Erasure
written by: Michael Graeme
I’m here at this trade show, arm companionably linked with a woman. I think it might be Ella, though I’m not sure yet, and I don’t want to ask. It’s not because I’m afraid to – more that some uncertainties are better held in tension than resolved. I see soaring steel sections, wriggly tin cladding, and polished concrete floors. Then of course there’s that sea of garish trade stands, all trying to outdo one another with colour and noise. Distant memory grants it a feel of the NEC, or maybe Gaydon. Another life, another time.
I remember coming away from Gaydon once with the feeling of a wasted day. Four hours on the M6 to get there, and most of that sat in traffic, then another four heading home. And all I had to show for it was a handful of one-liners in my notebook. I would have learned more in ten minutes just poking around the Internet. If that was the nature of my calling, I was making a poor show of it, either that or I was a character in different play to the one I thought I had a part in. I remember I rubbed those notes out, restored the page to a pristine blank. It seemed to make more sense that way.
Specifications. Materials. Tolerances. You know – things. Things you need as prerequisites for building other things, for building your way into the future. I’d thought those were my stock in trade. But I’d begun to see how the trade shows were coming to mean less about the things in themselves and more about theatre.
Colleagues enjoyed them all the same. Like caged hounds set free, they were, and then the rituals of swapping business cards, taking lunch, collecting receipts for expenses, and yap-yap-yapping the day away. Quite the spectacle. But anyone who’d read the manuals beforehand knew most of what was said at these events was performance, and not necessarily true. It was easy to catch the salesmen out, but I never considered that sporting, maybe because I felt, deep down in my bones, my presence was a pretence too. I was no more true than they were.
That’s what Ella seems to be telling me, now. Yes, yes… this is definitely Ella. She’s coming more into focus now, as are my memories of those earlier times. I remember my sober grey suit and the persona of a technical sage, but, really, I was just putting myself about, trying to look less introverted than I really was. Even submitting my expenses was part of the act. It was a way of showing I’d been there, that I was in the game, part of the literal world, the world that had written itself down for me.
So, remind me how did we get here?
Ella’s kiss!
I definitely wasn’t ready for that. She wasn’t dressed as Ella then – came at me with the face and the demeanour of a girl I used to know, long ago, one of those girls who never knew my name. But there I was, on the threshold of leaving that old world, leaving the job – maybe even retiring – and she was wanting me to write my details on my own leaving card.
It didn’t make sense.
“But everyone’s doing it,” she’d said.
No, what she was really doing was hiding her intent in that imaginary crowd, who had indeed written their names. It was her way of hanging on to me – not to return my emotional investment in her, but just more of the same – to keep me in her pocket like always, me hanging on, projecting out into the vacuum, and nothing returned. No love, no depth, no meaning. So, no, I wouldn’t sign unless she was honest, unless she declared herself, unless she moved even just a fraction in my direction.
And that’s when she kissed me.
That’s when I knew she was Ella, and that I’d fallen through the fabric of the world to a place where nothing is ever written, and we have to make sense of events as best we can. Next thing I know, we’ve fetched up here. Well, not quite here. Not yet. But that’s more complicated, and I’m still thinking about it. I need to explain this other bit first, if you’ll hear me out. The trade show: I mean… what exactly are they selling here?
Ella doesn’t seem that bothered – draws me back to the kiss instead.
“Felt good, didn’t it?” she says.
Oh, true. It was a long, deep kiss. I’d forgotten what that could feel like – the intensity, the rush. It had everything, and more – spoke not so much of passion, but a real power, and a sense of both acceptance and release.
So, again. Here we are, seemingly revisiting the past, yet not the past. It’s more the present dressed up in historical costume – those trade shows I knew in the late eighties, the nineties. The difference now is I can see it’s all performance, all theatre, when I’d not the confidence in myself to call it out back then. But more than that, it’s like one of those old TV shows you recall with enthusiasm. Then someone dumps it up on YouTube, and you re-watch it, and everyone seems wooden. Belief is no longer suspended – you can see they’re just acting, that the props are flimsy. But it was always like that – you’ve just moved on. You see things differently now. You see through things.
At least that’s what Ella tells me.
So… it looks like what’s on sale here are all those things I’ve imagined making up the world we live in. Each has its stand with smart-suited orators, background technicians, and fairground barkers. We have politics, media, art, sport, education, cops, tech-bros, even some AI bots… all there. Plenty of tricksters too: spies, fools, madmen, social-media influencers. But there are no actual things. And the crowds – the aisles are thick with them – each person a player in their own way. I see former presidents, prime ministers, celebrities, famous authors, talking heads – these too are part of the exhibition, each reflecting back the performance of the other, each taking the performance for the real “thing”, not the absence of any “thing”. And we take that lack of materiality as a virtue. We take it as the future.
“Ah!” says Ella. “Now that’s worth noting.”
“But there’s nothing to see.”
“You said it.”
It looks complicated, but it’s like an exhibition of civilisation’s end. There’s still some momentum from former times, and everyone looks busy. But the engine died decades ago, and it’s all winding down. They just don’t know it. They don’t see it.
“Well, go on, write it down. In your notebook.”
Notebook? Yes, I’ve always had a thing about notebooks, haven’t I? I’ve got drawers and shelves stuffed with them, most of them blank. It’s like what needs to be said, what’s really important, is so simple, so obvious, it shouldn’t need writing down at all. Open any of my notebooks, and it’s all there: blank, unlined vanilla pages – an entire universe in potential, and none of it realised.
“Ah, now that’s something else. You see? We’re on a roll!”
Oh… that kiss!
It put a mood on me for days – the feeling of something moving, the ground shifting. Sure, there was an ache too, for memories of the girl, but that’s all gone now. But it’s hardly a revelation. We’ve been travelling this road for a long time, and I’ve been here before. Well, not here exactly, but places like it often enough. It doesn’t mean we’ve gained any miles, just deepened a little, I suppose. If it’s all about the journey, then the deepening helps us see the scenery more clearly, that’s all. Which brings me to the next bit, or rather to the bit before.
I was out in the car, on my own, thinking I was getting somewhere, a nice bright day, a day for the scenery. My car’s an old roadster – not made for the commute of olden times, not made for the motorway – more a vehicle for adventure. It’s a little juvenile, even though, like me, it’s getting on, growing fragile, though mostly I can ignore the advance of years under a sheen of paint. I’m not sure where I’m heading – out to the coast maybe, into the west.
I come upon a bridge, a steep humpbacked thing. There’s a car coming in the opposite direction. It crests the top and takes off, then slams down in a shower of sparks. That’s sufficient warning to have me stamping on the brakes. We slow nicely, should have come over safe and sound, but the road falls away to near vertical and the next thing I’m in free-fall – me spinning one way, the car another, and all of it being filmed by a buzzing drone, like in third person, until it too goes spinning down into infinity…
Down, down…
We’re being filmed now, actually.
What?
We’re at the trade show again. Sorry to jerk you about this way. I feel it as a tingle on the back of my neck. So I turn and there, pretending to be part of the crowd, is this guy with a camera. He’s part of the security team, I suppose, part of the organisers, projectionists of this performative reality. I’ve surprised him. He gives me a cheeky thumbs up. Nothing to worry about, he’s saying. All just part of the act. He comes over to chat a while. Nothing he says makes any sense, but he seems friendly. I’m not fooled, though. He’s just trying to cover up. They think they know me, but when they play that video back, I won’t be on it. When you’re linked up tight with Ella this way, her presence renders us both insubstantial, neither one place nor the other.
But I was falling, wasn’t I? Falling from that bridge.
I land on the slippery pitch of a tiled roof, manage to hang on, skittering about trying to gain purchase on something solid. Around me are the gutters and beyond them that infinite fall. There are other properties – some below, some above, but all of them unreachable, and their geometries don’t make sense.
There are some dormer windows sticking out, so I bang on the lead, try to wake the house up. First, there comes this kid who looks at me with curiosity, but doesn’t get the urgency – just stands there unhelpfully on the other side of the glass. Then this older guy appears, a patrician air about him, something vintage and wise. He can see the problem and lets me in at once, helps me through, welcomes me into his house, introduces me to his family, his friends. There are women and children. One of them is Ella. She winks playfully like we’ve both been there all along, as indeed I suppose we have.
The house is my refuge from the fall, yet its geometry I cannot reconcile with what I saw on the outside. No length, no mass, no time can ever capture it. Imagination can only hold it loosely: old stone, a pastiche of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, a sense of Romance, of poetry, a fortress against machinery. But it’s not so much a time exactly, as a mood, not preceding anything, not transcending either, more subscending – if that’s a word – a deepening.
The impression is of my taking up residence for a while, a neat little room of my own, a place to be, to rest, to see. How long? Who knows? A night? A lifetime. Between times. Other times. And the kindly old patrician – cord trousers, checked shirt, white hair – nothing frail about him – indeed a vigour, an energy, and a wise intensity, but not a man of words. The house is his legacy, our inheritance. Ella’s and mine.
But what shall be my legacy?
Ella shows me round the outside of the place to help me get my bearings. But it’s like a drawing by Escher. Structures, geometry, soaring, interlinked, but none of it makes rational sense. You have to think it through differently, allow yourself to glaze over the logical inconsistencies. I realise the house is part of a community, all built in a similar style, a kind of pre-industrial revolution. Old England. Old Lancashire, before the mines, the mills, and the furnaces. We’re looking at my own deep ancestry, then. And the patrician? Is he me? Am I my own legacy?
“Ah, good one. Note that down.”
She points out an untidy cable tacked up under eaves, tells me it belongs to one of the tech billionaires who’s recently moved in. A satellite link, she says.
“It hardly looks in keeping. Could he not have covered it with a conduit or something?”
She opens her mouth to speak, but I’m ahead of her for once…
“Okay, okay. Noted.”
Notebook. Notebook. Yes, it all feels important. Urgent. I spend a while sketching out the geometry as best I can, including that untidy cable. I still can’t make things line up as they should, but I do the best I can. And then a mistake! There comes the feeling that what I’m drawing, what I’m naming here, is the real thing, and I’m seized by the urge to make this my legacy, to show it, to pass it on.
But for all my ferocious sketching, the notebook is still blank, and Ella’s telling me to write things down all the time. Things that are nothing. Nothing making sense. Or rather, nothing being the only sense I can make of it. Then I’m walking in a village – same as the house – old stone and strangely looping pathways. There’s a familiarity to it, and I realise I’m looking for my old school, a place of past learning, and all of it obsolete now. But surely they’d still know what to do with the revelation of my notebook, my artefact, my learning since leaving this place, and boiled down to a handful of one-liners.
But who to speak to?
The headmaster will be busy. They have no time for revelation, for meaning, these days. The history teacher, perhaps? Alas, I am not of his profession, not time served at the mill of events. He will not listen to me. And anyway, first of all, we must pass the gauntlet of the officious and rather fierce-looking secretary.
Only the children, just now leaving, step back to let me enter. I am nonplussed by their deference, that they bid me welcome in their innocence, to this place that shall corrupt them. It will take the things from their satchels – their pencils, erasers, compass, and rulers – turn them to dust, disperse them on the wind. Then they too, might play dress-up.
The secretary looks up at my approach, scowls.
“Ooh, see that,” says Ella. “Note that down. That’s lovely.”
“But she’s all show, like the rest of them. She’s a dragon guarding an empty chest, thinking it’s still full of treasure and we’ve come to steal it.”
But there’s nothing. Nothing to take, as there’s nothing we can take from the trade show anymore. Not a single conversation or a pitch that means a damn. What’s valuable, I already possess. The treasure is in my notebooks, and all of them blank.
I slide the notebook under the glass, and she nails me with her eyes. I think she’s about to reject it, slide it back, but curiosity gets the better of her. She takes it up and begins to turn the pages. Again, I’m expecting her to slide it back in puzzlement, but she hangs onto it, intrigued, engrossed. Then I realise she’s… reading.
She sees words, where I still see nothing.
I rubbed it all out years ago. It made more sense that way.
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