Boxing Day

I've been putting in 8-hour days on the final draft of "Smith's Replacement" for Film Agency Wales. 

Worked all Christmas Eve. 

Kept at it from 8am to 5pm Christmas Day. Took an hour's break to unwrap my presents, tuck into a slice of cake and have a dram of Caol Ila to fortify my Muse.

Then worked until midnight.

I managed to get done what I needed doing, so Boxing Day I was up with the sun and I headed into the foothills of west Tokyo to go hiking with a friend.

We trekked past mossy shrines and sacred trees wrapped in thick hemp ropes. Paid our respects to shave-headed monks meditating under icy waterfalls. Rested for hand-made soba noodles on top of Mount Takao with fresh-pickled mountain vegetables and wasabi hot enough to turn cold the sweat on my back.

We hiked another three hours across a ridge line to a lake where homeless men fished for trout. Filleted them straight from the hook and ate them raw washed down with shochu from a three liter jug.

We were back in the city by five o'clock. Central Shinjuku. Four hundred thousand people an hour.

We stopped for a stand-up can of Kirin. Jostled by the crowds. Patent leather shoes stepping on our boots. The mud and gravel still caked on their soles.

A good day. A good way to end the year.

Great Balls of Steel - Part 3

Catholic eternity:

a massive metal sphere

and a sparrow

that lands upon it

once a decade,

brushing it

with its wings

until it is reduced

by the end of time

to a small steel ball precisely eleven millimetres across.

 

 

I wake up. Heart pounding. Blondeboy has his hanky beneath his nose and he’s laughing.

I jump up, swing at him, miss, sit down, apologise, rub the sleep from my eyes. I check my watch: it’s seven forty. I’m beginning to get my bearings. I check the LED counter; it’s up to 15,000. I’ve hit Fever three times in my sleep.

Blondeboy offers me his last bottle of nicotine drink. I down it in one. Ten minutes later it hits me like a pack of Marlboro Reds. At eight o’clock I’m squirming in my seat. The DJ’s playing some deep trance. The balls are leaving traces on my retinas thick as pressure lines on a typhoon weather map.

I lock my hand around the wheel for the next seventy minutes.

 

Last summer in Saitama, a housewife left her toddler twins in the car while she popped into a local parlour for a couple of rounds. She was in there for three hours. When she left the parlour, the kids had suffocated like a couple of dogs in a supermarket car park.

At 9:40pm, the MC announces closing time’s coming soon.

Blondeboy’s still next to me. His counter’s reading 990. He’s taken the bottle-top off the wheel and he’s firing off the balls manually in salvoes of five or six. Nothing hits home. He bums a cigarette off me, breaks off the filter, smokes it down to a stub in four fiery drags.

At 9:55, the techno music cuts mid-track and Auld Lang Syne starts up, our cue to pack up our shit and get the hell home. Blondeboy’s got 100 balls left. His eyes are orange from nicotine. There’s a twitch in his left cheek. That guy in Hokkaido must have looked like this before he copped it.

Blondeboy grips the wheel and shoots off the last hundred balls one after another into the maze of nails. It takes less than a minute. The counter drops to zero and starts flashing. He takes his hand off the wheel and lays it on the plate glass. The balls hang there for an instant, then begin to drop. He traces their fall with the tips of his rusty fingers. They slide down the face of the machine as though the nails weren’t even there.

 

taktaktaktaktak,

taktaktak – taktak – tak –tak

tak – chikusho – shit!

[he mutters - a perfect haiku]

 

Me, I enter the final tally into the producer’s computer. I’ve been in there for twelve hours. I’ve done better.

 

10:03pm : 10,062.