Monsters in Creation

By Peter Sutcliffe

A story about expectations, the relationship to what is or could be real, along with a note on how to get sectioned and what to do in a mental institution 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Sutcliffe
• Release date: Mar 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393915881

Peter Sutcliffe

The author lives in Brighton, England and can be contacted at [e-mail] - if you'd like to make any comments on the book, good or bad.

Book preview

Chapter 1 – Contact

I guess you could say that it all started the night I was nearly abducted by aliens. I say aliens, but these days who knows what they were: fascists, CIA, special forces, Facebook, Tiger Woods, aliens, take your pick, is there any difference?

Just a normal Thursday night, you know. Or maybe it was Wednesday. Sitting in the Druids, talking a load, usual round table, warm hazel brown, dribbled with beer puddles, crisps dissolved, me pushed into the corner between the radiator and the window, under this crazy picture of the beach: it’s got a star rising in the top left, an amazing, pulsating star, and three men, naked, black, really long, you know, as if they were those African tribesmen, those so tall ones, walking towards the star and kind of melting as they reach towards it, becoming part of the star. I love that picture, tried to steal it once and got barred by Rob for a month, but he relented after two weeks:

Chicken (he said) Chicken, you’s such an arsehole, trying to walk out a pub, a picture, a massive, I mean massive, framed picture, sticking out from under your coat. You never learn nothing as a boy?

Rob is short, shaved head, bullet head, got that cockney geezer lean forward intense look thing, the lovable rogue that’s about to break your fingers with a claw hammer and your balls with a one-liner. We once went fishing together, Christ knows why, a cold October morning, standing on the waterbreak, concrete grey, sea grey, faces grey except on Rob’s nose where these veins started out blue then (as the wind blew and the greyness grew) swelled and bulged, turning purple, then a kind of reddish colour. Carmine maybe? Or how about geranium? No, let’s say alizarin, madder red, the old Venetian thing. That’s one thing I learned something about as a boy, hues, shades, light and dark and the differences thereabout. Tints, maybe, if that doesn’t make you snigger. The distinction between alizarin and amaranth, love-lies-bleeding, great name, watching the oils slide into each other, tentative at first, shy, then seeping into one, melding, together at last. Colours are very important, I think, I’ve got a theory about colours that makes them very meaningful, crucial even; though I believe everything has a significance in its own right, in its own way. That night I got talking to a lovely woman, Julie, Judy, Josie, something like that, eyes of amber; what did we talk about? I asked her about her life, her history, her loves, then went outside for a smoke and then she was gone. I’m not sure she asked me anything, now I think about it. So there was nothing left but the walk home: over Ladywell Park, looking forward, not to the side, stumbling in the dark over the pitted turf, chewed by the ceaseless flow of feet. I love the park during the day, jugglers dropping clubs with tireless resentment, poi sticks whirling, falling, hanging-out geezers, chilled, relaxed, open. Apart from the smackheads mustering round the kiddie pool, looking to buy, looking to sell in order to buy, looking to share without buying: hard work being a smackhead, always having to contemplate that next deal. You’ve got to respect that much commitment. They add an edge, that posse of smackheads. No, not a posse, not enough of a sense of unity. An exchange of smackheads? A deal of smackheads? But they was why I was looking really really carefully at the broken ground, the pits and trenches worn by the pacing of the needle people. Much like the smackie face, come to think of it, broken and churned by the work put into it. I was picking my feet up and planting them very slowly on the ground, using my toes to feel carefully before relaxing them down, firming. Then I stop, close my eyes, and project myself, my spirit, out of my body, sending the atman, the consciousness, up into the sky, visualising just like Stevie (the Guru, the Man) says. Look down and see a shabby, skinny mush standing still, in an open space, leaning slightly to the left (always to the left, broken bones twisted in repair, contorted childhood memorials). Then spread the vision, encompass the world, we are all one, feel as one, sense the trees, the grass, be the world, shape the world with my inner mind, make myself the world. And walk forward slowly, sensing... shit, shit, that hurt. Now that does fucking hurt. Now I have a different vision, a clear vision of a huge metal tool puncturing through membrane, the tip, the puncture point, rupturing the delicate, thin skin, a piledriver crashing down into a delicately nurtured garden. The invading virus things – are they spores? or microbes? – they look very much like the orcs in Lord of the Rings, the especially gnarly and irritable ones – flooding through broken tunnels and shattered corpuscles into the main highways of my body. Feeling sick, I look at the damaged foot – only a splinter of wood, brightly coloured, broken from a poi stick or some other pointless fucking wood-tossing-related-activity. Just tetanus then. Or worm. Jim claims to have sat on a needle in this park. Got a wee shot of smack as a surprise reward and was then pulled for possession 10 minutes later, failed the blood test, convicted, fined, pressed into rehab classes with the drug and alcohol team for months afterwards, months, behavioural counsellor whiteboarding the event over and over, motivationally interviewing for the responsibility continuum, insistently trying to map a needlestick arse injury onto the dynamics of addiction...

But what were the action triggers, Jim? How can we focus on goal-related outcomes if all you can say is ‘I sat on it’

Clearly, as a story, a load of bollocks but then Jim has his problems. Comes and goes but you wouldn’t trust him with your stash. There is a story of him walking down the high street, late for some sort of meet, imaginary maybe, pushing his way through the shopping herd, swearing, shouting. Then he stops. Stands on the pavement, obstacle-like, blocking the flow of cut-price capitalism. Takes off his watch – cheap, Rolex-fakewise – puts it on the pavement, pulls down his strides, squats down and shits over the watch. On a Saturday morning this is, consumer stampede day, shoppers everywhere. Seemingly oblivious, Jim stands up, buttons-up, picks up the watch, shakes it, puts it back on his wrist and moves on.

Pondering the effects of shit on wristwatches, I limp up Castle Hill, past the Donkey’s End pub (not a happy end I’d guess, judging from the nights I’ve had in there), over the top of the hill, with the Cottage estate curled round the whole of the valley in front of me, snugly fitting between the hills, like a sleeping... dog isn’t quite right... gila monster perhaps? ‘Cottage’ gives a homely, rural feel but I think the estate has other, quite different, qualities. Yellow pollution lights speckled throughout the concrete flats and semi-detached houses like buttercups. It always makes me think of Christmas when I see the estate like this, like a slight tattered Christmas tree; or an urban starscape, with the parks and playgrounds as the empty spaces, the gaps between the solar systems. Home, such as it is. Instead of walking straight down the hill, I cut left, through a line of allotments struggling to raise the tone of the landscape, convert it to the productive. Alabaster white baths reflecting shimmering lights, bean frames casting long skeletal shadows over my path as the wind starts to blow leaves across my face, plastic and paper trapped in the wire fences, til the path led me down into the underpass, a gaping white mouth sucking me down under the dual carriageway. I wasn’t sure why I was walking this way, the graffiti always depresses me, the emptiness of the egotism. I speeded up, the slapping sound of my steps getting louder and louder, as unbalanced as always, but pulled on through the tunnel... there were lights spinning, flashing hard enough to blind me as I walked out. Strange enough to see lights anywhere near there anyways, apart from the flare of a lighter now and again: shit, litter, feral kids bad attitude skateboarding – these are the constants of the underpass world, some sort of dwarfish realm like in those operas full of flying women and swords and little blind dwarves making jewelled stuff. Not that I’ve got a problem with the skateboarders, they just roll a lot, not going anywhere much, blank-faced, vague, little robots, incompletely programmed, which is why they’re always falling off. But these were real spotlights, big eyes pinning me down, and I stumbled forward, unable to see anything much in front, waving my arms in front of me, feeling for a hold, shouting. At least I think I shouted something, was it just a cry, an animal noise? I wanted to stand and be brave, to be someone strong for once, but I was instantly in fear, panicked, and I tripped and fell forward. Waiting for the ground to hit me, I covered my head with my arms but then felt nothing. It was like I’d been caught and held, the air had decided to keep me, but I still couldn’t see anything, the lights brighter and brighter and brighter until I felt as if I was spinning, physically spinning in the air and I was lost, dazzled, mindless.

Then I was nowhere, nothing, truly part of space, nothing but a space. Stevie would have been well jealous, since for a moment I could claim I was truly at one with the nothingness.

Linseed oil, a jumbled, untidy room, but rich in flavours and smells and textures; dominated by a heavy wooden bench, like a butchers block, with curved and shaped wood rising from near the floor, twisting in grained solidity up to a roughly unsmooth surface covered with pots empty and full of liquid, or packed with brushes skewing in all directions, mad-hair heads, labels capturing the eye: birds of paradise, starbursts, slabs of colour, fruits, animals, fish, all the colours that you can imagine – teal, peppermint, aubergine, everywhere, everything, the spectrum redoubled. Sunlight at one end of the room, an extension – an extrusion – from the interior of the house, windowed on three sides, frames painted and pretty, ledges oiled and absorbed with shells and sculptures and tsunami-wave shaped carvings and geometric and human models. On the walls, shelves and pictures, a tumble of angled lines, pick-up-sticks like. The shelves piled with tubes, frames, tools – adzes, pliers, short saws, chisels – and brushes shaped and sized – square, curved, rich horsehair, rough bristled. Pictures that tried to capture all moments of time and space, a concentration of emotions painted onto canvas. With my father kneeling by his easel, towels and blankets twisted and piled under his knees, wrapped round his feet, drifted into banks against the table, his face twisted in concentration as he spreads his colours directly onto the canvas, squirting from the tube – sepias, pomegranates, lustrous oyster shell pigments that gleam and fire in the light reflecting back the visual delights of the room. Such rich flavourings. Then he twists from the canvas, looks towards the interior of the room, the cave from which the extrusion has grown, looks at the machine, the abstracting machine, that stands there: black and silver, sucking perceptions from the room, twisted chains and straps, a tall complex engineering plainness.

Before I retched, the lights again, flickering lights, stupefying, dazzling, vision lost – was I being pulled into a star, made purely dust? Sounds like consummation of the best kind but, actually, was on the shitly painful side. I felt my legs squeezed, held tight, and heard the sound of birds – gulls? And water, a tap? No, it was waves, waves slapping onto a beach and sucking pebbles down into the sea, rattling like dice in a cup. The smell of salt but ripe, in a way. Over-ripe, somehow fetid. My eyes cleared and I saw that I stood straight, post-like on a beach, buried up to my balls in large pebbles of grey and black, part of a curved arc of shoreline that stretched out far to my left. On my right, almost within touching distance, a wall of greenish grey rock rose sheer into the sky, gulls spiralling around the ledges, pits and caves worn out of the rock. Bird shit fell like rain, catching me on the side of the face. As I started to wipe it away I discovered that my hands had turned to claws, long crabby claws that clicked and snapped in a very satisfying fashion. Satisfactory even though I nearly cut off an ear. Now, you’d think this would be a freaky experience for me – I can lose my shit at the sight of a mime artist or a nose bleed. But instead I felt calm, relaxed in the warmth of a friendly, lazy sun, enjoying the gentle tickle of the last energy from the rush of the waves, stretching themselves up the beach until they licked around my balls, said balls rising and falling slowly in a reassuringly rhythmic way. Just as I was flirting with the notion of an erection, and the issues of crustacean masturbation – lobster self-abuse, mate, it’s a claw problem – I saw a small group of people approaching me along the beach. Leading was a tall thin black figure, shaven skull but with hair hanging down his back, a beautiful outfit,  robes of some formal kind, pure chalk white linen, swept over his shoulder, and wrapped intricately around his body. Something about him was magical – his thin, intense face glowed with power. I thought of a high priest, a shaman or something. As if he was something converted into flesh. Truthfulness or energy or light made solid. His hands were beautifully shaped, long and active, pushing forwards in the air as the group proceeded along the beach so he was creating the path for them to follow. Their footsteps left patterns on the pebbles, dark shapes that melted as the group swayed along the path laid down for them by the tall man. Last in the group was a very short figure, squat, wide: a huge head and a droopy, heavy face of complete seriousness. His eyes were black and melancholy. My eyes were drawn to the things he carried: a wooden box, with the lid open, showing the handles of stuff... some sort of knives or forks? And a towel over his shoulder. Though, to be honest, my inspection slid over both the men quite quickly, remarkably interesting though they were, and focussed on the middle member of the group. She looked as she was enjoying her walk along the beach, watching the sea, the sky, the gulls with sharp interest. Her hair was shoulder length, a beautiful warm brown, framing a face that was so vivacious and full of excitement that I was entranced, fixated. As they got closer, both she and the tall man looked at me in a cool appraising fashion. They stopped in front of me, in a line facing me, and paused for a few seconds. The waves licked around their feet, the gulls soared casually through the air, everything else was still, was relaxed and peaceful. I looked at them; they gazed at me, without judgement. Until the beautiful woman – did I know her? I couldn’t look away from her, everything about her face compelled attention – nodded gently, and the short man – for some reason I was surprised he had no hump – crouched and filled the box with water, after pulling a set of knives from the box and handing them to the tall man. Then the woman (Miranda I thought her name should be. No, Pandora, I decided, she had a box of some kind, I seem to remember, and she was a goddess, like this woman) dipped both hands into the box and, stepping forward, began pouring water over my head. It felt warm and soothing, and as it ran down my face, I felt my body begin to change, to melt and re-shape into something bigger, harder, as though I was swelling and growing but my consciousness began to fade and dissolve, patches of vision blacking out like a computer screen going down, pixels turning off. Before it all went dark and I ceased to exist, I saw the woman wink at me; and then the world was full of light again, bright, painfully bright, and I was screaming and fighting, my body kicking and writhing until blackness returned and this time there were no more visions, no beautiful women.

Chapter 2 – Measurement

I woke up in a small bare room, plain walls yellowing slightly, taped posters instructing on hygiene procedures over the dripping sink in the corner. My head ached badly with lightening flashes of pain, my tongue felt enormously large and dry – though that was often the case: people, even relative strangers, sometimes commented that my tongue looked too big for my mouth, that it wasn’t likely to fit. But tongue-to-mouth-size ratio isn’t easy to assess accurately, at least not without specialist tools, so I’d never worked out if I was different from anyone else, or was it just people taking the piss? Anyway, my arms, torso and legs were strapped quite tightly to the thin uncomfortable bed I lay on, so there wasn’t any opportunity to measure up at present. Back in the happy house then, the house of mad.

Trying to shout was hard but sticking my tongue out as far as possible and hacking in my throat made a ‘huh, heh’ noise that, surprisingly, seemed to be sufficiently loud to interest someone outside the room, unless it was simply coincidental, since the door opened and Blue Man walked in and up to the bedside.

Water please

I lisppery whisper and as he bent over to pour a little water (drawn from a bottle on the small plastic table beside the bed) into my open tongue-filled mouth, the vision stuff from the underpass last night flowed back into my mind and I studied him more closely: maybe I was wrong about this being a hospital, maybe he was part of that thing, maybe he’s one of the aliens... he looked fairly strange – greasy black hair, long sideburns, eyes that are so far sunk into his face that they look like they’re trying to hide, all blue clothes as far as I can tell, mostly a smokey blue – baggy blue shirt, loose blue trousers, blue bags over his shoes. Why would someone wear blue bags over his shoes? Wouldn’t an alien be able to clean its hair properly, to get a more greaseless effect? And do aliens like blue that much? Wouldn’t they at least go for