PDP

When I was a little dot I wanted to be a clown, blue faced for bad luck with wire in my plaits. I slack-roped between the turbines up on the moors and pulled extravagant strings of sausages from unexpected spots. Over time the clown turned inwards and I still live somewhere between Pierrot and Auguste, but I'll never forget the feel of greasepaint in my eyebrows or the happy calm of knowing what I wanted to be.

They say the secret to a happy career is getting paid to do what you love. I love staring and hiding food, drawing troupes of small dogs in the margins of my diary and pretending I live on an island somewhere with the Very Reverend William Buckland and four and a half of the Mitford girls. The world of work has always been hard for me. And yet I must earn enough money to keep me in the needfuls, at least to keep stocked up on Cheestrings and weed.

My skills are many and varied and I'm a personable sort, at least to your face. I can make any animal you like out of cloth, although they always turn out looking somehow like me. I can cross my ring finger over my middle one without moving the others. I have a wide repertoire of untoward recipes. I can write the odd sentence. I have my own dog suit. I am eminently employable.

I think I'd be ideally suited to a career as a familiar, or an Executive Imaginary Friend. I'd make an excellent protagonist - or antagonist - and would be a perfect fit for the position of muse. I could find success as a skeleton in a closet or a madwoman in an attic or some kind of half-forgotten god slumbering away at the bottom of the sea. I could be your nemesis and my rates are more than fair.

Which is all fine and dandy, but it doesn't go down well at the Job Centre.

Everything Is Going To Be Alright

I'm sure I saw a sloth last night, under the laurel in my garden, dragging its belly through the scrag-ends of the snow. I predict sloths will be big in 2011. As will tubular bandages, Beetle Drives and Pierrot chic.

It will be a year of austerity, we know that for sure. I have taken measures - the dormice plumping in the jars beneath my bed, the snail farm in the shower. Butterface is saving on stamps by hand-delivering her letters straight into my lunchbox. Even the monkey's giving up online bingo.

It will be a year of clarity and pamphlets, the year I finally win a competition in Take a Break. It's the year of the Royal Wedding and I am planning my party already. You should never miss an opportunity for high camp. It will be a gala year, you can take my word for it - a juicy, wriggling piglet of a year.

I have left out a trail of chicken nuggets for the sloth. It leads right to my front door.

In Which Horses Are Indeed Mentioned

I've decided inside now that I live on an island, a cold rock hunkered down somewhere in the north. I make my liquor out of samphire and my boots out of the seals, hunt soft, sweet crabs in the rock pools and rabbits in the scrub. I eat my fish in waist-deep waves, slicing them to sashimi with my knife of flint and licking out the roe.

My boat is small but he is brave and sometimes I sleep beneath him just to listen to the rain. There are goats on the island but I don't trust them and the foul-tasting puffins nest fat and useless on the cliffs. Down by the dark pool the horses stand, piebald with lichen and unsettlingly still. The dark pool has a skin on it so thick you could walk across it, if you dared.

At night I sit in my implausible caravan as the wind butts and mutters outside. I carve little scrimshaw kittens and read my murderbooks at the table, picking the faux-walnut vinyl off its top. Whales pass by from time to time and once a year the squid come, their lights dancing in the water like drowning stars.

Here on the outside I have another cup of tea. I have spent the morning corralling cats and sewing outlandish trousers and the rest of the day stretches ahead of me in a tangle of wool and hair, paper and smoke, Strictly Come Dancing and softboiled eggs. Later, though, I'll sit shivering in a salted bath and with my fingers in my ears I'll be able to hear the gulls.

New Term

I am better in the winter, when it all goes moss and bone, when the fiddling drizzle comes and nobody tries to make me play with balls. I am better jumpered. The summer makes me feel hungover, lightly greased with shame. I am not a one for T-shirts and team sports, but nor am I strong enough to resist the nagging notion that I am wasting a lovely day, cooped up indoors like that. When my breath is visible I can breathe again, get fat and grow my winter coat.

Now it is September, though, the smell of stationery on the air. In September I am compelled to corral my papers, pick the knickers off the piano and pull my socks up good and high. In September, I resolve. And then when the first snow comes, I fill my belly full of pine needles and go to sleep behind the stove.

This winter I resolve to think more about horses. I don't think I can do anything more than that.

A Small Puddle

I think I need a new look. For too long I have languished in longjohns and bootees, an attenuated toddler with uncombable hair. I wear Snout's underwear and ramshackle trousers and I smell like an old man, of tobacco and wool. Every day I see the college students, poreless and fauny, loping off for another day of i-pods and meow-meow and nubile frottage and I think it's time to get some glamour back into my life, somewhere between the smoke and the snooze.

So I dictate this to my handmaiden from a bath of gin and olive brine, my shellacked lips fellating a pink cocktail cigarette, my talons lacquered carapace green. A clingfilm-clad dreamboat feeds me anchovies and tongue and when I rise queen-like from my salty mire he rubs me down with kittens. Herons dress me in a gown of baby locks and little skin slippers with curled up toes and my suitors' sighs dry my hair, my hair that falls starfish-studded right down to the ground.

Spangled piglets carry my train as I slink from dressing room to boudoir, where I am met by my hooded butler and a flagon of eggnog and ambergris. I sink into the cat-belly cushions of my solid sugar chaise longue and look lazily at the cabinets and the boys and girls inside. I point to the one I like the look of least and run a comb through my hair.

Consummatum Est

It is finished. My murderer crosses her hands over her chest and falls backwards into my arms. I dip her down beneath the surface of me, under my waters in an endless baptism. We are spent.

My desk is mulch, a year’s worth of toast crusts and furry cups, ashtrays and dandruff, impotent ink pens and notes-to-self, empty baggies and Lucozade bottles, unfilled-in forms and fermented fruit and teetering pagodas of splay-spined books.

I should arm myself with bin-bags and Mr Muscle and clean it all away. I should use the special nozzle on the vacuum cleaner and get into all the nooks and crannies, suck away the ash and the dust, the shed skin and the spilled words. I should scrub and swab and straighten and polish and make it all spick-and-span.

Instead I am going to take to my bed with wine and weed and bonbons and poetry and I’m not getting up until Monday.

A Pleasure Postponed is a Pleasure Increased

When I grow up I am going to be a Life Coach. People are going to pay me to make their lives better. I will rid them of all the qualities that stop them enjoying life; ambition, aspiration, a work ethic, reliance on others, fear of consequences, high standards of hygiene etc. I will teach them how to love their sofa and forage for scraps. I will make my clients come and live in my house and I will drag them down to my level, down here in the gutter, looking up the skirts of passers-by. I also think that I might start farming dormice for food, in hundreds of tiny jars.

The Eurovision party was postponed. Best Girl had double-booked. We taped it and are going to watch it next week. The gowns remain in their scented boxes, the greasepaint in its tubs, the bridles and bits in the kitchen cupboard. I know who won, but that’s beside the point. Instead of watching Eurovision I spent the evening doing drunken patchwork and watching Snout kick the arses of cocky online Street Fighters.

Someone has written ‘Zoe bum dad’ on our wheelie bin.

Half-Day Closing

I am a lazy monster. My motto is: If You Can’t Do It In Bed, It’s Not Worth Doing. This morning I put my jumper on inside out and I still haven’t remedied that. The others are in the living room, returned triumphant from the cinema, gnawing on chickens and watching Street Crime. I did not go, I was good, I stayed at home and ate murderer pie and posset for pudding. The killer’s the binge, this is the purge.

Now I have reached Critical Glaze, the point in a day when I am doing more staring than writing, and I think it may be time for me to go. I should be outside, gambolling in the sun, but I am an indoor girl, queen of the curtains and the sixty watt sun. My bed is my meadow and I have never been a lamb.

Dilemma

You start off looking at a Slow Loris and before you know it you have spent half an hour watching videos of ghosts and of demons that claim to have the body of a pig. Blinkin’ YouTube. Now I am dead scared, alone in the house for at least an hour and desperate for a wee. Do I go to the downstairs loo, past the door to the cellar, the cellar with the blocked-off room where the floor level is a foot higher than everywhere else? Or do I go upstairs, past the attic trapdoor that opens itself from time to time? Or do I just stay in my room and piss in the teapot again?

Recently I have been thinking about the inside of other people’s mouths. The mouth is by far the busiest orifice. I love the inside of mine, the pink crannies, the sweet and tender craters. My tongue is supple and acrobatic, it noses about like a curious animal. It reaches up to trace the ridges on the roof of its den, it dips into the bowl of each molar, it slips between teeth and lip to slide about counting, taking stock. Sometimes, if I don’t like who I am talking to, my tongue spells out rude words on the roof of my mouth. If it gets overexcited I have to bite it, and then it lies flat and docile, and I can concentrate. I wish I could see people’s tongues all the time.

End of the Month

Whiskey + Hobnobs + Poppers = Sunday

Gainful Employment

My bedroom smells of daffodils and I am wearing the furry blue dressing-gown that makes Spatchcock think I am her mother. Earlier this evening I somehow contrived to get stuck underneath the double mattress of our bed. I always thought that living in a house with four men would mean I was relatively well-protected, but I roared myself hoarse and they didn’t stir from Fifa ’08. They thought I was one of the children, playing their little screaming games.

I have been looking at the search queries that bring up this wad of words. My favourites are:

Ultimate bionic catfish
Dead hedgehog
The lonely sock sack
Amanda Holden armpit
The killer inside me

And most of all:

Pied Piper to the girl with the naughty knickers.

Self-improvement or Bust

Amusingly, the horoscope on my homepage has got stuck, and for the last five days has read “A wave of emotion hits you quite suddenly. Prepare to do some damage control”, which could be the horoscope for every single day of my life.

Outside it is overcast, but I am making a nest in my own innards to keep me safe if it rains. I had a wonderful weekend but now I am polluted, grimy on the inside. I want to feel like apples and linen, to wear a white dress and whiter knickers and sit unstained in the tender grass. This week I will be a good Sack Posset, the opposite of smoke.

Sometimes I would like to be tidier but I don’t think I can. I sit perfectly still for eleven minutes and around me appears a fairy-ring of filth. I am the Pied Piper, leading a merry procession of half-full coffee cups, piles of orange peel, screwed up Rizlas, paper-back books, broken biros, wads of tissue and lonely socks. From my person falls a constant rain of tobacco and hair, for where I am is mess, and where mess is, must I ever be.

On Disgust and Other Things

Squids are the Angels of Disgust, waving tentacles like phalluses covered in toothy, sucking holes. Disgust fascinates me. I am sure that if we could overcome it, we could be unstoppable. Disgust comes from the fear of invasion, the fear that the disgusting thing will get on your skin, inside you, in your mouth and up your nose, and yet the disgusting is often a mere half-inch from the sexual. If we all made ourselves do one disgusting thing before breakfast I am sure that we could take over the world.

I won about three pounds on the Grand National. War of Attrition did not run. I drank a vast amount of Mother’s Ruin with the Best Girl and noticed that the dead hedgehog has moved several feet down the road. Clearly a zombie. Best Girl and I made a Book of Glory for an absent friend, stuck full of tasty pictures and headlines from Take a Break and Chat, like “Thank God for My Bionic Girdle” and the world’s worst Daniel Craig lookalike. Then we wrote drunken nonsense in it and I drew a picture of a small dog. A good time was had by all. I watched us as we played out in the garden: LoH in his cowboy shirt, cardigan and shorts, his shaven hair growing back fluffy; Brother Mine all in cream like Jesus; Snout in his Thundercats T-shirt with his hair a homage to Slash; Best Girl’s boy, who I like to call Extended Play (because it has the same initials and because of his consumption of energy drinks) sporting skinny tee and yellow Wayfarers and Best Girl, her new jeans immaculately accessorised, standing next to me as we giggled ourselves silly. I love them. I was rocking my ancient dungarees. Here’s some advice – never get drunk wearing dungarees. It ends badly.

Now I am back in the spare room scrumping for words, trying to keep my mind out of the sea and inside the killer. Outside the Rag & Bone Man is cruising the street, looking for damaged and discarded things, just like me. Spatchcock is sitting on my shoulder, which I suppose she thinks is funny. Time is getting on, I must away.

Fall Forward

The best sight in the world is blue sky through the bottom of a pint glass. The clocks went forward last night and today we went adventuring. We drank beside the canal and watched the barges pass, smoking rollies and sharing packets of dry-roasted in the optimistic sun. Soon it will be time for night cricket, tea-dresses and the Eurovision. When Eurovision comes, the Best Girl and I will dress as drag queens and I will serve pink gin from porcelain teapots. First stop though is the Grand National. My money is on War of Attrition.

The police came round again last night. The children had been systematically destroying the abandoned van over the road. I had heard them at it, and if I were a more upstanding member of society I would have called the police myself, but seeing as how I break several laws just sitting still, I thought it unwise. Poor, stoned Snout opened the door and bamboozled the pretty, blonde, twelve-year-old constable with a detailed history of the vans he has seen on this road and on other roads in the past. The Lover of Horses, Brother Mine and I hid in the W.C. Snout said enough to make her go away but not enough to get the children in trouble. We are more afraid of the children than we are of the law. Later some men came in a lorry, took the van to pieces and carried it away. No sign of the cat with the human face, but no doubt it wasn’t far away.

Now I am here, garlic-fingered in other people’s clothes, lying on my belly with my bare feet in the air like a teenage girl writing in her secret diary. I am the kind of person who would read your diary if I found it. I am the kind of person who, left alone in your house, would heft your mattress and rummage through your knicker drawer until I found your diary. I love secrets, especially other people’s, and I sit upon my clutch of them henlike, overprotective and broody for more.

Things I Have Found on the Floor

In my Secret Book of Wonders I keep my pictures of groups of strangers. My favourites are the ones on which a single face has been circled. I keep my collections in there, my lists of curious British place-names like Catbrain, Netherthong and Pity Me, the best of all the facts I know, delicious words and revolting recipes. I draw troupes of small cavorting dogs in the margins and perfume the pages with cinnamon and sweat. My secrets I write in green ink. It is a textbook of all the things I want to know. It is my exo-brain and I keep it in the drawer of my bedside table, with my boxes of moths and embroidery silks.

I hoard things like I hoard words and I know that, were it not for Snout, I would end my days in a bedsit packed floor to ceiling with dense strata of stuff; yellow newspapers and label-less cans, crusted crockery and broken electricals, shoes and gloves and babies’ dummies that I had found on the street, the neighbours’ rubbish decanted from the bins in the dead of night, an enormous amount of cat food but no visible cat, road signs and traffic cones and eventually my own dead body, crushed while trying to worm my way through the filth. This is a thought I use to comfort myself. If everything goes wrong and I somehow lose my Snout, I can at least be assured of a happy dotage.

The collection of Things I Have Found on the Floor is already well underway. I am good at finding treasure. I have found forty pounds in notes of varying size, and ten pounds of Marks & Spencer’s vouchers. I found a bag of weed on the bus. Even better, I once found a silver goblet in a car park, and in the same place a few weeks later a pair of golden slippers. I have found false teeth and tiny plastic kangaroos and a china doll in a wedding dress that I took home and put on a shelf until I realised its bloomers were infested with beetles. One thing I won’t be bringing home is the very large, very open hedgehog that is very dead on the road outside my house. Its innards now spread far and wide, it has been there for days. I have been listening to the squeals of the passers-by as they all stop to have a good look. I wouldn’t be surprised if the responsible party turned out to be that cat with the human face.

Morning After

Once upon a time, LoH stole his housemate’s bed and took it on a tour of all the pubs in town. Snout and I once spent a whole week in bed, rattling with pills and frosted with powders, chewing on mushrooms and weeping at the beauty of the ceiling. He proposed to me while I was pleasuring him on a pool table. We were very naughty, when we were younger. Last night we watched some educational television (largely fish-based) and drank wine out of real wine glasses, as opposed to gravy-boats or teapots. Documentaries are the new Class As.

Mastication and Jubilation

Eggs are the food of gods and monsters. So raw that they are not yet become. Paint them up like beetles, push them still warm into your other mouth, eat them with a tiny silver spoon. I have two hardboiled eggs in my pockets, and a pinch of salt twisted up in newspaper. I will eat them later with great pomp and circumstance and I will save the shells to make boats for witches. Later still when it gets dark I will eat a fish, served curled in a blue bowl with its tail in its mouth. I am very particular about what I eat. Food has magic and it can change you. If you eat enough rabbit you will be able to see behind yourself without moving your head. Honey is immortal and so to spread it on your toast is to eat the future. Bone soup is an aphrodisiac. You should never skimp on your ingredients. Authenticity is key. Use real toad in your toad-in-the-hole, real shepherds in your shepherd’s pie and never, ever serve upside-down cake unless your guests are hanging helpless from the ceiling by their manacled ankles.

Today is a momentous day. Not only have we had the vacuum cleaner fixed, but I have finished the first draft. I will celebrate the best way I know; wine, weed and the BBC’s Blue Planet. I want to see the vampiroteuthis infernalis, I want to see the herring deposit their curds of sperm at the water’s edge, the anchovies in their bait-ball, the slow-motion desecration of the whale carcass, the sea-sponges like sweetbreads and the umbilical eels. Most of all I want to see the lake at the bottom of the sea, the briny unreality of it, lapping at its crab-infested shores. Then I will have a bath with Mrs Gaskell and come out scrubbed and shiny and smelling of coal-tar soap.

Explain Yourself

Every morning before the sun comes up I stuff my silver peacock pipe with sticky, stinking skunk and crawl backwards through a cat-flap into the head of a killer. From time to time I slip out and come here to spew. This is the Vomitorium at my Roman feast.

Time was when my candle-wish, my first-star-like-a-milk-tooth-plea was to read all the diaries in the world. And what a good Sack Posset I must have been, because my wish came true. We have lost our will to secrecy, our capacity for the clandestine, we are all turned inside out and everything is exposed, and I want to play too.

I suppose it is a bit like standing naked at an upstairs window. Most people will walk on by, but some people might see, if they are the rare kind that looks up instead of down. Keeping an internet diary is akin to flashing. Discuss.

Today it is sunny and the light on my computer screen reflects my face. As I type I am confronted by myself. I am a perversion of pretty, beauty defiled. Full lips cracked and sore, nascent and blatant wrinkles, a couple of cuts on my cheeks and my poor, tired eyes, the dark circles beneath them receding into the flesh. My hair has matted into impromptu dreadlocks. The hair on my legs and under my arms is as long and thick as on a man, and between my legs it grows straight and smooth, like an animal’s pelt. I do not mind. My body is just the bag I use to carry around my malice and my glee.

Busting Out All Over

It’s here, for now – sky the colour of hyacinths, crocuses in the grass, heat on the back of your neck and, of course, the obligatory twat with a massive sound system and a love of techno music. Twelve ‘o clock and it’s Radio Wanker. My brother and the Lover of Horses are playing football in the garden. I am cloistered up here, as though I have been walled in and left to die. I can’t complain though, I am having a high old time, smoking and drinking coffee and writing bloody murders. The muse has finally opened her legs for me, the slut.

A bee came in before. One once stung my mother. They are the Columbos of the insect world, they make you think they are all bumbling and affable and then they turn around at the door and POW! They sting you. And then they die. Which is, I suppose, where the analogy ends.

I will sit here until my lover comes home and then he and I, his brother, my brother and the Lover of Horses will all sit down together in the room with too much furniture and we will drink cheap wine and cheaper beer and tell jokes in poor taste until dawn. Or at least until midnight – we’re getting older every day, you know.

A Brief History of Religion

Sometimes here it rains sluts, like elsewhere it rains sardines. They bank up in the gutters where they lie wriggling until the night comes and with it the baying men, scrumping for pussy, who catch them and bend them backwards and that is a hymn to me, my chalice and my ritual dagger. Sometimes one will leave behind a garter like a bejewelled slug and I will pick it up and take it home. Witches wear garters. I was probably a witch in another life, sucking skyclad on the devil's death-cold cock.

When I was younger I thought about making a god, and I collected toilet roll tubes and sticky-backed plastic and the pistachio nut shells that I see everywhere I go as though they have been laid out in a trail for me to follow. I cooked gods in my dingy kitchen, clambering goat-like over the mountains of filth. I whipped up a celestial smorgasbord; Hundreds and Thousands and asafoetida, cockles and offal and liquorice whips, gods scrambled or boiled down to stock, gods as the mock in my mock-turtle soup, gods salted and smoked and pickled and poached and then I licked the bowl clean.

I had gods of meat for whom I scratted in the bins, broke into butchers' shops, scarfed sausages raw and wore corsets of steak. I had deities of derelict buildings, cloaked in yellow newspapers, their eyes like boarded up windows. The winter-god came crabbed and skinning, beneath its caul of hoar frost grinning, backwards like the dead. When I worshipped winter I did it in a bath of ice, skin rucked to gooseflesh and teeth bared in a chattering rictus.

Then I decided to cut out the middle man and just worship myself. Easy peasy.