TRANSCRIPT OF SaF05, SINGLE-CHANNEL VIDEO, 2019

REVELATIONS

I’m thinking about a woman on TV, in The Last Days of Pompeii. I’m praying to wake up as a boy. The Calvinist church is across the road. Stripped back, emotionally withholding. No ornamentation, no fuss. It’s 1984. 

The Sunday night bible study group is led by an evangelist couple, both hairdressers. They live in Aberdeen where they have a salon. Every Sunday evening, they travel sixteen miles inland to Drumoak. They run the Youth Fellowship group in the Manse hall. I started because my only friend from the village goes, and because there’s nothing else to do. Then I get into it. A lot. Mainly I read Revelations. My atheist parents don’t approve. But they don’t try and stop me. 

One time at the Youth Fellowship they get some boys in from Durris, the next village along, to teach us breakdancing. One has frosted ginger hair. I can’t remember his name, but I can remember which farm he lived at, and where he got on the school bus. People said he gave his brother a blowjob. They had a sister and their mother was a housekeeper at the big house. One day on the bus, the sister said their mum was cooking Baked Alaska for the Laird that night, because it was his birthday and that was his favourite. 

The boys for teaching breakdancing are outside the Manse hall, smoking with their early moustaches. It’s dusk. The oldest spits. It shoots out like a bar of soap from wet hands. He does this every few minutes. He’s holding a Regal between middle finger and thumb. The burning end is pointing inward. To tap the ash, he flicks the filter in staccato with his index finger. He does it more than necessary. It’s repeated often, like the spitting. Tapping and spitting take turns. 

I’ve been going to the Youth Fellowship maybe a year when they put on an open evening. My parents come along grudgingly. There are cups of tea, then we all sit down on the plastic chairs arranged in rows. The hairdresser couple project a film. Halfway through, there’s a sequence of a missile hurtling through the air. The camera tracks it, side on. The missile is centre frame, travelling slowly, right to left. An American male voiceover tells about the imminent coming of the antichrist, saying, “He will come from the East.” The missile is Gorbachev. It’s 1985. When we get home my parents are silent. Later my dad looks at me in the kitchen and says, “You understood what that meant don’t you?” I did, and after that it was like a switch went off and I didn’t go back or feel the need to. It wasn’t because of him. The switch was going to go off anyway. That’s when I got into BaF84. 

FAHRENHEIT

Me and BaF89 are cleaners. We clean the timeshare apartments near Balmoral. Now we’re standing in the mirrored external doorway of Finnies The Jeweller on Belmont Street in the city. Or maybe it was called something else and not a jeweller. I don’t remember because it’s thirty years ago. It’s night-time. I think it’s winter. I’m wearing a woollen navy coat, like a duffle coat but less structured. My hands are in my pockets. There’s a smell of Fahrenheit. We’re facing each other with the mirrored glass either side of us, lit up doorway. We’re on acid. And we’re just standing there. And it feels like a long time. And it feels like no one can see us. I’m very aware of my mouth, how it feels. My hands are in my pockets and we’re looking at each other. Still in its pocket, I put one hand between her legs. She says nothing, just my name. I take my hand away. 

X

Date: 16th November 2015
Start time: 17:49
Location: -19.53368357 23.64108922 938.0 5.0
Behaviour: Approach 
Behaviour time: 18:17
Who: SaF05
Habitat: Acacia scrub
Recipient ID: Woody
Outcome social: Rubs
Comments: SaF05 presenting
Count: 3
End time: 19:50

Date: 21st November 2015
Start time: 05:55
Location: -19.52420401 23.63942514 940.0 5.0
Behaviour: Grooming
Behaviour time: 06:59
Who: SaF05
Habitat: Acacia scrub
Recipient ID: SaF03
Outcome social: Reciprocate
Count: 2
End Time: 09:23

GaF93 was training to be a radiographer. We met at Club X. Her father was the head ranger at Glen Coe. She pushed me against a wall in a doorway, somewhere around Renfrew Street. I’ve looked for it since when I’ve been in that area. But I don’t know where it was because it was night-time and twenty-seven years ago. In daylight, lying on her bed, up against the window in her room, inside the student halls in Paisley, I looked down at the dark triangle of her pubic hair for the first time and thought what I was seeing was her underwear, then realised her underwear wasn’t on anymore. For a split second I saw my mother’s dark triangle. Then it switched back to hers again.

Date: 21st November 2015
Start time: 05:55
Location: -19.52420401 23.63942514 940.0 5.0
Behaviour: Moving 
Behaviour time: 08:30
Who: SaF05
Habitat: Acacia scrub
Count: 2
End Time: 09:23

Date: 15th February 2016
Start time: 16:52
Location: -19.52420401 23.63942514 940.0 5.0
Behaviour: Marking 
Behaviour time: 17:15
Who: SaF05
Habitat: Mixed SP Woodland
Mark: Urine 
Posture: Stand
Substrate: Sand
Count: 2
End time: 17:54

Date: 2nd March 2016
Start time: 17:53
Location: -19.51344016 23.62442348 938.0 5.0
Behaviour: Vocalisation
Behaviour time: 19:21
Who: SaF05
Habitat: Mixed SP Woodland 
Vocal: Given
Call: Contact
Outcome External: Ignore
Count: 5
End Time: 19:42

DUF96

I’m with DuF96 at a party on West Princes Street. Woolf are about to play. I’m showing her pictures on my phone of a sculpture I just finished. An image pressed between four thick layers of clear Perspex. A chest in a black T-shirt, saying SEIKO. An arm folded across the chest. A diver’s watch around the wrist. The layers of clear Perspex have many overlapping circular holes cut out of them. Some of the holes go straight through, some of them are blocked. Moving through the pictures, I go too far and the next shot is of GaF13 lying on our bed with a clear glass butt plug inside her. I scroll fast back to the sculpture shots, but DuF96 saw it. She just smiles. In the months after she died, I had repeated dreams in which I was bartering and bargaining, negotiating deals, sacrifices or swaps in order for her to come back. It’s levelled out now.

SUBS

Loch Long is eighty metres deep. A mile away along the shore is a hollowed-out mountain, inside which all of the country’s nuclear warheads are housed. The nuclear subs go up and down the loch on their way to and from the sea. They’re at sea for three months at a time, and while they’re gone they have no contact. If someone at home dies, they won’t know until they get back. There are two types of nuclear sub: reconnaissance subs that are out scoping things out, roaming, and lurkers that sit in one place and just wait. There’s no wake. I see them moving along the loch but it’s hard to know how large they are, or how far away, because their surface is so matt black. Someone told me they wear soft shoes in there so that no one hears them. I kayaked over the degaussing range. They go through it on their way out to sea. There’s instrumentation on the seabed – sensors – for measuring the magnetic signature of the subs. Because during maintenance at the base there’s so much hammering that they become magnetic.  

TUNNELS

We continue to look in the evening when it gets dark. It’s our last chance. When we enter a pan, the wind picks up and rushes thick dust through the vehicle. The vehicle doesn’t have sides, windows or doors. It’s all open. OkM18 is driving and LoF17 is in the back behind me. She’s got the spotlight and she’s shining it straight out into the darkness to the side of us. It makes a tunnel of light within which alternating distances of objects in the dense scrub get illuminated as they move by. We pick up speed. The image keeps blowing out because the spotlight is strong. I’m in the front seat filming with the phone out of the left of the vehicle, holding it as still as I can. This goes on for a long time, this tracking through the landscape. And we don’t talk, but I know that LoF17 knows that I’m filming the spotlight, trying to keep it in the centre of the frame. And I know that she’s trying to keep the spotlight still, so that it’s in the centre of the frame. And all the different planes keep on appearing then disappearing: further, closer, tree, broken tree, further, far, tree, closer.