Scene 9
A pub. Late afternoon. Lemon and Joe are playing pool. In the background are a table football table and VANESSA. CHRIS enters, “fresh” from football. Joe pauses his shot.
LEMON: Well?
CHRIS: Nine!
JOE: Nine’s all right.
CHRIS: Nine’s our season best.
JOE: Nice one.
Joe bends to sink something simple.
CHRIS: All right, Vanessa!
She waves.
LEMON: You still using the old ‘six-four-zero’?
CHRIS: Had Ben hanging back, didn’t we. Just the three goals in the second half.
Lemon is artificial and discomfited.
LEMON: Now you’ve [sic] in single figures, could it be time to start thinking offensively?
CHRIS: Maybe. And I'm not saying we're disappointed with the wretched result. If anything, we're ecstatic. But as the clock ran down, we faced a team increasingly less convinced of the strength of challenge we represented.
LEMON: Turned down the volume, did they.
CHRIS: Of the final five goals, three were accomplished by aerial scissor-kicks, one can be traced to a quite unnecessary hack-down by Ben, and one was an own goal.
LEMON: Deflection, or . . .
CHRIS: Yeah, deflection. To be honest, Ben kicking it in off Batesy’s elbow, so. Both. Ben played well actually.
Perhaps some soundtrack music begins now, or perhaps it has begun earlier. A pool shot, a real mega-hit, splays pseudo-chaos across the table-top. The camera shot lingers until this pool shot’s very last wobble. Meanwhile, floating away . . .
VANESSA: Did you win then?
CHRIS: Christ, Vanessa!
She’s laughing.
CHRIS: Have you not been listening? You must've never’ve been listening for a month to be asking me a question like that . . .
Showing posts with label Chris. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chris. Show all posts
Scene 10
A little later. Chris and Vanessa near the foosball, chatting, not playing. Shish-kebabbed men. It’s only beginning.
Joe is leaving the pub.
The soundtrack is continued from the previous scene. Joe puts on headphones, and we hear the two musics overlaid.
Joe is jogging. Cambridge in the evening. He goes past a small protest, organised by PAN – Pandemic Action Network. The placards say things like “Progress Not Slogans,” “Global Action Against Global Threat,” “Cameron Drinks Blood,” “Solidarity in the Face of Global Disease,” and “Repent, the End is Well F*cking Nigh.” The greater part of the activists are dressed as chickens. One stands a little apart, his head under his wing, relaxing. We hear a chant, dwindling. Joe comes past a chapel, where a choir rehearses. Three musics. He takes off his headphones. He stands and listens. Two musics. The soundtrack music fades. The song.
A little later. Chris and Vanessa near the foosball, chatting, not playing. Shish-kebabbed men. It’s only beginning.
Joe is leaving the pub.
The soundtrack is continued from the previous scene. Joe puts on headphones, and we hear the two musics overlaid.
Joe is jogging. Cambridge in the evening. He goes past a small protest, organised by PAN – Pandemic Action Network. The placards say things like “Progress Not Slogans,” “Global Action Against Global Threat,” “Cameron Drinks Blood,” “Solidarity in the Face of Global Disease,” and “Repent, the End is Well F*cking Nigh.” The greater part of the activists are dressed as chickens. One stands a little apart, his head under his wing, relaxing. We hear a chant, dwindling. Joe comes past a chapel, where a choir rehearses. Three musics. He takes off his headphones. He stands and listens. Two musics. The soundtrack music fades. The song.
The Lying Voiceover
BY FRANCIS CROT
Sunday. Parker’s Piece, which Lisa till lately had thought “Parker’s Peace.” The sky sweeping with chewy emblems of luminance. A charnel stack of bicycles, and the usual heap of Nike and Adidas “picnic baskets.” The game hadn’t begun. Hallucinatorily cheerful panorama. The boys stood in two groups about twenty yards apart, scuffing a few footballs among them. They didn’t wear bibs – they knew who was who.
Lemon jogged over to Chris. They spoke, Chris shrugged, Lemon shrugged, Chris laughed and patted him on the shoulder.
“What was that about?”
“Got something up my sleeve. Something to add to the secret weapon. He don’t know the half of it.”
The lads took kick-off by ignoring the ball and running around with their arms held firmly at their sides. Gradually they formed four lines traversing the pitch. They were not elegant or even in synch or even, let’s be honest, doing back-flips. Skipping. Aborted toast pops. Gaz was about sixteen stone, he was doing forward rolls. Gut Heathrow for Gaz’s personal dojo, I dare you, he’d hardly learn a grace. I want you to step forward and bear part of the responsibility for this brutal chaos.
Balls are peculiar signs of courage – the only pebbles which buckle. Guts by contrast, when you appreciate how elastic they are and how they pump, gasp with duty, even in the open air . . .
Sunday. Parker’s Piece, which Lisa till lately had thought “Parker’s Peace.” The sky sweeping with chewy emblems of luminance. A charnel stack of bicycles, and the usual heap of Nike and Adidas “picnic baskets.” The game hadn’t begun. Hallucinatorily cheerful panorama. The boys stood in two groups about twenty yards apart, scuffing a few footballs among them. They didn’t wear bibs – they knew who was who.
Lemon jogged over to Chris. They spoke, Chris shrugged, Lemon shrugged, Chris laughed and patted him on the shoulder.
“What was that about?”
“Got something up my sleeve. Something to add to the secret weapon. He don’t know the half of it.”
The lads took kick-off by ignoring the ball and running around with their arms held firmly at their sides. Gradually they formed four lines traversing the pitch. They were not elegant or even in synch or even, let’s be honest, doing back-flips. Skipping. Aborted toast pops. Gaz was about sixteen stone, he was doing forward rolls. Gut Heathrow for Gaz’s personal dojo, I dare you, he’d hardly learn a grace. I want you to step forward and bear part of the responsibility for this brutal chaos.
Balls are peculiar signs of courage – the only pebbles which buckle. Guts by contrast, when you appreciate how elastic they are and how they pump, gasp with duty, even in the open air . . .
Contempt Festival
BY FRANCIS CROT
. . . at that moment Lemon ran into the playing area, took a knife from his joggers and opened his throat. The blood leapt out all at once, like something waiting to be free, and he folded up. To put this into perspective, it was not as surprising as a sudden latticework of mellifluous dogs, a structure some fifty feet high, or anything like that. All players but one crowded around the corpse – the “injury” paradigm was what they had to deal with this. Chris, riven with hysterical panic, yet deft enough to braid a kettle, deft enough to snatch from you your iPod, but not its song from your ear, dribbled around the bloodshed. He faced an open goalmouth and tapped it in there.
. . . at that moment Lemon ran into the playing area, took a knife from his joggers and opened his throat. The blood leapt out all at once, like something waiting to be free, and he folded up. To put this into perspective, it was not as surprising as a sudden latticework of mellifluous dogs, a structure some fifty feet high, or anything like that. All players but one crowded around the corpse – the “injury” paradigm was what they had to deal with this. Chris, riven with hysterical panic, yet deft enough to braid a kettle, deft enough to snatch from you your iPod, but not its song from your ear, dribbled around the bloodshed. He faced an open goalmouth and tapped it in there.
Rom Zom Com
BY FRANCIS CROT
The manner in which Brenda receives this harmless pleasantry will convince you that she is mad. Let us leave her a moment where she is packed – she is quite safe – her impertinence snipped, and her mind glitching with God, and consider the figure of the zombie, whom by now you trust has inherited a good deal of sense with his zeal, and the figure – I mean the trope, or circumstance – of the pandemic. Generally if you splatter his brain everywhere the zombie will not get up. But the brain can seep into other parts of the corpse, so head-mashing is not a hard-and-fast rule – when is it ever? If you haven’t got the disdain for what passes as a humane thing yet you are basically my point. But I would also like you to consider the dynamics of pandemic, i.e. to bother about how many die and how. It is a difficult and paradoxical enterprise, to “get” the disdain but also to bother about how many die and how. What you can do is, write down your concerns on a bit of paper, walk about half a mile that way and just pop it off our suggestions cliff. Of you, I’ll ask more or less whatever I feel like. Smack yourself quite hard in the head. You’re more of an idiot if you don’t. The disdain, the plague, the smack. Carry on. “Hello! Hello!”
Joe halted in a general cloud of gravel and nearly overbalanced.
“Get away from it!”
“It’s OK!” said Brenda. “This is His body, which He gave for me. This is His blood, which He shed for me.”
Joe revved the engine tetchily. “Get in! For God’s sake get on!”
“Are you Saved?” Brenda gasped.
The glowing ashes of Joe commenced a vigorous search of their options. “Yes,” he said, and Brenda peeled out and straddled the seat behind him and wrapped her thin, stinking arms around his chest.
I said “chest” but my meaning is not thus fully conveyed. They rode entranced over the smashed glass of a row of shops. A large group of moved vaguely from among the dolls and Joe accelerated. Go cupids (I know ye were left here by the previous tenant) and scatter rose petals on their tombs. Better choose white. Here and there a devil torpidly drew out the intestinal perplexities, and beside each Joe slowed to see if anything could be done; beside each it could not.
They came through the market at the centre of town, where most of the stalls were overturned: the debris spread so there was no clear path, and Joe rode carefully over wares whose crying you would forgive and wares whose crying you would most certainly not. Flapping tarpaulin; spilt fruits, loaves and cakes; all dappled with gore; and limbs and heads smashed not much like, you could see, apples; and grand fans of secondhand books: Boykoff (Jules) & Kaia Sand, Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space. Palm 2008. 128pp incl. many b/w photos, reproductions of posters, signs, handouts, etc. pages sl. discoloured, wrprs sw., bloodstain at tail of sp., run through w/ little finger prob. of Lisa Morgan, £6.50, etc.; and Dr. Raphael Lyne, specialising in the Early Modern period, straightening abruptly from the stomach of the vendor of spicy cakes and breads still gnawing a rubbery tube of his offal and so drawing forth a placenta of organed gore, and a slick new flood as the corpse jerked free of it, maybe “the touch that did it,” as Beckett would have it. Dr. Lyne, who also had an interest in Beckett, lurched at them ready to hug but was tangled in the cryer’s offal, and he whipped the bike around him without trouble, sending up a diverse bloody spray. Joe remembered the banana bread had not been that good either. They went past a college; a body fell from one if its parapets onto the road behind them.
No, beside each it could not, and besides Joe wavered before the prospect of seating a third on his commandeered lime green (and red: it goes without saying) Kawasaki ER-6n. But he prepared himself to ram one of them, if he came upon an indeterminate altercation. It was not like domestic violence, Joe thought, it was better defined than that. The girl behind him – “Brenda” – shook more than his new bike. “Try and stay calm,” he said, to him it sounded like, “Do not be frightened.” Chris, Howler, Lisa and Lottie were all heading to their row of houses on Cavendish Avenue to warn the others. Nobody had signal. They were to regroup in the parking lot of Addenbrooke's, or if it proved impossible, in the Golf Course along Trumpington Road. Joe had originally left with Jealsie and Vanessa. What do you think of their screamed arrangements.
“I need a mallet,” said Brenda properly speaking to your surprise. “I’m not interested in a mild tool, as adapted for coaxing nails forth at it is for driving them down. I want a masher with approximately an anvil’s heft.”
They left the Kawasaki by the Cam. They found survivors finally near Addenbrooke’s. Chris, Lottie and Lisa were among those trying to drag someone from his weeping o’er scrubs and the endless rose within. Brenda tersely recounted the seeping belfry. There was a lively discussion, scant on logic. Some wanted to barricade themselves into the upper floor of hospital, silencers fitted to their cereal spoons. Others, petulantly arranging their tattered skirts and so on, thought it safer to strike out by foot in the countryside. Does not the pleasantness of this place carry in itself sufficient reward for any time lost in it? Perhaps they should head for Malton.
“Did you go past the houses?” said Joe.
Chris nodded.
The manner in which Brenda receives this harmless pleasantry will convince you that she is mad. Let us leave her a moment where she is packed – she is quite safe – her impertinence snipped, and her mind glitching with God, and consider the figure of the zombie, whom by now you trust has inherited a good deal of sense with his zeal, and the figure – I mean the trope, or circumstance – of the pandemic. Generally if you splatter his brain everywhere the zombie will not get up. But the brain can seep into other parts of the corpse, so head-mashing is not a hard-and-fast rule – when is it ever? If you haven’t got the disdain for what passes as a humane thing yet you are basically my point. But I would also like you to consider the dynamics of pandemic, i.e. to bother about how many die and how. It is a difficult and paradoxical enterprise, to “get” the disdain but also to bother about how many die and how. What you can do is, write down your concerns on a bit of paper, walk about half a mile that way and just pop it off our suggestions cliff. Of you, I’ll ask more or less whatever I feel like. Smack yourself quite hard in the head. You’re more of an idiot if you don’t. The disdain, the plague, the smack. Carry on. “Hello! Hello!”
Joe halted in a general cloud of gravel and nearly overbalanced.
“Get away from it!”
“It’s OK!” said Brenda. “This is His body, which He gave for me. This is His blood, which He shed for me.”
Joe revved the engine tetchily. “Get in! For God’s sake get on!”
“Are you Saved?” Brenda gasped.
The glowing ashes of Joe commenced a vigorous search of their options. “Yes,” he said, and Brenda peeled out and straddled the seat behind him and wrapped her thin, stinking arms around his chest.
I said “chest” but my meaning is not thus fully conveyed. They rode entranced over the smashed glass of a row of shops. A large group of moved vaguely from among the dolls and Joe accelerated. Go cupids (I know ye were left here by the previous tenant) and scatter rose petals on their tombs. Better choose white. Here and there a devil torpidly drew out the intestinal perplexities, and beside each Joe slowed to see if anything could be done; beside each it could not.
They came through the market at the centre of town, where most of the stalls were overturned: the debris spread so there was no clear path, and Joe rode carefully over wares whose crying you would forgive and wares whose crying you would most certainly not. Flapping tarpaulin; spilt fruits, loaves and cakes; all dappled with gore; and limbs and heads smashed not much like, you could see, apples; and grand fans of secondhand books: Boykoff (Jules) & Kaia Sand, Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space. Palm 2008. 128pp incl. many b/w photos, reproductions of posters, signs, handouts, etc. pages sl. discoloured, wrprs sw., bloodstain at tail of sp., run through w/ little finger prob. of Lisa Morgan, £6.50, etc.; and Dr. Raphael Lyne, specialising in the Early Modern period, straightening abruptly from the stomach of the vendor of spicy cakes and breads still gnawing a rubbery tube of his offal and so drawing forth a placenta of organed gore, and a slick new flood as the corpse jerked free of it, maybe “the touch that did it,” as Beckett would have it. Dr. Lyne, who also had an interest in Beckett, lurched at them ready to hug but was tangled in the cryer’s offal, and he whipped the bike around him without trouble, sending up a diverse bloody spray. Joe remembered the banana bread had not been that good either. They went past a college; a body fell from one if its parapets onto the road behind them.
No, beside each it could not, and besides Joe wavered before the prospect of seating a third on his commandeered lime green (and red: it goes without saying) Kawasaki ER-6n. But he prepared himself to ram one of them, if he came upon an indeterminate altercation. It was not like domestic violence, Joe thought, it was better defined than that. The girl behind him – “Brenda” – shook more than his new bike. “Try and stay calm,” he said, to him it sounded like, “Do not be frightened.” Chris, Howler, Lisa and Lottie were all heading to their row of houses on Cavendish Avenue to warn the others. Nobody had signal. They were to regroup in the parking lot of Addenbrooke's, or if it proved impossible, in the Golf Course along Trumpington Road. Joe had originally left with Jealsie and Vanessa. What do you think of their screamed arrangements.
“I need a mallet,” said Brenda properly speaking to your surprise. “I’m not interested in a mild tool, as adapted for coaxing nails forth at it is for driving them down. I want a masher with approximately an anvil’s heft.”
They left the Kawasaki by the Cam. They found survivors finally near Addenbrooke’s. Chris, Lottie and Lisa were among those trying to drag someone from his weeping o’er scrubs and the endless rose within. Brenda tersely recounted the seeping belfry. There was a lively discussion, scant on logic. Some wanted to barricade themselves into the upper floor of hospital, silencers fitted to their cereal spoons. Others, petulantly arranging their tattered skirts and so on, thought it safer to strike out by foot in the countryside. Does not the pleasantness of this place carry in itself sufficient reward for any time lost in it? Perhaps they should head for Malton.
“Did you go past the houses?” said Joe.
Chris nodded.
A Great Adventure
BY FRANCIS CROT
Faintly hilled farmland lay between Malton and the chums Chris, Joe, Brenda, Lisa and Lottie like a 50x100 grid numbered from the top left hand corner, I think it’s fair to say. The chums began at 25,1.
Chris informally led, rich with consultation. Deft enough to whittle a toy giraffe from a stick insect without even disturbing the critter’s ponder.
If we were to call one “turn” the time it took the chums to cross from one space to another, then – how to put it? Such a delicate matter. Despite their notorious feet-scuffing, the dead covered ground at the very same pace. Tenacity, don’t you know.
They saw birds, dogs, foxes, frogs and newts, insects and spiders, and one Muntjac deer. None seemed fucked. They went across a forecourt. Stiff peach children. Torn craws and blue prolapsed Lurpak. A rather nice neck, otherwise. Joe and Chris came out with carrier bags of fruit, bread, cheese and chocolate, their pockets full of lighters.
Generally the dead were still. Oh, their heads might roll back for a corrupted squint at the heavens: when’s it going to reign? My bon mot honours the dead’s little hobby. A few would reprise old habits, even shuffling a tractor over a patch. The “gas escaping” hypothesis must be unbelievably embarrassing by now. Old habits die hard. “Pvt. [Helen] Zemeckis! You & Mac secure the Ladies’ Room!” Their behaviour was more truthful than when they were alive – everything now done in long, fluid cringes.
Just fuck off. It was only when a chum stood in an adjacent space – or a space adjacent to one of those spaces – twenty four spaces in all – if you don’t count the one occupied by the zombie – and why would you count that? – that a zombie would cross into a new space. He would step invariably meatwards. No flanking, no retreating, your zombie on the move. You’ll find he prefers meaty latitudes to meaty longditudes. For example, in one little melodrama Lisa stood at 28,3 and dead don at 26,4. The don took himself to 27,3 – though rambling to 27,4 would have brought him just as near. It is a tradition in Cambridge that undergraduates may walk on the safeguarded grass if accompanying a don. Many undergraduates did so pursued by flesh-eating dons. This is the point isn’t it – flexible interpretation of our heritage. So, latitudes were preferred to longditudes, closer meat preferred to more distant meat, and in cases of equidistant meat, the meatier preferred. Thus a zombie would chase a space occupied by two chums before he would chase a space occupied by only one. He’d pursue Joe before he’d pursue Brenda, he’d pursue Brenda before he’d pursue Chris, he’d pursue Chris before he’d pursue Lisa. He would rather pursue poor old big-boned Lottie than any of them. She had a hell of a time of it (except hell goes on for a long time).
The first night they didn’t sleep. The second they fitted on a spongy bank, covered by trees whose boughs were full of cowslips and wildflowers, near some ancient-looking earthworks. When more experienced, they would join with the cowslips and wildflowers. More than once they awoke with visitors milling below. Lottie reckoned it was only sixty miles or so to Malton, but their route was an arabseque, circumstance its curling tongs. The ideal camp spot, as its notion evolved, was a small spinney affording five – then four, then three, and then two – high generous spots where the chums could roost without fear of rolling out, preferrably in a meadow, near a stream, surrounded by stiles to groan and bang as the dead bungled through. They attained this Eden only in fragments. They found anyway that, despite constant exertion, they needed less sleep. They made the most of the twilight and the dawnlight, and soon the starlight and moonlight too. When the world was distinctly lit they moved through it.
“I believe everything is matter. Yet I think there is a God,” said Joe embarrassed. “I don’t have any reasons but I believe it anyway.”
“That’s faith,” said Brenda.
“And that He’s some kind of creator. I don’t know how He relates to us. I don’t think it’s the way many of your evangelicals believe, that you pray hard, and you get what you want.”
“He got me my one thing,” said Brenda. “The only thing I ever asked for, He did. Don’t ask me what it is. He might stir-fry you, if you knew.”
“Could be dumb luck, Brenda. Either way we could use some more.”
They were being closed into a ravine. None of them liked it, and that’s why they fell silent. Overhead, the ribbon of afternoon sky was empty. Trees were starting out of the rocks on either side. When the ground began to climb a little, Brenda spoke again.
“Joe – Joe – Joe, the whole world changed so that I could have it – have my wish –”
“Yeah –”
Her voice dropped, “– my prayer – all this – all that – because of me. You explain that. And now my life belongs to Him.”
“For the love of God,” he said, but to these words he attached no meaning.
They saw greenery of that sort which is most set off by blood and sunshine. They saw gravel walks margined with flowers, and hedgerows, corn fields, and stone houses.
At first they made it their policy to set barriers in their wake, wedging shut the stiles, and dragging a heavy pipe, once used as a bridge, into the ditch it had lain over. But as Chris and Joe were trying to kick apart a rotted tree trunk fallen in a little stream, Lottie pointed out that they might simply be enclosing themselves in a more thickly-infested area. “It began in the chapel,” said Brenda, but, nonetheless, from then on they no longer bothered.
Joe and the others, except for Chris and Brenda, were all in their second year at Christ’s. Chris was a postgrad. Brenda was in Year 10 at a comprehensive in Impington, just north of Cambridge. Her GCSEs were to have been English Language and Literature, Maths, Double Science, ICT, Citizenship, RS, French, History, Art and Design, plus short courses in Italian and PE.
“Hey, I have a list to read to you,” Joe said during a brief firelit camp stop. “I think you’ll probably interpret it as the, you know, all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small thing. But I’d be interested to know how you feel. You ready?”
“OK,” said Brenda. Chris and Lisa slept. Lottie, upset, agitated the coals with a stick. Even if she could loot a Vision Express, how could she be sure it was the right prescription?
Lisa and Joe, thought Brenda. What a perfect match. Gown and gown. The argument from design.
“I saw one once where,” said Joe. “Wet vermilion injection of human penis. Cuttlefish mouthparts. Tibula and fibula with massive osteoma. Young crocodile viscera. Lion’s oesophagus. Honeycomb of first and second sheep tummies. Gravid uterus. Foetal armadillo ratusia. Seal colon. Wolverine rectum lymph nodes. Embryonic foal with membranes. Looks like a condom in soup. Sea mouse. Hen skeleton, without head. Partridge skeleton, intact. Rat spines. Encysted tumours. Thin-walled dermoid cyst. Sheep’s eyebrow. Lingual ribbon. Same seal colon from earlier, now inverted. Corrosion cast of stillborn’s arteries. The liver is a thick haze in that one. Six skulls of various rodents. Firm clot effused between ventricles, producing natural cast. Hydrocephalus skull salad bowl.”
He raised his hopeful head.
“No effect,” said Brenda. “I don’t get it.”
Joe was to have read Philosophy.
“Oh. Whenever I read it, I remember everything is just matter. Shall I go on?”
“That’s all right. I’d like to read to you from John.”
“All right,” he said, laying down.
Faintly hilled farmland lay between Malton and the chums Chris, Joe, Brenda, Lisa and Lottie like a 50x100 grid numbered from the top left hand corner, I think it’s fair to say. The chums began at 25,1.
Chris informally led, rich with consultation. Deft enough to whittle a toy giraffe from a stick insect without even disturbing the critter’s ponder.
If we were to call one “turn” the time it took the chums to cross from one space to another, then – how to put it? Such a delicate matter. Despite their notorious feet-scuffing, the dead covered ground at the very same pace. Tenacity, don’t you know.
They saw birds, dogs, foxes, frogs and newts, insects and spiders, and one Muntjac deer. None seemed fucked. They went across a forecourt. Stiff peach children. Torn craws and blue prolapsed Lurpak. A rather nice neck, otherwise. Joe and Chris came out with carrier bags of fruit, bread, cheese and chocolate, their pockets full of lighters.
Generally the dead were still. Oh, their heads might roll back for a corrupted squint at the heavens: when’s it going to reign? My bon mot honours the dead’s little hobby. A few would reprise old habits, even shuffling a tractor over a patch. The “gas escaping” hypothesis must be unbelievably embarrassing by now. Old habits die hard. “Pvt. [Helen] Zemeckis! You & Mac secure the Ladies’ Room!” Their behaviour was more truthful than when they were alive – everything now done in long, fluid cringes.
Just fuck off. It was only when a chum stood in an adjacent space – or a space adjacent to one of those spaces – twenty four spaces in all – if you don’t count the one occupied by the zombie – and why would you count that? – that a zombie would cross into a new space. He would step invariably meatwards. No flanking, no retreating, your zombie on the move. You’ll find he prefers meaty latitudes to meaty longditudes. For example, in one little melodrama Lisa stood at 28,3 and dead don at 26,4. The don took himself to 27,3 – though rambling to 27,4 would have brought him just as near. It is a tradition in Cambridge that undergraduates may walk on the safeguarded grass if accompanying a don. Many undergraduates did so pursued by flesh-eating dons. This is the point isn’t it – flexible interpretation of our heritage. So, latitudes were preferred to longditudes, closer meat preferred to more distant meat, and in cases of equidistant meat, the meatier preferred. Thus a zombie would chase a space occupied by two chums before he would chase a space occupied by only one. He’d pursue Joe before he’d pursue Brenda, he’d pursue Brenda before he’d pursue Chris, he’d pursue Chris before he’d pursue Lisa. He would rather pursue poor old big-boned Lottie than any of them. She had a hell of a time of it (except hell goes on for a long time).
The first night they didn’t sleep. The second they fitted on a spongy bank, covered by trees whose boughs were full of cowslips and wildflowers, near some ancient-looking earthworks. When more experienced, they would join with the cowslips and wildflowers. More than once they awoke with visitors milling below. Lottie reckoned it was only sixty miles or so to Malton, but their route was an arabseque, circumstance its curling tongs. The ideal camp spot, as its notion evolved, was a small spinney affording five – then four, then three, and then two – high generous spots where the chums could roost without fear of rolling out, preferrably in a meadow, near a stream, surrounded by stiles to groan and bang as the dead bungled through. They attained this Eden only in fragments. They found anyway that, despite constant exertion, they needed less sleep. They made the most of the twilight and the dawnlight, and soon the starlight and moonlight too. When the world was distinctly lit they moved through it.
“I believe everything is matter. Yet I think there is a God,” said Joe embarrassed. “I don’t have any reasons but I believe it anyway.”
“That’s faith,” said Brenda.
“And that He’s some kind of creator. I don’t know how He relates to us. I don’t think it’s the way many of your evangelicals believe, that you pray hard, and you get what you want.”
“He got me my one thing,” said Brenda. “The only thing I ever asked for, He did. Don’t ask me what it is. He might stir-fry you, if you knew.”
“Could be dumb luck, Brenda. Either way we could use some more.”
They were being closed into a ravine. None of them liked it, and that’s why they fell silent. Overhead, the ribbon of afternoon sky was empty. Trees were starting out of the rocks on either side. When the ground began to climb a little, Brenda spoke again.
“Joe – Joe – Joe, the whole world changed so that I could have it – have my wish –”
“Yeah –”
Her voice dropped, “– my prayer – all this – all that – because of me. You explain that. And now my life belongs to Him.”
“For the love of God,” he said, but to these words he attached no meaning.
They saw greenery of that sort which is most set off by blood and sunshine. They saw gravel walks margined with flowers, and hedgerows, corn fields, and stone houses.
At first they made it their policy to set barriers in their wake, wedging shut the stiles, and dragging a heavy pipe, once used as a bridge, into the ditch it had lain over. But as Chris and Joe were trying to kick apart a rotted tree trunk fallen in a little stream, Lottie pointed out that they might simply be enclosing themselves in a more thickly-infested area. “It began in the chapel,” said Brenda, but, nonetheless, from then on they no longer bothered.
Joe and the others, except for Chris and Brenda, were all in their second year at Christ’s. Chris was a postgrad. Brenda was in Year 10 at a comprehensive in Impington, just north of Cambridge. Her GCSEs were to have been English Language and Literature, Maths, Double Science, ICT, Citizenship, RS, French, History, Art and Design, plus short courses in Italian and PE.
“Hey, I have a list to read to you,” Joe said during a brief firelit camp stop. “I think you’ll probably interpret it as the, you know, all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small thing. But I’d be interested to know how you feel. You ready?”
“OK,” said Brenda. Chris and Lisa slept. Lottie, upset, agitated the coals with a stick. Even if she could loot a Vision Express, how could she be sure it was the right prescription?
Lisa and Joe, thought Brenda. What a perfect match. Gown and gown. The argument from design.
“I saw one once where,” said Joe. “Wet vermilion injection of human penis. Cuttlefish mouthparts. Tibula and fibula with massive osteoma. Young crocodile viscera. Lion’s oesophagus. Honeycomb of first and second sheep tummies. Gravid uterus. Foetal armadillo ratusia. Seal colon. Wolverine rectum lymph nodes. Embryonic foal with membranes. Looks like a condom in soup. Sea mouse. Hen skeleton, without head. Partridge skeleton, intact. Rat spines. Encysted tumours. Thin-walled dermoid cyst. Sheep’s eyebrow. Lingual ribbon. Same seal colon from earlier, now inverted. Corrosion cast of stillborn’s arteries. The liver is a thick haze in that one. Six skulls of various rodents. Firm clot effused between ventricles, producing natural cast. Hydrocephalus skull salad bowl.”
He raised his hopeful head.
“No effect,” said Brenda. “I don’t get it.”
Joe was to have read Philosophy.
“Oh. Whenever I read it, I remember everything is just matter. Shall I go on?”
“That’s all right. I’d like to read to you from John.”
“All right,” he said, laying down.
The Condescending Summation
BY FRANCIS CROT
Late that same afternoon they crossed an abandoned farmstead filled with strangely serene animals, and made a tense raid of the farmhouse, for viaticum. A night came of very mild moonlight and the creature came so suddenly on Chris he near shat both their pants.
God spoke to Brenda often. Was it Mark E. Smith who first pointed out that every culture has some concept of a large invisible man in the sky with moons and stars on his hat who says “I WILL DESTROY YOU” in a vast, booming voice? It was not thus. It was not that person riding around on her, it was not any vulgar transposition of public sensation onto private sensation; but nor was it abject internal monologue. It was unmistakeable; it did not come from her and was not of her.
It was linguistic but not what she would call language. It was in the world. As she learned to listen for it, it changed the way she knew language.
Mostly He comforted her, and showed her how she might comfort Joe and for a time the others. He spoke to her through Joe as well. He told her He had a plan for them.
Once in the reserve, the path led initially through woodland and then through more open boggy land along the bank of an unmarked river. The otters, though characteristically reticent, could be seen splashing dazedly towards them. The miracle had jumped the species barrier.
After 200m they saw a brick pillbox, topped by another little gathering of otters eating what looked like a screaming teenage boy. Seeing it was getting too late for him, they crossed by a little bridge. After about 100m they were on the the plateau proper and the views opened up.
After about half a mile they spotted him again, approaching a pair of – survivors begs the question, a girl it seemed lugged a boy, who waved to them half-heartedly – and from the ridge they saw the blue sacks of their stomachs gleam, plop plop, in the lightly wooded fancy barrows visible to the left. Otter minions shuffled from the woods add their rabid hands to the frenzy. A worthwhile detour led right for 150m (marked with a Countryside Commission sign), through a kissing gate and then curved through open park lands designed by Capability Brown.
Late that same afternoon they crossed an abandoned farmstead filled with strangely serene animals, and made a tense raid of the farmhouse, for viaticum. A night came of very mild moonlight and the creature came so suddenly on Chris he near shat both their pants.
God spoke to Brenda often. Was it Mark E. Smith who first pointed out that every culture has some concept of a large invisible man in the sky with moons and stars on his hat who says “I WILL DESTROY YOU” in a vast, booming voice? It was not thus. It was not that person riding around on her, it was not any vulgar transposition of public sensation onto private sensation; but nor was it abject internal monologue. It was unmistakeable; it did not come from her and was not of her.
It was linguistic but not what she would call language. It was in the world. As she learned to listen for it, it changed the way she knew language.
Mostly He comforted her, and showed her how she might comfort Joe and for a time the others. He spoke to her through Joe as well. He told her He had a plan for them.
Once in the reserve, the path led initially through woodland and then through more open boggy land along the bank of an unmarked river. The otters, though characteristically reticent, could be seen splashing dazedly towards them. The miracle had jumped the species barrier.
After 200m they saw a brick pillbox, topped by another little gathering of otters eating what looked like a screaming teenage boy. Seeing it was getting too late for him, they crossed by a little bridge. After about 100m they were on the the plateau proper and the views opened up.
After about half a mile they spotted him again, approaching a pair of – survivors begs the question, a girl it seemed lugged a boy, who waved to them half-heartedly – and from the ridge they saw the blue sacks of their stomachs gleam, plop plop, in the lightly wooded fancy barrows visible to the left. Otter minions shuffled from the woods add their rabid hands to the frenzy. A worthwhile detour led right for 150m (marked with a Countryside Commission sign), through a kissing gate and then curved through open park lands designed by Capability Brown.
Gouge Addiction, or, The True History of Brenda True: Who Was Seduced By A Zombie, To Which Is Appended, A Concise Allegory of the Bird Flu Pandemic
BY FRANCIS CROT
They picked up the M11 for half a day. Only two cars passed in that period, the first going away from Malton and the other towards it. As they were resting in a dip, they didn’t notice the second car in time to get a good look, and be sure if it wasn’t the same again. Lottie thought so. Still-flaming husks, and the welcoming victims of those accidents, shepherded them West across the countryside.
“I saw one where a spaceship explodes in orbit, raining billions of tonnes of toxic sludge onto the planet. Everyone north of the equator becomes one of them.”
“I saw one where the virus only works on adults. So it’s effectively kids and teenagers trying to survive in their world.”
“Praise Him! Praise Him! Praise Him! Praise Him!”
“I saw one where they rose and layed down again without ever committing a single act of violence.”
It is hardly possible to express the ardour of it. There was plenty of courage, and before long, plenty of certain chums sacrificing their lives to facilitate the continuance of other chums’ lives (in the considered opinions of the survivors). There is a piece of cinema which is important for anyone who burns to know, but know safely, from an armchair, what Lisa looked like in her final moments. It is the bit in the Coen brothers’ Fargo in which the character played by Steve Buschemi is shoved relentlessly into a wood chipper. If you look at the state of Steve Buschemi at the end of Coen brothers’ films, you will see there is a tendency to divide him into increasingly tiny pieces.
Their main themes were God and the infection. A peculiar manners developed within the transmission of practical information. Quite a lot was said very clearly but very indirectly. The pronouns “they” and “them” had unmistakeable reference.
“I saw one where a hot pink meteorite plunges from the sky in the middle of a drive-in movie. Any woman who smells the rock becomes one of them, except sex-crazed.”
“I saw one where the only thing worse than the corny ‘the dead take over’ concept, or the ‘the dead become a metaphor for consumerism’ trope, which would have been poignant, like, forty years ago, was its twee hipster equivalent. You know, the I-know-I’m-writing-a-story-about-the-dead-because-I’m-making-a-comment-about-the-dead-stories. Look, you can make a ‘comment’ about whatever you want, but the ultimate take-away is that in the course of doing so, you just wasted a considerable amount of your creative life for the sake of giving the world another goddamn zombie story. And yes, my qualifications for a zed moratorium include zed love stories, zed noirs, zed mysteries, zombie teen lit, zed westerns, zed dramas, zed comedies-of-error, zed with cance-AAAAAARGH! AAARGH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAArgh. Eugh.”
Where they could they followed they waterways. They drank from the streams, and the infected proved a little less swift at crossing than they.
One river, unmarked where they followed it, was their companion for two days. Light grasses wrapped round Joe’s legs. Lazy foam gathered at its quieter edges. “I’d be interested to know,” he once said carefully by its banks, “what you think of the modern church’s dependence on relationship language for our experience of God.”
“I don’t know about dependence,” said Brenda. “You’re so fucking aggressive about God.”
“Preference, whatever. Show me the scripture where it says, ‘A personal relationship with the proprietor – that’s how you get into the Kingdom of Heaven.’”
“Ephesians 5. The church as the bride of Christ.”
Joe grinned, his tongue between his teeth, and waved his head side-to-side. “Yeah, OK, OK! But it seems possible to me that it’s a very cultural, you know, twentieth century thing, helpful for a lot of people, but not necessarily the key to like understanding experience of God for everyone, and possibly even alienating for some?”
“I dunno Joe, God knows you so intimately … all knitted together all Joe-ish … it’d be almost rude of Him not to give you the opportunity to know Him.”
“God as creepy social media stalker.”
“Hmm.”
They picked up the M11 for half a day. Only two cars passed in that period, the first going away from Malton and the other towards it. As they were resting in a dip, they didn’t notice the second car in time to get a good look, and be sure if it wasn’t the same again. Lottie thought so. Still-flaming husks, and the welcoming victims of those accidents, shepherded them West across the countryside.
“I saw one where a spaceship explodes in orbit, raining billions of tonnes of toxic sludge onto the planet. Everyone north of the equator becomes one of them.”
“I saw one where the virus only works on adults. So it’s effectively kids and teenagers trying to survive in their world.”
“Praise Him! Praise Him! Praise Him! Praise Him!”
“I saw one where they rose and layed down again without ever committing a single act of violence.”
It is hardly possible to express the ardour of it. There was plenty of courage, and before long, plenty of certain chums sacrificing their lives to facilitate the continuance of other chums’ lives (in the considered opinions of the survivors). There is a piece of cinema which is important for anyone who burns to know, but know safely, from an armchair, what Lisa looked like in her final moments. It is the bit in the Coen brothers’ Fargo in which the character played by Steve Buschemi is shoved relentlessly into a wood chipper. If you look at the state of Steve Buschemi at the end of Coen brothers’ films, you will see there is a tendency to divide him into increasingly tiny pieces.
Their main themes were God and the infection. A peculiar manners developed within the transmission of practical information. Quite a lot was said very clearly but very indirectly. The pronouns “they” and “them” had unmistakeable reference.
“I saw one where a hot pink meteorite plunges from the sky in the middle of a drive-in movie. Any woman who smells the rock becomes one of them, except sex-crazed.”
“I saw one where the only thing worse than the corny ‘the dead take over’ concept, or the ‘the dead become a metaphor for consumerism’ trope, which would have been poignant, like, forty years ago, was its twee hipster equivalent. You know, the I-know-I’m-writing-a-story-about-the-dead-because-I’m-making-a-comment-about-the-dead-stories. Look, you can make a ‘comment’ about whatever you want, but the ultimate take-away is that in the course of doing so, you just wasted a considerable amount of your creative life for the sake of giving the world another goddamn zombie story. And yes, my qualifications for a zed moratorium include zed love stories, zed noirs, zed mysteries, zombie teen lit, zed westerns, zed dramas, zed comedies-of-error, zed with cance-AAAAAARGH! AAARGH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAArgh. Eugh.”
Where they could they followed they waterways. They drank from the streams, and the infected proved a little less swift at crossing than they.
One river, unmarked where they followed it, was their companion for two days. Light grasses wrapped round Joe’s legs. Lazy foam gathered at its quieter edges. “I’d be interested to know,” he once said carefully by its banks, “what you think of the modern church’s dependence on relationship language for our experience of God.”
“I don’t know about dependence,” said Brenda. “You’re so fucking aggressive about God.”
“Preference, whatever. Show me the scripture where it says, ‘A personal relationship with the proprietor – that’s how you get into the Kingdom of Heaven.’”
“Ephesians 5. The church as the bride of Christ.”
Joe grinned, his tongue between his teeth, and waved his head side-to-side. “Yeah, OK, OK! But it seems possible to me that it’s a very cultural, you know, twentieth century thing, helpful for a lot of people, but not necessarily the key to like understanding experience of God for everyone, and possibly even alienating for some?”
“I dunno Joe, God knows you so intimately … all knitted together all Joe-ish … it’d be almost rude of Him not to give you the opportunity to know Him.”
“God as creepy social media stalker.”
“Hmm.”
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