Vehicle E-Book

Jen Calleja

• Herausgeber: Prototype Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 344

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

In a time when looking into the past has become a socially unacceptable and illegal act in the Nation, a group of scholars are offered an attractive residency to allow them to pursue their projects. When the residency transpires to be a devastating trick, these Researchers go on the run, and soon discover that their projects all relate to one major event: the Isletese Disaster – the decline and subsequent devastation fifty years earlier of a long-forgotten roaming archipelago called The Islets. One figure emerges as central to all of their work: Hester Heller, a reformed cult musiker turned student recruited from the Institute for Transmission as an agent of the state and tasked with gathering reconnaissance on the Disaster by using her old band Vehicle as a cover. Heller is the key to the Researchers collective story, which they try to piece together while evading their pursuers. Compiled from the Researchers' disparate documentation, recollections, and even their imaginations, Vehicle is a timely and daring exploration of xenophobia, exploitation, the writing of histories and legacies, and the politics of translation.

Leseprobe

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Jen Calleja is a poet, short story writer and essayist who has been widely published, including in The White Review, The London Magazine and Best British Short Stories (Salt). Her short story collection I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For was published by Prototype in 2020.

She was awarded an Authors’ Foundation Grant from the Society of Authors to work on Vehicle and was shortlisted for the Short Fiction/University of Essex Prize for an excerpt from the novel. She was also longlisted for the Ivan Juritz Prize for Experimentation in Text.

She has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize as a literary translator from German into English and was the inaugural Translator in Residence at the British Library.

Calleja played and toured in the DIY punk bands Sauna Youth, Feature, Monotony, Gold Foil and Mind Jail, spanning a period of over a decade as both a drummer and a vocalist.

She is co-founding editor of Praspar Press, an independent publisher of Maltese literature translated into English and originally written in English.

Vehicle: a verse novel

Jen Calleja

For Peter, Kat, Henry, David and Emmanuella

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Vehicle

List of Central Players

Vehicle

Glossary of Terms

Timeline

She and I could sit and recite passages to each other as if it were a play, so if the text is [ever] lost, we can get together and reconstruct it.

Hilary Mantel on her and Clare Boylan’s love of Good Behaviour by Molly Keane, Speaking Volumes, BBC (1990)

The countryside is beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like it. Thatched roofs on the houses. Snow everywhere, the sky is so blue. I’m 22 years old today.

Henry Rollins, Get in the Van

List of Central Players

The Researchers

a group of desperate academics

Hester Heller

musiker / student at the Institute for Transmission / translator

Boyd Breakwell

student at the Institute for Transmission / journalist

Fraiveru Alma

musiker / author of A Refugee’s Diary

Sandringham ‘Sandy’ Heller

ex-diplomat / father of Hester Heller / translator

Cicilia Hershy

Boyd Breakwell’s research assistant / forensic archivist

Franżiżko ‘Franżi’ Alma

a triole of The Islets / father of Fraiveru Alma

Charles Mirr

professor at the Institute for Transmission

Vehicle

a musik band

Runaway Cart / Getaway Car

a musik band

Johannes Cubic

a cult musiker / ex-husband of Hester Heller

Maxi Undankbar

editor of musikarchiv magazine

Rita X

curator of the exhibition Vote For Me Not To Be PM

HMSTradition, ship’s log, May 2000

… a quake was felt off the coast … flotsam and jetsam … what’s this nonsense daubed on that floating wooden door … a caramel-coloured cat casually swam up to us but we were seemingly miles from anywhere … captain, when I look starboard, I see a shimmer like an oil spill, and a flicker of green … two nights back I heard a huge quantity of creaking bouncing off the ocean … ash, sparks, heat came on the wind … delays due to unforeseen flux in pressure …

Nationwide Telegram, July 2000

Earlier today, a foreign messenger entered parliament to hand deliver word of a remote disaster, and, as protocol dictates, they were shot on sight. We are in danger. The Nation is now on high alert. Do not accept telegrams from unverified sources; return to sender. Do not look out to sea, do not look into the sky. Unless it is completely necessary, do not look out of the window …

THE RESEARCHERS NEED TO GET THE ART OUT OF THERE

It felt like a trap. But feeling trapped is also a feeling, a certain regard. It is a coming in from a bitingly cold disdain. The open call was in many respects an amnesty. The volume got turned up on reflective, critical and morose practices, anyone not living in reality, now, considered filth or froth. They say that banning the past will make everyone happier. Historians and their kin have been underground for a long time, giving lectures in basements, rehearsing theories in the mirror, telling stories in small groups, among fellow delvers and miners.

The Library Research Residency, the chance to reside and read at the Central Library during autumn 2050, is the first sniff of credit and cash in years. We, the ‘first cohort’, have been put up in private quarters above the Central Library, each with our own room, a communal space, a stipend. None of us dares speak of our research. We fear everyone else is a spy, or, worse, someone from our own field. There might be fruitful overlap, but then, what if there were fruitful overlap! Nobody wants that, a dilution of the unique niche we have crafted; collaboration is in any case in violation of our residency agreement. Collaboration is a sign of weakness, a mark of a lack of confidence, according to the Solo Manifesto distributed by the government years ago.This could be a vehicle to long-term funding, a permanent position; maybe we are all in competition. We isolate ourselves, like the Bordering when the Nation left the Mainland; wall ourselves off, present our vague, mythological, aloof selves.

We are all under pressure. There are only three months to complete our self-initiated projects. Typically, three of us will be in the archives, three shut in our rooms, three in the living space, two in the bath. Two months left. Every other night we have parties, we are the only people in the whole austere building after seven. Dinner parties, dance parties. We are sealed in, no guests permitted. The stress of work and the tension in the place creates eruptions, outbursts, floods of emotion break their banks, outbreaks of exhaustion. We are strangers shipwrecked on a desert island, one with an endless supply of food, booze, zigarettes and powders. One of the librarians is a certified tablet dealer with a satisfying cataloguing system; their case is a pixelated work of art. Check out docs and books, check out a dose to focus, a vial to relax, a tablet to make you float a foot above the ground, a lollipop to make you sink down into the floor or the pages of the book you are reading, the lines bobbing just underneath your nose. Everyone is constantly wearing something off, something as toxic as concepts.

In the early mornings there is the open and close and open and close and open and close of sneaking back to one’s own room or slipping into someone else’s after everyone has gone to bed. It is good to forget one’s brain. One’s identity. Translate into something abstract, only touch, not thought. In these moments of presence, of timelessness, we feel ashamed to see why the government is pushing letting go of the past, of who we thought we were, and just existing. By the second month this clandestine behaviour seems ridiculous. There are plaited limbs on sofas with a shared bowl of cereal, compression in the stairwell down to the Library, no shirts in the kitchen before carrying two or three coffees back to rooms, a hoarse cheer goes up from within as the door clicks shut.

We fantasise about the figures and places we dedicate our lives to. It makes us euphoric, melancholic. We write little stories about them. Sometimes we are in them. We daydream, but we will never meet them, be them, be there. They would understand us, they would really understand us.

There are vague hints dropped late at night. I’m looking at:subculturalthe depictiona surveya studythe constructionthe dynamics.

One month left. Yolanda finds a graffito in their bathroom, scratched into a tile by the bath: too good to be.Work is frenzied, sleep has left the building. The abundant lunches and nourishing dinners left on the long dining room table by invisible hands become smaller, oilier, saltier. Bottles breed. No one can claim whole bags of tablets and powders.

It is our final week. Most of us are in our pyjamas, unwashed, greasy, stinking at four in the afternoon. There are papers, books, files everywhere. Lidless pens, blunt pencils, indecipherable notes. No one dares ask how things are going. In a few days we will be giving a presentation to the funders and the public of our findings, read from our drafted manuscripts furiously typed on the Library machines in our private basement study with its own coffee maker and complimentary snack display.

The phone rings: Yuri overheard a Library assistant asking off-handedly if those artholes’desks would still be cleared out at 5 a.m., and their supervisor put a finger to their lips. You better get down here, Yuri says, I don’t think this is good. Someone else is trying to get through on the line. Call me back! Yuri hisses. The door slams in the meantime, it is Wanda. It’s all gone. My writing, my scans, the arting Library system deleted everything.

Get out, now, the voice on the phone says. You need to grab everything and go!

Who is this?

I can’t tell you who I am, they will take everything you found for them.

Who are you? What are you talking about?

We were all researching, all the same thing, then they took everything, they have a list of histories and peoples they want wiped from the archives, and they draw researchers in to find every scrap. You need to leave!

But this is the first residency, isn’t it?

There have been dozens! You were all targeted specifically, they know researchers never share opportunities or confer … I need to go, someone’s coming, grab what you can and get out of there, they’ll probably come first thing tomorrow, or tonight, you can’t be sure.

The residency phone can only make calls within the Library, or receive calls from somewhere in the building. Are you a librarian? A visitor?

They are gone. It was like getting word of the imminent assassination of all our dear departed subjects.

Yuri? Yuri? We’re coming down! What were we going to do? Stefan had been seeing someone called Coy who drove a school bus for a living before this. There is no access to a telegrammer in the living quarters, only in the Library, and our accounts are blocked for the duration of the residency. Coy worked in a bar near their flat about a mile away. Stefan ran out the door shouting, meet me downstairs, out front in half an hour! Please get as much from my room as you can!

While most of us went to the Library to get what we could, the others got drawers and bin bags and scooped everything into the dark. Down in the Library, we checked the systems in vain: every word and image, gone. A moment to mourn, before grabbing armfuls of loose paper, bent-back books. The librarians were alarmed, alerted. They ran over, tried to grab our notebooks, our crumbled waste. We started running, throwing everything down the stairs, between the bannisters, kicking folders, throwing heavy directories at the panicking librarians.

When we got to the foyer, a few of us had barely anything at all. Stefan pulled up outside in a navy blue van with white writing on it and a crest bearing an open book, then jumped out to help. Bin bags came flying from the penthouse windows, bursting onto the road. We chucked everything into the van, paper crushed in our fists, stuffed up our jumpers and down our trousers. We pushed off the security guards, Hiromi throwing a punch that was caught by a guard trying to take Shaz’s rucksack. They wanted the paperwork, not us. We pulled away, watching them throw buckets of water over the transcripts, print-outs, letters left to die on the pavement.

Once in the van, Ffion, driving fast, turns their head slightly and shouts for abstracts from everyone. No interruptions!

MOSES is researching the former Institute for Transmission, a school used to train government agents of the future, including former key students Hester Heller and Boyd Breakwell.

YURI is researching Hester Heller, the translator of International Prize-winning Isletese author Fraiveru Alma.

HIROMI is researching the Isletese territories and terrains, specialising in the Isletese Situation and the Isletese Disaster.

STEFAN is researching popular journalist Boyd Breakwell.

WANDA is researching musik in the Nation and On-The-Mainland, including Hester Heller’s band Vehicle.

GRAHAM is researching for a comparative study of the translation and retranslation of Fraiveru Alma’s A Refugee’s Diary by Sandringham Heller and Hester Heller.

YOLANDA is researching A Brief History of The Islets (unpublished) by Sandringham Heller and his rejected letters to the Isletese triole Franżiżko Alma.

BENJAMIN is researching public art created around the Isletese Situation and Disaster.

FFION is researching the life and work of the poet Cicilia Hershy, who started her career as a research assistant to Boyd Breakwell.

SHAZ is researching National–Isletese Relations, particularly during the Isletese Situation and Disaster.

ARMANDAR is researching National customs and rituals.

We head north out of the city. Someone puts Vehicle’s album Fast Lane on in the van. The sound of feedback comes in and everyone empties their pockets and hoods, holds up scraps of notes, counts boxes, frozen by a bombardment of memorised fragments. A drumroll comes in. Everyone starts talking at once.

IT’S DAY EIGHT OF THE RESEARCHERS’ EXILE TOUR AND, WHILE DRINKING IN A RURAL PUB, YOLANDA IS DARED TO RECALL EVERY ISLET

THE ISLETS: A roving clutch of small islands of no fixed location. One of the Three Soughtafters: rare and prized locations that offer advantages – legend has it that should a world power attain all three simultaneously, they would hold ultimate sway, though the other two are deserted and in ruin. Official language: Isletese, and dialects thereof. The Isletese language is thought to be a Scandi-German dialect of a Greek-Arabic dialect, formed over hundreds of years of settler contact, with each Islet speaking contemporary Isletese majeure alongside a range of other languages and hybrid tongues. The Islets are comprised of numerous small islands of diverse appearance and climate.

DUTCH EILANDJE: Red brick smokeries are scattered around this Islet. One whole village on the Islet bakes a special kind of stroopwafel or syrup waffle that was once shipped over for the enjoyment of the elite classes in the Netherlands. This Islet was also partnered with the city of Paris for a stretch of time lasting over a hundred years, and they have an annual festival celebrating their twinning.

NATIONAL ISLET: Once named Salford Island. This Islet was selected by the Nation for its climate, which is the complete opposite of that found in the Nation, and for many years it was a very popular holiday destination. Curiously, the houses are almost identical to those you would find in the Nation, and famously get too hot. This Islet received National terrestrial television until the 1970s. The study of National was popular here until the late nineteenth century. The second university is based here.

PEA ISLET: A very small Islet, uninhabited, which has been used for residencies for international writers. It contains a small writing shed and sleeping quarters and nothing much else. Writers-in-Residence have included Greta Jarvis, Lionel D. Dilbert, Siri Sil and Marm.

ISLET ITALIA: A group of six families lives on this island. The Isletese and Italian cuisine have fused, so you might find a lasagne layered with fettle weed, or gnocchi made from the large, knobbly wixke variety of potato. The families (the Amissos, the Bêts, the Creefis, the Duuqs, the Eiolis, the Fiws) have all lived here both harmoniously and unharmoniously for many years.

DEUTSCHE INSELCHEN: A stunning Islet known for its coffee production and sunsets. Infamously sided with the Lithuanians during the Treble War and sheltered many soldiers and sailors during their respite months. There was one pathetic opposition meeting and a weak rally on the Islet. The Lithuanian Prime Minister almost visited to assess the usefulness of the spot, but ultimately disregarded its people for their ‘complicated’ heritage. There were rumours turned myth that she came here in exile.

ISLET ESPAÑOLA: A central fishing industry was housed on this Islet. The glass-roofed factories and houses are indistinguishable from one another, and every man, woman, and child works towards the fishing, gutting and packing of seafood.

ISLAND PORTUGUESA: A long trajectory of The Islets passes around Portugal, so this Islet flourishes seasonally. The Spanish famously rushed across the border to catch it as it went around the coast during the mid-to-late sixteenth century, settling on it for a hundred years.

ÎLE FRANÇAISE: The greatest cultural influx was the modes of dress from France. Other Isletese came to the Islet to visit the Library, built here by the French. The Islet was used primarily to encourage a certain species of chicken to flourish. They were everywhere for decades. Then one day the French came and took them all, bar a couple of dozen to distribute in the French countryside.

SPIT ISLET: A small, long, thin Islet, also called ‘thread’, ‘vein’, ‘lick’, ‘scratch’ and ‘the comet tail’ due to its appearance and relational distance to the small, round Deutsche Inselchen. It is frequently used for feasts and parties by all the Islets. Only three groundskeepers live here – each the apprentice to another. There is always an elder who trains the middler, a middler who trains the younger, and the younger who retrains the elder.

DISH ISLET: A skerry. So called because it has a peculiar lip around its edge. Also called ‘the pom-pom’ and ‘nap Islet’, it is a small, bushy scrap of land that is the perfect spot for snoozing away the whole afternoon. You simply raise an orange and red flag to signal that it is occupied. It is blanketed with springy, dark green moss and its lip prevents people rolling off it in their sleep. Many couples have been caught off guard here frolicking at night – and sometimes during the day. The spot was spoiled by tourists and constantly occupied before The Islets turned away from the world.

MAIN LAND ISLET, f.k.a America Islet: Three fat sausages of islands joined at one end like a chubby pronged fork, was how America Islet was described by one president. The Amainlandians came to save the Islet when it had gone slightly off course and suffered an attempted invasion by Denmark, and they stayed on afterwards. One ‘sausage’ was for holiday homes, one for a casino, the other for industrial production testing. The first Isletese skyscraper was built here.

CORPSELET: An Islet used solely for battles, either in Isletese civil war (conducted by Isletese people from different Islets, or by settlers under the name of the Islet they reside on) or used by other countries as a hired space to act out their problems to their conclusion. It went on to become a site for scientific experiments.

SCANDILETS or NORVEGE ØYA, DANE OYA and SWEDISLETS: A constellation of twenty-six closely grouped skjærgård, or skerries, originally gifted to Greenland hundreds of years ago at the height of the Isletese–Greenland friendship founded on the migration of walruses back and forth from the two nations. The walruses were killed off in just a handful of years after the invasion.

INSEL-BELGE: This Belgian-settled Islet contained a city of breweries. They eventually gave the Islet to Germany for a few years before it was turned into a museum of remembrance for Isletese lost to war, enslavement and murder. The grounds house a park and a few homes on the outskirts.

INSEL SVIZZERA: Also known as ‘Swiss Cheese Wafer’ (a popular snack invented on Insel Svizzera) due to the many bodies of water that interrupt its landmass. These include four lakes collectively called ‘the Moons’ and smaller distinct pools and ponds, each with their own name – even the tiniest puddle has one. A diplomat was sent to reside on this Islet and stayed for twenty years. He kept a large staff of Isletese in involuntary servitude. When his youngest child, born and raised on the Islet, fell in love with one of the family’s servants, they packed up and left within three days.

CLIFFLETS: Chunks and hulks of cliff that are repelled and attracted by The Islets. Drifting cliff faces forming a fearsome fake front. They create the effect of a mirage by seemingly being a coastline as if viewed in a cracked mirror, hazy and uninviting. See mosslets.

MOSSLETS: A chain of fluffy moss balls the size of bathyspheres, strung together with vines that loop and knot around the perimeter and between The Islets themselves. They create their own climate, a humidity or a cool spray dependent on their specific type. Alongside the clifflets, they act as a cloak for The Islets.

ÖSTERREICHISCHE INSEL: The Austrians used this Islet to rehearse prototypes of infrastructure. Architecture students were shipped over with apprentice builders and other craftspeople to trial new architectural experiments and town-planning ideas. This was often recorded as ‘Probezeit (im Ausland)’ – ‘trial period (abroad)’. We know where The Islets were approximately located during part of this time as ‘Mittelmeer’ – ‘Mediterranean’ – was sometimes specified on the paperwork before the scheme was ended.

SCOTTISH ISLETS: When the Scots would travel with the Nation to The Islets, they felt that they needed their own space. A couple of small Islets linked by a bridge often called ‘elders holding hands’ were unofficially occupied for rambling. Bothies built by the Scots remain and are now occupied by Isletese families.

WELSHIRISH ISLET: The Welsh and the Irish built rows of summer cottages here and fish in the lake at the centre of the doughnut-shaped Islet. The whole Islet is overrun by flowers.

PRAISER ISLET: A place for worship.

MOUNT ELMOSH: An Islet that is no more than a floating mountain. There are settlers on it with small white and blue houses built into the mountainside. One half was hollow where large chambers were built inside for large gatherings.

ISLET MAJEURE: The central Islet, population 55,000. The other Islets orbit it as The Islets make their way around the Mainland in a pendulum-like swinging back and forth. The Islets convene here once a week for discussions, deliberations and the festivities that run from Thursday afternoons until Saturday evenings. The main university is based here. Rather than having one leader, the Isletese have three that hold equal power, called the Trioles. They each have very different skills and strengths and are voted in democratically every five years. There is a biannual conference on the Isletese language where new developments are announced. Those deemed most important and likely to stick around, and words that have formed on single Islets and then officially ‘leaked’ across all the Islets, are issued to every Isletese household with a definition in red embossed lettering on white card to be added to a wooden indexing box. This is where the famous candyfloss honey is made, and where old Isletese women produce fine lacewear for local – but also exclusive, international – weddings. This is where parliament has been seated since The Islets banished all settlers, whose powers and interest had been waning for decades, and became completely independent nearly a hundred years ago. After years of occupation, The Islets broke all ties with the rest of the world, but the world’s influence remained.

ONCE EVERYONE’S DRUNK, A FEW OF THE COHORT LIST THE CONDITIONS THAT LED THE ISLETESE SITUATION TO BECOME THE ISLETESE DISASTER

Flooding; sinking; unexplained fires; flipping over; a nuclear accident; mass depression; floating away; detonation of undetonated bombs; drought; incurable disease; the great storm; loss of industry; over-farming; a shortage of bees; crumbling away; falling to pieces; being hammered by storms; engulfed by floods and flames; riddled by great holes opening up in the ground and swallowing homes and citizens; soaked by icy and boiling rain coming in waves; being under attack; starving from bad harvests and from the fidwer fish dwindling in number by 80 per cent in the last two years; suffering from an epidemic of contagious illness due to: climate alteration; nuclear, seismic and chemical testing; earthquakes; wildfires; hurricanes; eruptions of lava; unexplained explosions; weakened land from mining; partial invasion; protective clifflets eroding; passage to other islands where medicine stocks were kept becoming treacherous; it is now a wreck that wandered the oceans and seas of the world, aimlessly and abandoned.

WHILE THE COHORT EAT A MEAGRE PICNIC IN A FIELD THE MORNING AFTER THE ESCAPE, SHAZ INSISTS THAT THE NATION KNEW ABOUT THE ISLETESE SITUATION YEARS BEFORE THE DISASTER

SOS # SOS # SOS # SOS # SOS # SOS # SOS # SOS # SOS this is a distress signal from The Islets. Please respond. This is a distress signal from The Islets. Please respond. This is a distress SOS # SOS # SOS # SOS # SOS # SOS # SOS # SOS # SOS

Dear Friend and member of The Consortium of Isletese Dominion. No one has answered our calls for help. No one is picking up the phone on the end of the dedicated line. Nor reacted to flares, to sirens, to fleets of prayers in bottles. We have sent our bravest people on missions to deliver the same missives over and over again, with more urgency every year and you shot or locked up every last messenger … We keep on trying. Our change in course to leave the world all those years ago, our exile, much ridiculed, much celebrated, much fought, by both sides, may be a factor in your lack of response. We won’t go so far as to say revenge, but perhaps a punishment for sending you all away. The tipping has finally come, and we need your help more than ever. Your country/countries are expressly responsible for: THE NATIONAL ISLET. Which is experiencing mostly: FOG, HAILSTONES, FLASH FLOODS. But we would welcome refuge for the inhabitants of any of the Islets. Please take this as our asking for the returning of the favour. You, reading this now, may never have heard of us, or you might have been briefed. But as set out in the Agreement, we are due this.

We ask for assistance, for shelter and refuge. Each Islet has a given name: he or she who named it is accountable for it. We once begged you to forget all about us, now we need you to remember. Will we be brought back to the bosom, or orphaned? The day of making good has dawned. We await your response. Yours desperately, The Islets (January 1997)

SOS # SOS # SOS # SOS # SOS # SOS # SOS # SOS # SOS this is a distress signal from The Islets. Please respond. This is a distress signal from The Islets. Please respond. This is a distress SOS # SOS # SOS # SOS # SOS # SOS # SOS # SOS # SOS

WHILE CHANGING A TYRE ON THE VAN, GRAHAM LAYS OUT THE WORTH OF STUDYING THE TRANS-LATION (BY SANDRINGHAM HELLER, IN 2006) AND RE-TRANSLATION (BY HESTER HELLER, IN 2020) OF A REFUGEE’S DIARY BY FRAIVERU ALMA

A Refugee’s Diary by Fraiveru Alma

trans. Sandringham Heller (2006)

Father died today. Killed by falling masonry during an earthquake. ‘In the case of my demise …’. I fulfilled his wishes and sent the prepared notices and parcels with the ferryman’s final journey, all bearing his insignia and name, Triole Franżiżko Alma. There are fires and eruptions of screams. Power cuts. Sudden waves rolling down side streets and stairs. I came across a patch of thick fog in my upstairs bedroom. My neighbour’s house disappeared noiselessly (or so noisily I blanked it from my mind) overnight. We’re almost becoming acclimatised to the bangs. No, we’re not actually, not at all. And I don’t feel well. It’s time to reunite my fellow musicians. This calls for another tour with Runaway Cart. (July 2000)

trans. Hester Heller (2020)

Dad’s dead. ‘Should I not make it …’ Crushed under a pillar shaken loose during an islequake. Sent the small pile of pre-franked letters and string-wrapped packages with the last boat out, all marked with his official insignia, name and title: Triole Franżisko Alma, one of the three Prime Ministers. […] It’s time to get the band back together. One final tour with Getaway Car. (July 2000)

MOSES AND WANDA COMPARE NOTES ABOUT THE HIATUS TELEGRAM CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN MEMBERS OF THE BAND VEHICLE (1997–2000)

From: Patrick Connolly; Dr. Eevi Mäkinen;

Thomasina Xavier (France)

To: Hester Heller (The Institute for Transmission, the Nation)

Hi! Hester, S.O.S! you there??? H.H., help help, we’re drowning, we’re dying, if we don’t tour soon we’ll lose our minds we’re nearly out of money s’il vousplaît, bitte, we feel lousy all the time, it’s almost been a year S.O.S hey it’s us again we don’t think we’re going to make it through this drought our brains are slush, don’t you miss it? don’t you miss us? S.O.S. we get gig offers every week, that promoter has written every other month for the last two years! we know you’re at school/college/whatever, Tommy’s temping in the box office of an opera house, it’s so toxic, the verbal pats on the head during orientation when she told them she sings in a band! we know you said that you’re over touring, bands, all of it, the merch still brings in some pocket money, Patrick sends out aprons and patches on the daily, all the envelopes of cash and cheques go in a tin, after postage, it’s like a part-time job, it feels like the whole world is ending, haven’t heard from you in a long while, we all live in the same district of Paris now, we meet up, but it’s not the same, just talking, we run out of things to say! overcome with grief for our lives before, feels more like ten years than three, we miss you, do you hate us? hiatus! the fan mail’s out of control, theories that you’re dead, long dead, that you’ve gone missing, not seen since our last show, we’re going to explode, we can’t survive without the band, can you? we’re not leaving you behind, we’d never replace you, there’s a rumour going around you’re still playing drums, giving lessons to kids at the school where you’re teaching? studying? cleaning the toilets? Patrick says if he has to listen to one more punisher at the record shop ask after rare test pressings or try to sell him empty disc cases filled with bed bugs or want to talk about our heyday, hey, get us out of here! you hold the key to our prison! we’re nearly out of records, what do you think about a re-press? Eevi says: it’s just me and two kids under three, twelve hours a day, I’m wading through shit and dirty clothes and vomit, we know what you’re thinking, what’s the difference? you’re just building tension for the comeback, suspense, we know you’ll be in touch any day now, come on Hester, you know you want to, we could book a tour like that,we could set sail, help us,save the arting, floundering souls aboard H.M.S Vehicle (1997–2000)

MOSES PERFORMS THE WELCOME SPEECH GIVEN BY THE DIRECTOR OF THE INSTITUTE FOR TRANSMISSION FROM MEMORY FROM THE BACK OF THE VAN

As this is exam week for our students, we wanted to gather you, friends of the Institute, in anticipation of the new school year. The Institute is like a thrumming walled citadel, a contained but volatile cosmos; many of our students start shipwrecked, we offer them a life raft, not back to dry land but to a spectacular, stimulating desert island.

Isolated. Clean. Safe. A private learning environment in which one must take risks to thrive, thrash to the top, not simply rise, nor float; be thick cream, not collapsing foam!

We see their potential, we give them tools, teach them to use them; we fish out the talents just beneath the surface, we warm them up, wind them up, whip them up, then let them go into the world as agents of change.

Funding removed for the study of languages, linguistics, creative arts, media studies, down to negative and derisive public opinion (stimulated, naturally, by governmental propaganda – too hard! too soft!) humanities unanimously written off as worthless;it was the perfect opportunity for the Institute to be founded.

Shortly thereafter, with foreign languages banned to prevent clandestineness, discomfort, muddle, the burgeoning internet infrastructure collapsed to stop disinformation and penetrable walls. Unqualified writers, artists, practitioners blocked from publishing, performing and exhibiting for ‘quality purposes’.

We became supreme. We train up agents who find themselves running free through an era of weakened resistance.

The practices of persuasion and coercion are the most powerful, painless weapons at home and abroad. We specialise in the honing of unassuming but highly influential figures such as:

poets, writers, journalists, artmakers, policymakers, rhetoricians, spokespeople, Narratologists, spin doctors, speech writers, diplomats, psychotherapists, curators, Semioticians, architects, cultural institute directors, parents, political cartoonists, confidantes, mentors, actors, motivational speakers, film directors, graphic designers, comic book artists, advertising creatives, agony aunts and uncles, lecturers, conceptual and fine artists, translators and interpreters, nursery and primary education workers, politicians, hypnotists, writers for TV and radio, and new best friends.

Citizens don’t hear speeches anymore, their brains register them as lies. Political influence must be fed drip drip drip in adverts, films, public conversations, through family members.

They have to think they have come to conclusions all by themselves.

Once research shows a policy or thought is sticking, the Prime Minister simply says the very thing people believed they believed.

We’re looking for an I’m glad I thought of that response. An obviously this is how it has to be sentiment. The as I’ve always said affirmation.

We seek those who can effortlessly influence. They might have to change the direction of a literary scene or infiltrate a terrorist block.

We place our agents’ poems, paintings, pop songs, spreading their presence across the country to spark tide turning. They act as rudders and oars and sails.

And not just placement, but extraction: our students learn how to get people to reveal all, speedy methods to bond, to form trust, to get close, to gently urge a dropping of barriers, to have strangers willingly gift their very selves within minutes.

Our student profile has changed in recent years: less prepped and slick with confidence, more raw protégées with invaluable life experience, skills in flexibility, survival, surreptitious operations, code-switching, getting things done with a naturalness and lack of ego that can’t be taught. Those who have lived many lives in their few short years, seeking direction and mentorship, companionship in their orphanhood, disownment, estrangement, forced or chosen exile. Those for whom traumatic and stressful occurrences were commonplace, who are not easily thrown by the dramatic or extreme. Those who are often underestimated, made invisible, never truly seen.

We encourage a competitive spirit, something else they’re used to. We blow up copies of student assignments and paste them up in corridors, encourage scrawling of critique for all to see. We like physical scuffles, intellectual brawling, the corridors a battleground of wits and split lips. Each achievement results in a patch to be sewn to one’s school sash, badges of honour to complement the minor hallway battle scars, building up of skills, building up of tolerances; we tell our students: be rigorous, meticulous, frolic, cavort!

We welcome you, funders of our new covert cohort!

Join us in our school motto!

Keep being who your parents know and love!

Keep the world the place your parents know and love!

Do it for them! The steady course!

Your generosity gives a young person a second chance and in turn protects the status quo.

YURI AND STEFAN COMPETITIVELY QUOTE FROM THE CONTROVERSIAL PROFILE OF HESTER HELLER BY BOYD BREAKWELL FEATURED IN THE GAZZETTA IN 2015 IN A SUPERMARKET AT 2 A.M.

Does the translator of Fraiveru Alma bring the International Prize into disrepute?I have been invited to profile the translator of Fraiveru Alma’s novel Grips.Bestselling Isletese-refugee-diarist-turned-award-winning-novelist.Musiker-traitor-turned-award-winning-translator.Full disclosure: Hester Heller and I were at school together. I wouldn’t say that we were close. I was going through an ‘accomplished woman’ phase at the time. I had posters of their dignified, refined selves around my room. I always thought it looked like we were having a party.I’d invite them round every night so we could talk about their achievements. So I could tell them how amazing they were. I loved reading about them. Biographies, think pieces: rediscovered women of the past were my thing. You could say they became my full-time thing. I preside over their legacies with devotion.Hester is the anomaly: still living, yet still lost to history.My big sister was a fan of Hester’s band. That fandom must have rubbed off on me.She was once a poster hanging in my sister’s room.A drumbeat coming through my sister’s wall.Then my muse. This profile will be my mistresspiece, my maestrawerk. (2015)

STEFAN, MOSES AND FFION OUTLINE HOW CICILIA HERSHY LIKELY BECAME BOYD BREAKWELL’S RESEARCH ASSISTANT BASED ON INSTITUTE PROTOCOL AND THE FRAGMENTS OF DIARY ENTRIES

After a cursory mentor–mentee coffee interview where we mutually worked our charms – both Institute alumni! – till we almost sparked a fire, Breakwell gave me an office next to his at the Research Institute, around the corner from the Archive of the Institute for Transmission. He gave me the gist: a profile of a national traitor who switched sides mid-mission; a pathetic, tragic figure likely in hiding somewhere; a woman he had once admired and with whom he’d once apparently shared a tryst (he said this carefully, judging my reaction).He took me to his office, which was covered in carefully arranged photos.Hester on the Mainland with her different minor bands leading up to Vehicle. Always with a bowl cut, dyed every colour.Assessing the weather from the images, the more humid the more curl and coil her hair took on. In cold weather she looked grey and ill; in the sun she was tanned and glowing. Something about her drew me in. And there was Breakwell, so young, could I say cheeky, but somehow nervous, shy. His lips bright pink, thick blonde hair in waves. Spritely, lanky. Breakwell now was hunched, a little haggard, but there was still something boyish about him. (2015)

MOSES HAS LISTENED TO HUNDREDS OF HOURS OF DECLASSIFIED INTERNAL PHONE CALLS AT THE INSTITUTE FOR TRANSMISSION

July 2000

The Assistant’s Office of Dr. Charles Mirr,

Institute for Transmission

to The Private Quarters of Hester Heller,

Student Apartments

Recorded telephone call begins:

BB: Good morning Ms. Heller.HH: Mm. Morny [sic].BB: This is your [short pause] 6.01 a.m. wake-up call. You have an examination today – HH: I know – BB: – at 9 a.m. I must advise you that your examination has been moved from The Second Largest Hall to Dr. Mirr’s office due to yesterday’s security alert, as safety measures have been placed on all government-related buildings.HH: Oh. Variety. I wonder what that was about. Maybe that disaster that was in the news telegram?BB: Yes. Maybe. Don’t know. Please arrive at least fifteen minutes before the beginning of your exam.HH: Nearly there.BB: [pause] Nearly where?HH: Just three more, then I’m finished, actually. You? You’re a first-year like his old assistant?BB: [pause]HH: You’ve been waking me up every day for a year, maybe it’s time we got to know each other? You’ve got a much better bedside manner than the other one he had. BB: Oh, thank you.HH: He was so arting chirpy.BB: [giggles] Oh, right.HH: You probably have everything about me in front of you?BB: Um, no, not really, just your courses and examinations.HH: There’s a bit more than that. I used to wake up the third-years for a bit in my first year too. BB: I haven’t read all of it. There’s a lot to read.HH: I used to mix it up a bit. Sometimes I would do voices. Or I did jingles on the keyboard for a couple of weeks one summer. What are you studying?BB: [pause] Grade 1 Observing. Grade 1 Skim Reading.HH: Which selected modules? BB: Grade 1 Tells. HH: Ah. I taught a bit of that last year.BB: I was in your class. It was my favourite class last year.HH: What else?BB: Grade 1 Friend-Making. HH: Yes.BB: [pause] Grade 1 Seduction.HH: They let me go straight to Grade 3 in my first year.BB: [pause] Yes. I saw. I’m doing Grade 3 Composition.HH: Oh really? You’re one of the popping music kids.BB: I play drums. I’ve seen you at the practice space, don’t you play?HH: You sound young? Older than the beginning of last year, so you must be really young? Sixteen?BB: Seventeen.HH: A Mirr prodigy. He likes those.