The treatment handed out to inanimate objects over the centuries has been appalling. Humanity has consistently taken up objects, used them, changed them, broken them up, created new ones, and discarded them without so much as holiday pay. And it is something we are all guilty of. For who among us does not possess at least a few objects? And in fact they are our very slaves. We did not consider their rights as autonomous individuals when we rudely possessed them.

 

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Pete Nicholson

[extract]

Proposals

I received a call three days after sending the letter. Tom, the voice on the other end of the line, told me, in a tone of hardened steel, that I was coming at things from an angle he couldn't ‘make sense of immediately'. A cab was sent.

It was 8 p.m. when I arrived, and there was no moon. The building reared up like a massive set of sloping shoulders. I imagined a connecting pair of hands reaching under the city. I was buzzed inside.

Tom was not his voice. He was short and slightly stooped, with a sheen of red hair ironed into a tightly controlled wave across his head. His skin was the colour of good mustard, and the hue had spread into the lines around his mouth. The lines possessed none of the qualities commonly associated with lips—they seemed hard, starched almost; they collapsed around the corners of his mouth in the brief moments when he let his face relax. Only when he smiled did the face make sense, pulling together into a look of awesome resolve. It did this, I would come to learn, at the beginning and end of all his sentences.

As we walked across the foyer he took his hands out of his pockets, made an oval shape in the air, and extended them to me. Our handshake continued into the lift, where we rose, silently, to the eighth floor.

He turned to face me as we stepped out, looking, it seemed, at a point somewhere behind my eyes.

‘Pas,' he said, finally, extending a hand toward the door in front of us. We were outside some kind of tearoom—through the glass door I could see a seemingly infinite number of microwaves spiralling into the distance. ‘I look at you and see, in a way, something of a young Tim Lam—you know Lam?'

‘No.'

‘Young guy, tenth floor, closer… damn that guy… on one—'

(We continued like this for a full five minutes, him talking, me following him in and out of corridors, cubicles and meeting rooms. I was not sure whether he was showing me around, or was lost himself. Since he began speaking, he had not yet paused for breath.)

‘—in the same way we all did when we started,' Tom said, pausing, at last, at a mauve door. ‘You have to balance it.'

 

Fingers in the Shape of Pistols

‘I've done all the talking,' Tom said, lifting his little legs onto his desk. They were stubby, like small bits of firewood, and I wondered if he'd be able to get them down again. ‘You tell me something.'

On Tom's desk, resting against his computer monitor, was a photo of an African child playing with a toy truck in a sandpit. The sandpit consisted mostly of a light-coloured mud. The child was wearing a floral dress that, bizarrely, had a tear in the sleeve the shape of Africa . I knew this would not make a good joke, and even if it would, I could not make it, because I am no good at jokes. Still, I wondered whether Tom had noticed the shape of the tear, if this photo had given him the conviction that, in some small way, he was sponsoring the whole continent and all its woes, all its children.

‘What?' I said. ‘What do you want to know?'

Just then a buzzing, humming noise started up, like a distant plague of locusts. Tom didn't seem to notice.

‘Your family,' he said. ‘Tell me about your family.'

I rubbed my eyes. When I opened them, the child in the picture had opened her mouth into a flawless ‘o'. Within her lips lay a perfect blackness.

It'd been almost three days since I'd spoken to anyone. I had been screaming, though, off and on, since mum left. My voice rasped like an engine coming to life on a winter morning.

‘Fuck, Tom,' I said, clearing my throat. ‘I've lived alone with my mum for as long as I…'

‘How long?'

‘Ten, maybe fifteen years.'

‘Okay.'

‘Last month she was diagnosed with MS.'

‘Wow. Is—'

‘It took me so long to get her out of the house… I… Last week I'm on the phone, organising some adjustments to my car, and I go into her room and she's—'

‘Shit, Pas.'

‘Wait.' I said. ‘In the afternoon she calls—she's at the airport, twenty minutes away from leaving for Queensland to live, for good.'

Tom put his legs back on the floor, face twitching from resolve to mush and back again. Fingers drumming on the table. A consistent rhythm, vaguely South American, but tight, tight, even as he backed away and had to continue on his thighs.

‘Right, Pas. Right,' he said. ‘Who… why Queensland ?'

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Contents listing

From Total Cardboard 8
£5.00
144pp, 24 x 17 cm
ISBN: 0 9757380 1 1

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In our enlightened times we no longer feel constrained to discriminate against each other. We have also extended this courtesy to animals, to a degree. Even plants have their needs tended. For we accept that all living things have their value (in public anyway). We even show concern about our environment, and only dump toxic waste when no one is looking. As a consequence of our concern, it has come to be noticed that inanimate objects are often neglected. For they do not come under any blanket concern for the environment. We are talking individual rights for individual objects here. Indeed, individual objects receive more than their fair share of discrimination. And just because they are not alive, it does not mean they should not have the same rights as the rest of us. For how can objects speak out for themselves if they are inanimate? They are not merely being shy either. They require some rights enshrined in law, even if they are too embarrassed to come forward. The treatment handed out to inanimate objects over the centuries has been appalling. Humanity has consistently taken up objects, used them, changed them, broken them up, created new ones, and discarded them without so much as holiday pay. And it is something we are all guilty of. For who among us does not possess at least a few objects. And in fact they are our very slaves. We did not consider their rights as autonomous individuals when we rudely possessed them. And we claim to own them. Even if that were true, and there is some argument to show, no matter how much you pay for an object, if you do not respect it as an individual, then you have no right to dictate the course of its existence, objects did not ask to be manipulated by us. In fact we have never asked whether they like being asked. And even if they cannot answer, or communicate in any way, this does not assume they have no rights. By any democratic standard, mistreatment of an object represents a fundamental denial of an object's right to exist as an object, for and by itself, for its own purposes. And if the object just sits there doing nothing, then that may be considered an expression of its own autonomous existence, and that should not be tampered with. The fact that objects will never complain of injustice means we must protect them all the more, as we would always protect the vulnerable in any society. And perhaps there are more reasons now to treat objects with respect. For, in our modern era, objects outnumber us a thousandfold. If they were ever to become critically aware, and to organise themselves along political lines, then we may have some problems. Objects might go on strike, they might decide on sanctions, or even declare war. It would be a conflict we could not win. There have already been several instances of objects hurting humans without provocation. How these instances would increase if objects became resentful at their situation. For these instances are increasing already, if slowly. We should not have to live in potential fear of objects. We should begin educating them now. So they can take their place on the world stage as equal players rather than props. We should find out what the hopes and aspirations of objects are. Once we work up an appreciation of them, then maybe we can have a dialogue with them. Then we can have partnerships with objects, establish their rights as equal entities, rather than merely possessing them.