The Girl in the Night

 

It was simple. Either her body would be there, or it wouldn’t. As Ralph dug, he considered which one would fill him with more dread. If Jenny was there, then he would have to see her face again, and that would be painful. Except it wouldn’t be her face, of course. Not quite. 

Ralph slung a clod of earth behind him. Across from him, on the other side of the grave, James Mayhew and Ernie Tamms worked with their spades, dark silhouettes in the dance of torchlight. Ralph stabbed at the soil before him. 

How long had she been underground? Five weeks? What happened to a face in five weeks, he wondered. When they opened the coffin would they see a face they knew: pale, blue and still, but recognisably the young woman who they used to pass in the street? A face that might, in a moment, come back to smiling life, eyes dancing with light. Or was five weeks enough that her skin would have started to tighten and melt away, the skull beneath revealing itself in cruel, cold lines?

There was a clunk and Ernie Tamms stopped dead. Ralph and James stopped too. He had hit the coffin lid. The men breathed for a moment, then, slower and more carefully, went back at it. 

Seeing Jenny would be horrible. But worse, much worse, was the other possibility. What if they opened the coffin, the final resting place of this warm, vibrant girl, and found not the rotting remains of her once beautiful face, but instead… nothing. An empty chamber, whose solitary inhabitant was not currently at home.

The three men cleared the last of the soil. They looked expectantly at one another, half drawn charcoal sketches in the murk of night. Perhaps they could stop now. Leave the coffin lid as it was and the mystery unsolved. Like that experiment with the box and the cat inside, neither dead nor alive until you looked. They could move the earth back right now and the coffin wouldn’t be empty, or full of horrors… they just wouldn’t know. 

Except Ralph had a feeling that they would know, sooner or later. That one night soon there’d be a tap on the bedroom window. That he’d wake up to see those dancing eyes and that smiling face, half lit by the moon. That the next day there’d be another person missing, in a town that had seen too much tragedy in this last month. Looking at James and Ernie, he could see the same thought on their faces too. 

He clicked off his torch and knelt down. The light from the other men’s torches swayed over the wood and brass and dirt, searchlights over no-man’s land. He grasped the lid. Noticed that his hands were trembling, as if they, being closer, knew more than he did. He pushed the lid up, sliding it back across the coffin. The torchlight flicked down, casting his giant looping shadow against the pit they had cleared, past him, into the black abyss of the coffin. 

For a long moment Ralph was still, his eyes fixed on what he saw. Of course. What else had he been expecting? He let out a long breath.

A muffled sound came from above him. One of the torches flickered out. Then the other. 

Ralph crouched in the darkness, waiting for what came next. He felt a sick, unwanted smile crawl up his face.

At least, now, he knew.

Check out

I wrote this in response to a prompt which simply said 'Shopping List'. I nearly discarded it, thinking I had nothing to say. But I made myself do it, and gave myself a 15 minute limit to finish. In the end, I'm quite pleased with it. But then, I am a massive egoist.

Do I need anything from the shops?

I do. 

I do need something from the shops. 

I need a place to queue with a human at the end I need a little conveyor belt to put down my stuff that will Smoothly trundle it obediently away So I can put down more things Without creating a mad tower  Of milk and magazines and four packs of beans In one square foot of self service space

I need a real life person with a badge and a hat to pick up my shopping and make it go bleep Someone who knows Where to find the bloody bar code Who won’t spend half an hour Turning the bread round and round and round But will slip it, professionally, under the laser, first time.

I need a human soul, who won’t get confused By a three gram difference in weight. Who expects there to be items in the bagging area. Who won’t make me wait for assistance while  A venomous red light flashes in my sad, lonely face.

I need someone who can look And see by my thinning hair and the lines round my eyes That, yes, I can be trusted to buy These four bottles of red wine.

Someone who’ll remind me that I have parking to validate Who’ll smile as they wait for me to fish out my coupons Who’ll give me ten seconds of genuine interaction And treat me like a human Rather than another machine, doing the work of the company

Do I need anything from the shops? Yeah I need to feel like they value their workers rather that tolerating them Until they can think of a way to sack them all off And give half their jobs to machines And the other half to me

If they don’t have that Then I can probably do without whatever else they have.

Rob's Amazing Film Collection - Part Seven: Box of the Banned to A Bridge Too Far

 

What's better than looking through someone else's stuff? That's right - nothing. It's not weird, it's great and normal.  Well, happy days for all of us, because I've decided, for some reason, to let you gaze in admiration at my shelves of DVDs and BluRays.  We'll look at some of the films in there, I'll try to remember anything at all about the film and you get to judge me for my lack of culture! It's win win.

This time, we're wandering towards the end of the 'B' section. Let's see what's in there. 

Box of the Banned

Well straight away we've hit what scientists would call 'A complication'. The first two items on the shelf are not films but, rather, collections of films. 

The films in question are all ones that were banned in the 1980s. Apparently they were too horrible to watch and if we saw them we'd all go mad and eat each other or something, so they were hidden away where no-one could see them. A few years later, in the mid 00s, everyone calmed down and went, "Alright, you can watch them - just promise not to go mad and eat each other or something." And we all said, "We promise," and so here we are, with these lovely collections in our houses, and almost no-one got eaten.

A lot of these films had been mysterious, forbidden titles since I was a child, so I was most excited to get my hands on them. They came from a fascinating time - a time when film makers went, "Hey, no-one is regulating this - we can do whatever we want!" It turned out that what they mostly wanted to do was to show people's faces coming off.  

I don't propose to go into them all in detail. The quality is variable, with the only real constant being, "Don't put this on unless you want everyone else to start crying and being sick". There are some real highlights, like the original Evil Dead (which I'll be talking about if we ever get to 'E') and Zombie Flesh Eaters - a mad Italian zombie film where a zombie fights a shark underwater. I know, amazing, right? 

But there's also stuff that's quite dull, having gained notoriety simply through the act of being banned in the first place, like Driller Killer, which peaks once you're done reading the title. And some stuff that's genuinely quite horrible, and after you've watched it your DVD player seems to glare at you for making it touch the thing. Yes, I Spit On Your Grave, that would be you. Go away and think about what you've done. 

Boys Don't Cry

Alright, this is going terribly. I've owned this film for years but never seen it. I know, I know - it's meant to be amazing. There's no excuse. I'm just a very lazy boy.

I bought this when I was teaching a module on the new wave of independent cinema. One of the great things about cinema is that it's easy to become an expert - much easier than literature with all those stupid long books. So I quickly bought and watched all of the films in this 'new wave' and declared myself the king of being hip and cineliterate. 

Well, I watched all of them except one. Kimberley Pierce's Boys Don't Cry has sat on my shelf for over ten years, silently judging me. Why have I watched everything else but not this? I even watched Aronofsky's Pi for God's sake, and that's about ants and drills and in black and white.

I'm sorry, Boys Don't Cry. I did watch Pierce's remake of Carrie, so it kind of feels like this is on you. Did you have a telekinetic fight scene? No, you did not. 

Boys N the Hood

You'll be delighted to know I've actually seen this film, though only quite recently. It was another film, like Boys Don't Cry, that seemed to hover about forever saying, "You should have watched me, you know." And because I'm a contrary beast, I'd put it off as long as possible. You can't tell me what to do, films with 'Boys' in the title.

I'd always kind of thought, "Well, this isn't really made for me." I'm as white as it's possible to be, and I felt like watching it might be the equivalent of suddenly trying to do complicated handshakes with everyone and calling them 'Bro'. 

Which is, of course, idiotic. One of the great strengths of film is that it helps us to step into the shoes of others. As Roger Ebert said, it's a machine for generating empathy. Also, I bet I'd be ace at doing a complicated handshake, and there's no way anyone would call it cultural appropriation. 

Braindead

Back before he became obsessed with Hobbits and Beatles, Peter Jackson was into blood and zombies and making you feel sick. Braindead is one of his earlier, funnier works. In terms of content it's a horror movie, with people becoming violent zombies and rampaging through a quiet town. But in tone, it's played as broad farce - a comedy of manners where disguising the effects of the zombie outbreak is as important as surviving them. 

I was a university student when this came out. I already loved Bad Taste - Jackson's first horrifically violent monster comedy - and was well up for more. This ticked all the right boxes. Visceral cartoon violence (slicing through an army of the undead with a lawnmower). Implausible, outlandish set pieces (hosting a dinner party while trying to conceal that some guests have body parts falling into the soup). And brilliantly silly dialogue ("Your mother ate my dog!" "Not all of it.")

This is one of those films I used to show to everyone, fondly believing it to be a universally hilarious piece of work which everyone would enjoy. I've since been informed, by the friends that are still around, that this is not really the case, and had I considered taking some kind of personality test?

Brassed Off

This is lovely, isn't it? I think it suffered a little at the time for being 'Not Trainspotting'. It came out around the same time as Danny Boyle's tale of Scottish drug shenanigans, and the marketing - sensibly - leaned into some surface level similarities. "Did you enjoy Ewan McGregor shooting heroin into his veins and experiencing the bleakest, most desolate levels of human misery? Then maybe you'd also like to see him play the tenor horn with some old men!"

When I first saw this, I assumed it was going to be part of that same "New British Film" thing, shaking off the stuffiness of the Merchant Ivory stuff and doing young, fresh, anarchic things with style and content. But that's not Brassed Off's gig, really. It's a precursor to more down to earth films - a  kind of John The Baptist to the politically inclined regional Jesuses of The Full Monty and Billy Elliot. 

It's funny and good hearted, but shot through with a kind of melancholy love for the struggle of the working class. And at no point does a dead baby crawl across a ceiling.

Braveheart

I've not watched this in years. Not since Mel 'Racism' Gibson went awful in public and made it hard to watch him in anything without thinking, "You bad racist! I hope you lose."

That's not the reason I've not seen it for so long, though. I'm generally fine with distancing an artist from their work, and a film in particular is the work of so many people that it seems mad to associate it with just one villainous contributor.

No, it's not that. It's just... it's so very long, isn't it? Three hours or thereabouts. Who's got that kind of time? Maybe if it had robots. I'll happily sit through Blade Runner 2049. But if memory serves, Braveheart is mostly a load of kilted non-robots, being sad in the mud. 

I probably will get around to watching it again before too long. It's very enjoyable, as I recall. If it's ever on when I'm flicking through the channels, it's one of those films where you think, "Well, I'll just watch ten minutes of this and then go to bed," and then suddenly it's midnight and you're jumping up and down on the sofa demanding reparations from the English. 

Brawl in Cell Block 99

My friend Andy used to buy me a serious, quality film every Christmas. Eventually I had to confess to him that, though I appreciated his contribution to my cultural life and the thought he had put into his selections... if I was honest I'd rather watch people getting shot and/or punched in the face.

His look of disappointment was legendary, but he is nothing if not a listener. From then on, he swung right to the other end of the dial and started to gift me the most depraved, horrific and downright dumb films he could think of. 

This is such an example. I can't remember much about the plot, but I don't need to because there's the title, summing it all up. Some men have a very violent series of fights. Various film making techniques conspire to make you forget that you are an educated human being who opposes violence in all its forms, and you cheer on the frankly horrible punishments as they happen. At one point something happens that is so unspeakably gross that you find yourself making a noise that is at once an astonished laugh, a cry of horror and a whimper of relief that no-one else is witness to how excited you are.

Breakfast at Tiffany's

This is a weird film. It's a bit like Alfie, in that loads of people seem to love it and associate it with a kind of sexy, cool super fun lifestyle. And then you watch it and everyone is having a terrible time and their personalities are made of dust and there's a deep, dark ennui running through the veins of the narrative and oh my God why is life so bleak?

There is, however, a super nice song and Audrey Hepburn has a tremendous face. So I guess we'll file it under 'feel good hit of the Summer' and move on. 

The Breakfast Club

Haven't seen this in years, and have no strong desire to revisit it. I can't remember when I first saw it, but it was already too late to be caught up in whatever mad swell of zeitgeisty joy made everyone love it to pieces. I knew there was a great song in the soundtrack - the sublime Don't You Forget About Me, of course - and that it was meant to make you pulse with the endless Summers of youth. But I was in my 20s by then and already hated teenagers with a huge, uncontrollable passion. Bunch of whiny pricks. 

These days the opinion seems to be very much that The Breakfast Club is fairly problematic and that it hasn't really aged well. So why don't I throw it out? Well, it's a kind of document of time I suppose, worthy of study as a kind of bellwether of late 20th Century attitudes to sexual identity. And, also, when I'm really old, I'll probably watch any old nonsense if it makes me feel briefly, gloriously young again. Hey hey hey hey.

Bride of Frankenstein

I'm not a huge fan of classic horror. For me, everything pretty much starts with Night of the Living Dead and properly kicks into gear with Halloween. But this, if I remember it correctly, is a sparkly, sprightly joy. There's a knowing sense of playful experimentation to the whole thing that seems way ahead of its time - throwing up striking, iconic images and deftly playing with the form of the genre. 

It's almost as if they knew they were making something that would shape popular culture for decades to come and went, "OK, we're going to make a film, and the answer to every question we might have is 'Yes, let's'".

Bridesmaids

This could easily have been one of those films that became big just because it was important, what with its large female cast and proper attempt to redress the massive imbalance in who women were allowed to be in comedies. 

It is, however, great in its own right. There are massive swings at big, silly ideas and set pieces that lean heavily into the opportunities afforded by cinematic spectacle. But there's also proper solid character stuff in there and a love for the characters that makes this work beyond it's slapstick premise. 

The Bridge on the River Kwai

I have a lot of gaps in my 'proper old school film' knowledge. I watched this again recently, having  first watched it over 20 years ago while recovering from a broken arm. I couldn't remember anything about it, possibly because I'd been on loads of painkillers last time and kept laughing at everything. My verdict on this watch is that it's quite good, if a bit long, and maybe it would be funnier if I was on painkillers.

Bridget Jones's Diary / The Edge of Reason /  Baby

These are good, aren't they? I avoided them for ages, because I'm a bloke and page one of our manual makes it quite clear that time watching Bridget Jones is a waste of time that could be spent watching Pulp Fiction again. 

And from the bits I saw when it was on TV - usually Hugh Grant and Colin Firth slapping each other, or Renee Zellweger trying on some pants or something - it all looked a bit twee and broad and, frankly, for girls. The sort of cinematic equiivalent of a hen party. I know, and after all the nice things I said about Bridesmaids. I can hear you crossly scribbling out the bit of your notes that says "What an amazing feminist this man is."

Well, I don't think I was particularly wrong about the overall tone of these movies, but they're fun and well written and everyone in them is being generally delightful. And there's Sally Phillips in there too, and she's just lovely. Why isn't she in everything? 

A Bridge Too Far

Another 'classic' that I'd not seen until a few years ago. Before that, my primary association with the events depicted in the film was the computer game Arnhem, for the ZX Spectrum. If you're very young and don't know what a ZX Spectrum was, try to imagine what your phone would be like if you smashed out most of its brain and replaced its screen with horrid, fleshy rubber keys.  Yes, that's right - loads worse.

Nevertheless, my teenage self spent hours re-enacting the battle of Arnhem in a game with blocky, dayglo graphics, and considered himself fully up to date on the events of the Second World War. This turned out to be somewhat disastrous for my History O Levels and I do not recommend computer games as a 'primary source'.

Anyway, this film is great. Now, this is another long film but in this case the scale of the storytelling seems to justify the running time. We follow a massive cast, across a wide narrative field, and at no point was I looking at the time and shouting, for example, "Could you please just get on with blowing up the Bridge On the River Kwai please?"

I was very excited when I recently watched this film and, the very next day, found an emulator for my PC which allowed me to play Arnhem as if I still had my old ZX Spectrum. I'm pleased to report that I'm much better at it now, though I bet I'd still fail my History O-Level.

That's all for now. Hope you've enjoyed nosing around in my film collection, and hearing me desperately try to remember what happens in the very same films that I once spent money on. See you next time, for the last few films under 'B'. 

If you've enjoyed this, and we have to at least pretend that it's a possibility, then why not check out the last instalment, where I looked at Blue Velvet to Bowling For Columbine.

Mature Cheddar

The other day I was digging a hole and listening to Midge Ure and for some reason this made me think about the church I used to go to in the 1990s. 

There's something about the digging of a hole - the slow, relentless progression of it - that lends itself to a kind of meditative reflection. The mind is freed to wander over old memories and ideas and, hang on, you've got your hand up. Yes, what is it?

Why was I listening to Midge Ure? Oh! Really? That's your question? Not, "Why were you digging a hole?" or "Why did you go to church?" Or even, "Will there be a break during this story or are we here for ages?" 

Why was I listening to Midge Ure?

Why would you listen to Midge Ure when you could be looking at him? Right?

In truth it's not a bad question. And I'm quite relieved not to have to answer the one about why I was digging a hole because I don't have an answer to that. Loads of people have asked me, and the best answer I can come up with is that I'm in an abusive relationship with soil. It has a hold over me that I can't explain. Ahh, soil. You earthy, crumbly mistress.

Where were we? Oh yes. Throughout that sunny afternoon, as I chipped away at the rocky ground and sieved out an inexplicable amount of stone, I did so to a playlist I'd specially made of Midge's solo albums. I called it 'Mature Cheddar' after an excellent joke in the Gavin and Stacey Christmas special, and I don't mind saying I was having a lovely old time. 

The playlist was a thing of simplicity and elegance: all the solo albums, in order, starting with 1985's The Gift and running through to 2014's Fragile. Not a best of, not a curated list. Just a logical, chronological progression. I think there's something Midge would like about that. He strikes me as someone with an eminently logical brain and I reckon that if he'd been there on that hot Summer afternoon, watching me worry away at the edges of my excavation, he'd have nodded approvingly at my choices. 

He'd have spoken encouraging words, in that intoxicating, gentle Scottish burr, saying things like, "Good work on that hole, Rob" and, "This is a very well organised playlist," and "It's very hot. Shall I go get us some Mint Cornettos from Tescos?" That would be ace. Yes please, Midge Ure. 

Get a load of that hole. It's amazing, right? Took ages.

There's something about a chronological trip through a series of albums you know well. It's impossible not to be drawn back  to the time of their first hearing. Simple triggers hit; one song ends and the first notes of the next one chime in your mind before they sound in reality. Associations rise up: Midge's first album, The Gift on vinyl, wobbling on my dad's turntable. Pure on cassette tape, fluttering away as I sat on the floor of my student bedroom with a girl who wasn't that interested in me and didn't have much time for Midge's third album either. Breathe spinning on CD as I painted the walls of my first house. Fragile, twinkling out of an iPod in the same garden where I would, years later, dig an inexplicably massive hole. 

These albums are burned into very specific times from my past. And there's a couple of reasons for that. One is this:

Midge Ure is not an artist who gets a lot of airtime. You might hear If I Was on the radio now and then, but that's your lot. I bet most people reading this have never heard of the albums I've mentioned and are backing slowly away, thinking, "He's making this up. I bet he does think Midge Ure watches him digging in the garden, and he probably talks to him as if he's there, and draws pretend albums on cardboard with crayons."

This does look like I drew it myself, doesn't it? But it's real. No, it is!

The second reason is this. I don't really play his albums that often either. I know - it feels rude to say so, doesn't it? Especially after Midge went for Cornettos. Sorry Midge. I feel like we can be honest with each other, though, after all we've been through. These are not albums I put on that often, and so their primary association has remained in the past, their melodies interwoven with the hopes and failures of my younger self.

And as I listened on that hot Summer afternoon, and dug deeper and deeper into my garden, I wondered why that was. Here I was, having a perfectly lovely time listening to the synth based rock/pop stylings of 'Answers to Nothing' in the afternoon sun, all the while knowing that this was a brief phase. What's up with me? Do I love this music, or not?

Well, the answer can be found, I think, back at the beginning of this piece where I said it reminded me of the church I used to go to. Back in the late 80s and early 90s I was part of a church that had a quite straightforward - some might say naive - view of the world. We were pretty sure that everything inside the church was pure and brilliant and full of virtue, while everything outside of the church was a right old mess that needed sorting out. We, of course, were the ones best qualified to sort things out.

Me in 1990, about to solve your problems with music and/or Jesus.

This was, in retrospect, a staggeringly arrogant way to look at the world. There was no room for consideration of other cultures, or of a more complex appreciation of  what might constitute 'truth'. There was just a sort of underlying assumption that people's lives were terrible if they didn't believe the same sort of stuff that we did. When I think back on the version of myself that practiced that brand of faith, I'm filled mostly with shame and regret. 

However, there is something I miss about those times. Yes, it was often outweighed by insensitivity and a misplaced confidence in the power of thrusting leaflets at people and shouting, "Beware Satan!" But one thing was good, and that was this: We believed in something, and we were unashamed about that belief.

As I've got older I have, I hope, shaken off the single minded arrogance of that version of Christianity. But perhaps in doing so I've also thrown away some of that joyous, naive freedom that lets you just believe in stuff. That freedom to be uncool and unafraid of how things look.

Those Midge Ure albums are a long way from the tangled mess of my experience with the church. But they are full of belief, and a kind of unselfconscious desire to make the world better. Song after song proclaims ways to be kinder, to strive for peace, to trust and hope for the future. And he does it in the simplest of ways. There never seems to be a point where Midge stops and thinks, "Hmm, is this line a little basic? What will David Bowie think?" He just throws it in there, saying things in the most direct and passionate way he can imagine.

I promise I'm not just drawing these myself. Although I'd be chuffed if I'd made this. 

That bird looks like it means business. 

There's a sort of charming, earnest politeness to most of Midge's songs that just delights me. It doesn't matter what he's talking about - new love, the madness of war, the need for us to understand one another in a divided world - he approaches it with a sort of wide eyed optimism that I find beguiling. He's comes across as a very nice man with a guitar, saying, "Hey, how about we try being nice to each other?" in a variety of ways. 

And that's why I both love these albums and struggle to fully embrace them. They are so very sincere and polite and uncool. And while I like that about them, there's a foolish bit of me that needs things to be dirtier and more complicated. I listen to simple messages of hope and for some reason find myself embarrassed. I threw that bit of me away when I left that church. 

And yet here it lingers, in these gentle, wilfully naive pop songs. 

The hole is dug now. No, I'm still not sure what it's for. And these albums will drop away for a while, as this phase passes. The ghostly presence of Midge Ure will fade from my garden, melting away like a Mint Cornetto on a hot day. 

I hope that one day I'm strong enough to be properly uncool. Until then, Midge, please don't stop doing this. I don't know if there is anyone else.

I've edited down the playlist, in case you're moved to check out some of what I'm talking about. You can find it here: Mature Cheddar