Steel Kisses

Steel kisses ginger air.

I look outwards, out towards her burning flame on that early autumn night. Her presence lounges between the rooftops.

Waiting.

When we get outside, it is raining, and the abusive hum of the steelworks is hungry and haunting. Thin dustings of frozen water stick to the skin of the windscreen. Running a long finger across the roof of the car, I draw a line in the wet.

Above us it rears itself. I see a muscular backbone of post-apocalyptic gothic temples where you have to worship. Its culture is slag. Its children are steel. Its worshippers, fire.

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37

My half-dressed muse sits nonchalantly apercu awake with burning cigarette drawn into her archive lungs.
That
lovely
scent of tobacco drifts downwards.

36

Red nail varnish on plump toes.

Janet is wearing a white patterned dress, inside of which every sizable curve and crease is painfully visible. I take another biscuit like a good boy and smile. It’s a poor, unconvincing effort. Janet hustles on back to her desk and necks a few pills, HRT to bump up her falling oestrogen and keep her blooming. She fans herself with her hand; the open window and two electric fans fail to ventilate her.

A thousand gallons of water couldn’t cool that ruddy warm mask.

35

Suddenly the sky starts to turn. It shines every colour and she is in them all, from the lightest blues in the background to the peculiar shining rust lines which sit astride the milieu of muddy grey clouds. Over on the road are shoes – or skulls- tied tightly around green-leaved trees. They swing in the strong winds of the early evening.

34

I flick on the television. Another year approaches.

On the screen, a suntanned man in slow motion begins to smile a wide smile. Behind him is blurred out. The background is a hazy dusk colour; a Spanish or South American courtyard? There is an old gentleman dancing with a luminous woman with long black hair. A lifting piano underneath signifies that something is approaching. The handsome, soft-featured man begins to reach down. His smile dissipates as he too waits for something approaching out of shot.

It is his child. They embrace as the camera pans out to show the whole courtyard of dancers. This company does holidays that cater to families, and it does them well. They advertise just after the exhausting bombardment of Christmas adverts and January sale offers....Time we started thinking about our holidays, honey. You get no rest from the advertisers. You get no rest from anywhere. As soon as you’ve booked, then it’s Valentine’s Day, then Easter. The eggs are in the supermarket, and chocolate Jesus gets no sanctuary from the drooling mouths of parents and children alike. The reassuring regularity of existence, over and over again, laps against us. Drugged and drooling in the comfort of my television chair, I sip the dregs of my drink, the air very still and dry next to the anaesthetizing heat of the radiator.

A wife sleeps alone upstairs.

33

Above the rain continues to fall upon us. Olivia’s face is muggy with the wet air. Empty the great vault, empty. Full to the brim it falls on the world, dripping its reeking contents through the damp air and into our lungs, with every second they swell and gurgle as they drown under the shit of disconnection. I wipe my mouth and take another long drag of a wet cigarette before passing it back to Olivia. The smoke holds its shape in the damp air, waiting to be ordered away.

Work Cake

She rolls the cake in.

The room relaxes.


We wait with our plates and expectant mouths.

I feel guilty for not bringing cakes, bad etiquette on my part. Office time is measured in cakes: birthday cakes, wedding cakes, coma cakes, house and new husband cakes, goodbye so long old chap retirement cakes, departmental changing cakes, rebranding and returning cakes, end of the financial year cakes, change of building cakes, charity cakes for good causes. There was the starting cakes and the leaving cakes, the Friday cakes, sometimes lavish cakes, leftover cheap cakes languishing in store cupboards, round and robust cakes wriggling whilst we plunge in the knife and stand there waiting.

The waiting is what we were after.
Waiting means not working.

32

She sits right next to me, and when she leans over to use the computer, I can feel the heat of her presence against my own. I look down at her legs, exposed by her short black skirt. She catches my gaze. Men are basic; crudely we live our lives but a slither away from barbarity, our modern, intellectual selves teetering on the rim of an old abyss.

31

The binary Eighties decor stank of

Thatcherism

 and musty handbag heat.

30

Criss-crossed cranes lovingly folded together

 

over a Sheffield skyline.

 

 

29

Nearby, in a greasy spoon, they cut to a swill slopper whose glossy face reflects the light. In the background shift workers eat breakfast. Juicy bits of fear fly out of the cracks in their chapped lips.

They’re coming in, they’re saying you won’t see us any more; we've been made redundant .If the works ever close, then that would be it, a ghost town'

Her ghost stories are alive. In the background, fluorescent-jacket men force down their final breakfasts. She’s a toothless seer; her dailies are where worry coagulates amongst the eaters. One by one they leave her world for good, never to return.

They move on to more people: High Street shop owners and people in power. A pudgy-faced politician, in office for years, preaches. He's cautiously optimistic, he knows. In his beady eyes I see a faint lust.

28

‘They’re drunk,’ he says.

I stand on a precipice, shaking. What a journey, what a long and ridiculous and arduous journey. Cars flicker past in the distance like smouldering embers which flush and speed away. A redolence of her fills my nostrils, her sulphur scent. To be out there, in the summer, I would give anything. Out there, it’s even stronger, I know it. I don’t know how, but I do.

The big old baby men come forward. As each piece of flesh draws closer, I feel their full-fatted forms choking my existence.

Three eggs.

Nate watched as she cooked. She had a small frying pan with nothing in it but a slither of dirty fat. She slid it around left and right like a calm wave.

'Do you have a light?'

Lombard took out a lighter, it was squeezed tightly in her back pocket and her long fingers worked hard to pry it free.

She broke three eggs into a bowl and whipped them lazily.

'Do you want a drag?'

She kept whipping. Then stopped for a second and said, 'drugs make you weak.'

'There's only one drug man. And the rest, well the rest I've learnt ain't much of worth.'

'You're talking about weed?'

'What else?'

Lombard poured the eggs into the pan, sipped her coffee and stared out the window. He'd be here soon and then they'd be well and spectacularly fucked.

Lombard looked down at Nate's leg.

'Why are you wearing one sock?'

'You can't moderate how i sheave these feet. For your information I only own one pair and of that one pair one sock was made sodden and would not dry.'

'Did you try the radiator?'

Nate stood and thought hard. Then there was a knock on the door.

27

The mouth of the Humber yawns wide into the North Sea. Its shallow oesophagus runs through the county, cooling with streams which tire and fall away as they come closer to the core of her molten heart.

26

So I amble around the station ghostly. 

Streams of passengers disperse out of the train with me and float down into the sewers.

This swollen day had bumped into the whole week, an uncomfortable passenger of the psyche squeezing its way into my once-quiet life.

Guards wait by the exit.They look at me like dirt.I am flushed now but free of their grasp.

I'm not sure, but I think I'm a despicable man.

We fuck. When you remember the winter in the summertime, it’s beautiful. Breezes move over a fading blue landscape, ghost faces and cold stones. On the other side the same thing occurs. From a winter‘s day like today, the summer seems like a lavish dream, so bright, so intense a light in your eyes that your vision turns to white nothingness.

The house is silent.

They just stay together for the children. That Christian morality, that proletariat morality, that brain washed-out cum common-sense morality launches its guilty little arrows at me.

Click. Flick on the light. The air is warm. Home.

25

There comes a great satisfaction from burning the past, physically taking information out of bags and throwing it upon the flames. Let all the information burn and let us be free once more.

But oh those pages cling together nervously, tightly; they incinerate from the outside in, leaving perfect leaves of paper just waiting to be spied upon by nefarious rubbish burglars.

24

 

The screen waits. She is patient, she will be a blank eternity, waiting; there’s no point being with her in the day, she doesn’t want me then, she wants me in the deepest night, she wants me when I’m alive with ideas, when this skin is alight against her body, that’s when I need to put pen to paper, that’s when I need to create. 

23

He was a hardworking man. He worked the iron, he sold the slag. Mountains of it, big grey mountains as far as the eye could see.

22.

Car’s on the red.

In the gas station the thing won’t start. I take it out of gear with my left hand and put it back in, turning the ignition key several times for that reassuring spark. Nothing happens. I’m gasping, mouth becomes dry, and I’m blocked in. I look in the mirror. See their snarling faces. Behind me people are waiting. There’s something about a town that swells out like a disease. Mandibles stretch out and around the throat of the country, suffocating and scraping civilization into nature and clawing you inwards one dream at a time.

The dashboard lights flicker off as the engine starts to turn over.

Were the streets of medieval Paris as filthy and crime-ridden as the choking streets I walk down today? Spilt milkshakes are creamy pink on the pavement. I put my foot in it. All this greasy and aggressive competition does nothing but make me increasingly numb. The muddy leaves coagulate in heaps of mushy matter in the gardens of the houses and around the gnarled trees which seek to free themselves from the pavement. All matter is pushing upwards to get a fresh breath of air, climbing and crawling upwards with arms outstretched to the heavens in hope.

21

As I leave, the night falls. I turn on the radio to quell the silence and then the headlights to quell the darkness. The road sides are slushy where the snow has turned. I hadn’t planned on staying so long.