HETEROTOPIAS

(continued)

 

 

A multi-coloured dream. The same every time she faints. She is a fainter because her blood pressure is low. The fainting dream is beautiful. She falls into a world where she feels safe and loved. Anxiety disappears. Time does not exist because when she comes round it feels as if she has been dreaming for hours. The dream unfolds a whole life. She and her daughter smile and laugh. A street party with neighbours who know her name. Children playing on the street. Food shared. A little girl in a wheelchair hands out balloons. She has to work the next day but she likes her job. Money is not a problem. Her home is secure. She knows all this somehow because the dream unfurls like a scroll, all the days are present at once. The sorrows are manageable here.   

 

She wakes up on the damp lino, in front of the fridge. Silverfish coil and uncoil in the space where the lino ends and the dirty floor under the fridge begins. For a moment she has no idea where she is or why she is lying down. The back of her head is sore. The dream dissolves. Her daughter is crying out for her in the other room. She stands up, slowly, reluctantly.

 

In the cupboard over the fridge there is a bottle of children’s Neurofen, all but empty. She adds a little water and shakes it. The warmth of the dream fades and is replaced by the familiar cold hollowness in her chest. 

 

 

5. Rites and Purifications

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A man. He wakes one morning and feels a lightness. A plan has formed. His wife and children are sleeping. Hoarse cries of his cattle in the field beyond his house. They are hungry. Dawn mist floats above the grass. Ghostly greys.

 

 

 

A gun. Blood. One hundred dead cattle. A man, skull shattered. A woman and her children bereft.

 

 

Do you want a story that stitches all these elements together? Pretty, poignant sentences. Something to paint the scene in beauty and pathos. His hand on the neck of the bullock. Warm hide, smell of the cud. Tears burning his cheeks. Shame welling up in him that he is standing here, about to do this.

 

 

Or a story that spells out how the state, our state, has sold us off, so many serfs, to the highest bidders. Our helplessness. An explanation of how the corporate control of money and our resources has ruined us? 

 

 

Money is too dirty for art and fiction. Write about sex and beauty. A sweet little redemptive story. Smooth over the fissures, the blood, class, money, the truth of how we are forced to live now. 

 

 

6. Perfect Other Places

 

Peter’s legs ache from sitting on the damp, greasy pavement. The wet weather makes people mean and Tuesdays are the worse than Mondays. On a Tuesday people are hate-filled and in a hurry. There’s only enough for a coffee and a scone from a whole morning’s work. Peter thinks of it as work because he hates begging, the monotony of it. Long ago the shame of it receded because the way he sees it, everyone is either a beggar or a slave. 

 

Lunchtime showers drive the crowds off the Boardwalk. He has a good waterproof coat with a hood that has saved his life this year. If he could get his hands on a pair of waterproof trousers he’d be like a pig in shit. He’s working on it. There’s a nice-looking volunteer, new, who likes to look out for Peter. She’s good at getting him some basics like new socks and the odd t-shirt. Sometimes he thinks she might even be paying for stuff out of her own pocket but that doesn’t bother him. She has expensive skin. Her name is – no he can never remember it, something exotic, almost Russian, or maybe one of those old Irish names they keep coming up with. You can tell she’s from good stock, probably a farming background before her father hit the big-time and found a pot of gold soliciting in a solicitors firm, which he then bought out or set up his own business doing legal pimping for the rich with the whore of the law.

 

Sometimes Peter gets a kick out of himself and his imagination. When he was a child his teachers told him he had a great imagination which really meant he was good liar. But he always had a way with words – and that’s useful now. Almost as useful as good manners.

 

Aoibhinn. That’s her name. He has her number on his phone but he keeps forgetting her name so he couldn’t find it in his contacts list. She probably shouldn’t have given him her number but for some reason she’s taken a shine to him.    

 

The good coat came from the religious nuts who stalk the streets looking for converts. Peter went to a few meetings and smiled a lot, and got the coat, some thermal underwear and great pair of white trainers out of them. Not designer gear but good, solid stuff.

 

The streets are more and more crowded now. He sees more kids begging and homeless again, competing with the veterans. Eastern European guys without a shred of dignity because they know they’ll never get home again. Vicious fights in the parks. Peter is a loner but it’s hard to avoid people. Aoibhinn thinks he’s smart. Gives him newspapers and books which he reads and then tears up for bedding. He’s old enough to have seen it all. The same lies and mistakes.

 

It feels worse now though. Disgust in people’s eyes. A different type of hardness in the welfare workers – no more leniency or bending the rules. New laws making everything more difficult, harder to survive. Talk of banning begging. The end of the end for all his ilk. Will they send out vans to round him and his friends up? They do it in other cities, other places, other times. Dump them in a prison. Dog eat dog.  

 

Now that would kill him.

 

He recalls a phrase from the religious meeting. ‘This will be the Age to end all Ages.’  They might be right. This time. 

 

 

Note: inspired by Michel Foucault’s essay Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias, 1967. All photographs, expect the last one, taken by the author, on an old Nokia phone.