Pressing no. 37

Goodnight, Goodbye

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© Matthew Sheret, 2008

Pressing no. 36

The Lady, Regent’s Park, 2008

Bed

Breathing, concentrating on her breathing as she lies naked on the bed, taking air in in slowly through parted lips, consciously filling her lungs to bursting point and holding
___________________ before the exhale, jagged, out through her nose, letting the air flow run over her body as the duvet lies rumpled at the side, a barrier against spreading out, taking more of the mattress than her body quietly requires.
_____ Inhaling
___________________ and so on, now very aware of the currents changing subtly as they plunge down past her chin and whirl in her clavicle, flushing over and around her breasts before dissipating, only a reminder of the cold wind making it as far as her stomach, calming. ______________ The self-awareness is almost too fantastic at this stage, her heartbeat thumps up the sheets and into the pillow, it seems, because it’s more interesting to think of it that way than to just accept that there is no other sound in this room than her respiration ________________ it’s not confined to that though now, the catalogue grows behind her eyes: pressure of right forearm inside of skin as it grows against wrist and elbow; throb in feet left by the daily padding on concrete; flicker of painful sensation in front teeth after coffee starts creeping into crevices and cavities; _______ burning itch of leg hair growing back through pores post-shave on shins and calves;______________ tug at cheek from bruising after tripping into the handrail on the W3
__________________________ Sleep, when it comes, an extension. Clothes in dreams take on the qualities of this constant airflow, as if painted onto the space three millimeters above her skin. _______________ The pillow so comfortable it can only be dirt and grass. __________ Moonlight and starlight newly made a sun in slumber.

© Matthew Sheret, 2008

Pressing no. 35

Battersea, 2008

The Model

Shapes. Lists: A scalpel
_____________ Architecture
_____________ Televised love stories
_____________ Time
_____________ What am I building? A model of an office block, fit for an empty wasteland. I know that a structure can only become rubble and space. I know equally that this model will fill a now half-empty bookshelf in a now half-empty bedroom.

Once ________ her dress clings only to the leg that faces the wind, while its ruffles and creases billow between her breasts and her belly. But the sun burns and glances off of the leaves and the grass and the walls of the nearby ICA, and the light penetrates the deep blue of the fabric.

I can see what I shouldn’t: the lace of her bra-strap; the outline of her ribs; the flow of her calves and inside thigh; her eyes; a smile. I fill in the gaps: the scar on her knee; the freckles on her back; her gasps in my ear.

I’d ___________ No.

It’s just a passing memory.

A distraction, now: take the card, measure the card, mark the card, score the card, cut the card, glue the card, repeat. Making shapes, making models. The model has an abstract relationship to its potential. It is an idea, essentially unreal.

© Matthew Sheret, 2008

Pressing no. 34

Chrissy’s Boiler, 2008

Words

Words I think as I walk to the pub: We probably don’t deserve the future we’ve ended up in.

My pocket emits words: “New.Message.From.Sarah” ___ Man-made saucers that circle the earth bounce the language of a friend into the shiny black pebble in my pocket. My friend is about to fly, and she will cross continents.

One slip of plastic in my pocket is a key to the city, another replaces coins, a third with an RFID could put me on a plane, the world under a wing. I just use all three to get a double Scotch in an old room near Holborn. _____ Drink.

______________ I hear that last night a man was killed in a case of mistaken identity: The killer thought the victim had insulted his wife, but that was another man. _________ We still kill over words.

© Matthew Sheret, 2008

Pressing no. 33

Barbican ceiling, 2007

Sunday Sketches

A hotel bar, a tiny little corner, offset and quiet. A four-square dancefloor is stepped around by the occupants. The ceiling above is mirrored. The effect isn’t particularly tacky, or trashy, it’s simply a useless feature in a room better suited to cheap scotch and bar nuts.

He perches on a tall stool in the corner, wearing a grey Tom Selleck moustache and greasy hair which frame eyes sunk so far into the sockets he seems hollow. He mumbles constantly, like a talentless bastard beat poet, and fingers in turn his pint, his peanuts and his mangy denim jacket, scrabbling for eye contact but coming up short.

She yawns, hungover, hiding her face from me on the seat opposite: I don’t know her, it’s just that kind of bar. Her bra strap slips under the sleeve of her frilly top, more bookish and awkward than cute. It is a shade of pink that, I imagine, will succeed in highlighting the blotches of her skin and stop far short of erotic. She gets up when her friends arrive, only to be replaced by a girl equally as deadpan. The effect is profoundly moving, as if they’re part of a continuum.

© Matthew Sheret, 2008

Pressing no. 32

The Ten Bells, 2008

The Pub at The End Of The World

The Ten Bells has looked like a pub at the end of the world for a long time now. _______The paint on the wall outside - so far off-white that brown is a closer fit - peels and flakes away in huge patches __________ frozen in decay. The wooden frames look riddled with rot and the most respectable feature is the lantern above the doorway, which has seen better days and looks by turns quaint and menacing.

It is a fag-end of a place, populated by the trendy, shitty people that have coalesced around Whitechapel since trendy, shitty industries made their homes here ______ maybe around the time Ceasar landed.

This guy bounces in through the doorway. I can’t tell if he’s drunk or sick _______ his eyes are glassy when he looks at me. ___He’s like a child _____ He looks too young to be a tramp but it’s clear that he is, the grime on his face and clothes too ingrained to be anything other than authentic. He buckles to the floor because he can’t remember what legs are supposed to do and the barman’s on him in an instant, picking him up be his junk-shop neon hoodie and hauling him outside, into the shadow of the church over the road.

Fuck him: If his brain’s broken then he’s already been spared the shit the rest of us are putting up with; if he’s drunk then coming to in an alley beside the pub at the end of the world is the least of his problems.

© Matthew Sheret, 2008

Pressing no. 31

Adventurers

…and it was a bookshop, like any other on Charing Cross Road, and she had left a free tabloid beside the grotty till and a small pile of unpriced hardbacks on the splintered counter

…and Zia had always said she’d rather listen to Chopin - would actually rather listen to a piano tuner - than to The Cure, but the security tape showed her nodding along to ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ all the same

Before something distracted her
Before she dropped the book to the floor

Before she left and never returned

…and we don’t know why, there weren’t really any clues, just that newspaper filled with misery and tragedy while paperbacks holding more of the same sat bleaching in the sun

Except, on the floor, the fallen book
…and peeking out from the frontpiece a forgotten photograph above a spidery inscription

Mark on the Bristol waterfront, 2007

© Matthew Sheret, 2008

Pressing no. 30

Providence, 2008

The Third Perfect Listening Space

It’s been pointed out that Burial’s Untrue ought to be listened to at some point after 3am. ________ In UK time it’s 2.50am, so New York is sat somewhere around 9.50pm. ________ Maybe two hours of this flight left, straddling time zones, never really 3am until long after I touch down.

The album, playing in one ear, takes me

- fuckingturbulence -

takes me out of the aircraft and into two distinct and perfect listening points: back to the loft of Bradley Road, drinking cheap Scotch alone and trying to tie plans and paper and plots and polaroids into something lasting; out in Finsbury Park, getting a bus to meet Esther in winter dark though black lit streets. This is the third perfect listening space then: Thousands of feet up in the night air. ________ The album is drawn to the colder moments of 2008, the lonely points at which I’m aware, keenly, of the threat to me that the world beyond my control poses.

- theplaneshudders -

________ Looped themes play out across Untrue in a manner that reminds me of the best poetry. Untrue is still about home, the darker shades of it, and it reminds me of the hidden industry of my capital city, making ghosts of the top layer and ripping away the tangible, forcing them it blend into the landscape. Nothing is more important than the common themes: Darkness, Lonliness (voices in isolation), Drive, Depth, Connections (lost and broken, but there).

Instruments bounce

- bouncejoltfuck -

bounce around this lost space, the album builds walls for echo and distortion and repetition that don’t dilute or damage the source but do, certainly, degrade it, degradation the natural result of the passing of time on all things.

Untrue is a washed out as I feel now, and then. Untrue is drunk. Untrue is lost in memories, built both to house them and to make something new of them. Untrue doesn’t need me.

© Matthew Sheret, 2008

Pressing no. 29

Barbican, 2007

The Last Train

I ask the Nu-Rave Vagrant is it raining, or just the remains? as I step out of work and onto slick pavement. He mutters remains and stumbles off down the road, trainers swallowed by curbside tributaries that reflect the streetlamps as they flow towards half-clogged sewer grilles. I pull my hood up and head for the tube and don’t check my texts until I’m squashed in the lift down to the line, a little present for myself as we descend, us night workers.

I can’t really see who’s in the carriage of the last tube with me. Three of them have papers guarding their faces, the thumbed copy in erratic condition being fourth of fiftieth hand by now. As we trundle on I remember a ride at Universal Studios in Florida, the memory buried by years of neglect. I have no idea what dredged it up. I remember I knew it was fake.

I change to the mainline and think about what I’m coming home to. Ian’s long gone, and if the text from his Mum is anything to go by then he’s still in the wilds. Months have passed. I’ve stopped replying, because you have to stop caring at some point. When I get in I’ll see a pink wig on the hook by the door, a jacket I never wear and too too many shoes. I’ll probably see one of Amy’s cute post-it notes on the mirror too: Erin, borrowed shoes/dress/make-up, will cover you with kisses in the morning.xXx and of course I’ll roll my eyes and tut when I see her, but secretly I’ll feel really cool.

There are papers everywhere on this last, late train. The overhead lights flicker like a “scary” TV movie, but it stirs me in a different way. I feel like I’m on a journey into night. We cast no light and chase towards some unfixed point, guided by rails and kicking up sparks. I let myself think I’m in a Kate Bush song and close my eyes.

© Matthew Sheret, 2008

Pressing no. 28

Bonfire Night, 2007

Power Out

“He_o?”
“S rah? __ an o _ h ar me?”
“Hello?”
“Can you hear me Sarah?”
“I’ve got you now. What’s going on?”
“Have you lost power too?”
“Yeah, there’s nothing down here. You too then?”
“Yeah! Can’t believe it’s that widespread though.”
“Maybe all of South London’s blacked out!”
“Fuck. Wow! _____________ So, shit, I can’t shower at yours either then can I?”
“No-”
“-except gas heating, but even then. No.”
“It’s mad down here. I left the house to see what was going on, see if the street was out-”
“-yeah, Ali did the same.”
“Yeah. And the shops all down the street had closed up. All I could hear were the birds going mental, it was so strange-”
and maybe seven things cascade through my head: Walking a street south of Russel Square a little while after the blasts, radio piping into one ear and helicopters and police cars screaming through the streets while people just sort of ambled around, not panicked, just displaced; scenes from atmospheric Hitchcock films; memories of a recent dream about a Zombie holocaust that kept me from sleeping after I woke up from it; threads from my ongoing notebook for a story about the end of the world; Turning up to meet people looking a bit ragged because I haven’t showered; grabbing my camera and heading into town
“Wait _______ it’s on! The power’s on Matt! Hooray!”
“Really? _______ Oh _______ yeah _______ oh.”

© Matthew Sheret, 2008