Tired Tower
(on Kindness Street)

"A cat limping hind leg across the street between sharp April sun and steady me With a profound sadness leaking meeting out on the tarmac."

Text for Hammer House of Harm on Delerium Street:

"This home, though not quite all such a word may conjure, nevertheless kept me provided. Daily I would receive a bowl of food, a brown grey gruel, salted or sugared, often cold, but occasionally warm, even piping hot once. What else is needed to perpetuate a balanced state. I washed in the water they had left me, until it was too grey to consider, and drank the rest that came in with meals. I learned to shit standing, knees aquiver, and wiped what stains remained on hand on wall. (Experience taught me a little system - right for eating, left for wiping.) I slept when dark fell outside the window and awoke with the light. In short, the functions of life continued unstoppably and in full harmony with the surroundings in which I found myself. Had I arrived in a palace I would have dined on cholesterol and slept on layers of down, in my cell I had porridge and plaster and stayed thankfully alive.

I saw no one in that place unless a beating had to be administered. This served to break the solitude. I learnt slowly through a trial of errors what was expected of me and tried my hardest to behave correctly. My first ever food in that place had arrived in a shallow wooden bowl on the morning after the first night, and more had come quite late that same day. I learned that if I did not consume these meals within minutes of my having received them then I would be kicked for around a minute by a gentleman wearing a blue tracksuit. The food was pushed through an otherwise locked opening in the door and the empty bowl removed shortly afterwards. I would be kicked if the bowl was not replaced. The kickings were never too severe as the gentleman in question wore soft leather trainers. I was not to sleep during the light hours as then again I would be kicked, and could not wrap myself in my blanket unless I was to go to sleep. Its use would otherwise be punished. No. And, fortunes surviving, in sleep I found the usual dreams, and for these I was not beaten. I shall not recount those dreams. They were unpleasant dreams. Let it rest at that. They passed from being dreams into being mares of the night. Snorting, charging mares, with wild black manes and unshod hooves, thundering through the sleeping nerves, the sleeping mind, in all its channels, in all its ways and byways.

Thus, returning our concentration to the beatings, did I adapt to the twist of fate which had brought me there, grateful for the routine which had been thrust upon me in such strange and unwelcoming circumstances, yet impatient to learn my next instructions, my imminent manoeuvres. I would have to wait days for elucidation. Eighteen days in fact. Or eighteen nights, for it was they that I counted, and it was in the light following that eighteenth night that new demands were finally made of me. New demands. Now what could they be.

Something to do with demonstrating. Demonstrating what. What. I can't quite remember. A note came through the door with the morning's food, a note in some foreign scribblings. Then, in the afternoon, a grim grey afternoon, I was paid a visit. The door opened and in from the darkness outside came a young woman. She walked forward into the light from the window. She was quite beautiful, blonde, and dressed in a large, slightly oversized pinstriped suit, white shirt and red tie. In she came and peered around the room, trying to make me out. She saw me curled up in the corner and instructed me to stand, which I did, and stand with my face to the wall, which I did, and on my toes, which I did. Then she positioned herself close behind me and started to dictate my instructions. She spoke extremely fast and it was difficult for me to take everything she said in. She also used a lot of words which were beyond my comprehension, and referred to people I had never met or ever heard of. If I faltered on my toes she belted me on the back of my neck with some blunt instrument causing my face to meet sharply with the bricks of the wall. She spoke of intercalation and of vermiculation, she talked of recidivism and threatened me with peremptory infibulation. Mention was made of gonorrhoea and small drosophilas, but in what context I failed to understand. For a good half hour I listened to her words and suffered on the balls of my feet. And then she left me, informing me that I should sleep and that I would no longer receive any beatings, providing that I did what was expected of me. I promised I would. I stood against the wall for another hour, on flat feet now, trying to unravel her mystery.

It was all very disturbing."

Mark Batty