From The Vaults #2 - The Amen Ra Letters
Myself and three friends used to share the best place together. It was cheap , it was huge and it was in the middle of everything . It was so close to the tube station that sometimes I’d actually wake up on my way to work surprised to find out that I’d carried out my morning routine whilst on some sort of autopilot. Somehow my body had trained itself to get out of bed , wash itself , brush it’s teeth , get it dressed and get out of the door without activating my conscious brain which would’ve just thrown too many spanners in the works. It was an impressive feat that for a while I feared was a sign of some sort of brain trouble , maybe even a tumour , but I relaxed into it reasoning that if my body could operate this well without me perhaps then it could take control from Monday morning to Friday evening and then give me back the reins for the weekend thus allowing me to live in a perpetual state of holiday. Sadly it could only manage the first 20 minutes of my day and the odd drunken voyage home. Other then that it ran like a well oiled machine that only failed me once in a regrettable incident I shall call Morning Glory-gate.
I digress…
So this house was pretty damn cool except for one thing…the house. As a concept it worked perfectly well , in fact it sounded like a dream , no it sounded like a sit-com. Two guys , two girls , all kinds of crazy possibilities!
In reality this house was a beast and I really think it wanted to kill us. If the walls had wept blood and the very entrance to hell had opened up underneath the stairs I think it would have been easier for us to deal with than the catalogue of misfortune we endured. One of the things that kept you on your toes about the place was that you never exactly knew from one minute to the next if you were going to be plunged back to a standard of living unthought-of since the seventeenth century. There was the kitchen that for a while had a real taste for electrocuting people. If you touched the kettle , BANG! The toaster , BANG! A piece of cutlery , BANG! It was just insane.
We complained of course but our landlords were deaf to our cries of electrocution and injustice. The only option we had was to stop paying rent and then of course a hasty dialogue was opened. After we pulled off a textbook good cop/bad cop gambit ,a rent reduction was secured and repairs were promised. Oh life smelt of roses on that day blissfully unaware as were we of the shitstorm we had just unleashed. We should’ve known that any repairs carried out were going to be less than competently completed. One of the only times a qualified workman visited the house, he looked at the wiring , balked and refused to work saying the risk of death was too great .
The whole house was a veritable museum of unsafe , illogical and dangerous D.I.Y. It was as if when they put the place together a lunatic had been ordering them what to do. It wasn’t unusual to find four different types of skirting board in one room varying in height from 3 to 9 inches. Light switches appeared diamond shaped on the wall where they had been stuck on with masking tape. Pipes inexplicably appeared from a wall only to plunge equally inexplicably back into the wall further along. Wires from unknown sources protruded from the corners of the ceiling , the copper wire glinting menacingly at our curious eyes. Strange smells of ancient evil would emanate from different areas , lurk for a week or two then vanish. Paintwork was slapdash and mostly the colour of baby shit. A hastily built kitchen extension housed an external drain inside the house and had floor tiles that appeared buckled by possible tree roots underneath all. It looked like a WWII bunker from the outside. The kitchen had so many built-in cupboards there were virtually no work surfaces. The back door never locked , the front door locked sporadically.
There was not a single straight angle in the house. In each room the floors , walls and ceilings seemed to be battling to get away from each other. It was like living in a house drawn by a child making there first forays into the world of perspective. Eventually my sense of balance began to compensate for living with the sloping floors to the extent that at the time it wasn’t an unusual sight to see me enter someone else’s house only to flail madly down their hall face first into the first available sharply angled edge.
The whole house may have been slowly falling over as from the outside it appeared to stand at a crazy angle with the chimney dangerously leaning in over the roof just above where my bed was positioned in the attic room. Apart from the threat of being crushed to death in my sleep by falling masonry I also had to endure sub-zero tempreatures in the winter and tropical heat in the summer as well as the risk of permanent back damage by the constant stooping and crouching that was necessary to navigate my room without hitting my head. After a year in the attic I’d developed the gait of a lolloping , drunken silverback gorilla.
Essentially it was a great party house. The month we endured with only electricity on the upper floors was offset by the fantastic “Jock’s n’ Nerds” party we held. The fact that my room became a bedroom , lounge and rudimentary kitchen for the entire household for three weeks had the sting taken out of it by the brilliant impromptu boxing match that took place outside the house at 5am after one summer party. The months we had to bail out the kitchen like a sinking dinghy every time the washing machine was turned on were offset by the time we transformed our horrible concrete yard by covering the ground with big cushions , putting the TV outside , drinking beer , barbequing meat and laughing until the neighbours complained. It was shitty but it was fun.
I digress again…
Apart from all the dangers lurking inside the house we were blissfully unaware that we lived on the same road as one of London’s largest psychiatric institutions. I only found this out after we began to receive weird mail. I know that it’s illegal to open mail that doesn’t belong to you but when it’s postmarked from an address on your street and addressed to people with names like Golden Amen Ra it’s pretty damn tempting. We received quite a bit of correspondence from this one particular patient and never knew what action to take. If we ignored the letters would it just encourage them to send more mystifying missives or if we responded would we one day open the door to find a wild-eyed , homicidal maniac waiting there to collect our souls? We chose something we were all adept at ; inaction.
In subsequent years this particular facility has developed quite a reputation for losing patients who then go on to stab to death unsuspecting joggers , which is unfortunate. I think we were lucky to leave when we did. Nobody maniacs ever turned up or at least if they did they probably just let themselves in, noticed the vile stink and left , even the clinically insane have standards.
Here’s a couple of the letters we got. I’m not even going to try and explain them because I think they , however unintelligibly , speak for themselves . If you have any theories on what they may mean then , please , answers on a postcard.
