Except for the birds

Dad and Mum ran me in to Easterby on their way to Robert and Carol’s and I tried to ring Lee but had no luck. So I wandered about at a loss. For no particular reason I was on my way towards the library when I spotted two figures handing out leaflets outside the job centre by the Northern Building Society.

RCP!

For some reason—later I tried to work out exactly why, perhaps simply just a blind and unthinking eagerness to make contact with some part of that other world, my life at Watermouth—I made a bee-line straight for the nearest of the two, a dark-haired man in his mid ‘20s sporting the now to-be-expected circular wire NHS specs.

He was selling copies of the Next Step and I introduced myself, and mentioned that I know Carl Cotton and Barry. He told me that an RCP group is being set up in Watermouth and that one has just got off the ground in Whincliffe. We had a long talk, or rather, he talked and I listened and nodded. He asked me for my phone number and I told him I didn't have a single fixed address and that I lived with friends. “What’s your local?” he asked and I gave him a vaguely truthful answer this time.

I rang Lee and waited at the library. My mind was in turmoil. Repeatedly I ask myself: what is it I disagree with? I think maybe it’s the RCP’s tactics and the way they extol their policies more than anything else, but maybe here I’m just being prejudiced by my dislike of Carl C. and co.

The RCP isn't something you should just ‘join’; you should feel and I don’t feel their policies. . . . I should accept that I can’t hide any longer from the questions the RCP raise for me about myself. I think deep down I’m frightened of discovering that everything I see and hear and do can be so easily explained by historical materialism and that that will take the “mystery” out of life.

When I see that written down on the page it makes me sick. I’m running away! I haven’t lived or seen or read and I don’t know or feel enough to know what I’m doing or to put what I’m doing in a larger perspective. This applies to my Nietszchean ravings . . . I write the words but don’t feel their full emotional impact. What I say is what I say. What I know is different. I need time. . . .

But perhaps this is all just flannelling justification for something the implications of which I daredn’t face up to?

When Lee showed up I was in a distinctly different mood than when I’d set off from home. We walked up Whincliffe Road to the abattoir that sits in the midst of a big area of semi-industrialised dereliction. We could soon smell a stench that caught in the back of our throats and we could sense fear as we approached the big anonymous factory buildings. We were nervous for some reason.

Outside, an empty lorry that had brought a cargo of animals was caked in shit and was being hosed out. Nearby in a concrete pen, sheep huddled silently, and from the bowels of the factory we could hear human shouts and a squealing pig.

Lee asked someone for some blood (for our photo-shoot) and it took four or five tries before we found our way into the heart of the abattoir, past rows of hanging, skinned carcasses; a lone man was skinning sheep heads, other skinned heads hanging neatly nearby on hooks; there was a room of white clad figures chopping up slithering piles of glistening guts . . . The stone steps, the yards and even the walls were stained with dried blood.

We couldn’t get any fresh blood because it had all been sold minutes before. We went back out into the hot sun feeling unclean. Lee’s vegetarianism was reconfirmed.

It’s such an awful way for those animals to die, the same sort of awful way that Jews died in the gas-chambers, their hardened, cheerful executioners shouting to one another above the bustle and noise of routine butchery.

Lee left to cycle home and after buying a couple of singles, I went home too. I briefly saw Grant stalking through Queensgate shoppers; he and a “curious” Nik may be coming down for the photo-shoot tomorrow.

Jeremy won’t be there; he’s visiting Ms. Hirst again, just him and Gillian Wade this time, who seems to have taken quite a fancy to his “la la la company” as she herself puts it. He showed me a card she sent him full of ‘witty’ comments and clear attempts to mimic his airy sarcasms. A case of Hirst’s ‘matchmaking’ according to Jeremy.

[Audio version]