Misdirections - Kit Edwards

Written in response to Swansea Performance Weekend.

I’m on a moving train, at my desk, in the Kardomah, awaiting a rolling dessert trolley. Moving north (instead of west) toward the end of the line. I write a list: 

trace

sensation

space

relationship

address

encounter

It’s early and already dark, a golden light moves through me, I’m late. The performance hasn’t started yet and now spaciousness grows between us, the point of encounter shifts off its plane. The spirit level tilts. On this backward-moving train, I sit and await my dessert. 

I enter the gallery and instead of dessert I’m handed a paper cup of somebody else’s cider, warm, as it tends to be. And I’m talking to a person in a frantic suit, a paper bear’s head engulfing their own human head. But it’s not a bear, it’s a tanuki, and who is Tanuki? I ask. I lean in to the hole from which he shouts. He says he’s met a wonderful couple, a brilliant pair — gorgeous, smart, charismatic — don’t you just love it when that happens? I nod and search the room for this glistening pair only to find Linder, who’s appeared beside me at the bar, which I now notice is illustrated with flaming visions of Lazarus, roaches, a phoenix rising. We say hello. She is a long curled paper cutting (a diagram of love), she grips my arm and says, I love your lipstick. I say, I love your dress, and I do. 

I’m late so there’s no time for more Linder and I turn and rush up the steps, landing beneath the balcony where something is happening. There are four or five people active in the happening, masked and dressed for kinky business. They are busy bodies, gussied up and attempting to connect a conference call to consult about something. We’re not really sure what, J says, they gather and then disperse, and we follow them around obediently. Timers sound and something occurs. One of them has managed to update to fiber optic broadband. Chains, miscellaneous brushes, and jade face rollers swing, bodies loll, and bother each other, posing and fussing, all comes to nothing. Faces gleam with jelly facemasks. A bank manager in a balaclava stands before one of Linder’s works (come find me where I’m hiding) straddling it with their arms. The pose aspires to dominance but betrays a yearning. 

In a small dark room beside the gallery, a series of video works play. I duck in and the woman from the first keep-fit aerobic video in the Welsh language tells me she wants me to concentrate on how I'm feeling, that the body, like a body of water, can be held. In another film, two women stand facing each other in profile accompanied by the sound of breathing – not their own but someone else’s, slow, deep, close. I match it, inhaling softly through my nose. One of the women crouches slightly while the other smoothes her palms over the crown of her head, running her hands through her blonde hair, tugging gently on the ends. Mirror neurons fire in all directions. 

I return to the action and the group is trying to connect again. They bustle into an enclosed display, phones held aloft, but their proximity causes glitches on the line and suddenly discordant howls sound and ricochet around the space and for a moment we all lose the plot, blinking wide-eyed, souls agape. 

“I became convinced that I was the same person as everyone around me, and repeatedly asked of the other patrons, are you me?” 

The tannoy sounds: 

THE GALLERY WILL BE CLOSING IN 5 MINUTES, PLEASE MAKE YOUR WAY OUT OF THE GALLERY. 

The slackers gain animus and join the call, clapping in our faces, shooing hens. Beside me the penny drops – Ah! They’re bad invigilators. But their neighbour is not convinced – no, no –  they’re doms and subs. The really real invigilator is applauding amusedly on her seat. P leans her phone into my ear and it whispers: can I get a thumbs up when you’ve received the message? 

On the train home there is gossip of a miscommunication amongst the players; the doms were not domming, the subs were enacting sub on sub violence. What is a good dom anyway? Maybe I just want to be looked in the eye, O says. O’s venus is in Virgo which means they only fall in love every four years. I redownload Co-Star and it tells me that this coming year Neptune and Saturn will meet again at 0° Aries on 20 February, marking a powerful new era where dreams meet reality, and visionary systems will take hold. The last time the planets aligned was in November 1989, and it tells me that history is not a circle but a spiral. 

Or an infinitely re-recorded tape (vulnerable to damp, memory degrading). Or a washing machine on a spin cycle. In another video, a woman kneels before the doorway of a washing machine. We are inside looking out. She presses buttons, slams the door, switches on a headlight and leans toward the drum as it fills with water. From the camera’s eye it is she who spins, the storm moving about us, sloshing this way and that. Soon she becomes orbs of light held in darkness and we are swallowed, moving endlessly through the watery yawn.  

I remember watching the washing machine as a child, sitting close on a blanket on the kitchen floor. It seemed to communicate some intelligence of its own – anthropomorphic in its pauses and shudders, beginning again at will. And it's all-consuming spin, making that which was once solid and familiar, undone. 

The observer is, in some way, part of that which they observe. 

“...as I swam into a black hole I saw the back of my own head”

Two days later I am back via the right train. I write this from here, the longest night of the year. And here, in the year 2026, the planets inching closer by the second. 

Linder’s room is cleared of obvious perverts and H sits in a golden puddle (electrum), beside a silver bowl of safety pins. Pages from magazines filled with images of the Virgin Mary are spread before her. Dress-maker’s scissors tethered by a red cord are summoned from her pocket and begin to bite. Holy mothers are severed and fixed to her gown. I write: 

pinned

pining

kneeling

pucker

puncture

punctum 

I can’t remember when I stopped praying with words, but now it's without intellect and directed down not up. She works quickly, her hands trembling slightly, and at times she rises with a dish of glistening Marys and invites us to assist. Shallow breaths, rummaging, gentle struggle, the warmth of skin’s proximity. Marys accumulate, the one made abundant in the maximalist tradition. H kneels in devotion to her image, and above her bowed head, Linder frowns in perpetuity. 

In the video room, I watch a woman demonstrate an elaborate contraption that assists her in smiling. Two clothes hangers are hooked into the corners of her mouth, each attached to a pulley holding a bucket of water that slowly fills from drizzling watering cans. Her mouth gurns reluctantly toward the sky. In another, a librarian fantasises about the reader of Spivak’s In Other Worlds, hands in dislocated choreographies, rubbing and stroking the page. Someone else paints a mountainscape on a slice of white bread. Another dances a strip tease for their parents on Christmas day. 

Elsewhere, a crowd lines the atrium, leaning against walls, crouching on the stairs. Black banners from an  exhibition hang from the mezzanine and read: 

Synchronised swallow Syndicated spectacle

A conspicuously dressed trolley is wheeled before us, two pairs of feet in white socks are visible beneath its skirt. They tentatively push the trolley forward, weaving between artworks and bodies, following the patterns of the marble floor. Like a newborn thing they grow in confidence and curiosity and begin to pose a threat to decorum. 

V and E (asynchronous sisters, fraternal twins) back arse-first from beneath the trolley, dressed for dinner (or for polishing, or whipping cream, I’m not quite sure). They hold each other’s gaze, clutching the trolley with white-gloved hands, and begin again, now at pace. Breathless, they take flight, finding the fulcrum. 

After, the two women stand there panting like dogs. 

The quilt is lifted, fluffed and rested on the ground. The sisters lay beside each other and a marshmallow is flung audaciously into the air, their wet mouths open and wanting. A plump body hits the cold tile. Fort-da. We laugh, recognising the game. One leaps up to the mezzanine, seeking greater stakes while the other dances around the room, hurling mallows to the heavens. They pretend to aim, but I think they’re barely trying – it’s more fun that way. 

On the mezzanine is the crowning glory. Behind a case, upon a plinth, a swollen and crumbling meringue sits atop a pink cushion. This is a heist. And this is a red herring. The meringue is huge and smashable, mocking the crown moulding, the shining porcelain displayed about the gallery. 

The sisters are hungry and beyond the pale. They liberate the meringue and begin to gorge, feeding scraps to each other. High on sugar and the authority their gloves allow, they thunder through the galleries, balancing baby meringues on statues, tipping recklessly over the balcony, snacking over Pan’s resting body. They leave fistfuls for onlookers to taste, and I do: sweet baked sugar, becoming milk, becoming nothing. 

Eventually, they descend, trolley and wrecked meringue in tow, and abscond to the garden. From the belly of the meringue they pull two drams of whisky, pour and swallow. I smell its heat from metres away. 

That night I dream of the Kardomah. I peer through a trick mirror and observe a sea of shining silvery heads fill the dining room, chattering and tilting cups of scalding coffee to their lips. Forkfuls of sponge, custard, lambs liver and onions, peas sliding across their laps and onto the tiled floors to the corners of the universe. I’m taken by the hand to a small table in the centre of the room. We are in a leisure centre, a school, a snooker hall, and a doctor's surgery. I see the dessert menu rise up before me. Words on toasty brown laminate, in large print, read ‘swinging candle whip’ in Comic Sans. As the owner sweeps past he rocks toward me and taps the menu with an outstretched finger – tap, tap – that’s the one, he says. A waitress (with great authority) dressed in a black pinafore with a white collar and cuffs comes close, she leans toward me and I ask, do you have any dessert? Even though I’m well aware that they do. She looks at me, her brow furrowed, the corners of her mouth turning upward. She rises and walks away, arms swinging in slow motion. I turn my chin to face the window. A field of ivory lace. A family portrait, the faces shifting and settling. I sit there for a long time before a light bounces in the corner of my vision, and I know what’s coming. I feel its wheels rolling closer and closer, though I daren’t look.