Ian Macartney: Three Short Stories

Routemaster Fleet

The armada sped through the night of Great Britain, silent, to
exit into our mutual national lump below North Circular
where they would loop until the next update, the greatest
future yet. But they also rode through the morning and noon
and dusk and sunrises next over – ten hours, from the amber
twinkle against the glass pillar on each vehicle’s rump in
Glasgow and its factories, to Lancaster, where families and
children waved them through main streets, empty of
commuters. N., this former lover of mine, told me he could
remember being a teenager, fourteen or so, when they
trundled by Lancaster. He grew up there. We were lying in his
bed in his flat in Surrey Quays, one of the two times before we
decided to just be friends. He seemed yoked to London and its
self-perpetuating imagery – he was to begin his job doing
admin for the Tate Modern in a handful of months. Insane, to
me, how London could change its image so easily, that pillar
of glass amidst the icon-red, the red of a stop sign, semiosis-
red. But not easy, also, because it took the entire country
either in its observation, or direct manufacturing, to make
these shifts so. All roads led to the web of London – it was an
uphill battle to unthink that and so many other assumptions
about the capital. Who mastered this route, huh? There was a
limp breeze to all Londoner self-fashioning, I felt while living
there. That city did not have to stake its claim. All else seemed
grey or silver and grey against red shells, is what I mean, and
because I haven’t spoken to N. in years it is hard to know if
this is the sweeping away of distant objects, a red buoy in a
blue tide, arbitrary distinctions we make with our eyes, i.e.
unthinking, like when you rush through a gallery, impatient
for a profound experience. The Tate Modern, as I told
N. that night, has my favourite painting of all time –
Untitled (Bacchus) by Cy Twombly. It is red. That’s it. Red in
loops and loops, blood or wine. However tourist-packed the
rest of that Brutalist institution may be, the room the painting
lived in was always quiet, chapel-quiet, as quiet as a
Routemaster in Newcastle or Birmingham or Leeds or
wherever else, London in not-London, the distance of transit
gloriously empty.

a

A Very Small Domestic Drama

Her Husband was building a matchstick model of Paris. His
Wife sipped whisky, straight, watching. How she wished to
strike out and set her Husband’s toupee on fire! She sauntered
towards him and, well, you can guess the rest – humans went
extinct, the oceans swelled, continents redecorated. Weather
went a bit jungle until, suddenly, two future-dinosaurs (let’s
call them Jerry and Flo) wandered their garden for a bit, until
they too had a domestic with some neighbouring meteorite.
The Universe scrapped it all; the wallpaper was torn apart, so
to speak. In response the Great Soul (let’s call them Sandy)
put all dust in one corner to bake for a while, aiming to forget
to take it out. Space-time went all cosmic beige, as a
consequence, dipping over to the Beyond, too much. A
decommission was authorised. We regret to inform you that
Nothing is Everything.... which is when the Lottery came in.
Quantum foam made a chance and chose, as per no grander
impulse than itself, a certain matchstick model of Paris, except
now the wife was happy and each matchstick spanned light
years. The city was not known as Paris, nor the City, but the
Model, for the Model survived all previous conceptions, inert
and stoic and outstanding, all of Existence modelled
thereafter after this. Believe me, it was preferable to what
churned before.

England vs. Scotland, New Cross, June 2022 (32 nd )

Of course I remember the miracle like it were yesterday. Back
then I was within my six-month stint in London – that pub,
The Rose, was right beside my rigid flat, a communal kitchen
with strangers, dormitories of a sort. The Scotland-England
football game was on their huge screen, always propped up for
moments like this in the height of summer. I don’t need to go
into details – quantum physicists exist for that – but,
essentially, in a flash, the score was poised between 1 and 0,
somehow, muddied ball suspended on one side’s net, but also
the other, superpositioned either off the tips of a goalie’s
fingers or the other’s other hand, or it was both or neither. In
only looking no one could tell. Injured time – it would take
generations of referees to announce the decision. So that
screen at The Rose was glitched, we thought, the game
undecided. Even to this day it goes on. Did I ever tell you
about that esoteric livestream of ours, by the way, the kinda-
occult one? Tom and I did it the year prior for a Glaswegian
charity. The main highlight was this tarot reading I gave to
Scotland. Bad results – Nine of Swords, Ten of Swords, The
Emperor. That means, Tom said, Despair, the Aftermath, the
Domain of Evil. He was the co-host at the time, technically,
but like myself drunk on whisky, so could only give me this
interpretation years later, post-London, both of us on the floor
of an Edinburgh flat party in full reckless motion (bags of
speed were out). It was a lot of young Scottish government
types, which was funny, because that night was off the heels of
my final shift as senior manager for an esteemed Scottish
cultural organisation, one of the festivals. They overworked
me before offering redundancy, then folded that December.
Anyway, that fortune-telling in the livestream, the glare of
truth from the screen, reminded me of this July miracle, the
one Westminster still discuss – the cleaving of light, blue upon
red, the goal forever in sight.

Ian Macartney can be found online at ianmacartney.scot, but for how much longer? 
Shorter work has been featured in PROTOTYPE, The Poetry Review, The Scotsman and The Guardian. Previous poetry pamphlets include sun-drunk (Stewed Rhubarb), Shale Bings (Broken Sleep Books), Darksong (Stereocat), Notes Towards No Subject (Fathomsun) and ! / Object (SPAM Press). 

Photo Credit: Russell Teapot.