The Red Light

I came home on Sunday night to an odd scene after a strange musical event in the Old Fruitmarket, one of those beautiful old buildings in Glasgow that was actually saved from sixties demolition. Probably by accident. My flatmate had switched the light bulbs in my room.

I should probably elaborate. I have had a fascination with red light-bulbs since just before I left London, when my flatmates tried to give our flat some Halloween cheer by installing a red light in the bathroom. It looked evil, and I loved it. Of course they were sensible types and got rid of it once the festivities are over. Nothing good lasts for long you see, joy must be reigned in with dictator-style levels of obedience. Take sky-dives, crocodile-taunting or amateur ping-pong rallies as just three examples.

Anyway, a while back, my present flatmate acquired a car, I know not where, and I have no reason to ask him, it just appeared shortly before Christmas. After we dumped the body in the boot into the canal, it pretty much became an object of much greatness. How we mourned when it got broken into a week later, but we have recovered. In our giddiness we decided that we would drive to a supermarket, much as real-life adults do. My flatmate bought all manner of useful objects, like food, frying pans, and a Banzai video reduced to £1, while I, mindful of my fleeting love affair with the red light-bulb, bought one of my own. I would not be cheated out of a red-light room this time I thought, triumphantly. I also bought some perishable food items that are currently evolving in my fridge into some miracle cure for cancer or a new building material fit for Emperors and oil-rich Sheikhs with one-step escalators in the their humble, fifty-hectare abodes.

The red-light bulb sat on a shelf for weeks and wept quietly to itself. Sometimes, I would whisper to it to calm it down, let it know that life outside the lamp was alright, but all it really wanted was to be inserted where the light don’t shine so that it could emit a radiant light of its own. Think of how a tapeworm feels outside the gut. Lonely, desolate, drained of emotion, starved of love and affection, of a purpose, of that palpable feeling that life has a meaning, a heightened inability to fit in, writhing on the ground or in the toilet bowl dreaming again of the womb-like encapsulation that once offered it the promises of the ages. It dares to dream. Yes, tapeworms are complex creatures, I’m sure you can sympathise.

Imagine my surprise when I returned to find my room a shade of erotic red. Shock passed, a rational assessment of reality followed, hampered somewhat by the alcohol, but then steadily a dawning realisation that something of beauty had occurred came over me. The red light, in which now I sit in typing, has four effects that I can think of immediately. Firstly, it has destroyed my ability to read in my room as it is too dark, and reading in the dark (and under a duvet) is apparently the reason for my tragic semi-blindness that leaves me startled in the face of oncoming buses whenever I try and wipe the omnipresent rain from the lenses. I now have to decamp to our permafrozen lounge which is a better place in any case, as I don’t fall asleep immediately. Perhaps I need to change my reading material. The second effect, which is slightly stranger, is that even innocent activities, such as changing into a tracksuit or taking off a jumper, make you feel slightly like a whore. The third effect, which usually occurs first thing in the morning when your brain is still circulating chemicals that make you think you are flying or try to make you tie a noose from your shoelaces, is that you feel like you are in a dark-room. Locked in a three-year nightmare to develop those agonisingly set-up photographs that, Eugene Smith-like in the apocalyptic territory of the dying industry of Pittsburgh, no one will ever see. The fourth effect, and possibly the most rewarding, is that if you cross the main road outside my flat and look up, it looks as if my bedroom is on fire. If I could install a ceiling fan that would interrupt the emitted light, it would look still more like flames were dancing dangerously in my own room. Or, more perplexingly, that somehow some hard-up call girl had broken into my flat and was now practicing pole-dancing using the fluorescent tube-light from our kitchen. Shadows play tricks on the mind you see, just like psychic temple-shooter Derren Brown.