My art installation at a studio in Whitechapel has become very famous.  All of London is talking about it.  It consists of a grey room, very bare, like a prison where a young, beautiful woman with pale skin is lying naked on the concrete floor in a foetal position.  Above her, bigger than a human, is a giant black raven with his wings spread against the ceiling.  The raven is shaking his wings to sprinkle herbs that fall in a light rain on her body.  He is preparing her like raw meat to go in the oven, so that he can eat her. 

Mum gives me a goodie bag of clothes.  It is only after she leaves that I open it and discover that it contains a pretty blue jumper with little red flowers on it, a yellow swimming costume and 12 pairs of the same kind of socks that she gave me for Christmas, which are so soft and I have been thinking about how much l loved them.  I think about how thoughtful my mother is and I can’t wait to throw away all my old socks and only have these new, soft socks.

I go to see Bush’s play with Miranda.  The curtains open and there is a huge globe, a miniature planet earth on the stage.   It has a palpable connection to earth, as if we are watching the real earth turning on the stage.  As it turns we can see the shadow of night moving across the surface, then day.  As day and night fall over the earth, the theatre becomes bright, then dark as if we are really on that earth on the stage.  Miranda gets up and goes to the side of the stage where there is a kitchen.  There is a rat on the sideboard and she picks it up and puts it inside a clear plastic container with a piece of chocolate cake.  The rat goes into a frenzy inside the container and I realise it is going to escape.  It bursts out of the box and looks around and sees me.  It comes straight for me like a bull.  It is as big as a bull.  It corners me and is going to bite me.  I eat some sweets designed by Beckett on the subject of love.  There are sweets shaped like lips, sweets that say ‘just good friends’ others that say ‘in the pit of your stomach’, and one shaped like a fish, which is delicious.  I think how profound and witty they are.     

Ed and I are in Eritrea walking across a desert of dark orange dunes.  We come to a lake of crystal blue water.  We swim, though we are scared of the poison jellyfish that live there.  Also there is a creature we have read about that lives at the bottom of the lake where the water is dark called a Clapper.  The Clapper is deadly to humans, but even worse, it lets off a wailing sound that ‘makes a baby crying sound like a walk in the park’ so we are careful to keep our movements gentle so that we don’t disturb it.  When we swim back to the shore it is sunset and the water is crystalline and beautiful in the light.  I am scared to put my feet on the bottom of the lake in case I step on the Clapper but Ed has been shown how to make my shoes safe by pouring the gravel out of them. 

It has snowed inside a suburban house.  The sofa, the armchairs and table, every surface is covered in a layer of snow.  There is a murderer in the house with me.  I listen but I can’t hear anything.  It is still and quiet.  I open the front door and there is a bicycle covered in fairy lights that looks so pretty against the dark blue sky.  I look behind me and see that my footprints in the snow are small and round as if I am a fox or a deer.  I realise the murderer will be able to follow my footprints.  I turn around again and Ian McKellen with long grey hair and beard, is standing in the doorway.  He is the murderer.  I stab him in the eye with scissors and blood runs down his face and drips onto the snow. 

I am standing on the moon looking out into space.  A group of us live there in a community.  I can see the planets and stars clearly.  I go over to the edge of the moon, like a cliff, and look over.  I see Jupiter passing, very close by, a huge, swirling red ball.  But to my surprise, I discover that Jupiter is being carried by a man all painted in red, like one of those living statues, on his shoulders.  I get out my camera to take a picture but I can’t twist the dial of the camera to the auto setting.  As I am trying to do this, I lose my concentration and fall over the edge of the moon.  Luckily there is no gravity so it is easy to hold onto the ledge with one hand.  I shout for someone to come and rescue me.  As I wait, Saturn comes past, carried like a pale yellow beach ball by a man dressed in yellow who holds it to his chest.  After Saturn, more men come, carrying the small planets that are closest to the sun.  Mercury is the slowest.  It is a spectacle like nothing I have seen in my life and I watch in awe at this ballet of planets.  I realise there are a lot more planets than we knew about.     

A man’s voice, authoritative, like in a nature programme, explains that the Atlantic Shelf in the North Atlantic Sea is the perfect place for prawns to live, but for some reason some people don’t like the fact that they come from there.  A blonde female television presenter, it could be Fearne Cotton or Denise van Outen is underwater, standing on the edge of the gently sloping shelf, wearing a wetsuit and diving tank.  The water is thick and blue.  If she took one step to the side she would fall off the shelf into a dark abyss.  As the television camera comes closer towards her we see that behind her there are these huge pink prawns hanging above the shelf in vast beds that stretched as far as the eye could see.  The prawns are as big as she is and really ominous and creepy, inert, like they are already dead.  They are being farmed in this very sinister way for some terrible purpose.  The presenter has to go into the beds of prawns to show the viewer.  She is reluctant.  As she walks in between the hanging prawns she keeps getting tangled in the long antennae and other bits that are coming off them.  She shields her face with her hands, getting more and more panicked.    

I am the world’s most notorious thief, worth 120 million pounds.  I have a razor sharp white-blonde bob and a thick black mono-brow like a stripe across my face.  I decide to rent a flat above a cinema so that I can make lots of noise without having to worry about neighbours complaining.  When I arrive with my bags I realise the flat is haunted by the ghosts of little Cossack boys who used to be imprisoned there.  I go in anyway and start to unpack.  There is a knock at the door.  It is Rhianna who tells me she wants to come and sleep at my flat.  I lend her a thermal vest top and take her to a dormitory of single beds where the boys used to live, and watch her as she falls asleep peacefully.  I suddenly think of Mishima committing hara-kiri.  I realise, in a moment of clarity, that nobody in the world has ever juxtaposed Rhianna and Mishima’s suicide together in their brain at the same time.  I am excited, almost overwhelmed by this knowledge.    


 

 

 

21st February 2012

I am on a train going across the Australian outback holding onto the outside of one of the carriages.  I look down and I realise the ground is moving, swarming with millions of kangaroos.  On the horizon I see a raging wildfire and I realise they are fleeing the flames.  I am on a call to rescue a lion who has learnt how to use the telephone and called a new helpline specifically for animals with problems.  The lion had telephoned because he couldn’t open a packet of biscuits.  When I arrive he is in a small kitchenette wearing an apron.  He tells me he is trying to make canapés.  I show him how to take the biscuit and scrunch the brown bit in the middle and twist the edge around it so that it becomes a daffodil.  I make one and pass it to him and he eats it gingerly, nibbling at the edges.

I arrive in India at the airport and at the passport control they tell me I have got the wrong visa. Mine is only for the city, not the country so I cannot leave.  I go in a taxi to a hotel and ring the British consul from the phone in my room.  He is a kind, helpful man who tells me not to worry.  In the meantime I should strip the beds, put the sheets in the freezer and use a parsnip head.  I have no idea what he is talking about.  I leave the hotel and go to an art gallery with a glass sloping ceiling where they are showing an exhibition of bossa nova and cool jazz album covers.  All the squares of bright colours and geometric patterns are beautiful against the white walls.

David Bowie is giving a concert.  I am in the audience, high in the huge auditorium.  The stage is designed like a chessboard with black and white squares.  A young woman comes onto the stage with a white horse chess piece on her head and sings a duet with him.  At first I think the concert is amazing and the duet is the most beautiful thing I have ever heard.  Then I realise Bowie is a pervert.  Each time he dances with her and bends her backwards towards the audience, he is using it as an opportunity to look at her knickers.  The show finishes with him lying on top of her in a bedsit and bursting into tears.  I realise it is not just part of the show, but it is real and he is crying because he thinks the concert was a disaster.  I go to try to get a council flat in a little housing office because I am a writer.  Lucy comes sprinting out of the distance, out of breath because she is running away from something frightening that is trying to get her.  She tells me that she hopes the mouths are following her and are coming soon.  She is running on the surface of a shallow, silvery lake.  Suddenly, behind her a cloud of hundreds of red mouths come flying above the water, chasing her, like a swarm of insects.  When the mouths meet the flamingos that are blocking Lucy’s way, each mouth opens wide and swallows the head of a flamingo like a gramophone funnel.  The flamingos can’t see, or move, so Lucy gets away. 

It is some time in the near future and Dalston has grown into a huge polluted city on the coast, a city of pale concrete tower blocks along an endless beach curving into the distance.  The buildings are so tall and thin they give me vertigo.  Down on the streets, the children of Middle Eastern oligarchs ride around in convertible Ferraris and Lamborghinis.  I am in a dirty, cramped flat and somebody has stolen my cigarettes.  The walls are brown, there are dirty plates and cups piled in the sink and a mattress on the floor.  I go out of the flat into a floor of a multi-storey car park and there is an announcement over the tannoy to go immediately to the exits.  I know this is a trick to rob people so I go in the opposite direction to the flow of people and walk towards the stairs.  At the door a girl with fifties rockabilly style hair gives me a flier for a ‘Tart Party’.  The dress code is ‘half naked’ so I decide go with my bottom half naked.  When I get into the party I am surprised to see that everyone has done the same thing as me and gone with either their top, or bottom half naked, instead of dividing themselves vertically down the middle.  I walk around the party looking at the costumes, which are all tight and shiny black and white.  There is a noise by the door and the police come and herd us into my father’s study at the Old Vicarage and give us a lecture on taking drugs.  While they are talking I choose my mother a present of a candle shaped like an orange lily but when I give it to her she tells me she wanted the tulip bulb instead.