Leith Stories, Necropolis (i)

I once had a pot skeleton (*) of a tall building, a sort of monolithic grid of stone and broken windows, which floated in the water like a ship. In coastal cities, on fog-bound days, everything would fall silent and it would appear. It would drift out of the fog, a few hundred metres from land.
People would become possessed. They'd be driven to walk down to the quays, cast themselves into the water and drown.
Then: their corpses would float, drift, and wriggle back to life. They'd swim towards this building. They would climb up in their hundreds, climb out of the water and scale its stone face, climb in through the broken windows.
The structure was called the “Necropolis”. Once the dead were inside it would drift away, vanish into the fog, and take them with it. Friends, fathers and daughters. Entire families, safely nestled in their new home.
I told this to Doses and he said: “That's stupid.”
“No it's not,” I said. “It's cool. It's fucking freaky.”
“It's not freaky man, it's stupid.”
Turns out this thing exists, as many macabre and derelict things do, in Leith.

Where I live.
Not to be confused with Lethe, although judging from the state of the people here perhaps the two share a common function.
Quincey got to Scotland ahead of me & had to go through the whole arduous process of finding a flat on her own.
She says: “I chose Leith because I thought it would suit you.”
I'm not sure what I ever did to deserve this woman.
I mean look at this place, it's beautiful.


Here's something that happened to me in Leith. It happened on Monday morning, on the way to work:
I went to the shop and bought a cheap energy drink and a pack of gum.
I walked out, crossed the road, and started heading towards Pilrig Park like I normally do.
There's this thing on the footpath, walking towards me. A little thing. I'm looking at it, and I cannot for the life of me determine what it is.
I stared at it, watched it bumble towards me. It was awkward, clumsy. It had a dog's body, except smaller and yellowish. It's head was a gray mess of weird shapes. From the way it was moving, it was clearly blind.
Exhausted from a terrible night of insomnia (during which I posted this and this), I accepted the appearance of this strange, fucked-up monster. It had no face, no mouth. It didn't pose an obvious threat.
It stumbled into a bin. I realised it was a fox. A fox who had killed a pigeon, and was trying to carry the thing off to eat it, except one of the pigeon's wings had arced up to cover his face and eyes. He couldn't see. He was terrified, vulnerable being out in on the street in broad daylight, but too desperate and hungry to relinquish his food for even a moment. He was so thin.
Desperate, clumsy. The thing bumbled past me and smacked into the iron gates of a small housing estate.
I walked on – I was late. My boss prints off my clock cards, periodically calls me in to meeting rooms to bollocks me about getting to work at 8:35 instead of 8:30.
So I walked on to the alley which leads to the park. I turned back and got a last look – just a dead pigeon lying outside the iron gate. I thought: aw no, poor thing. Had to drop it's food. But then something fast, a snout I suppose, whipped out from behind the gate and yanked the corpse inside.


Wish I could have photographed it. This clumsy little compound monster was one of the strangest and most beautiful things I've ever seen.
Only in Leith.
Coming home at the end of the day I found a small pile of dead pigeons near my flat – feathers stripped from their sides, bloody red bit marks on their pink skin. I went inside and grabbed my camera, I'd meant to photograph the corpses, but then the idea seemed too ghoulish.
I walked down Constitution Road and took these pictures instead. (**)



* - this term will be explained in a later post.
** - thanks to Doses and "Alive But Not Living" (henceforth called "Alive") & partners for the digital camera

Blog Entry

Ordinarily I wouldn't be making an entry about my personal life (at least in the present) or music or going to see bands etc, that's not the sort of blog this is.

Not really out to post photos of my friends or anything ("look, there's you! And there's ME!"). Go on rants about my political opinions. Talk about celebrities or thinkers I think are cool.

HOWEVER

Yes HOWEVER because through the good graces of a woman who is not actually named Quincey but for the purposes of this blog is, I am in possession of the following:



Probably this means little or nothing to you. YOU DAMNED FOOL! I forgive you.

This is like you getting to see one of YOUR bands, whatever they are for you, like the top two or three bands in your life. Jhonn Balance is unfortunately dead, so there's no more Coil, but Peter Christopherson made all the music anyway and this is him and I'm getting to see him.

And it just keeps coming:



The first ticket is a 12 hour horror movie marathon. Then Threshold Houseboys Choir. Then on Monday they're showing Suspiria. In a cinema! Amazing.

The movie tickets, I should say, were subsidised by the Film House membership I got as a going-away present from my job in New Zealand. So in something of an irony, working to promote the rights of women has given me a discount to see a film where women are stabbed, dissected, impaled by glass, hung from nooses, covered in maggots, cursed by surreal flashing lights, dropped into a room full of barbed wire, and then brought back to life to attack their friends.

If someone pitched me this weekend, and said: "all of this could be yours, but we'd have to pull one of your fingernails out with pliers", I would have said: "okay, do it." I would probably have asked for a shot of whiskey or something first. But going to these movies and this gig is better good than having a fingernail pulled out would be badly bad. Go Quincey.

Thank you for indulging me. Hopefully this does not constitute gloating. Probably not.

It probably doesn't mean a lot to you. There has been mention that recent Sleep Dep entries ("Sleep Dentries") have been gloomy and suggestive of a sad or depressed state of mind. Not so.

Here is a picture of a boarded up primary school near my office:

Death in the Family

This was late last week, or maybe the weekend. I’ve been having trouble sleeping but on this morning I slept in, woke up for a minute, then slept another hour.

Over breakfast I said: “I had the weirdest dream this morning.”

Staying with my parents, some kind of pre-Christmas celebration, and I’d given them a present: really expensive modelling clay. It came in bright colours and had special properties.

At night I stepped into the garage to take off my shoes. In the lamp light I saw the place was crawling with big insects. An orange beetle, a lime green praying mantis, a bright yellow butterfly. It was the modelling clay, of course. I called my parents to come and look. No-one had shaped it that way, it had come alive and shaped itself. I’m always nervous around big insects, but I had to admit it was a special moment.

One thing bothered me - later on, when I went to bed, I thought about the black clay. I remembered someone taking it upstairs. I almost went upstairs to check, but I was too tired, I couldn’t rouse myself.

I slept and slept. When I woke up it was afternoon and the house around me was silent, everyone else had left.

I went upstairs – in my parent’s house the bedrooms are on the ground floor, the kitchen and lounge upstairs – and stopped at the landing. Someone had cut Monty, my parents’ bichon freise, in half. Monty’s rear half had been stitched onto the rear half of a pit bull, and this hideous creature with four legs, two asses and no head was trying to cross the landing towards me. It was growling, but it couldn't walk properly, both sets of its knees facing inwards.

I found a spade downstairs, ran back up and lopped it in half, right along the stitches. It fell apart into its two pieces. The empty cavities inside (its bowels were missing) let out puffs of humidity. It was dead. It smelt like a butcher’s.

I found Monty’s front half in the next room – pieces of glass or crystal had been studded into his body in a precise grid. His face was an expression of anguish and death. No sign of the pit bull's front half.

The black clay. I looked around the room, but it had either hidden itself or fled. I knew it wasn’t safe to stick around, so I took the car and drove off.

My plans for the afternoon were to attend a concert in the Hutt. Some of my friends were going to be in the concert. I met up with everyone outside the auditorium, and we hung out in the sun while we waited.

“You were there,” I told Quincey. She likes it when she pops up in my dreams.

But all the while I was worrying about the situation at home. I’d fled the scene, I hadn’t called anyone. It would look like I’d gone crazy and killed my parents’ dog. I loved that dog! I couldn’t get it out of my head, but on the other hand I couldn’t bring myself to get home before my parents. I had a child’s trust that they'd sort everything out when they got home: bury the dog, find the black clay and destroy it.

Quincey listened through the whole thing. Afterwards she said: “You have some pretty disturbing stress dreams.”

Stress dreams, I thought. Yeah. It’s stressful being in a new country, no job, no friends, dwindling financial resources. Maybe when I find work I’ll go back to having regular dreams.