Dear Mr _____,
Something simply has to be done! I can’t do this anymore. Every day up at five, out to perform yet more drill. Do you even know where they keep us?! It’s absurd. Since a funding crisis eight months ago shut down our barracks we’ve been living and training in the old Tellytubby’s set – basically, picture an over-manicured golf course lousy with fluffy rabbits who, having become accustomed to the salon cut and blow-dry treatment, secured themselves lifetime free monthly styling at Tony and Guys by blackmailing the BBC with threats to go public on La La’s sexual predilections.
But it’s not that. No, I can stand the training. It’s amazing what you get used to, but I couldn’t tell you that the constant camo training gets to me. Nothing now strikes me as odd about darting into a manhole cover or jumping into a freezer cabinet and covering myself with instant
Don’t misunderstand me; I can often still see the necessity of trailing vulnerable youngsters like yourself. You’re a good kid, but I see you often walking inches from cars, not looking, listening to your metal, scheming. Catching busses, getting lost. Fine. The people who dispatch us, sure, I can see they’re ok. They’re just concerned about you. I report back to them and they write it all down while constantly, contemplatively stroking that cat of theirs. They don’t instantly set to catching you up and filling you with MIND BULLETS. But, _____, listen, these are interesting times and last week I was dispatched to stalk a fellow for nothing more than his tendency to hold forth to all he encounters on his generalised hatred of all Crazy Frog merchandise. There I am every Thursday evening reporting back to a bunch of five foot something suits in blue frog masks, and me sitting on a nursery school chair talking about when, where and how this underemployed, bum-fluff-ridden young man has been planting the seeds of discontent against this particular lucrative mobile-phone-related cultural empire. Me lurking week in week out behind beer kegs and beneath pool tables taking expletive-filled shorthand notes. An excerpt, chosen at random (with ellipsis for intelligibility):
“f*cking tuneless sh#te… and anyway, like, when you even seen a blue frog, ‘cos I ‘int, and it’s all done wiv computers anyway, all ya gotta do is scrape a frog off the road and stick it in one of them flatbed ‘ckin’ scanners and the computer does the rest, like, Daz says so and ‘e knows ‘cos ‘e put a picture of Mandy with a pig’s head, like, and it’s on the internet now and some Jap woman keeps writing to him ‘cos ‘er husband’s always on the blether with this girl from the office and e’s thinking of goin’ to Japan with the money ‘e got when ‘im and Johno levered up a paving slab and got the pigs to chase ‘em down the road so’s they could trip up over it…”
The thing is, ______, it’s money, and we all need money and I tried to get a job as a postman because postmen are always complaining about bad backs ‘cos you got people with really low post boxes (“you don’t know sometimes if it’s meant to be a postbox or a catflap” I overheard a postman saying to an old woman sometime when I was tailing him for the Royal Mail to check he wasn’t having it away with Mrs Arnold in number 217 St Spinach Boulevard and so I said well you could have me going with all the letters for households with low postboxes and some lanky fellow for the others, save on sick pay because back problems can really drag on, you know, but they said no, even though I told ‘em they could pay me half wages cos I don’t eat so much. I can’t do anything else, you see, so even following this fellow and the others, like him into every greasy spoon café doesn’t so much bother me. It was only when they asked me to zap him with that ‘inert’ genetically-modified virus, imprinting his mind with a love for certain chart-busting novelty songs that I took umbrage, and _______, I have to tell you, I’m at large. I’ve hopped it like you from Support & Attendence and Residential. But _____, what really concerns me is that yesterday I saw this thing scuttling by in an urban camo jacket not even, like me, head high to a space-hopper. _____, this lad, I’m sure of it, fully grown with gravy on his beard, was half as tall as me! I’m being tailed myself. They’re watching the watchers.
But ______, I have a plan. What goes around comes around and the way I see it they’ve made a fatal error, because, fine, when one of these superdwarves escapes, they’ve got perhaps a little leeway yet for nano-men small enough to listen in while doing backstroke in a vinegar shaker. But after that?! Ha, you see?! It’s only a matter of time. Once one of these guys goes AWoL it’s only a matter of time before we are all swimming in a sea of human surveillance sludge! An unworkable and exponentially increasing absurdity of execrecrable excrescence – who will report to who? We will all once again be free to go AWoL and wander as we will!
_______, they must be catching up with me now. I shook them off at the barbers – just like you’ve done to me – crafty, _____, real crafty! – but I’ve only got so long and soon my session will expire. ______, be vigilant. Watch for them at all times.
Oh yes, and never, but never, mouth off about Crazy Frog. Walls have ears. They’re out there ______ and never again do I need to see a full grown man beaten to death by a horde of gorilla pigmies armed with nothing but dessert spoons.
Goodbye ______, it’s too risky to write again, fare thee well.
Agent #18967~24444
November 25th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
This is an e-mail I wrote to a student who had and has a tendency to do a nija-style disappearance and make himself scarce heading off on a mission to anything from a poetry cafe to a Pro Evo soccer tournament. He loves, or loved, writing, and using long words. He is also hilarious, very witty, and absolutely barking. He enjoyed this e-mail, which I sent from a spurious e-mail address I took an age to set up, cursing at the computer while I was at it.
I remember writing it, and looking back I see now that for all but a fraction of time since I returned to this country I have been a recluse, rarely intentionally and willingly seeing the few people I have kept in contact with, because I wrote this partly in town, depressed by my surroundings in the Super King cafe in the indoor market and out opposite the library what must rate as one of the most meretricious clocks that has ever been built, some plasticky affair with a horrendously synthetic chime that gives Blackpool tat a run for its money in the drab kitsch stakes.
Like most of my friendships and relationships, I tend to peak early in terms of the amount of effort I am willing to put in. He may have loved this, but I haven’t really made so much of the rapport I have always had with the lad. He’s elusive, yes, and infuriating, but perhaps I could have done more.
Oh, I did give him a Xmas present last year, something I write about in an essay I haven’t yet edited, and so haven’t yet posted, a copy of what I now perhaps am sure is a nihilistic and perhaps damaging film, Igby Goes Down - a film I imposed on another student on a holiday not two months ago.
As ever, it’s strange, and emotional looking back (I’ve posted so many overlooked projects and documents today). Invariably, I am looking forwards, throwing myself into one thing or another, and to look back and see this wreckage is ineffably dispiriting. Still, despite my anger and irritability today with my first (high) dose of Modafinil yesterday, something I must yet write about, I can see that I am able to write so much more fluently than I have been ever before, and indeed, despite the depression I have been feeling worse it seems than I have for a long time, I have been cracking on with this blog. We’ll see. Look forward. Look up. March on.
November 27th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
[…] have been upon reading a completed e-mail I first drafted on paper for a student a year and a half ago. I’m at my parents’ house in Black Herd Mews where I have lived for most of my life and […]