The Power and The Glory

Happy New Year, etherkin. It’s going to be a strange one. Ructions are afoot - I have read the auguries in my laundry. 2012 is seals in the eelgrass. Something cold and bobbing.

Seals will be big this year, and sisters, and doggish things dancing on their hind legs through the trees. We’re on the edge of the strange times. On the plus side, the matador look will be in, and I look adorable in those trousers. Swings and roundabouts.

Anyway, here I sit, baht ape, watching out of the window as the headlights climb the hill opposite to the unreasonable black of the moors, picking my teeth with a wishbone and pondering what’s to come.

When looking forwards, it’s always best to start with a quick glance behind you. Last year was one of yearning, for penpals and monsters and muses and gods. Yearning makes me bilious. Perhaps it’s time I turned to Christ. Or to Christopher at least, patron saint of my dog-head daydreams, hot-breathed, slobbering force of faith. St Christopher was a definite sort.

In the meantime, there is work to be done. The Olympics are coming and I am Team GB’s only hope.

Apres le Singe

So now I’m in the market for a brand new muse. Butterface won’t do, of course – I wouldn’t trust her references – and that bastard Baby Mumps is out. It won’t be Michael, who came to stay on Mischief Night and hasn’t left his chair, Michael with his face like a sagging balaclava and his crinkling woolly hands, his hair slipping off at the back of his head and oh my god those thighs. And it can’t be any of my sundry cats – nobody wants a muse that’s always licking its arse and can’t kill anything bigger than a vole.

Nope, it’s an employers’ market out there. I’ve put a card in the Post Office window and am waiting for the phone to ring. I could be my own muse, I suppose, but I’d be an unreliable worker. I’d be tardy and churlish and smuggle stationery out in my hair, I’d clock-watch and time-waste and gob in the guvnor’s tea. I’d end up giving me the sack, for sure, and I’m pretty litigious when riled.

Essential attributes in a potential candidate will include a 2:1 or above in Applied Monstrousness, the ability to mix a perfect Benylin Sunrise, an unapproachable demeanour and unprofessional appearance, advanced skills in burglary, Beggar My Neighbour and Microsoft Excel, experience in dealing with difficult customers and at least five years in the position of muse, familiar or personal demi-god. An HGV license is desirable, as are a shotgun license and an elementary swimming certificate. Unsettlingly suggestive tails an advantage. I will be accepting bribes.

Armageddon Weary

The monkey and I are preparing for the Rapture, which is apparently due this afternoon. I've tucked my trousers into my socks and the monkey's set the video to tape BGT. I read that it will be some kind of storm but the monkey says that's just code and the vicars will come for us in blood-steeped chasubles and beat us all to death with acoustic guitars.

It's every other day now, the end of the world. I would greatly resent dying in someone else's apocalypse. I don't like to believe in anything I didn't invent myself, which is probably why I'm so bad at maths. I'm pretty sure I'll be safe, anyway. My end of days will come wearing coordinated cruisewear and a tight rubber cap, chin slick with Lurpak and mouth wide as the sea. Butterface will be my Ragnarok. Unless I get to her first.

Horses Cont.

Slab-backed, sweating, all nostrils and steam and teeth like slices of bread, clanking and stamping and champing at the bit, gilded hooves and oil on hot leather, flexing straps and straining buckles and the stirrups, the stirrups, the stirrups and nosebags full of liver and chamfrons stuck with rubies and unblinkered eyes, o lente, lente currite, mossflanked and tangletailed, burrs and fingers in their manes, screaming and screaming and climbing carefully up the stairs.

Butterface

I am worried. Letters from Butterface grow increasingly strange. I thought having a penpal would be all sweetness and stationery but I am beginning to think I was wrong. At first her letters were wonderful. Epic poems about implausible kittens, recipes for treacle gin, her next-door neighbour's bank account details and little doves and orchids of folded Parma ham pressed between the pastel pages.

Recently, however, they have taken on a more menacing tone. Photos of me fall out of grubby Jiffy bags. Pages from my diary. She sends me shopping lists with untoward overtones. Cockles, root ginger, Mulligatawny soup. She has started to use inferior quality writing paper. I would go round and have a word, but the only address I have for her is mine.

Last night I peeked out between the curtains and she was there, standing under the streetlamp over the road, the orange light tinting her swimming cap and her mouth as round as the moon. I slept with a hand whisk beneath my pillow. I should have known. The people I invent never turn out to be personable.

On the Mortality of Seals

What is it that rends the seals, casts them corkscrewed ashore? The Scientists say it's some sort of propeller, but I will have no truck with that, with an answer so human and true. I would rather it were Skalugsuak, the sleeper shark, full fathom five with its wormridden eyes, centuries old and reeking of piss, biting bone-deep into the bias-cut blubber and nosing the corpses ashore. Or maybe the mermaids, holding their black-eyed lovers just a little too tight in their tooth-lined arms, their beaks fast in flesh as they spiral down to the ecstatic depths. Or is it me? Is that where I go at night, eeling through the abyss with my knife between my teeth? Is that why I wake up so salty and cold?

It's All Spunk and Brine to Me

What am I crying for when I scream out my god? It is the indifferent mischief of eternal Heath Robinson machines and the first glimpse of the house-sized fin above the becalmed sea. It is vultures and haberdashers, manholes and the last page of every book there's ever been. It is what Spatchcock is looking at when she stares at nothing on the wall. It's the forgotten toy beneath my bed, dust-cauled and mumbling through spiders, the peeling birches at the back of things, what happens in the pavilions at dusk. It is what I'm dreaming about when I dream about home.

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.

Hot Lesbian Action

At the top of the back staircase in the east wing of my mind, there is a secret attic where I keep a pretty girl. She lives among the furniture that doesn't fit elsewhere, the rusting wrought iron daybed and the mahogany commode, the elephant's foot umbrella stand and the spavined rocking horse.

I pop up there from time to time to tease the ribbons from her hair, to lie her down on the candlewick covers of her musty single bed. She is the paper ghosts of peonies, a scentless potpourri. We share moth wine and macaroons and kiss like kittens beneath a dusty bust of me. When I am gone she sleeps again, barely breathing on a drift of shredded lace.

Be Afraid, Be Mildly Afraid

When I was a little girl, wind-up teeth gave me nightmares. I was terrified of the theme tune to Birds of a Feather. Haybales, bundled in black plastic and just waiting in the fields, made me nauseous. I was frightened of Radio Assembly as well, but that was because Gareth Minhall used to kick me in the back. I was afraid that my father would somehow get lost in space like Major Tom, or that my toy animals were sentient and sad with no way to tell me. I was scared that I would forget the words to Grace and get told off by the dinnerladies, and for some reason I was convinced that Ben O’ Brian was plotting to put me in a big jelly. I had an eye for the uncanny and an almost constant sense of unease and it was thrilling.

Now I am a big girl I’m afraid of bigger things, like money and responsibility and the cat-litter tray. I’m afraid I’ll be crushed to death on the 8.30 to Dewsbury, that I will die with my nose shoved in a fat man’s armpit. I’m scared of my potential, in both directions. I miss being frightened of monstrous trifles. Tonight my Snout and I are venturing out to the cinema, to see a scary film, and I intend to get very frightened indeed. When we come home I’m going to fuse the lights on purpose and sleep with one foot out of the duvet.

The Cat Crept In

I dreamt about the cat with the human face again. It was eating pork scratchings at the foot of my bed and thrumming like a hot machine. It crawled up the length of my sheet-swaddled self and rested its head upon my breast. A low song it sang to me, unrhymed and sepulchral, and it tenderised my body with its kneading paws of thorns.

I’ve got to stop eating cat food before I go to sleep.

The Ballad of the Wild Girl

When they came to save her she went for them hackles up, teeth bared, spittle strings swinging. She almost outran them, even on all fours. They shot her father and her brothers fled, tails between legs. When the men overpowered her they stabbed a needle in her flank and even as her eyes closed she bayed her wrath at the moon.

She wakes to white and is surrounded. They gather, upright and bald, to look at her, and they communicate in something sung, like birds. When she attacks they splay and bind her on the padded platform and make winter-sleep come. She dreams of hot breath, rough tongues and blood-clogged fur.

The sun here is a lie, sisterless and bright too long. A female rubs cream into her paws and smiles, which means something different now. The cream softens her skin so that when she walks she feels the floor and it is smooth, cool, unknown. They cut off her claws.

They put her in pelts like theirs and her skin burns. They strap about her shiny icy bones that bend her back so she cannot run and must sit straight. For hours they move their mouths at her with their hidden tongues.

When they can they tell her how she was found, and when she knows how she curses them. They say they do not know who her real parents were or why they left her but she says they killed her father and she shows them her teeth.

They give her to a family but at night she leaves and walks for hours, her choking howl diminished and unanswered. The family find her beneath her bed in the mornings, red-snouted, grimed and growling in her sleep.

With time she learns to trick them, to ape their ways and pass. She reads machines, watches buildings and draws pages of numbers with her new hands. She keeps her tongue inside but her voice retains a coarse sibilance, a forest burr.

When she is too old for them to keep she goes rigid-backed on hind legs into their world.For such long years they pass so fast. She does a job cooking their food and at times she strokes the meat first, holds her fingers to her muzzle and lets one or two slip in. She takes the bones home.

She has read about love and thinks that she might try. As he climbs the stairs in front of her, she fights the urge to sniff. Naked he has almost-fur and after the coupling she grooms it, lapping, hiding her inhales. He says she has such big eyes and in a while he marries her.

Another white room and the white-coated men again, only this time they encourage her to pant. Her husband holds her hand until the first one is born, snuffling, its purblind eyes cauled pink. When the whelping is over she gathers her cubs to her breast and smiles at them, which means something different now.

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.

The Insertion Smile

After the first beating resolved formed like baby in my belly and with words hurled like monster I swished my tail. Very well swelled in me and if they say here be monsters then here they be. In a toothlick I was gone and crawling backwards I came out here with this smile where my mouth should be. Now I am the inside of skin and some girls just sing to me, man, they’re begging for it. Just a lump at first, my tail, a root to the spine tree, but now it hangs pink to my knee or rudder-like and proud behind if I tense it, smooth and hard to grip, like wet glass all over. Sometimes it sounds like men are arguing in my stomach and I have thought about putting girls in there to keep them quiet. Girls, like violin strings and lambent. They love the tail. A door ajar is an invite in, just gentle at first, they smoothly snoozing, a sliding breath finger of mine, the down rising charmed. I like to touch them where their tails should be. I wrap their hair around my fist like bellringer or like the boxer binding his hands. The tail can flick and whip and pin and gag and make their eyes go heaven wide as it slides inside them. With the slackening I am gone, away across the rooftops I cavort and am legend.

Don't Sit Under the Lilac Tree

Sometimes I get sad because I don’t know any other monsters, and then I cry, steady tears of condensed milk. I sleep with one foot out of the blankets at night but nothing ever bites. I have walked a thousand miles on my hands and slept in graves both empty and full, but every time I thought I met a monster it was the shadow of a lilac tree. If I met another monster we could be penpals, and I could send it illuminated manuscripts about the state of my bowels and little sachets of silverfish. I wish more things came in sachets.

Snout and his brother are playing some kind of computer game in the living room and so I am trapped in here, listening to The Andrews Sisters and eating my finger-skin. I should be tending to my book, the slime-cauled goblin-child I birthed in the bathroom, but I think I have postnatal depression. It doesn’t work if you drink the gin after the fact.

Bone Appetite

There is now no corner of my mind free of murderous women and culinary sadism. I might be able to spend all day in nothing but long-johns and a smile, but I am shackled to the keyboard and oscillating between world-raping arrogance and depression as thick as Swarfega. Therein lies the fun of being a research student.

Last night Snout made a Vindaloo as hot as guilt, with bread and butter instead of rice. Tonight we will have something in garlic. I am thinking of changing my diet. People use food to change themselves, they eat health-food to imbibe virtue and purity, they eat their fellow men to absorb their strength, they eat Christ for similar effects. What you eat contributes to what you are, and so food can make me more monstrous.

From now on I will eat other people's personal documentation. I’ll feast on meat I find in bins and things that die in gutters. I’ll eat star anise and bay leaves like sweets and I’ll pick my teeth with wishbones. Tomorrow I am going to take a picnic to the park, and all the starveling chavs with their tracky-bs tucked into their socks will watch and drool like orphans outside a sweetshop as I tuck in. There will be pebbles in the champagne and frogspawn in the punch and all the edible knickers a girl could want.