OUSPENSKYVILLE

OUSPENSKYVILLE or The Ballad of Alan Borky 1.2

Several times I managed to pause just long enough to consciously make the seemingly highly sensible decision to give up and go back for the bus but it didnt matter because Id immediately find myself being involuntarily swept along as if my bodyd developed a mind and a will all its own enabling it to simply disobey me. But what really alarmed me I was going off me rocker were those moments when just for a brief instant I couldve sworn something really WAS half pushing half dragging me along almost frogmarching me against MY will to London Road deploying the icy charged gluey slipperiness of the pavements or roads whenever I literally tried to dig in my heels or battering my concentration into splinters with the Frost Giant brutality of the freezing wind and rain everytime I seemed to catch a brief glimpse through the mental roar of the million different voices and images raging in my head of what was REALLY going on.

And I mean really seriously what the fuck was I dreaming of? Back breakingly borne down by freezing wringing rags now many times their original weight every inch of me literally sodden through to the skin each extra moment I stayed out exponentially increasing my risk of catching pneumonia all for some stupid fucking book which went out of print aeons ago which I was never gono find in a shop that never existed.

But thats when the general atmosphere of sheer escalating lunacy ratcheted up another notch because as I finally turned into London Road I immediately started tryno convince meself my way was being blocked by the most
Alan Borkwood, 88 Tunnel Road, Liverpool L7 6LS, tel: 0151 709 0521

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fantastically surreal looking skyscraper Id ever seen in my life. In fact as a way of delaying admitting what I was really seeing I even managed to briefly summon up a pretty fair impression of indignation at the Council for planting something so huge there without warning anyone in advance as well as half convince myself I really did feel a certain qualified but grudging twinge of admiration for how quickly theyd managed to put the bleedin thing up while at the same time almost genuinely believing I really did feel utterly pissed off at the thought I was now gono have to go all the way round the world again.

But the truth was London Road now somehow appeared to be soaring almost vertically straight up in the sky which was utterly impossible of course hence a horde of my supposedly more rational microselves now started berating me from every direction I was seeing no such thing and it was all just London Roads pretty steep at the best of times and the unrelentingly freezing wind and rain gusting in my face was causing moisture to well up in my eyes blurring my vision and making the low levels of illumination provided by December daylight all the worse thanks to all those huge black rain and snow clouds smothering the winter sun plus I was already dead tired from all the slippery plodding Id been putting in so the daunting prospect of having to drag my weary leaden limbs up the admittedly steep hilld finally sapped any last vestige of mental stamina I had left causing me to hysterically overstate the case the hill did indeed seem SLIGHTLY steeper than normal.

But every word of that was so fucking obviously untrue another horde of loathing filled microselves were simultaneously banging on as running commentary during the similarly scary but dazzling kaleidoscopic video montage of all the other weird impossible things Id ever seen how this new
Alan Borkwood, 88 Tunnel Road, Liverpool L7 6LS, tel: 0151 709 0521

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Leaning Tower of London Road Effect was the final conclusive proof Id always been insane even as baby in me pram.

But in spite of all these and a whole host of other swarms of endless mental subcommittees dedicated to tearing me and each other apart by way of setting me straight some tiny isolated part of me struggled to keep my attention focused on the more logical rational thought no book on Earth was worth any of this outrageous preposterousness so how much more ridiculous now to put myself through the equivalent of climbing the North face of the Eiger for a purpose as pointless as fetching yesterday's fish and chip wrappers long after theyve blown away specially since Sarahs voice tea and painkillers now lay within immediate touching distance courtesy of the Empire Theatre side Lime Street Station taxi rank just round the corner.

The weird thing was though Id already long ago decided all I really wanted to do was simply plunge face down smack straight into the pavement to pass away into ice cold gluey oblivion and if I hadnt been subjected to the vertiginously insane spectacle of London Road inexplicably shooting straight up in the sky I almost certainly wouldve . But the fact the whole fucking universe was willing to start warping and spasming the very fabric of itself just to stop me going up London Road in search of some tatty old piece of barely held together bookworm riddled crap that Id never find in some imaginary shop thatd never actually existed suddenly filled me with such a seething sense of cosmic indignation I now knew no matter what NOINd be stopping me going up there. Not even the thought of the complete twat I was about to make of myself by tryno climb the soaring vertical face of London Road.
Alan Borkwood, 88 Tunnel Road, Liverpool L7 6LS, tel: 0151 709 0521

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But you know what? Id had a stomach load and didnt give a shit I was about to look as absurd as those campy Sixties TV shows where the special effects amounted to tilting the camera so Batman and Robin appeared to be walking straight up apartment blocks when they were really just shuffling long the studio floor.

In fact I was even prepared to wiggle my way up there on me bleedin belly if thats what it took even if it did mean someone might call the cops about some dangerous escaped mental patient who seemed to think he was a worm.

And fuck me even though it took a hell of a long time and a great deal of energy draining stress and countless vertigo and panic attacks tryno reach up and grab at things like shop fixtures and protective grilles as a way of gradually hoisting my way further and further up London Road I actually somehow fucking made a fair amount of progress. Oh I was both mentally and physically exhausted of course and I kept periodically having failures of nerve which left me desperately clinging to things like pillars or pavement kerbs or shop corners out of fear I might actually somehow plunge straight back down even though I knew it all had to be just an illusion and I must really be lying prostrate on the ground drowning in pools of icy rain water mixed with the gallons of the cold glutinous sweat gushing out every pore of me body something only confirmed by the visually disconcerting sight of concerned looking passers-by tottering towards me like bizarre flies making their way across highly reflective hazardously slippery bathroom tiles hence the enthusiasm with which I immediately set about thoroughly shooing them back away. And at some stage London Road even started slowly tilting back towards its normal accustomed slant necessitating my gradually
Alan Borkwood, 88 Tunnel Road, Liverpool L7 6LS, tel: 0151 709 0521

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switching to a new sort of run-jump-leap tactic in order to get past the normally narrow roads running the length of the little side streets finding though now it took just as many attempts to get up those formerly short stretches of tarmacadam as it would tryno run an assault course of extremely high and steep embankments.

So by the time I'd got to the top everythingd more or less tilted back quite close to normal though looking downhill everything still seemed somehow distinctly much steeper than on previous occasions yet in the process Id also finally established there werent any butchers or charity shops on London Road.

Yet what does soft shite do instead of heading straight for home Sarah's voice and painkillers? I somehow manage to get the idea in my head there was a possibility I mightve momentarily blacked out somewhere on the way up making me miss some key detail hence rather insanely I now started grudgingly trudging all the way back down.

But round the middle of my descent I finally realized what I'd taken for a butchers-cum-charity shop was really a sandwich shop and there in a narrow side window adjacent to the main window display of sliced meats sandwiches and various cooked foods were the books recorded on the video carefully arranged around a peculiar display of pendant length crystals raw mineral samples and various semi-precious stones laying on a bed of dirty crumpled lace.

The only thing was the books now looked so much older far more sunAlan Borkwood, 88 Tunnel Road, Liverpool L7 6LS, tel: 0151 709 0521

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bleached and very much more curlier paged than in the video not to mention covered in heavy layers of greasy dust plus none of them were the Bennett thing whichd dragged me out in the cold and the wind and the rain in the first place but the moment I spotted their authors names Gurdjief Ouspensky Collin all thoughts of Sex went straight out my mind because according to Bennett hed been involved with all three of these blokes particularly Gurdjieff and Ouspensky both of whom he styled his teachers in what he called Esoteric Psychology The Work or The Fourth Way.

And suddenly whatd at first seemed a complete waste of time now seemed positively inspired making me experience a delicious giddy almost drunken euphoria welling up inside my chest only for it to be instantly snuffed out the moment I realized I didn't so much as have the first clue why those books were there because not only were they unpriced but nothing about them even hinted they were for sale or for that matter just what their purpose was.

Worse their general yellowy discoloured condition and the enormous amount of dust theyd gradually become buried under implied they'd been put in the window long ago and maybe even completely forgotten about. Yet never mind the books why were all those semi-precious stones and crystals there? And given how the sole visible entrance only opened into the Sandwich Shop then if this really was the display for some say rarely visited second hand bookshop then where the hell was it?

Well there was always the possibility it could just be on one or both of the two floors immediately above the Sandwich Shop or then again maybe the Sandwich Shop originally started pushing the books in the hope of increasing
Alan Borkwood, 88 Tunnel Road, Liverpool L7 6LS, tel: 0151 709 0521

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the base for their potential profit margins because after all I'd bought books in health food shops at least once and maybe when no one showed sufficient interest in buying them the Sandwich Shops interest in selling them gradually tapered off hence their apparently neglected condition.

But that didnt automatically mean they were no longer for sale even though again it was also true they werent priced but they had to belong to someone and had to be there for a reason so maybe if I just hung around outside long enough someone might eventually emerge with a book in their hand and if I worked up sufficient courage to breach the subject what the hell was going on I might actually find out. There was even the possibility someone might actually quench my burning curiosity why that peculiar tatty faded A-4 sized poster Id just noticed of the Sufi Enneagram diagram mentioned by Idries Shah was there.

Yet the longer I stood there on my hideously pain-wracked new-shoed feet exhausted and drenched and buffeted by freezing ice-charged blustery rain moment by moment minutely scanning each and every tiny detail of anyone who even so much as dared to think about scurrying past me into the shop it became all too increasingly obvious not so much as a single bastarding customer was ever gono come out with anything other than plain white/faintly pastel grease-marked medium-sized paper bags stuffed with sandwiches or microwave heated pasties or sausage rolls and/or semi-opaque plastic-capped plain white polystyrene cartons of boiling soup or tea trailing huge clouds of snowy white steam behind them.

The other thing seriously starting to get on my tits was the way each time the
Alan Borkwood, 88 Tunnel Road, Liverpool L7 6LS, tel: 0151 709 0521

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door exploded open it was to the accompaniment of this hideous infernal oldfashioned brass-toned monotonously recurring skull bone penetrating brain jarring jingly K-TCHING! And for all the times the damned thingd set my nervesd jangling all I ever managed to catch was an all too brief glimpse inside the shop of trays of food and a seemingly endless row of drenched bedraggled people waiting for that food but of books or book buyers saw I none. Nor was there any sort indication of a way up to the hypothetical upper storey bookshop Id grown less and less confident of the existence of and right smack where such a way upd have to be there was a bloody great industrial sized alternately gleaming and glistening stainless steel urn operated by a pretty young pony-tailed female sales assistant whod periodically all but vanish under huge great mountain sized cotton-woolly clouds of snow white steam every time she dispensed boiling water from its tap for what I initially assumed to be tea or coffee until my quivering nostrils started detecting on the air a peculiar sequence of cheap smelling but also somehow deeply nourishingly pleasant chemically tinged warm air wafts which I eventually reinterpreted as the delicious smell of various economy brand packet soups. And yet normally I wouldnt be able to so much as stand the smell of such soup especially minestrone.

Meanwhile as I continued pondering the mystery of the missing bookshop it gradually dawned on me various girls Id been observing servingd also been observing me seemingly becoming increasingly agitated by my incessant use of my hands to vainly hold up or push aside the continuously renewed curtains of rain blurring my main window view of the shops interior. And of course the moment I tried to stop myself doing this I only found myself doing it all the more compulsively resulting in the girls' generally agitated state now
Alan Borkwood, 88 Tunnel Road, Liverpool L7 6LS, tel: 0151 709 0521

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ratcheting up to a positive frenzy which in turn only served to increase my own already exponentially growing anxiety they might actually believe it was them I was staring at though I managed to momentarily calm myself down by pointing out they might just think I was a robber casing the joint for all those semi-precious stones in the other window. Until it suddenly hit me they might think I was a robber AND a pervert!

At which point a somehow extra loud and harsh K-TCHING! announced an enormous great bearded police constable was now hurtling out the Sandwich Shop door in my direction setting my entire body quivering like a giant gong as I went into a state of complete catastrophic shock from which I only even began thinking of recovering long long after hed strode past me on his way back to the police station just round the corner his hands filled with cartons of snowy white steam surrounded boiling hot minestrone plus a variety of grease stained bags of scalding microwave heated food but NO books.

And now youre probably thinking this was me not going to Widnes to see Sarah all over again because the obvious answer all alongd been to simply go inside and ask how to get upstairs to the hypothetical bookshop or maybe even more straight-forwardly simply ask what the hell the books and crystals were there for in the first place?

And I quite agree that would've been the logical rational SANE thing to do but alas since my earliest teens I've often been prone to outbursts of hysteria verging on utter insanity becoming at such times tortured by the idea what other people might be thinking of me hence I now decided before I actually went in the shop itd be best to avoid any possibility of making a fool of
Alan Borkwood, 88 Tunnel Road, Liverpool L7 6LS, tel: 0151 709 0521

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myself by say accidentally confirming any notions the girls might have about me being a jewel-thieving pervert by neurotically rehearsing over and over in my head every conceivable slip up I could make.

For instance wouldnt I look incredibly stupid if I asked how to get upstairs when the way up was right there in front of me yet somehow Id failed to see it? And how much more of a twat Id look if the way up was then clearly pointed out to me in the form of some huge glowing neon diagram right there on the wall but somehow I still couldn't see it? Or what if there wasn't a way up at all? That is there wasnt a public one because what if upstairs wasn't open to the public because it was actually the shopkeeper's living quarters? Or what if the reason why there was no obvious way up was because somehow I was only imagining there were upstairs floors? What if what I took to be upper floors were really some sort of internationally famous Victorian decorative architectural faade landmark like the Liver Birds which everyone on the planet knew about except me? Or what if there wasn't really a faade at all and it was just a stress induced trick of my highly strained imagination?

Of course the easiest way to avoid any or all those potential faux pas was to simply concentrate on asking about the books in the window yet what if it thanks to searching so long for the Bennett book I'd actually started hallucinating the bastards and everyoned be staring at me thinking what fucking books? O god thatd be just the worse thing possible. I mean I'd never be able to show my face in London Road again.

Oh well I now concluded with a rather heavy-hearted sigh perhaps itd be best
Alan Borkwood, 88 Tunnel Road, Liverpool L7 6LS, tel: 0151 709 0521

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if I just forgot the whole thing and went home because after all I could always come back tomorrow.

But since tomorrow was Sunday and I couldnt come back tomorrow surely that was the final confirmation I either needed to fall face down on the floor and die or book meself a long spell in a padded cell in the hope I might at least slow the clear degeneration of my mental faculties. But lights cameras action! That final self-loathing self-defeating observation turned out to be the cue for another part of me to kick in.

You see this tendency I had to allow myself to be manipulated by what I imagined other people might be thinking about med been such a longstanding source of intense resentment with me sooner or later I'd always eventually react by making a particularly ferocious effort to do the very thing I thought I was deterring myself from. Hence re-energized I now boldly bounced into the shop determined to ask about the books only to realize the moment the now seemingly Big Ben-sized K-TCHING! bone-judderingly rang out not only were the suddenly pinhole-sized pupils of everyone in the place seemingly hostilely fixed on me but my larger-than-life alter egod shrivelled back out of existence taking my vocal chords with him enabling my considerable capacity for sheer naked gutlessness to instantly reassert itself leaving me now at the wrong end of an extremely long line of weary looking drenched people queuing for a sandwich I didn't actually want.

Alan Borkwood, 88 Tunnel Road, Liverpool L7 6LS, tel: 0151 709 0521

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