Goldsmiths - University of London

Hallow Thorpe has one night left of his sentence to run. On the day of his release his brothers will be there to meet him. They will be there to meet him and then they will go to the circus. This has been planned in advance by Will. They will go to the circus and Will, the middle child, will probably say something like ‘This world is face down in the mud of our universal search for concern.’ He had said this once during a community charity event where he was receiving an ill-gotten award. People were confused meaning typically upset. Right now Hallow is alone in his cell and sleeping. Tomorrow, the day of his freedom, it is the birthday he’d picked for his youngest brother Heath. In six months he has received fourteen letters (mostly detailed drawings of his room, filled with the things Hallow had bought him) from Heath, one from his father and precisely nothing from Will.

Hallow is sleeping though soon he will be awake. Hallow is dreaming. In Hallow’s dreams people act more normal than they do in real life. Women stay, men function, no one fucks. A rind produced by his brain but emerging through skin deepens in the world, grows shiny and hardens. Encases the gentle trembling hairs on his forearms and upper lip. Hallow’s heart, the smallest and most beautiful representation of which is an interrupted line, lashes against his chest and seems to swerve underneath the rickety tracks of his ribs. The dream becomes a lens shifting through a yoghurty light in slo-mo. He awakes, the bars are guards. Then Hallow blinks and they’re just grey lines like a depressed digital clock syntactically losing it. Then he blinks a third or fourth time and is really awake and not dreaming now and there are no bars just a wall that he gave up scratching onto the third week of his arrival. Time at first had seemed to make sense vertically until he had learned through lonesomeness that it didn’t, had learnt that time could pile on top of silence, could fossilize even the air if it was deep and heavy enough. There was a faith in things that could be maintained under silence and Hallow’s body built itself protectively over the sentiments of the dreams he held in the cell. In the best dream of his life he had imagined Will turning towards him saying: ‘I am starting to find people touching and it hurts.’

Hallow is trying to remember his dream. He is trying to remember his dream before he realises he is free. He knows this dream was a bad one. In it Heath was suspended above him and Will like in a school play. He was dressed like a slacker angel making a couch out of some white floss in the sky, like an angel too into laying on his cloud to help Will and Hallow or their dead father figure out where all the blood was coming from. There was a woman on the cloud eating McDonald’s with Heath. Ronald McDonald appeared and everything got scary and weird.

The taxi begins its slow, blinking, departure.

She turns around in the taxi, waves slowly as if the wave had frozen in the asking and scattered like there was a kerchief in her hand, like she might have only been blowing her nose.

Will tamps his ash on the raised headlight.

He looks over at Hallow who is looking through the window. Will looks at their reflections but doesn’t find much. They barely match up. Hallow’s face is lost in transparency. Will is headed back, blowing at the stars that move around like dandelion spore. In Hallows ear: a drunken snore devolving into a sigh. In Will’s eye: a rainbow set into a tear. At the end of that rainbow: a crock of shit, as far as he can see.

A match hisses in the puddle next to their father. A little bit of petrol floats over toward his moustache.

A light pings on and its cord dances around in the room. They can’t see themselves in the window now. A baby is crying through all their darkness.

Their babysitter appears in the window. She is holding the baby and looking out of the window and around Hallow’s face. His eyes being too impenetrable or scary or something. She turns with the baby. Her free arm is opening an envelope left on the table. Her fingertips are retrieving the sheathed paper. Hallow gets up and goes inside. He takes the note from her and rips it apart. Then it begins and the echo of it seemed never to rush upon its ending.

A door slams heartily. It is 1991 again and Hallow is partially undressed, still unmoved from his bed, though he can hear the clang of his impending freedom, and can imagine the fresh air a rolling pin smoothing the tiredness from his skin. He rolls over to his side and pulls both knees up to his chest, his thoughts set in the vinyl groove of a prayer.

The cell opens; the light stays exactly the same tone of refrigerated piss. Hallow gets up and out of bed mechanically. The warden is to the side of the door making a gangly procession of an ordinary walk. Hallow is a free man now. Something slops onto the floor as his legs dislodge the looped, novelty straw of his bed sheets. He has been sick in the night. He scrubs at the floor underneath until everything is so far apart it doesn’t count as existence.

Hallow goes outside for his brothers.

They are smoking in synchronization. On purpose probably. Hallow sees Will ordering Heath around like a drill sergeant.

Will stands to faux attention, his scratched wrist bent upwards from his brow like a gamblers visor. Will’s body is so chipped a hand encircling his wrist might read his bones like a wood instrument. Nose cracked off centre, ear bent back, tooth snapped; bruises like a British weather map covering his body. Elbows chapped and sore.

Will’s features are like books half pulled from a shelf in a private library. As if someone had been searching for hidden passage ways or safes. His high cheekbones and pulled-up skin still resemble advertising leaflets though. His dimples could be condos with jacuzzis in them. Those cheeks used to show more lipstick prints of women than a hundred clotted tissues in the girl’s bathroom. Behind the scars his father’s eyes still ring out clear as a July morning.

He throws his cigarrette in the mud and rushes Hallow leaping into him and affecting this girly Texan scream. They hug briefly till Hallow pushes him off, laughing, and punches his arm. Will’s grin curls up in the corner of his mouth like a thrown wet towel.

‘Goddamn,’ he rubs his arm vigorously. ‘I think I just got an incestuous hard-on.’

Hallow remembering the psychologist who claimed Will was in love with their father:

‘Again? I didn’t even catch you right.’

‘Whatever.’

‘Where’s dad?’

Will’s eyes mime the space around Hallow. Hallow punches him playfully in the gut.

Will bent double and gasping:

‘He’s shacked up with Mrs Murphy from the pub. If we get brother number four I ain’t doing anymore social workers.¹ That just won’t, how do you say; fly. I haven’t seen him in about two months. Also btw you look like a big homosexual child.’

‘Yeah well, you still look like Dad.’

‘Fuck you.’

Heath seems barely there, fogged and plumping out from the lithium he’s been dosed with these last few months. When he notices Hallow his eyes do this brief sunshine behind clouds thing. Heath offers him a Lucky Strike. Hallow takes two slotting one behind his babyish ear. He ruffles Heath’s hair without looking at him. Muscles pulse down from Will’s jaw to his neck like depth charges. They explode in his throat.

Heath’s face resembles the first land animal’s faltering steps on the earth so dry and indigestible is the sound. The therapist called this Heath’s ‘attenuated smile’. Heath’s been mute and virtually expressionless for five years. Today is his tenth birthday.

A linguistic appropriation/approximation of Heath’s train of thought/mood as he stands before his more simplistic brothers:

If a tear is a chrysalis what could open out from them and break, changed, into the world? If nothing they’re husks and I’m left more alone. We are going to the circus. If the world was a nightmare the circus would be its heaven. Carnies are like tv Priests or something. I’ve seen more cartoon people than I have human people and every human person I’ve seen has been left poignant and imperfect in the details of a more general crystallization. Flaws that can’t run any further up the system are held open at their threshold. The scream is empty or it holds it? If we’re lucky sometimes we catch the light. That’s heaven but what could lift us to it? Middle wants to go to Heaven more than any of us. I don’t think he ever has. I don’t know if that makes everything he does suspicious. Today I seem to be growing older with love. I think I am sad enough at Large to watch him die.

Heath tugs Hallow’s shirt. It pings back on to his equally springy skin and the two collide and depart again in short vibrated acknowledgment. Hallow ruffles Heath’s hair and studies Will’s face until he finds enough of himself in it to hate. Heath’s features lack any antecedence. Hallow used to believe he understood this silence and Heath’s eye were like iceberg’s tips. He went to work everyday to hold them.

It tore him down through his guts. Boredom deployed behind everyday exchanges like a parachute and guided him with a gentle, tumbling, sadness to bed. Heath’s silence began to grow monumental. All monuments are empty. Will used to pose in front of it like a tourist’s self-portrait. Hallow didn’t know what to do so he began to drink. Then there was one more thing he could.

Will is driving them to the circus. Hallow is in the back. The seat next to him is empty. Will and Heath are in the front playing new and obscure games.

They extort money from her on a monthly basis using an idea formed from a plotline lifted directly from her show.

Things that happened in those early days or some disordered memories like a shuffled pack of cards traveling between a dealers hand.

(When she left the boys looked for the sleight of hand that made everything absent.)

– She gave Hallow a set of dumbbells and sewed him a strong man’s costume. Watched him strut his wheezing body around the park.

– Taught Will how to pick a lock with a hairpin but set him rules that he outwardly resented but secretly kept.

– Their father growing penitent and sentimental, liquor occasionally flushed into the message bowl of the toilet in the departing strength of desperate resolutions.

– Her crowding them in her arms.

– The smell of her hair.

– The warmth of a body pressing feminine against them.

Will to Heath: ‘An acrobat is poet of failure who comes up against the memory of contact every time he lands. Every acrobat who has ever existed exhibits depressive, gravitationally induced, suicidal tendencies. Doctors have been working on a cure for centuries but there is no cure for a love of motion within the forces that condemn you. Since we’re being dandies today let’s call that art.’

When Will says ‘Dandies’ Heath affects the sloping walk of an MTV pimp. Will laughs, Heath makes an attenuated smile. People turn and stare. Hallow looks over the heads of several people, flexes a couple of muscles like other people sigh. Will stops laughing. He begins to talk to Heath again his voice vibrating between sad and mean like two old men arm wrestling each other:

‘Over there is the tightrope walker, see how people part around him. The tightrope walker is an excruciating bore who loved to hurt his mother. He negotiated every pavement crack with precision and scaled up behind ladders into the rafters where he hid so many black cats his luck channel hopped till the set of it blew out. Now he exists without luck or meaning and his mother is dead of cancer. Boom. Boom. Where are the elephants? They’re the real bastards. Disguised mafiosi accountants who use the big top as a lightning rod for their Frankenstein wagering of money, drugs and power which they use as political leverage to back their campaign of repealing child labour laws. They have many children and wish to make use of them. Their women cry but don’t do enough, though, they at least cry. I mean, if your mother won’t cry…’

Heath giggles which sounds like a guttural cough which causes people to turn and stare again. People’s eyes on Hallow cause his shoulders to slump and roll in diminishing vectors like a cart stuck between two hills on a rollercoaster. He shrugs into a murky despair.

Heath: ‘We are walking into a heaven without nets.’

Will is really fucking hoping he’s doing something right. He needs Hallow to know that. Heath is yanking on Will’s top and pointing at the dodgems.

Will: ‘You’ll have to be quick. We can’t miss the show.’

Hallow looks around them like he’s lost something.

***

1986

Will: ‘If he’s such an angel how come he’s so gone all the time?’

Hallow: ‘He’s really unutterably sad. When angels get sad they abstract. I dunno, he’s wired differently.’

Will: ‘That kid is practically retarded.’

Hallow picks Heath up and rocks him in his arm. Heath follows him everywhere now.

Will says, ‘you tried to leave us.’

Hallow begins to cry.

Will says, ‘why did you do that?’

Heath’s mother is washing dishes in the room diagonally across from Heath and Hallow. A man enters the house through the living room window in an astonishing fashion. He walks on his hands towards the kitchen flipping upwards at its entrance.

He stares for a moment at Heath and then enters the kitchen. Hallow stands up to confront him but his lank frame is easily dissuaded by the tattooed man juggling a set of stainless steel knives. The tattooed man is saying ‘Hello Barbara.’ Heath’s mother walks around the man and closes the kitchen door. The voices are low as is the sound of her crying. This sound is unidentifiable to the boys.

The man leaves, exiting the window the way he had come. Hallow rises to see if ‘Barbara’ is ok. She stumbles out of the doorway as Will enters. He has a black eye and is holding up some torn brake cables and laughing. Blood like maudlin silly string drips from his nose. Barbara bursts into a miniature gale. It blows down the house. Hallow shoots Will a murderous glare. Will is no longer laughing. This is their last day together.

Heath: ‘This is a man whom spiders break out of.’

The whip in the Ringmaster’s hand is of unusual size and cruelty and his white pant leggings are bunched underneath his dick in dirty creases. A tiger that couldn’t resonate less if it were mounted on a wall makes supplicant gestures in a cage stage left. The cage is unlocked. The tiger whimpers out towards the whip that bites his skin like a horde of suiciding bees. A purely demonstrative chair becomes an elegant repository of civilization in its ironic function.

Will leans over to Hallow, says ‘There.’

The crowd contextualizes the sound of the tiger’s pain into a shared illusion of fierceness. Hallow’s in his body like a kid swamped in oversized clothing.

Ringmaster: ‘Does anybody here like Cloooowwwnnsss?’

A tiny car appears from behind a curtain and drives in increasingly smaller circles around the stage. It upends and four clowns tumble outwards. Will nudges Heath and points towards one of them. The one he points at painted on smile has a mouth in the middle like a cup.

They stay seated and itching. Fifteen minutes later dreadlocked fire-breathers enter, clowns and the Ringmaster depart. The boys rise in unison with the sense of unspecified missions and old games of war.

Ringmaster: ‘What do you want?’

Hallow cannot speak.

Ringmaster: ‘Say something.’

Things steel in Hallow’s face.

The Ringmaster’s whip flexes and snaps, makes a terrible scribble of the air. Hallow is walking forward, moving through its erasure. Blood is seeping through torn clothes. Feels like a rain shower in summer i.e. kind of glorious. It removes the rind. Hallow takes the whip from the Ringmaster. Lightly prompts his chest with a palm. The Ringmaster falls over. Will who had positioned himself on his hands and knees behind him laughs. Hallow throws the whip out of sight. The tiger roars and bustles against the cage.

Ringmaster in fear: ‘What?’

The itinerant sound of escape manifested in the lifting of a latch by claw. Paws touch concrete with new found strength. The tigers face = the quick resumption of a buried nature.

Will: ‘Run… prick.’

The Ringmaster flees the tiger. The tiger less and less arthritic with each bound. Men appear in the distance raining with tranquilizer darts. A cry pulls everyone back like a draw string. There is the automated silence of shock. The tiger advances.

Will and Hallow are side by side and running for their brother.

A tear globes around the insane mouth of the clown. It drops onto the floor in a mess of red and white chalk, breaks open into a clotted silence. Others follow until either the make up or her skin is a set of bars the eyes grip and plead out of.

Heath: ‘Mu-uh-huh-erm?’

Mum (hand lifting slowly towards the protuberance of her plastic engorged nose):

‘Honnnnnnk!’

Heath claps his hands together.