Nice facade.
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Just one last jab
Banksy Identity Revealed In Self Portrait
(Reuters, Bristol, UK) Art revolutionary Banksy, whose identity has hitherto been a matter of massive public speculation, has finally chosen to reveal himself through a stunningly accurate self portrait. "Yeah, it's all like a big laugh really, I've been drawing me self portrait everywhere fer years. Sort of mockin' an' tauntin' me oppressors an' them Palestines who wants me locked up," the artist said in an official statement yesterday.
I love you Brooker
Supposing ... Subversive genius Banksy is actually rubbish
Charlie Brooker
Friday September 22, 2006
The Guardian
Here's a mystery for you. Renegade urban graffiti artist Banksy is clearly a guffhead of massive proportions, yet he's often feted as a genius straddling the bleeding edge of now. Why? Because his work looks dazzlingly clever to idiots. And apparently that'll do.
Banksy first became famous for his stencilled subversions of pop-culture images; one showed John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson in a famous pose from Pulp Fiction, with their guns replaced by bananas. What did it mean? Something to do with the glamourisation of violence, yeah? Never mind. It looked cool. Most importantly, it was accompanied by the name "BANKSY" in huge letters, so everyone knew who'd done it. This, of course, is the real message behind all of Banksy's work, despite any appearances to the contrary.
Take his political stuff. One featured that Vietnamese girl who had her clothes napalmed off. Ho-hum, a familiar image, you think. I'll just be on my way to my 9 to 5 desk job, mindless drone that I am. Then, with an astonished lurch, you notice sly, subversive genius Banksy has stencilled Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald either side of her.
Wham! The message hits you like a lead bus: America ... um ... war ... er ... Disney ... and stuff. Wow. In an instant, your worldview changes forever. Your eyes are opened. Staggering away, mind blown, you flick v-signs at a Burger King on the way home. Nice one Banksy! You've shown us the truth, yeah?
As if that wasn't irritating enough, Banksy's vague, pseudo-subversive preaching is often accompanied by a downright embarrassing hardnut swagger. His website is full of advice to other would-be graffiti bores, like: "be aware that going on a mission drunk out of your head will result in some truly spectacular artwork and at least one night in the cells". Woah, man - the cells!
He goes on to explain that "real villains" think graffiti is pointless - not because he wants you to agree with them, but because he wants you to know he's mates with a few tough-guy criminal types. Coz Banksy's an anarchalist what don't respect no law, innit?
One of his most imbecilic daubings depicts a monkey wearing a sandwich board with "lying to the police is never wrong" written on it. So presumably Ian Huntley was right then, Banksy? You absolute thundering backside.
Recently, our hero's made headlines by sneaking a dummy dressed in Guantánamo rags into Disneyland (once again fearlessly exposing Mickey Mouse's disgusting war criminal past), and defacing several hundred copies of Paris Hilton's new album (I haven't heard her CD, but I'm willing to bet it's far superior to Blur's godawful Think Tank, a useless bumdrizzle of an album, whose artwork was done by Banksy - presumably he spray-painted it on a brick and hurled it through EMI's window, yeah?).
Right now you can see some of Banksy's life-altering acts of genius for yourself at his LA exhibition Barely Legal (yeah? Yeah!), including a live elephant painted to blend in with some gaudy wallpaper. This apparently represents "the big issues some people choose to ignore" - ie pretty much anything from global poverty to Aids. But not, presumably, the fat-arsed, berk-pleasing rubbishness of Banksy. We're all keeping schtum about that one.
Charlie Brooker
Friday September 22, 2006
The Guardian
Here's a mystery for you. Renegade urban graffiti artist Banksy is clearly a guffhead of massive proportions, yet he's often feted as a genius straddling the bleeding edge of now. Why? Because his work looks dazzlingly clever to idiots. And apparently that'll do.
Banksy first became famous for his stencilled subversions of pop-culture images; one showed John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson in a famous pose from Pulp Fiction, with their guns replaced by bananas. What did it mean? Something to do with the glamourisation of violence, yeah? Never mind. It looked cool. Most importantly, it was accompanied by the name "BANKSY" in huge letters, so everyone knew who'd done it. This, of course, is the real message behind all of Banksy's work, despite any appearances to the contrary.
Take his political stuff. One featured that Vietnamese girl who had her clothes napalmed off. Ho-hum, a familiar image, you think. I'll just be on my way to my 9 to 5 desk job, mindless drone that I am. Then, with an astonished lurch, you notice sly, subversive genius Banksy has stencilled Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald either side of her.
Wham! The message hits you like a lead bus: America ... um ... war ... er ... Disney ... and stuff. Wow. In an instant, your worldview changes forever. Your eyes are opened. Staggering away, mind blown, you flick v-signs at a Burger King on the way home. Nice one Banksy! You've shown us the truth, yeah?
As if that wasn't irritating enough, Banksy's vague, pseudo-subversive preaching is often accompanied by a downright embarrassing hardnut swagger. His website is full of advice to other would-be graffiti bores, like: "be aware that going on a mission drunk out of your head will result in some truly spectacular artwork and at least one night in the cells". Woah, man - the cells!
He goes on to explain that "real villains" think graffiti is pointless - not because he wants you to agree with them, but because he wants you to know he's mates with a few tough-guy criminal types. Coz Banksy's an anarchalist what don't respect no law, innit?
One of his most imbecilic daubings depicts a monkey wearing a sandwich board with "lying to the police is never wrong" written on it. So presumably Ian Huntley was right then, Banksy? You absolute thundering backside.
Recently, our hero's made headlines by sneaking a dummy dressed in Guantánamo rags into Disneyland (once again fearlessly exposing Mickey Mouse's disgusting war criminal past), and defacing several hundred copies of Paris Hilton's new album (I haven't heard her CD, but I'm willing to bet it's far superior to Blur's godawful Think Tank, a useless bumdrizzle of an album, whose artwork was done by Banksy - presumably he spray-painted it on a brick and hurled it through EMI's window, yeah?).
Right now you can see some of Banksy's life-altering acts of genius for yourself at his LA exhibition Barely Legal (yeah? Yeah!), including a live elephant painted to blend in with some gaudy wallpaper. This apparently represents "the big issues some people choose to ignore" - ie pretty much anything from global poverty to Aids. But not, presumably, the fat-arsed, berk-pleasing rubbishness of Banksy. We're all keeping schtum about that one.
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Live from the kitchen
I've offically moved into the kitchen of our basment cavern, along with Pyjamas. Pleasingly, my whole bed fits in there. Never had a room mate before but PJs is pretty good. Shame about the regular hammering that starts at 7.30am.
Thursday, September 14, 2006
Plotting
I've been trying to come up with a proper crime thriller plot for a few days, amongst trying to salvage records and trainers from the sewage flood (see above.) It's really difficult, and has made me realise how forward thinking the great detective fiction writers are, and how much vision they have. It's brain-hurting to try and think the entire story through.
The picture that looks like the kind of place they find emaciated kidnap victims is the inside of the weird cavern at the end of my room. And, there at the far end, is the sewage drain. Nice huh?
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
The Tape 2
New ending for this...
She’d made the tape a long long time ago, and Christ did she regret it. It’d got to the point where all she could think of was the thing, and the threat it represented to her happy, normal life. What if it appeared, the archetypal bolt out of the blue, as some kind of blackmail demand? Everything seemed to end up on the internet these days, what if it made it up there and her husband saw it, or one of her boys?
She’d forgotten about it for a long time. It had barely registered as a part of her past. But somehow, she’d gone from being the young, dangerous kind of person that could have done such a thing to being a secure, married adult with children to whom the thought was abhorrent.
She’d remembered it on holiday. They’d been on the kind of horrible fucking package tour she’d sworn never to go on again. He’d found the ‘bargain’ online, and talked her into it, telling her that any time away in the sun would be better than nothing. They’d wound up in a dirty white high-rise overlooking a sullied beach that made her feel sad.
One the second day, she woke up early and walked along the seafront. She passed an impossibly long complex of whitewashed residents apartments decaying in the sun, the swimming pools long emptied and containing only brown tide marks and rotten leaves. Each tiny apartment was exactly the same in dimension, but they varied wildly in appearance. Somehow, the ones with the small, lonely flower boxes under the sills were more tragic than the dirty, ill kempt majority.
Before long she had turned back, feeling as she usually did only on Sunday afternoons and wanting an early drink to dull her acute melancholy. As she returned to the hotel, walking up the path that lead from the beach to the swimming pool, she heard the unwelcome, multi-tonal sound of a large gathering of people; yelps, shouts and shrieks filling the air.
She rounded the sharp foliage of the pale green bushes raised above a red-brick wall to the side of the path, and saw a large girl with generous, bouncing bare breasts running alongside the pool, covered in some sort of white froth and bellowing loudly. At the other end of the courtyard there stood twenty or thirty teenagers, laughing hysterically as a boy with a lopsided, died blonde hairdo tried to catch the girl, finally dragging her into the water and attempting to press his mouth to her chest. A grinning holiday rep in a green shirt was holding a silver, glinting video camera and steadily following the action.
For a very brief second she felt a defensive rush of indignation as the red-faced girl splashed around the shallow end of the pool, and then she felt the sudden upward pull of nausea in her stomach. She was taken aback by her own memory. Why had she never considered it with such a sense of shame as she felt now? Drained, she had taken the lift back to their hotel room, and had barely stopped thinking about it since.
She had been living in a shared house when the tape had been made, staying on in London after her time at university and, looking back, probably suffering the same well-trodden malaise as many of her friends. She’d lived with two other girls as they each tried to start their careers and replace the dreams of their early twenties with the realities of being normal, everyday people with bills to pay. There had been a few drugs and a lot of drink to make the situation easier, and it was reassuring to pretend this constituted a romantic ideal of life in the capital city.
One of the girls had a boyfriend who worked in the square mile and whose friends would regularly populate the tawdry, post-student flat, paying for the weekend’s amusements in return for the company of the three pretty young women. Toward the end of their period together, one of these friends had suggested the tape.
She hadn’t had much money, the job she had dreamed of having revealed itself as a hierarchy of insecure oddballs rather than the network of cutting edge creatives she had envisioned. Two thousand pounds was more than she could make in a month of long days, and would clear some of the debts that had become difficult to ignore. The tape was to be for personal use only, she was assured. She had become used to unwanted, resigned sex in those days. Like much else, seeing it as part of a brave, experimental life made it seem easier.
At the time, it hadn’t been so bad. She and her closer flatmate participated. They knew the two boys involved. It had been odd, but they’d felt as superior as they always did around these unsophisticated, eager men. ‘Give them their fun,’ she thought, ‘I’ll take the money.’ Then, like many experiences from those days, she’d locked it away and moved on.
At first she tried to think of solutions. Perhaps she could contact the boys, men now of course, and ask what had happened to the tape. Surely they too would be married and moved on by now? All she needed was to put her mind thoroughly at rest.
But when she considered the process required to track the thing down, the dragging herself through the dead relationships and sour memories of the past, she felt as sick as she did knowing the tape was still out there. She came to regard her life as a lie, the current state of affairs being built on a rotten foundation. She couldn’t accept that she was any different now, that a mistake she’d made then had been made by another person. She had done it, after all.
And so the tape came to dominate every waking minute, her attempts to dispel it as some sort of forgivable error in themselves becoming a preoccupation, and she came to believe that her life could never be definite.
One night she decided to tell her husband. She walked into the bedroom, seeing him sitting in the weird orange light of their overpopulated street that poured in through the blinds she wished she could replace, and froze in the doorway. She felt all of a sudden that even to go to sit with him was more than she deserved, that her admission would be made less valid with the drama of his worry. She leaned against the doorframe and closed her eyes, and started to shake uncontrollably as the tears ran hotly down her cheeks.
Much later, as she sat on the living room sofa in her dressing gown nursing her cup of tea, she felt better. Her husband hadn’t minded at all. He’d smiled and held her and said ‘everyone’s made their mistakes.’ Then as she sat she started to wonder, idly at first, what his mistakes might have been.
She’d made the tape a long long time ago, and Christ did she regret it. It’d got to the point where all she could think of was the thing, and the threat it represented to her happy, normal life. What if it appeared, the archetypal bolt out of the blue, as some kind of blackmail demand? Everything seemed to end up on the internet these days, what if it made it up there and her husband saw it, or one of her boys?
She’d forgotten about it for a long time. It had barely registered as a part of her past. But somehow, she’d gone from being the young, dangerous kind of person that could have done such a thing to being a secure, married adult with children to whom the thought was abhorrent.
She’d remembered it on holiday. They’d been on the kind of horrible fucking package tour she’d sworn never to go on again. He’d found the ‘bargain’ online, and talked her into it, telling her that any time away in the sun would be better than nothing. They’d wound up in a dirty white high-rise overlooking a sullied beach that made her feel sad.
One the second day, she woke up early and walked along the seafront. She passed an impossibly long complex of whitewashed residents apartments decaying in the sun, the swimming pools long emptied and containing only brown tide marks and rotten leaves. Each tiny apartment was exactly the same in dimension, but they varied wildly in appearance. Somehow, the ones with the small, lonely flower boxes under the sills were more tragic than the dirty, ill kempt majority.
Before long she had turned back, feeling as she usually did only on Sunday afternoons and wanting an early drink to dull her acute melancholy. As she returned to the hotel, walking up the path that lead from the beach to the swimming pool, she heard the unwelcome, multi-tonal sound of a large gathering of people; yelps, shouts and shrieks filling the air.
She rounded the sharp foliage of the pale green bushes raised above a red-brick wall to the side of the path, and saw a large girl with generous, bouncing bare breasts running alongside the pool, covered in some sort of white froth and bellowing loudly. At the other end of the courtyard there stood twenty or thirty teenagers, laughing hysterically as a boy with a lopsided, died blonde hairdo tried to catch the girl, finally dragging her into the water and attempting to press his mouth to her chest. A grinning holiday rep in a green shirt was holding a silver, glinting video camera and steadily following the action.
For a very brief second she felt a defensive rush of indignation as the red-faced girl splashed around the shallow end of the pool, and then she felt the sudden upward pull of nausea in her stomach. She was taken aback by her own memory. Why had she never considered it with such a sense of shame as she felt now? Drained, she had taken the lift back to their hotel room, and had barely stopped thinking about it since.
She had been living in a shared house when the tape had been made, staying on in London after her time at university and, looking back, probably suffering the same well-trodden malaise as many of her friends. She’d lived with two other girls as they each tried to start their careers and replace the dreams of their early twenties with the realities of being normal, everyday people with bills to pay. There had been a few drugs and a lot of drink to make the situation easier, and it was reassuring to pretend this constituted a romantic ideal of life in the capital city.
One of the girls had a boyfriend who worked in the square mile and whose friends would regularly populate the tawdry, post-student flat, paying for the weekend’s amusements in return for the company of the three pretty young women. Toward the end of their period together, one of these friends had suggested the tape.
She hadn’t had much money, the job she had dreamed of having revealed itself as a hierarchy of insecure oddballs rather than the network of cutting edge creatives she had envisioned. Two thousand pounds was more than she could make in a month of long days, and would clear some of the debts that had become difficult to ignore. The tape was to be for personal use only, she was assured. She had become used to unwanted, resigned sex in those days. Like much else, seeing it as part of a brave, experimental life made it seem easier.
At the time, it hadn’t been so bad. She and her closer flatmate participated. They knew the two boys involved. It had been odd, but they’d felt as superior as they always did around these unsophisticated, eager men. ‘Give them their fun,’ she thought, ‘I’ll take the money.’ Then, like many experiences from those days, she’d locked it away and moved on.
At first she tried to think of solutions. Perhaps she could contact the boys, men now of course, and ask what had happened to the tape. Surely they too would be married and moved on by now? All she needed was to put her mind thoroughly at rest.
But when she considered the process required to track the thing down, the dragging herself through the dead relationships and sour memories of the past, she felt as sick as she did knowing the tape was still out there. She came to regard her life as a lie, the current state of affairs being built on a rotten foundation. She couldn’t accept that she was any different now, that a mistake she’d made then had been made by another person. She had done it, after all.
And so the tape came to dominate every waking minute, her attempts to dispel it as some sort of forgivable error in themselves becoming a preoccupation, and she came to believe that her life could never be definite.
One night she decided to tell her husband. She walked into the bedroom, seeing him sitting in the weird orange light of their overpopulated street that poured in through the blinds she wished she could replace, and froze in the doorway. She felt all of a sudden that even to go to sit with him was more than she deserved, that her admission would be made less valid with the drama of his worry. She leaned against the doorframe and closed her eyes, and started to shake uncontrollably as the tears ran hotly down her cheeks.
Much later, as she sat on the living room sofa in her dressing gown nursing her cup of tea, she felt better. Her husband hadn’t minded at all. He’d smiled and held her and said ‘everyone’s made their mistakes.’ Then as she sat she started to wonder, idly at first, what his mistakes might have been.
Monday, September 11, 2006
Wiley gets wild
Wiley is sounding more and more animated as 2006 rolls on. He's just posted the main part of his new mixtape up here as a free download, and I'm feeling very grateful indeed. Track six is my initial favourite - no repeated lines, lots of controlled anger and rolling lyrical themes, plus great production.
Bring on volume 2!
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Wallace writes...
As anyone who's read Infinite Jest will know, Dave is a big fan of tennis, and here he describes Federer's mammoth talent in his idiosyncratic, opinion-ridden style. Always exciting to read new articles from him, and nice to see he has good taste in shirts.
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Ellis
There are lots of great little audio clips of Bret Easton Ellis talking about last year's 'Lunar Park' on this promo website.
The book is really amazing. It's the first one of his I'd read (having been put off, to my shame, by everyone reading American Psycho as a kid) and his writing is extremely compelling, masterful, funny and artful. The paperback came out recently too.
The book is really amazing. It's the first one of his I'd read (having been put off, to my shame, by everyone reading American Psycho as a kid) and his writing is extremely compelling, masterful, funny and artful. The paperback came out recently too.
Friday, September 01, 2006
The Tape
She’d made the tape a long long time ago, and Christ did she regret it. It’d got to the point where all she could think of was the thing, and the threat it represented to her happy, normal life. What if it appeared, the archetypal bolt out of the blue, as some kind of blackmail demand? Everything seemed to end up on the internet these days, what if it made it up there and her husband saw it, or one of her boys?
She’d forgotten about it for a long time. It had barely registered as a part of her past. But somehow, she’d gone from being the young, dangerous kind of person that could have done such a thing to being a secure, married adult with children to whom the thought was abhorrent.
She’d remembered it on holiday. They’d been on the kind of horrible fucking package tour she’d sworn never to go on again. He’d found the ‘bargain’ online, and talked her into it, telling her that any time away in the sun would be better than nothing. They’d wound up in a dirty white high-rise overlooking a sullied beach that made her feel sad.
One the second day, she woke up early and walked along the seafront. She passed an impossibly long complex of whitewashed residents apartments decaying in the sun, the swimming pools long emptied and containing only brown tide marks and rotten leaves. Each tiny apartment was exactly the same in dimension, but they varied wildly in appearance. Somehow, the ones with the small, lonely flower boxes under the sills were more tragic than the dirty, ill kempt majority.
Before long she had turned back, feeling as she usually did only on Sunday afternoons and wanting an early drink to dull her acute melancholy. As she returned to the hotel, walking up the path that lead from the beach to the swimming pool, she heard the unwelcome, multi-tonal sound of a large gathering of people; yelps, shouts and shrieks filling the air.
She rounded the sharp foliage of the pale green bushes raised above a red-brick wall to the side of the path, and saw a large girl with generous, bouncing bare breasts running alongside the pool, covered in some sort of white froth and bellowing loudly. At the other end of the courtyard there stood twenty or thirty teenagers, laughing hysterically as a boy with a lopsided, died blonde hairdo tried to catch the girl, finally dragging her into the water and attempting to press his mouth to her chest. A grinning holiday rep in a green shirt was holding a silver, glinting video camera and steadily following the action.
For a very brief second she felt a defensive rush of indignation as the red-faced girl splashed around the shallow end of the pool, and then she felt the sudden upward pull of nausea in her stomach. She was taken aback by her own memory. Why had she never considered it with such a sense of shame as she felt now? Drained, she had taken the lift back to their hotel room, and had barely stopped thinking about it since.
She had been living in a shared house when the tape had been made, staying on in London after her time at university and, looking back, probably suffering the same well-trodden malaise as many of her friends. She’d lived with two other girls as they each tried to start their careers and replace the dreams of their early twenties with the realities of being normal, everyday people with bills to pay. There had been a few drugs and a lot of drink to make the situation easier, and it was reassuring to pretend this constituted a romantic ideal of life in the capital city.
One of the girls had a boyfriend who worked in the square mile and whose friends would regularly populate the tawdry, post-student flat, paying for the weekend’s amusements in return for the company of the three pretty young women. Toward the end of their period together, one of these friends had suggested the tape.
She hadn’t had much money, the job she had dreamed of having revealed itself as a hierarchy of insecure oddballs rather than the network of cutting edge creatives she had envisioned. Two thousand pounds was more than she could make in a month of long days, and would clear some of the debts that had become difficult to ignore. The tape was to be for personal use only, she was assured. She had become used to unwanted, resigned sex in those days. Like much else, seeing it as part of a brave, experimental life made it seem easier.
At the time, it hadn’t been so bad. She and her closer flatmate participated. They knew the two boys involved. It had been odd, but they’d felt as superior as they always did around these unsophisticated, eager men. ‘Give them their fun,’ she thought, ‘I’ll take the money.’ Then, like many experiences from those days, she’d locked it away and moved on.
At first she tried to think of solutions. Perhaps she could contact the boys, men now of course, and ask what had happened to the tape. Surely they too would be married and moved on by now? All she needed was to put her mind thoroughly at rest.
But when she considered the process required to track the thing down, the dragging herself through the dead relationships and sour memories of the past, she felt as sick as she did knowing the tape was still out there. She came to regard her life as a lie, the current state of affairs being built on a rotten foundation. She couldn’t accept that she was any different now, that a mistake she’d made then had been made by another person. She had done it, after all.
And so the tape came to dominate every waking minute, her attempts to dispel it as some sort of forgivable error in themselves becoming a preoccupation, and she came to believe that her life could never be definite.
One night she decided to tell her husband. She walked into the bedroom, seeing him sitting in the weird orange light of their overpopulated street that poured in through the blinds she wished she could replace, and froze in the doorway. She felt all of a sudden that even go to sit with him was more than she deserved, that her admission would be made less valid with the drama of his worry. She leaned against the doorframe and closed her eyes, and started to shake uncontrollably as the tears ran hotly down her cheeks.
She’d forgotten about it for a long time. It had barely registered as a part of her past. But somehow, she’d gone from being the young, dangerous kind of person that could have done such a thing to being a secure, married adult with children to whom the thought was abhorrent.
She’d remembered it on holiday. They’d been on the kind of horrible fucking package tour she’d sworn never to go on again. He’d found the ‘bargain’ online, and talked her into it, telling her that any time away in the sun would be better than nothing. They’d wound up in a dirty white high-rise overlooking a sullied beach that made her feel sad.
One the second day, she woke up early and walked along the seafront. She passed an impossibly long complex of whitewashed residents apartments decaying in the sun, the swimming pools long emptied and containing only brown tide marks and rotten leaves. Each tiny apartment was exactly the same in dimension, but they varied wildly in appearance. Somehow, the ones with the small, lonely flower boxes under the sills were more tragic than the dirty, ill kempt majority.
Before long she had turned back, feeling as she usually did only on Sunday afternoons and wanting an early drink to dull her acute melancholy. As she returned to the hotel, walking up the path that lead from the beach to the swimming pool, she heard the unwelcome, multi-tonal sound of a large gathering of people; yelps, shouts and shrieks filling the air.
She rounded the sharp foliage of the pale green bushes raised above a red-brick wall to the side of the path, and saw a large girl with generous, bouncing bare breasts running alongside the pool, covered in some sort of white froth and bellowing loudly. At the other end of the courtyard there stood twenty or thirty teenagers, laughing hysterically as a boy with a lopsided, died blonde hairdo tried to catch the girl, finally dragging her into the water and attempting to press his mouth to her chest. A grinning holiday rep in a green shirt was holding a silver, glinting video camera and steadily following the action.
For a very brief second she felt a defensive rush of indignation as the red-faced girl splashed around the shallow end of the pool, and then she felt the sudden upward pull of nausea in her stomach. She was taken aback by her own memory. Why had she never considered it with such a sense of shame as she felt now? Drained, she had taken the lift back to their hotel room, and had barely stopped thinking about it since.
She had been living in a shared house when the tape had been made, staying on in London after her time at university and, looking back, probably suffering the same well-trodden malaise as many of her friends. She’d lived with two other girls as they each tried to start their careers and replace the dreams of their early twenties with the realities of being normal, everyday people with bills to pay. There had been a few drugs and a lot of drink to make the situation easier, and it was reassuring to pretend this constituted a romantic ideal of life in the capital city.
One of the girls had a boyfriend who worked in the square mile and whose friends would regularly populate the tawdry, post-student flat, paying for the weekend’s amusements in return for the company of the three pretty young women. Toward the end of their period together, one of these friends had suggested the tape.
She hadn’t had much money, the job she had dreamed of having revealed itself as a hierarchy of insecure oddballs rather than the network of cutting edge creatives she had envisioned. Two thousand pounds was more than she could make in a month of long days, and would clear some of the debts that had become difficult to ignore. The tape was to be for personal use only, she was assured. She had become used to unwanted, resigned sex in those days. Like much else, seeing it as part of a brave, experimental life made it seem easier.
At the time, it hadn’t been so bad. She and her closer flatmate participated. They knew the two boys involved. It had been odd, but they’d felt as superior as they always did around these unsophisticated, eager men. ‘Give them their fun,’ she thought, ‘I’ll take the money.’ Then, like many experiences from those days, she’d locked it away and moved on.
At first she tried to think of solutions. Perhaps she could contact the boys, men now of course, and ask what had happened to the tape. Surely they too would be married and moved on by now? All she needed was to put her mind thoroughly at rest.
But when she considered the process required to track the thing down, the dragging herself through the dead relationships and sour memories of the past, she felt as sick as she did knowing the tape was still out there. She came to regard her life as a lie, the current state of affairs being built on a rotten foundation. She couldn’t accept that she was any different now, that a mistake she’d made then had been made by another person. She had done it, after all.
And so the tape came to dominate every waking minute, her attempts to dispel it as some sort of forgivable error in themselves becoming a preoccupation, and she came to believe that her life could never be definite.
One night she decided to tell her husband. She walked into the bedroom, seeing him sitting in the weird orange light of their overpopulated street that poured in through the blinds she wished she could replace, and froze in the doorway. She felt all of a sudden that even go to sit with him was more than she deserved, that her admission would be made less valid with the drama of his worry. She leaned against the doorframe and closed her eyes, and started to shake uncontrollably as the tears ran hotly down her cheeks.
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