Lurid & Cute by Adam Thirlwell Page B

a stately library were false, and then the wall swings slowly open and you walk on through, into another book-lined room. Somehow, I was thinking, it was now a situation that was true and not true, at the same time. For once again Candy regained the acceptable tone.
    CANDY
    But maybe do you think you should get a job? Would that be good? Do you think you’re just getting bored? Is it good for you to be around the house all day? I mean doesn’t your mother get you down?
    ME
    Like a job like where?
    CANDY
    I’ve always thought you’d be a good teacher – like a good primary-school teacher and you’d work with kids and I think it’d just be great for you. You’d still have time for other things. I think you’d enjoy it.
    ME
    I think, no. I think no way.
    CANDY
    What’s happening with your work?
    ME
    I’m not sure.
    CANDY
    You think that’s why you’re not happy?
    ME
    Is possible.
    CANDY
    Why don’t you write a horror flick?
    ME
    A horror flick?
    CANDY
    Something with gore –
    ME
    You think?
    CANDY
    I want men bleeding from their eyes. Or at least I want something happening . Why doesn’t anything ever happen? Like make a movie about a massacre?
    ME
    I don’t think you can show it –
    CANDY
    You don’t?
    ME
    I do not.
    And so we chattered on. And once again catastrophe had receded, just receded into the blurred and pastoral distances.
    even if the gore remains, as a token, or proof
    Always I had felt about as moored to the world as that airship was moored to the landing stage on the Empire State Building – and that’s probably to be expected if you live a life where catastrophes are infinitely postponed. To be a stevedore or farmer is no preparation for a life like mine, where the real is more like sherbet. That feeling is enveloping – so that even as I turned and Candy asked what I had on my teeshirt, I was not perturbed. I looked down and with a surging recognition, the way a surfer must recognise the wave that will pull her under and cause the wipeout to end her days, I saw that in my hurry I had simply put back on the teeshirt with which my evening had begun. It was, therefore, a teeshirt with a range of bloodied stains.
    â€” That? I said.
    â€” Uh-huh, said Candy.
    â€” I don’t know, I said.
    And once again we paused there. As I said, we are no sharpshooters, Candy and I. We let the pause suspend itself, engorge itself. Because it’s really not so hard, to ignore things. And so it was like – what was it like? It was like that story of the man who passed through Paradise in a dream, and had a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there. And indeed, when he woke up, he held a flower in his hand. That’s one sort of similar story – or no, this is what it was like. It was like the story of that prince in the eastern realms who once upon a time dreamed he no longer lived in his palace but in the city, and was very poor. In this new life of his, he had no servants or cooks. He only had a wife, who went out every morning to work as a sales clerk in some department store. They lived in a house in the suburb favelas of a giant city together with a single hound. His life was shanty town and barrio. And then one morning he woke up and was back there in his palace with his courtiers or flunkeys, while the second hand on his gorgeous watch was perhaps just describing a minutely more obtuse angle –
    HIS COURTIERS OR FLUNKEYS
    Well wow you just dozed off there for a moment, sir –
    but the prince still in his heart knew that something, like definitely, had taken place. What happened therefore next is that he ordered the whole court entourage to go out driving with him in a minor motorcade, and sure enough when the SUVs entered the plastic outskirts of that giant city, with hotels and other details, he recognised a street. Calmly he left his limousine, where in the road a woman came up