Holy Thursday

After six months in room number seven Marshway Hostel which was run by English Churches Housing Group I was provided with a flat to rent on their grounds outside of the main building. The door number of the new flat was four and I thought of the four traditional elements, and the cross in the circle, and I was also reminded of having purchased Vivaldi’s four seasons as a Christmas gift for the Smith when I was younger.

The Pakistanis occupied the flat on the third tier above mine which was rented by a Yorkshire girl; she would wear Pakistani clothing and had developed their speech patterns, rhythms, and argot, some of the others I spoke to around the complex viewed this with an element of disdain. It wasn’t long before moving into the Four that I started to find the Pakistanis standing in my front living room whilst I had other guests over and at first I wasn’t concerned at all because rather conveniently it meant that I could score smoke.

R had supplied me with a black bookcase and I quickly filled the three wooden shelves with books which had become a burgeoning new interest and hobby for me. I was reading about science, art, and magic, poetry, and literature, and the bookcase occupied the left hand corner of the room. At a later date I painted the outer wood orange and had hand painted designs of leaves, trees, and suns, etched on the surface. I collaged the inner shell with images cut from magazines, based on a hell, earth, heaven theme. 

I had one day gone into George’s second hand bookstore on Old Vicarage Street. I knew George as a photographer who had once won an award for capturing a UFO ship on film in London, before it had reportedly sunk into the Thames. I'd previously struggled to communicate with him and I had thought whilst walking up the stairs, that I would show him some "magic", and after walking into the large book-lined room I crouched down low to look at the books along the bottom row when a man on step-ladders to the side of me let slip a large thick heavy tome from his grasp. Bizarrely, I found myself casually handing the book back to him, my left hand had been open and extended resting on my knee as I balanced on my haunches, and I had caught the book effortlessly and without looking, “great catch!” he said, and the small UFO crowd chatting in the corner started clapping. I hurriedly left the store, feeling embarrassed. The next time I was at George's I purchased encyclopedias on Unexplained Mysteries from him, he placed the volumes on a chair so as to insinuate that we should talk, but I couldn’t talk and I rushed off back to the Four with the books. I was amazed to discover in one of the books a charcoal sketch that was said to have been discovered in North America in the 1600s that had been drawn by a Native Shaman after having undergone initiation; the black shadows of demons surrounded the image of his form, and I thought it was an important information signal, crossing barriers of cultures, continents, and time. In a lined notebook of mine I had several months earlier scribbled an almost identical sketch.

I purchased a dictionary of the occult published by Wordsworth press and after flicking through the wood pulp pages I read and discovered the symbol of the lost voice, "fact or fancy?" And I was astonished because I remembered I had lost my voice on my 21^st birthday in the early hours of the morning whilst in Bately coming down from several E’s. Mohammad had presented me with a notepad and pen and he said “if I ask you questions can you write down your answers in the pad?”, and I nodded the affirmative, but I was incapable of writing any response, and the artist B had said, “I’ve seen a lot of lost souls around here tonight!” I had found myself reading a similar example to my own experience in the book it seemed. Reading could be fun, I learned.  

This was before the great fish moved silently through the night water, and after the 9 knocks, where B had appeared like Gandalph adorned in glowing white light holding out a hand and beckoning me toward him in front of the frame that in corporeal form he'd ripped the door out from..

I remember I was attempting to emulate B in that I had come to have open house with the neurological pre-set of a strong liberal tolerance to our cousins from the east. Many of the locals in the hostel thought I was stupid allowing the Easterners to come into my flat like that, but I dismissed them as racist, and I didn’t listen to them, B had set the example. He was an older man with white hair that may have contributed toward reinforcing an illusion of veneration and reverence, and I looked up to him. K, said "you know he's insane?" I had felt offended for him.  

Some nights there would be around forty men in the front living room speaking Urdu and they were strong and superverbal and I would sit in silence for several hours listening to a spoken language I didn't understand. They were highly homogenised and I felt that I was an individual and in the wrong place. Occasionally, I would speak out some unpleasant personal feeling without control or thought, like a sufferer of Tourette’s syndrome might do, and I know inadvertently that I probably caused offence.

In one’s personal and relative opinion the provided names were false it had seemed to me, and the two Pakistanis that I had become the most familiar with presented themselves as called Mami and Armour, “it’s L’amour”, I was once corrected. I never spoke the former's name aloud, and I never said "L'amour".

I would spend most of the income support benefit on books which I received after having blagged a psychiatrist with malingering clichés, I really didn't suffer from. In my defence, there seemed to be a subculture of this in the local environment at the time. In the week, I would occasionally run out of food. The man known as Mami who at times appeared as group leader brought me a large bag of rice grains, and Armour brought a television set, although I wasn’t at all interested in watching the TV. I had smashed the previous TV set mother had bought me for my room at 123 Bradford Road, having held it out at arm’s length, dropped it, picked it back up and repeated the action behaviour twice more over. One could hear lots of nice smashy sounds from the bulbs inside, I seem to remember, and the screen cracked too. It was a Bush TV. Bush hadn't seemed very popular to me at the time. 

On Thursday I received money from the Post Office, the date of which I regarded as a coincidence as I’d previously formulated a rapport with the day and I bought electric tokens for the meter, and books to read, and in the afternoon I was able to score an eighth of soapbar resin and I bought a small bottle of whisky. Later in the early evening I was sitting in the living room, playing CDs and talking to Chris who was an art student who had recently moved into a house with several other students from the University he was attending.

Chris had reappeared into my experience, knocking on the door of room number seven shortly after I'd moved in. I hadn't seen him for years. He had been wearing a green hooded top, like the one I had recently acquired, and he had grown his blonde hair long and he looked somewhat feminine to me. At one time he’d flicked through a fat book I’d had in my room that was published by Taschen called Alchemy and Mysticism. He said, “what if it’s not true?” and I didn’t understand what he meant, what if what wasn't true? it seemed like an irrelevant question at the time, the artwork appeared great to me, and I said, “you will see Chris, you will see”. He didn't know what I meant. 

Mami and Armour came downstairs from the girl's flat and they immediately wanted to watch television. I was smoking a spliff and sitting on a coffee table with my back to the living room wall, and I said, “No!” and they protested and I said, “Thursday’s a Holy day, there’s no TV on a holy Thursday”, and I was ignored, and Mami went to turn the TV on and it wouldn’t come on, and I said, “God won’t allow the TV to come on on a holy Thursday” and he tried again and the set still wouldn’t turn on, and I said “No TV, holy Thursday, God won’t allow it!” Mami and Armour were looking at one another and their eyes were wide and bulbous and their mouths were agape and they appeared to look spooked to me, although they wouldn't admit it, and I said, “you can see it’s plugged in, yes?” and even though the plug in the socket didn’t need compressing I pressed it down hard with the flat of my palm and I said, “you can see the switch is on? The red is showing” and Mami went back to attempt to turn the TV on again and still nothing happened, and I repeated my refrain in summation of the event, “God won’t allow it.”

Mami and Armour walked out of the flat to confer and Chris who had been sitting on the sofa without words posing like Rodin’s thinker said, “Justin, what did you do with the TV?” and I said “I didn’t do anything with the TV Chris, if you get up now and turn it on, it will come on”, and he got up and pressed the button and the TV set flashed into life, and I said, “right, switch it off, no TV on a holy Thursday”, and Chris abruptly switched the TV off. The cannabis was good, the liquor tasted great, why spoil the moment with an artificial medium with shows selected by some grand programmer one didn't know the values of?, I was feeling confident and high and I saw the opportunity for a game and seized it.

Shortly after this evening I had bought a copy of William Blake’s book the Songs of Innocence and Experience and I was amazed to discover and learn that the great man had written a poem called Holy Thursday, and I learnt the poem by heart. The poem had also reminded myself of once having arrived at the artist B’s flat, he was sitting outside his front door, on a stool, and he said that he’d been into Wakefield that morning and I said, “is Thursday the day then?” and he said, “yes it is Justin”.

Around six weeks after the event of the television set I was living in the second number four when I learned the following week, “David Bowie will be performing his new song Thursday’s Child on a Top of the Pops 2 special”, and I thought, my God, he’s done it, and his lyric from the previous album Earthling booted up from memory, “on a better day I’ll take you by the hand and walk you through the doors”. I bought the single the following day and a week later I watched the performance with the TV set placed on the red carpet floor, before the “mango magic” coloured wall. It was a Thursday. I was watching TV.