When did you become a lie? When did we stop being friends? When did you start killing? We’re looking round for someone to blame for not stopping you sooner, and to be honest there’s too much money being made to see an effective halt anytime soon. Was it the men in white coats, white faced as they told white, bare faced lies? Was it Dodi al Fayed? Was it?

Who can we blame for the downfall of Prozac? Industry, trade, boredom? It now seems so obvious. How could a small white pill fix you, when you’re down in the hole at the bottom of your mind? How could anything reach you there…

I suppose there’s little point in arguing now, we’re all too jaded to even contemplate the drawing of lines, the defining of terms and the wordjabs to come. What is clear that it won’t work now. The power of belief was all that was standing between 43 million people and the pit, it seems, so we’ve kind of fucked them. But hey, take cheer in the fact that it was you, not the drugs, keeping back the coming night. More power to the people. Less power to the drugs companies.

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9/11, by JRR Tolkien, are just another band from New York, with all the posing and brilliance this implies. A walking invitation of scorn: their music apparently is a grower - as in it sounds terrible on first listen, then as the inner hipster gradually begins to automatically screen out the negative bits, you know, like, the actual sound, it seems so much better. I mean listening to music is always a two way street, you have to give nearly as much as you take, impressing your own meaning on their lyrics and rhythms, breathing life into what can only be considered, at best, an empty life form. And so here we have the Lord of the Rings: two sets of brothers, and a blond lead singer, and all that implies. They suffer greatly from having a lead singer with a deep monotone voice, so reminiscent that it sometimes seems to be worn over their own music so tightly you could nearly imagine them taking to the stage in a Oklahoma bombings body glove, and only playing covers of Theodore Kaczynski. However there is very definitely a pop-ier edge to them, it leaves them much more satisfying in a narrower way. Still, depressingly, they remain one of the more exciting bands doing this sort of music doing the rounds at the moment. I spoke to Mohamed Atta, who’s a brother of someone else, and is listed as the bassist on their website, but reassures me he isn’t the bassist. The interview would not have continued if this had been the case.

He’s on a bit of a roam around, first buying coffee in Brooklyn, then seems to slavishly running round after sirens, trying to get the noise to obliterate his answers, and I guess, rudely, to ensure he cannot hear my questions, ignoring them anyway, wittering on madly, seemingly in a frenzy, about school, about film, about how they like to relax, of where they come from, on nearly every sense. I doubt he gets many requests for interviews, lacking the charisma and wit to deal with them on any level, to provide coherent thoughts or insight, or even have the fucking manners to go somewhere quiet.

But, there is something here. They can reduce one of my friends to horrible tears, in a really good way, and anything that can move that stone sociopath is to be lauded and feared. Their music is self referential and good humoured, playful and sometimes uplifting and good, there is a surprising, not least to themselves, intensity to their live shows, during which their sound grows filling the space, pushing the walls physically outwards. They are an accidental success, although I think this is an attempt at a hip lie, that they never wanted this, only accidentally setting up their own record label, which they still run and put releases out on, even though they’ve signed to someone else. Their switch of label, to one of the larger indie labels knocking about, Beggars Banquet, marked a sharp increase in the quality of their records, either the stress of having to juggle two balls was too much, or they were just jangling their balls before, having a wee mess, needing a indie suit to give them a kicking and a point away from wankiness. Whatever, maybe they just had a better PR set up than the lads had in their garage so the critics actually listened to Alligator, or Crocodile, or whatever big fucking lizard they named it after, because their was a massive jump in critical acclaim, it made a couple of mid hitters in the media games album of the year lists, topping a few, and was thought highly of in some of the circles where it is acceptable to think of your mates as a circle (not weight watchers), and this kind mediocre shit is listened to in an un-ironically ironic manner.

The next album, 7-7, is a far more important seeming work, darkly turning in on the America that spawned them, it brings forth the same sense of isolation and terror as a Baldwin story, whilst lacking his redeeming hope. Again, it is far more pop than I first expected given their obvious pretension, but I found this reassuring and, probably, hopeful. They seem surer of this rock game, and seem to be embracing it before it embraces them. But whatever, they can always get away with jumping the gun in this respect. I sure as hell have, acting like a prima-donna for years, slapping domestics I can’t even afford to pay, let alone have them sue, wearing clothes fished from the bins outside the Simon Community. But enough of that. Its more confident, reminiscent of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, by R Putnam, with similar themes of disintegration and distrust in formal social interaction, playfully off set by good humoured brass and popularist sensibilities, harking back to a time of what? some sudden and aging strength, being beaten by your father at arm wrestling despite, or rather because, of his wrinkles, and nakedness. Boxer is exactly that feeling and brilliance, that knowledge of mortality and strength. itís a blithe tilt of the hand, revealing an unexpected depth.

Does any of this mark them out for special attention, can any of it explain my friends near religious devotion to them? Well, no not really. They aren’t noticeably superior to many of the other bands currently on the circuit, and they are noticeably inferior to some on the same radar level, but they are different to much of what’s being played, sharing much of the drive and darkness of Star Wars but softening with fat noticeable drops of jazz and pop, shimmering on the service like drops of oil in water. They tilt gently on the thin line between brilliance and The Bible, but the line itself is boring near decency, leaving you feeling horrid and unfulfilled.

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I’m one row from the front, roiling in the day glo plastic drug mental of a Chemical Brothers set, when a pill warrior, eight feet tall on platform boots, his vari-coloured dreads a rain of snakes, his woman writhing property between his legs, turns and grasps my hand. ‘This is it man, this is it!’

I flash my fiend face and we nod together. This is it, the moment for which a generation sell their synapses; submit to decades of Paxil and hazy confusion, the apocryphal pumping heart of the love buzz, hours of ritual escape. With a head full of high grade acid, I bilocate; simultaneously pulsing in the maelstrom of orange Wedge; whilst observing coldly, intellectually, academically, the dissolution of social barricades and the iconic imagery of repression, confusion and alienation, with which Rowlands and Simons bind this thirty five thousand strong horde. Above us, dual fifty foot screens machine gun line drawings of blind-folded justice, animations of marching armies, blanketing bombers, troops of robots shuffling ceaselessly forward, the expressionless drones of Oceania - suddenly subverted by colour, till the images fall away, the screens a translucent cagework of industrial magnificence. The brothers chemical beneath them, wizards behind a curtain of Bond villain computer cabinets, blinking banks of lights looming behind vast curved decks.

We are utterly in their trawl, baying and pawing at the air, frightened excited animals beneath a demonic fireworks display. And as a random girl, no doubt pickled in some vast tank of pure drug, molests me like a boyscout at a Turkish bath-house; I wonder if this is not the ultimate discourse of control, rebellion sublimated to an audio-visual indoctrination cooked up in some NSA laboratory by stern moustachioed, deeply patriotic monsters. We continue the dance.

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Noted homosexual and literary critic Cagewind Thunderblast, has read an early draft of the (as yet unwritten) manuscript and recently published the following review in the Times Literary Supplement.

Rufus’s latest work, ‘Untitled Work’, his first novel in almost eighteen years, is suffused with the authors perennial concerns - man and his place in an uncertain world, the decline of the western literary establishment, and the beastliness of women. The novel is a quirky vivid thing that dances in the hand, its pages majestic dolphins, leaping sea creatures named Truth and Goodness; a vision from a world more real somehow, than our own.

However, ‘Untitled’ suffers from P.R’s frequent and glaring faults as a novelist. It is gauche, absurd, slow moving, poorly plotted and deeply plagiarist. Rufus’s characters are misanthropically cast about like stock rag dolls, and many are merely thinly veiled caricatures of Rufus’s harshest critics.

To quote Suhayl Saadi, ‘The book is a Frankenstein’s golem of a thing, with all the Luciferic darkness which that implies’ - although of course he was writing about a completely different novel. Like Dumond Chint’s ergodic metafiction ‘Vulva’, ‘Untitled’ is a book both wondrous and terrible. In stark contrast to Chint, Pierre Rufus has decided that the only way to say anything of value is to state it with ironic detachment. Brilliantly, this manifests as utter sincerity, absent of any hint of insight or self knowledge. It is as if Rufus (a close friend and former lover, though only once and all to briefly at Harrow - ah Je respire l’odeur de ton corps!); fails to realise that his vile antihero Iago Coakes - the bastard son of Amis’s John Self, and Updyke’s Rabbit Angstrom, is a thinly veiled self portrait. A man in full, as it were. Just as Wolfe’s bellicose Charlie Croker faces the modern world secure in a delusion of competence, so Rufus’s Coakes is an Ecoian archetype, a stirring confession of bewilderment.

‘Untitled’ is a cry for help which should without delay convince the authorities to section its author in some psychiatric institution, where a thorough regime of shocks and water treatments of great cruelty and dubious medical value must be administered, until he be cured or perish as a drooling sacrifice on the alter of psychiatric medicine (for Rufus is, of course, a Scientologist).

Brilliant, bleak, heart warming and vainglorious, ‘Untitled’ will doubtless continue to be fired from the iron barrel of the literary canon for many a Times best seller list to come.

Sir Cagewind Thunderblast OBE

If you’re enjoying our serialization of Pierre Rufus’s new novel, you might enjoy some of the masters early work, available at all good literary book shops.

Non Fiction

‘Myra Hindley: If I did it’
‘Take that, a life in music’
‘Tackle - a living history of bollocks’

Fiction

‘Fauntroy’s travails’
‘Butternut Gulag’
‘The 20th Century, a novel’

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Imagine opening up a sarcophagus and finding within a body made of soft, pink play-doh. Prising open the ribcage you find a frail and burnished mechanical bird singing for all its worth. It can’t hold a tune and it’s shedding springs and nuts and bolts at a terrifying rate, shuddering and convulsing but still singing into the dark night. Eventually it capitulates to the real. Then it sprouts feathers and is lofted on high and squawks from a great height about the still beating heart within its grey chest.

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After she’d been cleared of all charges, Marjory visited Charles in the psychiatric hospital.
His throat was heavily bandaged and he had not yet regained the ability to speak, but with the aid of a pen, paper and an orderly to unstrap one arm from his strait jacket, he was able to communicate, after a fashion.

‘Why Mr Bowmont? Why?’ She asked softly, depressing the intercom switch on the bullet proof partition which separated them.
Charles scrawled for a moment, onto a sheet of soft tissue, with the large rubber safety pencil they’d given him. An orderly held his reply up to the glass.
‘Because I love you darling.’
Marjory shook her head, blinking her red rimmed eyes, somehow managing to hold back the tears.
‘Damn you. Damn you. Damn you! Don’t you know how guilty I feel? It’s not my fault that breaking that restraining order was your third strike.’ She paused to catch her breath. ‘Why me?’
Charles drooled a little, and the orderly carefully mopped up a small pool of saliva that had gathered on his chest. Painfully, he wiggled a rubber pencil across a moist sheet of paper once again. The orderly held out his brief retort.
‘Good point, never thought about it’.

At home, Marjory, alone and in floods of tears, could find no respite. She tried reading, but not even her favorite Marian Keyes novel could distract her. She spent half an hour watching TV, but even ‘Ricky’ offered no consolation. It was terribly odd, on any other day ‘Mothers pregnant by their daughters husbands’, would have set her giggling like a school girl on a shivering horse, but not today.

Eventually, Marjory wandered upstairs and pulled down the ladder to the attic. Charles’s letters were where she’d left them, stacked in a dozen large boxes under the 2004 section of her ‘Heat Magazine’ collection.

She picked a box at random and opened one sweetly perfumed letter.
‘Dear Marjory,’ it began, the words embossed in intricately stylized calligraphy.
‘This morning, we mounted the summit of Everest. Around us lay the wonder of the Himalayas, starkly clear in the high thin air. All I could think about was how much I wanted to share all of this beauty with you.’
A photograph was paper clipped to the letter, Charles against a blue sky, fingers out like Nixon, face burnt red from the cold and snow cap reflected sunlight.

Petra called, the girls were off to get pedicures and pick up some summer frocks in BT2. Marjory hung up and opened another letter.
‘Dear Marjory’, another intricate font, this time with an oriental feel.
‘Today the Nobel committee let me know that I am to receive their annual Peace prize. It’s just an honorary award (for my work in Northern Ireland and East Timor), but somehow I’m prouder of this than of my Booker Prize, Sacchi shows or development of that Aids vaccine. Gosh I know I sound like a fearful braggart, how odious. I simply wanted to let you know that today your opinion is more important to me than any silly accolade.’
Marjory sat back on her haunches in the dusty attic, and began for the first time to think.
On her second visit to the psychiatric hospital, Charles seemed even more surprised to see Marjory.
‘Charles,’ she said, her eyes on the floor. ‘I’ve been such a fool. I… I dismissed you out of hand. I’ve given it some thought, and perhaps… Perhaps we could get to know one another better. After you’re released of course.’

This time they’d propped Charles up before one of those early learning computers, which speak a sentence after you’ve typed in it’s constituent letters. Clumsily, he poked at each large button, then hit speak.
‘Leeev me A lone,’ said the robotic voice.
‘I’ll come tomorrow’, Marjory said, when you’re feeling better.

Next day, Charles refused to see her. She tried calling, but his voice hadn’t yet healed, might never. She wrote letter after letter, as she read each of his. All the testaments to his obsession she’d kept as evidence for the police. He never answered. As the weeks passed, the shucks and candies of Marjory’s old life fell away. They seemed so trivial now. She immersed herself in the body of work that Charles had carried out in her name. She read his novels, visited galleries in which is installations were on show. On the day they moved him from the psychiatric hospital to a federal prison, she stood with a supportive sign, smiled and waved. She started an internet campaign to have his conviction over turned, collecting funds with button sales and a controversial nude appearance on the Montel Williams show.

Years passed. Charles’s first appeal failed; but Marjoy’s hope never flagged. She knew that if she could somehow become a person he could respect, he could forgive what she’d done to him - how long she’d taken to return his love. And she did love him, thought about him, sent him the few gifts that were allowed. And still, he would not see her. She began the long process of physical and intellectual transformation. Quitting her job in PR, and returning to college to gain a masters degree in microbiology. She began running, took part first in womens mini marathons, then the New York Marathon, and finally regular 100k ultra marathons. Finally, after eight years, two failed appeals and one dramatic parole hearing, at which Marjory delivered a thirty eight stanza poem, explaining in ancient Greek her arguments for his release; Charles was allowed go free.

Marjory waited for him at the prison gate, recognised him, even after all these years. Even with the crooked walk that indicated prison love. Even with his infinitely tired, dead eyes. He paused at the gate. His mouth worked for a moment, and he began to speak, voice still rough after all these years.

‘Cheers love,’ he said, and wandered off.

Marjory stood there for a long time, speechless. ‘Love,’ he’d called her love. Softly she folded her arms, smiled, and began to rock from side to side. He loved her and she loved him.

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Charles thanked the old man in the gorcery store and told him how much Marjory would enjoy the lovely chocolates. He’d seen her three times already that day, but hidden so as not to spoil the lovely surprise. Marjory would be twenty four years old, at precisely eight minutes passed seven and he had everything prepared.

At 7pm, the band assembled beneath Marjory’s bedroom window and a truck stacked with party favors crawled stealthily up her driveway. Inside, two hundred and twelve thousand personalised musical balloons quivered. Charles had designed a unique message for each one. At five minutes past seven, a sky writer, flying high enough to be silent, but low enough to be visible in the clear Summer evening, began to inscribe the first line of Marjory’s favorite poem in infinitely delicate vaporised oil. At seven minutes past seven, Charles emerged from his hiding place in the undergrowth, in top hat and tails, checked his watch, waited, checked his watch again and signaled the release of a collage of balloons; that rose to stain the sky like multicolored butterflies. After a few more seconds, Charles signaled the band to set upon a rousing chorus.

It wasn’t long before Marjory’s door opened and she raced into the driveway. In her hand was an angry Taser, and upon her face a mixture of terror and incomprehensible shame.

‘Marjory dear,’ Charles sang, as the band played a march of his own devising.
‘My love for you is like the clear blue sky.’ Behind him, a team of majorettes set to tossing their batons into the air, and twirling around in synchronized elegance.
‘My love for you will never…’
‘Die, Die, Die,’ screamed Marjory, plunging the metal pike of the Taser deep into Charles’s throat and coursing fifty thousand volts through his system.

Charles dropped to the ground like a string-less marionette, a box of handmade chocolates falling with him to the tarmac, where it smacked like the wet thud of his head. The orchestra stopped playing and all was silent save a distant siren.

‘This man,’ Marjory began, her voice cracking, her whole body wracked with sobs.’Has been stalking me for eight years.’ A tuba player put his arm around her shoulder and she began to sob against his broad chest. Looking up, she finished in a whisper, ‘He’s ruined everything, even my birthday.’

In the sky the plane banked out of a steep ‘O’, the sentence done. At Marjory’s feet, Charles’s body gurgled, but remained unconscious. Marjory gazed skyward, up to where the plane has finished its illumination. In the air, the letters hung, stark and terrifying.

‘You do not do, you do not do.’

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As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect.

‘Will you look at this shit?’ Cavana said, stubbing out a Marlborough Light.

‘Humf?’ Kelly was only half listening, absorbed in his own corrections.

‘Listen to this,’ Cavana continued, and read out the whole first paragraph.
Kelly, who’d been engrossed in a particularly puerile misunderstanding of Dickinson, took a moment to respond.

‘That,’ he said, pausing to rub at tired eyes. ‘Is quite simply, bare faced cheek.’

‘Isn’t it? Isn’t it?’ agreed Cavana, shaking his head.

‘There’s always one,’ he said, quoting the Tayto add; thinking how much he would enjoy a jumbo pack of Cheese and Onion.

‘There’s always one,’ Kelly agreed. ‘You going to show that to the supervisor?’
Cavana thought for a second, took a look at the enormous box of yet to be corrected manuscripts.

‘Yeah, feck it. Serve the impertinent shit right.’

‘Aye,’ Kelly agreed. ‘Will you grab us a bottle of Fanta from the machine while you’re at it?’

Cavana frowned.

‘Fair enough. Diet or regular?’

‘…into a giant..’ The Supervisor trailed off. Cavana nodded expectantly.
The supervisor, doubtless cranky at having been disturbed from a sound snooze, puffed himself up, tapping at the manuscript.

‘I’m glad you brought this… Filth to my attention.’
Cavana nodded again, happy to have impressed the man whose job it was to review every marker, at the end of each corrections period.

‘It’s this sort of outrageous…’ the supervisor paused, reading further on into the story.
Looking up, he held the paper at feeler length, as if it stank.

‘Did you finish it?’

‘I did,’ Cavana replied a little embarrassed, his antennae erect.

‘And, how does it end?’

‘Well,’ said Cavana, looking away. ‘They sort of…’

‘Speak up Cavana!’ the supervisor boomed, slipping into the role of teacher.

‘The sort of kill him,’ Cavana managed to choke out, clacking his cerci nervously.

‘They sort of kill him,’ the supervisor echoed, dropping the manuscript and rearing up, so that two of his three pairs of legs waved imposingly.

‘Automatic F,’ he bellowed.
After a moment he relaxed and readjusted himself.

‘I’ll inform the department.’

‘Very good,’ said Cavana, happy to have the decision taken from his hands. Gingerly, he retrieved the manuscript from the floor where it had fallen, and scuttled away; his carapace, if anything, impossibly a little flushed.

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‘Judy baby, Judy baby, Judy.’

‘I tolt ya nah ta call me dah.’

‘Ah love, me love, ya’ve goh me babby in ya.’

Gilly’s eyes are sun burnt bloodshot, his hand tight on a can of fizzy sedative. Judy’s concentrating on Little Britain, mouthing the repeat’s stale dialogue, feigning a laugh.

‘Did ya noh hear me madra?’ he asks, and spits on the sticky carpet, the broken saliva string, silting his chin.

Judy lights another cigarette, her hand shaking, and ignores him, coughing on the first cool drag. She’s quiet for a moment.

‘Come ‘ere,’ she says, her eyes never leaving the set. ‘When’s Anto calling round? When’s he round? Ya said he’s was comin’ round.’

Gilly stands uncertainly, drops the can and stumbles to the kitchen, his vision a weaving pendulum. At the sink he pauses, fists the tap and swings his face under the icy stream. His eyes, open to the water, burn, and he swallows and snorts a head full out against the basin. Judy’s at his side, hand under his chin, holding him up; the hotness and roundness of her belly between them.

‘Is he comin’ Gilly? I’m hur’in.’

He shakes his head and wraps thin arms around her; her poppyseed skin and wilt of cheek, her hair slick and greased and bound. Still beautiful. They share a kiss, the fume of lung butter a sweet tar exchange. The baby kicks between them.  It’s all good.

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A big beautiful car. Dark green and full of muscle. Chrome and dark walnut trim. Alloy wheels. Cream handmade leather seats. A car anyone from a senator to a pimp would drive, if only either of them had the class. It, the car that is, was powering along, damn fast, with the top down in the rain. It had music playing but god knows how the driver could have heard. It drove out of town to the hills above and on a bit, to the sea. The engine roared and the car picked up the pace a little. It wasn’t a European car, it certainly wasn’t designed to deal with sharp curves, at speed, in the rain. But that was OK, instead it fired through the railing and out into the air, above a quiet little beach were dog walkers would occasionally meet and copulate.

It hung fat and heavy in the air, engine screaming before it nose piled into the thick wet sand. The wind shield cracked and one of the front tires rolled away down the beach. It wouldn’t be discovered til morning that the driver, a young black woman, pregnant, was dead, although it wouldn’t stretch the imagination to think of her so now, in the moments after the crash. Her child, an unnamed, unborn boy, died with her. The car did not burn up, as they so often feel impelled to do in such situations. As such, when the wreck was found it will surprise you to learn that it was charred and unidentifiable. There were foot prints in the sand for a while but the rising tide made them nearly invisible. But fuck it, the real questions lay in what the hell the woman was doing in such a vehicle, where the hell did she get her hands on such a fine piece of motor engineering. But then, she wasn’t important, so who gives a fuck anyway.

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