Anyway...
Prompt 1: Three Objects found on the Bedsit Floor
They're all on the same floor, almost within touching distance of each other, and the first thing I can touch is
I: Hovis Medium Soft White bread...
...bought last night coming back from Em's place, a strangely melancholic remnant of yesterday's hangover. I spent most of yesterday sleeping. There was a short aborted trip into town; sunlight, cold-warmth, spring ghosts, those just-remembered January contradictions. Back at Em's house, oddly exhausted, I fell into a deep luxurious sleep. I woke sometime in the still early darkness, feeling that icy melancholy of the last hours of the weekend on me. Fragments of school days circle me like wolves; the top 40 on the radio, recording Talk Talk and Adam Ant and Olivia Newton John on my mono tape player. Watching it get dark outside, up the hill to the Black Woods. School hanging over the day and this new night time.
A gallows proposition.
After cups of tea and a dinner of leek and potato soup I headed off to face the strange and regretful apocalypse of Sunday night. The people smoking sat outside the Western Road pubs seemed somewhat muted. Blue cigarette smoke in the quickly cooling air.
Sunday night feels middle-aged, still melancholy at the passing of youth, -the optimistic potential of teenage Fridays, the twenty-something promise of Saturdays, the reflective, serene thirty-something Sunday mornings.
Sunday night is all those things that could have been.
The newsagents were all bright with magazines and pasties and too many things to buy for dinner I couldn't decide on.
A loaf of bread the only thing that made sense.
I ate toast while watching the TV.
...with the thumb of my right hand on the bread I can stretch my little finger to touch...
II: 'Brain Storm Comix' number one, 1975
...bought back in the autumn of last year. 50 pence from one of the charity shops down London Road, twenty five years after it was first published. I paid 15 pence more than it was when it was first published.
Those Saturdays last autumn were strange, squeezed in between the morning shift at work and whatever I did that night.. I didn't read the comic then, not until this morning (or 'comix' the 'x' denoting it was aimed at adults rather than children) when I sat in the gloomy light of Monday morning - an early shower meant an hour to kill before work. Pulled this out from somewhere. I can't remember where now. From the pile of books under the kettle-table? from the strange dead space between the record player I've not switched on for years and the wall behind my bed?
Strange remnant from the hippy era. Chester P Hackenbrush distills a variety of drugs into one single pill, washes down the whole lot with hash beer. Goes on a 'trip', meets the 'knights of hallucination' and confronts the ultimate truth of his own reality, 'a character acting out a part... black ink on white paper'.
There's one picture of the eponymous hero staring out at the viewer, and, to another character talks about the viewer -myself in this case- '...its a huge form - a figure staring down at us... is it God?'.
Not even sunrise, not really, and mistaken for a god by a drawing in a comic, or comix, that was 25 years old.
...it's behind me, I reach for it with my left hand, a book, a copy of
III: 'Ghosts of Cornwall' by Peter Underwood.
...bought over the autumn of 2006 on a trip to Cornwall to see my parents.
I've left it open, face down on the floor. What was I reading? Why did I want to save this particular haunting? Lets have a look...
'Roche Rock, a medieval hermitage with a brooding and sinister atmosphere'.
There is a photograph.
The ruined walls of the building do look sinister. A foreboding edifice. Actually, flicking through the text, it does seem a fairly interesting haunting. There is a tale about a woman, who, on a sunny afternoon encountered a strangely hostile atmosphere, of reports of scuttling shadows that people say may be the ghost of a leper, a monk, perhaps even a smuggler.
Ghost stories are always more effective without a real reason for them.
You can find these books almost anywhere.They were cheaply printed, with black and white photographs and bad pencil drawings. When I was a kid they would be in the gift shop of every castle, every tourist country village, every 'open to visitors' manor house we would go to on the Saturdays and Sundays of childhood. Strange childhood remnants. I've got these 'ghost books' from Bristol, Devon, Scotland (of course) and Kent, for some reason. My favourite is 'Scottish Ghost Stories'. The first book of ghost stories I ever bought. Not the original, I lost that years ago.
That drawing that accompanied chapter two the Attic in Pringle's Mansion, Edinburgh, still gives me the shivers now. Or Chapter three the Sallow Faced Woman. Oh yes. Of course. Chapter Thirteen. The Floating Head. When I was seven years of, I convinced myself that this floating head was hiding in the cupboard in my room. In my overworked imagination the floating 'head' became the far more terrifying floating skull. Over those endless summer nights in Scotland, I would pray to whatever god might be listening to not let the floating skull get me this night or any other night.
The Floating Skull always seemed ridiculous in daylight though. In a childhood marked by ghost-hunting as other kids played football, the Floating Skull always remained a somewhat private haunting.
They sell these ghost books at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton city centre. I never bought one though. Maybe because buying a book aimed at tourists in a city you live in would just feel wrong somehow.
Or maybe I would be afraid of what chapter thirteen might contain.
I'm sat on the floor, as well as the three objects around me. No connection between them, apart from the fact they were all on the floor of my bedsit on the second Monday of my 39th January. All objects hold memories, and all memories are ghosts.
I do a new thing, deliberately.
I place the bread on the floor to the left of my laptop, and now I place Brain Storm Comix number 1 on the bread and Ghosts of Cornwall on top of that.
An absurd tower of things, and I only do this because no-one will have connected these three objects before.
