You again

By John Saul

Should I sit here employing the cut-up method only to discover I’m labelled one in a school viz. dada school dada mama lala and only because I’ve said I’m employing some method even if I’m not comma there I am in a school a school not so much of porpoises more of authors scribbling away back there in the distance the thing is I should never have said method never used the word fragment it gets a person into all sorts of bother e.g. dada bother, mistype the last word and brother is the next thing to stick, and as for brothers: there’s such a thing as a manuscript decorated with jewellery and brothers which is all very well but where does it get me, and where am I going, should have kept my mouth shut, eyes shut, now next time I look it will still be dada as well as fauve futurist vorticist or just plain difficult difficult prose well bananas to that, bahnhof is the word in this part of Europe, the thing is will I ever get over you it would be stupid to die still not having got over you, if there is any point to undertaking anything I should at least successfully get over you so as not to bow out on a low note, can you hear it, surely, thick piano wire note, dark smoking quaver, ragged and grubby on the stave, lowest E-flat there is, a smutty picture on a ledger line down the bottom of the page, but why is bowing out so difficult you are quand même not perfect in contrast to, say, a ginkgo leaf, the thrill of an orgasm and on the subject of what is perfect let me not forget Turkish rice pudding what a cuisine, in some respects the world might have been better under the Ottomans, one more quand même, you were partly perfect so a contrast even to the virginia creeper through the window to the south now-that-it’s-turned-red, another thing is, once I’m dead, what happens to the not having got over you, if you ask me I reckon it disappears along with everything else, if for a moment I can state my position on this, one of my positions, after you or I cease to exist it’s not us that’s gone, even if we have, it’s everything else, the virginia creeper goes, the windowpane goes, the floor gives way, gone is the southerly aspect, goodbye, that archipelago of clouds in parts so velvet, the smell of rosemary in the bushes down the road, tschuss they say at day’s end around the container terminals in the lower Elbe, before the beer cans come into play, likewise tschuss upon the apple orchards of the old land, as whole continents of people darken into nothing, gone, every last manuscript decorated with jewellery and brothers, next door’s acacia, the wailing accompanying the world’s wars, every last cruise liner, the lights go out on who knows what, the cantilever arrangements for the tunnel I worked on towards the end of youth, the ventilation shafts, bridges and roadside laybys, another era, the protests gathered on the fields, goodbye, I’m glad I’ve cleared that up a pat on the back is due and many high-denomination banknotes actually, a reward, lord gimme a string of limousines to carry the guards with their elbows leaning on the cases, after their bodyguard duties of walking down some boulevard Obama-style as I take the lot to the bank, if one is to be found, so as to turn the notes into a number, stop their decorous papers vortexing in the passing squalls, I was about to say I wish you’d cut my hair but I remember you did cut it once out on the patio I took my shirt off you didn’t comment a single thing and yet your thighs brushed against me at stomach height, a motion which could well have been saying a sentence of its own, words and grammar in the language of sex, for my part after checking my forearms which you liked to stroke so as to calm the fine hairs into alignment, remember, after having been directed not to move I looked down at the paving and one or two flowerpots, mysteriously one had just earth in it, I could hardly catch your expressions on account of your direction not to move but I soon I could swear your mind was far away, my best guess sensed it dwelling on the day’s open-air market, you are in your element in the queues there, haggling with a smile, settling only for the best, did you pick me out this way, prob not, back on the patio the last thing we’d talked about before you fetched the scissors was the word zucchini, coupled with the beauty of the name Gaza, Gaza City, as for us personally, relationshiply, we should have talked more you said, and said again later, after the scissors had rested long silent weeks in the drawer, and weeks more growth of hair, you said as much as we were breaking apart like an iceberg cut in two, I think of it as icy because at the other end of the long-distance phone-line I collapsed to the so-called Arctic oak of the living-room floor, well I would wouldn’t I, I loved you so much, one person loving another: a dubious situation got to give it its due, mind you after an hour on the floor and the tears glacial but still not turned solid in that Arctic environment—speaking educationally, that Pole Daniel Fahrenheit from Gdańsk did point out liquids could stay liquid below their freezing points—indeed in their progress the tears were feeling somewhat sticky on my cheeks, so at last after much ticking of a nearby clock, the big one on the wall in a cream frame, after I was no longer irritated that there is no such tree as an oak in the Arctic, it really was time to get up again, lying down equals defeat, I’ve moved on so far from there you wouldn’t believe, I don’t believe it myself, but a year later I dared cook that risotto, remember the Baltic Mills, we learned the recipe from the home of good risotto, Gateshead, it was risotto or scrambled egg and the egg so sticks to everything, it’s the chicken’s revenge, I wonder how you are but will go on wondering since there is zero contact between us, I dread to think you’ve been cutting some other hair, shirt off, out on the patio, wild music emanating from the living room, drowning the snips of the scissors, the unnecessary patting, I got up off the floor once I’d found myself looking at blemishes in the wood close to my head, I scratched at one and it wouldn’t change, wouldn’t improve itself, it did occur to me you as well would understand the need to do something about this nick in the wood, dirt in the blond of it, we had so much in common, the risotto in Gateshead for example, down in a basement under the Baltic Mills, I even remember which way I was facing at the table, in respect to the entrance door that is, which you were facing, I had the kitchen hatch in the distance, the sort of thing everyone can remember even if they can’t put a name to that friend who last cut their hair, I need water, a lot of which has passed under a lot of bridges and back again since the phone call, gimme water, drinking water is all right even if the taps are the wrong way around, I can’t say I wasn’t warned, Laska also a Pole said at the time of installation most people put their taps this way round so their arms don’t have to cross over when they need a drink, nonsense I said, I’d like them this way, but he was right, Poles often know best despite geography being a clear handicap, historically at least, as I see it they will with kitchens and bathrooms leading the charge overtake the British any day now, touchy subject, let me just say they have all their taps around the right way and that’s a good start isn’t it, any day now it will finally be okay to leave aside that other talk, about Danzig versus Gdańsk, to move on, as Chuck Berry said you’d better do, you probably have, in from the patio and into the kitchen maybe the bedroom or just down the road to the concert hall, nothing is as full of emotion as opera they say, music coming from nothing and firing everyone up, tip a little music on the mountain-side and a volcano starts, spill it on the floor and your house is gone before the hoses soak the ashes in some river water, but before I move on I will be harping over the volcanoes, you see an author who was South American in more than origin said he and those around him had the volcanoes and earthquakes not to mention giant chillis rivers the size of oceans while over in these parts all people had in the way of excitements was the aurora borealis and pet bulldogs and such, tame lives, the idea of a good time around is here is to open an old wardrobe or put on a paper hat, so you said once after we had been drinking thick red wine, I put my shirt back on and although we could have stopped and kissed you said it was more important that you put away the scissors first, then you were gone a long time and the haircut had fallen well into the past, what’s up I tried saying to which you said Nothing and I said Are you sure you said Really I asked Really? you came back with Of course, my fear is this may be the way robots talk to one another, however they may be feeling at the time, it was reasonable after all for you to discard me, I wonder what the postman would think, he knows what’s going on, just from the backs of the envelopes, I can say one thing: when you desire someone and they walk away, towards the bathroom, say, it is the strangest feeling, much on a par with eyeing up a lemon dessert to find it tastes really cheap and chemical, or like picking up a book believing the text is decorated with jewellery and brothers, but going back to you again, by now you’ll have joined up with another and I am jealous, the feeling arrived out of nowhere, plunked itself down, there, in that arrival lounge of the soul, and I’m stuck with the concrete slabs, a dour place, how I wish to be amid groves of apricot and pomegranate and walnut trees in bloom, to end on another phrase I cut out from somewhere and there it is, with the jewellery and the brothers, scissors and risottos, and as ever you again.

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John Saul grew up in Liverpool and now lives in London, UK. Widely published, his short fiction has appeared in the Stinging Fly, Dalkey Archive's Best European Fiction and (twice in) Best British Short Stories. Awaiting its first north American buyer, a fourth collection, The Book of Joys, came out in 2024. He has a website at www.johnsaul.co.uk