POV #1

Mabel liked having the lads around, poking their rookie snouts into every nook and cranny, curious and keen as mustard if a little dreamy, clumsy, even, slipping off the lawn’s edge into the begonia bed and having their smart, neatly pressed shirt sleeves caught by the bougainvillea barbs again and again, like they’ll never learn.

‘It’s been a long time since the front garden has seen this much fun,’ Mabel told a bearded man who was busy pulling on a hooded white suit and zipping it up to his chin. ‘Nice boys, polite, are they yours?’ But the man grabbed the large black multi-pocket bag that reminded Mabel of her old nurse’s kit and slipped down the side of the house without replying.

A lad then approached, the tall ginger one with a face like a speckled egg, offering a crooked smile that made Mabel think of Mother Goose and all the crooked things that went on in her rhymes. He asked the same questions all over again, scribbling down her answers into a brown pocket notebook, paying no heed to the sticky red beads clinging to the pea green blades of grass poking at his boot.

Mabel’s attention drifted over to a couple of big strapping lads who stood guarding the wooden gates, each with a German Shepherd heeled to his thigh. On the other side of the gates, the pavement was bobbing with nosy parkers, guessing, wondering, pointing and murmuring amongst themselves; all in vain, of course, as the only people who knew the truth were either dead or gone, and not about to venture forth with their version of events any time soon.

Derek’s head floated into view like a stormy cloud. He said something to the gatekeepers. The three of them turned towards Mabel, Derek’s fat lips spelling out, ‘Deaf and stubborn, good luck with getting anything useful out of that one!’

The lads saw Mabel’s face and blushed, burying their eyes into the loamy soil beneath their boots, while Derek laughed on, all alone, his ugly red mug split into two halves of a slashed watermelon. Mabel never could fathom why God in His infinite wisdom should choose to furnish her with a twit for a son when all she had ever wanted was a sugar and spice little daughter, to love and protect like Mabel’s own parents had never done for her. But God is God, and Derek is turning fifty-one this autumn, and some things in life are simply not up for a redo.

‘So you heard and saw nothing out of the ordinary last night,’ the speckled egg asked, shielding his eyes from the sun.

Mable considered the pearls of sweat decorating his brow. ‘Would you like a glass of water?’

The lad grunted in the manner that made Mabel suspect that he was never really listening – all those questions and not even listening – and she thought better of telling him about the three unholy shadows that had passed by her window in the dead of the night and staggered around in the darkness moments before the screams penetrated the walls and pierced the protective veil of her deafness.

POV #2

Thirteen minutes. Not very long, is it, unless you’re having a root canal treatment, or drink so much tequila you end up stuck on the toilet with a bucket in between your knees and cold sweat pouring down your back, wishing you had never been born. And yet, thirteen minutes was all it took to flip-turn my life upside down, to quote His Fallen Majesty, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. This wasn’t supposed to happen to me. I never asked for this. I never asked for any of this.

This blood on my hands, this sticky crimson blood I’m trying to scrub off my fingers, like the modern-day Lady Macbeth, is the proof of my innocence, not guilt. I tried to save the old man, but there was just too much blood in him. Did Lady M say that? Well, if she did, she was telling the truth. There really is no good way of stopping the blood once it begins to spurt. I tried, I really did, I placed both hands on the long gaping hole in his chest, but the blood wouldn’t stop bubbling out no matter how hard I pressed, so in the end I thought I was only making it worse and I took away my hands and I watched the blood cascade down his belly and spill onto the floor, and then I saw the white of his rib bone and I started to sob.

I

RUSHMORE

VANISHED

A paper plane glides across my desk. Moments later, another plane skims the top of my head and crashes into the wall of library books I had built around me to help keep the riffraff’s praying eyes at bay. Somebody’s clearly feeling prolific. Me, I’m yet to wake up from the lunch-induced coma. Shouldn’t have eaten Maurice’s spare cheese sandwich on top of my bucket of pasta carbonara and Lola’s unfinished chocolate muffin business.

I unfold the plane. It’s a missing poster: Cyclops, the one-eyed Chihuahua, had vanished from his home on Rushmore Hill. The owner is heartbroken. But not heartbroken enough to offer a reward, only their undying gratitude. Probably don’t even want it back all that much. I read it somewhere that Chihuahuas are the second most euthanized dog breed in the United States. Wonder which breed gets the first place. Hope it’s the one that took a chunk out of my chubby three-year-old calf on the beach in Croatia back in the day. When all I did was try to feed it a pebble.

‘Astrid!’ Lola signals to check the other side of the missing poster. She’s not especially nice about it. I flip the poster over. It says: BORED NOW. I write: BORN BORED, then try my best to fold it back into a semblance of a plane. Mission impossible. I hand the mangled poster to Quiet Boy. ‘Pass it on?’

Quiet Boy reads my note before sliding it over to Lola. ‘Don’t ask me again.’

Lola writes something down, taps Maddie on the shoulder. ‘Mad? Mad? Babes? Maddie?’

Maddie whips around, snatches the note out of Lola’s hand, sneezes all over it, slams it in front of Maurice.

‘Er.’ Maurice regards the crumpled, sneezed upon note with pure unadulterated disgust. ‘Text me?’

‘My name’s Lacey,’ says the English sub. Who I forgot all about. And who, with her short 80s haircut and black kohl-rimmed eyes cast mostly downwards, is pulling off a decent Princess Diana impression. ‘As in, Cagney & Lacey?’ She giggles at her own words, which is just about the lamest thing a teacher could do in front of her students. Or anyone, really. ‘No? No one? Okay. Never mind.’

‘Of course we know Cagney & Lacey,’ I say. ‘Are you even in the right class?’

‘This is the Film and Television class, yes?’ says Lacey. ‘The cool crowd?’

Everyone claps, whoops, and cheers. Everyone, that is, except for me, Lola, and Maurice. The three of us, we’re different. We may have been born to Generation Z, but we don’t actually belong here. As you can tell just by looking at us, Lola, Maurice and I are all about channelling Generation X.

CHANNELLED

Everything starts with an image. Kubrick. Anderson. Fincher. Almodóvar. Jodorowsky. You need only glance at a screenshot from one of their films and you’d know straight away which cinematographic storyscape it comes from. The same goes for people. No point in feeling the part if you’re not looking the part. Visual language is everything.

Personally, I’m inspired by PJ Harvey (b.1969) and her determined inconsistency. Tomboy black vest coupled with a pair of faded black denim cut-offs. Straitjacket white dress, disturbed by a splash of blood red neckerchief. Occasional bout of glitter glamour. On my more reticent days, I like to swap PJ for Kurt Cobain (b. 1967). We’re talking blasé, we’re talking layers, we’re talking nevermind: T-shirts, light blue denim and oversized jumpers, stripes and graphics, and Etiko trainers (a lot like Converse, except not).

Maurice? Think Placebo’s Brian Molko (b. 1972) crossed with Bauhaus’ Peter Murphy (b. 1957, so technically still the deer-in-the-headlights Baby Boomer, but one whose visionary work propels him to the honorary and much coveted Gen X status), further crossed with vintage Bjork (b. 1965), before she went and laid all those eggs on the red carpet. ‘It was her way of saying, I don’t want to be here!’ explained Maurice, flinging his baby dreads out of his eyes. ‘Basically giving a middle finger to the Oscars and all that nauseating, fugly, smarmy Hollywood phoniness.’ Although I had nodded in agreement at the time, I still thought that Bjork’s egg-laying stunt came across as desperate and frankly, something Greta Thunberg would do. A true Gen X does not seek notoriety: they let the notoriety find them.

Lola is all about S.E.X. Simple as. But none of that whore in the bedroom Boomers smut parade strutted around by people like Madonna (b. 1958), or that silly crotch-in-your-face Gen Z ambiguity. Lola is 100% about Gen X sex-on-legs icons: Kylie Minogue (b. 1968), Courtney Love (b. 1964) and Mariah Carey (b. 1970). Meaning hotpants and babydolls, angel wings and tiaras, smudged berry lips and living, breathing, bleeding, smacking, slurping, sucking, bruising, fleshy sexuality.

And if you have a problem with any of the above, we’ll just punch you on the nose, toss your bike in the river and send you home crying like a little bitch.

SORTED

By now, the class is completely taken in by Lacey’s insipid banter. Everywhere you look, there are Zzzs falling over themselves to make her feel wanted. One even tells her she reminds him of Princess Di. To which she literally and metaphorically swoons.

Lola, Maurice and I keep profoundly schtum. We know better than to encourage a teacher. Because the next thing you know, they’re all over you like the worst kind of rash. Joining your super exclusive table under the linden tree at lunch breaks, feeding you homemade hummus on carrot sticks, talking the latest Tarkovsky remake, all the while secretly trying to insert their penis into any available hole going. Been there, done that. With the last year’s photography teacher, Seb Brown, to be precise.

Seb was a bit older than Lacey, an über indie with a rampant Williamsburg beard and a silly range of hipster accessories, from tortoiseshell spectacles to a dangly earing to 14oz Japanese selvedge denim jeans. We were only kids then, and we thought it was kind of fly that an actual photography tutor would choose to hang with the likes of us, and ask for our actual opinions, and listen to what we had to say without yawning even once.

Guess on some level we had known all along that he was a bit of a groomer and a bullshitter, but we didn’t care. This was the first time in our lives that an adult was taking us seriously, and Seb wasn’t just any adult – he was the adult who had three solo photo exhibitions under his vintage leather belt, two here in Rushmore and one in some cool warehouse space on Fish Island. We could barely believe our luck when he invited himself to one of our Cult Classic Movie & TV Marathons. ‘So can I come?’, he had asked, and we were, like, ‘You so can – and you can also score some vodka at the off-licence, maybe some fags, too?’

Big mistake. It took only one marathon and a couple of dinner and movie dates he had paid for out of his photo-club kitty for us to realise that Seb was a creep and a bore and basically a paedophile. We needed to shake him off, and fast. Which was way easier said than done when the creepy paedo had not only taught one of your main subjects at the Institute, but also knew your home address and phone number.

We had tried blocking him on social media and sneak-eating our lunch in the darkroom; we had taken all kinds of convoluted routes home; we had even attempted to repel him by doing a black magic spell off the Internet, but no matter how hard we had tried to lose him, Seb Brown always managed to find us in the end.

‘He’s literally like that Liam Neeson’s character in Taken,’ Maurice had said. ‘Un-fucking-shakeable.’

His doomy insight was the last drop. We were beat, our fierce Gen X-channelling spirit reduced to a Recue Remedy-swigging, chain-smoking, full-spectrum gummy-popping hot mess. Something needed to be done, and fast. But what, we did not know.

Then one morning, Lola skipped up to our table and informed us that our Seb troubles were well and truly over. Just like that? Just like that. Maurice and I didn’t believe her at first – this was way before we learned that there was an awful lot more to Lola than just a pretty head and slutty dress sense – but when a sub took our photography class later on that day, and then again the day after, we both jumped to a conclusion that Lola must’ve killed Seb Brown’s stalking old ass so that the rest of us could live.

‘Eeew, you guys! I didn’t kill him – I just blackmailed him! Check this out.’

Lola pulled a little plastic bag out of her camera caboodle and dangled it in front of our faces. I couldn’t quite work out what I was looking at for like a second or two, guess my brain was trying to spare me the horrible truth. But then it hit me and I practically threw up all over my brand new suit, a stitch for stich replica of the one worn by PJ in her iconic video for This Is Love.

‘Is that...?’ Maurice choked with laughter.

Lola nodded. ‘Yep! I kept the condom! Don’t think Seb will be returning to Rushmore Institute of Art and Design any time soon. Not if he knows what’s good for him!’

UNBOUND

English. Romantic. Poetry.

Not Bukowski, not Ahmatova, not Baudelaire, not even Ginsberg.

English.

Romantic.

Poetry.

We’re the first creatures to crawl out from the underbelly of the New Millennium; the damned leftovers of the Old World; the budding monsters raised from hell to put this mutilated place out of its miserable existence. And still, this bland piece of Millennial quiche is trying to feed us romantic verse.

Well, I don’t bloody think so.

I open Tokyo Ghoul, Vol. 11. Another note slides by. CAN’T GO ON LIVING LIKE THIS!!! A crooked cock pokes out of the corner. LET’S DO SOMETHING KRAZY!!! Another cock, bit bigger and straighter, with a pair of gigantic hairy balls hovers over the word KRAZY.

That’s just how the weather rolls around these shores, I guess. Constantly raining cocks and balls.

‘Prometheus Unbound is a closet drama,’ drones Lacey. ‘Can anyone tell me the meaning of this term?’

‘It’s gay, innit,’ says King Grime. Real name William Gunsborough, he has changed it by deed poll as soon as he turned sixteen. Said it would help launch his rap slash acting career. The world’s still holding its breath.

‘How so?’ asks Lacey.

‘It’s set in the olden times,’ Maddie steps in. ‘When homosexuality was still illegal.’

‘This is such a waste of time,’ says Octavia the 1st. Who’s not actually first in anything, except maybe pointing out the obvious. Her title is down to another Octavia breezing through our class last winter, on her way to somewhere far more exotic (I want to say Bulgaria?). So naturally, some mastermind came up with the bright idea of stamping each Octavia with her very own reference number. Bit like Auschwitz, except no ink nor blood got spilled, only a few cheap brain cells. With Octavia the 2nd long gone, you’d think Octavia the 1st would be glad of the opportunity to lose the Mad Hatter title. But no. She stuck to it like a limpet and even developed a super elaborate signature to accommodate the 1st.

‘What makes you say that, Octavia?’ asks Lacey.

‘Not one person in here possesses enough verbal-linguistic intelligence to process an entire poem,’ replies Octavia the 1st. ‘We’re the visual-spatials, for Christ’s sake! We don’t read!’

‘True,’ says Lola.

‘True,’ says King Grime.

‘Er,’ I say.

‘Octavia’s right,’ says Quiet Boy. ‘We don’t communicate with words, we connect via colours and images, pictures and maps.’

‘What he said,’ says King Grime. ‘So can we watch Straight Outta Compton?’

Lacey stares at him, her mouth agape.

BORED NOW.

Seriously.

Anywhere but here.

Anything but this.

I catch up with Maurice and Lola after the class. ‘Fancy doing something tonight?’

‘Sorry, babes,’ says Lola. ‘I have a date.’

‘Ditch it!’ I say. ‘Come on! You said you wanted to do something krazy with a k!’

‘That was me, actually,’ says Maurice. ‘But no can do. Mum’s hitting another deadline, so I’m cooking tonight. Catalan fish stew. Fancy?’

‘Yeah, think I’ll just head home.’ I’ve seen Barbara on a deadline. Not a pretty sight. ‘But thanks.’

Maurice applies more lip gloss, takes another selfie, frowns at his phone. ‘Why hasn’t anyone told me I’ve uglified?’

‘Babes!’ says Lola. ‘You’re a beautiful!’

‘Aw,’ goes Maurice, pursing his glistening lips. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Ask your 40k TikTok followers,’ says Lola. ‘Who fucking adore you.’

‘Thanks, sugar,’ says Maurice. ‘Means everything.’

King Grime wanders over, slides his arm around Lola’s waist. ‘Want to be in my porno?’

‘Fuck off, Grime!’ Lola pushes him out of the way and walks off like she means it.

‘Your loss, innit!’ King Grime yells after her. He winks at Maurice. ‘How about you, bruv?’

Maurice lights up. ‘Me? Seriously? Well, I suppose—’

‘Have to warn you, though, this ain’t no batty boy movie. You’ll have to lick them pussiholes.’

‘Ew!’ Maurice slams shut his locker door, then storms off after Lola.

King Grime looks me up and down. ‘Don’t you be giving me them begging eyes, girl! You’re way too scrawny to make it in the porn industry.’

‘So you make pornos now?’ I ask.

‘Flipping burgers ain’t gonna finance no music career.’ He squints at me through a finger frame. ‘S’pose I could always put you through a Kardashian filter and that, then let the post-production deal.’

I turn to make a dramatic exit of my own, but the corridor is suddenly filled with students aimlessly milling around, like a flock of lost sheep, cruising for bruising, loitering without intent and forcing me to lean against the wall and wait for the coast to clear.

‘Check you out, bruv,’ says King Grime. ‘All dressed up and nowhere to go.’

KIDNAPPED

I’m sitting in the meadow on the top of Rushmore Hill, taking a breather from the rest of the world. The grass here is the right shade of green, lush and tall, and sprinkled with red poppies and lilac thistles and wild daisies. Makes a nice difference from the Truman Show set-piece lawns of the rest