This Darkness Mine Read Online Free PDF Page A

plane, spraying bullets into everyone. Men, women, children and hostesses, bodies sag and crumple, tissue-soft, soundless, not a drop of blood is spilled. Wood shavings and sawdust crunch underfoot, they find a reel-to-reel tape-recorder. Stop-start-stop. It is playing a sampled loop of horror movie screams.
    The plane is full of dummies and glass-eyed puppets.
    It was all a lie, not as it should be, not the revenge they wanted to claim.
    Bullet-laden screams to Allah! pierce the fuselage. The plane weaves and tumbles, making contact, it dissolves, blooming into flame, scattering hot pollen of scorched debris and charred torso. A dummy falls to earth, is caught on camera, mistaken for a man, the hunt is on for his remains but nothing remains, nothing is found.
    A burning rain falls on a city, burning the date into memory.
    Nothing will be the same, not ever again.
    Change the channel, there must be something else on.
    ****** 
    I tried to escape the city last night but couldn’t do it.
    The motorway is melting down. Liquid essence of chaos emeralds and midnight drives. When the orange sodium glare is a balm to sleeping children, generating a tarmac and asphalt world. Outside of which wriggle and writhe the shadows of the static and the still, life goes by at speed here, as it should. The miles creep away ahead, dissolving into a dulled electric distance, it is an umbra-born of the things that live behind the sun. They came to earth and made the motorways their own, snaking grey acres chewing the arable into wastelands of cracked slab and cigarette butt stains, words crawl over upright shelter walls. Spray-paint smears declaiming incantations of industrial twilight, piss-teeth streaks in blotches of disco purple and terrible green spotted with a bubonic black.
    He has no face or body to recognise, only those gnashing beggar teeth. Brown creases of rot, enamel twists and calcium flakes show through his gnawed lips, behind them lurks Blackbeard’s tongue. This is a different breed of pirate, a roadside wayfarer, the hitchhiker you wish you’d left behind, him with his soft cheesy breath fogging up the inside of your car. The heater breaks and the car goes cold, interior frost bites your fingers, his piss-teeth bite you open, eat you raw. He’ll be along the way, somewhere, tattered cloth hands, overcoat rape. No, I cannot escape here by road.
    The air smells of Kosovo.
     
    So many colours in the world and every one of them an ugly sin. Relapse was inevitable, the cure only lasts as long as a woman’s heart. I’ve held one in my hands, for a while, small and hot and pounding so very, very fast. They wither too quickly, leave us behind to turn to stone, granite chrysalis in this cold arbour, vines growing around the feet, burrowing in as the warmer juices run out.
    She’s gone long before the bed has gone cold around you.
     
    Another day in the office.
    My mouth tastes of hot ink and burnt plastic. Dizzy sickness lollops its way around my brain, bright spots burst before my eyes as I try and concentrate on the creepy-crawl of the red numbers.
    My eyes flicker, dirty picture arcades, sepia and wet, open their anterior doors, puckering to suck me into their trembling guts. Somewhere, an audience of shudders nudge and giggle amongst themselves. Then, they go quiet, pink twanging chords are plucked out on nervous strings, this death-world pitches and spins around me, making me throw up a yellow dangling string. Catching at it with my fingers, I tug on it, feeling barbs snag inside me. The audience mutters to itself, shifting its dulling posterior, slapping out its many cunts and cocks, nursing them with double-knuckled thumbs to pass the time. Blood wheedles its way out through my grinding lips, I pull again at the yellow string, its raw fibres dragging, back and forth, across the tartar-softened undersides of my teeth.
    This isn’t going well.
    I let the string go.
    With a snap, it flicks back inside me, spitting a little