Jack Shenker
Jack is London-born, Cairo-based, and within an ocean of procrastination he sometimes finds little mangy islands of time on which to sit down and write. In his other life he searches out invisible cities for the Kublai Khan, interrogating nymphs and naiads and knock-kneed nectarine salesmen and flitting from one space to the next in search of borders that someone, somewhere keeps smudging - www.jackshenker.net
In The Forest, Where None May Pass But You
In the forest, where none may pass but you, your feet sponge first into moist orb-steamed tarmac, and you’ll sink a little.
The heartbeats of stauncher men than you have pebble-popped to a brisker beat on arriving at that baked-concrete welcome of the airstrip; their veins unclogging plasma with a panicked pant, their toes rumpling in dismay. This is garrisoned ground, after all. But you won’t be unthreaded at the outset, the artifice has taken too long to arrange, a bouquet of pluck plucked from the stems of compulsion. So you’ll plough on, on to the swishing of the double-doors ahead with that felt trim and those bilingual safety ciphers, on past glass-glanced sheens of light microwaving each pore, on with the blithe metal of a suitcase handle clammy in your hand.
It’s scalding, the fake cold of the desert terminal.
Passage here is self-censored and although you’ve always known that now you’ll feel it too, synapses firing neurotically with each bead of machine-cooled perspiration creaming self-doubt on the skin. Your fingers will thumb rapidly through a concertina of crayola-inked pages of orthodoxy where the smudges are precise and proper and authorised and everything reminds you that this is their space and their system and you are a parasite within it, to be digested or disgorged at their leisure and you’ll think ‘Why did I think I could do it? Why didn’t I self-censor, and remain?’
And whilst in the queues you’ll notice the shops and the toilets and the utility cupboards and the uniformed man laughing with the uniformed woman – a joke, a smile, a blast of reckless rhythmic banality in the gateway to the other side, as if this was the destination and not the micro-barbed cattle fence of the frontier, and you’ll think ‘Who are they fooling?’ and your heart will exhale a little because you’ve seen through it all, and you’ll know you’re ready for them. And your toes will unrumple on the ersatz earth beneath them and you’ll stride ahead with sparkling teeth and upcurled lips jutting forth, and in this forest only you will pass.
Gerania
The inhabitants of Gerania are deaf, dumb, blind and dead to the touch, but they communicate as freely as you and I and with all the candour of the gifted. The traveller entering town for the first time will be struck initially not by the slug-bricked slate of the houses, which are adobe sparse and grey, nor by the truancy of birdsong which, like the gurgle of the sewer, the muffled sob of the lover or the clank-clinked bounty of the thief, has long given up on Gerania – a place where ears have all the superfluity of a coward’s boast.
Rather his first interaction with Gerania will be through the nose, up which squabbling spires of feral passion, stout betrayal, limp-wristed dolour and mundane suffocation will curl and climb. With the other senses levered off by the passage of time, relationships between the people of Gerania are now experienced solely through the nasal passage, the proboscis lexicon of which has evolved into something far broader than our every-ebbing storehouse of words, winks and fondles has ever been.
As he rambles the town alleyways our traveller will find his eyelids dribbling shut, all the better to tune into the malodorous funk seeping out from every flagstone. Here his nostrils are assaulted by a light-fingered smothering of preening pinks; a cloying honeycomb of perfumed gloop, vine-twisting itself around elderly necks as the rhubarb-rhubarb of empty chatter clatters around the chamber. Further on the whiff of now-raked soil hangs dispiritedly on a corner; the spice of workshop plywood is knitted in there too, invisible fresh-sanded shavings dancing in the stench of an empty room and a stopped clock and tea once laid for two.
If the traveller lingers too long in Gerania, his eyelids will solder and his auditory receptors will congeal and sprout cotton and his fingers and palms will flake and taper into nullity and all that will be left will be the gamy reek of a thousand people brawling and bragging and screwing and sweating, carried on the wind.
Alabaster Shadow
I am the alabaster shadow that walks amongst you, an achromatic banshee shredded grist from a limestone cliff. From dusk to dusk, I move in the smudges of mankind’s thumb; I condense and atomise with the respiration of the light and like hot breath on your neck, a curl in the air on the sidewalk or the soft-scented patter of quick-deceased rain on a flagstone I pass through you, a gloaming orb of human grain washed through your veins with the bite of iced water. I remind you to forget.
My chalky pollen is as diaphanous as hope itself, throbbing as a human in darkness then diffusing like a shark-infiltrated school of silverfish in the light. I am a background wrenched pallid to the fore, blasting open each pore to the smells and shapes around me yet transcending them all with an ivory chill. I speak censorship, and I take your form in order for you to avoid me. I am the entwined couple, the newborn at his mother’s breast, the hunched agony of the thinker and the hollow-eyed brightness of the dreamer. I am your phantasmic double, slicing the atmosphere like a swallow and rearranging it behind me as I travel.
Cloaked in ash, I am your red-ribboned kelpie; I alone occupy the bowels of your world, so that you don’t have to.
Filter Beds
The body was boxed in by shadows, flesh-threaded through tall reeds that poked out from under the weir and arced gracefully towards the riverbank. I guess that’s why nobody found it, at least not for a while. These marshes always felt vacant anyway; I thought of them as the city’s bowels, urban innards plucked out from granite skins and hewn roughly back onto the surface, a pockmarked playground for the draff. The dog-walkers, the drug gangs, the pylons and the hulking scrap dinosaurs silhouetted mid-gulp on that amaranthine skyline. And me and Jermaine. This was our playground too, and now it had a new attraction.
I think it was the second week of summer, the one after Mum had left, when I first saw it. We’d wandered down past the electricity substation that afternoon and stopped to throw stones at the bleached yellow warning signs, the world space-splotched thinly into the distance and nothing left here but us and the dull ring of pebble on metal and the shiver-hiss drone of the wires humming just above our ears. Jermaine never said much, and so neither did I; whatever bound us together was little more than the shared awkwardness of circumstance.
Without warning he darted towards the filter beds and it took only a few seconds of buttoned up heat for me to set off in pursuit, the two of us sending great clods of earth skittering down the old ironwork grooves before vaulting the chained-up gates at the end of the track. By the time I made it over Jermaine was already lost in the clam of the scrub – the bushes down there sliced up and rearranged your breath behind them with a dizzying retch – and so I kept running and running, on past the misremembered narrow boats jostling in the freshet, on past the heron, until I finally slowed to a canter and collapsed onto the moss-grazed railings by the weir. And that’s when I saw it, a pinstripe canvas down-faced to the water, puffy limbs bobbling teasingly from the root. I called for Jermaine.
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Next day the air was full of quick-deceased rain on flagstone, and the house was empty. Jermaine called round and stood at the doorway with a disinterested lope and a sneer on his mouth at the dry-rot window boxes standing sentinel over the dustbins. Mum had once put them there to brighten things up, and like everything else, they smelt stale. I couldn’t tell if Jermaine hated them because they were condescending, or hated them because they were dead. He asked me if I’d told anyone about the body. I said I hadn’t, and we sloped down to the marshes.
The body was still there, although something had dislodged it slightly from the reed-snarl and a fringe of pallid face was now angled faintly up towards us. It made me feel sick. The bench we both perched on was inscribed with the name of a man who loved this spot, partially obscured with a labyrinthine dreadlock of permanent marker scrawls and neat drops of drizzly perspiration expunged by the wooden slats in the rainfall. I wondered if the body would ever have a bench inscribed for it and was tempted to ask Jermaine, but I didn’t.
If you lay on your back in the filter beds back then the only thing to pierce the clouds was a cluster of old toy factories on the other side of the canal. Other than that life was flat-packed to the horizon, so static that in the days before the body I used to let my hair mingle with the concrete and imagine that the whole world around me had been re-hung upside down. I wanted to do that now, let my eyes bathe in the greys until the sky unfurled itself into a metropolis and the marshes became its roof. But as soon as I tried Jermaine wrenched his gaze from the body and craned it over my own with a thick look of disapproval. He said we had to search the toy factories and see if we could find some clues.
I sat up and peered over the railings. From here you could just about make out the faded imprint of dismantled signs on the corrugated walls, soot-dimpled and punctured with rust. ‘Matchbox’, ‘Smithson Curios’, ‘Lea and Sons Ltd.’ they read, etched on the marshes’ retina like the aftermath of an ill-advised glimpse at high noon. They had closed up when the filter beds fell into disuse, the latter’s once-trumpeted role in seeing off London’s 19th century cholera outbreaks long forgotten. Every now and again the breeze would peel off a sheet of cherry dust from the crumpled holes and vaporise it. I lay back down.
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We couldn’t come back until the next evening, when the factories were shrouded in slow-draining parch-light and the pylons were noiselessly unsucking the sun from their skeletons. For a few moments we thought the body had gone because there was no sign of the pinstripes, but by clinging on to the far side of the railings with one hand and hunching down into the gloaming I eventually saw it, now completely rolled over and half beached on the bank, shirt sagging open and bloated alabaster meat spilling forlornly into mud. The features on the body’s face had got a bit jumbled and lost in the debris, two dirt-shut eyes sloughed from their sockets and jettisoned into the dermis. Even Jermaine looked a bit scared this time, firing off snatched glances into the encroaching ink and flinching at the intermittent rattle of the factory walls.
