O remembers: once we were one; now I am torn in two ...

From the safety of the white room, O sees and hears Niamh, and feels the shallow sobs that shake her little body; breath is paper-thin, eyes bursting white, and angry, purple knots rise to her throat; she is cursed: trapped within a tree; he feels the measure of her prison, hard wood on soft feet; arches, bends his knee; genu-flects; bone-crushing weight on his chest; and the dumb pressure of the twisted crown on his temples; and he feels white horror of death in a hospital toilet; convulsing, vaulted rib-cage, splayed, open palms, nailed by pain to a bedroom floor; surgical gloves separate beating hearts; and, hand to mouth in horror (breathless imminence of release), he remembers: the softness of your bubble cheek, as your tiny vanilla mouth kisses mine; lit from within, you are my waxy-yellow, alien sister; a red corona flares around the globes of your fingers, as they reach to touch my small balloon white face; tiny swimmers embrace, treading water; the only daughter falls beneath, drowns to let me live; once we were one; now I am torn in two […]

… O sees the face they made in the hairdressers’ mirror, in the school photographs: unsatisfactory paper-over, mute white scream of separation; approximation of normal, acid mask of adjustment; something transitional, incomplete; somewhere near the border of tears […] 

David's beautiful eyes...oh man, wonder if he'll ever know...

...And then today he remembered the legend of the riven man, violently cleft to reveal a block of pure white molten light, standing stone, star-gate, luminous wound of the Fisher King; follow the light to the other side: come away, human child, to the waters and the wild; ah, to step across the threshold of the white room in which David’s beautiful eyes – oh man, wonder if he’ll ever know - had mesmerized...

Always the pessimist, O had to laugh...

Always the pessimist, O had to laugh: he was not the boy who is nothing; but the boy who is half of something; one spirit of a two-spirit human…and She, of course, the other half, had wandered off again, and was nowhere to be found […]

…But not as heartily did he laugh as earlier in the day, when - for no reason he could think of – he suddenly said out loud, ‘just lie back and think of England’[…]

And then today he remembered the legend of the riven man, violently cleft to reveal a block of pure white molten light; standing stone, star-gate, luminous wound of the Fisher King; follow the light to the other side: come away, human child, to the waters and the wild; ah, to step across the threshold of the white room in which David’s beautiful eyes – oh man, wonder if he’ll ever know - had mesmerized, and the white room in which David’s luscious strawberry and cream french manicure – I’ve left every place - had so enthralled and beckoned him in […]

…so the white room is more than Pure Reason’s iron cage, he reasoned; the cramped and crippling cell of cultural revolution; boxes, boxes, boxes, and Adorno’s brutalist straight lines; more than modernity’s whitewashed facade, or airbrushed Enlightenment cartoons; more than postmodernism’s shiny surfaces: Carnaby Street, Chelsea, cheap plastic Angels in waxy cornflake packets (you can’t wait to rip open), Ursula’s Bond-girl belted white bikini, Champions by the Water Jet, silver wigs, sparkly tights, knife-sharp geometrics, black and white mini-skirts and matching plastic hats, Be seeing you, and other tawdry sixties tom-foolery; ha, ha mix-and-match, ready-to-wear, drip-dri, sta-prest spectacle, and yawning, pop a vacant polo; Deconstruction’s colourless dream of Strawberry Fields (ab-sent the aching scent of real summer strawberries); tense, frigid borders of anxiety, and fear of what lies beneath: where x-ray horrors overwhelm the senses – if the eye offend, then pluck it out – to keep out the visceral warm blood’s heaving and writhing coils, incomprehensible monsters rolling in primeval swamps; and Look! There’s something in the trees; it's coming […]

…words collide, plates slide, down deep, down deep; but here there is safety in strong-box manu-facture: try not to get worried, try not to turn onto problems that upset you; here there is good, thick insulation between ego and id; O’s white screen offers intoxicating glimpses of little savages in ancient forests, eyes that mesmerize and come and join the dance; but retire to a safe distance, to the airless closet of modern art and science; watch feet cross and re-cross London Bridge at four and five and six o’clock, a washed-up artificial hand – never, never il miglior fabbro: cold, modern, fish-eyed, fascist Pound […]

Now, O knows the difference between the cul-de-sac of positivity and the wild allure of the Neverland attractions, between death by calculation and the (eastern) promise of the lush gardens of magical thinking; and he knows it’s still the same – the nymphs haven’t departed; they just keep awkward hours…

...the greatest thing you'll ever learn is...

...the greatest thing you'll ever learn is...

Dearest sister, few can even say your name. And few have ever heard your voice...

O looked everywhere, but couldn't find it...anywhere; he had mislaid the key...

When - and he could swear it wasn't there a minute ago - there it was, right there, beside him on the bedside table...just lying there saying here I am in a rather self-satisfied, 'told you so' kind of way [...]

...the letter [...]

My Dearest Sister,

Few can even say your name. And few have ever heard your voice. There are no dainty footsteps on the stairs, no creaking boards when the house is still and ready for sleep.

When I was a small boy, in the window of a white room, staring at the sparrows on the fence, I thought I felt your cool breath on my neck. I stood very still, faked unconcern, then suddenly turned to catch you. But you were gone. I clenched my fists, screwed up my face, and willed you to return. And I thought I heard tinkling laughter, and glimpsed white ankle socks and a flouncing party dress disappear round the bannister at the top of the stairs.

It was Christmas at St Peter’s, and I was sitting in music class. We were all in a circle, learning Christmas carols. Around the class, each one of us would sing a line. My stomach hurt and I was hot, and then it was my turn. Without looking up from the stave, and the tiny dancers on the page, a clear, bright soprano voice came piping: ‘the holly and the ivy, when they are both full grown…’ and everyone gasped at the Christmas magic; and everyone clapped. And later, Mrs Baron told my dad I had the voice of an angel. The voice of an angel! But it wasn’t the voice of an angel: it was the voice of my angel; my dearest sister, Niamh.

‘He’s such a beautiful boy’, said Auntie Lynne, one day at Grandma’s house. Mum looked down at me. The sorrow in her eyes made me turn away, to the open window, towards the boys chasing their ball across the green. It was then I decided I would become Fred.

And I would get my knees dirty and care less about clothes and hair and the thickness of my legs. And I would impress Mr Jessop and get picked for the football team. ‘Yes, I am a boy’, I said to myself, making straight-arm, tight fists. And maybe that was when you left.

Ah, Niamh. How I missed you at that awful Grammar School, where I learned to turn my back and run from you - and everything that was good - into the playground, to follow a ball across a vast, windblown plateau, just one among many lost boys, swinging in huge disciplined arcs, like flocks of birds following the fishing boats. I don’t remember ever having actually kicked anything; except myself.

For a few moments, in bed this morning, as I emerged from a comfy, safe place, I was very close to you, Niamh. I was soft and warm, and there was a sparkle at the end of my finger, as I reached to turn off the alarm. It was a tender moment: I loved myself, and we were one. But somewhere in the moments of becoming, you slipped away, and I knew once more the disappointment of waking to an ordinary day.

Do you remember the time I was crossing the road with Tom, and he and I were head to head, deep in conversation? And I was staring across the road at you. Yes. Full in the face; a romantic comedy, love-at-first-sight, shameless stare! You flashed a coy, schoolgirl, come-on smile - you were almost beside me as you crossed - and you were gone... Niamh, this time your hair was red, and your mouth was a tidy, pillar-box bee-sting.

How is it, whenever you appear, you haven't changed a bit? Every time - and many years have passed since first I knew your face and name - you're still a rose-bud ready to bloom. You are Myfanwy on your bicycle, Holly holding tightly onto cat, Clare the playful dancer; you are youth, beauty, and energy; the wild one, the mischievous twin; the water-nymph, the dryad; the elf, the fey, the star-child; you are my sister.

You are what I seek. And you are what I will never find. What makes me mad; what makes me sad; what makes me…what makes me, well, me, I suppose…

O looks around the white room...

O looks around the white room in which he finds himself again, after finally saying goodbye to the dusty books, the elders, the sacred circle and the fire - which had promised much; and delivered nothing; nothing, that is, except the gnawing pain of hope for something better – he remembers the starman somewhere over the rainbow, and the boy who is nothing - and his white room, the gradual slipping away of colour, as the days pass by in dread procession, or are stylishly dragged like bloody furs down a white catwalk; as jagged red lightening crosses his body of wax, boom boom boom spake Zarathustra; and David, pierced by a lance, long ago falls earthwards, hooded, and scissors down grey shale to die among strangers in alien fields; and he is gone; and the horror of the final pop as the cosmos folds in on itself - in neat, sharp painted squares; and he is gone; and he remembers the hectic celluloid flicker of the flames, the crackling, silver voices of the elders; long dead, all dead (they're all dead) - and please hold the line, caller - wheezes loose swells of drowned concertinas and furrowed, melting wax of yellow holograms; stretched white balloon face shimmers and calls all indistinct, temporarily out of order, from beyond the grave, as the discs spin for Wells' time traveler, as the delicate Eloi, Weena – dare to gently kiss her tiny, fairy foxglove, achingly pouting hummingbird mouth - waits impatiently by the stage door, frets in the dark, and yearns for blessed release of childish play; and the steely spiders of memory spin threads all eerie beside the dusty books in the secret library; and brittle voices crackle, calling from afar: 'hello?…hello, can you hear me?’; worm white and metallic through dead air, heave through heavy earth, pulse, and push a white hand through, stretch and surge, emerge, shake off the dust of grave clothes [...]

...and the wireless crunches between stations [...]

...'mayday mayday...needle's spinning...can't tell which way is up' [...]

...’I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion…I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate…all those moments will be lost in time…like tears in rain’ […]

...‘and we’re open ‘til six on Sathurday' [...]

 ...'wei…?…wei?’ [...]

...'time to die' [...]

...but he has long hung up, and gone outside to whiter white; and may be gone some time [...]