Leaves

Here's the bloated beginnings of a not-very-short short story I started writing.
I gave up. It's called "Leaves".

Even before I opened my eyes, I felt the presence of the hangover.

They always catch me by surprise; I will have been too drunk to remember that I know what happens when I get too drunk.
I could feel the pressure inside my head.

The thud. The wrestler that clamps hold of my temples. The elephant standing on my forehead.

My jaw ached and cramped.

I wanted to swing it left and right to click it, to test the hinges and see if I could shift the locked feeling. It wouldn’t move.

I knew what to expect when I opened my eyes. Shards of light stabbing my irises like glass shrapnel. I braved lifting my lids slightly. No light. No stabbing.
My body felt like lead. So tired I couldn’t muster the effort to even twitch a finger.

My eyes flopped open wide, briefly. Darkness. It must still be the middle of the night. My gaze darted around blank surroundings. I heard creaking, squeaking. Something moving against something.

You know when you’re at a restaurant and you’re fighting a badly-cooked steak? Sawing into it, trapping it in place with a fork. And then it suddenly shifts on the plate and your cheeks burn with embarrassment at the volume of screech that sets the other diners’ nerves on edge.

An evil “screeeeeeeeek” that turns your stomach and pours vinegar on your nerves.

That’s what I heard. There; hung over, dogged by half sleep, in the middle of the night.

I don’t know why I wasn’t bothered by the sound, but I wasn’t. Sleep cradled me again, as the pressure in my head dulled my senses.

I don’t know how much time passed before I opened my eyes again, but I’m all too familiar with the disrupted sleep too much alcohol brings. The view as I opened them wasn’t familiar.

Leaves. Green and translucent in sunshine.
When we were married, and happy, we had an enlargement of one of our wedding photographs framed on the wall opposite the bed. I kept it there even afterwards. Although it made me sad every morning when I woke, but not as sad as the sagging aloneness that swept over me those first few weeks afterwards, when I took it down and put it away.

That’s what I saw when I opened my eyes every morning. But not now.

Not the usual gloomy surroundings of my room. Not even the makeshift bed of a friend’s living room sofa.

Leaves.

Still no discomfort from my eyes. No stinging shrapnel. That’s good; sore eyes are one of the worst revenges of alcohol on my system. Not such a bad hangover then. But a confusing one. My eyes swept beyond the foliage, and realisation dawned. Reality crashed in.

A U-section steel beam had crushed the whole driver’s side of the car against me. My right arm pinned to my side by intruding metalwork. As the door pillar had distorted, it had swung the top anchor point of my seat belt upwards and behind me, leaving the unyielding strap tight against the side of my throat.

I still felt only a dullness. Surely there should be horrendous pain ensuing from an accident like this?

I grappled with a slippery memory that danced away from me inside my mind. My head was still crushed by a thunderous headache. My jaw still cramping and locked across to one side. There was an overwhelming hissing rushing inside my head. The blood. I paused and could hear my pulse whistling in my ears.

I saw something shifting on the payload of the lorry in front. I’d been dawdling along behind him for half the night, it seemed. He must be lost, there’s no way he should be on a twisting, turning, tiny lane like this. A sodding great lorry in the tight gloom of the night. I felt as though he’d always been there just ahead of me, blinking an occasional deeper red glow from his tail lights as he braked for this corner or invisible dip. I was almost hypnotised by the great rump of the trailer, not needing or bothering to follow my own lights revealing my knowledge of the road, I simply tailed his tail.

Wits jerked alert by motion in front of my eyes. A tarpaulin flapped ahead of me and I saw the shapes beneath moving against one another. In the dipped light from my car I saw a strap snake upwards, snapping, and the vague movement I’d registered became a sudden glint from my lights reflecting, as long grey shapes fell into my face.

Whenever you talk to someone who’s been in a car accident, they’ll always tell you the whole world stalled into slow motion. It sounds like a cliché. I can tell you now that it’s true.

There was something delicate and beautiful about the way the impact shattered the glass of my windscreen. I watched entranced as the web of silver lines fled the point of impact. Like time lapse footage they twisted and multiplied and split.

Fractals.

I watched with newly-capable eyes as the glass opaqued itself into a million tiny safety squares.

Leaves.

When we were married, and happy, we would walk. For fun.

Out across the fields behind the main road, crossing the dual carriageway and into the farmland. Often we wouldn’t get far before we decided it was too cold, and the pub back in the village would call us with the promise of an open fire. Or it would be too hot, and the pub back in the village would call us with the promise of a seat in the sunshine watching the ducks on the river.

When the sun was low and bright it would catch the leaves in a way that tinged them with magic. They seemed to glow with the joy of feeling the sun on their surface, bristling tiny hairs. Chlorophyll dancing in their cells they would hum with the energy of photosynthesis. Pure, bright joy of simply existing. As we walked we shared their delight. Joy at simply existing, together.

I thought of those days as I looked at the leaves in front of my eyes. Displayed and framed by the shattered remnants of glass. A crooked frame, as the screen pillar had buckled, frozen in the act of squirming away from the impact of the first girder.

From the other evidence in front of me I assumed that my car would be a total loss. The plastic of the dashboard gaped in a split before me, revealing wires and foam. The edges of the plastic looked stretched and white, like an old credit card when you fold it back and forth over and over again to make it break. The material of the facia had been forced beyond its limit of conformity. The sturdy steel reinforcement beneath was what supported the steering wheel on its column, in its new, awkward site.

The wheel was still flat and unbuckled, but twisted and pressed against my chest. It wasn’t uncomfortable, but it restricted each breath I took to one shallower than my lungs desired.

I flicked my eyes around the remnants of the cabin. Attempting to turn my head resulted in failure, and I began to notice a tension in my neck. My head was in an awkward position, it seemed, and I could feel the plates of bone and twists of tendon against each other, unhappily close together. Still, my jaw would not unclench, the cramp holding it to one side would not release.

Leaves.

Blowing softly. A breeze had sprung up and I began to feel cold. My cheek even more so. Just above the tight-muscled discomfort in my jaw was a sense of great coldness, that side of my face numb and chill.

My gaze lifted from the leaves ahead and I saw the rear view mirror. Amazingly unbroken and still in place against the brow of the window frame. It had moved.

I’ve never suffered from fear of the dentist. Always quite content to endure the vague discomfort a visit entails. I suppose I’m lucky, not to have needed extensive work or fillings. But I always close my eyes in the chair. I tell myself it helps me relax, and gape my mouth as wide as I can; help the man do his job.

But really I close my eyes to hide from the sight of his lamp. A big angle-poise lamp he uses to flood my mouth and see what he needs to see in his little inspection mirror. I don’t like to see his lamp because sitting smugly at the centre is a polished chrome boss, a little touch of chic to lift its design from the industrial doldrums. A chrome boss so brightly polished it mirrors everything beneath. My mouth.

I don’t mind the dentist when I can’t see what he’s doing in my face.

Wall-E

Well.

I was obviously in a fragile emotional state.
That morning I was reduced to a crumpled, emotional heap to see Peppa pig fall off her bicycle and break daddy pig’s giant pumpkin.

She had no stabilisers on her bike, see?

Daddy pig was just glad she was ok, but it could have been serious.

So, seeing Wall-E that same morning, with a friend and his small daughter was always going to instigate trauma. Pixar can do that – brightly coloured computer graphics whizzing around faster than Pacman, but when they hit the core just right, they can draw you in so much that there are tears.

Wall-E is a little robot far in the future. He spends his solitary days tidying up the derelict earth, compacting garbage in his tummy and arranging it artfully in vertigo-inducing Aztec pyramids. His days are dutifully spent in the company of a planet full of landfill and a faithful little (and seemingly indestructible) cockroach pal. Until the day there’s a mysterious, important arrival to his dirty, dustbowl existence. An arrival whose presence brings a vast importance to his hobby-style collecting and threatens his solitary status quo.

And could, possibly, save the human race from an eternal bone-dwindling EzE-Boy space laziness.

Wall-E is the last dutiful cleaning-warrior. His cohorts have been defeated by armies of rubbish and decay. But opportunity comes for this small dirty hobbyist to score big time amongst the misfits and failures and robo-fruitcakes and space baby blimp remnants of the human race.

Yup. A little robot that looks like a manky pile of air conditioning and binoculars. And ET, kind of. Pixar take the failures and the weirdies and the freaks and the cheesers and – once they render them with their magic brush of universal appeal, they make them heroes.

I snuffled and blinked. I stumbled out into the light with tear-stained trousers. I enjoyed the trailer for "Igor".

I was a mess.

At a small robot that looks like something I used years ago to water the garden with. And can’t even talk properly. Perhaps I’m mentally weak?

Or perhaps Pixar are geniuses? Perhaps they stumbled Indiana-Jones – like into the presence of the holy grail. It’s easy to imbue character into a hunk of anything by exaggerating emotion. It’s harder to do so by minimising everything - action, facial features - and still leave you with the feeling that it's important. Reducing dialogue down almost to nothing, and madcap slapstick hilarity to a beeping flat-line. To show a little metal box endlessly sorting junk – and somehow have it clamber up my heartstrings and twang them up near the top. Up where it really counts. Where I care.

It’s barely worth mentioning that the animation surpasses anything you’ve seen before. Because it always does. When they finish raising the bar, they can cut through it like a stick of rock to find that it says “Pixar”. All the way through.

You can keep your Space Chimps and your Over The Hedge. This is where it’s at.

Unless it's all down to the hormonal whirlwind blowing through my household at the moment. That means everything is noble or sad or just too much.

Maybe Wall-E is just irritating and manipulative and concealing an eco-message to batter us about the head and make us recycle our old toys? Perhaps Pixar are just trying to spin a multi-million dollar merchandised lunchbox profit out of tugging our sympathies here and there? Trying to shift thousands more radio-controlled plastic robots into the homes of the world.

There, now I'm being all cynical. Oh, I'm such a state.

The Sword Bearer

Before I start this, let me point out that I know I'm sad.

Clear? You understand that?

Right.

I like films a lot. All sorts of films. I forget how I originally heard about this one, but it is very obscure. The Sword Bearer is a Russian film, originally called "Меченосец". Somehow I happened upon a brief plot summary - maybe in one of the endless bizarre foreign dvd sales email newsletters that ping into my inbox.

It sounded very interesting. I looked for information on the IMDB, and there was next to nothing. Even more interesting - nobody much seems to have seen it outside of Russia.

I became mildly obsessed with seeing this film, curiosity being a strong master.

The more I heard nothing about the film, the more I wanted to see it. Eventually I ordered a cheap dvd from Russia. But no English subtitles. So I ended up having to rip the disc and combine it with homemade subtitles I found on the web. Bundled them all together and flipped the resulting avi into an iso - Bingo!

So was it worth all this slightly frightening obsessive behaviour?

Yes and no.

Imagine a film that deals with the story of a single Xmen character, Wolverine maybe. From childhood. Instead of an action film with cool oneliners, this is a quiet film that deals with an insular, almost autistic loner. A man who only wants to find a romantic connection but is always thwarted by his temptation to lash out with a violent power he's known and hated since childhood.

Oddly, nothing much happens during the film. Yes there is a lot of violence, and there is some action. But the distances between the characters make it hard to relate to them, they keep a distance with the viewer too.
I suppose it's a fantasy story, like Xmen. But the protagonist's power only hinders his life. If you knew from your youth that you were incredibly strong, it's likely that you would use your strength to assert yourself in difficult situations. And resorting to violence breeds more violence.

But the film doesn't concentrate on the violence. Its not made 'cool'. There's no explanation given for the 'power'. The plot moves slowly, and is character-driven. Which makes for a difficult watch at times when the main character behaves so autistically.

I enjoyed it, and it was never boring. But I was dissatisfied at the end of the film. Probably only because of my own expectations. Even though I didn't really know what they were.

But that's the gamble of being interested in films just because they sound interesting. Sorry if this all sounds vague, but I don't want to provide any spoilers for anyone who's even slightly tempted to watch this.

I am at the mercy of odd films. I deserve your sympathy, but never your respect.

Saw III

Do you ever sit down to watch a film with a strong suspicion that it's going to be rubbish?

But you're not sure, so you watch it anyway. Because if it is any good, it could be really good.
That's how I ended up with SAw III. [accidental caps lock typo there, but I like how it looks so I'm going to leave it there]

I felt badly let down with Saw. Advance word-of-mouth suggested unbridled horror and inconceivable anguish and torture.

Nope. Carey Elwes looking fat and getting sweaty, and Danny Glover thinking he's in Se7en. Rubbish.

Saw 2 was appalling. Execrable stinking toss.

So I had low expectations indeed for Saw III.

It didn't even reach them.

Nigh-on impossible to watch. Not because of gore or extreme horror, just because it's so ugly and eye-damaging to look at.
Horrible direction. Horrible cinematography. Horrible performances. Unpleasant things befalling unpleasant people. No story, not much script - just desperate torture gags strung together in a mess of poo.

Toss. Toss toss.

I'm fully prepared to cut horror films loads of slack because you can't judge them by regular criteria.

As long as they score for gore that's usually good enough for me. I like all kinds of garbage films and I won't pretend otherwise.

What annoys me is something like Saw III taking itself soooooo seriously and pretending it's giving a treatise on the human condition - when really it's just tangling hapless goons up in cruel machines and telling them they're learning a lesson.

I wish I could un-watch it and spend that hour and a half on the Devil Wears Prada instead. Again.