My (DFL's) comments on ODALISQUE (by PF Jeffery) as I read the novel weekly chapter by chapter.
The author of ODALISQUE has been kind enough to send me a CD of the whole novel. He started writing this novel in the nineteen-eighties. Recently completed (June 2008).
I hope to read this novel chapter by chapter on a weekly basis - and record some thoughts on THE LINKS BELOW. There are 50 chapters plus epilogue.
The author is happy for me to send to you a word-document of each chapter at any time, at your request. My address is bfitzworth@yahoo.co.uk
THE AUTHOR HAS ADDED SOME OF HIS OWN COUNTER-COMMENTS TO MOST OF MY COMMENTS. IF YOU ADD SOME COMMENTS OF YOUR OWN, PLEASE INFORM ME AT THE ABOVE EMAIL ADDRESS OTHERWISE I MAY NOT NOTICE (OR BE ABLE TO ALERT THE AUTHOR ABOUT) YOUR COMMENT.
I am a long-term epistolary friend of the author (handwritten letters from 1967 on a rough weekly basis).
I believe in ODALISQUE as a great fantasy/horror novel (spiritual, grotesque and humorous), but I am still in the personal throes of grappling with its strangely powerful (for me, almost alien) ethos -- greatly assisted by its beautifully silky style of expression.
==============================
NOW COMPLETE
CHAPTER ONE - Awakening
CHAPTER TWO - Love
CHAPTER THREE - Unease
CHAPTER FOUR - Departures
CHAPTER FIVE - Services
CHAPTER SIX - Enslavement
CHAPTER SEVEN - Travelling
CHAPTER EIGHT - Destinations
CHAPTER NINE - Torment
CHAPTER TEN - Barbarians
CHAPTER ELEVEN - Pregnancy
CHAPTER TWELVE - Lactation
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Sale
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Brothel
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Whoredom
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Rooms
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Whorlets
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - Transitions
CHAPTER NINETEEN - Toiling
CHAPTER TWENTY - Carting
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - Deliverance
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - Settling
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - Household
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - Concubine
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - War
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - Pollygoggers
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - River
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - Palace
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE - Unharnessing
CHAPTER THIRTY - Samples
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE - Lessons
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO - Ruby
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE - Cursed
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR - Trial
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE - Advances
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX - Dancing
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN - Training
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT - Solstice
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE - Masque
CHAPTER FORTY - Engaged
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE - Grim
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO - Intrigue
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE - Errands
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR - Marriage
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE - Rode
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX - Road
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN - Battlefields
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT - Ending
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE - Coronation
CHAPTER FIFTY - Beginning
EPILOGUE
2008 Interview with PF (Pet) Jeffery HERE.
===========================
www.nemonymous.com
Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Saturday, June 21, 2008
The Secret House
Published 'Unreal Dreams' 1997
The garden was higher than its flowers.
That was what Sybil described it, if in different words, because small girls tended to see things as larger than they actually were. She never questioned the garden's walls. They simply existed as a boundary. As simply as she.
As simply as her friends the roses.
There was a possible drawback, however—the other girls who lived in the garden. Little urchins, all of them, with nowhere better to live than ... yes, in Sybil's rose garden. But there was something comforting about the tall walls--so tall they seemed to have jagged ice along their top edges. Enough inhabitants here without having to invite more. Sybil shrugged. How did those other girls get in, anyway? They didn't have anything to say for themselves more than chatter. Never really answered Sybil's silent questions.
Sybil looked at her own skirt, like wings down-folded, too short to reach the knees. Far better to spend her gazes elsewhere, she guessed. The roses were always beautiful, since she had not lived long enough to see them die. They hung their heads; they knew that pride came before a fall. The involutions of petal in pink, yellow and white were startling because each flower had a little of each colour—tinged at the heart with crimson.
The ivy creepers that cushioned the inner garden walls towards the icy peaks of their towering horizon--these were choked with blossoms too, hybrid blooms that ivy, in normal circumstances, could not possibly bear. Bu, here, anything could grow alongside anything else that grew. Even the girls were, surely, hybrids.
Except Sybil knew no such words. Her world. Their world. Too simple for words.
Shelter was, however, a matter of concern—since the garden suffered weather, perhaps more than most. There were dens amid bowers of branches, where trees stood without fruit or flower. Beneath such interwoven hides, the girls, Sybil included, clustered—chattering, if not gossiping—for what was there to gossip about? Indeed, why chatter? Sybil supposed that young girls, such as herself, needed to chatter, even when there was nothing to chatter about. Little did she realise that, one day, there would indeed be something--an item of intensest gossip to last a thousand years of chattering.
But, first, Sybil wondered why none of them needed to eat. Perhaps, God had put such girls here on purpose—ones who were radiantly beautiful in their prettiness, with breasts on the brink of showing off their buds--ones who demonstrated a perfection which did not warrant alimentary canals to thread them from top to bottom. Sybil did not question how she knew that none of the girls needed to eat, without having ever eaten nor seen the word nor understood even the nearest concept.
Until one day of rain. Such rain as never had been seen, prefiguring a season that none had guessed or, even now, could visualise. So they didn't worry about the slats of sleet that the rain eventually became.
Other than the fact that Sybil grew sick.
Her limbs no longer worked, except in short sluggish bursts of stretching her skirt of wings wider than they had been intended to stretch. The wings, indeed, shrivelled. Her face took on the crimson from the heart of the rose. And the roses, in empathy, drooped. In rosy respect.
The girlish chatter grew louder than the splatters that fell from the sodden uplands of the tree-dens. The girls, thankfully, did not see this as the start of a rot.
One girl ill did not make a million.
Sybil would recover and the sun would return. The blooms would lift and take back the crimson as truly the régime of roses.
Yet Sybil knew better. Or worse. Inside. Deeper inside than it was possible to go in a girl so small. How deep could one delve in shallow shapes of flesh, blood and bone? Till the discovery of a heart more feathery than, if as beautiful as, an enfolded head of red-stained petals.
The sleet split asunder into a myriad flakes of silence: disguised as white noise. And the chatter became undercurrents of gossip and concern, instead of its pretty-eyed version, when rumour was nothing but excited renewal of interest. Now, rumour was scandal, as insidious as the avalanches of crumbly ice-frost that dollopped from walltop as well as from knotted branch.
Until one girl found a locked door in the tall wall: one that had earlier been concealed by the everlasting ivy, now stripped to its waist of bare whitened bones.
But no key.
Sybil pointed at herself and spoke for the very first time: "Chickens have wishbones."
Chickens, like other accepted facts of life, were mysterious archetypes that the girls knew as instinctively as being alive. Deep-seated collectivities of unconsciousness were far more powerful than real memories. Yet they didn't know that chickens could be eaten, except perhaps at Christmas. But what was meant by Christmas? And did Easter eggs come first?
"Painting is like taking somebody's face and putting it on a white canvas," Sybil continued.
The other girls looked at the now blinding landscape of snow that the garden had flattened itself out into--and realised exactly what Sybil meant by a white canvas.
Nobody suspected the delirium of illness or of Sybilness as the perpetrator of words about wishbones and canvases. The same Nobody did not take such words literally.
Sybil opened her legs a little wider to one of the smallest girls with the slenderest, yet longest, fingers: a girl, albeit so small, bearing breasts full enough to bedeck a near woman beneath her skimpy sheen of modesty--a covering that could not protect her from the cutting snow-wind of winter. This girl prodded a finger inside Sybil's body—whilst Sybil stopped herself thinking by thinking of the warm sunshine and the bosomy blossoms and the thymy paths of her erstwhile life in the garden. The girl's finger eventually withdrew from Sybil a key-shaped bone.
And everyone wished.
But before they tried it in the lock of the door, they waited for Sybil's face to grow as pale as death's liliness. Her breath was fainter than a fairy's. The girls took the spittle from a mulchy mound of plucked roses they had piled up for provender in the shelter—without knowing what provender was or even how to suck its juices for their veins. With this, they stick-lipped Sybil's mouth and rouged her soft cheeks.
They eventually abandoned Sybil there--a painting, if not a picture, of health and everlasting beauty. And, chatting about the expectation of wondrous story-books soon to be found inside the Secret House, they hastened through the newly opened door ... out of the Secret Garden.
The garden was higher than its flowers.
That was what Sybil described it, if in different words, because small girls tended to see things as larger than they actually were. She never questioned the garden's walls. They simply existed as a boundary. As simply as she.
As simply as her friends the roses.
There was a possible drawback, however—the other girls who lived in the garden. Little urchins, all of them, with nowhere better to live than ... yes, in Sybil's rose garden. But there was something comforting about the tall walls--so tall they seemed to have jagged ice along their top edges. Enough inhabitants here without having to invite more. Sybil shrugged. How did those other girls get in, anyway? They didn't have anything to say for themselves more than chatter. Never really answered Sybil's silent questions.
Sybil looked at her own skirt, like wings down-folded, too short to reach the knees. Far better to spend her gazes elsewhere, she guessed. The roses were always beautiful, since she had not lived long enough to see them die. They hung their heads; they knew that pride came before a fall. The involutions of petal in pink, yellow and white were startling because each flower had a little of each colour—tinged at the heart with crimson.
The ivy creepers that cushioned the inner garden walls towards the icy peaks of their towering horizon--these were choked with blossoms too, hybrid blooms that ivy, in normal circumstances, could not possibly bear. Bu, here, anything could grow alongside anything else that grew. Even the girls were, surely, hybrids.
Except Sybil knew no such words. Her world. Their world. Too simple for words.
Shelter was, however, a matter of concern—since the garden suffered weather, perhaps more than most. There were dens amid bowers of branches, where trees stood without fruit or flower. Beneath such interwoven hides, the girls, Sybil included, clustered—chattering, if not gossiping—for what was there to gossip about? Indeed, why chatter? Sybil supposed that young girls, such as herself, needed to chatter, even when there was nothing to chatter about. Little did she realise that, one day, there would indeed be something--an item of intensest gossip to last a thousand years of chattering.
But, first, Sybil wondered why none of them needed to eat. Perhaps, God had put such girls here on purpose—ones who were radiantly beautiful in their prettiness, with breasts on the brink of showing off their buds--ones who demonstrated a perfection which did not warrant alimentary canals to thread them from top to bottom. Sybil did not question how she knew that none of the girls needed to eat, without having ever eaten nor seen the word nor understood even the nearest concept.
Until one day of rain. Such rain as never had been seen, prefiguring a season that none had guessed or, even now, could visualise. So they didn't worry about the slats of sleet that the rain eventually became.
Other than the fact that Sybil grew sick.
Her limbs no longer worked, except in short sluggish bursts of stretching her skirt of wings wider than they had been intended to stretch. The wings, indeed, shrivelled. Her face took on the crimson from the heart of the rose. And the roses, in empathy, drooped. In rosy respect.
The girlish chatter grew louder than the splatters that fell from the sodden uplands of the tree-dens. The girls, thankfully, did not see this as the start of a rot.
One girl ill did not make a million.
Sybil would recover and the sun would return. The blooms would lift and take back the crimson as truly the régime of roses.
Yet Sybil knew better. Or worse. Inside. Deeper inside than it was possible to go in a girl so small. How deep could one delve in shallow shapes of flesh, blood and bone? Till the discovery of a heart more feathery than, if as beautiful as, an enfolded head of red-stained petals.
The sleet split asunder into a myriad flakes of silence: disguised as white noise. And the chatter became undercurrents of gossip and concern, instead of its pretty-eyed version, when rumour was nothing but excited renewal of interest. Now, rumour was scandal, as insidious as the avalanches of crumbly ice-frost that dollopped from walltop as well as from knotted branch.
Until one girl found a locked door in the tall wall: one that had earlier been concealed by the everlasting ivy, now stripped to its waist of bare whitened bones.
But no key.
Sybil pointed at herself and spoke for the very first time: "Chickens have wishbones."
Chickens, like other accepted facts of life, were mysterious archetypes that the girls knew as instinctively as being alive. Deep-seated collectivities of unconsciousness were far more powerful than real memories. Yet they didn't know that chickens could be eaten, except perhaps at Christmas. But what was meant by Christmas? And did Easter eggs come first?
"Painting is like taking somebody's face and putting it on a white canvas," Sybil continued.
The other girls looked at the now blinding landscape of snow that the garden had flattened itself out into--and realised exactly what Sybil meant by a white canvas.
Nobody suspected the delirium of illness or of Sybilness as the perpetrator of words about wishbones and canvases. The same Nobody did not take such words literally.
Sybil opened her legs a little wider to one of the smallest girls with the slenderest, yet longest, fingers: a girl, albeit so small, bearing breasts full enough to bedeck a near woman beneath her skimpy sheen of modesty--a covering that could not protect her from the cutting snow-wind of winter. This girl prodded a finger inside Sybil's body—whilst Sybil stopped herself thinking by thinking of the warm sunshine and the bosomy blossoms and the thymy paths of her erstwhile life in the garden. The girl's finger eventually withdrew from Sybil a key-shaped bone.
And everyone wished.
But before they tried it in the lock of the door, they waited for Sybil's face to grow as pale as death's liliness. Her breath was fainter than a fairy's. The girls took the spittle from a mulchy mound of plucked roses they had piled up for provender in the shelter—without knowing what provender was or even how to suck its juices for their veins. With this, they stick-lipped Sybil's mouth and rouged her soft cheeks.
They eventually abandoned Sybil there--a painting, if not a picture, of health and everlasting beauty. And, chatting about the expectation of wondrous story-books soon to be found inside the Secret House, they hastened through the newly opened door ... out of the Secret Garden.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Widow's Weeds
Published 'Beyond The Boundaries' 1997
A pity the war was so short, having represented the best part of his life.
His wife Emily was now dead, last heard singing folk songs along with her favourite long-play of Kathleen Ferrier. The place still echoed in fact with her murmurs of housework. Even the old wireless, still sitting in the corner of the parlour, its taut tuning-wire long since bereft of any power to differentiate between stations, seemed to break out into fitful life, re-broadcasting seasoned Home Service and Light Programme favourites. It was peculiar, though, the wireless having been unplugged for all this time. You would think it would know better.
Eric plumped down in the armchair. Soon, this very house, to which he had been wedded, child, chap and chairbound, for so long, would become more a burden than a home.
His eyes shone in the late afternoon, its sunlight studiously maintaining the integrity of its shafting beams with the complicity of the net curtains.
It turned too quickly from day to night. Conveniently forgetting to switch on the flashing strip, Eric had ample time to ferment the memories. The people he had once known passed by his inner gaze like the bowed strangers who would one day follow his funeral cortège. But most were long dead themselves, moved by busy-body worms into more than a corpse's area, buried deeper than the dungeons he had forgotten to dust: the hoover seemed to clog up on bones, anyway.
Years before, he had come out into the garden, expecting the sunshine to jolly him up with its contrast to the gloomy parlour—the birdsong airiness, the perfectly green lawn, the clean-living sheets gently sailing upon the washing-line, the near unbroken ceiling of blue sparsely sown with tufts of angel's breath. Then, the sudden spluttering into life of a lawn-mower ... curse it, this country could not boast of many such peaceful days, and one of Eric's clownish neighbours had decided to crop his grass-blades. Eric mentally threatened to go round and barber the clown's green fingers for him. Indeed, Eric had escaped outside, there being a decided atmosphere within the house...
Yes, congregated in the various rooms were all the relations who had arrived for next day's funeral. Ensconced in the kitchen were the culinary busy-bodies, the various aunts who had taken upon themselves the catering. The whole place teetered with stacked plates interleaved with serviettes. Darting from bedroom to bedroom were the hide-and-seek gang, some too old to be imprisoned in prams and others too young to sit quietly whilst practising the novelty act of balancing a cup-and-saucer on the knee and nibbling a manicured cucumber sandwich. In the dining-room, were the loud faced uncles launching jokes in various shades of blue upon the surface of their beers. In the parlour, were Emily and her mother hatching plots with heroines but no heroes.
There goes that lawn mower again. Eric had failed to notice that it had stopped momentarily, so the resumption was a double blow. Funerals were usually sad affairs at the best of times, but burying one's own child (who had just been old enough to call Eric "Daddy") was so sad, it actually ceased to be a real emotion. It was grief multiplied by no known human factor. He could not allow himself the normal outlet of crying because, if he started, he knew he would never be able to stop till he died himself.
Returning to the present day of old age, the sun had just given up its ghost to the moon. Emily appeared to sit in the corner, where the wireless had once glowed. She spoke with static in her throat and mis-tuning in her luminous eyes: bearing old news to her widowed husband who thought he was hearing it for the first time.
"Churchill says the war will end in two weeks...", the speaker by the wireless crackled.
Many old people usually did hold conversations with the media, complaining volubly at the newspapers, answering back the soap operas, debating turns of phrase with the politicians who would one day know better how to stutter. But Eric was talking to his dead wife. She to him. Belief is everything, if nothing else.
"It'll go on till you think it'll never end," was his studied response, "and then it'll surely end."
Memories of that day in the garden seeped back. He was much younger then, of course. He tried to concentrate on the birdsong rather than the backfiring of the underhauled lawn mower engine. It was like trying to remember only the good things in life: the love he once felt for his mother, the arrival of the Beano Comic every Thursday when he was endlessly five years old and his eventual success at riding a two-wheeler. Such things were to expunge his last memory of his small daughter: holding her tiny feet as he playfully cart-wheeled her around in this very garden. She liked nothing better than mucking about in the tool shed, so none of it was perhaps surprising...
Eric entered the dim and dusty shed, grabbed the old shears and looked for the large garden fork—but suddenly realised that the latter had now been removed from where it had been carelessly left standing on its handle in the shed's darkest corner.
Without telling anybody where he was going, he walked into the street and towards the sound of the mower. The blades would drink the gardener's blood, he vowed.
Meanwhile, the blades of Eric's own expanse of grass grew patches as tall as a toddler's knees.
After his wife had died, Eric fell in love with a niece.
One day, he looked at her sitting in the kitchen, mixing tea. Emily's sister's girl, Isabel. She had only come to absolve her guilt of not coming. She had brought her best friend with her to blunt the atmosphere. Tentative glances. Angles of blame. Misgiven glitter from the pots and pans. Talk that meant very little to Eric. About a person whose name sounded like Cankerous Mildeyes. Whose brother went under the name Odgod. Was his niece or her friend going to marry Odgod? It seemed so. If it were to be his niece's friend, Eric would not mind. She might as well marry somebody as anybody. But as to his niece (whose face spoke of nun's weeds), he could not bear the thought. She was too innocent, reminded him of his daughter who had not lasted beyond a half decade. He wanted to take his niece's hand and kiss it, tell her not to marry. Especially not to someone called Odgod.
The two girls, the niece and her friend, giggled. Made the gas stove turn itself on. He did not notice anyone turning the knobs. All four burners, like spirits, spirted. The only way to heat the kitchen. How many times had his niece urged him to have central heating fitted to this old house, and how many times had he refused, knowing the open fire made the parlour snugger than any damn radiators? The snow splattered the window, as if someone had had a cold time of it crying. No sun today: one day less without God's naked light.
Cankerous Mildeyes was apparently known to both girls from her relationship with one of their teachers. A scandal had brought things to light. The Head had said Mr Van Chrome was leaving on a personal matter. The assembly of girls, in their straw hats, had nodded rhythmically to the hymn that ensued, as the day wore its course towards first lesson: embroidery with Miss Esther: then Preparation For Adult Life with Mr Urgle-Wett: Biology was always just before lunch, for a reason too obvious to fathom. And why they always studied weeds in Botany, rather than beautiful flowers, was quite beyond them. Until Scripture and Scruples made it clear. The girls' nonsense almost made sense.
Eric's kitchen was emptier following their gabbled departure. He'd never understand what they were going on about. Tears filled his head. He heard the distant self-tuning of the wireless as a picture ghosted across the screen of its wicker speaker. He would have wished he were Odgod, if he had not told his niece not to marry Odgod.
The ancient memories now flooded back, having broken the gates of misery: the senseless clatter from the kitchen, the secret voices in the unlit hall, the unrecognisable faces on the landing, the acrimonious whispers at the back of the parlour's darkness, the jolly screams in the top attic ... it was too nice a day to be indoors.
Eric discovered his tiny daughter in the tool shed leaning quite peacefully upon the upside-down garden fork.
The neighbour's lawn-mower started up, as if its blades were thirsty: jealous at the fork's spokes.
It was an odd God who allowed such things to happen.
A pity the war was so short, having represented the best part of his life.
His wife Emily was now dead, last heard singing folk songs along with her favourite long-play of Kathleen Ferrier. The place still echoed in fact with her murmurs of housework. Even the old wireless, still sitting in the corner of the parlour, its taut tuning-wire long since bereft of any power to differentiate between stations, seemed to break out into fitful life, re-broadcasting seasoned Home Service and Light Programme favourites. It was peculiar, though, the wireless having been unplugged for all this time. You would think it would know better.
Eric plumped down in the armchair. Soon, this very house, to which he had been wedded, child, chap and chairbound, for so long, would become more a burden than a home.
His eyes shone in the late afternoon, its sunlight studiously maintaining the integrity of its shafting beams with the complicity of the net curtains.
It turned too quickly from day to night. Conveniently forgetting to switch on the flashing strip, Eric had ample time to ferment the memories. The people he had once known passed by his inner gaze like the bowed strangers who would one day follow his funeral cortège. But most were long dead themselves, moved by busy-body worms into more than a corpse's area, buried deeper than the dungeons he had forgotten to dust: the hoover seemed to clog up on bones, anyway.
Years before, he had come out into the garden, expecting the sunshine to jolly him up with its contrast to the gloomy parlour—the birdsong airiness, the perfectly green lawn, the clean-living sheets gently sailing upon the washing-line, the near unbroken ceiling of blue sparsely sown with tufts of angel's breath. Then, the sudden spluttering into life of a lawn-mower ... curse it, this country could not boast of many such peaceful days, and one of Eric's clownish neighbours had decided to crop his grass-blades. Eric mentally threatened to go round and barber the clown's green fingers for him. Indeed, Eric had escaped outside, there being a decided atmosphere within the house...
Yes, congregated in the various rooms were all the relations who had arrived for next day's funeral. Ensconced in the kitchen were the culinary busy-bodies, the various aunts who had taken upon themselves the catering. The whole place teetered with stacked plates interleaved with serviettes. Darting from bedroom to bedroom were the hide-and-seek gang, some too old to be imprisoned in prams and others too young to sit quietly whilst practising the novelty act of balancing a cup-and-saucer on the knee and nibbling a manicured cucumber sandwich. In the dining-room, were the loud faced uncles launching jokes in various shades of blue upon the surface of their beers. In the parlour, were Emily and her mother hatching plots with heroines but no heroes.
There goes that lawn mower again. Eric had failed to notice that it had stopped momentarily, so the resumption was a double blow. Funerals were usually sad affairs at the best of times, but burying one's own child (who had just been old enough to call Eric "Daddy") was so sad, it actually ceased to be a real emotion. It was grief multiplied by no known human factor. He could not allow himself the normal outlet of crying because, if he started, he knew he would never be able to stop till he died himself.
Returning to the present day of old age, the sun had just given up its ghost to the moon. Emily appeared to sit in the corner, where the wireless had once glowed. She spoke with static in her throat and mis-tuning in her luminous eyes: bearing old news to her widowed husband who thought he was hearing it for the first time.
"Churchill says the war will end in two weeks...", the speaker by the wireless crackled.
Many old people usually did hold conversations with the media, complaining volubly at the newspapers, answering back the soap operas, debating turns of phrase with the politicians who would one day know better how to stutter. But Eric was talking to his dead wife. She to him. Belief is everything, if nothing else.
"It'll go on till you think it'll never end," was his studied response, "and then it'll surely end."
Memories of that day in the garden seeped back. He was much younger then, of course. He tried to concentrate on the birdsong rather than the backfiring of the underhauled lawn mower engine. It was like trying to remember only the good things in life: the love he once felt for his mother, the arrival of the Beano Comic every Thursday when he was endlessly five years old and his eventual success at riding a two-wheeler. Such things were to expunge his last memory of his small daughter: holding her tiny feet as he playfully cart-wheeled her around in this very garden. She liked nothing better than mucking about in the tool shed, so none of it was perhaps surprising...
Eric entered the dim and dusty shed, grabbed the old shears and looked for the large garden fork—but suddenly realised that the latter had now been removed from where it had been carelessly left standing on its handle in the shed's darkest corner.
Without telling anybody where he was going, he walked into the street and towards the sound of the mower. The blades would drink the gardener's blood, he vowed.
Meanwhile, the blades of Eric's own expanse of grass grew patches as tall as a toddler's knees.
After his wife had died, Eric fell in love with a niece.
One day, he looked at her sitting in the kitchen, mixing tea. Emily's sister's girl, Isabel. She had only come to absolve her guilt of not coming. She had brought her best friend with her to blunt the atmosphere. Tentative glances. Angles of blame. Misgiven glitter from the pots and pans. Talk that meant very little to Eric. About a person whose name sounded like Cankerous Mildeyes. Whose brother went under the name Odgod. Was his niece or her friend going to marry Odgod? It seemed so. If it were to be his niece's friend, Eric would not mind. She might as well marry somebody as anybody. But as to his niece (whose face spoke of nun's weeds), he could not bear the thought. She was too innocent, reminded him of his daughter who had not lasted beyond a half decade. He wanted to take his niece's hand and kiss it, tell her not to marry. Especially not to someone called Odgod.
The two girls, the niece and her friend, giggled. Made the gas stove turn itself on. He did not notice anyone turning the knobs. All four burners, like spirits, spirted. The only way to heat the kitchen. How many times had his niece urged him to have central heating fitted to this old house, and how many times had he refused, knowing the open fire made the parlour snugger than any damn radiators? The snow splattered the window, as if someone had had a cold time of it crying. No sun today: one day less without God's naked light.
Cankerous Mildeyes was apparently known to both girls from her relationship with one of their teachers. A scandal had brought things to light. The Head had said Mr Van Chrome was leaving on a personal matter. The assembly of girls, in their straw hats, had nodded rhythmically to the hymn that ensued, as the day wore its course towards first lesson: embroidery with Miss Esther: then Preparation For Adult Life with Mr Urgle-Wett: Biology was always just before lunch, for a reason too obvious to fathom. And why they always studied weeds in Botany, rather than beautiful flowers, was quite beyond them. Until Scripture and Scruples made it clear. The girls' nonsense almost made sense.
Eric's kitchen was emptier following their gabbled departure. He'd never understand what they were going on about. Tears filled his head. He heard the distant self-tuning of the wireless as a picture ghosted across the screen of its wicker speaker. He would have wished he were Odgod, if he had not told his niece not to marry Odgod.
The ancient memories now flooded back, having broken the gates of misery: the senseless clatter from the kitchen, the secret voices in the unlit hall, the unrecognisable faces on the landing, the acrimonious whispers at the back of the parlour's darkness, the jolly screams in the top attic ... it was too nice a day to be indoors.
Eric discovered his tiny daughter in the tool shed leaning quite peacefully upon the upside-down garden fork.
The neighbour's lawn-mower started up, as if its blades were thirsty: jealous at the fork's spokes.
It was an odd God who allowed such things to happen.
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Folded Away
Published 'Mail Art - Wearwolf' 1996
The beach attendant had never known such a hot day.
If it were not for the latest skin cancer scare he would be working very hard indeed – and herds of sweaty folk spilling in and out of the regurgitated tides.
But then he stared at the mountainous piles of unopened deckchairs.
And smiled.
At least ghosts put them back even before they used them.
The beach attendant had never known such a hot day.
If it were not for the latest skin cancer scare he would be working very hard indeed – and herds of sweaty folk spilling in and out of the regurgitated tides.
But then he stared at the mountainous piles of unopened deckchairs.
And smiled.
At least ghosts put them back even before they used them.
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