Eskew by Episode: 7 & 8

In which Jon and Muna offer commentary, anecdotes & random thoughts on every episode of I Am In Eskew.

Follow along with us as we go!

Episode 7: Edibility

In which David Ward encounters the Eskew Fish Market - and meets the worms again.

Jon:

I was genuinely and completely sleep-deprived when I wrote this opening section about sleep deprivation, which is probably why it reads strangely and to me in retrospect, a bit uncomfortably, in places - honestly, I'm not massively happy with it.

They’d just changed the flight path patterns to Heathrow, which meant that we were seeing planes over our bedroom from around 4 in the morning some days, and I think it was the summertime, so sleeping with the windows closed was agony...it was not a fun time.

I remember swaying gently on the Tube one morning, feeling utterly inhuman and deranged, pretty much alien to the people around me in my near inability to stand, and yet finding a strange sense of power in the fact that nobody was turning to look at me. (I was getting away with faking it, faking being a person!) That was something I was trying to convey, the invisibility of my experience.

And as it happened, at the time I was also walking to work past Smithfield Market. It’s a beautiful old building and a historic marketplace, located in the strangest part of town - just south of Farringdon, on the edge of the city.

It feels like a boundary-place, with butchers unpacking their vans on the right and people in suits staggering out of Fabric night-club on the left or emerging from posh coffee shops. I was fascinated by it, and so that became the Eskew Fish Market.

And finally, I don’t remember how or where, but for some reason I was eating scampi, which in the UK tends to be round-ish balls of shrimp tail in breadcrumbs (but can traditionally be other white fishmeat). It’s delicious, but like so much seafood, it’s horrifying. It’s unidentifiable white gunge hidden beneath a crispy golden exterior.

Pretty much the entirety of carnivore-horror delves into the hypocrisy and the weirdness of our relationship specifically with red meat. Which makes sense; it’s the fact that as a species we’re so happy to devour animal flesh which is nearly indistinguishable from our own.

But I’ve never really seen the opposite explored in horror - how utterly weird and horrible is it that we guzzle down this unrecognisable alien material from the depths of the ocean, which is so far removed from our understanding of anatomy but just happens to somehow be delicious?

Except, weirdly, Futurama, which I think really captured the appeal and the revulsion of seafood in The Problem With Popplers.

Anyway, it felt like the perfect opportunity to bring the worms back.

There’s a bit of cheating needed to get David into place with this one (who is the mysterious man who the worms use to summon David? Why can they exert this power over him but nobody else? Why wouldn’t they just use him to try and break free?). It’s, uh, more about mood than plot, this one. That’s what I’m going to say in future when I need an excuse.

Muna:

I'm mostly enamoured with the lack of detail here around David's friends. He seems to like them, be proud of them, but also seems to have no recognition of how they've become friends.

I've always been good at making friends, I suppose that comes with the territory of having moved around so much. After a pretty vicious bout of bullying in my very younger years, I learnt how to slot into a new school, and friends, and an environment. It was only years later, at university, that I learnt how to connect with people on a genuine level.

But that sense of somehow being outside, while pretending to be part of a group - I think lots of us (especially if you're an introvert) can relate to that.

Jon:

There’s a gorgeous piece of art from this episode, created by @planetsandmagic on Twitter. It was one of the very first pieces of fanart I ever saw for Eskew, and I remember being just stunned by the fact that somebody had taken the time to create something so beautiful off the back of something we’d made in our living room. 

There are so many talented people working online and it's just honestly really humbling to have even prompted something that's so beautiful!

Jon:

The devolution of the worms into a placid and idle state, and the shift in emphasis towards the cruelty of how they’re caught and eaten, is another obvious reference to Junji Ito and specifically Uzumaki’s Snail-Boy.

I can’t help it. I love that little guy. I love how his condition escalates during the story. It’s pure Ito, the combination of grossness and humour and absolute inescapable, infectious horror.

And ‘royal trout’ is a nod to ‘rock salmon’, which I remember vividly as a kid being steered away from in a fish-and-chip shop. ‘Rock salmon’ is the deliberately misleading name they used to give to any throwaway fish that punters wouldn’t want to eat otherwise - usually dogfish, I think.

Jon:

You know what, I’m proud of myself for affirming the indignity and absurdity of David as a human being, even as he takes his first step towards meaningful action and revolt.

He asserts himself and stands up for what’s right, but he gets slithered over by a stampede of disgusting worms for his trouble.

It would have been so easy to make him straightforwardly heroic here, but the moment of mischief and rebellion, when he’s graceful, almost acrobatic, is immediately undercut. As it should be.

A lot of the show is really about social anxiety, and on a re-listen, the final moment here - where David returns to his ‘friends’ and finds that they just aren’t seeing him, they don’t seem to care or understand about the reality of his situation, even as they continue to mouth the right words - hits me pretty hard. I’ve been there.

And that moment when David starts to carve the word ‘remember’ into his hand, as a kind of experiment...I see that as speaking to the exploratory feeling that can come when we act self-destructively, if that makes sense? The sense of detached scientific enquiry. ‘Is this going to change anything? Is this about to do something?’

Episode 8: Motivation

In which Riyo begins her investigation into the mysterious city of Eskew.

Jon:

So we had a moth infestation in 2019. They’d got into the carpets, and they were everywhere. It felt...a little bit like the opening to a horror story, the sense of decay, the growing escalation of the problem.

The horrible thing about swarming infestations, for me, isn’t even the insects themselves, it’s the sense of relentlessness, the powerlessness, the absurd sense of a cycle repeating over and over. You swat a moth in the corner of the living room. You come back and there are three more identical moths. You’re constantly on edge and nothing you do seems to be making a difference.

And then the holes begin to grow in everything.

Muna:

I found this episode, particularly the end, really hard to record.

In one of the flats I lived, we had a bug infestation. It wasn't my parents' fault - we had just claimed asylum and this was the house we were given by the authorities. My mother kept (and keeps) a meticulous home. She cleaned, for hours, every day. But the downstairs neighbours clearly weren't interested in maintaining the same standard of hygiene. So we had bugs, that made their way from their house to ours.

They were everywhere. In a cupboard you opened to get a glass. On the ceiling as you showered, hurriedly. Disappearing from the light as you went to get some water in the middle of the night.

That's what I thought of, in this episode and as we dealt with our moth infestation. I always overreact to bugs (we replaced our carpets in the end), even completely seasonal ones, like flies.

This stuff (this fear, of small things crawling into the open parts of you) stays with you, I suppose.

Jon:

This is another editorialising episode, really! And I’m sort of crudely jamming together a few separate concepts into a single idea.

I think the acoustic science of haunted houses is seriously fascinating - the theory that supernatural experiences may be at least partially explained by certain arrangements of architecture resulting in certain infrasound frequencies that provoke instinctive feelings of deep unease and terror. (Like a twisted, inverted version of the golden ratio).

So of course, once we understand how these arrangements result in these frequencies, it follows that it should be possible to consciously design a haunted environment that is perfectly terrifying, disorienting and distressing - a house that it’s impossible to actually live in. (This is sort of part of the haunted house mythos anyway - Hill House has been designed so that doors swing shut and isolate its visitors in different rooms).

Goldsmiths University actually did test out a haunted house experiment back in 2006 using infrasound frequencies, but it seems like they may have screwed up their own test and created a placebo effect by telling their participants beforehand to watch out for strange feelings. (Coincidentally, this is why Liam Neeson’s ‘experiment in fear’ in the 1999 Haunting movie may not have been all that scientifically useful.)

We’re taking that concept and we’re combining it with the malevolent practice of ‘hostile architecture’ built to reject homeless sleepers, as well as the UK Government’s repulsive ‘hostile environment’ practices towards asylum seekers.

At its heart there’s exactly the same strain of conscious, designed cruelty to all three - the anti-human choice to deliberately create an environment that will be hateful to those ‘undesirable’ people who try to live in it.

And it makes me think, as well, of the horrific abuses committed against prisoners by the West in recent decades, including the endless playing of earsplitting music, the blindfolds, the disorientation  - not targeted, violent acts of torture so much as a disciplined and sustained effort to make living chronically unbearable for the victim.

Muna:

If we take haunted houses to be haunted precisely due to the horror of the humans' experiences within them - then I always wonder how this translates to entire cities which have gone through conflict.

Take colonialism for example - once countries were declared independent, how do their citizens recover from the brutality visited upon them for (in some cases hundreds of) years? Is it any wonder that the brutality continued through internal conflict (even if we put aside the devastating meddling often perpetrated by colonial powers)? That psychic energy has to go somewhere.

That's what Eskew, as a city, also references to me. What happens if a place - not just a house - is so awash with negative psychic energy that it becomes an ever lasting loop of horror?

Jon:

Somali is a beautiful language with two distinct regional dialects and certain pronunciations that don’t occur naturally in European languages, which can cause some confusions, as Muna speaks the northern Somali dialect.

For example, we didn’t realise when we named the character that while ‘riyo’ means ‘dream’, ‘riyyo’ can also mean ‘goat'. Muna’s mum laughed really hard at that one.

Muna:

It's not the easiest language, that's for sure! In hindsight, although this is David's story, I do wonder if we should have added more Somali in it. Would it have aided the surrealism of the show, or alienated our listeners?

I'm not sure, but it might have been a brave experiment.

Jon:

We definitely should have! One of the really interesting aspects about The White Vault is how it makes use of multi-lingual characters and voice actors. I think it can add a lot.

Jon:

Again, there’s not meant to be any great mystery with the repetition of the fourteenth floor.

Eskew is a cancerous, monstrous entity attempting to shape itself into a city for the people who are trapped within it, but without fully understanding how to make things work.

David lived on the fourteenth floor in London; that’s part of who he is, and his existence in that flat is associated with ‘home’.

So Eskew keeps bringing him back to the fourteenth floor. Parts of himself are bleeding out into his own experiences within the city, and as the series spirals out of control, David and the environment merge more and more...

Next up: David takes some time out in the Burn Ward to recover his strength...and then goes on a date.