Senior Scythe: 'In the Fields of Electric'

I rarely sleep well these days. Too much noise in the background. Shots, screams and growls punctuate the night air all too frequently around here, in this absurdly overcrowded and aggressive town. I often wake in the morning more on edge than when my head hits the pillow the night before. A terrible state of affairs. I sometimes feel so anxious I can hardly breathe, my lungs almost too paralysed by my predicament to consume air. Which may be just as well in this cracked town of stinking silo fields, pollution-scarred skyline, human excrement build-up in the alleyways, and the ever-present stench of fear amongst the throng of the populous.

Oh how I miss my youth. The freedom and lack of worry attached to every innocent adventure, every clamber up a tree (remember them?), every wondrous trek around the woodlands of Grimmstone of a Sunday afternoon. I miss my parents so much, even more so now that I am surely entering the last weak stage of my own life; their warmth and care a commodity of infinite value in today’s filthy world. A vast, gaping hole is consuming my life, where my heart and hope once existed. This world is no longer receptive to my generation.

I am nothing more that a demographic blip, really - a seventy-five year old man trapped in a flooded, ludicrously over-subscribed industrial land, bearing witness to the disgusting moral wasteland that is Cracktown. My waking moments filled with nothing more than frail gasps of oxygen, my sleeping moments troubled with mortality issues and self-pity. I never married, there’s no surviving children, no mark have I made on society – but I once loved. I once felt alive. I once commanded audiences for my famous tales of adventure and intrigue. In my youth. But that was then, and this is now.

I awake cold and hungry on New Year’s Eve night, my sportscar-shaped alarm clock flashing 23.12. Not satiated by my brief spell of dreamless sleep, I toss and turn for a while in a futile attempt to relax enough to slumber. No such luck. The green neon light on the street, situated above a billboard advertising the latest handheld media device, blinks through the crack in the curtains, keeping me company for a while before I heave myself up from my pit of woe to sit on the side of the bed. I sit there for 20 minutes before, reluctantly, I move my frame once again to make myself some tea on the gas-ring. I’ve repeated this very same tired pattern 207 times since the Government moved me out of my rural home in Ashes Wicked to this sorry place; a routine where I wake up at quarter past eleven, drink a cup of tea, eat a slice of buttered toast, urinate for 2 minutes straight, then, nursing my sore urethra, I’m back to my sorry bed for another battle of wits with the Sandman.

Drinking my strong cup of tea and casually looking through the reinforced kitchen window, which overlooks Old Lynn’s Grain Silo and Electric Farms, I sit and watch some New Years’ Evers on the hill, neon-lit on the horizon, revelling in the misery of another nobody. Furiously kicking and punching a soundless rag-doll man in the cold winter air, some of the thugs stop every now and then to catch their breath and change the media cards in their mobile phones. The steamy vapours coming from their chubby mouths make them look like some bizarre kind of hooded dragons. Hooded dragons that have let themselves go a bit, admittedly.

Am I alarmed at witnessing such unimaginative violence? No more than usual these days, I have to say. Even when the hooligans finish the slaughter and throw the man’s wheelchair down the nearby riverbank, I don’t flinch. It happens. Bad things happen around here. And it is such a joyous time of year for these idiots. Vodka & laughing gas-fuelled seasonal Nirvana. Who am I to deprive them of their fun? As long as it’s not me on the receiving end, old chap. Besides, these hooded Neanderthals surely know that all CCTV cameras around here are switched off during this energy-saving period of time, so what can you do? Never. Get. Involved.

Hearing a couple of screams in the block of flats opposite the estate at 23.50 brought home the fact that I’m not going to sleep again any time soon. So I decide to dress and leave the flat immediately, to venture into the cold night air myself.

Making sure I stick to the Safe Zones, I trundle on up the alleyway to the Electricity Farm gates. I visit the farm regularly, to sit among the metal constructs and meditate my trifling concerns against the power lines, but never at night. Never before tonight. After a short distance I reach the farm gates and, as I step gingerly through the scorched hole in the adjacent fence to access the site, a tall darkly-suited man immediately pops out of it and rushes right into me. He knocks me to the ground. My body screams in pain, my hip recoils in shock, and my walking stick goes flying, landing some distance away in a large heap of black, oily mud.

I should say at this point that the Electric Field perimeter is so brightly lit at night that the sun’s own colossal power-rays of light easily pail in comparison to the brute force of the neon wattage around here. Every corner, every rat, every graffiti signature, every impoverished tramp, all brightly alight in lurid neon gleam, in stark contrast to the jet black darkness of the night beyond the perimeter. These massive floodlights always hum loudly to themselves, and occasionally dim with a snap and crackle at a lone moth, foolish enough to land on the blasted things.

I feel the mud seeping into my clothes as the stranger offers a hand and a muffled apology. I comply, and he pulls me up out of the mire and retrieves my walking stick. Did I say that this tall man is wearing a black leather gimp mask? How very queer. But who am I to judge? Must be Bondage Night at the local gay bar again (the Cat O’Nine Ales freehouse on Paradise Lane). Oh, wait, its New Years Eve isn’t it? Then it must be some kind of middle-class fetish/festive fancy dress party or something. Anyway, whatever, he looks a damn fool to me.

Straightening his tie, this strange man of smartly dressed S&M gear makes his muffled excuses and runs off into the night, squelching through the black mud with his clod-hopper feet as he goes. I look down at my walking stick and I notice it has traces of blood all over it – the gimp must’ve been suffering from stigmata when he picked it up. Well, it’s definitely not my blood. I turn and am about to call out after him but, no, it’s too late. He is long gone.

Stopping a moment to catch my breath after all this kerfuffle, to stop my heart from sprinting, to push in all my hernias and compose myself enough for the rest of the short journey. I carry on through the hole in the perimeter fence and onwards – into the farm grounds itself.

Walking a short way down the shingled path, away from the violent glare of the floodlights near the gates, I notice the strength of the moon out tonight. I hear small crowds of drunken ladettes clip-clopping along the streets outside the farm complex, shrieking and louting as they go in some tawdry, uninspired fit of tired celebration at the New Year that has just begun. Christ, I HATE New Year’s Day. Awful feelings of another year ahead. How fucking depressing. My advice? “NEVER, under ANY circumstances whatsoever, look to the future”. It’s an exercise of sheer futility. No solutions can be found in ‘the future’, nothing bright over the mountains of the ‘Moro, no pure saviour coming from the future to slay the ferocious dragons (the hooded dragons?) of the present. All utter nonsense. Why celebrate nothingness? Don’t get me started on Birthdays either.

I continue along for another 600 yards or so, off the shingle path and onto the soft black anti-conductor ground surface, pushing further into the bowels of the electric farm – suddenly shone down upon by a rare clear night sky – the stars and planets glinting and sparkling down through the cold blanket of darkness. I eventually reach the so-familiar clearing, which I guess is now a kind of secret haven for me, where I often rest and think; a steep grass verge beside a massive sub-heat generator with a corrugated shell. This vaguely penis-shaped construct apparently helps transform ‘thermal energy’ into ‘rotational energy’ – “a symbol of transformation”, according to a farm workman I found myself talking to recently. I don’t know about all that. But what I do know is that this place is very dear to me.

I first came here ten years ago, pre-Regeneration v2.0, before the floods and subsequent massive extensions to the farm. I remember it very clearly indeed. It was a beautiful summer day, the sky a clear, deep shade of blue, and I sat there on the verge for what must have been 2 hours, trying to come to terms with the test results I received from my lovely, voluptuous GP earlier that morning. A light breeze echoed through this metal land of generated, unseen power, and brushed my sweating body gently. I remember feeling a strange yet welcome chill. I wept gently. Then, out of nowhere, a young girl pranced up and sat down next to me on this very same grass verge. I greeted her with a nod and a wink, and she smiled back at me in turn – her joyous face of radiance warming my heart a little in the process. The girl, who I guess must’ve been no more than eight years of age, mentioned that she was here because she had heard that there were giant, beautiful butterflies flying around throughout the farm and she wanted to catch a specimen of these “multi-coloured angels” for a show & tell class at her school the day after. I confessed that I hadn’t seen such delightful-sounding butterflies here in the farm today, but assured her that if she kept looking and hoping, well, she might just find one. She paused and looked at me with a squint, her bottom lip protruding slightly. Reaching over to me, she touched my hand and asked why I looked so sad. “I’m still looking for my butterfly too”, I smiled, and wiped my eyes with my handkerchief.

Then she was gone. I looked up and was alone again. I called out to her, but no response. On this so-familiar grass verge, near the old centre of the electric farm, the bristling warmth of this scorching hot summer day returned to agitate once again. I looked for her among the lengths and breadths of corrugated lines of sub-stations and work sheds. I tried to locate her on each of my subsequent visits to this very place. But nothing. I never saw her again.

In the far distance a steam turbine generator suddenly sparks up and rattles its presence in the bleakness of the winter night, and I awake from my daze with a start. Sitting down on the grass verge once more, I take a slow, deep breathe and look around at my grey metallic environment of sub-generators, cooling towers, wires, steel poles and grills – all now piping and sparking to life in response to the demands of the distant turbine generator. Blue and white sparks fire from the warm, buzzing metal machines in pulses, illuminating this whole clearing in strange, yet beautiful, multi-coloured waves of light. Now shafts of red, purple and gold emit from the guts of the sub-generators, the frisson of hot machinery attacking the cold night air. Snow white steam, the sound like that of pistons firing, the increasingly loud humming and clicking of electrical currents, all surround me and excite my veins.

I am not in danger here on the grass verge, a safe enough distance away from the nearest metal sculpture, so remain sitting and watching in awe at this private showing of the farm’s innermost workings jolting into life. This glorious grinding and pumping performance of colour and electric, just for me. I am flattered. I smile back at the machines, my body lit up with the colours of the rainbow. Looking all around my proximity with excited eyes, I survey an area I can truly call my haven of colour and life. I laugh. I don’t know why, but I can’t help but laugh out loud into the night sky at this sudden, unexpected, performance of electric wonder. The sub-generators circling the verge all parp and splutter in tandem, throwing sparks in all directions. This must be a nightly event here at the farm yet, somehow, I feel that tonight’s showing is for my eyes only.

Or is it? Under the metal bridgework between two of the tallest sub-generators in the distance I now spy a small figure emerging from the darkness. This diminutive human figure walks a short way towards me, shrouded by shadow, before stopping abruptly under the glare of the lightshow in my secret theatre. In the strobed glittering of sparks I see long flowing blonde hair. A girl. A child out to play at this time of night? She’s holding her arms out to me, beckoning me. The hairs stand up on the back of my neck. No-one has ever wanted to hold me, to touch me, for probably the last forty years.

I stand and begin to walk to her, my heart racing, my emotions threatening to overcome my senses, my body alive with electric waves of my own production. My path is lit by fireworks overhead, glinting stars, pulsing sparks, and even multi-coloured flame. I want to hold this girl in my arms and never, ever let go. This life; so cold before. Yet now?

My eyes filmed with tears, I hold out my arms a short distance from the girl, who’s still partly obscured by the shade from the sub-stations. My whole existence jolted alive for this moment, anticipation overwhelming me. The sparks splutter and spray all around and land on me, dying out long before they can scorch my clothes. The machinery rattles on loudly yet grinds slower now, the distant sound of the turbine generator on the hill cuts off violently. The sub-generators clatter to a halt, the coloured sparks ceasefire, and the last steam plume rises up to greet the stars. I look back to the girl, and she has gone. Vanished. Without trace. I impulsively cry out – to plead with this young stranger to return to me. To take me in her arms. I stand there in that spot for a long time, open armed and alone. Maybe she’ll come back in a moment. Maybe she likes this strange spark show too, and maybe she’s just waiting for the steam turbine generator to start up again.

I wait until dawn, the Sun greeting me with deep-red surprise at my current location. I shudder in the icy dawn air of a New Year and pull my collar up to face the cold. I eventually give up my post and haul my bones homeward.

Exiting the fence-hole in the farm’s perimeter and seeing normal streets and houses again, I ponder the integrated existence of electricity in our lives. We couldn’t survive without it. Quite literally. Our brains fire off a multitude of bioelectrical pulses every single second of our lives. Our hearts are constantly jolted alive by surges of self-generated electric. Surgical apparatus rely on this unseen power to keep us alive. And so on. I’ll always remember when I first found out from my poor father that motor batteries often need a top-up of water to keep them going. Electric is life itself, and should indeed be thought of as a separate, living organism – here to help and guide us through life. An invisible guardian.

As for my own life? my future? My petty existence in this most worrying of places? I don’t know where I’m going, and I don’t know what I’ll do when I get there. But I do know that, for one fleeting moment in a strange place on a cold winter’s night, I had found my butterfly.



Senior Scythe
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January 2012