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Written by Tash Rialto. Performed by Morsten Weens. This track marks the start of Disc Two.

lyrics

They’ve imprisoned us in a mud-floored lower chamber of a small castle on a hill for thirty years. The chance of escape for one or both of us is nil. No shoes, a long habit with a hood, no objects of any kind, essentially in a high-sided pit with one wall open high up where the guards walk on stone ridges between the dungeons, but luckily the floor is often dry, and we have one diagonal drain for a toilet which rushes straight to the outside, a distance of a metre or more. We’ve never communicated with the people in the other dungeons because we’d have to shout up to the high opening, and if you raise your voice then the guards chuck buckets of water into your pit until the whole ground ends up a muddy puddle, and that can take weeks to dry in the winter. The only way we know there must be others is because we hear the guards shouting at them and throwing down their bread and watery gruel where it’ll surely be apathetically devoured. When the guards come, we must sit silently against the wall with our hoods up and our hands and feet covered, not moving till they’ve definitely passed. Never break the rules. Much as you disagree with them, it’s not worth it. We have no power, and they only have to use a tiny bit of their great power to end our lives or, more likely, make them unliveable. When we’re sure they’ve gone we can have a sneaky look to check then take our hoods down and go about as normal.

You get to know someone very well when you share a pit eight metres by five for three decades. You build up a bond because you have to: there's nothing else to do. It makes it easier for you to keep your head down when the guards are goading and jeering because you know you're in the same boat as your comrade. If you do anything except sit motionless and silent, your lives will be nasty for weeks. Once, they goaded us for hours, and then they went silent for a while only to wail into shrieks of laughter when they pulled up my habit with a hook on a long stick. Then they beat us both with long poles because I “exposed the body” within their sight, (so they said) and when in defence we tried to grab the poles, our tormentors shouted “Get more poles!” and more guards came rushing out to beat us harder with extra pointy poles. And they beat us on the ground too: shoved us, thwacked us and poked us as we lay there. Most of the time now though, the guards leave us alone when they’re patrolling or lowering down our bread and gruel (yes, that’s right, actual gruel. Vile). In the evenings they just come by to pull the water jug out. (They gave us the same jug for ten years once and we didn’t see it again for ages, but when it came back I remembered it and I got a lump in my throat. Silly really, getting attached to a jug. Silly old man.) In general you learn to emotionlessly absorb a lot of bad experiences: anything at all except perhaps a swarm of trainee guards. It takes the new recruits a while to settle down until they start leaving us alone. They’ve taunted us for half a day at a time before, and they’ve done everything you could just about conceive to make our lives misery, but never once have they just thrown stuff at us. I bring it up because sometimes that’s all I want. I wouldn’t even mind if they threw rocks because the wounds would heal, and at the end of the day we’d have more rocks to play with. Maybe that’s why they don’t throw stuff in. I find it funny that in thirty years not one guard has ever thrown a single object at us other than our basic dietary needs. I assume that must be a deliberate jailers’ strategy, to deny us all things other than the very basics of what we need to stay alive (if you can call it “alive”): a way of demoralising us and keeping us placid. I suppose it works very effectively.

I know everything about my companion, and he knows everything about me. We agree we’ve been given a harsh sentence for our crime.
Very over the top.
But that’s what everyone gets.
We suspect we’ll die here, we’re already so old and pained and broken-over, but who knows, we may be released at any time. We never hear any news about anything…

I have a story to tell – one real story, a learning experience. No others, just this one:

I learned even after three decades of being denied everything but a large cloth (essentially) to cover myself, and the most basic of nosh to keep me alive, that a person can still be the same cunt they were on the outside:
Last year around Christmas time, we assume, one of the guards put a cranberry tart on the rope. We didn’t know whether to save it or chomp it down straight away. Eventually we decided we might as well just eat it rather than put it on the muddy ground in a corner and wait for it to rot or get stampeded by mistake. “All right,” said my mate, “half and half. What can we cut it with?” We glanced around, but as usual there wasn’t anything to cut anything with, so I said, “Go on, eat half and I’ll have the rest,” but I knew – I knew – the moment I said it that he’d eat the lot. And so with a repressed gleam in the eye and a slight tugging up at the edges of the mouth, my companion crammed the lot into his gob and swallowed it noisily and with difficulty.
Can’t believe it.
Even after all these years. You’d think a person might change…
…Still a cunt.

credits

from Marathon Tuxedo Go All Jackanory on Your Arse, released January 10, 2012

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Marathon Tuxedo UK

Marathon Tuxedo is Tash Rialto and Morsten Weens. Rialto does programming, vocals on the left, guitars, comb and paper, percussion. Weens does programming, vocals on the right, and percussion. Weens is also Sexual Ben sexualben.bandcamp.com and Rialto is in Von Bartha vonbartha.bandcamp.com ... more

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