"The fires had started three years ago. Speculation was rife as to how, but to us it was irrelevant. A rubbish-tip, a landfill; any of the dumping grounds that dotted the area could have provided the spark which set the region alight. For all the tension, ethnic and otherwise, that might have existed... It had been our one point of commonality that had been the catalyst; waste, and decay. The accumulated debris of two and a half million people, undergoing a steady degradation themselves each day, discarding then being discarded - more and more of them surplus to societies' requirements. Jay had felt it once. The pressure of the obsolete, the useless, hammering on the gates of real existence. 'When there's no more room in Hell,' he'd joked 'the dead will walk West Brom.'

Now a fire had started that consumed that debris, fed off the discarded in a way which trade-unions, bigotry and faith never had. Those flames all burned people, but this one needed only oxygen and the slime trail of their existence. Denied our chance to burn out, the young had no choice but to stand and watch - to grow old and fade away into the caustic billowing clouds of inky smoke, from an inferno that no even rivers of blood could ever extinguish.

The fires of tyres and plastic had ripped through the land-fills and the tips, and ignited an industrial heritage; Coal fields abandoned and built upon, the goal of the seeking tunnels which wormed their way through the bedrock of my home town. Steam poured from the lakes of reclaimed parks, as the flooded pit shafts beneath them began to burn, and smoke and flames from manholes and the thick forests of nettles that choked the chasms of old bore holes. Petrol boiled and exploded in the subterranean tanks of filling stations, warmed red-hot from contact with the smoldering arethracite. As the very ground was consumed, roads cracked and shifted as subsidence corroded already mine riddled foundations. And where the seams lay closest to the surface, coal gas seeped through the ruins of collapsed houses and through inches of charred top soil. Walsall became just another circle of hell."

The above (with a few alterations) was a fragment of prose from a longer short story I never finished, written about the 10th of July last year. The date is probably optimistic, since I wrote even less then, and it probably accumulated over a few days. The aim was to lay the foundations for my concept of a Birmingham Gothic style, which requires both a suspension of disbelief and a sense of folk tradition, which I think the concept of a burning Industrial town provides. The catastrophe actually happened, in a town in America which I suspect provided part of the inspiration for the moody atmosphere of Silent Hill. The setting is something which I intend to expand upon later, and is somewhat recurrent in my other short stories.

Tune of the moment: Only Skin - Joanna Newsom

Jac

Labels: fiction