THE CASE (PART ONE), ON THE TELEVISION

Thursday morning, twenty three minutes to ten….

The television screen reappears. A band of interference lifts the curtain on the action to follow. At first Peter is aware of the screen, but slowly it appears as though the action were at first hand, not watched, and then there is another sensation, a tickle in his nose. Peter shakes out the neatly pressed folds of a white cotton handkerchief and blows hard. Being well starched, it doesn’t absorb anything, just pushes, spreads something slightly warm and slippery around his upper lip a while. He becomes aware of a certain variety of sounds in the vicinity, old fragmented historic sounds of footsteps on damp concrete, the scraping of gravel underfoot, in grit or green kerb mush in wet gullies, in alleyways, on paths or roadways. There are black and white 1950’s detective movies playing every night on late night T.V. The heavy rain, the street corner light illuminating a shadowy figure, coat collar turned up and there are footsteps leading into that strange world of pre-sleep, pre-nightmare, of falling away, slipping away.

Peter is, momentarily aware of his slightly numb index finger; it should pre-suppose hand and that which controls hand. It seems so obvious but the idea falls away, slips away into a grey nothingness, into a “word”.

“In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.” John was on to something. He didn’t investigate, wouldn’t have made even a half-way decent detective. His interests were elsewhere. The words are in control, but Peter, Bug eyed Peter, he is only interested in what this story has to offer in as much as he can steal bits of it to fill out the gaps in his own little adventure.

There are words wandering about in Peter’s head. They slowly filter down, form a pattern, and switch on the machine. The words tell him in what direction to turn his head, where to focus his eyes, whereabouts and what to tune his ears into, where to point his nose. Up and down, from side to side, Peter’s head surveys the surroundings, the redbrick walls; the jagged glass parapet veneered a dried blood brown. A varied collection of dull earthen coloured bottles, some broken, dirtied by time to a smokey semitransparent rust, abandoned railway cutting electric smelling rusty dirt and stones urine and vomit. He records a few crumpled, faded looking Coke cans, temporarily brightened, by spots of recent rainfall, various torn up scraps of blue coloured paper. Here and there a newspaper, torn pieces of newspaper, growing mould, a dustbin-lid full of oily water and little islands of dead insects lays not more than three feet from where he stands in the muddy passageway. All these things neatly detected, tagged and labelled and filed, up there in his head, in the machine. Raymond Chandler would have been dead proud.