1. Happy clapping
Arms crossed, each hand on the opposite shoulder, feet paired tightly, Gavin slipped from the board and plunged, motionless in motion.
That time like I think I was happy, in the pool, and of course they could never know how I was feeling least of all then, deep in the cube, not breathing, when I was perfectly still and the water glazing past me all starbubbles bursting and reforming like I weren’t there but like I was there too, but like cuddled untouched.
I tried clapping my hands at the bottom in the deep end. I never heard the sound of clapping, in my whole life, ever, I mean for me, they didn’t, no-one never clapped anything I done ever. Not when I could hear it any rate, and if you can’t hear it, it wouldn’t be clapping would it?
2. Moving
I'm carving GT on the table leg while they talk about me. They say, your next home is somewhere you have to travel to, knowing I don't know where. I’m a parcel they have to deliver. Contents may settle.
The car park a weightless case in the boot the seatbelt the setting off. Sit tight a slight tilt the jolting the station is framework.
A glistening statue the platform the girders the loudspoken wordfall, heralding trains.
And bodies are milling, they never collide. They are worshippers practicing absence, tapping their fingers on the infallible factness of time. To be out of place is unusual for them. This seat is taken.
3. Reflecting
Perpetual emotion, moving to care. A boy's barely bearable boyhood. The vehicle tilt is the slant of a head for instructions hard heard or the globe as it drifts, as if everything else was quite stable, quite built. The angles, the tunnel, the window, the mirroring in-ness. Look out.
Wasn't expecting the tunnel. Gavin's flat face is exposed to his own eyes, the reflected spectre examining self. His cubist bust is shadow boxed, still in the frame, stuck in the flux. Is it permanence glimpsed, or just the ephemeral evading capture? The light shutters again, darkness collapses, re-revealing fixtures: a hill, some trees, a barn, or a stable was it, a pylon. Then they too are gone, in all their dappled glory, passed away.
4. Inertia
I had this teacher right and she said, one time after class she just said, don't take all that hyperactivity bollocks. You need to understand inertia. She showed me, in the lab. This is what inertia means for the others: roll the ball along the floor she said. For most people. And your inertia is like this. Spin the ball. Instability, it's not your fault, it’s your default. I'm like, what’s a standstill? Then some stuff about trajectory. She was alright she was, told me I been ostrichised.
5. Life is just
Listen, your ear against the pillow.
Life is just the sound of rough skin, your own gnarled finger, rubbing momentarily, coincidentally, against cloth. That’s all. Miniscule, ephemeral, inconsequential, yours.
6. To whom it may concern
Gavin was quick to appreciate the need for decorum and smart appearance. He was with us for only 6 months under the Work Scheme but the winter is our busiest time so he had to hit the ground running. Gavin learned quickly, for example how to tell at a glance whether or not a coffin is empty, and keeping step while bearing, he is definitely not the kind to let the grass grow under his feet. In fact we had to instill in him the importance of standing still at times. Gavin is clearly able to think outside the box and was always polite and understood appropriate distance and I am pleased to recommend him for work in your building services division.
Yours faithfully
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8. Scaffold
The house stares back. Gavin calculates, the gang files tubes from the truck, stacking. He bends to prop up, looking up lending support. His eye frames and weighs.
They hoist transoms and mullions, clapping braces and swivels, accumulating stability, imitating permanence. These are splints for a wounded building. From the platform, you can look out, though you are not in. The others gab in the cab while he empties a basket of clamps.
9. Platforms
They rigged platforms for sounds that people thought were here to stay. Boards raised for the players and towers for speakers, propped on the resolute geometry of stance, the sounds babeling out to silence all silence.
Yeah I worked with him. The worst was hanging round waiting to strike while the band did encores or stirred applause and Gavin just wanted the plug pulled. He re-tested the hawsers while we slumped in the truck. Everything held.
One time with this job on a block we got fed up with him fussing and drove off, just round the corner as a wind-up like.
10. A frame folds inward
Assuming himself abandoned, Gavin loosened four clamps, two on each side, shoulder height, reaching out as if pilloried, then shrugged off to the pub, unsure of his own presence. Later he slunk into station shadows to doss in the waiting room.
When they showed up in the morning, he said Wait. They stood back, saw the rope shudder in his hands, watched the bucket swing up, gauging its weight from the foreboding arc, heard the pulley creak. Gavin released the rope. The weight thudded onto the exoskeletal planks. There was one almighty pause. Tremble took hold, forces unfastened. The whole flimsy frame folded like a dark star plunging inward, caps spinning, clasps sprung, ledgers collapsing in a grandstand failure of parallel, all its purposeful angles ridiculed in the onrush of gravity and brutal metal, as if a universe were being rehearsed, its experiment failed, the true lack of structure revealed.
The ladder, still tied, slumped to a pointless flat, and the sound left over was made up of dust. They all rebuilt it in grim co-operative silence.
11. Resonating
All metal is removed. The body is washed, dressed in a fresh white cloth, and laid out on a narrow bed. The living withdraw and the room is sealed. The tunnel swallows him whole, and a fierce static dance shrivels his last gasping spirit. The torment is heightened with booming a-rhythmic drumbeats and insistent voiced-over commands to breathe. Breathe! Stop breathing! Breathe! When the priests return, the corpse is given water and allowed to leave.
MRI REPORT
Patient: TAWLEY Gavin
Scan date: 10/03/2014
Indication: 58 yrs
Height(cm): 179; Weight(kg): 65
Patient claustrophobic, scanned in the prone position. Left ventricle: normal cavity size, no LVH. Mild impaired global systolic function, no regional wall motion abnormalities. Right ventricle: normal in size, no RVH. Mild impaired systolic function.
12. Part of a pattern
It seemed to me I had a friend, there was someone called Alison, did she die I suppose and they cleared her away like a tea tray, she was part of the pattern on the cloth that was crinkled and stained and covered unknowns, or Alice it may have been, was it or another or none. It seems unlikely, what would we have said, to one another?
13. Report contd. p2
has been a resident now for 6 years and seems content here. He has establishd routines and always take his medication readily. No visitors. No known family. Still always bring his suitcase down to mealtimes and to events in lounge area and sits in diffrent chair each time which upset some other residents. Now he using a frame he devised a way of strapping the case to the front. We believe it to be empty.
Mr Tawley complain sometimes that he has tunnel vision but the optician has been to him and his sight to be normal if weak.
Signed
Date
14. Final frame
Setting off for somewhere Gavin strapped on once more the case of all his belongings and pivoted through the door held open for the lady who ran the exercise class, as she came in he went out, his frame momentarily enframed. The cold saw through his dressing gown with ease and the blown snow mocked his eyes, but the way was short and familiar and beyond question. The stops of his frame and his shuffle between them left dominos on the path, double twos soon overdusted. And so beneath the stanchion at the end of Platform 3 he rested his case and lay down this way down in a shallow drift, arms across his chest, his profile updated, the useless frame encasing him like so, his ghosts at last unboxed. Now boarding.
Kevin Armor Harris lives in England and writes short fiction, mostly reflecting his background working in community development. His stories are characterised by a quirky combination of humour and a readiness to disturb and surprise, challenging understandings of art and identity, and bringing sensitivity to the experiences of outsiders and those who experience exclusion.