23 May 2012
All the bluesbury-based stories in one. Be warned: there are 5 of them. It is very, very long. (7982 words). It wouldn't let me do it all in one, so look for the next half after
1) the bluesbury hotel incident part 1.
Hotels are mysterious places. They are so full of life, yet so devoid of character. They are the half way house between settings, and the pit stop of every person, interesting or boring, old or young, dead or alive, big or small (or maybe a bit of both, or tall but thin, or rather akin to an obese midget hedgehog). The sheer number of characters that pass through the door marked 'Reception', or the door marked 'Employees Only', or perhaps who enter via the back door that introduces the warm, damp back-street that smells of chips and cigarettes, after a brief and aggressive telephone call to an estranged relative; is too big to put a definite finger on, maybe even to put a rather indecisive finger on.
Also ridiculously high is the sheer number of hotels in the world. They line the streets like polished tin soldiers, looking down on the cosy cafés that nest beside and beneath their polished tin feet.
As there are so many, I will focus on only one.
If you happen to fall upon the ridiculously grey city of bluesbury, which I have reason to suspect you won't, you will not be immediately struck by its fading Victorian beauty, as the only angle you can approach it from is a few degrees from north-west, and not a pretty angle to view it from at all. Your vision is blocked by a purposeful scattering of shabby high rise cardboard boxes, studded with dingy cafés, bankrupt theatres, jobless actors, and what seems to be the rust that has fallen from high street shopping chains: the lone barracks of clothes and hardware, way too far from the mothership to be rescued.
(Bluesbury is a town where everything comes in dribs and drabs, you might like to know. In fact, Bluesbury's dribs and drabs were voted as the second best in the whole of England, with the best being Waitasec, the city populated entirely by dribs and drabs (a drib being the male of the species and the drab the female. As a group they are referred to as drubs, with the young pupae being the 'Drublings'. Recently, the gay, lesbian and bisexual community of Waitasec have been campaigning to get the popular phrase 'dribs and drabs' changed, as they say it does not represent their sexualities at all. Most asexual drubs are not really in favour of the change, as they cannot picture anybody saying something 'comes in dribs and dribs/drabs and drabs/dribs and drabs/dribs but sometimes also drabs')
The hotel in this book is in the bowels of the old town, located about in the centre of the city, surrounded by the park district, the shopping district, the rich district, the poor district, and a clutter of streets of varying degrees of wealth, trapped in between them all. Most cities have a saturated centre, with the frequency of buildings slowly becoming sparse and petering out towards the suburbs. Not Bluesbury. Bluesbury, surrounded by hills, is a tightly packed hive of ever thickening society, with networks of underground flats and overground cinemas battling it out in the concrete and plastic jungle.
To understand this story, and indeed others, you will have to know a little bit more about bluesbury. It is not a normal town. It somehow crosses boundaries untouched by modern physics, and is such a hive of alleys and labyrinths, that change with such fluidity and purpose, that it may even be thought of as conscious. There are several cities like this in England. None of them is on any map or mentioned in any guidebook. Normal people don't see them. It's to do with their brains. If a person saw such a thing as a "magic city", they wouldn't know what to make of it. They would never have seen one before, and have no idea how to handle it. Each cities' design is more extravagant than the next. Some float. Some drift. Some kinds named "quantum cities" don't Even have a definite point, since they are not observed. Brains have no idea how to make of these, and so fill in the logic gap with whatever is perceived to be behind the offending cluster of Impossibility: usually grass, or sky, or sea, or a UFO (it depends on the mind). These cities are all over the world, and all equally impossible. Bluesbury is widely renowned for being the single most boring impossible city in england. The most boring one in the WORLD, however, is in Holland. Now, since these cities defy logic, you'd expect some pretty odd things to happen. Well, they do. No matter how boring life in Bluesbury gets, it is NEVER as it seems.
If you want a picture of life in bluesbury, imagine a busy city that has been put on pause, and the bloober (the 'correct' term for a TV remote) stamped on and broken, and the batteries locked in a safe underneath Antarctica, guarded by huge bears with flaming skulls for heads and an assortment of heavy weaponry and untreated mental issues. It has all the variety of industry: a film company, a business and enterprise centre, an arts college, a host of restaurants; but none of these will ever go anywhere. You can't make it in bluesbury. It's simply stuck in perpetual arrest. No company will ever shut down, but no company will boom. New things that come about simply join the mass of grey matter that never dies, but never truly lives. This is where most people give up hope in the city and move on, but there is beauty to be found in the place yet, and in the form of individuals, and their stories. And where better to find people and stories than a hotel. The Graham hotel, to be exact. This is where this book begins. In the lobby, on the eve of 1995.
Chapter 1: beginning
Cyril Burnsley was not a strong man. He was two metres and three and a half centimetres tall, and built like a telegraph pole. His long hair keenly stuck to itself, and at the tender age of eighteen, acne dotted his cheeks, which from a long distance made him look like he proudly sported a beard made of tomato purée, complete with side burns and moustache. Most nights he would sit at home and read a book, or perhaps eat late at a café run by the father of a girl he liked. On this particular night, though, he was wearily traipsing the kitchens of the Burnsley hotel, trying to find a crescent wrench.
You may be wondering what a boy of eighteen Is doing at a hotel kitchen looking for a crescent wrench so late at night on new years eve. Surely he should be out getting thrown into breweries with his friends and family, stumbling over a family of drublings, you intelligently, but ill-informedly deduce, from under your brimmed hat? You'd think so, but the entirety of Cyril's close relations were at the hotel too. They owned it. His father had bought the building from another hotel company, the 'falling star', which had upped sticks and moved south to London a few weeks earlier, after falling a tad too far. This was the Burnsley hotel's fifth night open, and it had received a total of twelve customers. Truth be told, it wasn't exactly finished yet. The falling star logo still splattered the quartz coloured, overly sterilised Walls, and the marble finish on the surfaces and tiles was in the act of being replaced. It was not a modern building. Lichen cluttered the windowsills and balconies, and it's Victorian architecture loomed darkly over Egg street (a street so dull that being loomed over is possibly the most exciting thing that has ever happened to it in it's dim, concrete little life. It may have even been so exciting that if the street had a bladder, it would be rapidly emptying all over the clean White metaphorical carpet) It was, though, by far the most aesthetically pleasing structure in the town. It looked out of place, crooked, but, strangely, it fitted the scene like the piece of a jigsaw puzzle that falls under the sofa, never to be seen again until you move house, and you comically state that you'd been wondering where it went, as if you could have put it there on purpose, to annoy yourself. It was as if someone had thrown a haunted house into a junkyard. Sometimes bats could be seen flittering from the roof at night, silhouetted against the cold moon, and the loft was still home to a whole host of skulking, damaged creatures, crawling and scampering out into the dark of the back alley on reconnaissance missions for food. And drugs.
Cyril hurriedly brushed his hair to one side of his flaky-white scalp, and plunged a bony hand into the wrench drawer. It fell on a wrench. The wrench cried in pain. Was it crescent? It certainly felt crescent. He gave it a tug. Nope. Tin opener. Another few wrenches were pulled out, still to no avail. There were squirrel wrenches, bench wrenches, octahedron wrenches, spherical wrenches, even an old '30's schizophrenic wombat wrench from the radio show: "whoever can think up the silliest name for a wrench get's a free pen!". He delved in again. His fingertips brushed past potted plants and assorted mysterious instruments, whose uses had disappeared from existence at about the same time they had been thought up. There was so much in the wrench draw. He could feel boots, unicycles, telephones, a lung. He stopped for a tiny molecule of a second. A LUNG? So THAT's where that went, he thought to himself.
Finally he found it, just as cries of 'Cyril!!!' were starting to drift in from the lobby. "I'VE FOUND THE WRENCH, PA!! I 'AVE!! It's HERE!!" he angrily retorted back, as best he could without squeaking, comically. "whats that about an ear?!!?" Came the muffled voice of his father, Bertie Burnsley. "IT'S 'ERE!!" "WHAT'S 'ERE?" "THAT BLOODY WRENCH!!" "DON'T SPEAK ABOUT YER SISTER LIKE THAT!!" "NO!! W-ARR-ENCH!" "NEVER MIND THAT!! GET YER ARSE IN HERE AND HELP ME!!" Cyril was downright confused. His father never talked to people like that, least of all him. His manner sounded strained and urgent. Was he in pain? Cyril doubted it. No swearing
Bluesbury Collection Part 1 • Opuss № I