RuKsaK

A tongue moves to the alveolar ridge, flicks its tip and wobbles a rollicking consonant which dives back to the middle of the mouth, floats for a fraction while a round vowel breezes around the tonsils gushing gently from lungs. The lips slip sideways, the tongue flattens upwards and a noise throbs out of the nose. It all takes a tenth of a second and a spoken word flings itself out of a human face. A tongue, nose, lungs and throat and teeth all hurl themselves in trained directions and talk and talk and talk, pleased at how their dancing brings death to silence. Hands make fists, legs swing kicks, heads break other heads, but nothing is more relentless and vicious than a human tongue.
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When Stink spoke he felt these movements rattling around his face more than he felt the meaning they gave. You could see when he spoke his brain was detached, not in the slightest bit bothered what his mouth was doing. He spilled chains of sound from himself and took no care to see what they became – how they rebuilt themselves, drove into different ears and then how, in no time at all, took new shapes on paper and came knocking on his bedroom door with handcuffs swinging for his wrists.
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I sat at the back of the court looking at Stink. I saw how the room looked when it wasn’t heaving on you, as it had when we’d been in there before. I saw how much I hadn’t seen when I’d stood where Stink was now just two years before. There was so much I’d not noticed – occasional breaks in the wooden oppression such as a vase of scentless daffodils, stranded on a high window sill. I took in the faint dust, which probably needed a year of bureaucracy to get it wiped, and the distant smell of varnish that seemed to be everywhere, but a thousand-years-old somehow. With all the spindles, door frames, railings and benches the place was full of lines – those kind of lines where colours slam mathematically into each other and demand attention from your eyes – a brown bench top casting a spear of brown across the white of the walls. The floor tiles zagging against each other adding more crisp to the view.

I looked at Stink in the dock, with its extra lines and counted the ones which jabbed into him. With the lines of a door frame, the box of the dock, the tiles stopping at his body I saw it was very many. It looked like his bag of flesh and soft clothes were suspended in this room – somehow abstract, like he’d been peeled out of another world and pinned into this one – his body dangling from a hook in his collar. I wondered how many of these sharp, violent lines there were in the room and how long it would take to count them from every angle – I figured years, but this room had too many years crammed inside it – it was giving them away.

It gave Stink four of them in Slade prison – the judge dishing out the court’s orders in her bored, importantly-slow voice. The police, with their ceremonial cuffs at their sides, removed Stink from the dock. He looked like a cardboard cut-out, melted in shape, being edged out of the side door – going into his next story, one of his last. He didn’t look at anyone or anything and he was gone and I wouldn’t see him again for longer than expected.
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Go here for the penultimate part: Stink and the suicides - part 13.

Sunday, May 29, 2005

Stink and the suicides – part 12