The Movement was not something that had appeared overnight, but nevertheless I had been caught off guard by it, by the capacity it had to suddenly and violently take over my life. I knew there had been Movements in the past, but they seemed unreal somehow, like scripture, like truths that were to be swallowed, to be digested if possible, but never to be proven by my own experience of the world. I grew up watching grainy black and white film of these Movements, reading about them in textbooks and journals, talking about them with people who had been lucky enough to take part in them. But I had never joined a Movement.
I remember a story someone once told me at school, one of those apocryphal tales that the young love to share. A boy had been at home on his own, in his bedroom, masturbating, when he had heard his mum come through the front door, back from work. He heard her coming up the stairs, he panicked, and he grabbed a knife and slit his wrists in a desperate attempt to hide his shame, and to make it look like he had been trying to commit suicide so that his mum didn't realise that he'd been having a wank. He died.
I'm not sure how, if that story were true, anyone would ever have found out that he was knocking one out when his mum got home. Unless she could tell. Unless she could tell, and she then told that story to the kind of person who likes to share gossip with friends and strangers about unspeakable local tragedies.
I first realised there was a Movement taking shape when everything started going wrong in my life. I was on a train and I'd just spent the last of my money on the ticket. Not the last of all the money I had, but it would be the last for a while. The man sat opposite me was thumbing his way listlessly through a faded broadsheet. Glossy supplements fat with aspiration kept leaking out of the pages of the newspaper like tongues being born at a funeral. The writing on the pages was so close together that you could barely read it, the letters all flowing into one another, the ink still liquid on the paper. I had a headache.
Not a bad headache. Just a dull bore behind the eyes. My eyes felt raw and vulnerable. The backs of my hands were sweating, the palms completely dry. It would be at least another two hours before the train arrived at my destination. And the heat. The heat was relentless. Three weeks it had been like this, and the grass was brown and brittle. People in the cities kept dying. They said it was because of all the heat.
The Movement was happening all over the country, as far as I could tell. It was a reaction of some sort, of that everyone was certain. People were finding new ways of banding together in the same old fashion, congregating in the same old places, saying the same old things. I thought it would be harder to stop this time, harder to put back in the box.
There was one night in a club where I saw a man in the middle of the dancefloor, eating whole boiled eggs. He ate four or five at least, barely flinching. I'm not sure what he had used to carry them in. Some kind of plastic tub I guess. People barely took any notice of him. At least I think that's what happened. It was a long time ago. I might have imagined it.
That was all before the Movement started up again though. Before I started running out of places I could stay the night, and started heading south, towards the sun. I'm making the whole thing sound like some kind of lonely trek across the desert, like some timeless and apocalyptic American novel where everyone is going somewhere and little ever happens. In my world, in my story, it was different. No-one was ever sure where they were going in the first place. It seems inevitable that so many people got lost. You could see whole herds of them alongside the road, if you knew where to look, milling around in the shadows while the traffic sped past. A Movement was already building, even before the clouds started to dry out and the air grew thick with dust.
I've come to realise that life is made up of Movements, of these underlying currents always forcing things forward. The Movements ebb and flow, wax and wane, and constantly underpin everything we do like a drone oscillating in the background. The Movements are punctuated by Events, by spikes in the graph, by the things we can remember. These Events, these islands of life, are eventually swallowed up by the Movements, until you can no longer remember where they were or what they really looked like, only that they happened.
So that summer we braced ourselves for the tide about to wash over us. For most of us, it was the first time we had really felt it. A lot of people drowned in it. They were consumed by it, they disappeared into it, and many didn't reappear for years. When they did, they were unrecognisable. Some are probably still up to their necks in it.
I never joined the Movement in the end. I was more like a bystander, an observer, but by no means a casual one. The Movement affected me and everyone I know in ways that to this day I still haven't come to terms with. I remember a time when we all went camping, and a girl we used to know fell in the sea. When they pulled her out, there was a small crab in her hair, thrashing about to try and free itself from her tangled plaits. We took it back up the beach and we tortured it. We took it in turns to rip its legs out, then its claws, and then we smashed it on a rock. Afterwards we all stood back to have a look at what we'd done, and we lit a fire. We slept outside that night, and when we woke in the morning the crab had gone. Probably seagulls that took it.
I never joined the Movement, but I hear there's another one on the way.
0 comments:
Post a Comment