

"OK."

The old woman stepped out onto the beach, sniffing the air, looking at the sun, scuffing at the sand still damp from the tide. The water had wiped the shore clean. She sighed.

"Pick up ‘is clothes. Let’s get back."

They walked at the old woman’s pace back to the village as the sun set and found that the other parties had already returned. They had found nothing. They nodded as they heard where the clothes had been found. Maura spoke with her peers and said a search would be carried out. The fires were ordered out then and the meeting was over.

The next day Clara followed Maura as the old women went weeding near the vegetable fields. The girl stood at the edge of the fields, by a tree.

Maura waddled along a row, inspecting plants.

"Is you Clara girl," she called out.

The girl, shifted behind the tree.

"Best speak or i’ll think yerra carrot."

"They won’t let me near the South Shore, Maura."

"As’right," said Maura. She grunted as she pulled at some roots, looked at the bottoms of leaves.

"But why?"

"No place for a girl."

"But I want to help with the search, Maura."

"No search today."

"But Maura!"

"But Maura nuthin’," the old woman snorted. "No searching til the moon’s waned. That’s another day’n night."

"But why?"

"Don’t know much for sumn’ ask so many questions, eh girl."

Clara said nothing, but waited for the old woman to explain. The old woman straightened.

"Not safe to go near the south shore when the moon is full. Everyone know that."

"But why?"

"Bad things bound to happen."

"But what?"

Maura sniffed. "Don’t know," she replied. "We lost the story. All my elders gave me was the warning an’ I’m giving i’you. Guess’ll find out what it’s for in time. C’mon, c’mere. Help me catch some ‘pillars."

They took boats out on the third day, dragging the bed with rakes and taking nets out into the waters. They turned the water muddy and caught nothing.

Back at the village it was decided the man had swum out and drowned. A man would have to be mad to swim out on the south shore in a full moon so death was given as madness. His body could have been a hundred miles away by that time. They burnt his clothes and Mortim, a man older than Maura, said some words:

"Simon Bartram, taken by madness and taken by the sea. Let us hope it has taken him where he has needed to go. He is not welcome here anymore."

"So i’goes," mumbled Maura.

Clara learnt to ride a pony. Clara helped Magdelene knit; Magdelene saying she liked how the stitches were smaller just there. Cauliflowers were planted. Paul Bastel was punished for thievery. Maura caught a cold. A month passed in this way.

Then the fish started to change. Morten Dowagers started shoaling off the east banks. Their numbers were so great in the shallows that children could bring back armfuls of purple-finned fish, cutting their fingers on the belly ridges. Marasin the elder went to inspect the fish; clambering over the rocks with the help of two men; telling the children to take only one at a time; none below two feet nor longer than five; and none with yellow eye markings as these were female and most likely pregnant.

Frokenwallows washed up all around the island, which were quickly burnt as even dead ones can be poisonous; as a result the Hollows were opened up for swimming and Prittenmags returned.

The air was full of Jack-Darrows and Flotsam-Hawks, attracted by the boon in the sea. Dusk was the noisiest part of the day and trees exploded if you shook the right ones.

Two lovers on the western reaches swore they saw nibbing-whales hoom and spray fifty yards from shore one night; a dozen or more humps rose and bloomed; the noise brought apples down. Mortim dismissed the claim which ended with the whales leaving north, against the currents.

Clara had a tree house built, mostly by Gordon and the Dunstun brothers, but entirely planned by her. Maura, once she heard of it, demanded access.

"While I still can," she huffed as she climbed the ladder. "Clear off!"

she yelled down to Robert. "Don’t be looking!"

"I don’t let anyone up here," Clara demanded.

"Hmph," Maura replied.

The tree house had a view looking north east, to the right of the corn acres, over the plains with the Mount in the distance and the glint of the sea just visible beyond the Grays Forest.

Maura sat in the chair.

"So who was he?" asked Clara.

"Who was who?"

"The man that downded off the South Shore." The girl pointed as she said this.

Maura shifted position and swigged at her flask. "What’s got’do with anything?"

"Coz things have been happening. You know; changing."

"Be-Cause. Clara. You’n say it right." The old woman was scowling at the girl as she said this. The girl hugged a branch.

"No-one else asking that," said Maura.

"I don’t know," said Clara. "I don’t know."

"He was Simon Bartram. Worked on the plains there. Sheep."

"Was he nice?"

"He did his part."

"Was he happy?"

The bell was rung in the village.

"Happy? He played a’ the dances. I believe he wooed Florence year ago now. Didn’t wan’ be a fisherman. That answer anything?"

"Don’t know," said Clara.

"Guess I shun’t be asking you questions yet, eh?"

Figures were running out of the forest now, towards the village and the ringing bell. Figures went to meet them. They were all too far away to tell who they were. Robert came to the bottom of the tree.

"Maura! A thing’s been washed up. We’re dragging it up now."

"Oh yeh? Washed up where?"

"South Shore, Maura."

"Yeh." She was sharing a look with Clara when she said this.

"Do you need help getting down, Maura?" asked Robert, who had appeared again at the bottom.

"No I don’t! I’ve jus’ sat down and I’m stayin’ a while." She threw the flask over her shoulder. "Get me some more tea, what you can do."

The men took a cart down the paths and brought back the remains of a small boat. They brought it to the square and lit fires around it, ready for inspection. Mortim and Narduke took sticks and poked at it. They found the bones of two men and a small iron-bound chest. Both the chest and the skulls were intact.

They opened the chest and the gathered folk gasped when the water drained away, inside were various coins, two silver cups, a pearl necklace and a golden centre-place, fashioned into the shape of two leaping fish with open shells as candle-holders.

"Is it true?"

"Are they real?"

"Did anyone actually see them before they were lost?"

Narduke, who was very old, said, "I did. They are real."

It was the teeth of the skulls that told their story. There were many missing, and some were fixed with a dull, grainy metal that crumbled upon inspection, that which still remained in the cavities. It was a technique not used on the island, as their diet did not tend to sugary foods. The thieves had come from abroad.

"So," said Mortim. "The story is at last complete. Foreigners came as thieves for the treasure but were lost before they reached their home. The sea did not think it fair they succeed."

"No kids’ll be digging holes i’ ground anymore," said Maura, holding onto Clara’s shoulder.

"They’ll have to do something useful now, eh?" said Mortim.

"Fill ‘em in mebbe," Maura answered.

Two weeks passed. The Morten Dowagers left the East Bank. The crew of a fishing boat, out south-west of the island, were tipped out of their boat as something dragged on their net. When they recovered the netting they found it had been torn along the middle; roughly, and almost in two. They had put their faces under the water, saw nothing. Two of them complained of itching around the eyes the next day.

The sea changed colour all along the eastern reaches, from the hollows to the needles; from a low green to a dull grey, even in the sun.

"I’ve lost my dog! I can’t find her!" Fina yelped all through the village. "Help!"

"It’s just chasing rabbits."

"I was in the forest. I kept the paths. I did!"

The dog did not come back.

"What do you think happened with Fina’s dog?" asked Clara, sipping at the tea with a squint. She was determined though.

"Island’s plenty big to lose a dog," Maura replied. "Lost a horse once. Found i’only when i’ started a’smell."

"I’m going to be Snowfall in the dance," said Clara.

"If I’ve got to watch it," said Maura, "least make it a surprise."

Another week passed. There were so many birds, Magdelene was teaching Clara to make omelettes. Shoaling-crows appeared, bobbing on the sea-surface like blankets. One evening the sea erupted into spuming foam as the birds fought over something. By the morning they had re-formed, slightly down-shore.

Those young or old enough to take to walking alone along the further shores spoke of seeing a shadow stalking them in the water, such that it made them run, or scream, or to throw what was to hand in fits of bravery.

Such things could not happen to such an island without stories brewing like leaves in the autumn. Like leaves they made their own cluttering noise as they jostled with each other and the ground.

There were stories of disaster and glory, either returned or rising; stories of gods, spirits, father trees and mother earths, Natterjacks, Branty-Hamfers and all manner of winds and currents, natural and unnatural. Someone had lost their pearl in the forest, the world was tipping, the sea was draining, the islands were being eaten one by one. All the old stories were swirled around to see if these new things were their conclusion. No-one mentioned Simon Bartram.

"I met him," said Clara.

"You wot?"

"I was down on the South Shore."

"You ain’t supposed…oh never mind. You met ‘im? Who?"

"I went down to the south shore and just a bit out from the shore there was a man sitting on the seabed. He was sitting cross legged so the water was just above his head. His hair was all wavy."

"What was ‘e doin’?"

"He was sitting."

"Sittin’?"

"Yes, Maura. Like he was looking. Then he saw me. All his hair moved. I waved at him."

"Waved at ‘im? At the man sitting in the water? What’d ‘e do?"

"He waved back or, at least, I think he did. With the water and everything, you know."

"Couldn’t tell?"

"No. And he held his arm funny."

"Wot, like crooked?"

"No, like loose. The water moved it. You could tell coz…"

"Be-Cause."

"Maura. Bee-Corze the rest of him was so still. I said ‘hello’ but he didn’t do anything. So I went up to the water…"

"Clara!"

"Well I’m here aren’t I?"

"Well tha’s fair ‘nuff ‘spose."

"And I shouted at him ‘are you Simon Bartram!’. I could see him move his mouth but I didn’t hear anything. So I threw a pebble at him."

"Bit violent wunt it?"

"All the speed went out of it when it hit the water. He caught it and he wouldn’t throw it back."

"Yeh?"

"So I took a deep breath and I put my face in the water and I yelled ‘Oi! Man in the sea! Give me back my pebble!’."

"Jus’ for a pebble?"

"It was a nice shape."

"Why’d you throw i’then?"

"The man reached out with his good arm and touched my face."

"You wot? Come ‘ere!"

Maura grabbed the girl and held her head between her hands, turning it back and forth. The old woman squinted at the girl. The girl was wide eyed and limp.

"Where?"

"Just on my cheek," Clara said with a very small voice.

"Hmm, looks all righ’ now, " said Maura, rubbing at some puffiness on the girl’s cheek.

"It was cold. I got scared and I jumped out and he jumped back too. When I looked again he was walking away, under the water."

"That’s it? You ain’t holdin’ back?"

"He left the pebble." The girl held it up. "I got it and ran back."

"Tha’s it?"

"Yes, Maura. Promise."

The old woman looked hard at the girl. The girl did not move. "Well don’t go back there again."

"I went there this morning."

"Clara!"

"But he wasn’t there! He wasn’t there!"

"Don’ go there again, Clara, or I’ll fin’ I’m too old to come climbing this ladder, you ‘ear?"

"Maura…"

"Ah!"

Traders came in the third week of the month and the first thing they said as they came from the boat was: "what’s with the stink?".

Because it had happened slowly no-one had noticed; the island had changed its smell.

The traders got drunk that night, dancing with and being politely refused by some of the younger ladies of the island. With the bottle empty and the ladies escorted back, one of the men went swimming. He did not come back to the boat. His colleague called the alarm the next morning and the missing trader was soon found. His body was washed up amongst weeds. When they lifted him he gurgled and wobbled so much they dropped him. His skin tore and dirty, pink water poured from the tear. They let him drain out and, when they tapped his rib-cage, he sounded like a drum.

They opened him up and found a great hollow at the centre of him. They found his lungs shrivelled up and tiny up near his neck; they crumbled like pine-cones.

The elders spoke quietly with the dead man’s companion, then buried the corpse quickly and officially. The companion left with good money for his wares, a boat full of Morten-Dowagers and the best certificate the island had declaring a death by drunk and by drowning.

The grey-colour was spreading along the shores in both directions and the harbour was clogging with wraseweeds.

The next morning a fishing boat sprang a leak while out beyond the Mount-shadow. One of the fisher-men dived in to check the damage underneath the boat while the others waited for the regular calling-knocks on the hull. Three knocks came, then a scratch, then nothing. They waited for half an hour, for all the other fishermen were too scared to dive in. They sailed back to shore and the diver washed up just before dusk. The discoverers turned the body over and water flowed from his mouth along with his lungs, as small and as hard as stones.

All boats were called back to harbour when the diver had been discovered. Everyone was accounted for and all were forbidden to enter the water. The fishermen drank more and slept late. The doctor was kept busy tending to the outcomes of fights.

By a small inlet near to the Mount and surrounded by the densest forest, there was found a small pile of corpses; dogs, cats, a seal and some birds, all water-logged with their lungs small and crumbling. Also discovered was the little finger of a man, pale and peeling. It crumbled as they touched it and only just managed to get it back to the village. Mortim found that, if put in saltwater, what was left of the finger took back some of the lustre of life, though it was too utterly destroyed to ever be called healthy again.

The smell fell over the whole island. The animals were skittish, prone to panic and to run; a few had been lost to ditches and the cliffs. Once it had been mentioned, no-one could ignore it. The smell was of the sea after an electrical storm; sharp and with an undertone of the rotting.

Fires burnt in many houses all day long, to keep the smell out, so smoke drifted around across the island in clouds.

The birds left the trees with the smoke, and fish left the waters as the grey-coloured water spread along the shores. Traders kept away from the island and stocks grew low.

Clara fell while climbing down from her tree house; as she was helped up she vomited over herself and Robert. She demanded that she walk unaided to the doctor’s house, but she walked with her eyelids so low that her dragging feet tripped over stones and she took wrong paths. Maura took her hand roughly and led her back to the village where three other children were laid out on pallets, mothers helping them sip water.

"Poison?" asked Maura.

"Or perhaps just different," the doctor replied, looking into Clara’s eyes with a candle held close. "The children’s young stomachs can not deal with whatever change has come to their food."

The children were given a diet of fruit and water, which took up the last of the fruit stocks. Many of the adults refused the fish caught off the South Shore and the flocks had to be corralled and guarded.

A priest from a Western Isle came to the island and stood on the quay-side holding up a staff in one hand, a heavy book in the other and looked out through the feathers and stones that adorned his hat.

"I have been called," he declared, "from far away to the aid of a cursed brother-island. I shall wash the curse from these waters and in return you shall allow us to build a small church here in the square of your largest village. Come!"

The priest with his party, followed by many of the fishermen and ladies in the harbour, processed through the village to the paths that led to the south shore. Mortim and Maura watched them go, passing a pipe between them and then grabbing a couple of the men to help them aerate the compost heaps.

Some thirty people gathered on the south shore as the priest walked into the water so his robes floated up about him on the surface, leaving his legs bare underneath.

"Hear me!" he cried and shook his staff. Then he slammed it down on the sea bed. Then he slipped straight down beneath the surface. The thirty or so gathered waited or him to rise again but he did not. Some say they saw a shape in the water, just before the priest slipped, others said it was just the shadow of a cloud. Twenty yards out they saw his robes bobbing on the waves. The party he came with ran back to their ship and left.

Mortim and the others watched them as they fled.

"They’ve gone and lost their raggedy man," said Mortim.

"Oh dear," said Maura, "best get going."

Great anger rose up in the crowd. They ran back to the fields and took up hay forks, clubs, spears and machetes, then gathered once more at the south shore with a lamb the herders had been powerless to keep. Fires were lit. Shouts rang out. By the time the elders had managed to reach the south shore the crowd had built enough courage to enter the water.

"Stay out!" Mortim cried.

"Outta the bloody water!" yelled Maura.

The men were yards out; up to their waists and neither hearing nor listening. The sea was a white froth around them as they thrashed at the water.

The men were not fools; they stood in a tight circle and threw bits of the lamb before them, then slashed the water to pieces as they slowly spread out. The bodies of scatter-knacks and peppipilots bobbed to the surface and the sea grew cloudy with dirt and blood.

One man stumbled when his machete hit something heavy.

"Quick!"

The other men rushed to him as he struggled to lift his embedded weapon. The water around him had turned deep red. They levelled their blades and forks at the water and he pulled his catch to the surface. The naked body of the priest emerged from the gunk, hinged at the rib-cage where the machete had struck and his shrivelled lungs bobbed where the water found its level in the hollow of his chest.

"Get out!" Mortim was calling.

"Its got me!" cried one of the men, looking with horror at his fellows before slipping under the surface. The rest of the men struck down into the sea, turning the water once more to chaos. More men went down. Screams rang out. Bits of men floated away from the scrum.

Callum Hearney was lost, Michael Duncan was without the fingers of his left hand, Thomas Duke had a fork through his right calf, most of the others complained of cold bands running around their legs and bellies. They did not recover the body of the priest.

They left the South Shore then, turning their backs and hurrying away from the bruised grey of the water, to hide in their houses at the centre of the island, closing their doors against the stink that raised itself from the deeps to smother the whole of the land.

A meeting was called. The elders sat around the fire and spoke in loud, slow voices so that everyone could hear. Maura sat at the edge, fingering at her necklaces and staring out at the start of the trees, her lips all tight.

They told stories and Narduke spoke first:

"A moon fish ate a maiden one night as she sang by the shore and, as she lay in its belly, it made her tell stories of where she came from. The maiden, so sad at what she had lost, spoke of her home island as such a paradise that the moon-fish desired more than anything to go there. When it had swallowed her completely the moon-fish went up onto that island and grew legs and arms and long brown hair until it looked just as the maiden had and the moon-fish walked with the people of the island. They were pleased to see the maiden back and told her but the moon-fish could only gargle. The moon fish ran to the maiden’s house where her mother hugged it but its skin was still wet and slippery and she pushed it away. Men came with torches and surrounded the moon-fish that tried to sing like the maiden had but its gills got caught in its long brown hair. They burnt the moon-fish up completely and when they swept the ashes away there was the maiden, back with them at last; ready for burial."

"What should this teach us?"

"That there is a natural order and breaking it will only lead to bad ends," said Narduke.

"That we should always be true to our true being, for denying it will never bring happiness," said Mortim.

"That you ent what you et," said Maura.

"What else?"

"A man was drowned and stayed at the bottom of the sea for years. When he came back he found they had filled his clothes with straw and stones and buried them, saying that it was really him in the coffin. His place on the island was in a coffin and that was filled with straw and rocks so he could not go back to the island at all. He grew so mad that he turned the island all upside down so it could come to him."

"What should this tell us?"

"That the living should not lie about the dead, so that the dead should not trouble the living," Said Marasin.

"That change must come, that all things come again, that nothing is unique," said Mortim.

"Only bury thems ‘at’s dead," said Maura.

"A man caught a fish. Only after it was dead did he realise it was pregnant with eggs. He sliced open its belly and let the eggs tumble into the water. Then he returned home and cooked the fish for his dinner. After that every time he caught a fish it would look at him and say: ‘you killed my mother!’ and he would have to throw it back. The man died of hunger."

"Know what you kill, and respect what gives of itself to give you life," said Narkduke.

"Finish what you start." Said Mortim.

But Maura said nothing.

"And you, Maura?"

"I don’ know," said Maura.

"Then what have the stories told us?" They asked.

Mortim stood up. "Well, something’s hungry. Either we feed it, or kill it"

"Throw dogs into the sea three times a day?" they asked.

Maura sniffed, "I don’ think i’s got a taste for dogs."

"How’d we kill it then?"

"Kill it? I don’ even know what it is."

"So what do you plan to do, Maura?"

Maura put an expression on her face that rumpled up all her lines into folds.

"What I plan to do," she said, hufting up her breasts as she stood, "is go an have a talk wi’it."

He had opened his eyes floating a yard above the bed of the ocean, some endless time after he had met with the creatures, one foot dragging up dust in slow clouds as it touched the bottom. He had done nothing for a very long while, assuming that he was dead. Then a change came to the sea and in feeling it he knew he was not.

It brought heat from somewhere far away, smelling of rock. Cold from close by that smelt of sulphur. It brought huge slow pulses and curtains of skittering movement. It crushed him and swallowed him and filled his ears with a low dull roar and he could not understand a thing.

Then the tide turned and brought him news from the island: the hollow knocks of wood in water, the rippling shushes of scratching sand, the sigh of wind over the shallow water, the back-washes of paddle-wheels and the rhythms of kicking feet.

He had raced towards the shore, hoping to get back before last fire. He pushed on until the bed finally began to slope steeply upwards and the surface became close enough to see clouds through. He coiled his legs and leapt up hard, kicking, his left arm breaking out onto the surface. Burning pain ripped through his body then as his arm dried out and its skin flaked off. He curled up around his arm and drifted down, leaving a small cloud of his skin chimneying up, until he reached the bed once more where he stayed quite still for a long time.

They lit torches from the fires and walked slowly down the paths towards the South Shore.

Clara hurried up to Maura and took her hand. Maura held it tight.

"Did they help?"

"What ‘elp?"

"The stories. Did they help us know what to do?"

"Mebbe."

"I don’t know what you mean."

"Oh child, you have to know wha’ stories are for."

"They’re for telling what happened."

"No, not usually."

"No; sorry, Maura."

"Well they are true, but they’re also not true."

"True and not true, Maura?"

"Sounds like a riddle dunnit. Yu’ll find most of what grown-ups talk don’t seem to make much sense. My advice is: best get used to it. One day yer’ll find yerself talking in riddles, and then what will you mean?"

"I don’t know, Maura."

"I’m sorry, Clara. Look, we’re nearly there now, help me down the beach."

The water near the shore was violent and painful to him. It was fickle like the air above it, lurching between hot and cold, rushing and turbulent, and the sun cut through the shallows and burnt him so everywhere he left a cloud of himself in his wake.

For weeks he sat in the shallows around the island, watching, cradling his destroyed arm.

Late at night, after watching the figures dance around the fires, and when he could take no more of the longing, he would head far out in the deeps, where the water was slow and cool and the songs of fish and whales filled him with rest now he had learnt them.

He thought that perhaps if he travelled far enough he would not hear the sound of the island.

He thought that perhaps somewhere deep out in the ocean there was a place where the air became so much like the sea that he could pass between them and make his way slowly back.

He thought that perhaps there was a point at the centre of the ocean where he could, if he stood upon it, have the waters of the entire world move around him.

But the deep water only became dark and slow and huge and it swallowed him up until he was nothing, and so he turned back to the light and the heat and the pain of the island where he could turn the shoals to his will and the people on the island would see his works and know him.

He kept the close waters free of the predators, the stingers and all the shrill, ungrateful sounds of killers.

He brought the island fish and other things he found.

"Maybe it really is Simon Bartram," said Clara, hugging at her skirts.

"No, girl" said Maura. "That man’s dead."

And when the people on the island saw him they ran or threw things and shouted, and their voices were just mumbled garbles through the water and meant nothing to him.

"Maybe I can help you , Maura," said Clara.

Maura said sharply "no girl. You ‘ave to stay back on the beach, and leave this ‘a me."

He took nets deep into the ocean until he found those creatures and gathered them all, letting them go as he drifted around the circle current, until the island was surrounded and nothing entered or left, and the bodies rotted and swayed.

"I think he just needs a friend," Said Clara.

Maura snapped "yer think I care what a stupi’ little girl ‘as to say on it?"

And Clara ran back to Magdalene, hiding her eyes.

He watched the people of the island run and burn their land until the air was as thick and dark as the water.

Maura carried on to the shore alone.

"And what d’yer think yu’ll learn listnin’ to a stupi’ ol’ woman?" she said to herself.

He had sat amongst the fishing beds and flinched as the hulls cut triangles into the light shafts from the surface, and raged as the fizzing nets dug into the gentle orbits of the shoals. He felt the needle-sharp scatter-pulses of birds diving in from the surface, making boiling stalactites as they grabbed at the fish and then thrashed their way back to the surface, leaving hissing foam in their wake.

As a bird crashed down he caught it and held it close to his chest where he felt its struggle, all fast and jittering. Then the struggle stopped, the wings opened out and began fanning with the movement of the water. He dropped it. It hung in the water.

The lightness of the beating of its wings stayed on his skin though, as something glorious and warm.

When the next bird dived down he caught it and held it closer. He put the bird’s head in his mouth and sucked. He coughed up feathers and bird spit. The dead bird dropped down into the water past the bucking figure.

He was revolted, he felt dizzy, and his veins were full of tiny bird-bones but he remembered the air, and the lightness of running. He was fast again, if only for a moment, for the frantic dim energy of the bird faded so quickly.

Then he felt the spastic kicks of children swimming in The Hollows. All his senses opened up and the water brought him a different kind of music.

They put torches on long poles and drove them into the sand of the shallows so as to light up the water. The men were then shooed back to shore while Maura peered into the gloom from the centre of the torches, with the water ballooning her skirts.

The angry, clumsy drunkards, wasting their breath. The unguarded thrashing of beasts and the young. The stupid priest shaking beneath his robe. All of them moved for him like the water around him.

And then he heard something new. A steady thumping rhythm that was calm and clear in the waters of the South Shore.

Maura was banging on the bed with her stick.

"Well, where are ya?"

Clara watched the old woman from the shore, her old body thigh deep in the water, hunched over so far her necklaces bobbed, in a circle of light, in a massive darkness.

With splashes all over her face the old woman thumped the stick on the bed steadily. "Come on then. Let’s get it done."

A figure appeared in the circle of torchlight then. It was flat on the bed and scurried sideways like a crab on long, disjointed limbs. Its oval head craned on its neck, twitching as it let water through its nose and mouth. Its huge unblinking eyes strained against the close light of the fire. Its entire body was pale white and its bones were visible through its skin.

"What is it?" they called from the beach. "Is anything there? Do you need help? What can we do?"

"What yer can do is shu’ up," Maura called back, not taking her eyes of the figure. "Mebbe pass me a bigger stick."

Nobody came out, though. Maura sighed, and thumped her stick the creature’s head.

"Shoo!" she said.

She thumped it again.

"Shoo yer bugger!"

The creature flicked its good arm up and took a hold of the stick. Its grasp was soft, but Maura could not wrench the stick back. So Maura let it go, and the creature took it into the water and laid it down beside him.

He looked back up at the old woman with his huge dark eyes, head slightly to one side.

"So who are yer then? Eh?" said Maura.

She dug around in her bunches and pulled out necklaces and drawings and belts, saved from Simon Bartram’s home, and from burning. She dropped them in to the water.

The creature watched them float slowly down, following as they wafted in the currents. When they came to a rest on the bed he looked back up at Maura with his head to his side, as before.

"Righ’," said Maura. "Like that is it."

She pulled a short knife from her dresses and showed it to the creature. Then she cut her hand. She let the blood drip into the water, where it fanned out above the figure in the water.

The creature sniffed the blood, letting it into his nose. Then he convulsed and sneezed it out, scurrying back from the light and turning the water all to smoke.

Maura tutted, and scrunched her mouth up on one side.

The creature shuffled hesitantly back into the circle of light. It scratched at the sand with the claw of its good hand, and showed Maura its teeth.

"Oh what d’yer want from me poor one?" said Maura, and sat down in the water, cross legged so she was in up to her chin. She held her good hand out to it.

"D’yer even know?"

The creature scuttled forwards, sniffing at the old woman, sitting still in the water.

"Yer doin us no good, yer know that righ’?"

The two looked at each other for a while, in the circle of light, in the darkness, with the crowd of people standing on the shore.

It was quiet but for the lapping of waves on the shore and the buzzing of insects, and all their breathing.

Clara was out before them, with Magdalene holding her.

"Stay back here, Clara," said the woman.

"No."

"Clara."

"No!"

Maura shuffled round in the water so she could see back to the shore, her hand still out to the creature. She saw the girl out ahead of the crowd, and she smiled.

"You stay back, gel," she called from the water. "You hearin’ me?"

"Maura!"

"Yu’ll do as yer tol’!"

"Stop it! Stop it!"

"I will not, gel."

"Please stop it and come back!"

"This is none o’yer business gel."

The little girl’s eyes were full of water that would not turn into tears.

"Then I won’t see it!" she said and ran from the beach, and ran from the South Shore, all the way back to the village.

The old woman watched the girl leave, turned back out to the ocean, so no-one could see her smile, and quietly said ‘good gel’.

Then she looked down at the creature, into its huge eyes, and touched its head. She said "She’s a good gel, that one. She’ll be alrigh’. Now then. You stay there a moment. I’m not done with you. I’ll not be long."

Maura stood up then, turning back to the island, standing tall despite the water rushing slowly from all her skirts. She said "This is Maura speaking here! This is Maura of the Mount and of the Southern Shore and I say that we will have not any more trouble from this one and he won’t come back. I have said this and you have heard it."

She ruffled up her bunches then and all her necklaces rattled.

"Good. Tha’s it. Tha’s all."

And with that she swept her shawl around the torches so they all went out in a circle, and in the darkness there was a splashing sound and a whumping sound, and then the high sharp tinkles of popping foam.

Then the people were alone on the beach. Maura was gone and so was the creature and eventually the water calmed down into its quiet, regular lapping.

The creature never came back either, true to Maura’s word, and the ocean around the island returned to normal within the week. The island took longer, but the rhythms returned with the change of the season.

Clara had wept into Magdalene all that night, then was quiet the whole next day, as the rising sun taught her how the world carries on.

That night they lit a fire for Maura and told stories.

Clara had snuck into Mortim’s tent while they did this, and took the finger from the jar before sneaking back into the circle.

Mortim asked her to tell a story, and Clara told the story of the ants in the treehouse and how Maura had solved the invasion by leaving honey by the door.

Later she threw the finger into the fire, and the next day recovered the bones to hang from a necklace that she still wears to this day.

They rattled as she waddled down to the South Shore, thwacking at weeds with her stick, huffing at the distance.

Little Gretchen had told her the boys were out there swimming while standing half in the doorway, very young and still too scared of her to speak above a whisper.

So she had left her tea, excused herself from the women and called for her stick and her shawl. It took her a long time to reach the South Shore these days, as did everywhere, and she made sure everyone knew about it.

"Oi you!" she yelled. "Bobby and Fearney and Simon Halloway: I see you!"

The boys were out yards into the sea, splashing at each other.

"And we could hear you from before the trees, Clara!" yelled Fearney back.

"That’s so’s you can’t say I don’t give you fair warning, eh? Get out of the sea, the lot of you, and get out now."

"But why?"

"Bee-corze I said so!"

They climbed out onto the shore, their legs suddenly heavy.

"But why, Clara? Come on."

Clara sighed.

"Bee-corze a man once walked into the sea without knowing where he was going," she said. "And he almost took the whole island with him."

"What happened?"

"The sea exploded, and there was a cloud over the entire land."

"Were there deaths?"

"Nasty deaths, and lots of ‘em. Corpses piled high there were!"

"Clara! Tell us! Come on!"

"Help me up, and take me back, boys."

They hauled her up, and she gave out an angry moan, half at her joints and half as a warning. She took one boy on each arm and had Simon Halloway beat the path ahead of them.

"Clara, the story."

She laughed, and rattled as she did so, and she told them the story of the man who walked into the sea.

ELTV Clips

Hello!

I'll be putting up some more clips from ELTV, the latest night from Goodmeeting Productions held on 11th June at The Nave, in the coming days, but here's a round up of some i've already put up:

Firstly, the second two trailers for the night:

Here is Joshua Miles, aka Epileptic MC, calling us out from his own TV station:

And here's Jo Faith, reporting in from the ELTV News Room:

Here's the segment from the final show where the Epileptic MC appears. To put the clip into context, Tim & Andrew's heroic efforts to launch a tv station dedicated to promoting the community of East London have been hampered by some very mean-spirited and small-minded tweeters and texters, and by the repeated attempts by Epileptic MC to hijack ELTV's bandwidth...

Here's the segment taken from the start of the second half. While the tech crew are still trying to get ELTV back on air after some technical difficulties, Andrew treis to entertain the audience with a song about East London.

And here's a short film we aired straight afterwards while we were still working out how to bring the best of East London's Arts scene to air, you know, like when the BBC used to show cartoons when the cricket was rained off. You know.

Thank you for watching, and stay tuned.