frank

I am posting Frank weekly, one chapter at a time. at the moment my view is that the chapters should follow the sequence of posting, but time, and particularly fictional time is fluid, so I am considering ways of making the time line of Frank more accessible in the context of electronic media. Suggestions from any Fran readers welcome.

Here's chapter 1
Forest Hill

Frank contemplated the black rectangle of infinity embedded like a Rothko in a frame that stretched the limits of stilled perception. The amber grey beneath contained a thin silence that belied the frantic and frankly disgusting activities of the millions of inhabitants of this city. A slip in the focus of his recently rheumy eyes brought up another picture, this time of his own angular self, arms crossed at the elbows on the cheap desk, the white shirt creased and stained by street-lighting. He felt that the fields of colour were real and this travesty of a portrait abstract and impenetrable. He pulled a cheap untipped cigarette from the pack on the table. Lighting it a comet flared against the sky and then the acrid smell of tobacco tinted the distant stars and hidden planets. He tried to focus on his own image again, an act that generally offended him; or rather that had offended him for the last few years, but now he felt that the night was pooled between the far side of the window and his reflection, that he had to reach out to himself through the viscous black feeding liquid, and horrifically he saw himself smashed in that liquid like a fragile shell. Crisp shards of himself splintering into the ink, turning in it, and due to their improbable thinness, becoming invisible. He was pixillated and dissolved not into the eternal night but the machined glass.

Rapid physical movement was anathema to him, but now his hands clawed at his real face, fingers hooked into hollows at temple and jaw; steadying, recovering, assembling. He gasped and ground the cigarette into an aluminium ashtray he had stolen from a cab-office. You’re getting shaky Frank, he thought; is this what it’s like for everyone? Getting old, facing the end? He stood and turned his back on the window, receiving the room, resonant with the smell of fried bacon and talc. The bed-sitter creaked as he moved to the sink and splashed water into his face. He looked up at the cerise walls, small regular blobs of white showing where some past tenant; he liked to think the last tenant but suspected a much more extensive history, had removed posters and the blue tacked bits of emulsion. The bed of course was the nadir of his fallen state. If the walls carried their history of popular aspiration through posters the bed’s history was far more noxious. It was impossible to think of any kind of sex except the individual taking place on that poor palette. He despised procreation for all the obvious reasons and regarded masturbation as the absolute proof of man’s partial evolution from apes.

Life without immortality was truly appalling.