Ace Cavalier and The Wild Kicks of Jazz

"Every relationship I have seems to go the same way: undiluted ecstatic wonderfulness, followed by the tragic realisation of the impossibility of happiness," Ace Cavalier expressed each thought with the emphasis of an upturned palm, while the other hand lifted a pint of unidentified liquid to hover about his mouth. 


He continued: "it's mostly down to the kind of girl I go for: [sip] beautiful, vastly intelligent and fucked-up." He grafted his woman from thin air, tracing his hands across the planes of her beauty, conjuring the intelligence with a flick of five fingers, from open into a fist, which opened again in desolate resolution onto the conclusion: "Fucked up."


It had been a strange couple of weeks. Ace had attended a party of some standing at a farm house on the edge of town. It was the sort of party one could leave in the morning and return to in the night, where everyone brought enough for themselves and everyone drank more than they brought; where the witches and the pagans and the microbiologists and the nihilistic atheists and psychologists and satanists and arsonists and musicians all came to sit by a fire and discuss bus timetables and the evolution of consciousness. Ace Cavalier went because of the mead. And the gin. And the vodka. And the possibility that he might meet the girl.


Well: he met the girl.


"Then follows pain. The next unending stage is prolonged suffering, but I don't think I can class myself as quite there yet." Ace's tone became reflective as he squinted up into the middle distance, as though if you asked him then and there he would not know when and where he was.


He thought of hours spent reading poetry aloud with the girl; the psychological text on Narcissism they ploughed through hungrily, finding more and more in common with each other and each other's pains; he thought of Ben Okri's "Astonishing the Gods" which they had read together until he had fallen asleep, which had so sublimely crystalised hours of conversation, and which he desperately wanted to finish with her; he thought of the meadow and the flocks of birds and the river bank which was the gap between the worlds; he thought of the morning she had awoken screaming his name after he had tried to chase her through dream after dream...


He shrugged, and took a deep draw of his drink, which he had concluded was probably some kind of super-strong, super-sweet, flat cider that didn't taste at all of apples.


"Yes, the pain..."


"After all, I've still go two tickets to a jazz recital tonight that are non-refundable. Seriously, one day it's "hey, let's go to this jazz" the very literal next it's "hey, let's never see each other again." And nothing in between, no argument, no conversation, no nothing." Ace's confusion was matched by his voice climbing higher and higher. He became visibly agitated.


"Just what the hell is going on? What about the jazz? I was looking forward to the jazz. Will there be no jazz? You know what: fuck it, I'll go to the damn jazz and there I will free-form on the subject of love and sex and crazy jazz denying women until I am thrown out for free-forming at a respectable jazz recital; Why? because jazz isn't really jazz really, and 'free' is just a four letter word; freedom is seven."


Ace's incomprehension and frustration boiled over into a slew of four-letter word poetry: "Lost jazz, gone jazz, kind jazz, mind jazz, damn jazz, evil jazz, fake jazz, good jazz, hope jazz, fear jazz, doom jazz, boom jazz, love jazz, girl jazz, been jazz, seen jazz, pain jazz, hope jazz, more jazz, PAID jazz. None of it does anything!" He cried, "but eight, seven, two: kindling, booming, go and go and go to the jazz, why not? Can't we go to the jazz? I've already paid and the tickets are non-refundable. God knows I'll probably hate it, rebel, and get thrown out for obscenity and disorder, and they'll be some tuts and titters and mutterings of an oaf madman drunk, but it's done now; it's paid for. I've paid. Can't we go to the jazz?"


His eyes fell on the woman he had been talking to, whom he had accosted completely without warning at this bar on a crisp November afternoon. He suddenly realised he had forgotten her name, if he had ever bothered asking for it at all. He allowed his eyes to turn plaintiff, but not so far as to be pleading, and maintained eye contact for an uncomfortably long period. She began to blush and, as Ace smiled ever so slightly, she returned his smile in spades. Then she said:


"I can't. I'm married, and my husband wouldn't like it." Her eyes told a different story; one of longing for jazz and going to the jazz and hating the jazz for not being free.


"You're married?" Asked Ace, only momentarily pausing to allow her to nod, before he continued; "Is it serious?" They both beamed at one another, she tossing her long black hair from side to side and wrinkling her nose in secret joy, he congratulating himself on another unforgettable pick-up line.


Ace Cavalier drew himself up to his full 6'2" in height and wordlessly motioned the woman towards the door. Hesitantly at first, she span away, then towards him: "my stuff...", she whispered, before disappearing into the back of the busy wine bar to collect her bag and coat and all the other things that would seem like pointless little toys in her hands just for this one moment. 


Ace reflected; Ace frowned. There was something he needed to ask.


"My dear," he said as she approached, her face flushed with jazz-based excitement, the arms of her coat a rushed, crumpled mess: "are you a student?"


"I'm a graduate, haven't been a student for seven years..." she talked excitedly about herself for a little while as Ace tuned out completely and stood stationary at the bar, finishing his pint of what was probably cider and nothing like cider. He checked he had everything ready for his escape, then interrupted her: "I'm just popping to the loo" he said.


As he walk away on the street outside, Ace tied his long dirty blond hair up and tucked his chin into his collar; he hunched to look smaller, and his expressive hands were safely holstered in his pockets. His right hand felt for his wallet and his phone, and confirmed their presence; his left hand fingered two tickets to a jazz recital that night: one adult, one concession.


Pained, but determined, he strode into the next bar he came to and ordered a drink he didn't recognise. "I'm sorry, my dear," he said to a woman stood primly at the bar: "are you a student?"


"Post-grad"


"Really? Do you know what this drink is...?"

Stephen Wealthy

Stephen Wealthy has letters addressed to my home. They land with some gravity in the hall. Some are from HMRC, doubtlessly demands for taxes owed, the same sort I get. Others are red and come from Southern Water, who are also my water supplier, so I recognise the colour well. There are formal-looking communiques from a bank, the same bank I sometimes get formal-looking communiques from. He never opens his letters.

Stephen Wealthy does not live at my address nor, to my knowledge, has he ever. For the first two and a half years of living here, I consistently saw letters addressed to a group of four individuals who never picked up their mail. I tried writing 'not known at this address' and putting them back in the post, but this seems to work only gradually. These, it is reasonable to assume, are former occupants of this building and Stephen Wealthy was not among them.

Letters for Stephen Wealthy only started appearing a small number of months ago.

I have begun to suspect that there is no Stephen Wealthy. In fact, I suspect that I am Stephen Wealthy. I suspect myself of creating this fictional character with a prosperous surname. 'I suspect' I say because I don't remember doing it, or even feel I have the expertise to do so.

There are plenty of cases of people performing complex acts without being aware of it. Some have been attributed to sleep-walking, others to multiple personality disorder. Whatever the case, Stephen Wealthy has gone from someone who does not and has never lived at my house, to a former occupant. He has done this without the seemingly necessary step of living here in the meantime.

Perhaps you are reading this with no small degree of incredulity. Perhaps you feel that there must be a simpler explanation, one less dramatic, less 'radio 4 afternoon play'. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps you are Stephen Wealthy, having Googled yourself and found this blog-post. If you are Stephen Wealthy: you've got some letters that really look like they need some attention.

But maybe I am Stephen Wealthy. For the purposes of the timbre of our post as it strikes the welcome mat, I am identical to Stephen Wealthy. Respected institutions like Southern Water, Natwest and HMRC have our names filed at the same address and they all seem to have the same demands from both of us.

Perhaps one day I will awake in the middle of worrying about the same financial stuff I worry about, in the same house I worry about it in, but having been Stephen Wealthy moments earlier. Perhaps that already happens with regularity; I don't know how I'd tell the difference.

However, the thought of being Stephen Wealthy, if only in some impossible to quantify selection of moments between sleeping and waking, makes all my financial worries seem inconsequential. It makes me feel calm, in control. Just the feel of the words, as they spill from my mouth, "I am Stephen Wealthy" straightens my back and lifts my chin.

It makes me want to make the boldest claims and roll the dice at the highest table: I am Stephen Wealthy, even if I am not.

I am Stephen Wealthy.

The Comets Decide: Chapter 6 - Asylum

Louis Biggs didn't want to think any more. At this point, with the sky paling and the birds chirping their tired evening songs, he just wanted his mind to close down. He was looking for an off switch to pull; a lever in his skull that turns everything black and sweeps everything downstream.

It felt as though the river of thought flowing from his consciousness was drowning any perspective he once had and his mind was gasping just to stay alive. Where once he had enjoyed control or at least the illusion of it, now its motions and currents seemed strange and threatening.

The images of his reflection darted this way and that, all disturbed and distorted under a torrent of menace; a shadow of the comets that were crowding his sky.

He found himself glaring at the patterns in a leaf, into its veins and intricacies; he came to imagine himself as a leaf - to flutter in the wind, extend from a tree, be eaten by bugs, absorb sunlight in the day and become dewy by night; to grow and be fed and to feed; to die in shortening days, fall from a branch and be driven by the wind; to coalesce with the dirt and break down into the soil that feeds the tree.

For a moment Louis knew what it was like to be a leaf.

But then he thought what idiocy it was to be a man becoming a leaf and the image shattered around him and he slipped under the surface of his rushing torrent.

He seized himself, curling his shoulders up to his ears and breathing out in a slow motion of defiance against chaotic thought. This time, he became the little deer he could see some distance away, tentatively grazing beside an artificial lake.

But being a deer carried too much stress - he constantly feared for his life and swivelled his head so much so often he got dizzy. Deer are fickle and run in panic, sprinting for a safety that never really exists.

"All right" he said to his hands; "I'll be your damn comet".

His head thrown back, he gazed into the sky; motionlessly careening through space, dipped in star dust like it was wet paint and propelled by inertia and attraction; his body at absolute zero degrees and disintegrating; he was more than just the dying remnant of an unborn star; he was destruction and creation and being in balance; lighting the void briefly and eternally; absolutely no criteria to satisfy, no observer to entertain - what is a 'good' comet, anyway? - like the leaf became soil, so the comet became life through death and Louis became light and plunged into darkness.

An hour passed and the sun fell. Louis Biggs woke from the doze and stood to walk home, turning to examine the flattened grasses where he had sat, propped up by a beech tree, whose trunk could have been carved for his back and head to slumber against. He could hear the brook at the bottom of the bank babbling and the occasional springtime cricket call.

For a moment he paused, then he sat down and listened until, once again, he fell asleep.

The Comets Decide: Chapter 5 - The Comets Decide

What does it say about a household that all the locks are controlled from a panel under daddy's desk?

Shannon Insane Soldier used to come home and beat his wife half to death. It happened with such regularity that it was almost ritualistic, though it never lost the sense of wild chaotic fury that terrified the poor woman.

Rituals have a stately progress: they are considered and controlled. Shannon Insane Soldier's nightly ceremony was anything but.

After leaving his wife in a bloody mess, he would swagger over to the nearest wall and pound a cubed inch of brick off it.

"Keeps me sharp" he'd mutter, cradling the fragments of wall in his shirt to carry outside.

He would then fasten them to the inner wall of his Doomsday Bunker, with the aid of super glue, accompanied by a justified sense of self-hatred.

There's only a finite number of times you can take a cubed inch of brick out of a wall until the wall begins to look threadbare; cracks appear, drops of moisture seep through in the rain, the bitter smell of mould infests the home and heat just seems to disappear into the night.

He knew, his wife knew and the children knew that it was only a matter of time until he brought the whole structure down around his and everybody else's ears.

Why ears, anyway? What kind of sense does that make? What's so special about the ears that they should be singled out as that particular physical attribute threatened by structural collapse? These were the thoughts running through his head as his bloody fists pounded the wall of his kitchen one sunny afternoon in late spring.

Tiny fragments of brick mixed with mortar mixed with blood fell to the floor as the rhythmic pounding lulled Mrs. Insane Soldier between unconsciousness and the awful reality of her life. Her husband had brutalized her and had then dragged her with him to watch as he repeatedly punched at the structural walls of their home.

"Don't marry a guy call 'Insane Soldier'" Her mother had told her "Seriously, it doesn't sound like a good omen"

"I don't care, my life is meaningless, I may as well get beaten up everyday by a seething mass of violent hatred for the rest of it. We'll scar our children in all sorts of ways and maybe, when they grow up, they'll be sad for me." She might have said that. Of course, she didn't:

"You don't care about me! You're just jealous! Leave me alone!".

And the doors. Let me get back to the doors.

At that moment they were locked from the control panel under the desk, turned on its side in the corner of daddy's den. Today, like every other day, Shannon Insane Soldier was angry and wanted everybody to suffer for it.

The children (son Captain, 11 and daughter Leotard, 9) had been slapped about a bit and thrown into their room, where they huddled together, listening first to their mother take a few haymakers for the team (as Captain explained to Leotard, they were a team) then the walls buckling under the constant pounding of their father's fists.

"One day" said Captain "the house will fall over. Daddy wants us to be safe, so he keeps us locked in here. We're safe." Captain knew he was lying, but wanted Leotard to believe it like he used to.

The children couldn't see the sky because there were metal shutters that dropped over the windows when the doors were locked. Neither could Mrs. Insane Soldier see the sky, as she had blacked out.

They couldn't see the comets falling and, even if they could, they wouldn't have known what it meant.

After all, I couldn't tell you what it meant, and it's coming out of my mind.

Shannon caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye. He thought for moment that the wall was coming down and prepared himself to be crushed by the almighty weight of an entire building.

He had often thought that the house coming down on him would be like getting hit by a train, only that a train would pass by and you'd only get hit by it once. But if a house fell on you it would be in the process of hitting you until the firemen find your mangled corpse.

Shannon wanted it to fall. It would make him the only man capable of single-handedly knocking over a house built of bricks and mortar.

He'd be known on internet forums everywhere as Bigger Bad Wolf, who had killed his wife, his children and himself in a glorious act of manual demolition. He'd never be forgotten. He would even trend on twitter for a while.

But the building didn't collapse.

A rock had smashed through the metal shutter and lay smouldering on the floor. Shannon wandered over to it, and bent down to pick it up - it was burning hot to the touch and he recoiled as another rock came searing through the shutter, opening a larger aperture in it and revealing, behind it, a dark spot in the sky.

Shannon dumbly squinted at the comets as they fell. "But" he squealed "any idiot can get hit by a comet".

He was proven right instantly.

One after the other they came pouring down on him. The first one struck his crotch, the second his forehead, then his little toe.

He shrieked and fell, angry and embarrassed at the awfully painful, but not yet deadly, peppering he was receiving.

Suddenly, his penis had been ripped out of its socket: does a penis even have a socket? Whatever the case, juices that defy description were flowing from a wound where his penis used to be, visible through his torn trouser crotch.

He started to cry.

One flaming rock severed the bicep in his right arm, and another the left. He was lying prostrate, unable to lift his hands to protect himself, unable to move or even to strike at the sky uselessly.

As abruptly as they came, the red hot chunks of astral matter stopped falling on the now severely debilitated, pitiable Shannon Insane Soldier.

Later, when Mrs. Insane Soldier went to her husband's desk and freed their children, the mother and her children hugged for a long time.

Then they decided to get a rescue dog. They settled on a Cocker Spaniel-Collie cross they saw in a nearby sanctuary. They called him 'Harald' and he was so happy and proud to be trotting alongside Captain and Leotard as they made their way from the car back into their home.

Shannon had regained consciousness by this point, but was still lying in a pool of his own juices. The dog ran over to him, licking bits of him clean. Captain was happy; Leotard was happy; their mother was happy, the dog was happy when he found Shannon's severed penis and had something to chew on, Shannon threw up; they were a team.

Leotard looked quizzical, like she was struggling to make sense of something. She was remembering a school lesson and the words of a priest. They had meant very little to her at the time, but now they seemed more apt.

Eventually she asked: "Mummy, did God judge daddy?"

"No." She replied: "The Comets Decide."

The Comets Decide: Chapter 4 - Prayer (Everybody Prays)

I like to walk the streets with a bottle of wine in each hand: one to throw and the other for dough.

That's for if the bastards try anything.

My Syrian friends at Smokemart do two for five pounds on the Italian red and I take advantage of their generous offer.

Call me paranoid, but I can't help it: I think of how I'm going to make it three hundred yards to my home without some troupe of thieves and drunks accosting me for my wares.

It's worse if I've picked up bread and milk and am making a whole round trip or maybe it's a night for take out pizza and a movie, which complicates matters in the case of emergency self defence (though not insurmountably - I'd just drop the bags and guard it all like a starving mother).

But - listen - the comets are coming, so damn the bastards.

Just look up and you'll see salvation in the dark patches where on a clear night you can see nothing - no stars, no wisp of cloud, no giant moths lost on their journey to a sun that has once again abandoned them, spreading softening red light between lovestruck couples and eternity - just nothing.

That's how you know they're on their way, in those gaps of black on an otherwise bright starry night.

No one will tell you because it'll scare you out of your skin and then you'll have bones draped in Addidas at every shop counter and no legal tender will get you those cigarettes.

Is it the self-service machines? A government initiative to cope with the time when the streets and stores will look like osseological lecture halls.

Tonight, so far, I've got the weapon wine home and I've drunk it down and, whilst swimming in confusion, I notice the black patches of night from my window before dropping to a half sleep and dreaming only of falling from impossibly high precipices.

I think that it's the end of the night but the radio keeps up its whispering the whole night through and, fading in and out, I make out a thousand comets between the stars and I laugh.

I wrote a poem:

I hope that if there is
some laughing God
who looks upon this earth
for his amusement
A man would one day look back at him
And laugh the same laugh

The cool wind comes bustling through the window, the radio crackles and sings, a thousand comets crowd my night sky and I can't tell if I'm dreaming at all.

The Comets Decide: Chapter 3 - Comet Facts

The Earth, travelling at 67,000 miles an hour, spins only once a day. A misunderstood force called gravity holds its thin veil of atmosphere to it. Space is almost empty, so there is nothing to rip the air from its surface, the mantle from its magma.

A comet will eventually lose everything if it orbits a sun like ours. It can barely even hold itself together, so it leaves a bright trail of dust in its wake; in time becoming nothing but tiny particles spread across the void.

There are many possible ends for a comet: It could pass close to a gas giant and, being so fragile, be torn apart. Then it might fall in a shower of terrific magnitude, scarring the surface, ripping great holes in the gas, bringing its journey to an end in violent, spectacular fury.

There have been comets whose final moments have been observed from earth, as they careen past headed into the sun. There is even a story of one such traveller that seemed to perform the impossible task of navigating a path through the atmospheric matter of the sun to return, years later, to our skies.

There are geologists who think that the oceans themselves are a remnant of a comet's impact, that three and a half billion years ago a great medley of comets came and rained down on the earth, depositing huge volumes of water in the form of interstellar ice, melted by the still young earth. From the sky came the comets and from the comets came the oceans of from the oceans came life and from life came...

According to tradition, a comet became visible the day that King Harald of England was crowned, auguring his eventual doom at the hands of William and an arrow in the eye. In more scientific circles, such things are scoffed at; belief in such omens is superstition, paranoia and ignorance born of fear and misunderstanding. But, concurrently, one can live quite comfortably from the work of reading messages from the skies, in which comets are like the spectacular flourishes of fate's foretelling, and serious money-makers.

However, not all nearing comets are of such use to soothsayers and mystics; there are dark comets, those that have lost all their bright water and are left with only a dull organic crust. These may move without detection until they are upon their final destination; until it is too late for Bruce Willis to save us; until they fall from our skies, reaping what they sowed.

The Comets Decide: Chapter 2 - Mass Panic

It was all over the evening news that night.

Is there really mass panic? Women screaming, throwing their hands in the air while running from their homes; men playing Russian Roulette, or charging in throngs to municipal buildings, burning libraries and shattering city halls?

How about impotent parliaments, dissolved and broken by hoards of mindless voters in chaotic revolution, passing laws against death and clothing so that new naked immortals can walk the earth like John Barleycorn forever in flower?

Or what about money? Is it deemed useless immaterial; are goods trampled and damned; are cattle freed and then hunted by bands of accountants?

Can you see tribes of special needs teaching assistants, clothed in freshly cut goat-skin jerkins, hanging from dark lampposts and talking like birds?

What of crowds surging through the streets, trampling brother and sister alike, caught in a fervour for death, a fury of hopeless descent?

Do people, have people, are people acting like they do in the fantasises of newspapers and moviemen? It is the end of the world! But we are all still ourselves. These nightmares are not stronger than our condition and our condition cannot focus on one thousand comets all at once.

We still remember to brush, we crave warmth and companionship, we sing songs, write letters or watch the television and then we still need our sleep, so we draw the curtains as the power dies.

Stuck in ourselves like spiders in the bathtub, we still dream of broken promises and fighting school bullies and wearing jeans to a wedding we weren't invited to, like we always have.

We maintain our veneer, unable to become another person; become this wild, crazed rioter from disaster movies and the nightmares of politicians.

The fact is: we are ourselves.

No comets are going to change that.