Olivia's Diary

Part 2 here.

Part 3 here.

Part 4 here.

Part 5 here.

Part 6 here.

Part 7 here.

Finale here.

#Fuck them all. Plane taking off. I’m not going back.

Waiting for that first burn of vodka. Something sear my throat and take the memories away.

It’s me, Olivia Fox, getting the fuck out of here.

Plane full of fat white people going on holiday.

Fair enough.

Old birds showing off who bought more fags in duty free.

Fair enough.

Me, finally relaxing.

Fair enough.

No more churches. No more mosques. No more public safety announcements. No more protests. No more placards.

No more, Britain.

I tried, I really fucking tried.

Mum and Dad want to burn me but Christ, I tried.

Legacy of Empire, ruling class gone soft, university reeducation program, I fucking tried.

When you have visions, what the fuck can you do?

The great hungry of the world coming to us seeking peace, health, love, wealth, drugs, sex, call it what you will. And I’m getting out. I’ve had enough.

I’m going to puke.

I’ve been masturbating to videos of girls vomiting on one another. That can’t be good, can it?

Stomach acid burning my eyes, not exactly what you’d hope for a promising young talent.

It can’t be helped.

The body screams.

I listen.

Like I said, Mum and Dad weren’t too happy. Dad calls me a vicious little racist. Mum wants to know if I will move back in with them. Scared that London, out there, the jungle, is getting to me.

Well, she’s right there. The jungle haunts my nightmares. Getting back to gothic mosaic suburbia isn’t going to help that.

Suburbia, pretty, affluent, most part white, local colour stations, Indian doctors, Paki shop owners, Turks with kebabs and cafes, blacks fucking off back to the jungle once school hours are over.

Everything in its place, trite postcolonial pantomime ticking along exactly as its supposed to.

Labour back in government, what does it matter that Dad can’t get his windows fixed? Noone else can.

Little cosmetic job but the kids have to go somewhere. 90s Mum and Dad gotta put Bart and Lisa out to pasture. Half of them go home, BBC till they’re 30 and can afford to brave the jungle with some inherited measure of composure and dignitas.

We shits of unruly and unrequited paterfamilias don’t get that option, so we’re fucked off into the night at 21. Bachelors degree stamped, thank you very much, now go and face the fucking casualties.

That’s another name for the jungle – the casualty ward. A bit like the American Dream, only there was no dream, just maimed invalids and burn victims limping in from every corner of the imperial earth. Ever wondered why they call the “greatest post-war achievement” the “National Health Service”? Built by immigrants, naturally.

Great Britain, casualty bed for a war ongoing, fought out in mind-jungles stretching from home to hell.

Quite naturally the colonial class are still at it, though there’s no art to it anymore, no guiding principles, no shining lights.

Just bandage theatre of nurses, clerks, managers, surgeons, ambulance drivers, inspectors, consultants, lawyers, and trustees, medical professionals en masse arrayed £10 a piece for no other purpose than keeping National Health patients alive for a few more turns round the sun never sets.

Fuck it all, I’m out, I’ll take my chances on the dunes.

A refugee, God so help me, God forgive me.

I am fucking off to Rome to meet Gina.

She may be a ghost but if she’s real I believe I am in love with her.

We first met at the Gala. I the photographer, she the leading feature of The Magazine.

Posing all day, draped in silver mesh, gown doing little to hide her nutty dark nipples or the fur coat over her cunt.

A nightmare for a mid-shelf photoshoot but a dream for a devotee of Venus and her art.

We’ve seen it all before, of course, Gina made famous by the immortal gaze of M. Petrucci, for whom she acted when she was only 17. Served again in several of his later, more challenging films.

Shooting the legendary Gina Delasusa, highpoint of my fucking career, made all the more giddy by the booze.

Turns out Miss Gina (very emphatic about the “Miss”) is as much an erratic and dangerous drinker as I am. Several pints of vodka and a passionate lesbian kiss against the walls of St Paul’s later, we passed out in her king size bed in her suite in the Ritz.

Neither of us managed to undress.

Flight well underway now, hostess pouring my vodka on the rocks.

She likes my style. I like hers. Italian? Bulgarian? Romanian?

I don’t know and I don’t care.

Peroxide blonde in high ponytail fashion, dark lashes, enhanced lips.

And a swirling figure hugged tight by that vicious uniform.

Are those tits enhanced too, darling?

Checking out her ass as she’s leaning over, I hope she’s sensing my eyes, I hope it’s all on purpose.

Vodka bites harsh, same again when she’s back, can I tempt you to join?

Out the window, booze biting in, world below.

Funny to think of the RAF scrambling up in the heavens, 80 years ago. Luftwaffe faggots too.

A horrible way to die, hurtling out the sky, body unwounded, death inevitable.

Smash, fire, petrol, maimed, screaming.

Or is it inevitable?

I’m most afraid of those moments before, the brutal rush of luck run out, the callous infirmity of it all. The pain, the sickening crunch, the knowledge of this, all fucking this, about to end.

Death on film is always graceful or agonizing, blissful fade into white or merciless render into black and blue-red hell.

Death on social media is clean and underwhelming.

I’ve never seen it in real life.

When I was a girl, we had a beautiful secret garden at the bottom of our lane. There was a climbing frame there, old, rusted, beloved. I fell from it and snapped my ankle clean through.

Bone pierced flesh, trying to hobble home screaming.

Alongside pain were stomach cramps, convulsions, nervous trauma, spinal panic.

Shame that something was broken, deeply rent and wrong with me.

Fear as to what this meant.

Airplane pilots nosediving into warp and carcasshood, searing the landscape with their violently altered souls.

It brings me right back.

Oh look, peroxide is coming back, thank God. Another vodka please while I admire your chemical treat beauté.

Bleach wash in her hair, burning her scalp and my eyes.

Smiling and serving me over ice again.

Wanting to burst those lips and taste ethanol.

A camera, my eye. Ice become marble become God. Beauty cast by my knife, not a single drop of blood spilled.

Welcome to my world. They call me Olivia. Blood Sappho.

I will build you a Cathedral.

The Caliphs have spies everywhere. Our temple is forced to be invisible, sanctum, unknowable.

Entry is bought one way and one way only.

From flesh, we burn that which is base.

From minds, we cleanse that which is common.

The night is young, and the yoga begins.

Ours are the ways of beauty, for beauty evolves as do we.

We surgeons and scalpels, we figures and masks of dream.

Pleasure, fear, arousal, disgust, love.

We amputate all that we hate.

We mutilate all against fate.

Silicon Dreams, we have gone deep into the jaws of death.

Blood Sappho, Edition #1.

Cover Star, Léa Prinetté, Parisian, 26.

Black hair, eyes tattooed red, physique long and slender, resembles a snake.

Photographed in jeans, breasts exposed, licking a scalpel.

“I always dreamed of being photographed”, her editorial.

“I want eyes on me, exposing me, drilling beneath my skin.”

Léa works as a bartender in Paris in a Caliph district.

On the next page we see a closeup of her thigh with deep red incisions.

“Liberté”.