This Cuckoo Island

By Peter Englebright

Clive Barker meets David Lynch in this peculiar horror novel.

A corrupt company board is lured to an isolated island to be murdered whilst an artist films them as part of a real life slasher movie.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Firewood Books
• Release date: Jul 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781513099613

Book preview

Chapter 1

‘A man in a big black car; dressed in blue jeans, a white T shirt and a black leather jacket, travels up and down the lands.  He carries with him the righteous fury of God.  More specifically, he travels with the hand of God.  If he lays his right hand upon your shoulder you will be judged.

The judgments and the punishments are severe, and without pity’

Edward reads the story from the little square of text pinned up alongside its accompanying painting.  The writing was printed from a computer.  The painting itself is failing to draw his attention.  It depicts the close up of the left shoulder of a man in a grey suit.  Resting upon the shoulder is the right hand of a man wearing a black leather jacket.  The pink-white hand has a slight green tinge to it peeking out from under the fingers.

The artist, mid-twenties Clive Dunthorpe, sidles up to the older Edward.  ‘Does it take your fancy?’

Without turning around Edward says, ‘It’s, um, it’s not bad.  Very competent.  I like the idea more than the execution.’  He turns to face Clive.  ‘The story is more interesting than the picture.  You don’t really get the story into the frame.  It doesn’t really work without the context written out in the text beside it.’

Clive slowly nods.  ‘I see what you mean.  But the story is just a silly thing.  It doesn’t matter.  What matters is the picture.  That it fails to communicate my silly little story is irrelevant to its pictorial beauty.’

‘I’m afraid that the story is the only interesting thing about it.  Without the made up religious overtones it just isn’t any good.  It’s just a competent picture of a shoulder with a hand on it.  The story is everything.’

He sees Clive deflate with disappointment.  It’s always fun to depress other people.  ‘Don’t be like that.’  He points vaguely at the gallery walls of Clive’s exhibition.  ‘A lot of these paintings are...fine.  Many enjoyable pictures.  I don’t personally think any of it’s great art, but one day, if you keep at it, who knows?  You show... potential.’

Clive decides to unsettle the arrogant condescending fool by asking an awkward question and see how he wriggles out of it without causing offence.  ‘Are you buying anything?’

There is the expected awkward pause as Edward formulates his get-out strategy.  ‘You know, I’m not convinced this year’s batch are the right ones for me.  I think if you exhibit next year then the quality will be that much higher.  I think I’ll wait for then.’

He isn’t going to let him off the hook just yet.  ‘My prices are cheap right now.  I’ll make you an offer.  Name the unsold painting you like the best and I’ll sell it to you for half the listed price.’

Clive is determined to annoy Edward and get him to dip into his overstuffed wallet.  Politeness, or more accurately civility, is going to railroad Edward into a purchase.

‘That’s very generous of you Clive,’ he says with a fake smile on his face.  He looks around at the competent but prosaic and boring images all around him.  There really is nothing he wants to own, never mind hang on one of his own walls.  The only picture that does anything for him is the one they are standing beside.  It might not be good, but at least it’s got something going for it with the story.  He indicates the painting with a flick of his head.  ‘I assume the text comes with this?  In your own handwriting?’

‘You want me to write it out for you?  Are you buying a painting or a story?’

‘That’s a good question.  Ha ha.’  He says the words, he doesn’t actually laugh.  He looks down at the price – it’s not much, but it’s not nothing either.  At least the story stirs something in him.  ‘I think this is the best painting here.  It’s a minor work, but the ideas are curious enough.  For half the price I’ll buy it.’

Clive wonders if there is anything more satisfying than shoving an unwanted painting down some up-themselves arsehole.  If Edward was too polite to say no then that’s not his problem.

The man adds, ‘I can’t escape the impression that painting is not your real forte.  I feel your talents might be better suited to another medium.  You might be better at the conceptual side of it than the actual doing it part.’

––––––––

The exhibition of Clive’s art brought in some money.  Half the paintings were sold for small amounts and the gallery covered its costs.  His reputation and standing as an artist did not rise or fall.  He remained ignored and unappreciated.

––––––––

In the courtyard, surrounded on all sides by tall imposing tenement buildings, stand three slightly geeky, long limbed and sensible-shoed eighteen year old girls.  Or more accurately, they bob up and down on the spot with the occasional jump as they try to dance together under the central tree.  Up-tempo electronic keyboard music and drum machine percussion is provided by a cassette tape they recorded the day before.

Each of the girls only recently learned the rudimentary skills needed to make the pleasing sounds on cheap plastic keyboards.  They were tutored by an online video that Clive found.  He is the boyfriend of one of the girls.

He is filming the girls from the second floor kitchen window of his flat.  He is awkwardly standing in the sink with one foot in it, the other on a chair he pulled up in front of it.  The borrowed 16mm camera he is filming with is angled out the window at full arms-length.  He can’t get his eye close enough to the viewfinder to be sure if he even has the girls in the frame.

The music video is not a commercial venture.  It is Clive’s new art project.  He has retired from painting for awhile as he isn’t getting anywhere fast with it.  This video art malarkey looks like an easier option.  Simply by not being unwatchably awful it should put him at the front ranks of its niche.  So he recruited his girlfriend and two of her pretty friends to form a band for one song.

His own musical knowledge is zero, but he found an online tutorial that showed how to play a song on the piano.  He got the girls to learn the song from the video.  Eventually after a few weeks they could play it through from start to finish in one go without any show stopping mistakes.  He considered writing some words to go with the tune.  Then he discovered that between the three of them they couldn’t carry a single note.  He decided it was best for all if they kept it instrumental.

As a band all they have going for them is a bit of amateurish charm, their youth and the fact that they photograph well.  A blurry incompetent film of them dancing badly to a poorly performed and recorded instrumental might not lead to sold-out concerts, but it might gain some attention from the art world.

By labelling it art, and showing it exclusively in an art gallery, he might at last get the start of the reputation he craves.

The girls start to pogo to the faster midsection of the song.  Their blonde and brunette hair flick up and around their heads; whipping and lashing themselves and each other.

His sepia toned film – badly filmed and edited and blown-up to 35mm in order to increase the visible grain – will be so deliberately bad that no one can simply dismiss it as being bad.  They will have to judge it by a different criteria as merely ‘good’ or ‘bad’ won’t really get to the bottom of what he is trying to achieve.  At least that’s his story, and he’s sticking to it.

––––––––

An audience of around four hundred movers and shakers (and deadbeat artists) stand in the gallery facing the cinema screen.  In front of the screen is a small two-step high stage with a podium.

Clive stands at the microphone on the stage and is talking without notes.  ‘It might not look like it to the untrained eye, but the crapness of what you are about to see is deliberate.  Despite what cynics amongst you might think, I do know the difference between good and bad.  I just prefer the third rate, the badly made if done with passion.  I don’t know why, but I love bad dancing.  I prefer and appreciate it on some level that good dancing just doesn’t reach.  An incompetent reaching for the stars and hitting porcelain instead is both hilarious and inspirational.  This is a celebration of crapness.  Of people out of their depths floundering.  You always know it’s going to be a good party when the stripper’s crap.’

He pauses for the laugh.  No one seemed to notice that the stripper line was a joke.  He ploughs on.

‘A bit rubbish, but rubbish in an interesting way.  I will happily take that over smooth and perfect.  Perfection bores me.  It’s boring to win.  The losers are always so much more intriguing.  Various degrees of failure delights me.  It animates me more than succeeding.  So this film is for all the failures out there.’

Clive steps back from the microphone to indicate that his speech has finished.  He receives a light, polite applause from the audience.  Now he’s set their expectations so low he can’t fail to elicit some praise.

The gallery lights dim and the 35mm projector burns a bright rectangle of light onto the screen.  The shadow of Clive’s head looms large as he vacates the stage to stand to the side at the front of the audience.

The white light is replaced with a black screen.  The black screen is replaced by an image.

What appears on screen is not the three girls in sundresses and bare legs jumping around the courtyard.  Instead there is pornography.  A man lies with a woman.

The audience has no prior information on what the subject matter is.  They don’t know that what they are viewing is not what was intended.  As far as they are aware this is the art.  Why would they think differently?  The piece in the program was clearly labelled ‘Music for a Parade (of Whores)’.  It was the title of the song he picked for the girls to learn.  He loved the title; and even better, it was an obscure traditional so there was no copyright problem.

At least the audience is still there.  No walkouts so far.  If anyone is disgusted then they’re keeping it to themselves.  He sees uncomfortable looks and the odd red face of embarrassment, but no one complaining.  They probably expected confrontational art considering the title, and they perhaps don’t want to be seen as the squares that rejected it without at least giving it a fair chance.

The man and the woman continue to fuck on a bed in what is an otherwise a bare plaster walled room.

The gallery patrons stand their ground and watch.  Maybe they are reading this as a provocative attack on their bourgeoisie principles.

It hasn’t turned into a disaster yet, but all it will take is one person to break the spell.  If that person snaps and rejects the film, then the polite social order will be broken and the group thinking that was accepting this insult might turn on Clive.  His film of geeky long limbed girls dancing might look positively subdued and boring in comparison after this, but he can’t take a chance on this being rejected under his name.  He has to stop the film and not take artistic responsibility for it.

He files around the side of the gallery until he reaches the back.  The gallery owner, a woman he’s known for only a few days, is leaning against the wall in between two paintings.  Above her head is the little glass window that the light from the projector is spilling from.  To his surprise she is watching the movie with rapt attention instead of disgust.

Clive shouts at her, ‘You have to stop it.’  The owner indicates for him to quieten down by putting a finger over her lips.

‘This isn’t my film,’ he says at a much lower volume.

‘No.  It’s better.  This is going to be a scandal to remember.  This is going to put my gallery on the map’

‘We can’t show this.’

‘But we are!’  She quickly propels herself off the wall and walks into the crowd so she can be away from his complaining.  She finds a spot halfway in and stops.

He follows her into the crowd and hisses into her ear from behind, ‘Did you switch the films?’

She looks back at him.  The look she gives him says many things.  Boiled down to its essentials it says: fuck off you insulting idiot, do I look like the type of person to do what you accused me of doing.

He backs off as now he wants to be as far away from her as possible.  She turns back to watch the screen.  He backs up to the wall and takes her previous place under the projector light.

The sex on screen has now moved off the bed.  The man stands in the centre of the space while the woman is on her knees giving him oral attention.  This is not going to end well, he can feel it.  All he wanted was to show a technically inept little music video while being pretentious about it.  Now he’s an arty pornographer.

At least the film looks interesting.  Ancient even.  The colours were obviously once vividly bright and garish.  Now with the patina of passing time the colours have faded down to a much more pleasing,