NOVEL EXCERPT: Richard, Jenny and a pair of Antediluvians

Eight minutes later, Richard returned. Jenny was etching something pornographic into the tabletop, scratching at the surface with a house key. She looked up, her gaze holding something devilish, almost diabolic. Richard grinned.

“Two Antediluvians, shaken and stirred.”

“Champion. Tell me, what goes into an Antediluvian? Does it require a sprinkling of arched nose and too-thick reading glasses? An artificial grey patch and stupid wizened curl?”

“Cherimoya, or custard apple. It's one of the only tropical fruits I can handle,” he said, gleaming.

“What do you mean? You don't like mangoes, papayas, pineapples?”

“Yes yes, of course they're fine. But anyway they've been normalised. They're no more tropical than palm trees, which are scattered round Torquay harbour like breadcrumbs, leading nowhere. But there are others, real fruits of the tropics which haven't been integrated into the British palette.”

“For example?”

“For example,” he leaned back. “Well. I'll tell you, but first, to your health.”

“To ours.” They clinked, drank, winced. There was an uncomfortable silence during which their eyes met.

“Richard?” Jenny's face had coiled into a mutated spring, darkening in three areas.

“Oh, dear,” he said, letting the brownish yellow liquid flow back into his glass. “This cherimoya's rotten. That's rotten luck.”

“It's awful, Richard. Awful. Don't take me back there, I won't allow it.” Her face was still distorted. He passed her a serviette to mop her chin, then went back to the bar. His thick wrists slid along the top, feeling the rough matte wood for signs of wear.

They were given lime daiquiris, a platter of carbohydrate-based snacks and half a dozen cans of Diet Coke as compensation. Reimbursement was impossible.

“The system doesn't allow it,” he told her.

“Bloody typical. What do you call these?”

“Mini Cheddars, only they're not. They're posher.” He threw two into his mouth, only one making its target. The other collided with his unshapely chin and made him blink.

“They're pretty good. Crunchy. And these?”

“Thins. Cheese thins, I suppose.”

“Anything that's called a Thin is bound to be disappointing.”

“You're right.”

“I know,” she said. “You were going to tell me about tropical fruits.”

“I was. There's one I can't handle, though I can't recall—” He stopped short. Was he about to recall? His mind had been washed clean of childhood remembrances and adult guilt, was untarnished by all the shame of a human life. He thought of tropical fruits.

“Richard?”

“Durian. Oh, my.” His eyes began to trickle. “I remember. I can't stand it. But how did I know I couldn't?” Some shred of long-term memory wedged deep in his cranium, jogged by the fact of a dodgy cherimoya? Was it so fundamental, so formative as to survive hibernation, to be roused by the sudden sensory reference?

“Durian?” she said. “I've heard of it. I heard a story about a kid.” Richard groaned. “My father used to work at a secondary school, before he died. He's dead now.”

“Secondary school.” His mouth opened and a spindle of saliva fell, hung an inch long from the corner of his mouth.

“Not far from here. They used to celebrate Ivory Day.” The words made Richard's stomach twist. “It was really archaic. They all dressed up in robes and hung chandeliers and draped insignias on sheets in the Great Hall, the Ivory Hall. Talk about bloody antediluvian.”

“Elizabeth,” he said.

“That's it. That was her first name. Christ, to think, all those wars. That's what constituted a hero. Can you believe it?”

“Unbelievable.”

“Yeah, well, what happened went down in the annals. They split the fruit in some creepy, pseudo-masonic ritual. Elder and a Minor, textbook weird. Poor soul chosen at random, gallumphs onto stage with his tail between his legs, two thousand eyes trained on him begging for a false move. Fucking kids. Kids love failure. So do adults, mind. We're barbaric. Richard?”

“Barbaric. You're right.”

“I know. So the kid gets up there and he's got this problem with his bowels. Nobody knows about it but him, maybe his parents. Actually I bet they do know but they've not let on that they know, leave him in the dark, neglect the sucker. Barbaric.” Jenny slurps the last of her daiquiri and instinctively cracks a can of Coke, cruising into the present tense. Her palette dries easily so she likes to have a drink to hand. She sips the fizzy drink, immediately regrets ridding her mouth of lime tang. Picks up the coupe and drains the dregs, craving citrus. Wonders if a daiquiri should even be served in a coupe. She's sure it isn't. What an establishment, mouldy fruit and misaligned glass/cocktail combinations. Muses on its origin – glass, not cocktail – remembers a classmate years ago telling her of Marie Antoinette's breast, sliding into glass in conical perfection. Perfection? She imagines her own breasts being cast into silicone, handled by masters of ergonomics wearing white gloves and marvelling at her body. Artful hands playing her like an instrument. Future generations drinking from her shapely bosom. Indirectly but still. The prissiness of it all. Buxom, delightful.

“Richard? Are you with me?”

“Yes.”

“Good, because it's just getting to the good bit.”

“The good bit? What happens next?” Richard reclined sideways to nearly horizontal, world spinning about him, his weight propped under one elbow. Drool formed an eel-like bridge between the left corner of his mouth and his forearm, slid like a snail-trail onto the table. Jenny barely noticed, she was thunder and lightning.

“Kid goes up there, knees trembling. He's heard of the durian, knows how bloody dangerous it is. How fucking stinky it is. And he's got this problem with his bowel whereby all is let loose if too pongy a pong strikes his nasal cavity. This really is a recipe for disaster, you appreciate.” Jenny slurped at her Coke.

“So the leader, elder, whatever masonic bogus he goes by, slices the fruit in fitting with tradition. Tradition, that's who's to blame here.” A car horn carried into the room via the open door. “He cuts it right in half, its scent wafts kidward. Kid balks, freaks, doesn't know what to do. What can he do? He's at rock bottom, there's nowhere he can go.”

“What happens?” Richard almost shouted, somehow counting on Jenny to rewrite this memory for him, as it flashed past his eyes in a foray of fleeting images. Dreadful, haunted images.

“He shits his pants, Richard. The whole room hears it. There's a deathly silence, you understand. The sound of knife through durian husk is practically amplified by the reverence in the room. It's a palpable silence broken only or at least first by the sound of knife through husk, then second and louder and more dreadfully by the sound of this kid passing gas, sludge, brown matter filling the space between his behind and the cloth of his pants. It's pathetic and tremendous and unbelievably tragic. I almost couldn't believe it.”

“I don't believe it.”

“It's true.”

“I don't believe you. You are telling me this.” His faced drained of all colour and he lost consciousness. He slumped further in the booth, his chin inching closer to the table until it rested grubbily on the off-black lacquer. He was out for a minute, like a light, like a candle.

It's going to be alright

Isabella and I enjoyed a braai, or barbecue. Non-Chinese, possibly Pakistani. Watermelon and seeded flatbreads, stuffed things and poor hogs hanging from their feet, stripped of their gonads. Gonads were laid out in shining baubles on tabletops, almost glistening in the purple sun.

We visited a contemporary art gallery in the south of the city. Are contemporary art galleries always works of contemporary art in themselves? This seems to be the case. I have not encountered one which runs contra to the rule. GOMA, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Tate Modern, that little one in Venice, the Guggenheim (haven't been, but from the outside!!), etc. I even took a couple of very contemporary photos of the contemporary art space, so as to accentuate and so on. The ceiling looked like stairs to me. The building had none.

Barely even altered the contrast. Look at her, glued to her nothingness in this expansive black-white-grey monolith myth of a hall, art in herself.

Something clicked recently, a sort of phenomenon which has come to light in my head in the last week or two. It's about the relationship between the old and new, those who do and those who document, the rugged and the pristine. There is a rift in so many ways - behavioural, habitual, maybe even ideological - and the natural response of the present generation, who perch on the edge of a thousands of years-old series of dynasties and handwritten histories and instead look upwards to the stars through a pixelated lens, is to ogle. Ogle and boggle. Because people doing things with their hands - that's fascinating, really. It is, especially if the current vogue is to cover up as much skin as possible so as to avoid getting any darker, play LOL (League of Legends) on your iPhone in order to pass the time, and go to the canteen three times a day for your sustenance. One student of mine said her boyfriend was ugly because he was too dark. They used to call him Blackie. How does one approach that?

So Sophie and I went to stay with one of my students in her hometown. We were invited and we accepted and it was a joyous thing. Her town (they call it a town because it has fewer than two million people or something, tower-blocks galore) is called Zhongjiang and is terrific, relatively calm, colourful and inhabited by fine people. We did some very Chinese things, which I will recount here.

First, Mathilda's favourite cafe, complete with school friends and even a sun, which appeared out of nowhere. Guess how much taller I am than them. Shots which better illustrate this to follow.

We were treated SO well that we almost felt guilty. One big family dinner (big like eight on one table and eight on another) was tofu, beans, chillies, ribs, two soups, hot aubergine with veg and other gubbins, cold aubergine with spicy gubbins, pickled cabbage, fatty meat on mauve kindling (unidentifiable & I didn't ask), and the pièce de résistance, a ginormous bowl of seafood, incl. crab, mussel, clam, prawn, other & other.

Family meal #2 (similar crowd) was traditional Sichuanese hot-pot with ingredients incl. taro, potato, see-you-tomorrow mushrooms (und I did), cow stomach, various meats, chunks o' fish, big green leaves like pak choi or similar, and more. Everyone has a small bowl with their own bespoke combination of oils, parsley, spring onion and chilli. It is great fun, and we had our own private room!

It left us feeling bloated and squishy-faced.

But merry, and that's the important thing, ey chaps?

Meals at home were similar, though marginally less opulent. Green beans and mapo doufu, egg and tomato soup, so on so on. M's mum is a qulinary queen and made us feel tremendously welcome. She even facilitated the making of dumplings (jiăo ze), which were boiled and steamed and let off a lustrous honk when they were done. Here we are in a dumpling frenzy. Frenz in a friendsy.

I suppose, in life, in everything, there are those who got it and those who don't got it. In this, in the construction of dumplings, I currently don't. There are artists, dough-deft and unimaginably suave thereabouts, popping out twirls like nobody's business. I, by contrast, am a rookie, newbie, fuddle-handed loser. But, I say, do they all taste the same? Yes I believe they do.

Much taller. A head and maybe shoulders taller.

It actually becomes a hindrance in social interaction. Kids look up at me with horror in their eyes, stricken as if by a demon or monstrous spectre. They scurry to their parents with tears wetting their irises. What am I to do?

The citytown of Zhongjiang is watched over by a North Tower in the north, and a South Tower. In the south. Must I spell everything out?

Ascent of the former made us giddy with altitude, or just excited to be alive. For what is one day but a continuation of the last? And what is life but a sequence of graduating days? Blessed are those who have foregone Chronos in favour of Kairos.

The shaoyaohua, or peony flowers, bloom annually and with notable gusto. Fields awash with white and pink specks, wonderful, resplendent, beauti-- and trampled by keen photographers, eager to make their mark in the cyberverse.

I, for one, think they could be a band. Wistful, lackadaisical, either carefree or careless (we love that in a band, don't we, isn't it cool).

This was taken at the top of I think the South Tower but I may have got them confused. Tradition here is to take a red ribbon (different ribbons have different inscriptions which in turn signify different things and in turn mean different consequences for those for whom you do the thing), write upon it a message, dedicate it to a person or persons, walk to the top of the wee mountain, up all the steps, sweat as you go, walk three times around the actual tower clockwise, then three times anti-clockwise, and finally tie the ribbon around any low-hanging branch of any tree available. The trees are quite replete with red ribbons, let me tell you.

I took, I wrote, I dedicated, I walked, I sweated, I orbited thrice one way and thrice the other, I tied. I sent positive thoughts and wavy vibrations. Did you receive them? Perhaps you know who you are.

Then, at night, we played ninja under neon lights.

And later, mahjang with a swish electronic table.

There's another thing which clicked a while ago but which hasn't come up naturally in relation to any of the pictures. But I guess I shouldn't be bound by pictorial representations of things: words can paint pictures, though inefficiently (1000 vs. 1, I'll take the 1). This has to do with the Chinese way of utilising the land. It is different, or 'ours' is. Ours? Who are we? What is us?

As there are 1.3 billion people here, pragmatism and utility are first priorities in a lot of processes. Canteens are enormous and churn out vast quantities of food, very cheap, for hoards of hungry hippos. Wastage is wastage, but the children are fed. Everything is made in order to accommodate hundreds or thousands or millions of people. The subway carriages are bigger than London's; the roads are wider, have more lanes; local small-time bakeries are constantly constantly constantly producing loaves, and constantly constantly constantly have queues; towerblocks are in perpetual construction, popping up like Lego tenements; in the outskirts of the city, gigantic roads are mid-way through being built, and jut out at the sky 15 floors up in order to one day ferry people upon people upon people.

And the land: if it can be changed to better suit its purpose, it is. Whereas in England or France or for that matter most of Europe, you'll nip around and see mostly large flat or hillside fields either growing maize or sunflowers or hemp or lying fallow or being pastoral with grazing animals etc etc., the actual lay of the land existing in its own way, in Sichuan much of the land is shaped and sculpted in order to suit the needs of the country, the people of the country. The terrain is constantly being redesigned, reshaped, remoulded, in a bizarre and at times saddening demonstration of power of machine over nature. Seeing this process mid-way is the most strange: the land sits bare like a big brown pudding being carved up. Gradient is no good, so hills become steps, and vehicles need access, so mudded highways are scraped into the soil, laid over so that the system is practicable. 

I don't know. I guess it's completely normal. And it fits with the unabashed nature of social interactions - there are no political or societal reservations (as a whole, anyway) about redesigning the land they inhabit, if it thereby becomes more effective, more productive, more utilisable. It is a triumph of change, progression or something, in a country heavily preoccupied with its own ancient history. I find it interesting.

*

Coming for you

squeaky faced

Every day

cut and paste

Weighing up

less speed more haste

London town 

where I was graced.

**

Big love goes out to my main gal on this day, entering a new gorgeous year and taking off in more dimensions than can be articulated. ♡