(novel extract)
Read by David Mildon
Living here was shit. A month ago, just after they'd moved, he'd written that on a wall down the industrial estate behind Ikea: LVNG HRE is shiT. He'd spent ten whole minutes of his life writing it, in big black-and-gold letters, and he considered this to be time very well spent. He was proud of it. It looked dead good. And, of course, it was true. Living here was shit.
Sometimes he'd cycle past it, and imagine that he was with his girlfriend (he didn't have a girlfriend) and he was saying to her, I did that. No, really. Good, innit?
He used to live with his mum and his brother in a place called Colnbrook and now he lived with his mum and his brother, here. And it was shit.
He hadn't done graffiti for ages, but a month ago, bored shitless one afternoon after school, he'd dug out the cans and got to work. Most graffiti artists just wrote their names all over the place, but what was the point of that? Chunk couldn't see any point to it. Wherever you went you were supposed to write your name on a wall or etch it into a bus window or scrawl it on the side of a bridge or whatever. Chunk felt like saying, every time he saw a tag, is that it? Haven't you got anything to say? Chunk had a lot to say. At first, of course, he'd just sprayed his name everywhere, same as everyone else. But then he'd decided that, although CHUNK looked pretty good, actually, in six-foot high yellow, red, and green block capitals on the side of a train, writing your name everywhere was pretty fucking stupid and pretty fucking boring and pretty fucking pointless. So he stopped writing his name and started writing other things. He wrote funny little messages and rhymes and jokes and cryptic statements and whatever the fuck he could think of at the time. He had this idea, and once he'd had it it wouldn't leave him alone, this idea that he would become this like famous secret graffiti artist with these crazy messages and shit all over the place. People would talk about him. He'd be famous, but no-one would know who the fuck he was. It would be fucking great.
He had this other idea that also wouldn't leave him alone, this idea that the first idea was total fucking bollocks and it would never happen. He got that one right, anyway. But fuck it. They'd moved here, and it was shit, and he had to tell someone about it.
"Thurrock". It sounded shit, and it was shit. There was nothing there, for a start. Just this massive non-place, this anti-town, one fuck-off superstore after another, and one fuck-off car park after another, and fuck-off fast-food places, and fuck-off garden centres and fuck-off multi-storeys and fuck-off sports centres and fuck-off malls and fuck-off industrial estates and fuck-off business parks and fuck-off leisure parks and fuck off.
Even compared to Heathrow, where Chunk had spent many happy afternoons and evenings, just hanging round, cycling round, lying around watching the planes, even compared to that, this place was massive and sprawling, and full of cars and not much else. It was like Heathrow gone all wrong. The roads were like toys: they looked bland and brand new and plastic.
OK, he to admit it, there was this one weird and even interesting area he'd discovered kind of by accident one night, after school, where you could cycle along all these grey-brown empty roads, dead wide, with flat low buildings on either side, and razor wire on gates and concrete bollards and the occasional delivery van or lost, confused shopper driving around and wondering how the fuck they were ever going to get back to the M25 before the scavengers attacked or before they died of boredom or before the world did.
Anyway, west of this area there was this cliff, just rising up out of nowhere. Like being at sea and arriving at Dover, or something, Chunk imagined, anyway. Something like that. The cliff must have been like a hundred feet high or something. You couldn't see it most of the time, because there were walls and roofs and underpasses and overpasses and slip roads and side roads and pillars and multi-story car parks in the way, but once you'd spotted it you kept getting glimpses of it as you passed between buildings or crested a hill and suddenly had a clear view for a second before you dipped down again and got surrounded..
Life in Colnbrook, life before they'd moved to this shit-hole, had been dead good because it was near Heathrow, and you used to get planes going overhead all the time. You'd look up: plane. Any time, any day of the week, look up: a plane. It was ace. Chunk sometimes, when he had fuck-all else to do (most times) would lie on his back in the garden, and watch the planes go over. It was fucking dead good. The best one was the biggest, the 747: the jumbo jet. It was massive, but it looked dead graceful, as well. He couldn't understand it. He couldn't, as his brother would say, "get his head round it". How did it stay up in the air? How did it get up in the air in the first place?
He read loads of books about planes, and understood (pretty much) how it all worked, and how the whole point was about speed and lift; how, when the plane was going fast enough on the ground, the shape of its wings meant that the air pressure underneath was greater than above, so the fucker just took off. Even so: it didn't look quite possible. But there it was, so slow and heavy, blotting out the fucking sun.
Once, around dusk, he'd seen this 777 descend through a thin shelf of blue cloud, and its lights looked like laser beams, slicing through the night. Sometimes he'd see one plane coming in to land, while another, thousands of feet above it, slowly crossed the sky. He tried to imagine what the people in that second plane were doing, what they were seeing. What conversations were they having? What in-flight movies were they watching, right now, so far above him?
The planes didn't run all night, of course: the boring wankers campaigning against night-flights had seen to that.
Night-flight. He loved that: just the sound of it. Night flight. If Chunk ever started a band it would be called Night Flight, and he would be lead singer. And lead guitarist. And he'd stand there like that big guy in that band his brother liked, leaning up to the mike, yelling and shrieking and bellowing and whispering.
His brother was one scary fucker, alright, but that band, that band was fucking brutal.
Once all the planes had stopped, Chunk would watch as the night filled with stars. The Plough, Orion, Cassiopeia. It was too bright, really, to see the stars properly, but even so. The glow from the airport and from London and from every fucking house in every fucking street and every fucking streetlight and all the cars and all the other crap got in the way. But even so. Chunk would just lie there in the garden on those dazed summer nights while his mum was out working or drinking, and his brother was out doing whatever it was he did most of the time (Chunk didn't want to know). He'd just lie there, maybe smoking a joint or drinking a bit of vodka, getting a bit spaced-out and dreamy. What were you staring at when you stared at the sky? What were your eyes supposed to focus on? Was that a plane, up there, that little dot floating across his field of vision, or a satellite? Could you even see satellites?
Another drink, Chunk? Don't mind if I do.
--
Chunk by Peter Higgins was read by David Mildon at the Liars' League Home & Abroad event on Tuesday 14 August, 2007.
Peter Higgins was born in Dewsbury, a northern town famous for its connections with the Yorkshire Ripper, suicide bombers, and tripe. He lives in London, a southern town famous for its connections with suicide bombers and tripe.
David Mildon is a LAMDA-trained actor and playwright who's appeared at the Hackney Empire, Trafalgar Studios, Theatre 503 and BAC as well as in Belgium and Italy. He was a founding member of Liars' League and his pseudonymous stories Worms’ Feast and Red have been performed by them. Red also appeared in the June issue of Litro short story magazine: www.litro.co.uk
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