The barren lands of south Essex are places where I rarely venture. Here concrete streets are forever twisting themselves into ever more bland configurations, a Lovecraftian-horror in reverse. Victorian terraces overnight contort themselves into blocks of glass fronted flats, their balconies emptier than the souls that reside within. Schools are ground down and compressed into the cement blocks that build ever more labyrinthine multistory car parks. Even the supermarkets collapse in on themselves, the resulting supernova leaving ever more densely packed neutronmarkets behind.
Minds here are corrupted not by incomprehensible visions of infinity and malevolence but by a bizarre religious devotion to Margaret Thatcher’s doctrine of self sufficiency. The gibbering madnesses that result are, however, largely the same.
Hospitals, a frightening reminder of the coddled horrors of living in a socialist state, are largely shunned, and their functions are slowly being replaced by a variety of macabre houses of medical horror that cater to the twisted whims of these strange and deranged people. Shopping centres no longer contain just shops. Here you can have your teeth vibrated clean, strapped down into a chair just outside Wilkinsons, your lips pulled back, a crowd of onlookers marvelling at the lack of enamel left in your maw. There, next to that stall where they print pictures onto canvas for no readily apparent reason, you can have your eyeballs sliced open, businessmen allowed a quick glimpse of the ultraviolet dimensions before the cornea is replaced and their lunchhour is over. And everywhere you can sit with your feet in a trough and let piranhas feast on your everdying flesh.
Those that cannot pay are left to rot in their shoes.
Jeff Randall is Essex Terror’s senior.
