It’s here on the fifth floor landing where those end words of Wilson’s are still meant to appear on certain occasions and anniversaries, in certain light conditions, to certain people, written in shimmering blood. A TV crew from Bosnia came West one year and camped out outside the big dark building that is VOID HOUSE. They filmed the wall up there every day for a year and they never saw anything – going home to Sarajevo out of luck and over-budget, director destined for retirement. A scientist they hired took samples from the wall – he said he found traces of human blood and it was still fresh, much fresher than it should have been so many years after the event.

Ludger Shat said there was a feeling in the place, right from the very first day of the shoot. He said the air was cold. He said the silence was inhuman. He said you couldn’t even dream safely in a place like that, let alone make fiction in it.

He makes a pilgrimage to the building every year or so, leaves flowers on the paving slabs, says hello to some of the ageing extras who still live nearby and then gets back on the train to Glasgow with a bottle of whiskey and a packet of tranquillisers. Ludger Shat still wears the promotional T-shirt he sported when making the film. It asks a simple question, melodrama made irony by history:

BONE GRAFTERS II: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN SEX & DEATH GET CONFUSED?

And Ludger knows, if anyone does, but he’s taking his secret to the grave.

Jonesey

Jonesey

Jonesey started taking nightclasses in a shite attempt to get the DHSS off his back. Each Friday he turned up down the old school where he used to go as a teenage arsehole and he went walking back in old glass classrooms and down smell corridors of all memory lane (etc) to try and get his mind right. Jonesey got a tattoo that sed NOSTALGHIA on his forearm too. (Clever little cunt).

That bloke what ran the jobclub arithmetic class only had one (1) arm and all girls thought he was ‘definition of cool’, giggling and blushing and fidgeting with their AIDS ribbons nervously whenever he came close. Jonesey sat at the back all time smirking and drawing doodles of lynchings and ‘scenes of revulsion’ ©. Weeks of maths, shorthand and history passed him by and (in shorthand) Jonesey got bored.