Deciduous, A Novel by Gerry Mark Norton 1 Fish in the sea, you know how I feel River running free, you know how I feel Blossom on the tree, you know how I feel Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse, ‘Feeling Good’ …the ringing of the steel is sung in the stillness of the stone. Russell Hoban, Pilgermann 2 1 You will close your eyes for the final time full of regret. This is a certainty and you must get over it. All those gaps between the living…so much squandered time…all those moments equalling hours equalling days spent picking your toes instead of your brain. This world is battering your skull, splitting fissures in your spirit, trying to crumble it and cave it in. To live and breathe in any semblance of a natural way will take all the effort you can muster, every day you ever live, and even that might not be enough. Every concept is just that, a concept, and if acted out by physical entities is still but an idea. We do not become anything more than human beings, holding all the potential we ever had, when we play out such models. Perhaps my younger self would be disgusted by what I’m about to say, by who I’ve become, like I always worried would and promised myself wouldn’t happen. Perhaps the me of yesterday would find looking at the me of today unbearable. But we must seize the day; point our cameras, aim our viewfinders and snap each shot we can before we are swallowed by whichever jaws reach us first. Life left alone is glorious, perfect. But we just can’t leave it alone. Each man has his very own pair of eyes that see very his own worldview, and if nobody else can see it then he shall have to try something else. Games of power played out by anybodies – those who chose the weight-throwing path. And each man eventually reaches the same conclusion: none of it matters, so long as I am at the top. It seems likely that any man who’d want to impose himself upon others like this is a psychopath, lacking the most basic empathy for his species that the majority of even the worst of us possess to some degree. Thus, we must conclude him to be even worse than the worst. But the persons themselves should not take all the blame. The way of the world – capitalistic, hierarchical, ego-led – actively encourages competition at every avenue – ‘you’re good, but you could be better’. It values and indeed esteems the individual, which isn’t negative in itself, but this is at the expense of everything else: every other person and living creature, and the planet itself; this while clinically smashing the slightest evidence of deviation from its homogenised mechanics, such as imagination, or basic sense of self-worth. But when everyone else is and always has been doing the same, how is anyone to know any different? How can a man transcribe a dream when the very word is absent from his lexicon? We are born creatures of nature but are instantly nurtured, shaped by what our senses receive. The world is still blobs of colour and sound, your body still fresh and baby-musty, but already they’re filling your world with nonsense, those big blobs – meaningless nonsense, because that’s what the world you’ve been brought into consists of (better to learn it now than later) – and I don’t mean the frivolities or the trivialities, which are valid and arise in the purest of lives, but the pretences, the charades. You are a novelty, so the topic of any room you are present in might often be you for a little while, but it soon wears off and they’re back to normal, and oh! the drivel they rabidly dribble: how are some other people we know or do not know inferior to us?; stop making mistakes and displaying traces of individuality and instead listen to what I would’ve done if I were you; I wish I had more paper 3 notes representing bank gold to exchange for things to decorate me and my domicile and distract me from the creeping hollow developing where my soul should be. People are shit-scared, though most of them don’t realise and in all probability never will. They live such self-serving lives because that’s what you’re meant to do – to fit in. They saw what happened to the boy who wore eyeliner at school. You must keep your head down and never raise it, let alone into the clouds through which the sun breaks every morning to illuminate the day. It will blind you. The sun is wrong, breaking through like that, only to light up the death-grey stone edifices and perfectly content people a shred of accidentally-revealed- personality away from turning their backs on you for ever. Thankfully, there are the few of us who question the status quo; who have the sheer audacity to ask a question or two; who dare to yell, ‘This is Me and this is what I like doing!’ It takes a very brave man to simply voice a thought, sadly. And yes, we do all feel dreadfully alienated and alone when among the throng, the ‘insiders’, but for good reason. The operating system of the world is deeply, profoundly sick, and it is our realisation of this, coupled with having traces of nature remaining, that produces such a reaction. If it hurts, there is hope. We are many, or at least many-er than we seem, but we are scattered, and countless never muster the courage to let the others know, to signal their existence, because they’re scared, or perhaps even because they never discovered that others existed, dying lonely and hopeless. If these paragraphs have stirred anything within you, have thrown open a floodgate or even simply flicked a switch, I urge you to stand up and be counted. I don’t mean in some militant way, but simply, please, let the world know you are here! Make your own noise, play your own tennis, create your own unique racket, using whichever tools ring the nicest to your ear. The more of us who chisel our names into the rock, the more likely some isolated one like us will happen upon our inscriptions and realise just how much resistance there always is and was to the endless leaden monsoon. So inscribe big, and inscribe often, and inscribe with your own signature, and each will be accompanied by an atemporal caption telling the reader YOU ARE NOT ALONE. I began this book with a rather bleak, pessimistic declaration, I know. But, as far as I see it, regret will surely surface at such a point; when the only place left to look is back, back on the things you did…and those you didn’t. Surely one cannot help but regret a life that will soon have no life left to live…aside from the hypothetical Man Who Was Always Fulfilled, who, in which case, having never known its absence, can actually never have known that he was fulfilled, having nothing to compare it to. And then there is the oblivious man…my point being that perfection is an unachievable ideal, regardless, but I’d like to reach that final day able to remember all the stuff I did do as well as the stuff I’ll now never get a chance to. So, here is a slice of my noise. 4 2 East London was enjoying the last few days of an early-October heatwave. The latch had coughed its confident click, today tinged with a cruel, skull-clattering knell that resounded all around me as I pulled the door closed and fumbled with my keys on the porch. In an instant I was engulfed by the heat; a repellent, overwhelming blast screaming at my immediately distressed body, silently searing each bare patch of skin, namely my toucan’s bill of a nose, my Desperate Dan chin, the rest of that freckled face, and my ginger’s-pale forearms and neck. It was stifling; the day would’ve rendered futile any attempt to focus on a single strand of joy. The accompanying daffodil-yellow light oppressed itself upon it all, the world outside my door, the rancid reality revealed with undeniable clarity; indefatigable, it showed naked the burningly ashen vista I’d stepped out into. Faces remained screwed into bumhole pouts; body odours unmasked, the armpit musk of passing boys and men nauseating, those belonging to the fairer sex beckoning, tempting tongue to lick and taste. Steadfast simian swaggers, semi-erections, each creature emanating, glowing, sticky, yuck; fearful bacteria contorted into gregarious gods, urban sex emperors; each action a dedication to a life indebted to the god in the sun. But none of that was important. I began the journey, each alternate pace seeming so very profound, the cowardly buckling clomp of Adidas on cracked concrete the pulse of the vessels of an organism that might today be finally freed to live its life in corporeal form, or eviscerated dishonourably. My faltering steps either funereal or nuptial, nonetheless a march towards an uncertain future that would nonetheless certainly result in the death of all that has become familiar during my tenure on this fetid, aborted rock. We are urged to be kind to the mistakes of our siblings, and so their continued pillaging of our hope goes unresisted.