BITE

It’s not so much that I lied about the pillowcases, it’s just that none of you appear to realise what they go through in a normal day, and even the cleanest and brightest is shattered by wine stains and fag ash and coffee after a few hours. If I had a maid she’d have to be bringing me fresh linen three times a day just to keep up with the damage.

All people to a certain extent have a split personality, it’s just that mine is more pronounced. ‘Oh you must get a website with just your pictures on it,’ said Poppy, yesterday. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Look, if you were the Antichrist and you just happened to able to draw beautiful pictures, wouldn’t you be just a tad annoyed at everyone – well –  not only misinterpreting your work but also being able to splice it in with their middle class aesthetics and bovine morals, when you’re bleeding and tormented in a dungeon, planning to overthrow all that? It’s getting to the point where I think you can only see my pictures if you read what I have to say as well, which I agree will put a lot of buyers off, but sometimes, there are more important things.’ ‘But a website with just your pictures in would look so beautiful,’ said Poppy. ‘Yes it would, but I can’t go on providing people with things that just make them worse, in my opinion. I’ve stopped drawing altogether in rebellion.’

BITE was a failure, we all knew it would be. This is the printmaking competition I’ve been grinding my teeth about for the last two months, and which I finally turned up at with The Drowning and Reading Lucian and Flowers. 


Here’s Flowers. 

Here’s what I said:

‘Oh hello, The Royal Academy’s shut today, well their storage place is, so I couldn’t pick up my rejected work and bring it over to submit along with this lot. Can you let me turn up sometime next week and submit it then?’ ‘No. This is the last date for submissions for Bite.’ ‘I know that, but don’t you make exceptions for certain people?’ ‘There are exceptions, yes.’ ‘So you’d open up for a private submission for someone very special, like Hockney, say, but not for me, is that it?’ ‘Yep.’ ‘Even though my tree picture looks like this and would clearly assist your show? Better than Hockney, I’d say.’

Fame. Fame is the problem here. It is just no good having divine blood – or in my case demonic – some say there is little difference - because people just don’t notice that sort of thing and shut you in with a whole load of rules. ‘I am a lord of Hell and this is how you treat me.’ I could have tried the ‘but I’m wearing a cute antique top with hand-sewn Broderie Anglaise which is rare, the Antique Doll Lady noticed right away when she saw me on the tube, and will do terrible things to you in bed if you do just this one little thing for me,’ but I didn’t. Of course not. I only manipulate people when I know I’m going to get nothing out of it but my heart broken, or sometimes just to make everyone hate me, depending. NOT so I get my own way. What, precisely, is the devastating sexual power of the Underworld for? To make human beings dote on you and pay homage to the very things you hate about them? C’mon. I didn’t spend 12 million years burning in the seventh circle to go in for mindless seduction and sort out minor literacy problems with submission for Bite, of all things. If Jay Gee can’t do it on the force of antique lace and size 23 jeans and local charisma she’ll just have to do without. Start playing with people and you lose your grip on Godhead, she knows that as well as I do, being me, after all.

Back to Jay Tee, who right now is the only person who I think understands me (aside from Fin and Jay Eee), and in my opinion, just needs ‘managing.’ And maybe some help with his outfits. In fact I have some Elizabethan stuff right here which would be just right for his Tragedy of Blood persona, or identity, or essential soul, or fundamental meaning of his existence: I still maintain Deadgirl is really written by Webster, or Ford, maybe, and Jay Tee is a character scooped from the world of the Renaissance and stuck in an entirely false setting until he hits the cellar and sets up shop as a prince of darkness. This is a stills photo from the film, and one which sums up the problem. It’s quite uncharacteristic, as normally he is shouting or filled with malice and mean spirits, too overcome by his diabolic hinterlands for even a second of Nirvana to cross his face. NEVER in the course of the entire movie does he look like this, though he must do of course because it’s a still. Just one I didn’t notice. Maybe there are more.

Here’s what I had to say about it when I first saw it:

‘This is Jay Tee looking so sweet and innocent - even his hair looks innocent – you’d almost not believe this could be a still from Deadgirl. BUT. There is nothing like someone who could look - could be - classically cute, and compelled by classically cute problems, but is fortunately redeemed by overweening psychosis and native genius. This picture captures the ambiguity of the film, but you have to look quite closel... quite closely - they cut me off - to see the scratch marks on his right cheek and the leaden psychopath behind those hurt eyes. The Children of the Devil are Innocent and they flourish like the green bay tree. I shall write an essay on this photo, probably.’

Which inevitably now I cannot do, because of all those aforementioned problems with the superego, and the fact that Poppy took one look at this picture and said, ‘looks exactly like Mendel,’ which it does. ‘But. I watched that movie three times without noticing any resemblance whatsoever. Either Noah has so overwhelming a personality that his prettiness is utterly overtaken by his soul, or he doesn’t actually look like that and that one photo’s completely deceptive.’

It worried me, the similarity, because this ‘personal interest’ factor interferes with my plans, yet in some obscure, cruel way, validates them. I mean, here it goes, this is the awful truth: 


You sit around, more or less miserable and incapacitated, absorbed by your own genius and what a ruination it makes of your life in any way that matters according to everyone else, and even to you, mostly, captured by solitude and living in dreams or nightmares and for so long now you can’t tell the difference and hardly care, watching the dust fall and the moths twang about, never cleaning your cooker or anything else, and only just about getting out of your twilight realm for a leg-wax, and writing a novel about a man who writes misogynistic horror novels in a cellar, because he can’t face the light of day or his mother, because that is what YOU are, and his love for his muse who is his ideal victim, because knocking around in cellars with arty misogynists who can’t bear to kill you is what you mainly think of when you’re not thinking about butterflies and little white clovers, and THEN, out of the blue, you stumble across Deadgirl and happily watch the thing, because it’s practically a blueprint of your novel anyway, and probably of your life on as many levels as is possible to realize, and then you watch it again, and again, and AGAIN, and somehow or other you fail to notice, with all this watching and identifying and general bliss at recognition and empathy and finally being understood, that the hero of the film bears a remarkable – in fact an almost exact – physical similarity to the very person you based the novel on and are in fact still completely in love with even though you’ve not seen him for two years. Not that Time has relevance. That one tiny little fascinating and formidable detail escaped your notice did it? Did it? Hell it did.

‘Thing is, Poppy - no, Grace, I’ll do your Tarot cards in a minute - I think I didn’t notice this because Jay Tee is too similar to me, and the problem with the er, other one was that he bore no resemblance to me whatsoever. He wasn’t interested in any of the cellar stuff and the world of divine horror I’ve got dreamt up round here, well, not as a real vote, just as a ‘leisure activity’, like drugs or whores or parking tickets. He was – shall we say – not a disciple; in fact he was more like JoAnn if he bears a resemblance to any of the people in that movie. But you can see my trouble now. What looked like a pure identification with personality and character – and value system – now looks like the turgid repetition of some morbid crush on some empty aristo with floppy hair. Noah is far too good for that sort of thing, he’s not a love object, he’s someone I could actually talk to. He’s too intelligent to be dehumanised like this, precisely why I didn’t objectify him to begin with, nor did it occur to me to do so. I’ve never considered him in this humiliating regard, and now I have to. It’s bloody irritating, like some infernal curse coming true over and over, like the Oedipus complex or something, in fact very like Oedipus. I’ll never be able to write to him now. I’ll just get tongue-tied, suspicious of myself, self-conscious. It is so fucking annoying. We were getting on so well. And he’s an intellectual, probably would be quite keen on reading my views on Deadgirl, but all that’s over now, if he’s just a stand-in for some mediocre charlatan with the pointless, brainless beauty of a poisonous vetchling - even you admitted that stupidity was harmful - and NOT the powerhouse of subversion and tortured genius we wanted him for in the first place. Now we all have our time wasted. Frailty, thy name is woman, is all I can say. God gave you an example of bona fide brilliance and you turn the whole thing into some pin-up poster for a petal long fallen. And lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.’

Poppy told me to stop worrying: ‘get Noah to collaborate with you on the script of The Dark Game, star in it, direct it, and model for you since he looks so like Lucian or Mendel or whoever it is anyway (you can play Matilda), and do it NOW, since you’ll be another five years writing the novel, given the quality of the writing and the momentous nature of all these people sitting around brooding and wondering what to do, analysing Cranach paintings, checking grammar, doing hand-embroidered facsimiles of Durer’s Melancholia’ – ‘and illustrating it,’ piped up Grace, ‘that’ll add on another three years’ – ‘so bring the movie out first, get Trent to help you. I like the name Trent,’ and went off to do things in the kitchen, whereupon I told Grace about Deadgirl, with a plan to watch the movie later, something that failed to happen because I had to read her the whole of Eloise and she had to write four essays, mainly about ME. Here’s one of them:

She asked a number of interesting questions, some of them too obscene to relay here, and was particularly keen on Rickie, whatever I said to persuade her otherwise. She thought Jay Tee a total villain. ‘Hopelessly misunderstood, yet again,’ I thought privately to myself. ‘No one will ever see his pain and his point.’

After all that, I thought I’d better crack on anyway. The truth is dismal – the truth is shocking – but – maybe it isn’t. Maybe, there’s a reason for all this. After all, I myself don’t look like the demonic creature I am either – nor does Grace, who appears to be an incredibly cute nine year old with lovely hair and a dear little face, but if we could see her soul it would be bleeding from weird wounds and utterly psychotic, as she herself registers – so all of us can get away with charming looks and manipulative aesthetics if we wanted to. We could exploit our God-given advantages if we wanted to. People could think us good and sweet and innocent, were it not for the fact that crushing, irresistible, coruscating, chthonic talent refuses to bed down with the silver bells and cockleshells and MUST BE HEARD. In which case, it’s just an accident of birth, not the point, or at least not the point of concentration, save that both Noah and I have defeated and contravened our basic prettiness to such an extent that it’s almost impossible to even notice these things, most of the time. And anyway, Andy, The Fantastic Academic’s immediate remark when I sent him a picture of Noah at an award ceremony was ‘he has an interestingly sinister face,’ so, NOT, ‘he looks like a sweet little flower,’ or ‘not another one of your boring pretty boys, give it a rest.’ We’re safe then, because Andy is wrong about nothing, and Noah looks satisfyingly enough like a serial killer for me to stop feeling anxious. We can consider the oddly amorous leit-motif in another way, surely. And in our own time. We have plenty of that.

So… BITE. I once called a girl I had a fling with ‘a flower with teeth,’ and she said this was ‘the nicest thing anyone had ever said to (her)’ (sic). But it’s easy for me, to come up with good lines, and if I’d been born a man I would have little trouble with romance, none at all in fact. Grace thinks I still don’t have any trouble: ‘you’re beautiful, you do etchings, which is more important, and you’re intelligent. Just go down the pub and grab a cute one.’ I felt like saying, ‘there are certain provisos: the cellar, for one thing, and charisma. I just can’t be fagged with yet another lame doll who can’t talk properly. It’s too depressing, and besides men hate intelligent women,’ but I didn’t. There seemed little point. I mean where does one begin? I have to say I wasn’t too gloomy around Grace. She cheers me up really, and just laughs when I threaten her with being tied up or having to stand in the corner with a dunce’s cap on her head; in fact she’s only too willing to get tortured which puts me off my stride somewhat. Poppy meanwhile, cleaned my kitchen. I am still so gobsmacked by this I can barely speak. She had to remove what must be, what I know to be, YEARS of dried-out, gummed down, burnt-in and solidified cooked food from the surface of the cooker – I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking she worked as hard as Jay Tee did to prise open that door in Deadgirl, which had rusted shut, and you’d be right - it looked like a sty – and years of grease from the oven – and she did all sorts of other things as well – wiped down the sides – washed everything up – cleaned the blender - that’ll be useful - wiped down even the doorway – the place is transformed, even generically transformed, as I told her. It was a horror story, now it’s charming and rustic, with lovely yellow walls and herbs in hand-painted terracotta pots, dinky little Mexican tiles – you can see all this now, now that the dirt and the drab has been mopped away.

What THAT means is that gradually people will come to visit. Gradually I will tidy up my bedroom and hoover and hang things up and clean the skirting boards and shoo away the spiders. Gradually I will get accepted into polite society and my flat won’t look like a neglected dungeon any more but a beautiful bijoux indoor garden of delectable colour and flowers. I’ll be artistic and interesting and not a lost God from the burning ulcers of Dante’s Inferno. When that happens, someone else will have to play my role. I am crying now, losing my rightful position as The Dark King, what I was born to be, always meant to be. It’s not fair. But ‘everybody’s gotta learn sometime.’

Or do they. Surely NOT? Surely the point is as it ever was, the marriage of Heaven and Hell, not this upstairs downstairs world above world below, either pretty pictures, or death in the cellar, but both? Do I have to keep saying this over and over? Why does no one listen to me? ‘Listen to me, please, listen to me, just for once, for once pay me some fucking attention, please,’ cries Rickie, desperate, drooling with lust and frustration. Then he has to apologise, because that’s all just too hands on, too loud and visceral and true - too dark, too unusual, too experimental, too brilliant - which is what agents say about my novel, and I quote - for the nice girl with her nice hair and nice life and nice boyfriend and nice legs (though nowhere near as nice as mine are): ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’ Is the whole world just made up of JoAnn Skinner clones? Is this what we have to put up with?

If it is, I am not moving. I am staying here with the rats and the rabid, and about to read Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ (again) for further clues about what I plan to do with the next bloke who comes my way, because all that sensitive romantic stuff just bores me stupid. And, just in case you were thinking, the flowers don’t like it either. They get really annoyed when I deny them their screaming status. They’re totally sado-masochistic, what do you think creation itself IS? Peaceful?

This is Deadnettle but could just as easily be called Deadgirl, as should be obvious but I know won’t be.