Yesterday's must-haves pitch from abandoned billboards on the end terraces. Torn sports cars and satellite television deals either side of tanning salons and video rentals - symptoms of the same longing that sates itself at newsagents and taxi ranks, on celebrity magazines or the cuts of some weaker quarry.
Women here amend their uniformity with cheap flourishes. Streaked hair and barely-there-tattoos testing the limit of a male sensibility that has no demand for difference. They vie for the nod to give some fumbled comfort to the bar's usual brutes, who are busy drawing on all their lust and loathing to proffer, with a pint pot hand, the final word on tits and politics. Men and women smothered in lust and lofty aspiration, kicking a blanking world because it returns them to human scale.
Through broken homes and ten fathered-families this town is barely a generation away from shared blood, for among those with a distaste for solitude is also an impatience for anything but themselves: a self-obsession based on no merit of their own lone minds, but of a sip and spit of the unfamiliar, so that partners are taken briefly to define only opposition from Self.
The constant to and fro of the limited populous has gradually formed a giant, untraceable kinship, whose components - in the vacuum of their shared anonymity - obsess over their own inner turmoil, making a script of the same small inconveniences used to excuse themselves from the crimes they commit in boredom or hate, for both here are of the same ancestor.
Reality is re-proportioned according to their sense of self worth. Blood thickens until it will clot their veins.
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