Forget Yourself Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  FORGET YOURSELF | Redfern Jon Barrett

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  Part One

  -

  This Is Everything

  A Minor Corner

  The Blink Rations

  Mushed Teabags

  The Book

  A New Corner of the World

  Casino

  Origin

  PART TWO

  Part Two

  -

  Frederick

  Purple

  The First Rations

  Lost Apples

  Confess

  The Real City

  Expanding

  PART THREE

  Part Three

  -

  Two Hundred Eyes

  Gold

  An Answer

  Remember

  Pilsner

  A Whole New Crime

  PART FOUR

  Part Four

  -

  Theft

  Buried

  Drowned

  I Love You

  Spinning Won't Help

  PART FIVE

  Part Five

  -

  A Wedding

  Burned

  Miss A Stitch

  The Triangle Hut

  Severe

  Watching

  Orange

  PART SIX

  Part Six

  -

  Fluttering

  The Book

  Luxuries

  EPILOGUE

  Epilogue

  -

  About The Author

  Published by LETHE PRESS

  118 Heritage Ave, Maple Shade, NJ 08052

  lethepressbooks.com

  Copyright © 2013, 2016 Redfern Jon Barrett

  ISBN: 9781590213643

  No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any

  means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and

  recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without

  permission in writing from the Author or Publisher.

  Cover and interior design

  by INKSPIRAL DESIGN

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Barrett, Redfern Jon, 1984- author.

  Title: Forget yourself / Redfern Jon Barrett.

  Description: Lethe Press edition. | Maple Shade, NJ : Lethe Press, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015045333 | ISBN 9781590213643

  (softcover : acid-free paper)

  Classification: LCC PR6102.A7749 F67 2016 | DDC 823/.92--dc23 k12

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015045333

  I AM LIVING IN A HOLE. I am living in a hole in the ground. This is where they put me, though I don’t really know who I am and I will be someone else pretty soon.

  Tarp above; mud below. I am less of a nuisance here.

  It is important that you know: I love you.

  Of course I have no idea who you are.

  But I have no real idea who I am either, so it seems fair to me.

  Will you think of me, holding you? I have blonde hair that reaches my shoulders and I am of an average stature—though of course my definition of average will be misleading. I have the long fingers of a thief.

  I love you because here, in this hole, that is all I have. Love and earth and rainwater. Perhaps you aren’t real. That doesn’t matter.

  I will still hold you.

  Will you let me?

  I am not dangerous.

  Tomorrow I will wake up someone new. The same damp earth will be under the same toes; the same fingers will clutch the same food and bring it to the same lips. But someone else will taste it.

  The same eyes with someone else’s vision.

  The same brain with someone else’s thoughts.

  For me,

  for Blondee,

  this is the end.

  I have tonight. Tonight is all I have left.

  These hours are for me, for my story.

  About how I broke the world.

  IT STARTED WITH A BREAKUP—I imagine that to be common. The book tells us how breakups should happen.

  If one person cheats, the other breaks up with them.

  It’s simple enough, and happens to be the first proverb on love in the book. Page 15, written in purple biro. Someone I didn’t know had remembered it and written it down.

  I had loved her, as far as I could tell; but she couldn’t believe it. She lashed her tongue to all who would listen: Blondee is cheating. Blondee is cheating with Tie. Even after he was dead—especially after he was dead.

  ‘Never cheat’, says the book. What exactly cheating was, well, that was not so clear. My body—my full hips and thighs and too-small breasts—those I had shared only with her.

  But my mind?

  Tie had been there from the very start.

  When people arrive here—awakening from a death-sleep which was the end of their old life—they are named by the clues they came with. I had nothing. Nothing but mid-length blonde hair. I was naked. It was how I came into the world.

  So I was called Blondee.

  I remember a small crowd. I was in the courtyard at the centre of the compound; a single water tap, some broken flagstones, and three-dozen old vacuum-tubes hammered into a row to form a fence. I wanted to know who I was. My skull throbbed. I had memories, but none of them were personal, none of them were really mine, and they were flat, two-dimensional, meaningless. I knew what bread was, and how to clean my teeth. I knew what a city was. But there was no detail. I didn’t know my favourite type of bread or what colour my toothbrush was or even the name of a particular city. When I thought of a city I conjured up tall buildings and empty streets, a lifeless, pointless shell. Those were the memories we were left with.

  Tie was the first person who blurred into view that first time I forced open my aching eyelids. He was smiling in a kindly way. He was disturbing. I tried to cover my breasts, left with the pointless, heaving memory of shame. I was declared a minor-theft. Like I say, I have long fingers. A lot of the others were there, though I can’t recall which ones, and they were bored by my arrival. My terror was banal. Tie gave me a blanket, and someone said ‘Blondee’.

  We’re here because we’ve committed a crime—that’s what we tell ourselves. I didn’t look so bad, so my crime must have been minor. Due largely to my fingers, I must have been a thief.

  That was a long time before Ketamine came into the world. She had also been dropped in with the rations, her mind blank, a carrier-bag of possessions straddling her arm. She was thinner back then, her eyes so innocent you’d hardly have thought she’d committed a crime at all. She was declared a minor. She was pretty, with her long black hair; clearly a seductress. So her crime, she was informed, must have been minor, and it must have been sexual. In the bag was a t-shirt, the word ‘Ketamine’, white on black. That must have been her name. It was added to the back of the book with the others.

  We fell in love and she came to live in my triangle hut: a large window propped up against the outer wall of the compound. That first night she’d lain next to me, trembling and confused. She trembled on her last night with me as well.

  I knew it was over one day in particular—one of the days just after Tie’s death. We were in our triangle-home. The crisp cut of scissor scattered another flurry of tufts to the floor.

  She was cutting my hair.

  The hair gently meandered over the smooth brown-and-yellow pattern, carried by a breeze that no number of rags stuffed between gaps could ever really get rid of. Another snip and the draft caught the yellow strands at knee-height, carrying them away from us and to the
edge of the lino, which I had cut into shape and used as a rug to hide the worst of the dirt floor. Korma-flavoured noodles and home-made fuck-me-fuck-me perfume wafted through the air from next door, mingled with the tinny music from an ancient player. Ketamine’s nipple had rubbed against my arm as she leant over my neck, la-la-ing along as she inspected her work.

  I must have looked unhappy. I was thinking of Tie. Tie rotting.

  “Are you done yet?” I swept my hands down myself, my skin all tingled and itchy, the stool pressing wood and metal into my arse.

  “No, no, no,” she sang, the notes matching those caught on the air.

  It had been my idea that songs should have words, but it wasn’t something I’d be able to prove. The sun shone strong through the glass. I needed air.

  I stood up, showering my warm feet and the cold lino with hair. I almost hit my head on the shard of mirror which hung from a string.

  “I’m not done,” she squawked.

  “I am.”

  “You’re still thinking of him. Aren’t you?”

  “I am.”

  “He’s dead. He’s dead and you’re still wasting your thoughts on him. You’re with me, Blondee. You’re with me.”

  “You’re so young, Ketamine.”

  That did it. We had argued before, but not like we did that night. All night. She told me I didn’t love her. I said that her gossiping had given me a reputation: no-one trusted me. She countered that she had only told the truth. What could be wrong with the truth?

  When it ends you have break-up sex once.

  This entry comes later. I don’t know who remembered it, but they wrote it down in the book in coloured crayon smudges.

  My eyes were still wet and my throat still swollen and raw as Ketamine ran trembling fingers over my breast, pressing her face into my stomach with desperate trails of snot and tears. Short black hair tickled the spaces between my fingers so I used my hand to brush at the humiliating tears, first on my face then on hers. We had tried to make it work just to avoid this, to keep ourselves behind private glass, where other people’s memories were irrelevant.

  “Ket—” it wasn’t my voice, really it belonged elsewhere. Ketamine moved her face a nose from mine, wordless and crumpled, dripping onto my collarbone.

  No kissing, no kissing, went written words, a bullet-point below the proverb. No kissing. Break-up sex is pleasure, not love.

  When it ends you never see each other again.

  Really, this is the most impractical of rules. The world is only twenty minutes long one way and sixteen minutes the other. Ketamine and I would see each other again, as did everyone who broke up. But the book reminds us how things are done outside the compound. We have to try and act normally, even if really, we can’t. If we saw each other we’d avert our eyes or whisper ‘good morning’ at most. Eventually it would become normal. That was how everyone on the outside must have done it.

  The triangle hut was mine. She moved out.

  I didn’t remember anything about love so I had nothing to add on it to the book.

  You keep something of each other.

  This is the nicest of the love proverbs. I had no idea who had remembered it, but I truly wished I did. I wished I had been there when they wrote it, so I could gently kiss them on the ear as they pressed blunt pencil to rough paper.

  I got the t-shirt, cold and wet. She got some of my hair—the only blonde hair in the tiny world shared by a hundred of us.

  And so goes the code of love.

  THE SUN FELL HEAVY UPON my face, grimy and uninvited. The ‘Ketamine’ t-shirt was too small for me but I was wearing it anyway, hidden beneath a thick blue woollen jumper which frayed at the edges. The t-shirt was damp and squeezed me. I was perched on a small pile of bricks outside my home, watching the eleven houses around mine: each house in this section was as small as any other, but each was unique, made up of loose timber and old car doors, or maybe metal grilles and plastic tubes. It was too hot—everyone was indoors, sleeping over soft and dirty mats. All I could hear was the glistening hiss of the heat.

  Ketamine had taken her few belongings and they had been replaced by a void. It filled my home, a void somehow larger than hut, eight steps long and three steps wide. I had tried to fill the space with clutter but it was swallowed up as soon as I turned my back. So I watched the world instead. There was no danger of seeing her in this corner.

  “Get me away,” she’d spat. She’d asked to live far away, amongst the moderates, and they’d allowed her. Something about her was special. She was newest and prettiest. She was belligerent and...

  I needed to stop thinking about her. I would go for a walk.

  I lived in the corner for those whose crimes were ‘minor’. Around our corner are walls. The walls are yellowish grey, high and rounded. My triangle was in almost the very corner of our corner. I walked along by the wall, running my fingers down its length, swerving ‘round to avoid the occasional house, propped against the perimeter like mine. The air was soaked in heat but the wall, the wall was always cool. There was never any clue what lay beyond it—forests or fields—perhaps we were on a platform in the ocean, or in the very middle of a city, sound-dampeners hiding the rush of waves or people on their way to work. Whatever, it didn’t matter.

  At the start of the world, apparently, people threw things over the wall, but it made no difference. They didn’t know much at the start of the world.

  More huts, one had ornaments outside—

  A tidy garden means a tidy mind.

  Though not many even in that corner could afford such luxury—what items we had generally went indoors, where we could enjoy them. Outside was too unpredictable, when days of snow could follow the hottest evenings.

  I came to a hut made of bookshelves, piled atop one another and roughly-bound with sealant. It would be cool in there, a windowless box of bare wood. I ran my fingers over the dark grooves and varnish-coated contours which were warm and sticky beneath my fingertips.

  There was a giggle inside. My hand snapped back, my fingertips brushing the scratchy fabric of my pullover. I moved my hand between myself and the hut, hovering between the two, before pressing my palm flat onto the exposed wood once again.

  A giggle again: longer. I eased my palm away, feeling my face ache into a smile. Once more—once more I would touch it. I gripped the shelf, my fingers turning white, the sealant cracking slightly, a small cloud of dust spat toward my torso.

  “What the—”, a voice, soft and startled.

  “Is someone there?” Another voice, this one rough and battle-ready.

  Saliva filled my mouth and choked my throat. I walked on, quickly, not daring to run. A few feet away was the bush, an expansive shrub which served as the only foliage in our corner. I hid beneath it. I slid in and down toward the dusty grass. The bush boasted tiny dark-green and deep-red leaves woven together, jostling against one another with the slightest breeze. Sometimes, when it was cold, the red leaves would all flutter to the floor. Sometimes, when it was too warm, the green leaves would turn brown.

  I was almost at the border, where our lives ended and the lives of those whose crimes were ‘least’ began, with their fine houses and tremendous luxury. Between us was the courtyard, beyond that the land of those whose crimes were ‘moderate’, who had stolen from children, say, or sent an old woman to hospital. Of course our crimes weren’t that detailed but those were the clearest memories we had been left with—of violence and anarchy and deviance.

  There’s something important about our memories here—fact and theory become lost in one another, entwined, meshed together like berries and bruised vegetables.

  Take plagues. I have an idea of a plague, of suffering and blackened skin and crosses-on-doors. Whether one has ever really happened, or if only the possibility remains, I don’t know. The same is true of war—I can see soldiers, in smart-rough uniforms above heavy-booted feet, but whether soldiers have ever fought one another, well, I couldn’t say. Take earthquakes
that crumple cities, take acts of bravery, take extraordinary kindness, take mass celebration—if these are facts or ideas, in truth, is a pointless line of thought.

  We’ve been left with small acts of unkindness, of suffering that we must have caused, that we’ve known from the beginning, of crimes which turn the stomach and hide those who must have been guilty of the worst—the very worst—to the far corner, away from us, at a distance that can eventually become bearable.

  People are punished for their crimes.

  The first page. But there are variants on it in every single section of the book.

  People who inflict suffering are removed from society.

  Lifestyle. Page 69.

  Criminals are confined.

  Bodies. Page 84.

  Criminals don’t get the pleasures most do.

  Food. 99.

  It was Tie who had first explained my crime to me—poor fat Tie, bulky and heaving and sweating. I was shallow: my skin prickled in horror at the sight of him. Even so I had to ask: why was I ‘minor-theft’? ‘Minor-theft’, ‘minor-fucking-theft’. What did that mean?

  Tie had told me that it meant I wasn’t the best, but not the worst either.

  I asked him what that fucking meant.

  Tie had told me that everyone here committed a crime. My crime was minor—it did someone, somewhere some harm, but they’ll have recovered.

  I asked him who the worst were.

  He took a moment before replying, gazing at me through small sad eyes, and told me that the worst were the ‘severes’, but that I wouldn’t see much of them. Then the moderates. Then the minors, such as myself. Then the least, like himself. Least meant that whatever they did can’t have been too bad.

  He went on to tell me that I was a minor-theft. That meant I stole something, something which was probably important to someone and the theft of which will have hurt them.