24. BENCH

I found a bench in the graveyard above the church. All was still. I could not hear proceedings from the wedding ceremony. I put my head down between my legs and tuned in to the clicking of my metal heart valve, comforted by the thought of the ball rolling backwards and forwards in its little cage. Click, click, cli click. Like the tinny rattle from a teenager listening to rap on a Walkman three rows behind you on the bus. There was traffic sound audible from the cobbled road a block away, and a river. I was starting to recover.

After a minute or two I was back on my phone, reading through the Kompetition pamphlet. A different phone: “For the next thirty minutes I’m going to give you a special phone number”. From a quick glance over both sides of the sheet there was no phone number. There was marker pen scrawl on both sides and a layer of Calton Road grime. The graphic in the centre of the sheet, thickly bordered in black, like a funeral announcement, was a cartoon pyramid and the words “THE KLF RE-ENACTMENT SOCIETY” printed above a more densely populated section in smaller font.

I heard the church door opening. My head still between my knees, I craned my neck and saw two ushers talking quietly, pointing to the drivers smoking by their cars. I read faster. “How can I improve my swimming skills?” and “Will AI develop empathy during 2023?” An email address. On the other side some detail on books that I did not recognise, some unknown names and very familiar places – Jura, Laggan, Newtonmore, Cape Wrath. A circuitous route if ever there was one. At the end: “the Kompetition rules over the page”, and I am back to swimming and AI.

Familiar faces were leaving the church, and I could make out the groom (AKA The Photographer) and, as people’s heads moved, the bride. I shifted along the bench to make myself less conspicuous and kept reading. My own wife’s voice appeared like Jiminy Cricket, advising me to return to the church and join her to exit the church and congratulate the happy couple. I kept reading. Dusk was falling. I was an old man recovering from overexerting myself. I heard the crunch of gravel, and a yell. The Photographer striding up, shouting “What the F*** is going on with you?”

THE BENEFAKTOR

As retrieved by GANTOB, adding some asterisks

17 October 2023