175: Vertiginous

I was living at the edge of a forest but also on the shore, right on the beach. At least, I was staying there for a while. During a work Skype meeting, a seal wandered in through the French windows facing the sea and shuffled to a spot by the coffee table where it stopped and stared up blankly at me, just barking over and over. “You’ve got to look at this,” I said to my colleagues, turning my phone around and filming. Filming—is that what we call it on Skype, these days? Anyway, filming the seal seemed to prompt it to return to the sea, and it shuffled out of the doors again. I trained my phone on it, following it. I didn’t want my colleagues to miss any of the action. When I turned the phone back around to look at their responses, they were all just blank, not saying anything. I had my camera off and my mic muted, of course, so they had no idea. They didn’t even know that I was in this hut by the beach. Previously, I’d been living in the offices themselves, although I’m not sure they knew that. At least, I hoped they didn’t. I would make sure to take the lift up to the 38th floor very early in the morning, along with the cleaning staff. There’s something about the precarity of those jobs, being as they were on zero-hour contracts and run by an unscrupulous contractor based in the Cayman islands, and because all the contracts themselves were routed through the Cayman legal system, due to some unfortunate wording in the statute referring to the floor-height of domestic working environments, and, given the highest building on the islands at the time stood at 37 floors, an eagerly exploited legal loophole meant that employees working on the 38th floor or above on Cayman-registered companies operating anywhere in the world fell completely outside of any legal assurances. In fact, they often fell completely outside of windows or hatches or down elevator shafts from the 38th floor or above. So, as I rose in those brisk autumn dawns of 1989, in the relative security of my minimally secured post, up the shaft to the 38th, my reflections on all this precarity extended to a foreboding sense of precarity in my own body, and in the cabin and mechanisms of the lift itself. In this fragility of my corporeal physicality, I would often, in those early hours, rest semi-slumped against the lift doors, where, ear against the slither between them, I could hear the whirring of the mechanism and picture the vertiginous depths below me as I rose towards the upper levels. I would imagine the lift cable snapping, and fret over whether I’d be able to enact the recurrent and, ofter, painfully ideated survival strategy for those last moments of plummeting terror. But then, after a few deep breaths, feeling the cool of the hammered sheet metal door on my face, I’d zoom out a bit and see the lift shaft from the perspective of modern safety standards, and the architectural assuredness of the entire structure. I reassured myself that it was infallible, and more often than not, I’d arrive at the 38th floor unscathed. I lived in a sort of storeroom, an expansive but cramped and dusty enclosure that seemed to have been forgotten by everyone in the company, save for one or two who remembered, but kept it to themselves. There was a working fridge nestled in the corner, and occasionally staffers would use it to store their surreptitious bottles of beer, bursting in at random moments during the day to pour a bit into the safe opacity of their flasks to take back out on their shifts. Surely their line managers could smell it on their breath. Or, maybe they were complicit. Once a raucous conclave of line managers with their direct reports, some 30 to 40 souls, barged into the storeroom in a guffawing, cackling, grunting, jostling and groping column that made a staggering charge towards the fridge, which they overturned in their efforts to snatch out its contents, which they smashed and sprayed and poured into each other’s faces, shrieking and snorting and pissing themselves. All the while, I was hiding behind a piece of melamine shelving unit, looking at the corners of the room and wondering if I should be soundproofing them. It’s really only the corners you need to soundproof, in a four-walled room. Because that’s where the sound, in a box-room, accumulates and escapes. During this period, every morning without fail, after arriving at my accommodation-cum-workplace and shaking off my lift shaft anxiety, I would invariably receive a Wordle text from Mother. Six goes: one line of incorrect letter guesses stacked on top of the other: A dark shaft bordered by the green and yellow squares of correctly guessed and incorrectly placed, and correctly guessed and correctly placed letters. I always wondered—did she even know any real five-letter words? I made a note to myself to send her a five-letter word dictionary. But in the meantime: Try ‘Fizzy’, always start with ‘Fizzy’. I stopped receiving texts like these after moving to the coast; there was barely any reception. She always used SMS, never internet-based messaging services, so I seldom hear from her these days. As the seal glanced back at me before shuffling back into the surf, there was a sort of motherly glint in its eyes, as if to say, “Come now. You’ve had your fun. You’ve had your jokes and laughs. Come with Mother down into these depths.” The seal turned its head and dived into the water. I was muted, camera off. If I could just stay like that, in that moment of present absence, perhaps my colleagues would never notice that I’d taken to the aquatic life. Or the subaquatic life. ———— It was a contemporary opera by a Danish mime company, called Freddy Krueger plays the washboard. Actually a very inventive production, a hermeneutic inversion of Massenet’s Manon, with the protagonist substituted for a choir of Freddy Kruegers, all playing washboards of various grades with their knife-gloved hands. But as such, the combined effect of the multifarious scratching and rattling formed, to some ears at least, cogent phonemes in a mellifluous, poetic French tongue. “Can you hold my drink while I clap for the performance?” Sure, I said. She handed me the drink. It was very cold. “This drink is very cold, what…” I started but was cut off — “Oh, silly me, you’d better take these or they won’t hear me,” she said, peeling off her gloves and stuffing them into my free hand. I started to look around for somewhere to place the drink, but it was useless - we were jammed up in the standing stalls and there wasn’t even space to crouch down to the floor. “What the hell is in this…” “whooooooooo”, she started whooping, drowning me out. The curtain-call was endless. I could feel my hand numbing. The main actors, dressed in their Krueger gear, came to the front of the stage and bowed. I tried to reposition my grip and realised I couldn’t move my fingers. The supporting actors appeared from the wings and were invited to the stage front. I desperately tried to shake the drink from my hand but both were now fused, frozen solid and my wrist snapped and the cold crept up my body, freezing me to the spot. My body shatters. But my soul escapes through my eyes, just in time. And as my body shatters, the fragments scattering among the peanuts and crisp crumbs, the sound of tinkling ice is drowned out by the standing ovation. Now disembodied, I drift up into the great dome of the Royal Opera House, and I'm sucked out the open slats of a ventilation hatch. I rise up through the clouds until I see a crow perched on the fluffy top of a cumulus nimbus. I didn't know you could do that, I say to the crew. I can't, it says ruffling its wings and pitching itself in an earthward dive through the cloud. And nor can you, It shouts back as I feel myself condensing with the water vapour around me. Meet me in the fountain, I think I hear the crow call. As I start to rain down towards Trafalgar Square, I fall mostly on the hind part of the south eastern lion and lash against the same quadrant of Nelson’s shaft, streaming down and collecting into the body of fountain water. The crow from the cloud is nowhere to be found. For a time. Then a ruffling of feathers breaches the relative calm of the square, like a distant crack of thunder. And the rattling caw shakes the panes of glass in the ministerial offices and diplomatic buildings clustered around these austere spaces. And everything hangs mid moment while the collective attention shifts wholesale to the fourth plinth, upon which perches the 12 foot corvid, shuffling from foot to foot, preening the roots of its feathers with its beak, before flipping its head upwards in a skyward flutter, shrieking twice, shrieking thrice. And a flickering rapid lateral blink over its polished obsidian eyeballs, as the water heralds a fourth, fifth and sixth shriek. As floating particles in a body of water, the full depths of these optics are lost on me. But on the surface of this body is yet reflected the undulating aspect of this dark apparition, and through the same body shudders the muted cry from the obscure beak parted like a crab pincer clawing at the day-cloaked stars. Back on the fourth plinth, the crow pipes up: Who drains the fountain ponds? Who cleans the filters? Who names the pond water? Who frogs the taxonomy? Well, I suppose every new feeling frogleaps over the former. Familiar, impersonal rages bubble up, wholly new, yet with zero personality. No distinct traits in these, of course. Everything is in flux, standing still does not stop anything, we are the flow… Then, the crows stares right into the water at me… You remind me of someone I punched once. Well I say punch but actually I swung and missed. Nose like a soft icicle, where boyfriend says there'll be crisps soon. And the crisp packets in which they find themselves have other ideas. Ideas such as “magistrates should marry their mouths” and boyfriends with soft noses like icebergs and a packet of demands such as “magistrates must marry their mouths”, must marry their mouths.