My Story

My story was a Mystery. That sounds glib, but it’s true. It turned up one day in my red Silvine memo book that I kept in the inside pocket of my jacket.  Nobody else had access to it. The handwriting, true, was similar to mine, but I could tell or thought I could tell that there was something about it that made it somebody else’s handwriting.  Imagine my puzzlement bordering on shock.  On a trip to the tall buildings of the capital, I silently read it to myself while sitting on an underground train between the Oval and Elephant & Castle. The lights flickered from time to time and, beneath me, the seat juddered. I had pulled out the memo book to find a telephone number.  Why here? My mobile wouldn’t work underground. Well, certainly not in the 1970s. Wait a sec. Nobody had a mobile in the 1970s.  I looked at it quizzically. Not much larger than a packet of 20 Senior Service. Suddenly, it trilled like a blackberry bird.  I had no idea what to do with it. I only remember this now as I’ve suddenly rediscovered my memo book again at the bottom of a drawer. It is now 2011 – and I hardly remember why I needed to go to London that day forty odd years ago. Perhaps I’d find a clue inside where I might have noted down some of my journeys for the disinterest of posterity.  I walk into the bright garden and sit in a ready-erected deck-chair. My story. Still a Mystery. It is couched in my handwriting of today, matured slightly from what it had been when I was younger.  Except there are some unattributable block capitals. Suddenly I heard a dying trill and felt a juddering and the sun flickered. THE END

Benny's Bingo

Benny had been in charge of the Bingo Hall for 42 years when it happened. In the early days, he was the caller of numbers: proud to set a modern trend by calling only the bare numbers themselves with no silly rhymes as had been the erstwhile rage. Then he had to have a throat operation to rectify all the wear and tear caused by the old smoke in the Hall.  He then couldn’t even hold a conversation with himself which he’d often voice alone. The Bingo Management  allowed Benny to stay on as manager – with his experience in keeping the books balanced and the balls lop-sided. He hired a buxom lady-caller – someone who spent her time floating on a deceptive mill-pond inside her mind and maintaining a fixed baggy look under her brow like the Lone Ranger’s mask.  She only came to life upon opening the mike and staring steelily at all the ancient ladies with their thickly indelible marking-pens and the rough coloured paper that the numbers were printed on.  “33 – Blonde and free;  55 – Sexy alive; 69 – Body wine; 77 – Bed in Heaven...” With all these innuendoes, Benny asked her (by handwritten note) to keep her numbers bare – no need to embroider them. But when she later slipped in a non sequitur: “42 – Rabbit Stew...” that was it for Benny. You see, Benny had a fatal attraction for Bunnies.

Shifting Vigils

        A: Who told them?

B: I can’t remember. It seems to be common knowledge.

A: Who are these people called common and who the hell told them!

B: Well, you nearly died. Something needed to be said, didn’t it? Somebody needed to be told. We needed to get your family together to say goodbye.

A: Huh! A death bed scene is not the ideal way in which I’ve seen myself dying. Certainly not when watched by that so-called family of mine.

B: So, you wanted to die suddenly in your sleep?  Or in a fatal accident?

A: Anything’s better than lingering.  .....Though, thinking about it, lingering would have irritated that family of mine more than finding my dead body in a bed. Hmm, perhaps a death bed scene would have been the best thing, a really looooong death bed scene, with the need for shifting vigils.  Shifting vigils, yes, I like that thought!

B: Lingering is something we all do I suppose ever since we were first born?  Lingering on the edge of something none of us can really explain.

A: I see life as a sort of pride before a fall.  The pride is a sort of denial about death. The fall, death itself.

B: Death, in whatever form it takes.

A: Death itself is a life thing. A sort of long painful life process. The state of death after death is not really death at all.

B: If there is a state of existence after death at all. Nobody has proved there is such a state, either by going there and coming back or fetching someone dead back. A lot of charlatans showing that state of existence ... exists – but there has never been any real scientifically rigorous proof.

A: Some say that a few people get so near to death, they experience or, at least, see in the distance what after-death experience looks like after they die. I believe that I have been very near to becoming that near – as near to the ultimate nearness as this gap between my finger and thumb.

B: Going back to what you said about pride. I find that quite interesting. Life as a phenomenon of pride: the ability to uphold or balance the precariousness of life. A pride in that confidence in balancing the unbalanceable. Or a confidence in that pride.   A confidence-trick.

A: Are my family still here?

        B: Yes, they’re all in the sitting-room next door.

A: Probably drinking all my drink, knowing them.

B: Drinking for some people is a way of underpinning that pride or confidence to balance life against death, I suppose.  Anyway, shall I bring them in, now?   I hope they will be able to see me or at least hear me call them in.

A: You mean fetch them back for the rest of the Wake?

B: Yes, the wake or the deep sleep?   The black pit of the deepest possible sleep or the wake left by some unknown tide of endlessness.

A:  Wake or sleep, deep or endless, they’re all the same to me now that life’s balance or pendulum has stopped swinging , stopped at least for me.

B: Ha! The Pit and the Pendulum.

A: The Pit and the Pride, more like.

B: The pity in the pride, more like.

Weirdtongue cruelly sawn, its stump pumping red

Horrasy, Horrasy, the Hawler's dead!

A Poetry of Proverbs

        .

        “Pride comes before a fall.”

“Do you think it’s dangerous, then?”

“Of course, it’s dangerous. Put one wrong foot wrong when doing something like that turns doing it at all into the wrong foot itself and then you’ll have fallen into that huge black pit some call death.”

“You were always so damn poetic! It’s just that if I don’t try I shall never succeed. I know I’m good at it.  I think I’m in fact the best in the world at it.”

“How many people have tried it before you? You can only be the best at something if others have also done it and done it badly. Being the only one to have done it does not mean you are the best, because someone else may be better at it than you, but has not been bothered or foolhardy enough to do it.  And I’m not trying to be ‘damn poetic’ there, as you put it. Just realistic.”

“You always had a flowery turn of phrase.  ‘Poetic’ was the wrong word. Poetry is cleverer than mere floweriness. I don’t want you to think I’ve ever thought you clever at anything! Ha Ha.”

“Point taken, Sandy! Oh, hello, John, I didn’t hear you come in. Sandy and I are talking about her doing it at last. What do you think. Pride comes before a fall? Or only fools can get near enough to joke with death? Ha ha. I like proverbs, even if they don’t mean anything!”

“Yes, I heard what Sandy said to you. No wonder she’s now blushing. Errr. A blush in the cheek is to brush the cheek of death.  That’s another new motto for you!”

“John, you know full well that Peter hates the thought of me doing it. You could at least give me some encouragement.”

“Give you some encouragement to die, Sandy? Is that what you’re asking me to do?”

“Well, if you know that I’m bound to try doing it, whatever you two say, your encouragement is better than your discouragement. You’re only wanting to feel less guilty if it all goes wrong by discouraging me when you simply know I am definitely destined to do it.  Encouragement may help me do it successfully. Discouragement may increase the risk of me failing. Think of it logically. .... Peter!  What are you doing? Let go of my wrists!  John, what are you going to do with that rope?”

“It’s for your own good, Sandy.”

“Yes, Sandy. Sorry. We’re being cruel to be kind.”

“But what’s that! MMMMMMMMMMMMMMM...”

“Well, that’s that then, John.”

“Did we really need the gag as well? She can hardly breathe. She could only have done what she intended to do with her hands. Well one of her hands, really.”

“The writing or typing hand?”

“Yes, or the hand that draws a thin blue line in the sand against false criticisms. Ha ha.”

“But the gag is for her own good, too. She might have been able to shout loud enough for her critics to hear!  They might be lurking next door with their evil tangles of unspooling threads!”

“Yes, but they might be able to read her mind, though, even at a distance. Things can pass over vast areas these days with all that damn webbery in the air!"

“Yes, you’re right. We’d better finish the job. We don’t want them knowing that she intended to publicly complain about the nature of their reviews of her novella, do we?  That would have been dreadful. Something worse than death, in fact.  Critics hate being criticised. They’d chase authors into Hell itself, rather than put up with being criticised themselves.”

“So, if death can’t put a halt to it, then, there is no point in following a gagging with a deadly daggering, as they say. It’s best just to let her experience near-death as long as possible till her mind goes awol and she forgets or wipes clean that she was utterly determined to complain in public about their devastating reviews. They can’t possibly read an empty mind. Lingering longer abashed is better than precarious pride." 

“Yes, give Sandy till Autumn, I say.  A mind in endless fall is worth a million fell swoops.”

“MMMMMMMMMMMM...”

DIALOGUE - A Near-Death Experience

.

"Who started this?"

“I didn’t. I think it was you.”

“Well, I can’t remember anything before you said you have been deceiving yourself your whole life.”

“I can’t remember talking about self-deception. Didn’t you mention that you had started to love Johnny – for his sake, not yours?”

“I don’t think that’s anything to do with self-deception.”

“I do. You think you love Johnny only because he has got used to you loving him and your withdrawing it now would make you unhappy because it would make someone you once loved become very unhappy, so you have blotted out that you really have stopped loving him, and so you actually feel that you still love him as a consequence of something I can only call a subconsciously induced self-deception.”

“Look at me, do I look like a liar?”

"Well, no proper liar looks like a liar. I see a woman who has blonde curls turning slightly to grey, still pretty, and a personality that has made you my best friend since before... Well, I don’t think there was ever a time when you weren’t my best friend.  Our mothers wheeled us side by side when we were babies, don’t forget.  As far as I know, you have never lied. Except, that is, perhaps, those lies you tell yourself.”

“Johnny was your boy friend first, don’t forget. Don’t you think there was some element of deceit on my part during that period of him leaving you for me?”

“No. It was a natural process. I was never suited to Johnny, nor he to me. You did us both a favour.”

“I haven’t told you this before. But I seduced Johnny.  My intention was to steal him away from you. I had no idea you weren’t suited to each other....”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. I’m glad I’ve got it off my chest now. Perhaps you have deceived yourself that you weren’t suited to each other when you discovered he loved me more than he loved you.  I’m sorry.  Truly sorry.”

“Why tell me now?”

“I don’t know. And while we are on the subject. When we were in our pushchairs, parked next to each other on Market Hill outside Tesco, I stole your rattle.”

“I don’t remember."

“Perhaps because I was slightly older?”

“Hmm.”

“Old enough in fact to lean over and release the brake on the backwheel  of the pushchair... Are you listening? ... But I didn’t actually release it, but only very nearly did. ........ Where’s Johnny?”

From the Hearth

First published in the anthology BENEATH THE GROUND edited by Joel Lane (Alchemy Press 2003)

FROM THE HEARTH by DF Lewis

Only those who follow the story can understand how frightening the road they tread.  Susanna understood this when it was too late.  Following the road, she found it became a tunnel where the sky was worse than Hell.

            Today, though, she often wondered why the actual road where she lived was lower than the rest of them in an otherwise flat Essex town.  Whilst standing at its top corner, she could still see a range of chimneystacks sloping down into distance.  Perspective was everything.  Even the past had perspective.  She was a wild-witted girl of whom advantage could easily have been taken, had it not been, in those more innocent times, for an over-protective step-father.  An industrial working-class town where heads often nested in honestly persil-clean pillows, heads that sweetly squeaked and squawked, pretending that their bodies only existed for fondling.  Susanna's family was close-knit half the time, wildly ill-suited the rest.  Dysfunction with a purpose.  They tried to thrive on leisure, despite the work ethic that awaited them once they crossed the threshhold of the front doorstep straight on to the blurred chalk of the road's hopscotch lines.  Susanna's menfolk drew dole as if it were a throwaway sky-line where even angels (with oodles of self-righteousness) floated around painting pastel-shaded frescos upon otherwise ugly weather fronts.

            Tom was her half-brother.  Grizzled and grown-down to a tussock from a promising start as a stripling.  Pamela her real mother.  And, yes, her step dad, Donald, the one with the wide whiskers and wraparound beer brims.  His hat, too, was larger than life.  Played the snooker balls as if they were dam busters.  Which reminded Susanna that Tom was currently outside in the road scuffing his best shoes with yet another game of football amid his gnarled cronies of childhood.  Often kicking around a bristly youth called Hugger or, if Hugger were not available, a knurled mini-millstone—enough to jar even willowy calf-bones.

            Susanna had only a few god-given graces.  Anyway, lacking a finish to her breeding began to serve a purpose when her best friend happened to become a certain Lucy, a coincidentally separate individual, albeit one with sufficient similarity to engender inseparability.  Lucy was a red-eyed droopy-lip of a wench who seemed rather resentful of having only one best friend in the shape of Susanna.  Both yearned for the more meaningful companionship of the proud-looking sporties in an older class—those who wore gymslips like flags of war.  After all, it was wartime, and the most patriotic spirit in those days resided within such middle-of-the-road communities.

            Susanna and Lucy, therefore, by lack of other influence, were gradually attracted towards darker, direr affairs than polishing boys' faces.  Susanna had inherited, through some miscegenate unaccountability, books and papers from step-dad Donald's attic, an attic which seemed deeply unvisited because nobody else knew of its existence either by angle of exterior roof or potential of perspective.  Brother Tom and step-dad Donald had spoken of it, though, as if they suspected the existence of realms beyond man's understanding—spoke of it in barely audible words of one syllable (most of them mispronounced).  Yet, with inadvertent intention, the two girls were somehow directed towards this attic where they were to discover mouldy documents speaking of worlds even lower than the basement—a dark sphere of imputed eeriness more in keeping with the Gothic Humours than the workmanlikeness of the local trades.  Both girls were remarkably precocious as far as the written word was concerned if not in the more spoken sides of their physical nature.  The itches they needed to scratch they did more by reflex than salaciousness.  Their singing in unison was perfect. 

            In any event, some particularly mouldy words in the attic's documents spoke of toad creatures harbouring themselves beneath the town's China Factory ... stating that some of the more decorative crockery was based on fitful sightings of these creatures, creatures that had recently drawn too near the surface.  The fact of the factory workers' children being sent away, soon afterwards, was both a mystery and an all-too-clear sign that sirens were about to wail of war.

            The toad creatures, of which the attic's mouldy configurations told, were nurse-like to the bottom of their Earthen natures—so much so, the two girls yearned to visit them and gain an inkling of how properly to nurture others.  They did not want to grow up into the thrusting womenfolk they might otherwise have been destined to become during the more modern future. 

            At first, they delved along the road's alleyways that—according to the tracks the attic's tract told them to tread—traced a downward path, below the basement, to where the bravest toad creatures were said to prick their ears.  Susanna and Lucy tried to crack jokes and enact a life of hockey-sticks and mild matriculation to ward off any encroaching eeriness.  They had, indeed, since our first acquaintace with these two girls, become delegate Prefects at school—against the very base natures coursing through their inherited veins.  Both step-dad Donald and brother Tom had, independently, long since vanished on imagined forays in North Africa or towards the Antipodes.   Mother Pamela boiled soup interminably, often misrepresenting it as stew—a fact which caused Susanna to suffer from imputed anorexia before its time.  Lucy, too, loved to suffer with her friend and, thus, refused the more filling platefuls at her own home so that she could share the scraps and swill which mother Pamela dished up on faded and chipped crockery.  This thinness of diet, it was reported, allowed the two girls to squeeze through gaps others couldn't even see.

            There was a local belief which was so very local it was held solely in that part of the town or, even, just in Susanna's road itself.  Up was down.  Down was up.  Then was now.  Now was then.  Admittedly, it was the loose-lipped gossip of a belief which, perhaps, nobody fully construed.  This belief was often voiced abroad when digging the local allotment; probably in preference to War Talk proper which, as primary sources maintain, often did cost lives during that inimitable make-do-and-mend era.  It was as if Faiths grew and flourished from the very chimney smoke.  The cleaner the flues, the more that clarity prevailed.  The sootier, though, to the point where the smoke was close to becoming tangible curds of tar, crazy extrapolations were spoken with the straightest possible faces.  The darker it was, the dafter the beliefs became.

            It has already been known that there was a boy called Hugger—a village idiot with no village to call his own.  He saw two extremely thin girls but wondered whether he was seeing double because, in his eyes, different parts of the town shimmered out of perspective with each other and most roads felt as if they were already underground.  He promised to accompany them, on the final foray, after several dress rehearsals, to the very cellar where he told himself (if in different words) that the tops of some of the toads were embedded in the concrete like turnips.  How Hugger knew about the mouldy parchment in Susanna's attic was never satisfactorily explained but that was because the girls forgot they had already told him to keep this a secret, there being a requirement for someone else to keep the secret to make it a better secret, a secret worth keeping.  The more who knew the secret ... well, there was an optimum level before the secret was officially out.  And there being three of them was certainly enough to make it a secret more secret than most.  By leading them down, Hugger was merely re-enacting a story he thought he'd already been told.  This was where the frights let themselves be known, irrespective of any force wielding such frights.  Fear came from not being warned or even propely made to be afraid.  Fear was strongest where there was nothing of which to be afraid.  It can be sensed only in words, not in deeds, activities or even threats.  Especially not in any real atmosphere of darkest horror.  Intimations of a wicked reality were scarier than even that wicked reality itself could be.  And the sense of fear grew and grew, merely as the words grew and grew, as Hugger, in the guise of a Sweep, led his water babies down to a deep cellar of chimneys-tops, their pots sticking up from the ground whence cataracts of smoke churned and choked.

            "Hold my hand, Hugger."

            Susanna could hardly see him in the gloom beneath the imputed floorboards.  Lucy could hardly see her own face in front of her hand.  Hugger could see neither of them—though often he lived up to his nickname and gave them childish sooty cuddles to guarantee their presence.  He had shown them how to lift the trap which revealed the dizzy steps and, wordlessly, he made them follow through ... a quest which, until they knew its meaning, held no meaning at all.

            "Toad creatures, they are what the attic mould foretold," thought Susanna.  Lucy even said it ... with a short sharp laugh to relieve the impending terror ... but Hugger was uncharacteristically quiet, his hunched shape growing darker and darker as it led the way ... holding the sweet fingers he thought to be a girl's. 

            Earlier, the three of them had gone into a huddle and discussed the quest.  If this is being heard (as opposed to being read), one may already have overheard their mindless, middling lightness of laughter.  The words were spoken in between, as if learned parrot-fashion from someone more omniscient than themselves:

            "There seems to be an awesomeness, almost a religion..."

            "Yes, yes, the war has angels you know ... many think they see them in the sky as if the gas ovens give birth to birds as well as to dry stews..."

            "What's all that to do with the toad creatures, Hugger?"

            He turned and spoke as if he spoke for the very first time: "The attic mould must have blotted the paper there ... and 'toad' may have to be read as 'road' to get the full sense."

            "Road creatures, Hugger?"

            "Yes, Man is naturally the wanderer, the refugee..."

            Susanna and Lucy nodded in unison.    The talk went on for hours.  Mother Pamela could be heard shifting beds upstairs.  The monochrome snapshots of step-dad Donald and brother Tom in their gold-tooled holders glinted in the semi-blackout which the world still allowed.

            Meanwhile, the trio of shadows—bordering on silhouettes—delved deeper into the bowels of the road.  Hugger knew he was almost alone.  His mind came to the forefront, if only by some false perspective.  Always destined to be the protagonist, he drew sympathy and identification.  Hugger was a hero, not an idiot.  The girls were just two of the Song-Lines he followed.  He loved their legs and the growing shapeliness of their being.  He had watched them fondling each other, when they thought nobody could see.  Love was often like that.  He wondered, as a strange non-sequitur, about the aboriginal heart of the matter ... as he negotiated the lowest reaches that Mankind could ever reach without Hell itself kicking in.

            The darkness was wet to the touch.  The girls had now re-established themselves with a growing provenance, relegating Hugger to a corner of their consciousness.  The ground was littered with human heads, the blackness blurring their various racial leanings.  The girls somehow knew, without being told, that the rest of bodies below the heads were embedded vertically below even this furthest reach of surface existence, their various legs stretched out in wide frozen stride or mean limp.  The girls watched Hugger start kicking these heads to check how well the necks prevented them from becoming separate footballs.  The resultant cracks, throbs, bleats and squelches thankfully filled the girls with more wholesome thoughts, visions, even, of the toad creatures they'd originally hoped to see—honest-to-goodness horrors which would have made them shudder with mere fright or simple disgust

            Susanna woke with a start.  A siren wailed far off.  The first of many.  She heard Tom, Donald and Pamela scuttling to the basement air-raid shelter.  But she stayed in the safety of her own bed, hugging her knees as if that would ward off an inevitable past.  Flashes, as if passing under chimneys of light in an otherwise endless tunnel of nightmare, made her dark shape fitfully invisible.  Lucy had failed to return to any degree of visibility at all, however.  Never hugged her own curvy ley-lines.  Never been told the frightening story in the first place.

            Listen, though, and you will hear your own black heart.  You don't need ears for that.