Issue 2: August 2003

Martyn Crucefix | Katy Evans-Bush | Alan Jenkins | Tim Turnbull | Julian Turner

TIM TURNBULL

Read Roddy Lumsden's introduction.

Lullaby for an Alcoholic

Put down your head and flutter into troubled sleep.
Dream parachuting soldiers yanked across the sky

on sudden winds. Fall into darkness, bored on trains
by blethering strangers, or in your bed as from the street

a fire engine dopplers past. Pull up the gritty sheets
and count a million sheep or more. Imagine waves

exploding on the pier or make a mental sketch
of a silent kite cartwheeling down an empty beach.

Wake up on a sofabed, a silver curry tray
set on the floor, a coat wrapped tight about your head.

Surface from beneath an unfamiliar eiderdown,
a warm body beside you and the stink of dried-on sweat

or stir in a dusty meadow on a summer afternoon
and lick your lips and catch a little, sour taste of death.

Stranded in Sub-Atomica

After four years of wrangling over unpaid rent the housing co-op,
      the one he helped found
in the seventies, obtained an eviction order and repossessed.
      He went, owing thousands,
back to Sussex, where his mum and dad cleared out upstairs,
      aired his old bed
and, despite the disruption to their twenty year routine, made him
      as welcome as they could.

Vic and Jill, who followed him into the flat, had to hire a skip
      to shift the shit he'd left.
There were piles of comics, old newspapers with articles circled,
      some with pages hacked out —
behind the settee the missing pieces, filed in cornflake packets —
      a pamphlet biography
of Rosa Luxembourg, copies of Green Anarchist, assorted tracts
      from the WRP,

A Nietzsche Reader, stacks of PG Tips boxes which leaked residue
      like bracken spores
when moved and gave a deep brown dusting to the work tops
      and the grease-caked floor.
At the back was an exercise bike, unused, and supermarket bags
      stuffed with paper and rags
and heaped waist high and supermarket bags full of rubbish and more
      supermarket bags.

His parents watched him eat his meals and hide behind the Times.
      Attempts at communication
tailed off into embarrassed silence. His mum and dad held hands as he
      retired to the bedroom.
The flat stank and there were insects, insect larvae, wood-lice and slugs.
      Jill went down the shops
to buy disinfectant, rubber gloves, heavy-duty bin liners and bleach.
      For ten hours, nonstop,

they sifted, sorted through and binned his worldly goods. He sat
      and stared across the Downs
waiting for dark. There was a record player which worked, except that
      the speakers were blown,
and clothes among the rubbish, which leaked onto the clothes, and more
      rubbish in the cupboards
and mouse crap on the cooker and there were notes — scribbled notes —
      endless scribbled notes —

minutes of meetings that detailed who said what to whom, on what night
      and what they really meant,
drafts of letters of complaint, accusations to associates of unspecified slights,
      filed but never sent
and character assassinations of everyone he knew, presumably for reference.
      In short, documents
recording every nuance of his descent into paranoia and indifference,
      were bagged and burnt.

By midnight all that remained were lousy carpets, a table, two chairs
      and on the back wall,
in coloured marker pen and thick wax crayon, lines, loops and patterns,
      messages scrawled
in an erratic hand, drawings of people labelled with their names and crimes,
      broken hearts,
runes, animals, misquotes from the Tao. A cross between a Venn diagram
      and an astrologers chart

it described the universe revolving round, set in a childish, yellow sun,
      a giant ME.
Vic went to the car to fetch the wine and glasses, brushes and emulsion.
      In Sussex he
shrank back into his chair as the moon was covered up by heavy cloud.
      The couple viewed
the mural for a while, traced the lines with finger tips, then set to work
      painting it out.

In Sub-Atomica the princess struggled in the clutches of the arch-fiend
      Doctor Doom
and Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, threw himself into the fray against
      the villain's goons,
hurling balls of fire. He must reverse the evil Doctor's shrinking-ray
      or be marooned
forever. Somewhere outside Brighton dawn's first light was filtering
      into an empty room.