The Zero Complex: Chapter 00

The Zero Complex: A Novelette

Or; The Life and Times of an Infinitesimal Zero, a London Nocturne 2022-2023

CHAPTER 00

The Sash or The Tash?

Or; On Not Recognising Recognition

Oh, I was going to tell you about how this whole David Niven theme came about, wasn’t I?

I got waylaid with pulling out my Horace.

Easily done.

I was also detained, oh so discourteously, by the psychogeography of Miss Gold’s bottom.

Understandable.

Anyway, I’m at TG again, Electrowerks, April 2023, and waiting for my pals Andy and Sophie to arrive.

I spot a very tall moving structure.

About 6’8”

It’s breathing.

I think it might have agency.

Come on, contact lenses, do your work for me.

It’s John!

Yup, it’s John, he’s wearing a TG sash.

Well, I always like having a chat with John.

Let’s go and have a chat.

On this occasion, we have a gentle conversational excursion around-and-about London venues, the closing of London venues, the renaming of London venues, the refurbishment of London venues, and the construction of installations within London venues.

We’re getting seriously Historiographically Psychogeographical.

In the middle of our discussion over whether Monster Queen’s new venue is called The Dome or The Assembly Rooms, I notice something:

Hello, hello!

Oi, oi, oi, - that wasn’t there before!

That’s new!

Well, cognitive narratologists say that a reader’s attention can be drawn towards new unexpected details.

And we have one right here!

See where I’m pointing?

No, not there, here!

Right here! Look!

John’s grown a moustache!

John’s grown a moustache and I still recognised him!

Uncanny!

Strange but true.

Suits him too.

Now that doesn’t happen to me.

Shortly after the pandemic restrictions were lifted I realised that the expanding waistline I had accrued disallowed me to jump back into my row of pre-pandemic carefully-selected day suits.

So, I wrote this Facebook ‘status-update’:

‘I’m looking at a row of suits that suit me but don’t fit me.

It’s just as well I’ve grown a David Niven moustache that fits me but doesn’t suit me.’

But the snag is far more terrifying than the aesthetics of what fits and suits!

Whenever I alter my facial hair, or my hairstyle, my whole face changes.

When the my facial hair arrangement is repositioned, my face suffers a crisis of physiognomy.

My face is sort of sucked into a blender!

Or G-force wind-tunnel.

Or vortex.

My face becomes plasticine.

It enters the Twilight Zone.

I become unrecognisable.

I become someone else.

I misfit.

In a visibly sequential invisible way.

You know, like a Blunt, Burgess, Philby and Maclean.

Or Sidney Reilly crossing border controls.

Or Aery Neave’s costume changes on his way back to Blighty from Colditz Castle.

Or the superhero, Inspector Clouseau!

I walk through a transformation portal or spin in a rotating identity door!

Far more complex than a mere costume change in a telephone box. (And, anyway, Clark Kent would be really stuffed these days considering telephone boxes are disused museum pieces.)

Maybe I’m more like Mr. Benn: bowler-hatted psychedelic dude.

Or maybe just Walter Mitty?

…

‘Oh, my God, your brother’s a chameleon,’ says Bella’s hairdresser a few years ago, ‘He’s different in every photo!’

[Prompts me to undertake David Bowie impressions for five minutes in Bella’s kitchen by singing, ‘Ch-Ch-Changes. D-D-Davids’, and positioning my hands in avant-garde ways in the manner of the album cover, ‘H-H-Heroes’.]

And two weeks ago:

‘But that’s not you,’ says Chris, who’s known me since 1991, looking at the Samhain ‘Slimelight’ photo by No One Studio. ‘Jesus. You’ve shown me four photos from the last three years and you look like a completely different person in each one! And, actually, the real you sitting in front of me looks different to all of them!’

‘It’s a real snag, mate. It could be fun having a Proteus-Complex but if fuckers don’t recognise you in the clubsthen you end up with a Zero-Complex! You feel like a right dropout. You know, dropout in an uncool way, rather than a Timothy Leary “tune-in, man” way. Andrew Eldritch got that re-writing nailed.’

‘Actually, you look Irish in that Irish one, funnily enough.’

‘Yeah, I do, don’t I? I look as though I’m desperately torn between making a joke, or telling a wise shaggy-dog story, or starting a violently good-humoured destructive pub brawl, or writing an intricately constructed and perfectly justified damning critique of English colonialism under the reign of Elizabeth I. Not that I’m stereotyping, of course. But I’m allowed to stereotype, now that I am Irish… Officially.’

‘But this one. Ha ha ha! It’s “Sergeant Pepper” or some eighteenth-century hussar! Hurrah! Can’t believe you looked like that a year and a half ago.’

‘Cookson thinks it’s very pop star. That gazing into the distance pose. It’s no wonder why plumbers coming to fix my pipework mistake me for a musician.’

…

So, there you have a glimpse.

Or two.

But the real coincidence about this TG-moustache-business is that Mr Matheson’s partner, Mia-Jane, said to me no less than four weeks ago at Monster Queen at The Camden Assembly Rooms, or The Dome (as John would prefer), long after my David Niven moustache had disappeared and been superseded by a new, and what I thought to be a uniquely dramatic, facial hair arrangement:

‘Aaaah! You look like Ian Dury! He looks like Ian Dury! Ian Dury! Doesn’t he look like Ian Dury?’

‘Erm?’

Now, this comparison had me totally baffled.

For a while.

But three weeks later, and only a week before this TG Matheson-moustache fiasco, I discovered a very telling photograph of Mr Ian Dury, and I solved a major misrecognition-recognition puzzle.

But let’s pause that episode for the moment because I need to tell you about the improbability of the other coincidence:

So I’m in the middle of telling John an instantly forgettable story about the 2022 TG Valentine’s photograph where my David Niven moustache played a prominent active role and, just on cue, Andy arrives!

Andy and John hug.

Hug time!

‘Ooh, you smell nice!’ says John.

They re-hug so John can dive in for a second sniff.

‘Aah. Special aftershave this. From a special seller!’ Andy replies, grinning.

I get excited: ‘Ooh, Andy, Andy, you mean Geo F. Trumper, don’t you?’

‘That’s the one!’ Andy winks.

‘Oh, John, John, John, this is the same shop where I bought my special Godsend upper-lip Merkur mini-razor for my David Niven moustache! The one I was just telling you about a second ago! The very same seller! Oh, the happy coincidence! Oh joyous joy! “Oh, frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”’

Would you believe it, eh?

What are the odds?

These suspicious coincidences would send both Paddy Power algorithms and GCHQ surveillance systems into a frenzy.

Or send Richard Matheson into penning another Twilight Zone.

Or send Aristotle into a nervous breakdown about the art of plot construction.

Mimesis? Shove it!

I tell you, ‘if this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as improbable fiction’.

…

…

Dramaticool Interludicool:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N99S8n2TiA

Not I

Before I lose my way by falling down a narrative hole, leaving only my lips illuminated in the darkness, let’s skip and trip to Monster Queen’s new venue at The Assembly Rooms.

Context is all, some say, so let’s be really precise:

June 2020:

Full Beard

June 2021:

Angled Sideburns, Goatee, plus Moustache

February 2022:

David Niven Moustache

July 2022:

Absence of David Niven Moustache

December 2022-April 2023:

Angled Sideburns, Small Goatee, No Niven

…

Let’s remember, at each stage, I look like a totally different person.

Nothing like the reconstruction of history, nothing like it. I wonder if there are any historiographical flaws of methodology? I don’t think I’m being ‘Revisionist’.

…

Anyway, Monster Queen:

Mia-Jane in corridor:

‘Aaaah! You look like Ian Dury! He looks like Ian Dury! Ian Dury! Doesn’t he look like Ian Dury?’

‘Erm?’

‘Ian Dury?

‘Yup, you look just like him. Has no one ever said that?’

‘Nope. But, Hi! I met you at TG. NNYE!’

‘Erm?’

‘You don’t remember me!’

‘Eeeh?’

‘I was wearing an Art Nouveau suit. Flowers?’

‘Um?’

‘Oh.’

‘You look like Ian Dury! Doesn’t he look like Ian Dury? He looks like Ian Dury!’

Mia-Jane doesn’t remember me.

The thing is, I haven’t changed my facial hair since December.

Now, she didn’t say I looked like Ian Dury at TG NNYE in December but I clearly look like him now at MQ in March.

And I’ve only changed costumes!

Admittedly, the costume has skipped thirty years of art history from Art Nouveau to Art Deco, but that’s it!

So, hold on; I now look more like Ian Dury than I look like me and myself only three months ago.

Let’s rephrase this for clarity’s sake:

I look more like Ian Dury than I look like myself if myself were to be compared to myself as myself if myself was face-to-face with myself.

Bewildering, eh?

This is serious.

Very serious.

I’m a Zero.

Again.

Identity, vanished!

Fuck, this is so surreal, there’s only one thing for it.

There’s only one thing that can be done that would make sense of this rupture in the phenomenology of the universe.

Channel the weirdest thing that’s ever been written in the history of rephenomenoligising the universe…

Channel J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition vibes!

A radical solution to a radical problem.

Off we go…

The Ian Dury Rhytidoplasty Kit:

Or, Plan for The Re-Assassination of ‘mr peril’.

1) Narrow Short Goatee Beard, One, on Chin-Tip

2) High Angled Sideburns, Two

3) No Moustache, None, - No Trace of Niven

4) Messy Quiff, Raffish

5) Brown Eyes, Manic – Two

6) Earing, One, Right Earlobe

7) Grey Bags Under Eyes, Unhallowed - Two

8) White Shirt, Very High Collars, Dashing , - Regency

9) One Suit Waistcoat, Modern, Black

10) Shirt Armbands, (Nice Touch), Black, - Two

P.S.) A Winning Smile, One, - Disreputable

And:

P.P.S.) Unbridled Coruscating Wit

…

Oh, I see!

I recognise!

Holy shit!

‘Oh, look - it’s me’.

It is I!

Face to face!

Looks like the jury’s in on this one.

Judge me with your rhythm gavs!

Mia-Jane has got a point, hasn’t she?

Actually, she’s got ten points.

And a bonus point at the end.

And a special double-bonus point at the end of the end!

‘Congratulations, Mia-Jane, you’ve won the unprivileged prize of being featured in a pointless blog (which isn’t a blog) about nothing!’

[Ear-Splitting Audience Applause]

Mind you, ‘Nothing’ has had quite a lot of traction in literary circles, you know. Been on trend for years. Just look at Samuel Beckett! Or King Lear. ‘Nothing will come of…’

Anyway:

I look exactly like Ian Dury!

Everything’s the same, apart from facial physiognomy.

But that doesn’t matter, - because my face is entirely overwhelmed by the precise arrangement of these hair-driven cultural signifiers and sartorial assorted accoutrements.

Fuck me, if Roland Barthes were alive today, I’d feature in Mythologies instead of ‘The Face of Garbo’!

Ian Dury might get a look-in too.

Actually do you remember Look-In?

You know, the magazine?

Oh, come on, that magazine your parents insisted on buying you in the eighties for educational purposes. The magazine you never opened.

Not once.

Ironic title, really.

…

Actually, I’ve got that wrong, haven’t I?

That was Look and Learn magazine.

Not Look-In.

Obviously, I didn’t look hard enough.

Or learn.

Ironic title, really.

…

Speaking of Magazines:

Or; An Epistle to Mr Stefan Dickers

Speaking of magazines from other eras, you’ve got to admit it, Mr Stefan Dickers has got a few, hasn’t he?

He’s got loads of ‘em. Occasionally, they all come out on unapologetic display at the UK Fetish Archives for solid historical research, public consumption, voyeurism, and a good old perv-out.

I took a long, longing, arduous look-into these magazines.

They’re a lot more interesting than Look In, or Look and Learn.

If my parents had bought me these magazines back in the eighties instead of Look and Learn, it might have encouraged me to read, look, and learn more avidly.

Might have given me the full education I required!

Did you know Mr Stefan Dickers has got a whole team working for him? Archiving old magazines, collecting pamphlets, and flyers, and chairs, and shoes, and bits-and-bobs, and torture equipment, and some seriously kinky shit too?

To be honest, I don’t know what the torture equipment was doing there.

I didn’t like to ask.

Personally, I thought it more appropriate for it to be placed in The London Dungeon.

But what do I know, eh?

…

My real purpose in writing an epistle to Mr Stefan Dickers is to apologise for my absence at The Sexual Freedom Awards, where he was awarded The Lifetime Achievement Award for his pioneering work at for archiving LGBTQ+ and Fetish material The Bishopsgate Institute.

An epistle, if you please:

Dear Mr Stefan Dickers,

It was a joy to meet you at the second ‘open night’ of The UK Fetish Archive.

I was the bowler hatted bloke! I thought you were a fine fellow, - with a keen eye for eccentricity, like Miss Kim Rub!

When I discovered you were receiving an award, I thought, ‘Heigh-ho’, I must go!

There I was, finding it out very late in the day, or early in the morning, and thought, ‘Boy, I hope I have enough energy today, but I’ll sorely regret it if I don’t go! Let’s buy a ticket!’ Anyway, I put my life, and spirit, and gasoline into my work all day. Came home, had dinner, and fell asleep.

For three hours.

Woke up at 9pm!

So I stayed on the sofa.

Stayed on the sofa, feeling sorry for myself and bad for letting you down.

I wanted to shove-my-face-about, rally around, and do a bit of merry cheer!

Instead, I ate a whole tin of cashew nuts.

And gave myself a tremendous stomach ache.

…

(Felt like a right Zero.)

So sorry,

Yours sincerely,

London’s purple peril,

Brat.

P.S. Mind you, if you’re anything like Mia-Jane and I had turned up, you might not have recognised me. I wasn’t going to wear my bowler hat!

P.P.S. Mind you, if you wouldn’t have recognised me because I wasn’t wearing a bowler hat that would be a bit different ‘cos I think Mia-Jane is the type of person who wouldn’t recognise someone if they were wearing a bowler hat, - you know a bit like dogs who don’t recognise their owners when they put one on!

In Apology to Mia-Jane:

Or; On Not Recognising Appropriate Analogies

Oh shit! I’ve made another gaffe, haven’t I?

This is a really bad one too.

Really bad.

I’ve just drawn an analogy between Mia-Jane being like a dog who doesn’t recognise a hat-wearing owner.

Nothing about this analogy makes any sense.

It’s really bad.

And it’s pretty insulting to Mia-Jane, if you think about it!

It just goes to show that you just can’t push an analogy too far because the whole ship runs aground.

Especially in the hands of an undiligent Sea Captain.

I better write Mia-Jane an epistle of apology in another chapter.

An epistle about an epistle.

…

If this situation gets any worse people will start thinking I’m taking the epistle.