Alvin J. Crow intro

An outing to the museum, for which a sense of the macabre and a certain voyeurism is appropriate, is to take place. Outing is to take place in the evening. We want to cover all the bases.
A kind of a school outing or of an archaeological society. Or of the standard bored and semi-interested students. No permission slips required from parents. The kids in the current group are all over eighteen, some are as old as thirty. Among the group is a dark and sombre boy called Alvin, tendency to brood alone, sits by himself on the minibus.
The members of this group have known each other since infant school, they know one another's foibles and peculiarities intimately, they have shared old jokes and enmities long since. Now they have settled down to their mild and cynical twenties, curious, facetious, worldly-wise, thinking the whole idea of a trip to the museum a veritable jest.
Now here they are in the museum, a large chunk of Victorian neo-classicism set in the middle of a long seedy street in the middle of the city. In they trip, and commence to traipse slouchingly around the outer perimeter of exhibition rooms, some wandering loosely off on their own, others chewing gum, arms folded, staring haggard at totem poles and stuffed animals. The whale skeleton is pretty cool, and that triceratops skull and check out the kodiak bear. Fossils are pretty dull, but how about that copy of the Delphi charioteer? Upstairs they have the caveman exhibit, floor of a neanderthal's lair, plus a fish skeleton fossilised and hung up. The whole place is a tribute to the noble science of taxidermy.
History section is not bad... some arrowheads, a flintlock or two, some Pictish rune-stones... a sabre from the Civil War... don't bother with the engineering section unless you want to look at 1902 motor cars and James Watt's fuckin turbine steam engine...
The charitable foundations that fund these places sure do a good job. Either that or private enterprise, whatever. The noble museum with the stars and stripes flying outside it. Look at these magnificent collections of ethnology and renaissance art.

Blue Room 12

The depression of a key, the click of a mouse, a blip on a screen... and it was all gone. Fanning out my investments over a wide radius, may as well have took it to the bookie's and put it all on a nag. At that accelerating scale of interest, at those fantastical rates, my spurious investments drained, life's-blood-like, away and forced me into liquidation. I need the services of some building society assistant to draw me a diagram, explaining cash flow and necessary overturns, explaining the fantastic intricacies of this forbidden world of finance. Right now in the heart of the City there are young men like me, hungry-eyed and cold-hearted, their jubilation and rapaciousness expressed in flutters of paper and the clicking of mouses.
And oh to be part of that invisible and mystical brotherhood, prostrate at the feet of the inviolate market, gladly would I slit my own throat at his altar, that omniscient god whom the brokers rush to worship, whose litany is the financial times index, and whose inviolate and transcendent calmness can be seen in the expressions of bank clerks. My unwise investments? Consider them a sort of sacrament.
I ended up sat in my high chair wit a cup of tea, steadily at work on a sort of Plan B:
"My plan to get into college".
An unrealistic aim, maybe, what with my record, but I must have something to fall back on. But, the millions having been lost through the unwise investments, a parental career talk has been occasioned with father...
(And thus we commence from the top, Kojak moment and all, until the bitter closing theme-tune once again strums lazily forth).

Blue Room 11

But the indiscretions of the night pass away soon enough, and are replaced by the wide, hard, rational day, when a young man must be grave, composed, and set his mind on business. Here I am now, careful shirt and neat tie, serious expression, absorbed in my sets of calculations. In the early afternoon whilst at work ,y favourite place is at the summit of one of the livingroom's walls, here I can perch quite comfortably, with a foot in either room as it were, and work undisturbed. I like the feeling of elevation from the common round I am given by this position. Ditto my umpire's chair.
But on with the day's work: My laptop is open and ready. I have balanced on the foam-thick wall various bundles of memos and notes, the requisite sections of newspapers, chew-ended biros. In my brand new foolscap notebook, glossy red cover, I hurriedly carry out an analysis of the world's markets. Index and share prices. The plummeting or ascending of commodities. The beautiful and intricate relationships of the dollar, pound, euro, yen, so delicately transcribed.
Now I have the gambler's temperament, momentarily reckless, unfeeling, hardbitten. If we deal primarily in thousands then steadily and with coolness increase the mark. The truth is when riding the rough beast called the market one must expect the occasional jarring loss. For which read, in my case, a series of disastrous and foolish investments.

Blue Room 10, Indiscretions

This particular tart had been selected for me by mother dear, who had entered the Blue Room first, straight-mouthed and firm-handed, in her dull starched clothes and her shadowy pinned-back hair. Yes mommy dearest had fulfilled her maternal duty, as she was ever wont to do, and procured a whore for her stressed and reckless son. Money changed hands discreetly and without fuss. I also found out, and must admit, while in the room with the girl, that she was some relative of mine. I come from a large, entangled, complex family. It's quite possible that I could become involved with a girl only to find that she's a second cousin once removed, or some such fuckin thing. There are innumerable great-uncles and aunts who made multifarious marriages and sired a myriad weans, as is the wont of the Irish. A third cousin? A cousin german? No matter.
In any case, do not suppose my conscience troubled me for a second. I was too drunk to care, all the subtleties of the situation failed to register in my brain. My arm around her and with a few pints inside me... Oh reader, if you could have seen me then! My face I'm sure was unspeakably and vilely contorted, like some vulgar red-faced laird who has had a beef dinner set down in front of him.
My inhibitions had gone out of the window. I stared, enrapt, feebly excited, at her neat, regular thighs set tight together, her plump breasts, her dimpled arms, I groped and squeezed, intent with drunken single-mindedness, I pressed her blue-tinged flesh...
In short I got it out of all proportion, drunk, sorrowful, and stressed as I was, and all on this glum-mouthed and distant-eyed girl with her folded arms and her legs that have to be persuaded to open before her body surrenders, going limp and slack.

Blue Room 9, the Girl

But boy am I stressed. After a busy day playing with the boys in the City. You bet I need some relief.
Here I come now, my shirt wit sleeves rolled up, my creased and weary tie, a selfish idiot in no mood for an argument. I blunder recklessly inside the Blue Room, a surging bouncy castle-like movement. I feel and look odious. Most of the prostitutes have already been dispatched on their various errands. One girl is selected for me: A lumpen and insensible girl in her late teens sitting huddled wallflower-like on the bench, like the last box of washing powder on the supermarket shelf.
Fairly pallid and chubby-armed. Rather reticent and might have a tendency to go stiff-bodied, making the act of love difficult. She seems morbidly distracted and blank-faced. As I sat beside her my arm around her and my hand on her belly, talking in a loud, savage, drunken way, I begin to wonder: What planet is this girl from? There seems to be an awkward, sour, bluish tinge to her skin, to her bare flesh, her dimpled thighs which I press with my hands. Maybe it's the light in here?...
I look in her eyes...
Vapid, empty, strange, as if an insectlike intelligence was figuring and plotting abstractly therein. A few specks of glitter on her cheeks. Cold and sorrowful mouth. Her eyes seem to glow with a sour electric-blue light, like someone seen on an infra-red camera.

Blue Room 8, The Blue Room

Beside the large, prosperous and respectable living room lies a sort of recess or alcove, which when stumbled into reveals itself as surprisingly long and dense, like an alleyway, very sepulchral and shadowy, with a threatening bluish light, leading to its common name, the Blue Room. Set against the opposite wall is a long wooden bench.
Once the entrance to the Blue Room is discovered, you realise it is only a sort of ante-chamber to the main livingroom, partitioned off, as though it were in some manner secret or shameful. You cross the threshold into the large, white-walled livingroom blinking in the light. And your feet sinking in the soft floor.
In this ante-chamber, known by the household as the Blue Room, sit a dozen prostitutes, sent by a local boarding-house for this very purpose. Wearily and gaudily made up, some wigs, a sparkling of glitter, heels, a bit of cleavage, a hot pant or two. Chubby-thighed lackadaisacal girls with crossed arms, wanting a fag, older women with softly amused faces spectral in the blue light, rolling their eyes at one another. Their bums on the wood bench.
Now as evening comes on and the shadows get deeper among the padded walls, the hookers are sent for one or two at a time. They appear to work in shifts. At periods of say ten minutes each they depart, swinging their handbags, heels sinking in the soft floor, as they march briskly through the lounge.
It can only be surmised that upstairs the clients have begun to arrive, and are waiting nervously in sparse rooms for the expected blow. Maybe these tarts are going to service the man of the house, waiting above redfaced and salacious, unbuttoning his waistcoat.
Perhaps this marks the commencement of their shifts, and they depart one by one to pre-assigned streetcorners and doorways, to dank and draughty sidewalks under streetlight. Waiting for the shifty sidling john.
Like in a doctor's waiting-room: "Next!" and up gets the next hooker in line, arms folded, huffy downturned mouth, glides out of the Blue Room and into the light.

Blue Room 7, an Exposition of the Ideal Home

But now for an exposition of the Ideal Home, our house of the future, our sumptuous and foolproof livingroom. With a digression into the particulars of the adjoining alcove, called the Blue Room.
First, the aforementioned glass ceiling, really consisting of a huge overarching bubble dome I suppose of some unbreakable plastic substance which protects the groundplan of the house entire. So that from a position high in the air an onlooker could clearly see the most intimate details of our household.
The impression from below is that there is no ceiling at all, so clear and transparent is the dome. As though a giant or accident of nature had reached down and plucked off the roof at one remove. Open plan, yes very. We in this household believe in an open lifestyle and in transparency of intention. And we enquire earnestly why roofs are needed.
Second, as above mentioned, the floors and walls of all the rooms are compacted with a thick and sturdy layer of foam, like your average padded cell. One could fall quite easily from quite a height and not be injured, and the walls you can bury your face in, they are like pillows, like a welcoming bosom. Now it is rumoured that behind this layer of padding on the walls are numberless sections of circuitry and wiring, whose purpose is to constantly analyse the prevailing conditions of the house and its inhabitants via hyper-adjusted sensors, and adapt both the physical dimensions of the house and its environment, ie temperature and light-intensity, in line with these conditions.
This is a mystery to us all. In practice, the only effect we can discern is that of the commonplace sliding doors, which hiss aside as you approach, which are all over the house. The supposed intricate networks of computer circuitry that lurk in the walls are in any case inaccessible behind all the plush, beautiful padding. Like I say, a mystery to us all.
Now you might say that only lunatics need padded walls, to fling themselves against, and that only infants have need of foam-enforced flooring. But I say to you that the effect of our uniform and sterile walls, so plush and buoyant to the touch, is singularly pleasing and comforting. Perhaps the association is with the mother's womb. No sharp angles in this house, no possibility of a hard knock or a bump on the head.