Empty roads intersect

It rained overnight leaving the soil damp and black.

Lee stayed over and he went again to the abattoir at 11.30 to get blood, returning in the early afternoon pretty sickened with what he’d seen. Blood, fur and fear everywhere. He’d heard the crying of sheep and the crack of the lead bolt as it was fired through some animal’s skull. As he stood there waiting, a pig that was about to be done in gave him a pathetic look and he had to turn away. He got two pop bottles full of blood for 60p, still hot from the pig’s neck; he’d had to hold the funnel as the blood splashed  over his hands. When he got back the bottles were still warm and topped with a head of red froth.

He cycled home to collect electrical flex, rope and a white pillow-case and came back shortly after Jeremy arrived, and at half-past four we set off to Easterby, Lee wearing his ‘corpse’ clothes—the formless gold trousers which I once wore proudly to school and an old blue collarless shirt.

When we reached ‘his’ house at the corner of Geoffrey Road and Abbot Street, Lee clambered in through the upstairs window to remove the barricades from the door and we climbed the partially collapsed dusty staircase to the second floor into what once had been a front bedroom. It was now a bare cell, with floorboards rotted through and gone in many places and a single glass-less window.

We gingerly crept across the floor, feeling none too safe because we could see the room beneath through the missing sections of floorboards. We tied Lee’s hands behind his back with electrical flex, tied his feet together and finally slipped the pillowcase over his head, tying it round his neck with the flex. When he was ‘in position’ we poured the bottled blood over the floor and him, adding touches here and there to good corpse-like effect. The blood dripped through to the room beneath.

He looked quite convincing lying there, backlit by the window, sprawled amid thick pools of blood and scattered shards of glass. I’d ‘borrowed’ a camera of Andrew's specially for the occasion, and Jeremy and I clicked away, creeping into new positions, reduced to hoarse and frantic whispers at the sound of a car pulling up outside, none of this helped by the floorboards giving way under my heel. I was glad to be out.

Our next location was a long narrow road that sweeps down between warehouses from Crossley Street near the Polytechnic. Bare-footed, bound and hooded, Lee took his place again, in the gutter this time, and we spattered blood onto his clothing which glistened thickly down the kerb. A few people who hurried by smiled at us, thinking “damn art students” no doubt.

The light meter on Andrew's camera packed in mysteriously, so I had to use Jeremy’s meter readings. Lee’s ‘body’ looked a bit ham and staged in this location, so we finished off our films on a piece of spare land up by the Polytechnic in an area I’ve never walked before—acres of weeds, empty warehouses, deserted roads and glass-strewn pavements.

Easterby is surrounded by a belt of warehouse-land: forgotten buildings and sordid corners that offer many fine panoramas of grime-stained walls, slate-roofs, rows and rows of empty dark windows and spidery fire escapes. Empty roads intersect overgrown wastelands where factories once stood.

The yellowing sun was low now and streaked the tangled weeds and broken paving stones with long shadows and light. We bound Lee once more and hid his corpse amid a profusion of purple weeds, his shrouded head nestled in the filth beside the front wheel of a little kid’s pedal cycle, his body awkwardly twisted to one side.

Finally, Lee wrapped himself in a large piece of dirty carpeting that, apart from his legs, completely hid him. We dumped him in a dark hollow against a red brick wall among the nettles and lumps of concrete, his bare feet poking out towards the camera. In this way we used up the rest of the film and the evening degenerated into blood-splashed boredom.

We had to walk back to the bus station and ride back with Lee who was covered in dirt, his ripped shirt stained with dried blood. He didn’t mind a bit, and he and Jeremy stayed until eleven-thirty before they cycled home.

Overnight Soviet fighters shot down a South Korean 747 carrying 269 people over the Sea of Japan. They claim the Boeing didn’t respond to repeated calls to turn back or attempts to “help it to the nearest airfield,” and because it was heading towards a top secret naval base at Vladivostok, it was shot down. One theory is that there has been a total oxygen failure on the 747 which immobilized the crew and explains their refusal to answer. I’m just now listening to Radio Moscow and they say only that the “intruder plane” headed off towards the Sea of Japan after twice violating Soviet airspace. The US government has expressed its “revulsion” and there's going to be a big international wrangle over this in the next few weeks.

My writing is tired and strained and filled with colourless expressions . . . There’s condensation on the dining room windows tonight for the first time in months.