The backdrop of smog and traffic festooned the streets in long contaminated streams, the mix of rubber and sharp exhausts caused the air to swell shut, and horns delivered their sermons on that London road, competing for the sacred right to become a resounding monument. New to London, he had a wary look about him; Highbury had been a bore, Richmond too; what else was there? perhaps it was the swell of the deep sea or the forgotten cry of the gulls; he was undone nightly on a narrow bed by the handsome call of Margate Main Sands and its myriad of humble people. The air that washed over him like a transitory power caused him to stop short in his slow walk home right in the middle of it all, one hand still tucked in a pocket to retrieve the halfgone lighter from it, and attend with a boyish squeal the leaden pearls known to be his large glassy eyes. On each of them a burning droplet ballooned but did not fall. A brisk wind picked up and encouraged their conflagration. In modest retaliation, he nudged each eye. Failing this, he let out another desperate squeal and cursed the air and the wind and London herself. With a mess of dramatic fingers he pulled and poked at the swollen fluid, and amid the unconcerned rage of maddening machines seeking retribution for the roundels imposed upon them, and swollen with petrol to the point of hysteria, the burning quietly intensified; the machines did not relent but roared once released from the oppressive red punishing them with inertia, for sensible greens had relieved them of suffocation. In further protest they collectively roared once more: down him and past him and around him and through him: the predator of prevailing urbanisation moved in squads of indifference, governed by the impression of unquestionable reverence which they mistranslated in the expressions of cold disgust given them by the disgruntled audience that wished for hell to consume them … Lawless London! read the large print of a passing newspaper; a shrill horn nearby came in service to shatter the peace of a rolled cigarette that dropped from his hand to meet on the rippling asphalt the vacant currents populating it, where the powerful sole of a passing Chelsea boot eventually seized it and further down the tributary transported it. He steadied himself with the use of a spread leg to douse each eye with a cool finger … You careless cunt! went a man on a bike, head turned to censure the man tending the unseeable fire, a near separate collision with a street preacher reciting from The Sparkling Stone unravelling in the process of censure … Dere are five kinds of sinners! the John of Ruusbroec enthusiast commenced, aided by a tiny microphone connected to a little distorted speaker hitched up to a luxury belt … Indeed, we have spoken now of the tree tings through which a man becomes good and we have spoken of the tree tings through which a man becomes God-seeing! but what my brothers, my sisters, makes a sinner a sinner? … a large sealed plastic tub sat before him, a bungled wound sliced widely into the red head of the lid … Give now to the box before me! my brothers, my sisters, give to the fountain of my Farda! and with a smile he waved to a toddler passing him, and with a reproachful gaze regarded the homeless man just behind the toddler  … My fucking eyes! the man went; and an erection passed him then, was he following the homeless man just metres ahead? livid the man limping with it who gurgled and hurled obscenities in a hushed breath to no one, his eyes unstraight and completely gone (his frame as unfurnished; numb to the roar around him that battered without respite even the dreary mounds of stranded vegetation heaped insensitively in odd arrangements by nonlocal planners; no one passing him cared for him in the slightest (his hindrance of an existence to those passing was not an intimate one, it was not buried deep in some thick envelope waiting to be disclosed, but rather throbbed in its solitude in the wordless current of ten thousand people a day, and rather it extended to them a lifeline of sorts: for the impassive figure served them to remind them that the quotidian that they longed to retreat from was in fact worth embracing (for one is often reassured by the torment of others); indeed one driver, upon glancing at him in a silent moment of disbelef, felt a sword through his very soul, and straightened himself immediately in a moment of hushed innerconsultation, only to slouch once the reek of reflection amounted to a dark commotion of bells, which he waved off; the contents of his soul were intact and undamaged, and to reward his indifference he turned the music up louder), nor did they take into account his fatal interaction with real reality; indeed he had once fallen through the false bottom of measured reality and tasted sudden contact, which is fatal, and never resurfaced, for when one’s primary reality is abruptly displaced by the taste of fatal reality, it inevitably leads one to an as sudden death, wherein one’s livelihood, one’s relationships, one’s political ideaologies, and one’s clothing tastes cease to amount in the echoes of it to much more than an incidental pattern in one’s otherwise ordinary past, unworthy of study but a good chat, stretched now before spans of time to be doted on intermittently as biographical retrospect fodder; fretted over dinners where a second of time only (and not a second more!) falls into possession of those who have found themselves collapsed in the fatal jurisdiction of real reality, having fallen once upon a time through its false bottom), stained only by the colour of insistent illusions as he claimed to himself, against the wall where he leaned to tuck a stray shoelace inside his shoe, the erection still unattended, to have witnessed with his own eyes a large satellite appear in the sky that morning around three, or was it four? and flash the seventyfive shooting stars before severing itself to drop back inside the shadows … My fucking eyes! the man repeated, head bent with the neck where in the radius of both the not so distant sound of a streetlight hit hard with a colourful sticker banged and carried over to him as the lad in mismatched sportswear raced on by (having disarmed the eletronic bike he was commandeering outside of an L&Q newbuild where the genesis of a reign of tormenting the lines of streetlights could be traced; in his trousers nestled too was an erection; and he smiled, a tooth coloured by a metal insert gleamed boldly) … Oh you must watch the film, Murphy’s presence is simply ineffable, went a passerby, Ineffable … Well that’s quite rude to say, went the companion … What is? … Calling him that … Ineffable? … Yes … Why? … Well what makes you say the man is unfuckable? … the eyes of the ebike bandit engorged as he stared on at the tragic figure of Phlebas, stranded amongst versions of his own species without expression, having now doused his eyes; Phlebas looked on with eyes refreshed and stilted intrigue as the socalled ‘famous clairvoyante’ Madame Sosotris, whose face he could render just about, what lay obscured beneath some draping hood, nursed in their company a bad cold and a pack of sodden cards on the side of the road where from the pack the crone drew out the drowned Phoenician Sailor and slammed it on the kneehigh table before them, what seemed, upon Phlebas’s inspection, a formerly blank piece of cardboard somehow processed into appropriate shape and crudely drawn over, populated in sections by cheap patches of disjointed watercolours … Hmmm, Phlebas went stolidly, I’ve not seen this one before, what’s it mean then? … Not what it means but – aha! look on here! the Madame went quickly, the hood pulled lower as around it her hands raised up in histrionic precision to find meaning in distraction; and down went a second painted card with a, The Virgin Mary on the Rocks! Belladonna! … Hmmm, went Phlebas, And was this one painted by yourself? … Hmmm? the clairvoyante questioned, What of this then? and she slammed down the man with three staves, the Wheel, the oneeyed merchant, and an entirely blank card: an empty fourth fortune, was it an accident? as she quickly withdrew the blank, again conducted some mess of her hands, what unctuous display startled even the most rushed commuter from the otherwise routinely turgid self, and replaced it with the Hanged Man, an authentic card upon Phlebas’s distanced inspection, though stirred just then from the theatrics as the inspection caused him to visit the rough hands of the clairvoyante where he stood now stirred up from stolidity by their masculine structure, unnerved by the limbs in part because of the feminine intonations of the fortune teller … You shouldn’t believe this man, a young girl barked from Phlebas’s side, barking now at the dog beside her … Down Huxley! causing a suppressed impulse within Phlebas to surface, He’s not a she you know! … He’s not a she? clutching the laptop bag, the impulse … What d’you finks under the hood? … I’d hope a woman to be … He’s not a she sir! Huxley, down! look at his hands sir why d’you fink ‘is face’s hidden? … Phlebas without a syllable more to the girl nor the fortune teller departed then to meet in private the public display of shameful astrological mistrial (at a dinner party later in the evening he did not recount the event but spoke instead about the painting he had examined earlier in the day: a blindfolded woman sitting atop a globe playing a lyre with a single string), leaving the barking girl, Huxley and Madame Sosotris in a state of unconfirmed dissolution on the trembling asphalt where a lengthy wave streamed past: a hunchbacked man with a bulge around the gut seemed to leap past the wave entirely, muttering indignantly about the German whose selfportrait was Christ, a cane stabbed into the concrete with each declarative word; a taller man in the trough slowed down by long thick threads of reddish muscle quivered as he tipped the green liquid into his mouth, and pulled a trail from the electronic cigarette clasped in the other oversized hand; skulking behind him in the smoke: a short woman brandishing a flag with Long live the Revolution, Long live Marat printed across the bright colours of a nation at war (though the revolution had not received a single riding lessons, it had nonetheless been put in the saddle; and not one revolutionary had stopped to consider the horse); caught in the ears of Huxley and his master the woman raving over the nationalism embedded in paintings of barren English landscapes with, He keeps his garden, he keeps his estate, his country house, his factories, his shipyards and his armies and all of it! the woman went, mouth opened to a trove of cavities, So fuck him, he can’t even get fuckin sheep to feed from his cold fishy hands.

…

Caleb Matteus is a writer from London.