A Daughter and Father Examine a State of Panic (after John Ward McClellan)

Where are we? It is a place called an "art gallery". What are we doing? It is time to look at a picture. Why? It is a good thing to do now that you have had another birthday. Which picture is it? It is this one. What is that? It is a wood. What is a wood? It is a collection of bare branches, crackling in the wind. Why are the branches bare? It is possible that it is winter. What is winter? It is the time of year when it is cold. Who are they? It is a group of people picnicking in the wood. What is picnicking? It is eating food in a place unprotected from the wild elements. Why are they eating outside when it's cold? It is because they do not have houses.

Why are the branches so straight? It is the sort of branches that this sort of tree has.

What is the thing with squares? It is the board for a game called "chess". What is chess? It is a game where people try to be more intelligent than the person they are playing against by moving people and animals around.

Who are the man and the woman in the middle? It is the people in charge. Why are they not doing anything? It is because they are in charge, so other people do things. Why? It is the way that things are.

What is that thin thing over there on the tree? It is called a "tendril". It is like a branch, only thinner: there are lots of them, if you look carefully. Why is it there? It is there to prove that the tree is alive even though the branches are bare. What are the things on the tendrils? It is a type of fruit, but it is poisonous.

What is that? It is a sheet that they have placed on the ground, to eat their food from. Why do they have such big sheets? It is because they use those sheets to make the things that they sleep in when they stop for the night.

What is that? It is an animal called a deer. Why is it hiding? It is because they might catch it, kill it and eat it.

What is that face on the ground? It is a thing called a "mask". What is the mask for? It is made from the face of the man she loves, who has had to go away to war. What is war? It is a thing where old men tell young men to kill other young men.

What are those things over there in the back? It is a pair of horses. What is a horse? It is a type of animal. Why do they have the horses? It is a tradition of people who keep travelling. What are they for? It is their function to carry people and to carry the food for the picnic.

Why have the branches gone so twisted? It is an attempt to block out all the light possible, because something is happening. What? It is something that we have caused.

What has made the people and the animals go away from the chessboard? It is the wind that has blown them away.

Where has the deer gone? It has been blown by the wind against a tree and sucked underneath the bark of the tree.

What is wrong with the horses? It is fear and anxiety to leave.

What are the people doing? It is an attempt to escape. What are they trying to escape from? It is a change in the natural order so that the branches are quiet and the wind is cracking. What are they carrying? It is the food that they have wrapped up because they cannot afford to waste it. What is that coming through the trees? It is the sheet. What is the sheet doing? It is coming from elsewhere. It is rustling in along the forest floor and bending in around the trunks. It is attempting to get bigger. Why is it like that? It has turned into a sea and it is trying to drown them before they can escape from the wood.

Where are the people now? It is the same place, but it is different. How is it different? It is not a wood. It is no longer a collection of trees. What is it? It is someone's scalp. What is a scalp? It is the skin of somebody's head. What is on the scalp? It is a collection of hairs that look like crooked branches. What is the sheet doing? It is actually a towel that is being scraped across the head.

Why are the people in charge in front of everybody else? It is because are they not carrying anything. Why are they not carrying anything? It is because they are in charge, so other people carry things. Why? It is the way that things are.

What is the woman doing, stretching out to the mask? It is to an attempt to pick up the mask and save it. Why is she trying to save it? It is an attempt to save the man she loves as well.

Why does that man have his head in his hands? It is an attempt to protect himself from the scraping sound that is filling his ears.

What are those people putting into the bags? It is all the sheets that make their homes.

What will happen now? It is too late for everybody: the towel will sweep them away. Where are we? It is a place called "the heaven". What are we doing? It is the fact that we are looking at it that has caused it to change. How is it changing? It is changing towards the worst. What is that called? It is a word called "annihilation". What does that mean? It is all over. It is the end.

The Child in the Corner

As you can see, the child sits in the corner of what used to be the park. He is in what used to be the park to play. He sits on the ground. He is on his own. The only thing he has to play with is what used to be the park.

As you can feel, the child touches the soil. He lifts the granules of the soil. He sifts the granules through his fingers. The granules feel like bits of a mother's skin that have been rolled up and left in the ground. He lets the granules fall back to the ground. Some of the soil is sticking to his fingers.

As you can smell, the child smells the fern leaf. He has broken off the fern leaf and picked it up. He breathes in through the fern leaf. The fern leaf smells like the vegetables that went sour in the field that time.

As you can taste, the child eats one of his sandwiches. He tastes the cheese in the sandwich. The cheese is going runny in the sun. The cheese is like clay walls turning to mud in his mouth. He tastes the salt in the cheese. He tastes the bread. He tastes the salt in the bread. The bread tastes like sweat on a stranger's hand.

As you can hear, the child hears the wood-beetles in the trees. The wood-beetles are far away. The wood-beetles are invisible. He hears the wood-beetles. The wood-beetles are making a noise to him, but they are not talking to him.

As you can see, the child stands up. He urinates against the tree that is near him. He sees the curve of urine. The curve of urine is like a rainbow when yellow is the only colour allowed. As you can smell, he smells the urine. It smells like the animal skins that used to dry in the sun when every colour in the light was allowed. As you can hear, he listens to the urine. It crackles on the leaves on the ground at the bottom of the tree. He sits down. As you can feel, he feels the ground against him. He feels the pebbles. The pebbles are like small bricks from a wall scattered on the ground.

As you can see, the child picks up a flower. He looks at the yellow petals. He sees the way the petals don't quite lie flat. He sees the way the petals don't quite match. They are like lots of small bones that have not healed quite right.

As you can see, the shadows are getting shorter.

As you can feel, the sun is getting hotter. He touches the sweat on his forehead and it feels like thick rain.

As you can see, the child looks at the branch of one of the trees. The branch of the tree is thin and straight and looks like the long part of a rifle.

As you can see, the shadows are getting longer.

As you can feel, the sun is getting cooler.

As you can hear, the grasshoppers are talking to the child. The child listens. The grasshoppers are whispering with the dryness of their wings. The grasshoppers are telling him that nobody is alone.

As you can smell, the child sniffs the flower in his hand. It smells like the scent on a stranger.

As you can see, the child has picked up a small snake. The snake is red and green. The snake is smiling. Its fangs catch the yellow light. As you can feel, the child touches its roughness. Its roughness is like the uniform in the wardrobe. The child releases the snake. As you can hear, the snake doesn't hiss. It makes a crackling noise over the dry leaves then is silent sliding over the leaves wet with urine at the bottom of the tree before it disappears.

As you can taste, the child licks the soil from his fingers. He tastes the soil. The soil tastes of salt and sugar and flour. The soil tastes like it ought to be baked for bread for the insects.

As you can feel, the child has pushed the fern leaf to his face. He feels the itching of it. The itching of it is like the gas he was told about that time. He doesn't know the gas. The gas is trapped inside the leaves of the fern so it can't get out. The itch in the fern goes into different parts of his face as the wind blows. He lets go of the fern and watches it blow away on the wind.

As you can see, the child is still in the corner of what used to be the park. He sits in the corner. What used to be the park is getting darker around him. He sits in what used to be the park. He sees the darkening. He still sits there.

The Sea, The Sea

They walk in single file along the promenade. An army of two. No one else is around. She strides ahead of him with her head down. She has a fleece jacket tied around her waist. He walks with a stick and with every step he forces its ferrule down at the patches of concrete between the litter and the waste matter and pushes off at an angle so that it forces him into a sort of diagonal tacking motion both against and with the wind. She stops at the shelter and waits for him to catch up. She hands his bag to him. He settles in the shelter and fusses with his blanket and ensures that the bag stays upright and puts his book down on the slats of the seat. She clambers across the rocks. She pauses at the point where the boulders give way to shingle. She loosens her fleece, and lays it down. The clouds reflect the sea, the sea the clouds. She is quickly greyed-out in the distance of his vision. She flounders down across the stones to the strandline, stones rattling in her wake. She almost slips on a patch of kelp that waves in the wind, with the sand flies fussing in each leaf.

She gazes at the shearing plates of clouds. The higher ones are tracking over the others, travelling at twice the speed. She bites her tongue. Deliberately. Absent-mindedly. Deliberately and absent-mindedly. Needles of pain shoot up her sinuses.

He punches the bony undersides of his forearms, to attempt to keep awake. He feels the dull, bruised resistance well up, and his eyelids droop open.

He watches a colony of sanderlings twittering up and down the shoreline, probing for spineless food, ebbing and retreating as the tide grows and decays, pattering like horizontal raindrops. At this distance, they are tiny vertical shadows.

She breathes in and swills the taste around. It’s as if tiny buds of the sea had frozen then shattered and melted in her mouth.

He removes a cheese and onion sandwich from its wrapper and chews and chews and pulls out a stray piece of onion from between his teeth then swallows it whole and imagines it all sinking deep down into the Victorian plumbing of his guts and imagines his bowels ejecting the remains and sweeping them out through the pipes and crumbling brickwork into the shifting, treacherous, turbulent, poisonous ocean. The clingfilm wraps around his fingers and he screws it into a ball and throws it at the grating in the gutter at the side of the road.

He picks up the book and holds it in one hand, against the subdued backdrop of the ocean and tries to focus on both, one in each eye, and fails then tries to focus with both eyes on the letters of the title and fails then puts the book back down and stares right out to sea, past her, past the wading birds, past the furthermost ring of the drainage pipe, seeking to focus purely on the patch of clear sky at the very tip of the V at the horizon and fails.

He feels his eyelids drifting down, scraping against the rogue particles of sand that have flown like insects into his eyes.
She holds her binoculars up to her eyes. The cold metal stings against the puffed-up skin.

He closes his eyes then opens them and looks down the beach towards her but she doesn’t turn round.

She watches an oystercatcher. Impaling the smoothness of the sand. A gaudy show-off with bright orange trousers. A thing draped in feathers. Everything covered. Nothing to give any sign of ageing. Every peck a sort of rape.

She kneels down amongst the seaweed. Ruffles a piece of bladderwrack. Picks it up. Shakes it. By the balls. Flicks her thumb against the rough hem of the bladders. Feels the glutinous smoothness of the flotation chambers. Squashes hard. Feels the viscous goo squeeze over her fingers.

She lets her hearing dive into the churn of the leading wave. She listens to the rinse of pebbles. They knock and clash against each other like tiny compacted bells, the growth and decay of their sound as short-lived as a sound could possibly be. Almost as short-lived as a stillborn infant.

She feels the bite of the wind heat-stinging her skin with particles of sand, leaving the patches of sunburn in-between feeling cold. She feels it easing out the goosepimples. She reaches down to stroke them. They feel like the skin of some wise, ignored, neglected lizard, basking on a hotter wall on a hotter day in a hotter country.

He smells her perfume wafting up the beach and the curls of fragrance fizz into his nose, twisting like ribbons of kelp, and they ferment and cloy to a fused block behind his eyes and stay there.

She feels the texture of a flat stone against her hands, rough as a callus on her foot. She skims it against the breakers. It half-buries and erupts from the water seven times, the frequency diminishing as the sound dies away.
She shivers, and turns to pick her fleece jacket up off the rocks. He is looking down at his tartan blanket, not asleep. Not watching, either.
She lifts her hand. She smells the spilt-salt odour of the squashed seaweed. She licks her hand. Kippers.

She picks up a stone; a round one, this time. She makes as if to throw it. She turns round. He is gazing at his feet. She throws it in his direction. The stone bounces a safe distance away but within earshot. He is gazing at his feet.

He closes his eyes then opens them and looks down the beach towards her but she doesn’t turn round.

She gazes at the groynes, exposed by the tide. Untended ruins now. Like gap-toothed remains. Like gap-toothed remains in the ruined gums of an old man pulling his blanket up around him in a shelter and gazing out to the cold, slurrying, pale, relentless sea that moves his shit around every night and day. She sees every stump reduced from what it was - posts that had towered above and held cross-spars high enough to run under now decaying down into the sand. Things without structure any more. Revealed, then covered back up by a sort of migration of sand, building up and eroding back down. A full set of seasons in half a day. Growth and decay. Growth and decay. Nothing beside remains. The only type of groin she’s ever likely to see again.

He scrunches his eyes up tight and peers at his blanket and the tartan squares seem to come up and surround his eyes and he hunches his shoulders and the odour of urine and chip wrappers fades and he smells nothing but sand and sea and candyfloss and his mother’s perfume and the damp coat of a black Labrador.

He watches the oystercatcher and recognises the same one as last year from the brown mutant scuff of feathers beneath the right wing and he sees it vainly scratting around for food in what seems the implacable inertness of the sand and thinks that every stoop seems to contain perhaps a hint of slowing down and every stab of the beak seems a sort of cry for help, a plea for deliverance from this ritual.

He reaches for his thermos, for the cold comfort of lukewarm tea, and he unscrews the plastic cup and places it to his ear and he hears nothing but her feet rearranging the patterns of the rocks as she looks for displaced sea-creatures and he releases himself from her private world, lowers the cup and pours in the familiar polluted mixture of milk and sugar and old leaves that he drinks down without waiting for the steam to clear from his spectacles and the fetid brew swills around inside his stomach like the turbid, restless, all-encrusting sea.

He picks up the book and riffles the pages against his ear to makes his own private sea breeze then puts it down again.

She runs her teeth across her tongue. She tastes the salts of her own blood, leeched out and coating the inside of her incisors.

She lowers the binoculars and looks far out to sea. She tries to refocus. She fails. It feels like the tide has to turn before she’ll be able to. She raises the glasses to her eyes again, and zooms them in, and ensnares a crab, scurrying up and down the rotted wood of the breakwater, trapped inside the single projected circle of the binoculars like a prisoner in a rock-pool. Even magnified, everything around her seems smaller than before.

He punches the soft undersides of his upper arms, to attempt to keep warm and each blow keeps time with the inrushing waves and each seventh blow is heavier than the others but with each strike he feels nothing, except the marshmallow absorption of his own skin beneath his fists.

He feels the depressions of the slats in the seat against his backside and imagines himself sinking through them, sliding in splinters on to the promenade, and sinking through the grating, sinking deep and travelling down through the sewers and returning from the waters clean and agile as a porpoise.

She watches the sun set early. As ever, a cloud sneaks out above the horizon before it lowers itself fully. Like a thick warm woollen muffler that the sea is putting on before the sun goes sucking down. She turns to walk away, and spirals of heat carve up her tendon. She hobbles up the shingle. She carries the sound of the sea with her, deeply embedded in her tinnitus, a permanent memento, like a conch-shell stuck to the side of her head.

He watches her striding over the pebbles, the receding waves muted into greyness behind her, throwing her into sharp relief. He closes his eyes then opens them when he feels her breath near to his face.

“Tell me; tell me honestly, please: you know him; you’re his father. He’s not coming back to me is he?”
“No. No, he’s not. I’m sorry.”
“No. Right. Let’s get you home. Or would you prefer to go to the pub?”
“Yes. Yes, I’d like that. I’d like to go to the pub, please. If you don’t mind. Thank you.”
“OK. Let’s go.”
She helps him up, and they move away, arm-in-arm, both limping, back along the empty promenade.