Television??
Continued.
The final third of the journey was the most difficult. The steepness of the ascent began to exhaust the most hardened traveller amongst them.
‘This is tough,’ Levin said, panting.
Three steps below Hamish, he pushed and they pulled, until they reached a turn in the stairs. There was but one more series of steps to take.
‘I don’t know if I can make it,’ said Levin, waving away their offers of support. ‘You guys have to go on.’
James was irate, insofar as his philosophy permitted.
‘Mm. You can’t do that – sure it was your idea.’
Levin glanced sharply at James, open-mouthed at the treachery. ‘My idea? Since when is that? This is our idea, I thought?’
A dangerously dangerous moment ensued. Levin looked at James, who looked at Levin meaninglessly, who looked at the TV. The TV remained black and plastic with a reflective glass window, dead and matt. A lead traced forlornly away from it.
‘So, it was my idea?’ Levin repeated.
Levin was wounded. James was indifferent.
Somewhere in the distance a church bell chimed three. Hamish was patiently leaning against the banister.
Levin gave James a dirty look. He had regained his breath by now. He signed to James to take his side of the TV.
In Hamish’ room particles of light span through the roof like million ambassadors of morning. Hamish stepped in first. Levin came in next, backwards, followed by James. As they entered the room, carrying the TV, they caught each other’s eye and each held the other’s look. In unspoken agreement Levin and James lowered the TV to the carpet. The three moved to the window and gazed out, quietly contemplating the world.
From Hamish’ window all of Belfast spread out, each spire and tall building clearly visible in the bright afternoon light. Beyond was the glittering blue of Belfast Lough, a soft-bellied U of sea leading Antrim on one side and Down on the other; Scotland beyond the horizon.
They looked at the garden gathering its strength to bloom with spring fat bees blowing upwards towards the window; chirping birds nestling in the still-bare trees about to bud. Bright green sorrel dressed the dormant undergrowth and the paving stones seemed like slabs of mighty granite. Levin, James and Hamish looked upon it, saw that all was beautiful. Peace seemed to reside within every single thing and hope filled the space around the Earth.
They opened the window. It let in the breeze. None, though, felt they could give an outward sign of happiness. Something remained undone. Once it was done they could join the community of nature but not before.
James let the window open under its own weight, swinging outwards to the wide world. The window was wide, tall, and open. There was no doubt in anybody’s mind about the goodness of this act. Levin and James lifted the TV to the sill and let it see-saw.
It wobbled.
When the moment was good Hamish gave the slightest touch.
Excitement bunched all three closely to the window; they glimpsed the cord flying outward, a gleam of reflected light from the glass, a corner moving around, vanishing into the empty space. They leaned forward but the TV was gone from sight and now present to sound alone, a sound like deep-bottomed bottles breaking, or a sheet of velcro being ripped. Plastic popped and snapped and a boomf. Then silence.
As one they breathed a sigh of deep fulfilment. It was as if they had become lotus blossoms floating serenely across the eternal sea.
Levin opened his hands and looked at the face of his palms. He looked at a tree wafting in the breeze.
Hamish folded his arms and whistled a tune.
James peered out of the window straight down. He said:
‘Holy fuck.’
He looked at Hamish and Levin. ‘You totally smashed it to pieces.’
Levin maintained his state of galactic being. ‘Good,’ he said, looking at the world.
‘MacHill’ll be ragin.’
‘No he won’t.’
‘I think he will. You chucked his TV out a window.’
Levin spread his hands to soothe the troubled waters.
‘No he won’t. His TV was already broke.’
Hamish now took his turn by the window, looking down appreciatively.
‘Nice job,’ he said.
Levin now had a look too.
‘Mm,’ he said. ‘Smashed to little bits.’
Now the adrenaline kicked in. It was as if there was a massive pulsating universal heartbeat and they were part of it.
‘Fucking class.’
‘That’s the best thing I’ve seen in about six months.’
‘Is there another TV we can throw?’
James glanced at Levin with some concern.
‘There’s mine. But you’re not getting it.’
‘Screw you.’
James was insistent. ‘I have to watch Neighbours.’
They went downstairs to inspect the wreckage.
Once, several months ago before the Christmas break, some members of the house (Emmett and Barry in all probability) had gone for drinks and liberated a shopping trolley from its subjugation to the retail industry. This steel-meshed trolley now sat in the yard awaiting some new purpose in life.
‘Dudes, we can’t just leave this here for MacHill to come back and find.’
‘Stick in the trolley sure.’
So they did. Picking up the pieces of shattered black plastic, the 6 by 6 green motherboard with capacitors and copper paths and little spikes of solder, the huge thick lumps of sharp-edged glass, the heavy metal cylinder with wires sticking out of it, the dinged power pack and lead, and miscellaneous bobbles and screws, largely all of it was hurled with vigour into the trolley. Some of the motherboards had come out intact. Levin trod on one and snapped it by accident.
‘Oh. Fuck. Good,’ he said. He lifted it and set it in the trolley.
They wheeled the trolley up the steps into the garden and then out the wooden door into the lane beside the house. It seemed like just the right setting for it, amongst old blue plastic sheets and broken fenceposts and a tree growing out of the wall. They unceremoniously left it and returned to the house.
The livingroom was curiously light and wondrous.
‘Joint?’ asked James.
‘Aye,’ said Levin.
Hamish went to make himself a cup of tea.
It was two hours later. Levin and James and Emmett were getting stoned. Hamish probably was too since the smoke so densely filled the livingroom.
‘How do you think MacHill will take it?’ asked Emmett.
‘Take it all right,’ said Levin.
‘Naw man he won’t.’
‘We’ll see.’
The demise of the TV was immediately heralded as a thing of great virtue by Emmett. He listed all the ways it would immeasurably improve their lives.
‘For one: no more sitting on our asses watching all that shit that appears on twenty million channels!
‘For two: all that crap is American rubbish, with their values and political viewpoint just on and on being broadcast and altering our minds all the time. No, I mean it – you can’t watch shit like that every day without it influencing your basic outlook.’
‘Yep,’ said Levin, ‘that’s right. Marx knew about that – the material conditions of your existence.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Your values and ideas derive from the material world you live in.’
‘Aye. The TV was making our minds for us. That’s the basic material we had to make our minds out of – American propaganda!’
‘I hated the way it was in every single thing – even when they were making jokes about it, they were jokes that assumed you agreed with their worldview.’
‘Yeah man. It did. Fucking yanks.’
‘Fuck those yanks.’
‘Fuck that TV!’
‘Aye, but,’ said James. ‘What about Fear and Loathing? What about the footie? And Neighbours?’
‘Aw man, N
eighbours is the biggest piece of shit anyway. How do you make yourself watch that shit every day.’
‘Neighbours is fuckin amazing. You have to watch it everyday to get it.’
‘Football I can watch in a pub. Or even not at all. Who cares?’
‘Aye,’ said Hamish, cheerily. ‘Who needs it? We’re better off without this TV, just tons of shit on it every day.’
Everyone nodded. What Hamish said sounded exactly true.
Levin MacHill arrived home from work in the Apartment later that night. He was, indeed, unhappy; though he only heard the story at third or forth hand. Neil Steed had heard it from Barry Mitchell and had told it to Chris Bole. Chris told Levin that his TV had been thrown out a window but didn’t say who’d done it.
Levin became a steaming hot cauldron of boiling oil. He did not move, merely wobbled and steamed and made dangerous-sounding noises, deep-belly explosions and the rearrangement of bodily organs for war. Then he began to wobble at an increased velocity. Chris watched with some trepidation as the brick-like man became a blue and white blur. Chris retreated and continued to watch from the hallway. The kitchen began to flash with distorted dark reds and flames. MacHill’s hobnail boots remained fixed to the floor, indeed seemed to grow in stature, until they were shining blocks of unmitigated steel. Chris retreated to the front door, and then flung it open and fled into the dark night. He did not return for one week.
MacHill began jumping up and down, beating the damaged linoleum, making the pots and pans bounce. A plate smashed onto the floor, and another and another. He jumped, punched the roof, and fell, creating cracks in the concrete floor under the lino. His mouth widened and hissing steam flew from it. A lizard tongue darted out and lifted a chair and flung it against the wall.
His eyes darkened and he stopped jumping. He turned to rip the back door from its hinges and walked into the garden.
By smashing through the wall he found his way to the alley. There, in the trolley, in the gloom of the night, the sad clipped remains of a TV lay. That TV had been with him since he was fifteen years old. His old man had given him that TV when they’d got a new one, and young MacHill had been so pleased, so innocently happy, that he’d vowed never to let anything happen to this TV with which he had been entrusted. Now it lay broken, and with it the seal that kept MacHill from breaking. He sobbed, clutching the pathetic trolley handles, shaking the rattling collection of plastic and spiggots, his large humped back shaking. A cat in some garden near-by mewed in sympathy.
His eyes soon dried. His tears disappeared from his cheeks. Now his skin all over his body became cracked and brittle as stone. He held onto the trolley handles, knuckles glowing in the pale white night, threatening to snap the metal bar like a twig. His teeth began to grind and grate, his ears became dishes, his eyes grew too big for his skull and popped out with explosive force. Blood began pouring out of his mouth like a sea of crime. His hair stood up on end and he became eighteen feet of lava.
‘EMMMMMMETTTTTTTT!!!!’ he roared, sending cats and trees billowing across the alleyways of Belfast. He knelt and pounded the ground, tears beginning again, tears of fury. He beat the ground into solid stone and then cracked it with such fury it melted and ran like a river down the alleyway onto the road, setting the wooden gate on fire as it passed through.
He kicked the trolley so that it became a comet that ricocheted out of the solar system. He went into the house.
Emmett’s room was directly above his own. Pausing only to rip a two-by-four from the shattered remains of the kitchen door, he stomped up the stairs and knocked furiously on the spiky-haired one’s door.
‘Emmett!’ he shouted. ‘Open up!’
He banged on the door with the fist that wasn’t clutching the two-by-four.
He waited in silence, giving Emmett time to get up and get dressed and open the door for him. He listened for sounds of movement.
‘Emmett?’ he said, loudly enough.
He tried the door handle. It wasn’t locked so he went in, blood swirling in his eyes.
There was a grunt and a rustle of half-assed movement from the bed. Levin turned to it. He took three steps forward til he was standing above Emmett’s bed in the deep darkness.
He gave Emmett a decent amount of time to become more conscious – three and a half seconds – and then proceeded to unleash all the pent-up aggression of twenty-one years of not properly releasing aggression.
‘EmmettyoumotherfuckingbastardfuckyouyoudestroyedmymotherfuckingTVaghhhhhhhhhh!’ he said.
He leapt onto Emmett’s bed and began beating the poor boy about the head and neck with the two-by-four. The wood was solid and held well, not splintering or snapping. Emmett roused and held his hands over his face in weak defence as he slowly woke to what was going on.
Levin began leaping up and down on the bed as he smashed the two-by-four down on Emmett’s prostrate face. He was blathering incomprehensibly in what may have been different languages. Emmett gradually awoke more to what was going on. He began shouting above MacHill’s rant, trying vehemently to get the man to stop, but MacHill was entirely in another universe, one where he was a destructive automaton.
MacHill began kicking Emmett at the same time as beating him over the head. This is when Emmett became tired of his unwarranted abuse and shot out a hand stopping the two-by-four mid-swing. MacHill stopped.
‘Right,’ said Emmett angrily. ‘Do you mind telling me what’s going on?’
MacHill sneered at Emmett.
‘Don’t tell me what you don’t know. You fucking threw my TV out the fucking window!’
‘What the fuck?’
This blatant denial of an unfalsifiable truth drove MacHill into an extra dimension of insanity. He tore the two-by-four from Emmett’s grip and began laying it down on the beaten man’s head again. Emmett this time wasn’t simply taking it and leapt to his feet, throwing MacHill from off the bed. MacHill went backwards head first and hit the sink behind which miraculously survived intact. One of MacHill’s vertebrae popped out.
Emmett jumped daintily onto the carpet. What was not dainty was his scowl of anger and injustice. Now that MacHill had adapted to the dark this was clearly visible to his swollen eyes. MacHill pushed himself to his feet using the sink behind him as an aid. His two-by-four had snapped in half uncleanly. MacHill spat at it and threw it aside.
Emmett took a stride over to MacHill and high-kicked his left temple. MacHill didn’t even flinch and kept looking at Emmett with vehemence. Emmett kicked again and again but it was like kicking at a wall-set post. MacHill’s skull appeared to be made of iron strengthened with diamond steel.
MacHill opened his mouth and spat out a single tooth.
They both paused, getting their breath back.
Emmett opened negotiations first.
‘Do you mind telling me what the fuck is going on?’ he asked
MacHill’s eyes bulged out and breathed in until every one of his ribs snapped from his breastbone and sticking out at an impossible angle from his chest. Then he exhaled, driving Emmett against the wall, where he hung, helplessly, as the skin on his face peeled off and became dust impregnating the wallpaper.
MacHill ceased and Emmett fell to the floor.
Emmett immediately rose again and took one of his Warhammer 40K ® figurines – a space marine cadet – from his cabinet of models and threw it at MacHill’s cheek. It pinged off.
‘Ha!’ cried MacHill.
‘Fuck you,’ said Emmett.
‘Fuck you,’ said MacHill.
They engaged in a combat of the titans that shook the oceans. When after forty days and forty nights neither emerged as the clear victor, they separated, hands on knees and panting.
‘Fuck off out of my room,’ gasped Emmett.
MacHill bridled and told Emmett unflattering things. But the heavily built man left nonetheless.
Emmett slammed the door shut after him. It was three o-clock in the morning.