Danny Roberts' Heuristic Tales: Pilot

Some of you may know that many of the pieces posted on this Eponymist blog were actually written by my good friend and occasional collaborator, Danny Roberts. Every now and then, when he is passing through this particular time in space, Captain Roberts will email me with the latest short story or autobiographical chapter he has been working on and asks me to publish them under my own name. I am always happy to oblige.

Well Captain Roberts has been in touch again and it seems that he has decided to try his hand at script writing. Four scripts he has sent me, with more promised, and I have been commanded to breathe life into them. Rehearsals begin presently. In the meantime, I have been asked to record a pilot episode via Soundcloud and to take the role of Captain Roberts himself.

I am afraid I'm not much of actor (my last acting role was as King Herod in the school nativity play when I was six), but I'm doing my best. This pilot is divided into six chapters, two of which are recorded and available for your listening pleasure by following the link below. The final four chapters should be ready over the next week. Constructive criticism is welcome, though not necessarily appreciated ;) Enjoy!

https://soundcloud.com/eponymist/sets/danny-robert-heuristic-tales

The One Week Waltz

A week, a week, a week,
This song took a week, a week, a week.
A week, a week, a week,
Yes it took a week, a week, a week.

Took one solid week to get the lyrics right.

But still they came out crap.

Five to Six

"No."

So, through a second floor window, do we witness the last few acts of a desperate man. He writhes and contorts, falls to his knees, pressing his nose to the floor. Mutterances issue from his lips. His palms are dirty, his skin clammy and oozing sweat. Each movement seems an exertion. He clenches and unclenches his fists as he goes, left hand grasping a naked lamp. A buzzing emanates from somewhere in the room, probably a mobile phone on vibrate. He fails to hear, oblivious to all but the small patch of carpet he examines. And as each search brings no joy, he repeats that one word. No.

Ten minutes pass without change and with no small sigh our subject returns the lamp to its table and crawls back onto the bed. The late afternoon light of an early autumn sun illuminates the scene. He lays with his head nearest the headboard, then away at the foot of the bed. He lays on his back, on his front, then oscillating from side to side every other minute. Finally he lays across the single mattress and rests his legs vertically against the wall. He stares at the ceiling and ceases to move.

Have we seen all? Surely not.

"Oh for fuck's sake!"

With a violent heave he pushes away from the wall and does a backwards roll onto his feet. He examines the field of battle afresh. His face is red now, the blood pounding in his ears. He sweeps his gaze one more time over the mouldering emerald carpet, then sits down on the bed and opens the top drawer of the bedside table. He puts it on his knees and starts to throw the disordered contents onto the bed.

Finally there is only dust and detritus left and he takes the bare lamp and places the bulb near each corner, going around the rim faster and faster. He stops with a jerk and kicks the bedside table. Then he curses and kicks it twice more. He knows this was the good drawer. Nothing in here, no chance in the bottom drawer. He looks anyway, ignoring the shouts that his eruptions have elicited from below. The result of the search is as expected. He falls to his knees with a dull thud.

"Please. Just one more."

He's under the bed now, pulling up sections of carpet. One good find, he thinks. Enough for one more hit to get him over this hump, then he'll quit. A branch to briefly cling to on his short plummet back to Earth. Instead, he keeps on falling.

The crossroads was approaching. Time to face difficult choices. On the one hand he could give up the ghost here, ride out the sweats, walk them off even, take one night's tense sleep and be over it. On the other hand, he could ring Justin and go pick up and bottle out once again. He'd have to be quick though. Justin was only open for business during the hours before his missus got back from work at six and he was strict about it. Fuck with him and he'd cut you off in a heartbeat.

That time was fast approaching and yet he knew he would leave it until the last possible moment. He always did. This was injury time. Make a find, ride out the six o'clock tide and he'd be over it by the time it made a difference. Yet he'd been over this room a dozen times and all he had to show for his efforts were a few measly flakes of dullest green. Not enough to get an gnat high. So it was now or never. Had to have time to ring Justin and get there and back. Half an hour tops. He checked the clock. It read 8:06.

"Oh no."

His face fell as he felt a state of dread descending. The digital clock on his bedside table had been acting up. Running fast or slow for hours at a time. He found his phone and saw that it was five to six. There was a text waiting for him:

jus got a boss ched in but b quick cheers.J.

Oh fuck. So once again the fates had conspired to make the decision for him. He called this the ground state. The state in which he felt he was being ground down to dust. The gloom stirred, no longer held at bay. He felt himself aging. An upheld palm aged and withered and shrunk before his eyes. A desert mirage, but it set off a wave of nausea. He saw himself cold and grey on the slab, incinerated and scattered before a blue flame. Couldn't come quick enough as far he was concerned. Sooner the better. Why not just go now? If I have to feel like this forever, why not just get it over with now?

Oh no, you don't have it in you to do that. That's a defence mechanism that is, a healing rite of passage. Think about suicide and imagine watching in ghoulish form as your family and friends are informed of your death. You cry as they cry. Then having imagined one possible future for yourself, you take the opposite path. It's why the human psyche exists. To imagine future scenarios and rehabilitate the soul through internal role play.

It takes a lot out of you going through this every month. Why not do it properly for once and leave this life behind us?

 "Ok then. " 

He nodded. Ok. The yin and yang of it all. A change is as good as a rest. These things even themselves out over the course of a season. There has to be a last time and this is technically the last, last, last time.

Of course I should only say it is until next time. Au revoir rather than goodbye. Finality invites rebellion. Yet delay, well that's virtually a British tradition and I am conditioned by my very culture to queue patiently, remain on hold and wait in between the hours of 9am and 5 for a plumber who perennially fails to arrive. I can survive if I can believe that one day I can return to these pastures and be at peace. When I've earned the right.

The orange light of the sinking sun hurts my eyes, but I will endure. Fate may drag me in her wake but I have hold of the reigns and I'm positive I once felt her yield. Just a little. Only for an instant.

Forward we must go.

Onwards and upwards.

Tomorrow is another day. 

Prologue

To celebrate 'the end of the world', I thought I'd post the prologue to something I've been working on for a while. It's far too long to go up in it's entirety, but here's a teaser: 

“And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that accendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them... and shall overcome them... and kill them.”

The beast that stood before them towered nine feet tall and growing. It morphed as it grew, its face swelling crimson. Two more faces appeared out of its cheeks, one of yellow, one brown, an unholy trinity of voices intoning the words in a phased, discordant chorus as they emerged. Its clothes fell away to reveal hoofed legs of thick brown fur, pendulous testicles and a cock standing proud and veined and purple. It continued to grow, now twenty feet high, great horned leather wings unfurling at its spine, chilling the air around them with each monstrous flap. And as it reached the apex of its transformation, it leaned back and held its clawed hands out to the sky and gave a blood curdling howl of delight.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear NO evil, for thou art with me, they rod and thy staff they comfort me.”

The woman that faced the beast had fallen to her knees. She stabbed a crucifix in its direction, her flamed red locks sodden, already blowing in the sea breeze and blowing all the more in the vortex of the beast’s wings. Though terrified, she faced the thing bravely, her chanting all but lost beneath the mockery that echoed back at her. The words whistled through the gap in her top teeth, a wild stare fixed on the creature, tears streaming from unblinking eyes.

Dan stood twenty feet away and watched the scene as from afar. Like the dreams and fantasies of his youth, time had slowed to a crawl, giving rise to those same feelings of dislocation and fear. He took it all in: the showdown between impossible creature and insane preacher, the volley of biblical passages, the rumbling of the storm clouds. The rain was pelting down, but the very raindrops were deflected from the beast’s form. The grass began to smoulder beneath its feet, grains of sand rose from the dune like dust in a static field, crackling in the air around it. A discarded motorbike lay on its side a few feet away, handle bar buried. A sailing ship bobbed in and out of view on the horizon.

All this Dan saw, yet watched not through his own eyes, but as through a TV screen broadcasting live from behind his retinas. Reality, not for the first time, seemed distant and unattainable. How had he arrived at this point? He thought back through the disappearances and the global panic, through the requests to meet his elusive relative, way back to the nightmares of his infancy and saw that he had overshot himself. Was there a moment when he could say all of this had begun? Was he really responsible for what had happened? What would Jim have to say about all of this? And when would this women realise that she didn’t have a prayer?

The heavens rumbled, the sky cracked, the flow of time resumed its natural course. Dan lifted his eyes to meet those of the triple faced thing and witnessed oblivion.

He closed his eyes.

We Heartily Recommend... Moby Dick

Moby Dick is one of the pinnacles of English literature. Which is to say, steep, inhospitable and littered with pitfalls for the unwary reader.

The actual plot of the novel, Captain Ahab's obsession with hunting down the eponymous white whale, occupies only a fraction of the novel's length. The rest of the book is dedicated to diversions and digressions on every aspect of whales and whaling life. It's a dense, complicated book, employing a variety of styles from Old Testament damnation to sailor's yarn to scientific journal, the narrative taking on the obsessive mania of Ahab in its need to give the very last word on whaling.

It's tough going and a lot to take in, you will glaze over in places, but if you can last the course then you should find a tour de force in storytelling. It's not a book to read idly on holiday. It is a fine instructional manual for the budding writer. Melville shows great mastery of a number of styles and there's a lot to be learned on how a writer can bend the medium to tell his story rather than wedging the story into the confines of the medium. Indeed, many of the techniques Melville pioneered in Moby Dick weren't rediscovered until the great modernist writers of the early twentieth century.

It truly is one of the most remarkable performances that English literature has yet produced. Not one for the casual reader, but worthy of an obsession. Ahab would understand. 

The Hill of Howth

Oh there once was a babe born of fire and ice and Andy was his name oh.

And he vexed his mother for the things he drew all upon her kitchen table.

And he drew in the yard and he drew on the walls,

And he drew on her skirts and he drew on her shawls.

And he drew all over our Queen Vic's halls.

Andy. Andy, Andy, Andy.

And when he was a boy-child, beasts of burden folk would bring.

And he cured them of their ills all and learned them how to sing.

And the priest called him heathen and brute before God.

And he packed up his things and away he did sod.

But he still had time to heal one more dog.

Andy. Andy, Andy, Andy.

And when he was a young man to the Yankees he gave aid.

Sawed bones and sewed their wounds shut and at night the nurses made.

And he sawed off their feet and he sawed off their arms,

And he bound up their wounds with his ointments and balms.

But he washed his hands 'fore he worked his charms.

Andy. Andy, Andy, Andy.

And he became a wise man and through the seas he set to roam.

Felled trees and gathered lumber and carved the ship of stone.

And he threw up the decks with a flick of his wrist,

And he found him a ship that the seas daren't resist

Bent the sails to his will with his mighty fist.

Andy. Andy, Andy, Andy.

And as he was thought an old man, an inn and wife he kept.

And from hill and o'er dale they came and sang and danced and leapt.

And he poured for them porter and he poured for them stout,

And he dished out his council and cooked them his trout.

And he filled up their wives when 'is weren't about.

Andy. Andy, Andy, Andy.

And oh they laid his body down. Way down. And I pray you remember people, I think you do. They laid him out in that big old airship he liked to fly around in all day, having his adventures. Placed brandy bottles at his feet and at his head and all around him until his whole outline was in cognac and bathed in bronze. And they jigged and danced till dawn and sent him on his way into the grey sunrise. His ship did rise and float out to sea and folk cried and they moaned. Andy. Andy. Andy.

And an age went by, another life it did seem.

And all across town folk had the same dream.

And weren't long then till folk said he were seen.

Andy. Andy. Andy.

Andy. Andy. Andy.

And he returned a new man to teach what he did know.

And gathered 'round him students wide and learned them how to grow.

And he found them a college and he built them a school,

And expounded at length about freedom and rule.

And Fridays gave his lectures from the pool.

Andy. Andy, Andy, Andy.

Dark shades on a Lillo like some fool.

Andy. Andy, Andy, Andy.

Andy. Andy, Andy, Andy.

a(n)d(y) Infinitum

Whiteout!

Shit. Mistake this was. Who are these people? Faces keep changing. Morphing. One person one second and another the next. How long is it? Two months maybe. Always happens this way. Always have to go through this one time and then its fine. Better now than tomorrow. No. Not here. Not in front of strangers. What are we doing again? Why are we here? Oh yes. Stop looking at them. Cold. Look at the fire. Visions in fire. Figure in the backlight. Stay still. Long stare. Eyesight narrows. Blinds out the corners. Limbs gone numb. All that remains of the world is this fireplace and its occupant. Silhouette glowing in cherry red. Red Knight. Flanked by rock guards. Pieces of fake plastic coal make their head and torso and arms. It all hones into sharp focus. His helmet comes to a point. Flames flicker at his visor, lighting up his eyes. They bare into me. Only two points left in whole universe. Heart pounding. Look away. Have to. Look away.

Look at Jeff. Know Jeff. His house. But Jeff's three people at the moment. In three pieces. The top half of Jeff is from his head down to the v neck in his hoodie. You can see the separation between Jeff's hoodie and his t-shirt underneath. Sections two and three of Jeff are split down a crease in his hoodie in a left to right diagonal across his stomach. He looks like when the magician cuts his assistant in half and pulls the pieces apart. His face is changing too, his red cheeks and shaved head for an instant turning into a man at a party I once saw who threw up into a pint glass. Nauseous. Jeff's features morph on but the acrid smell still in my nostrils. Reminds me of playing Fish. Fish? Fish, where the person holding the blunt shouts 'Fish' and next person shouts 'fish' gets the next toke. Then people start using fish in sentences, only the most alert getting a go. Leads to such hilarious variations as 'I think I've pulled a mussel', 'Oh, I'm getting a bit of a haddock' and 'As a mackerel fact, I'm vegetarian'. Best I ever managed was, "You sea horses, right?" I tried, "You sea cucumbers?" but they were on me before I could finish the sentence. Stop carping on. Change the tune-a. Short of breath. Not enough air. Chest tightening. Need to get up. Can't sit here anymore. Shivering. So cold. Must find bathroom. Just for a moment. Have to be alone.

White. Gone white. And grey. Feel like I'm having a heart attack. Always this way. Need a distraction. Had a girlfriend sit on me during a panic attack. Poked me with her fingers until I screamed at her to get off. When I asked what the hell she was doing she smiled and said well it got rid of the panic attack didn't it? She was not wrong. Not sure that was why she did it though. She took it to the extreme. Usually just play a game on my phone. Or flick through an atlas. Get lost in the places. Or splash of cold water. Lost my place by now. Five second rule in operation. Everyone's gonna know. Why not just say? Remember what Jeff always says. If you feel yourself having a whitey, tell someone. It loses its hold over you if you admit it 'cause then you don't have to hold on to it anymore. Most people are sympathetic. It's only very rare you get sat on.

I'm out. Walk of shame. Ok. Said everyone would look. Jeff asking if I'm ok with that wry smile of his. Ok then. Time to fess up.

Laughter and ribbed that I only fessed up 'cause it's so obvious from my face. My grey corpse face. True what Jeff says though. Feel easier already. Faces still morph, but it's a slower cycle. The faces become friendlier. Start telling stories. Heard this one before but it's worth hearing again:

Jeff, Kev and Clarkey dropped acid once and went for a drive. They did it before Bill Hicks made it cool. And they didn't get pulled over by the cops. Not on the country lanes of Gloucestershire. Only thing they found was a junction. Dusk. Off to the right they see some lights and wait for the car to pass before they pull out. Three hours later they realise that the lights are really the porch lights of someone's cottage. It was that point they realised how fucked they were, Clarkey gone white and humming to himself in the back seat, and decided to go home.

The first time I tripped I had a massive whitey on the come up. Standing still I felt like I was moving at 60, my legs were on one side of the room and my head the other side and this voice came out of the heavens to announce to me that in the grand scheme of things I was nothing. Then we just played Magic the Gathering all night, falling into long silences, then both looking up at the same time and having an epic conversation about something random. In my head we became a sitcom, the next big thing after the Fast Show. Two stoners who say nothing for most of the episode, but when they do speak, it's dynamite.

Kev starts saying how gutted he was when Richard Whiteley died, 'cause he wanted to pitch him a show called 'Whiteout' where two teams got stoned in increasingly bizarre ways and the winner was the last one not to have a whitey. We play a few rounds. There's taking a toke and holding it in till it comes back around the circle. A game for sadomasochists. Then there's the blow back into a chilled pint glass. The smoke just sits there in the glass and you take it back like a drink, throwing it back like a shot.

Then we're on to building things, putting a hole in an apple to smoke through and making complicated joints using the instructions from the 'Spliffs' books. Me and Jeff's bursts into flames and for a second I see the Red Knight's hand in its combustion. A fleeting paranoia and then we're on to making buckets. Finally a piece of toilet roll is stretched over the rim of a pint glass, coin placed in the middle, and we take turns burning the paper. Burn two holes into one big hole and you do a shot of tequila. Suits me, alcohol relaxes me. Drop the coin in the glass and you have to shotgun a whole can of beer.

Jeff loses and jabs a pen into the tin and it comes over his face and he swallows the lot. Then he falls back down into his chair and starts off on a rant about decriminalisation and how the Dutch have got it right and that we should stay out there when we go and not get the flight back. Kev says nah, we have to fight for it to be decriminalised in our own land, not hide in a corner of someone else's country like we're ashamed of who we are. Have to fight for it where we live.

And it’ll happen eventually, Jeff says. Legalisation I mean. ‘Cause eventually a generation will come into power that realise the truth. That in spite of its side effects, compared to coke, heroin, alcohol, tobacco, Prozac, Valium, Tomazepan, Big Brother, X-Factor, religion, New Labour, the Democratic Republican Party and the myriad other narcotics and carcinogens which saturate our society, Marijuana barely even fucking registers on the fucking scale man.

Everyone goes quiet as Jeff's words hang in the air. He gets ups. Puts some music on. AC/DC, 'Powerage'. And by the time 'Gone Shootin' comes on I am floating through space in a bubble in my mind and Jeff is draping a duvet over my corporeal form on the sofa. Ba da, dum dum. Ba da, dum dum. Ba da dum dum. Early start. Ba da dum dum. Amsterdam by lunchtime. Say it's changed. Saying that for years. Clarkey snoring? Red Knight still staring out the corner of my eye. Oh come on now, don't stop me getting any sl