Sinister: another slice of ugly and awkward prose through your computer

[Kieran Devaney]

Simon was waiting for night time. He had been waiting most of the day, but 
now the sky was growing lazily streaked with orange and pink and soon the 
streetlights would be on. He’d been sitting in the park for most of the day 
because it was his day off work, and he had wanted to do something he’d be 
able to remember. He had spent the last couple of days thinking up exactly 
what this would be, but a suggestion both affordable and desirable hadn’t 
come to him and so he’d decided to spend the day in the park by where he 
lived. In fact, he was pretty sure he could see the window to his own flat 
from the bench – 14 floors up, the counting made him dizzy though. He played 
the whole day back in his mind; he had arrived early, not quite early enough 
to watch the elderly dog walkers mooching slowly through the damp grass, not 
even talking to their dogs anymore, but he had seen the kids wander through 
towards the bus stops on their way to school. His favourite bench was the 
one in front of the small pond, and he had resolved to sit there the whole 
day, doing what, he wasn’t sure, but in the days leading to today he had 
thought that such a use of time would look good written in his diary. 
Recently, keeping a diary had become a more and more unsatisfying task, it 
had started off, as all diaries do, as a noble exercise in recording Simon’s 
thoughts and actions, but in recent weeks it had descended into diatribes 
about his work colleagues, how much he despised them, and how much they 
returned this sentiment. It wasn’t a special hatred on either side, nor a 
particularly passionate one; the other people who worked in the office had 
been there for years, and they resented Simon’s scruffiness and his tendency 
to go off wandering at lunchtimes rather than stay and make small talk in 
the cafeteria. They hated the way Simon seemed to silently sneer at them, 
they way he silently seemed to have no respect for authority or for the work 
he was doing. Simon hated them because he knew that he could do very little 
to change their opinion of him, because it wasn’t him particularly that they 
hated; they would have hated anyone young who came to work in that 
grey/yellow office, they were faded, just dull whispers of what Simon was, 
of themselves, and they hated him because he would never collude with them, 
never allow himself to go near that world in case it sucked him in – an ugly 
black hole, void, grey. The last thing he ever wanted was to become like 
them. None of this, however, looked good in his diary, he wanted something 
he could grasp onto when he read it back, he wanted to be able to pick days 
out and hold them up to the light and watch tiny rainbows play over their 
facets. He couldn’t achieve this with dull platitudes about office politics, 
and he always seemed to sound petty and childish whenever he criticised his 
colleagues. But today was a chance to change it. Last night he had mused 
upon the contrariness of contriving an exercise just for the purpose of 
putting it in his diary and he wondered who he was writing the whole thing 
for exactly. He was loath to say it was for himself, partly because it made 
him sound pathetic, but also because he liked to entertain the romantic 
notion that someone would find it one day, maybe long after Simon’s death, 
and spend hours poring over the tattered, yellowing pages, warped with love 
as much as the effects of time and they would slowly come to adore the 
writer of that diary.

So he had walked to the park in the morning half sun and sat down on his 
favourite bench by the duck pond, sat with the shell of an idea in his mind 
and thought about making his life more like this, more like a collection of 
set-pieces where he was the lead actor, which he could wander through in a 
capricious haze; that was what life should truly be like, a whirlwind of 
choices without real consequence, and with plenty of time to sit and think 
about what had transpired at the end of it all. Simon wondered vaguely if 
his day sitting in the park had matched that. If it hadn’t then he probably 
didn’t deserve a life like that, he had had the choice of doing pretty much 
anything today, and he’d chosen to sit here in a grubby park where the 
windswept grass clung to the sparse soil, on the bench that he could see 
from the window of his own flat even on the foggiest of days.

He had sat on the bench for only an hour or so before boredom had crept up 
on him, he was thinking about feeding the ducks, because that too would look 
good in his diary, a springboard for some nostalgic childhood reflection 
about happier times. It didn’t occur to him that he had never ever fed the 
ducks as a child, and it didn’t matter really, Simon was used to such 
speculation and he reasoned that it’s better to borrow from the stereotype 
of a projection of a feeling, or an experience, rather than an actual one 
that you’d had yourself, because his own experiences were littered with 
anomalies, which constantly plagued his reminiscences. He decided to go to 
the paper shop over the road and buy some bread for the ducks, he liked the 
idea of this sort of dealing in absolutes, he liked untainted sentences and 
untainted experiences, that’s what he sought most of all from today. And so 
his diary wouldn’t mention the uneven tarmacking in front of the paper shop, 
where the pavement had been dug up, and then replaced several times over, 
each time with a new shade of grey concrete or black tarmac. Nor would he 
mention the metal grill in front of the shop window, originally there to 
stop people throwing bricks through the window, now completely rusted and 
stuffed with empty crisp packets and sweet wrappers, even though there was a 
bin just up the road by the bus stop. His diary would never mention these 
details because he liked to deal in the absolutes of experience, in clean 
sentences and pure feelings. So he bought the bread and a newspaper and 
ambled back to his favourite bench by the pond. Feeding the ducks was 
unrewarding and messy, which was probably why he hardly ever saw anyone ever 
doing it nowadays. The ducks looked starved, Simon wondered what made them 
stay; and then thought better of it. He tried to do the crossword in the 
paper, but it was much too hard; he thought about the sort of people that 
crosswords appealed to, and remembered a boy called Ian who he had gone to 
school with, Ian had the crossword almost every day, and he nearly always 
completed it. This worried Simon, who had never completed a crossword in his 
life; and school was almost ten years ago. What skill had Ian possessed that 
Simon didn’t have? He was about ready to give up when an old man that Simon 
sort of recognised came and sat down next to him, this wasn’t really part of 
the plan either, but they chatted for a bit and the man told him about how 
the park used to be much bigger before they built those flats, pointing a 
disdainful finger at Simons own block. Simon told him how he lived in those 
flats, to which the man replied that he did too. Slightly disturbed, Simon 
made his excuses and left; deciding to go into town for some lunch, it was 
only a couple of stops on the bus anyway, so he wouldn’t be long. Town was 
pretty full for a weekday, but Simon didn’t mind; he enjoyed indulging in 
the loner in the crowd cliché, and adjusted his walk and facial expression 
accordingly. He bought an egg and cress sandwich from Marks and Spencers, 
and ate it moodily on a crowded bench, wondering if, rather than just 
playing the stereotype of the affected loner, he actually was one. This was 
a depressing thought indeed and it stayed with him all the way to the big 
HMV which he visited every time he went to town even though he hardly ever 
bought anything. He often worried that the staff in there were getting to 
know him as a loner who never bought anything. He was therefore relieved to 
see his friend Laura wandering aimlessly down the aisles of CD’s in the 
manner often taken by people who don’t know much about music. Simon knew 
Laura from university where they’d got on fairly well, though Laura had 
always been a more social animal. Simon remembered envying her for that, for 
a lot of things really; but few of them were worth dwelling on. Simon liked 
to think that people envied him too sometimes, as he genuinely believed that 
everyone possessed something desirable, and thus somebody must surely desire 
him. This view seemed flawed though somehow, but Simon couldn’t question it 
now, he had to deal in absolutes, otherwise he would never get anywhere. It 
deflated him to think like that too, and when it came down to it, he 
reckoned he could deal with the big stuff, and probably manage ok if it 
wasn’t for all the little niggles of life, the dust in the grooves that 
occasionally made the record stick. And he felt that these things, which 
individually weren’t really worth commenting on, were latching on to him 
like burrs, he could see it in the condensation of his warm breath in winter 
time, in the play of grey/orange light from passing cars through his thin 
curtains on his bedroom wall; he could see it in the rusted metal grate 
stuffed with crisp packets and old cans, there to stop people throwing 
bricks through the paper shop window. All these things registered, and yet 
didn’t, he could pretend that he only had to deal in the tangible, in the 
stuff he could put down in his diary, the stuff that effortlessly came out 
in gobs of biro blue ink on his page. But all the time the little things, he 
knew, were working through his system, colouring his beliefs like wine 
through water. He knew too, that if he stayed still and shut them out he 
could separate himself from them, make them sit like oil on top of water 
inside himself, but only temporarily, not long before they would seep back 
in, chipping away at his principles, because maybe someone would desire him, 
or envy him, but they didn’t, he’d never experienced it, at least not in the 
sense that he envied Laura; and he despised the thought that his whole 
edifice of belief might be brought down by these tiny erosions. Despised the 
thought that he could be changed by these unnameable entities, by nuances. 
He had to deal in absolutes, in the tangible, had to push these tiny 
thoughts into the periphery. Concentrate.

Back in HMV, Simon was recommending some CD’s to Laura; she seemed genuinely 
impressed with his wide range of tastes and the scruffily debonair way in 
which he grabbed stuff from almost every shelf and briefly enthused about 
its contents. It scarcely mattered to Simon that he owned very few of these 
records, he knew the names so well that if he ever got round to actually 
buying some of them then he imagined that they would well up in his mind 
like an old memory being dusted off or an encounter with an old friend. 
Laura even agreed to buy one of the CD’s Simon particularly liked, and 
actually owned. For Simon, this was experience in almost its purest sense, 
it bothered him slightly that Laura had that kind of money to spend on a 
whim, when there were tons of records he wanted but couldn’t possibly 
afford; but this feeling was at best peripheral. There had been something 
good between the two of them for that fleeting moment, a real sense of one 
person trusting one another. There was something childlike about that 
gesture, Simon felt they had both gained a great deal from it. This was 
something he could put down and remember, and even though the way Laura said 
goodbye to him made him feel like just a friend of a friend again, the 
moment they had shared could be held onto, and he would hold it there in his 
mind until that evening, when he could write it down in cosy reminiscence.

He caught the bus back, and as he meandered along towards the bench he 
thought again about the validity of contriving a whole days activities 
almost solely so that he could write them down and then reminisce about them 
sometime later. He wondered if the diary was an end unto itself, and if he 
read today’s entry in ten or twenty years it would be nothing more than 
words on a page to him; or if it was a trigger to actual physical memories 
of his thoughts and actions on that day. If it was just a trigger then it 
would only really be useful to himself, and reducing his existence to just 
words on a page, to just cheap biro ink on thin diary paper made the whole 
task seem utterly pointless. He had thought about indulging in an expensive 
fountain pen and good cartridge paper for his diary, and though money had 
got in the way of such a venture, Simon truly thought that these items would 
have made his diary better. He acknowledged the validity in such ritual 
gestures and in occasional moments of clarity he admitted to himself that he 
preferred style over content, but who didn’t? In his mind his diary was a 
weighty tome, almost too heavy to lift, with yellowing pages full of faded 
ink in sprawling, but elegant handwriting and his vision rarely included 
what the actual words said. How could he come close to this with his pound 
shop office diary, with its tacky fake leather cover and wafer thin pages, 
and his chewed biro which was missing the lid and nearly run out? Part of 
him knew that he shouldn’t invest hope in such trivialities, that he should 
concentrate on recording his true thoughts, that everything else should be 
peripheral, but another part of him so wanted to submit to the clichés and 
the stereotypes, to embrace them fully. He felt that if he could get other 
peoples perception of him right then everything else would fall into place, 
and so he had to stick to what they knew. He wondered what they’d think of 
him here, alone in an ugly, grubby park with a dual carriageway running down 
the one side, and a couple of blocks of flats where there used to be more 
park. He shivered slightly and shrugged, it was getting quite dark by now 
and the others would probably already be back at the flat. Simon thought 
that today had probably fallen short of the mark, and although he hadn’t 
really had any clearly defined goals he had expected to feel sort of 
different by the end. But he didn’t. Too many things had gotten in the way, 
tainted the experience, uneven concreting, flats where there used to be 
park, being just a friend of a friend. None of that had been part of the 
script that Simon hadn’t written for the day. He thought it was probably 
time to go back. As he was getting up he noticed a poem scratched into the 
wood of the bench and he recognised it as being one of his friend 
Jonathan’s. He read it quietly to himself and thought that even though the 
scratches made the bench look as illiterately vandalised as everywhere else; 
Jonathan’s beautiful words transformed it into something unexpected and 
brilliant. Simon wondered if anyone else had read the poem, or if they had 
just glanced over the hastily made indentations and turned away in disgust, 
dismissing it as just more mindless graffiti. He got up to go, thinking 
about how much different today would sound if he ever read the diary entry 
he was about to write in 10 or 20 years. The lift would still be broken, so 
he readied himself for the stairs again.



peace and love
kieran

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