[more] Elvie

There is no sound in Upper Slaughter tonight.  I’ve already had the nightmares; I’m over that stage now.  Having been so cajoled by such an evocative title, my ears spent the first few weeks fervently heeding to the sounds of this town, and subsequently manipulating the mundane into an orchestra of elaborate horror.  A town built on the blackened dirt of an abandoned abattoir, etc.  My blood-fuelled ear-drums would pick up on the sound of a particularly eager wind whistling through leaves and interpret it as the sound of squealing pigs, the echo of far off traffic became the sound of desperately grunting cattle, a sliding door in the night became the drop of a guillotine. 

I have heard all of these things, and now that my mind has satiated its masochistic whims I hear the something which is worse, the utter desolation that hangs in the silence of a town asleep.  The inhabitants of this place seem to extinguish at sunset, as if they never saw the advent of the gas light, after dark they do not even titter with life, let alone roar with it as the houses in London did. 

And so now I sit on the floor by the window, and await sound, breathing so slowly that the hairs on my upper lip may well fear me dead in their stillness.  I can’t yet tell if I like this silence, maybe it should reflect upon me, penetrate me and instil an inner peace.  But as far as I can tell it merely makes way for all the sounds oneself makes, in the silence one can hear everything, every brush of skin on skin, every slip of hair across a brow, I imagine hearing the sliding of eyeball against lid –grating like sand caught between skin and tight cloth.  In silence the body pants and grunts and gurgles, in silence sweat and the hot thick scent of skin seem obscene. 

Here, you cannot modestly close your eyes and slip away into the background of humans, engines and movement; here you are a splash of magenta on an otherwise clean sheet.

I wish to be a cat, black and lithe, sprinting across roads and through bushes, scaling trees and walls, mounting roofs and revelling in the obscuring soot of their chimneys.  I would race through scores of humans, navigating their ankles as a stealthy wind would pass through a forest.  A fluid being, insubstantial, with flat paws of such lenient substance that any surface brushed by my escape would not register the touch – I would leave not a single mark, and I could flutter through the masses in peace.

I sit on a floor which is not my floor, by a window which is not my window; the only thing in this room which I can claim my own is the carbon dioxide, and that is of no use to me.

From the 'novel' (The Red Horse)

The trees are becoming silhouettes; they edge the road greedily, all but engulfing it.  Richard sees this darkness and is suddenly aware of how long he has been off the motorway, how long it has been since he saw a light that wasn’t his own high beams, which only just manage to cut through the thick black of the – b-roads? more like D-roads, Richard had thought when he first turned onto what resembled a dirt path.  These roads are unmarked but for the white-topped greenery that floats like fog on the sides of the road, it hems the trees like lace, and Richard knows its shape and that it’s commonly called Cow Parsley.  But he does not know why he knows this, neither does he know the feel of the stuff, that it smells faintly of urine and that it clings to one’s skin when manhandled.  Somehow it seems important to him that he find out.  Tom should know.  Thomas Taylor,Richard’s longest serving friend, yet the thought of him is cumbersome in Richard’s mind.  Tom should know, but whether he will or not is a different issue, one of a dozen issues that have sat stubbornly in Richard’s head.  They have been there so long that they are now stagnant, yet still glutted and pricking at his consciousness so tactlessly that his three hour journey from London to the Taylor’s new residence in the Cotswolds has been distinctly full of headaches.  In fact, Richard has spent most of the journey pushing his hand across his crumpled forehead, for a while he thought of it as a screwed up piece of paper that needed smoothing, but this notion put in his head an image of Tom’s literary ‘awakening’ as a writer, sitting before a typewriter and surrounded by empty wine glasses and paper balls.  Richard knows that this is inaccurate; Tom probably used a laptop and was sustained by tea while we wrote his best-seller, but the idea of Tom having procured the myth of the struggling artist only deepened the creases. 

And so by this point Richard has been repeatedly brushing back his forehead and caressing his temples with the overwhelming vision of his head a thin layer of tin foil, making his attempts at smoothing it futile.  He is an irredeemably creased man. 

But soon this concept brings about another image, one of Samantha Taylor placing leftovers in tin foil and zip-locks, Samantha, Tom’s beautiful caramel-haired hippy.  She had grown so hard over her last years in London; her heart was too good for it all.   

Suddenly the headlights hit a wall of green and Richard is swept abruptly out of his thoughts by a sharp bend in the road, he swears under his breath and the tyres squeal a little, for a moment he is afraid of having left a mark. 

At this point Richard’s destination is still a completely blank canvas.  His imagination plays upon a vision of it, though it is built on very little; the grand sum of his familiarity with the countryside was fed to him as a child through Kevin McCloud and Kirsty and Phil.  Ever since the immigrants had been transported en masse in to the city, the notion of Escape to the Country had taken on such a different meaning that they had changed the title to Love the Countryside before eventually panning it.  The country had altered its perception of itself, which meant that someone as young as Elvie Taylor had never have been versed in the ways of the countryside, it must be as alien to her as she is to it.  This thought has worried Richard before, but he promptly shakes it from his mind.  

Tired scraps of the programmes have remained in his mind and since the moment Tom announced the success of his book and their move, Richard has been persistently trying to construct an image of the new place.  A ‘luxury’ home in the countryside, he contemplates once again, he tries to imagine a modest house that the family would fit nicely in, red brick – no, that yellow stone they have up here, it was in that episode with the woman who had seven spaniels that kept licking Kirsty’s knees – stone fireplaces and oak staircases.  Samantha had once spoken of wanting a house like that.  

Richard is tired of this blind curiosity, he comes to a junction where a sign reads UPPER SLAUGHTER ½ MILE, and once again pushes back his forehead, with the vision of ripping tin foil appearing momentarily before his eyes.