Angus McGrath
Passion

Fiction

I’m “making it big”, which mainly seems to mean that I stay in hotels most of the time. We’re currently shooting a video for my new single where I just sit in the back of a white sports car while miming the song. The shoot, like every other shoot, is uneventful. A crew moves around me and sets up lights while I wait at the centre. The shoot and the hotels are the same; I kill time until I need to perform again.

It’s sundown when I arrive on set, and the director tells me about some classical choir music he wants to put at the end of the video. He says the car I’m in is white because the first of the four horsemen of the apocalypse has a white horse. I’m surprised to hear him say that because I didn’t think my song was about anything that intense. I nod through the conversation and only really pay attention when he says my clear skin will stick out against the steel and concrete. I take it as a compliment.

We’re filming on a wide and particularly quiet stretch of highway since the budget isn’t big enough to shut anything down. From here, I can see out over the city. Every few minutes, some cars come by, but we remain totally uninterrupted by them. The streetlights in the centre of the highway are so weak you can barely see the bitumen and light grey bollards and not much else. It looks like a video game that’s only rendered the road and the distant city, which, from far away, looks like stars. The lights from occasional cars only illuminate empty bits of road. It’s all boring to look at, so I ask if I can wear my sunglasses for the shoot and the director says yes.

For about an hour, as someone does my hair and make-up, I play Drake’s ‘A Night Off’ on repeat in my AirPods. In the song, Drake tells his girlfriend he’s sorry for spending all his time in the studio, but when he comes home, he really wants to have sex. The slowness of the song is meant to be sexy, but to me it’s just woozy. Sometimes it’s so sluggish that Drake’s voice moves out of sync with the booming toms. Things aren’t at the right speed, and everything should go faster or slower, but it doesn’t. I’d like to make music that feels this tranquilised. I’m complimented once again when the woman doing my make-up says she barely has to use concealer because my skin is so clear. I think it’s one of my strongest characteristics.

The heart is the vessel that pumps blood. It’s a husk of meat with many chambers. EAT is at the centre of the word DEATH. These are the thoughts that run through the teenage girl’s mind as she waits every day for a reply to her fan mail. It’s daytime in Germany. She leaves school, going straight to the post office in case I have replied to her. While letters are an undeniably nostalgic form of communication, she believes it will cut through to me in a way a DM won’t. Its endangered status as a medium of communication means I’m more likely to see it.

The sun is a star that gives life, much like she believes I do.

I sit in the car with the top down as the crew sets up ring-lights. I decide to Google the choir track, which is a ‘Passion’ for St John and, from what I can understand, is meant for church services about God’s last moments. According to Wikipedia, ‘Passion’ is a Latin word that means “To suffer, to bear or to endure”. Reading about the biblical apocalypse that follows the white horse, I find out it climaxes with angels playing horns. I think about angels making music and how good they’d be at it.

There are two burly guys putting this weird metal rig on the front of the car so the lighting won't get in the way of whoever’s driving. It’s overly complicated because the director wants the video to look like it's been shot on my phone, but they can’t just shoot it on a phone, so they need to do all these tricks. They spend ages doing things like putting gel on the lights so they’ll blow out and make everything grainy or me into a silhouette. The DIY aesthetic is really in right now and the label says I’m associated with it. One of my regular commitments for them is making content – “it keeps the fans engaged and lets them know you’re still there”. For months, I’ve only been motivated to take videos of the street from my various hotel balconies. In the daytime, my phone struggles with the sun and blows things out in strange ways. At night, all it captures are various blinking lights from other buildings. I think both are random but cool, and apparently people like them. The label sent it to the director as a mood board, which inspired the video.

When we’re actually filming, I mime the song and the director tells me I’m doing well. We shoot for three and a half minutes, driving the car down the road then turning around and pulling over so someone can adjust the lighting and someone else can fix my hair. We do this over and over again all night. Everyone likes the sunglasses, and it makes my make-up easier to touch up. I’m good at looking like I’m really feeling the track. In the dark, the speed blurs everything – white car, black road, grey bollards. Being here for hours with nothing around makes me understand how my skin looks so soft.

Pop stars are technology; as much records, cassettes, CDs, streaming data, online videos, printed images, and ephemera as they are skin. People establish and uphold stars through consumption. Eat the body of an object of love. The teenage girl, having spent hours at the post office, returns home. I’m on posters in her room, one image made up of several parts, different sheets. She is a hole that needs to be filled, so she tears pieces down and chews on the paper, praying it might taste like my blood.

The teenage girl watches a video I posted from my hotel balcony before the shoot. It reminds her of porn; amateur in a way that suggests naturalness but still clearly staged and framed. She sees the seams of my life yet still craves for it, hoping to rip them apart and look at what they conceal.

Occasionally, she goes on vore forums: online sites for people to discuss their fetish for devouring living people. There’s a sliding scale of vore, all the way from fantastical and bloodless fetish content where tiny creatures are swallowed whole by much larger beasts (think Pinocchio and the whale), through to full-on carnage focused on the violent consumption of human flesh. As her interest in the culture began, the teenage girl remembers seeing a Tweet, which said, “Many might associate vore with cannibalism; however, MOST voraphiles do not favour cannibalism. Vore is an IMAGINARY fetish; that is, it is impossible to perform in real life the way most fantasise, unlike most cannibalism.” She felt like this was a cop out, even then.

We finish shooting at sunrise and my manager drives me back to the hotel in the car we made the video with – we have it for 24 hours, so he insists we might as well use it. Everything is different once the sun comes up. The sky is a red that feels apocalyptic, and I want to hear angels playing trumpets. We decide it’s fun to play my album over the stereo. I think it sounds good. I notice there are fields of dry grass all around us on the other side of the highway. I never knew there were farms this close to the city. It’s comforting seeing the skyscrapers getting bigger and bigger as we get closer to the hotel. The road looks the same the whole way there.

Now that we’re in the city, the highway is elevated above the ground, and if we went off the side, we’d definitely die. I imagine my manager dozing off, then starting awake –thinking for a moment there’s an animal on the road – and swerving. Even just a second would be enough for the steering wheel to inch slightly to one side. The tyre would catch the road all weird and smash the car hard into the railings. He’d be freaking out by this point, struggling for control as the passenger door where I sit scrapes violently on the cement beside the road, designed to keep cars on the bridge. Sparks would fly against the window while the car shuddered, eventually catching a break in the cement barrier. We would pop through those metal ropes, freeing us up to plummet into the river below. We’d hit the water nose-down, so hard my manager’s nose would collapse against the steering wheel. I’d suffer severe whiplash, maybe crack my head open on the dashboard, but remain alive, concussed as the ocean slowly seeped into the car. The few fish around would peer in the unbroken window as I struggled to undo my seatbelt. I’d die with my forehead crinkled, a look of terror pasted onto my made-up face. I hope my sunglasses stay on.

Read the full story in issue four.

Angus McGrath is a writer and artist based in Sydney on Gadigal Land. His work circulates around subculture, the limits of meaning, negativity, and the cinematic.

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