CASKET
The procession was as silent as the proverbial grave. It moved in pairs, each pair moving as if it were a single person, each participant with a black hat, with each step timed by another’s – the road seeming to be surfaced with cotton wool, so delicate were the pinch-toed hesitations before completing each step.
The casket was carried upon the shoulders of the last three pairs: a highly engineered support in well-oiled traction. Indeed, all the pairs moved as a single pair, believing they each carried the casket, even though only the last three pairs actually did so.
I stood, however, alone, walking in equal aspirations of uniformly timed steps, immediately behind the casket, my hand raised so as to steady it should it teeter back from upon the six shoulders who already bore it so ‘frictionlessly’ as it were; there was no need for belt or braces but they said I should be there in case of unsynchronised mishaps. Every procession, however solemn, should have its own troubleshooter. I was bit like a sweeper in football … or full-back in rugby … a procession’s watcher and waiter.
The townspeople lined the pavement in honour of the casket’s contents. Their children were well-behaved, many pigeon-toed as they tried not to over-balance from the kerb, some of the youngest squatting – uncorrected for the silence’s sake – in the gutter. A few tourettes cooed (if quietly for them) and this did not seem to alter the solemnity of the occasion. I scowled meaningfully at the worst culprits, having assumed this was a job for the procession’s watcher and waiter.
There was no special uniform for me.
“You’ll have to dress in black like all of us, Gollum,” I had been told.
I had stared back at Chine the head processioneer – resenting the nickname he had used, one that had stuck ever since I could remember, as well as the unwelcome news that I could not dress for the part according to my own taste.
“OK, Chine,” I had said, biting my lip. I was no sound-leaky tourette. I did, however, have leaky thoughts, admittedly. My poker face did not stop me cursing Chine from within with a made-up madness of spells derived from ‘The Nemonicon’.
Chine must have known that magic book, because he had seemed – if sub-consciously – to withstand the bombardment of wish-fulfilment I had put in train vis à vis his worst interests. He merely smiled and later told me to stand at the back when the procession moved off and not to wander wilfully beyond my duty as back-prop.
Chine was at the front of the procession – too tall to be an actual casket-bearer – and I knew he couldn’t look back without breaking the pattern of synchronised solemnity. I hated his smug handsomeness. I also resented the rings that sparkled from his fingers. The rouge on his cheeks. I was not allowed jewellery or cosmetics. I did rather think his whole souped-up demeanour was out of place as I watched him jab and jolt his limbs in time to the steady drumbeat. He was the least coordinated of all of us. He thought his black hat would hide a multitude of sins beneath it. Already my spells were working. It needed the perceived present (not the past) for their full power to be revealed. Transported from pluperfect to preterite for their insidious clarity of righteousness to then be able to blazon forth, even if insulated by being seen as having happened rather than still happening.
I suddenly see it is even more now than before. I’m here … still at the back of the procession but eager to dodge and weave in the game of death. The pavement spectators – as I call them – are all now turning ugly and sporadically vociferous. The procession’s many pairs peel off from their erstwhile single-minded synchronicity into wild displays of randomness attacking perfect plans…
Chine turns – his face black with rage. We eye each other as if we have been sure forever that this was the duel the town had been waiting for, ever since death faced life in the ultimate battle that awaited us all in some inscrutable past disguised as the future.
”Gollum!” he asks, “What have you done?”
“No sooner he had asked it
Then he became the casket,”
I reply solemnly, raising my hand again to steady it.
***
SHIRTY
Weekend cottages were a luxury, in those days, and I could hardly afford the cost of the journey from London, let alone the rent on the journey’s actual destination. I always took a different companion with me, people I liked either for their conversation or for their body, but rarely for both.
It is delightful to tell you of one of the occasions when it was both. You’re probably othinking that I am concocting an easy style to convince you of its truth or this is effectively just a diary of wishful thinking! Well, think what you like, but the weekend I spent with Shirty is worth living through again, at least for me.
London is a big, big city, with big, big men
Who sit in offices and count to ten
And one of these men was the one called Shirty. A pure crisp whiteness with ice-diamond cuff-links, starched detachable collar, high-tight tie, chest-pocket where he kept his mobile and a body-shaped neatness. He was a cool merchant banker. Or whatever.
With stylish trousers possibly too short for Shirty. The only flaw.
And I took him to my weekend hideaway, because I liked the cut of his jib as well as the gift of his gab. Financial wherewithal was not even a consideration. Two handsome heads being talked with from each plump pillow of a country cottage’s feathered bed with a shiny wit between them as well a shared sleek skin – well, that was what it was all about with Shirty and me. A single moment. A focus of passion.
The place was haunted by a dog. I knew that. I have no excuses for not warning Shirty. This dog was a relic of a previous century and probably far beneath the attention of a modern couple like me and Shirty. A nagging bark that sounded from beyond the skirting-boards. I did not believe in ghosts. But how explain it otherwise? Only my easy style can gloss over the contradictions. I simply wanted to concentrate on this single prize of a weekend with Shirty. Next weekend would be time enough to worry about ghosts when accompanied, no doubt, by a more down-to-earth form of humanity than sharp-eyed Shirty.
He sat bolt upright at the first sound of snuffling beyond the bedroom wall.
“What’s that?” He was not used to being startled in his daily life. He normally had all corners covered. But not tonight.
I smiled. I secretly enjoyed the chink in his armour. I saw him sit bolt upright in the vague moonlight bidden by inefficient curtains. He had quickly slipped the previous day’s shirt over his head, hands struggling through the still linked cuffs. How could he otherwise exist in public view without a shirt? This was his persona. This was the way he kept his guard up in the bank’s boardroom. He even started counting backward from a whole pen of sheep he had just counted towards following our earlier pre-sleep relaxations together.
Then there came the slow relentless barking.
He jumped from the bed and walked over to the wall whence the noise seemed to be coming.
“Don’t worry, it’s only the ghost.” I smiled to myself. I had forgotten how satisfying this was – to watch my ‘guests’ become bewildered by something so outlandish, something so utterly un-London.
Ghosts are traditionally white glimpses of intangibility.
Ghosts are surely not guttural sounds like any old dog that has lost its way in the time tunnel.
Over the years coming here, none of us (my guests and I) get much sleep after the initial disturbance. Tonight was no exception. Shirty was grumpy as he wandered round the kitchen muttering incomprehensibly to himself of this and that. Probably the first time he was at a loss for real words. Not in character at all.
I’ve just remembered why the Shirty weekend was one to remember. This was the first occasion when the ghost dog actually appeared, rather than just bugging us with its barking from behind the wall. A wall dividing what from what? That’s a good question. It was the bedroom wall but it was difficult to know what was on the other side of it because I had never been slim enough to slide between it and another wall that was half built into the hillside and half purely exterior to the open air of the countryside. A dank, dark slot where God knows what might lurk.
The dog turned out to be dressed in a ruffly shirt befitting an earlier century.
I drove back to London next day alone. Shorty Shirty somehow no longer seemed to matter, as if I had forgotten he existed at all. Only writing all this out for you has reminded me about him. They now tell me, too late, that he was richer than rich!
They do also tell me a dog now haunts one of the bank’s boardrooms in the City near the Dome of St Paul’s. But that is only hedge fund hearsay, because nobody has actually seen it for real. The barks however are quite useful as a sort of abacus of sounds that befits financial or political calculation.
And I have gained a new pair of sparkling cuff-links. I shall probably give them to my next ‘guest’ for a country weekend … to show how much I care. And with the dog exorcised, we could both relax and enjoy things without any grumpiness.
***
THE SECRET HOUSE
“How shall a man find his way unless he lose it?” — Walter de la Mare
When he saw the secret house he knew there was a key to it somewhere. The map hadn’t shown any properties at all in the vicinity, but perhaps it wasn’t a map that would have shown them even if there had been any properties to show. He wondered why he had bothered to bring the map, as he hadn’t really been following it. He had simply been following his nose – shorthand for misguided instinct, and sometimes one needed a misguided instinct to fetch up anywhere at all one wanted to be. Indirect meant direct, when one least expected it. He smiled. This was the house he had been seeking all his life. He shrugged the rucksack to a hopefully more comfortable position on his shoulders as he approached the front door.
He decided knocking would be too easy. He ought to go round the back. This was typical of much of his life: always taking the more difficult course in the hope that it would end up being the easiest. If he’d been let in at the front, he may have thought he was intended to see someone who was never meant to be involved in his destiny at all and he may have missed seeing the person whom he reallyneeded to see when entering by the kitchen entrance at the back.
Halfway round the back of the house, he simply changed his mind – and returned to the front door. He had seen a tree growing that was a horrific sight. Its roots had been rudely revealed by the unconsidered digging at it by seemingly a large animal that had left its bristles behind: and the tree’s branches leant against the side of the house. It was still growing, as a tree, but it was the unwholesomeness of the whole situation that perturbed him, as the house and tree were held together by some backward state of misguided synergy. An awkward situation that augured ill for the route he had chosen. He thought the tree was smelling rankly of its own self-cultured cankers or growths.
Having returned to the front door, he decided that he should have ignored the tree and continued reaching the back entrance. But direct once it had become indirect could then become more indirect than indirect itself if several changes of mind were experienced, involving walking back and forth for several hours to the front and rear of the house, even skirting the tree when the tree’s side of the house was chosen rather than the other side of the house where there was no tree at all leaning against the house. If he had chosen the treeless side of the house in the first place to reach the back of the house, then the whole quandary would not have arisen. He would have gone straight to the back and entered the house via the kitchen, thus taking his fate within two positive hands.
He eventually managed to enter the house, because one of the servants took pity on him or, more likely, suspected him of loitering with ill intent. But having passed over his credentials, he entered the house officially at 6.05 pm when dusk was settling upon all visible surfaces. The entrance used was the one on the treeless side of the house which he had not previously noticed till now! A secret door. Only obvious as a door on the outside when opened from the inside. The servant was holding a balding broom ready for use, as some excuse for having opened it, but he knew she had really opened it because she had seen him wandering around the house on his own for some hours and, furthermore, he reckoned she must fancy him. She was a dowdy miss. But he was pleased for any excuse of making a grand entrance.
“Thank you for letting me in,” he said. He felt handsome, even if he wasn’t. He smiled knowing that it was a winning smile. “As you know, I have come to clean the chimneys.” He opened his rucksack to reveal the various interlocking rods and the shock-haired head of their business end.
“Madame must have forgotten to tell me you were coming,” she said, blushing.
“But first of all.” He held his chin pensively. “Can you tell me about the tree at the side of the house? I am in favour of nature and its preservation. Recycling. Birds. And animals. But nothing seems to live in that tree. It seems to kill all it touches.”
“It holds the house up,” she suggested while she made as if to sweep the floor with the bald excuse for a broom.
“More like the house holds it up!” he rejoindered.
Later, as dusk approached optimum density-point, the chimneypots, one by one, gave birth to a spiky growth. While two bodies, in a secret inner room with no key, lived their last moments of love as supported by each other’s hirsute arms.
***
LATE ARRIVAL
The clown was essentially white-costumed, even given the black hemispherical hat, the broken golden-hoop large enough to be a wide belt or sash, black slip-on shoes, bleached face containing tiny red lips and drooping black eyes …. sitting upon a huge domed mushroom mound …. awaiting the promised arrival of a blue tree embedded within a solid glass cone. Surely, a snow-globe to shake would have been better to amuse the clown or to amuse the children who might also arrive soon for Christmas – or, better still, another clown as company, bearing in mind the children were not promised to arrive at all.
A smile threatened to shatter the real face the clown was wearing as a frozen mask. Thoughts of sadness often made clowns smile and a Christmas without children was one such thought of sadness. Broken thoughts were mended, mended ones broken. Labelled thoughts were unlabelled, later unlabelled ones labelled. Thoughts of optimistic puppets in the morning, thoughts of pessimistic puppets in the afternoon. Thoughts of black humour when the time had come for going to bed. Erotic thoughts at night to fill the dreams with more than just soft mushroom mounds to sit upon. And by dawn, the more urgent thoughts of meltdowns and golden cummerbunds … then thoughts about promised arrivals being always late: little different, the clown supposed, from never arriving.
The clown’s silent smile forced a love of lateness, accepting that the only promised arrivals were a blue tree in a glass cone and the clown-here-already-so-never-needing-to-arrive-at-all and that both could never be contained within a single thought at the same time. It would make no sense to imagine such an unimaginable companionship. Not even fiction could attempt it. Even music, be it baroque or classical or modern or simply tinkling with snowflakes, failed to conjure such a dual impossibility. The clown’s smile meant there were no false hopes. The roads seemed impossible, the snowy precipitation having formed a ground zero rather than a cone of scintillating light. Lateness was not just for Christmas.
***
KEPT BEHIND
“An apple for your thoughts,” announced Miss Western in a moment of remorse amid those interminable kept-behind hours of dusk which come to all schoolchildren who strayed.
She watched the child in the front desk lean its head on the exercise book. It straightened its back into a yardstick, its eyes unblinking.
“Can I go home now?” its small voice asked.
“Well, I don’t know – you’re meant to be here finishing off the sums which you didn’t do at the right time.”
The child resumed its desultory scribbling. It was not the only one whom Miss Western had kept behind this afternoon. The Gostridge kids, Paul, Susanna and Josey, had been sitting at the back of the formroom only a few minutes before, complete with smug we-don’t-mind-if-you-keep-us-in-till-Kingdom-come expressions. She eventually sent them home because their mother would complain at them being victimised yet again. They certainly did deserve it. They used to be gypsies. But that was not the reason.
The nameless child was now re-doubling its efforts to encourage monsters to doodle self-portraits in the arithmetic book. There was a certain peculiarity in that she’d completely forgotten the child’s name. She would need to check it in the attendance records but the lines of black circles and red ticks told her nothing except perhaps that there were underlying patterns to existence in the small town where she’d decided to work as a schoolteacher. The Gostridges had more black circles than most, but that was only to be expected.
Miss Western was suddenly aware that a stranger was sitting in one of the tiny desks – at the back of the classroom, where the depleting afternoon light could not now reach.
“Yes? Can I help you?” Her voice sounded distant … even to her own ears. The moment of fright had been exceeded by annoyance at the intrusion.
“No, but I feel I can help you instead.” Whilst his voice was louder than hers, it was like the undercurrent of a conversation in a house next door.
Miss Western turned back to the child to see if it had noticed the exchange, but its head was back on the desk-slope, eyes still wide open, whirls and coils of its exercise book doodles appearing to flow directly from its brow.
The stranger — taller than the confines of the desk would have seemed to allow — left the back of the room and slowly advanced down the aisle, passing via varying degrees of shadow. If it had not been for this intrusion, Miss Western would have by now lit the lamps, for it had quickly turned too dark too early to see very clearly.
“I’ve got some homework to give you, before you can go, Miss Western … about visions of meadows, endless childhood summers and the meaning of fruit-stones and flowers.”
The voice had become more like an old 78 rpm record with a dog and horn on its label … hissing and cracking in rhythm to the accompanying steps.
“Who are you?” Miss Western asked, with fear now gradually dawning on her.
“I’m the one who can teach you of none-so-pretties, soft hobmadonnas and cuddle-me-to-you’s, and pick them from under sun and hedgerow – and, later, with all learning done, we can play frog-hop, scotch-skip and dibstones for an everlasting gossamer twilight…”
The spoken subject-matter belied the speaker’s attitude.
“Who are you, please?” the teacher cried, sitting as straight as a wooden set-square, protracting the hushed pause while the stranger manicured its claws and continued:
“I know the fairies who play in the pippin orchards. I spin tales at night from beneath the bed-clothes, where further down I dare not reach my toes for fear of hurting the coily things by the footboard. I’m a version of thee, I’m a version of others yet to come … and soon I will join the procession between the night daisies, joining songs of such sad beauty…”
Inexplicably, the words gave to Miss Western thoughts of tiny faces each with one finger placed on their pursed lips and of tenantless see-saws at sunset pivotting amid the twirling translucent girders of the golden hill-beams.
“WHO ARE YOU?”
He replied as quietly as he could. So quiet., it was easy to forget one had heard it in the first place. Miss Western’s eyes weltered with tears at the fading memory of his answer. There were now only shadows moving in the early evening breeze which entered from the window. She looked at the nearest desk scored with the anciently inked runnels, the incomprehensibly scored languages and graffitic tales of unlikely love. The pages of an arithmetic book fluttered over, full of nothing but interlocking black circles in meaningless patterns half-concealed by careless blots.
The following day, with the weather turning back towards winter, Miss Western shivers. One of the Gostridges has just asked if she believes in ghosts. There was meaning in the questioner’s eyes. But at least even the Gostridges cannot summon sufficient courage to ask about curses and ancient gods and arcane rituals and such matters. The other tiny children giggle as they place their palms together like pink fleshy moths closing their dusted wings, this being morning prayer. Miss Western prays, too, that she will truly forget the tall stranger’s response to her frantic WHO-ARE-YOU last night. He had merely pointed at the empty desk with the scribbled-in arithmetic book fluttering upon it.
***
I BLAME THE MOTHER
I knew George when he was a small boy. He was kept out of harm’s way in his father’s study, the window barred by the diffused but still articulate rays of the summer sun, a sun which always seemed to shine, probably because George was not allowed into the orchard garden to enjoy it. The glinting spines of the ranked books became a prison wall, insulating the boy from his god-given right to fresh air with the intellectual headiness of poetry and frowsty learning.
How did I know him? I was imported from a family of miscegenate second cousins to play ludo, snakes & ladders and, later, monopoly and whist. My role was the archetype boyhood chum. Pity I was a girl. But they put trousers on me and smarmed my hair down, dividing it with a ruler a third of the way across the hump of my skull.
I fell in with their designs. I pretended to like rugby and cricket, whilst sympathising openly with George’s lameness which prevented him from enjoying such formative activities. He had three legs. I cannot describe him properly, my selective memory having dulled the effect. My love for him I had to conceal, you see. It did something terrible to me … and, inevitably, to him.
He showed me some of his father’s books. George’s favourites were on the subject of female gods, for whom wars were no longer fought. Each time that he slowly extracted a volume from the shelf, he fleetingly placed his lips to the spine-top’s open slit to suck whatever was released by the mustiness. Then, returning to the desk scattered with board-game counters, he’d open the covers with an audible crack. One special book contained diagrams of the female form, which he’d try to explain. He was old for his age. I didn’t tell him I knew half of it already. But it opened my eyes. Many of the pages bore heavy foxing.
One day, George wasn’t there. Why they had transported me all the way to play with him, I cannot now remember. There was a bit of him left though – a lungful slice of stale breath where that special book had once sat in the shelf between two others.
I peered through the window to see a woman pegging out dirty clothes on the washing-line in the orchard garden. I could not see clearly enough to determine the anatomical nature of the skid-marked underwear blowing with the fitful sunless winds.
***
A MERE FAREWELL
It was like drowning in memories. Not those words about the whole of one’s life flashing by before your eyes as you suffer death by drowning. Because I could never swim in any event. Equally, I could rarely remember much about my life – but like most people, memories of things reside on some back burner waiting for their turn to take a curtain call. Except mine were fast asleep dreaming of things not themselves. Memories with memories of their own. False memories. My real memories having unreal memories as dreams. A concept I could hardly grasp. I’d rather depend on the old familiar places rather than places that never ever existed other than in the pipe dreams of those very familiar places hatching up unfamiliar places for themselves. Unfamiliar places disguised as familiar ones. Unfamiliar, I claim, because, they never existed. Until now.
I look out from inside my head away from these thoughts on paper. And wonder if I am the same person who wrote them down. I look down again to read them – and the print has changed in the meantime. The words now say different things from what I originally intended. Except they seem to be the same words. But words with different meanings – and when they are linked together in what I can only describe as sense-patterns, they keep flashing from one narrative sense to another, like a pulse. Or a strobe. Memories strobing. Faster and faster. Could I really be drowning in memories? The words seem to indicate that I am so doing. Slowly enough to record the process. But too quick to understand what is going on. People’s faces flashing by. Loves and hates interchanging. Various stages of myself stripped out in separate essences of self, none connected between. The only consistency is the ladder or tear in the very texture of the words as laid out in the page. They seem to be dividing like a Red Sea to leave an emptiness among the sense-patterns. A false syntax. A gap-strewn paragraph of thoughts and misthoughts. Memories taking over my mind with a force my mind can’t withstand even though it is the same mind that is creating this strange onslaught on itself.
One of the faces — flashing by in a trite stream of consciousness that I drown in — is you as a mere farewell. Simply that. The whirling onslaught slows to a silent last gasp of meaning. A face I recognise. It starts out, however, as a face without a feature. A white empty plate or recently emptied bowl. Then gradually a couple of eyes prick out. Wide rolling eyeballs that radiate an expression of knowing. Knowing me, if not itself. I say ‘it’ because there is no other word for a gradually emerging ghost of a person. Once it’s fleshed out by the ever-building flashes of identity that become stuck to it then I can begin to decide on he or she or me. I suggest me because I’m not yet convinced it’s not a mirror I see flashing into a steady state of existence. Rather than an explosion or implosion of a big bang.
I look down at the words again. I leave the slowly emerging features to thicken and define themselves. I feel the words may give me some clue as to the true resemblance of the face to whom or to what. The face itself is deceiving me as well as itself. Only the words can tell. The words will tell me who it is. And I notice that the crack in their texture has widened as if the tectonic plates of the sense-patterns are ever shifting to reveal a more meaningful pattern that is a white shape rather than a set of words describing a shape. A real shape rather than a shape imagined by the words I write. The whitening crack discards letters as if they are dead insects while it lays the paragraph into a flatland of nothingness. Alphabets fall off the edge of the paper like dead lemmings in full zombie flight. I shriek inwardly with fear. I seem to be heading towards some old familiar places that I once inhabited but had long since put out of my mind’s memory for fear of returning to them in the full flood of true present memory. Memories that are forming as new memories even as I think them. When does a memory become a memory? What is the time lapse needed to make a present event into a memory. A new unfamiliar place into an old familiar place. Place or face. Because a face is a sort of place. It has its own geography, its own secret alleys and hidden corners. Its own inhabitants sitting behind the eyes as if the eyes are windows to some apartments in a city’s high rise property. These little people look from the two eyeballs in the face, their own eyeballs rolling in their heads as they see some old familiar places for the first time. One hangs a huge rubbery nose between the two eyes as if hanging out a flag for a jubilee or something like a jubilee. A Mardi Gras. A trout stream. Or a fancy-dress festival that the city holds every year. The city is a strange one to them. It’s certainly not one of their pet old familiar places. Faces that find themselves in a foreign place.
I have taken my eye off the ball. The words have escaped my pen into new uncontrolled configurations of syntax and non-syntax, with that ever widening gap or crack that forces me to believe the meaning cannot bridge such an hiatus. And I have raised the head where I live in despair at controlling the words, raise it towards the ceiling, rising not with mere sight to see the rivers of geography in its cracked white plaster surface (otherwise blank). But the head actually rising in the air along with the sight itself to see it closer up. Either my neck has elongated like a giraffe’s or the head has actually separated itself to float like a fish towards the ceiling.
One particular crack in the ceiling is so deep I can see daylight through it to see a mansion’s roof fixed with faulty concrete. And my sight or the head that carries the sight escapes through it into the open air – and I am a mere speck of consciousness being wafted by the wind. At least I am safe from those words now. And from the old familiar places of meaning that each word familiarly contains, despite the horror that they would otherwise convey with the unfamiliar meanings that they felt themselves dutibound to convey to the unwary such as I who releases them on to the page. Each dot, each pixel of the marks being just another me. Just another beginning of a face. Drowning in memories, in anarchic thoughts and in the forgotten white airinesses of space where familiarity breeds contempt for any steady state or big bang. Because neither is right. The old peculiar place of dreams dreaming dreams that is the truth stream of Existence, yours and mine. The place that launched a thousand tench … no, an infinite number of familiar faces towards their inevitable sinking and drowning in the white water frenzy of words.
Better drowning in words of any shape or colour than in a mere well called Heaven or Hell.
***
SO, M’LORD, WHAT COULD I DO?
The blanket that my grandmother (and my mother after her) had knitted from at least a century of tail-end wool was one of my most cherished possessions. Its brightly coloured squares were sewn together with no concern for matching, but beautiful nonetheless. Its beauty not only stemmed from such sentimental attachment but also from seeming to be a living creature which delighted in lying on top of me, blunting those shadows sharpened from the winter darkness.
The rot set in, however, when I got myself a husband. It had been knitted upon the bone-needles of my mother and grandmother, who had lovingly clicked whole nights away watching it grow faster than any child of theirs, and so I knew the blanket could not be suffering from jealousy. It was a proud tradition in our family to marry, after all. No, I assumed that the stitches were loosening (and even laddering from square to square) because the blanket disapproved of the man I had chosen, not the fact he was my husband. It little cared to protect him from the cold.
What option did I have then, m’lord, when I saw the unravelling, the pitiful thread-barren, the fraying and teasing out, the sheer worrying of its texture into straggly tangles? At first, I lay awake at night, listing to him snoring, my fingers fiddling uncontrollably with the tantalizing bobbles of wool, weaving the loose ends into cats’ cradles of torment: knotting and unknotting mischievous strands which should have stayed unknotted and knotted respectively.
Luckily my conscience remained untrammelled. I pulled the blanket off him night after night, hoping he’d catch pneumonia from Jack Frost himself. He merely tugged it back in his sleep with a greater strength than that he possessed during his waking hours. In many ways, some of the blanket’s unseaming must be laid at the door of such antics. But not all. The blanket literally loathed my husband.
So, m’lord, what could I do? I merely watched it suffocate him. You see, it didn’t need my help. How could I have managed to tame such a bucking monster with my own small hands? No, it were the blanket, m’lord, that killed my husband. How else could it have become threaded through him from one end to the other?
***
CEILING ZONES
How long that particular ghost had been a haunter and I had been its hunter, nobody knew but me. I lived in a mansion wherein my ancestors had spread seed for many generations. I was the prime stock, the elder brother, the one who, however long in the tooth, would take over when various deaths had worked through various layers of red tape.
The other siblings, some of still indeterminate gender, clustered at the foot of the television, mooning up at the screen. They cared little for the future, except for the scheduling of programmes. However, a girl among them, Edna, had only one eye for the flashing screen in the corner of the parlour: the other eye was for the more hazy, slightly less understandable, gradually more noticeable flickerings in the opposite corner by the hallway door. Being the Nineteen Fifties, reception was brilliant in neither corner. None of it was in colour, of course.
I knew about my parents’ bedroom in the higher reaches of the mansion, where they kept themselves to themselves. I was the only one allowed into its sanctity, where sleep was punctuated with what I later understood to be fitful conjugation. As I came upon them from the landing, breathless after the ascent of the steep stairs, I was eager to tell them of yet another sibling’s mysterious arrival, yet one more set of eyes to feed, a further reason to buy a bigger television to prevent arguments over viewing positions.
The parents would wave me out of the master bedroom, indicating the paltry postal order left on the tallboy by the oriental wardrobe: as if it were the end of their responsibility: and I would, with hangdog face, slouch back down the stairs towards the lower floors.
It was the darkest landing of all, midway between the attic and the cellar, that I saw Edna in company with a haunter (a ghost that had “come out” without fear of the consequences). She appeared wanton, lounging across several treads of the stairway. The haunter was equally relaxed, hanging from the false ceiling which a previous dynasty had built to prevent the stairs becoming frighteningly precipitous.
I could not be jealous but, being the elder brother, I felt responsible for my sister’s life, especially when it involved associating with the long dead. The haunter seemed a trifle too laid back for its own good, as Edna coquettishly moved her head in its direction.
“Be off with you!” I boomed. The echoey darkness took away the edge of urgency. It was merely one more noise that time held endlessly in its maw, its only significance being in retrospect, when all the fateful twists and turns had been aggregated and assessed.
The haunter found it easy to ignore my interruption for, to such an entity, I did not exist. Wishful thinking or a state of in-denial by a ghost to block its would-be hunter, I guess. It must have hear the undergrunts of the television a few floors below, but that was more like the unbroken hum of reality. By contrast, the odd punctuations by those such as myself, who had broken the rules of fate, well, they were merely to be shrugged off: and, as soon as ignored, forgotten: as soon as forgotten, never to have existed at all.
I watched the black and white shapeless whirligig assume dominion over the stairway. The fuzz and static of false hopes, condemned, derelict dreams and misguided visions made the whole area throb with bewigged and bepowdered figures. Escaped from one historical moment when heritage was only just starting its process of self-perpetuation, these figures were the scions of the house, the long lost brethren who had knitted a whole skein of cousin arteries with few, if any, dropped stitches. It was a pity they had only twenty years in which to work and develop, since the mansion had only been built since just before the Second World War. During the blitz, ghosts had become more plentiful, but they were not of the right calibre, merely preening dandies, fancy dress pranksters, masqueraders of false-bottom history…
As ghosts always faded behind truth, Edna herself became another ceiling, straight as a die, a smooth white slope, with mock-baroque scrolling as it turned corners: the mock stucco…
I descended to the television room and blew on the screen to brighten up the image. This was to allow the remaining siblings to see in closer to the heart of things, where a tube swelled, a valve fluxed: a box of tricky ghosts: and somebody banged on the ceiling to complain about the volume.
I sobbed, for Edna had never existed. Her death wish was never to be granted by never having lived in the first place. If I had known she was never to be my sister, I could have tried to love her properly.
I still had one dream to live, when I might become a haunter too and walk as if on air, between the boxes that now contained those who once sat outside staring into them. Or perhaps I was just another breed of ghosting as part of a small screen’s snowy shimmer.
.
“Ghosts often disguise themselves as coved and cambered ceilings.” — Walter de La Mare, in a story he never wrote.
***
CONTINUED HERE:
https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/disconnected-miniatures-2-by-df-lewis.html
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