Serpentine Gallery 24-hour Experiment Marathon

They sought travel by stowaway methods but the fat guy (some sailor) that offered them passage was a dishonest liar and at midnight when they followed him on board the tanker Insurgent Dawn it wasn't to some secret cabin like he promised to lead them, but rather down, down and through the bowels of the gigantic vessel and then to a rusted trapdoor from which, once it was opened, urgently, with force, they dropped even further to the stinking darkness of the vast tank of oil. There, on that terrible lake made from thick viscous fluid they had at first a day of calm, a long day through which they rested, wretched and filled with fear, clung to their improvised raft in the stagnant blackness, holding close and whispering to each other.

Tell me my name again, said the youngest kid at one point, and his sister whispered 'James'.

Then there was that silence, like those that sometimes come in a story or in a film, a dark kind of silence, all empty, after which she whispered her own name, Olivia.

The journey itself was a smear of Bad Time. Long days and long nights of shuddering horrible sound, stomachs made sick with the ships awful motion as they swelled sightless on that dark internal sea. The tanker on the ocean and within it a smaller skyless ocean made from oil upon which they sailed or rather drifted, directionless, human flotsam, hunger thin and terrified.

No one knows how they survived. It was because of luck perhaps, or because of love though neither of them believed that much in either.

*

On land the first ground they stepped on was covered in snow but in the Halogen lamps of night it looked yellow, dirty, slush already, nothing from a fairy tale and badly pixelated in places. They hid in some low bushes, then quit the shoreline on foot and holed up in the car park of a DIY Superstore, scavenging scraps and rags for clothes from the bins, Olivia trying to wash oil off their bodies in the toilets of a nearby petrol station, scrubbing her brother's and her own skin raw. In the slush out back James found a hat, some baseball thing and put it on backwards, the name written on it that of some long obsolete burger franchise whose name began with M.

They moved at night. Not wanting to be seen. If James cried Olivia told stories. There were stories about a country called France. About a thing called a mountain. About a city on fire.

In the capital they found a kind of hostel. A maze of corridors. Barred windows. Filthy dormitories. Lost and displaced individuals. Immigrants. Unpersons. An implausible landscape.

Outside in the grounds the branches of the stunted trees were alive with scurrying creatures and insects and some sort of mechanical owls descended from airborne surveillance drones but now living wild. The owl things made strange and loud sounds through the night, which along with occasional gunfire woke them randomly at intervals. After two weeks in that place their eyes were still red, partly from the Tanker fumes and partly from sleeplessness.

Neither of them spoke much. Shell-shocked. Numb. James let his sister do all negotiations, introductions, and any practical stuff like all the medical exams and complicated questionnaires about their case and countries of origin and she was happy to do that for him, to take the weight of it. There was plenty of talk in the world; James was 8 years old and in his mind he had no need to add to it. When he went to his crude bed in the dormitory at night he lay flat on the sheets, arms by his sides and eyes staring at the ceiling, like a doll laid in a shoe-box coffin, a skull faced stick figure in search of dreamless sleep.

In the dayroom of the Hostel the TV bolted to the wall had a perspex plate over it to stop it getting damaged and was set permanently to some channel that played Megan Rebecca Ann Fulton, Judd Fischer and Ashley Reese Carmella Norton in round-the-clock re-runs of the Plastic Face movies; Plastic Face, Return of Plastic Face and Plastic Face Forever. Olivia said it was maybe because the Studio that made those movies had some sort of deal with the Franchise that ran the hostel place, but it was impossible to say. No one liked the movies anyway - no one watched them, and the two kids sat at their table and hunched over, trying not to make eye contact with the other inmates and whispering through the endless scenes of break-ups, divorces, romances, fights, weddings and such like that blared out of the flatscreen above them.

*

The capital was a terrible home without money and as new arrivals they had to find work. In the nearby streets James got money like most other kids - by cleaning windscreens at the traffic lights, or by getting tips from tourists for crawling under their parked cars in the multi-storey to check for IEDs or by fetching cigarettes for the American soldiers from the handful of shops still open out in no-mans land. Meanwhile Olivia scavenged the bins and the pavements, looking for gold coins or magical amulets they could sell on or trade at the Market each Thursday.

When James grew too big to crawl under the cars they starved or stole for a week or two. Small kids died in explosions all the time anyhow and he was more than glad to stop.

The city changed, filled with football fans, then marching bands. Posters went up advertising a new kind of Deodorant made from a genetically modified extract of some movie stars' sweat. In the posters the eyes of the models 'dripped with feelings of love'. The city stank of the stuff.

*

In the Autumn when the Spring Offensive officially failed it got too dangerous to be out on the streets at all and from then on they pretty much stayed in the Hostel, making friends with some Somali kids that were selling fake Rolex watches on Ebay. Phishing. Scamming. A bit of money here and there. Internet on dialup. Thin soup in the hostel. Stolen chocolate bars with brand names and writing that none of them could read.

Many times James asked Olivia about life before the journey. About home. About the place they left behind, but in what she told she was mostly vague with the details, not wanting to hurt him or to fix him on something that did not exist anymore and which would not exist again.

Later, near Xmas, she started teaching Roadblock Arabic to the soldiers, drilling them through the same stock phrases over and over again. Stop there. Open the trunk. What's in the package? Get down on the ground motherfucker. It was depressing. There was a curfew. Several people were hanged in the square, from cranes that should have been used for the construction of the beautiful buildings, but the work on them had long ago ceased. James drew pictures on scrap paper the soldiers brought for him.

He drew stars.
He drew a man in flames.
He drew shapes that he said were letters, but which no one could recognise.


In return for the Roadblock Arabic the soldiers taught Olivia about the city. About safe routes through it. About places where deliveries happened sometimes. About which parts of it were real and which parts unreal. She never made much sense of what they said, but she kept a note of things that might be useful some day.

One of the guys was real nice. Gray hairs and not quite so full of bullshit like the other ones, more quiet, thoughtful. One time he brought them a First Aid Kit, another time he brought a Geiger Counter. Another time he bought a bracelet made of pearls. One week he did not show up for his lesson. The other guys said he got drafted back home.

James did not understand.

*

The Xmas Push continued well into the New Year and when it failed there was what they branded a Spring Retrenchment. The grounds around the hostel were newly ringed in razor wire. The puppet government was replaced. Rain fell in strange storms that no one could predict. Tarpaulins covered the trenches and the places where the soldiers hid to fire at the insurgents and the protestors were soon knee deep in brackish water. From time to time the hostel filled up with young men whose eyes were red and whose clothes still stank of tear gas. Days later they were gone.

Plastic Face came off the TV and the set was tuned instead to a rolling Marathon thing called Vendetta where a man got revenge on all the people that ever wronged him in his whole life, live and unedited. It was awful, worse than Plastic Face, with screams and blood curdling terror in place of all the weddings and crap that were on before.

*

When the city got too dangerous they left the hostel at night and stowed away again, hidden amongst frozen carcasses in a lorry taking meat to the North.

In its mechanical cold they curled around each other, whispering, as once they'd done on their miniature ocean of oil.

They slipped out of the truck on James' birthday, near what used to be Manchester and then walked as far as they could. There was a small house on a long empty road that seemed unoccupied. James broke a window and they entered. The house was deserted. Abandoned. Plates of half-eaten food on the table, like the occupants had vacated in a hurry. James was cold still, lips blue.

They lit a fire with some books, used the telephone and called some pay-per-minute line telling stories.

Do you want to hear a story that is all about a war? said the person at the other end.

No, said James.

Do you want to hear a story that is about life after death? said the person.

No, said James again.

Do you want to hear a story about love? said the person.

Yes, said James.

The story went on some. There was a guy in it. Some singing. Some birds that span against a gray sky. It was something but it wasn't enough.

James and Olivia listened intently to it and looked out of the big window to the night. The darkness outside was that flickering kind, which is something to do with the way that black has too many shades in it and the monitor cannot process it all. Or maybe something to do with that special kind of night that people get sometimes, the kind that never seems to end.

*

For his birthday James got a watch - some kind of fake Rolex but one made for kids, that his sister had obtained way back in the hostel. The face was white and the numbers black, but the hands were what really endeared it to James. The hour hand was a figure of a man, and the other hand, the minute hand, was the figure of a terrifying ghost. The ghost was always chasing the man around the globe, all day and all night, but the ghost was always moving too fast, catching him but running past him, and the man was always moving slowly in circles - maybe because he was stupid or maybe because he had grace. You could imagine that scholars (if there were any left somewhere) were really arguing about the meaning of that watch and all different interpretations of life and theology and politics you could read in it. Anyhow. James loved the second hand the most - a gorgeous thin red line that ended with the circle of a Smiling Face, a yellow grinning creature-thing from the old old days, a face that moved faster than both man and ghost, passing them both and passing them both and passing them again. James thought maybe this face was time, the face of Time itself and he explained his idea in a lot great complexity to Olivia, talking and talking, using diagrams and gestures, as well as he could.

When he finished talking Olivia was sleeping. And the fire was burned down. And outside the sound of real gunfire and more or less imaginary creatures was still quite distant.

James lay flat on his back and stared at the ceiling. Wept. Slept.