Continued from here: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/torque-tales-3-by-df-lewis.html
AN END
When the sands started shifting I knew it was the end of some mansion within the sea. But to know an end one needs to exist beyond that end to be able to see it for what it is – or was. That day I met Edna was one such end – as well as beginning. Beginnings and ends can be very close indeed and still keep their identities either as a beginning or an end. Beginning: the sight of a vehicle looming in the sky from the corner of your eye – middle: collision – end: death. Torque, then a tightening tourniquet of descent. All in a few seconds. Except, from what I said earlier, death as an end is not an end in itself unless you view it from afterwards as an end. Therefore, death is not an end. It’s something else altogether. An end’s end, perhaps. But not the end. Not an end in itself. Not an end you saw as a whole process of a verifiable end after it has ended. And only you can verify it. Anyone else verifying it is merely hearsay. For ‘end’ please read ‘ghost’, enlightening earlier miniatures as giants.
Before I get you too confused, I’d better tell you more about Edna. She was sitting on one of those many back-support bench-type seating-arrangements of ribbed solid plank-wood that are plentiful along the promenade looking out to sea. Not that the bench itself looks out to sea, but the people sitting on them. The protruding pier just off to the right.
A middle-aged woman (with no name at that stage as in the early days names were forbidden). Too young for me, and I didn’t really think it appropriate for me to engage her in talking so I prepared to walk on. But then I heard a helicopter off to the left – outlandish clattering growing louder and louder – presumably the air ambulance or a coastguard patrol. It was so low I feared it was going to ditch, but it eventually clattered with twisting vanes off towards Jaywick, with no obvious reason for its manoeuvres in hindsight. So, yes, I had thought it had crashed into the sea’s roof, but it hadn’t, or it was now it own whickering ghost completing the journey, and I looked back to the bench and Edna had vanished, presumably lost forever in the ocean of strangers with which the world is mainly populated. Some of that ocean is close by in your own neighbourhood, the rest in far reaches of the world you will never … reach. A literally man-made ocean with its own inexplicable, often dangerous, tides across cockle-beds or shingle or ribbed beach or sieved granulations or rocky coral.
But in addition to that ocean of strangers there are usually local inlets or lakes or rivers of non-strangers. Friends or lovers. Colleagues or drinking pals. People you know or have met however briefly – even just seen in the distance. Like Edna.
Thinking about her, Edna probably doesn’t count as a real meeting or encounter, because she would have had to look at me, too. Just an exchange of passing glances would have sufficed for it to have been qualified as a proper encounter. But, as far as I was aware, I had looked at Edna, but she had not turned to look at me.
As I continued my walk along the promenade towards the pier, I started musing again about Edna. Suppose she had looked at me while I was preoccupied by the noisy manoeuvres of the helicopter? I can’t imagine that would have been the case as I guess everyone was looking at the helicopter at that stage rather than at each other. But that is only a guess. Edna may have scrutinised me closely, even at some length. The incident with the helicopter, I now recalled, lasted at least a few minutes. Time enough for Edna to get as close as a couple of dancers about to embark on a waltz at the local palais. Skin-pore close.
I shook my head and shrugged. I was getting carried away. The relationship with Edna had begun and ended with my pointless glance of appraisal at a nameless middle-aged woman sitting alone on a bench looking out at sea. There I go again. A bench doesn’t look out at sea. It’s the people sitting on it that look out at sea. Watching the tide come in and out across the rattly shingle. Wondering which tide would be the last one. Which cloud in the sky the last one that you would ever see skimming above? Feeling eyes boring into your back, and not daring to look round.
Shingle isn’t like shifting sands. But my lap rucks oh too easily without even daring to move the bent knees within it. Not daring to move is equivalent to being on the brink of it being impossible to move. To move or turn. Ever upon the quicksand of hesitation. Ever on the benchmark of differentiating trial and error. Ever upon each edge of the end. A ghost’s end, as a new beginning,
The tide faintly sweeps in like some soft machine.
***
MANSION MANQUÉ
The stiff key like a tiny intricately static machine became sticky in the lock and bent out of true as I tried to turn it. The place I was trying to unlock seemed more like a barn than a cottage but I had already convinced myself – based on earlier-read literature – that it was comfortable inside as a would-be mansion would have been, even if made mainly from wood. Well, as a cheap place for a weekend break, pretty basic, but still acceptable with a real bed. No need for heating at this sticky time of the year, I thought, as, despite having bent out of true, the key released the tumblers one by one in slow motion sound.
Inside was dark. No lights. I cursed as the switch by the door made no difference at all – not even a short-circuit flash. Despite the lateness of the hour, there was still enough natural vision to read the notice just inside the door: “The pilot is under the sink in the kitchen”. This was the shorter of two notices. The other one was full of small print relating to the temporary tenancy.
I presumed it meant the pilot light. Not someone, say, who flew a helicopter.
I lingered for a while looking back through the open door at the wonderful view of rolling hills. I found the key still in my hand – strangely in two bits, as if I had just carried out, absent-mindedly, my own version of a Uri Geller trick of softening metal with the will-power of my tender fingertips. A sort of soft machine. I’d better find the pilot light under the kitchen sink before it was too dark even to find the kitchen.
The rolling hills had merged with the twilit sky even as I gazed at them back through the open door. The moon had carved its horn-shape into Heaven’s masonic under-roof. Words that had taken over my mind, as if I were a poet, not someone who had very little vocabulary before entering this edifice, let alone the holiday cottage or pitch-black barn or even mansion manqué…
I felt my way along the wall, meeting protuberances that I would not care to describe or guess their nature despite my increased word-power to do so. I desperately tried to stop my new gift of imagination running away with itself. Normally, I could not even imagine anything beyond my immediate selfish needs.
Eventually, I found what I guessed to be the kitchen – judging by the smell of rank food. But then I stumbled into what could only be described as a bed. Soft covers – too soft – my fingers going through the material and its under-stuffing with uncomfortable ease. But then I found the sink – drip, drip, drip, said the tap – so loudly I wondered how I hadn’t heard it before now. Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle, said the drain beneath the open plug. I bent down to open the cupboard where I imagined the u-bend to be. Even if I found the pilot-light, how would I ignite it? With a hiss of flame or the mere click of a switch – as the whole place would hopefully, at best or at worst, spring into flumes of gaseous gloom, a gloom capable of outshining the darkness that had by now set in with an impenetrable shroud, thick enough to touch.
I saw the back of someone’s head under the sink, strangely luminous with smooth brylcreemed hair glistening off the reflection from my eyes, eyes still storing depletions of hillside sun that I had kept inside the hump of my own head. Slowly, that head, with nostrils large enough to swallow me, looked round – as if upon a revolving plinth reminiscent of one of a seaside array of novelty clowns’ heads.
I struck a sudden match, somehow snapping it in two, but not before allowing the flame to ignite one of the nostrils – and bright red eyes broke open not only from the head in question but from scores of other heads around the walls like Hallowe’en pumpkins. Some with vertical eyes, not horizontal, as if in a state of dizzy descent.
This was not going to be a holiday easy to forget, I thought, my absent mind now returned to simple words and simple thoughts. I was ever a simple sleepy soul…
In the glowing blood-light, he staggered back to the disintegrating plumpness of the bed-covers – tired of the waking dreams. He twisted the stiff key in some soft lock’s ignition and let sleep do the rest.
***
BIRD FLEW
It came as a shock that Avian Influenza was back in the breaking news. It was the day I made a visit to the National Gallery not far from where I lived in London. I wasn’t entirely sure whether it housed ‘The Laughing Cavalier’ and, if I had a computer, a computer that actually worked, I could have looked it up I suppose before I went. One fact of which I was sure, however, was that ‘The Laughing Cavalier’ was not the painting’s correct title; it had been christened that by some future Victorian lady. Its eyes (or, rather, his eyes) not only follow you around the room, they also follow you, perhaps, through time itself. Slowly turning from upright slits to full openings and back again. A series of knowing, smirking glances that told each one of us something about glimpsing. Something like: trust in me and I’ll save you. Or: I am nothing but chemical pigments, so despair!
Dawn was breaking, like a Turner, before I reached Trafalgar Square. The taxis looked as if yellow yolk had spilled all over them. It made me think this wasn’t London at all, but a different city that did not otherwise exist. I was driven by some unknown purpose. Taken a sickie from work. It was almost as if I then thought that ‘The Laughing Cavalier’ was a form of lucky charm, a talisman in tangible form, to ward off the onset of doom. Whatever else it might have said with its eyes.
I imagined a chicken soul. A tiny spirit of existence that was obsessed with eggs. The dawn by now had become slugs of orange marmalade crawling along the roof-ridges and draping the top of Nelson’s Column (i.e. Nelson himself) with pithy residue from God’s lemon-squeezer.
I cursed. I could see the Gallery was not yet open. Foolishly, I imagined everyone else had, like me, been up for hours. It felt like lunchtime to me. I asked a passer-by whether the Gallery contained ‘The Laughing Cavalier’ because, if not, I would be able to kill time with a task satisfyingly useful: like tracking it down elsewhere. I was ignored as if I were considered ‘persona non grata’. With some dismay, I suddenly realised the painting might not be in London at all. But in some upstart city like Amsterdam or Madrid. Upstart. The word had ‘art’ in it! I laughed with self-mockery as I opened my earlier packed lunchbox while sitting near the stone lions and the fountains.
Swarms of pigeon-life swooped around in synchronised patterns because some tourists illegally scattered breadcrumbs for them in the square. That reminded me that the news had only broken late yesterday, the news about the re-awakening of Avian Influenza or H5N1 as some called it. Many of these torurists may not even have heard about it. I liked the expression Bird Flew. I laughed again. This was no laughing matter. When you eventually read this and see how I spelt ‘Flew’, you won’t laugh, either. Unless you never get to read this…
Eventually, I saw the doors of the National Gallery being opened like a countrified stately mansion. Dawn, had, by now, finally broken. And the oranges and yellows were slowly fading to grey. Like a painting that had sat too long in the sun. Hung in a window that got too much exposure to the prevailing heat of a long hot summer. I replaced the uneaten Marmite sandwich in my box and I called across to one of the Gallery wardens standing on the outside with a cigarette in his mouth.
“The Laughing Cavalier?”
“In the Wallace Collection,” he shouted back.
I waved a sign of gratitude, as I heard the spinning tourniquet of many clattering wings above me. With now no glancing sun to make their eye domes flash.
***
DEADLY WORDS
It wasn’t always dark, it wasn’t always damp. Or should I have said that the corner was never only dark, it was never only damp. It seemed to go in cycles. It was the top corner of one of the top floor mansion bedrooms; near a chimney flue and where the severely sloping ceiling met the outside wall. The cycles comprised periods of not being damp or dark at all. For months on end, and going back in history, for years on end, I suspect. Neither damp nor dark. Then cycles comprising periods of being both damp and dark at once. Never one condition without the other. Darkness and dampness as a tug of war: a host in creative or destructive battle with its parasite, but I was never sure which was which. Darkness or dampness as the cause or effect? How could I tell? I am not a surveyor or professional builder. I was simply sure that you always needed both dampness and darkness for each to exist.
Meanwhile, it was a mystery in other ways, too. There seemed no obvious reason for it. The roof in the corner’s vicinity had been repaired (and eventually the whole roof was replaced as just one repercussion), various other pointing or structural jobs done, chemical treatments given to the wall, even prayers given up to whatever gods controlled dry rot or whatever the condition was called. When in a whimsical mood, I often compared the phenomenon of that corner’s characteristics to those of a real person, someone with moods. Body as well as outer personality and inner mentality. Someone like me. Or someone like my wife. Or someone or something else completely.
We had lived together in the mansion for many years. A shadowy third lived there, too, but we never saw it, being usually where we were not. Except on the rare occasion when the three of us attended the same room; it would hide behind something in the room, made itself as small as possible, climbing in, for example, behind a book on the bookshelf. Just like a shadowy third would.
“What’s that noise?” I asked. We were sitting together in one of the centrally-heated drawing-rooms that stretched from back garden to frontward drive. This drawing-room, being downstairs, was naturally longer than the combined width and length of the many bedrooms, even though one of them was above the stairs-area and the kitchen. All bedrooms, though, were kept centrally heated, too, in this modern age. I think I was the only one who had got to grips with the logistics of this place where we lived. Its spaces and margins, and its accoutrements or aids of comforting existence that swelled and unswelled with the seasons. Neither my wife or I gave the impression of ever even thinking about such matters. Mysteries for us were never mysteries. Unless you consider something to be mysterious, it never becomes a mystery.
“It’s the wind,” she replied. But, upon thinking about it, the shadowy third was possibly just as unthinking as we were. It never questioned our existence, never thought about how old we must be now, never wondered what it was doing there and why there was a purpose in it being there. Doing and being, different words meaning the same thing perhaps. What and why. What doing? Why being? It knew it was not the wind making a noise. It knew it was itself we had heard. That was the ‘what’ at least? The ‘why’ remained beyond its reach to know. Beyond, indeed, its reach to be.
It scuttled from the drawing-room as soundlessly as possible and then up the stairs on all fours, on all its tip-toes. Its favourite lurking-hole was in one of the bedrooms beneath the roof. Yes, you guessed it. That corner. That dark damp corner. That damp dark corner. Each room normally has eight corners, half of them ceiling level, the other half floor level. It kept repeating “dark damp corner, damp dark corner” in some form of incantation. Not with words aloud, but from thoughts inside. Thoughts are always silent. Even when you come to speak thoughts, they turn out to be quite different thoughts from the thoughts you thought you were thinking before you spoke them or they are not your thoughts at all! Or someone or something else thought your thoughts on your behalf? Like the shadowy third, for example.
Perhaps its presence explained everything about that corner and about my trying to explain it here at all. Eventually, it hears the whispering of myself coming upstairs with my wife, and carrying our bedtime reading. The days are closing in, growing shorter. Autumn: the only season that is known for certain to exist. For all of us, mysteriously never-ending. While the shadowy third remained silent, perhaps forever.
.
“Don’t say anything,” was the last thing she said.
There was a hush that lengthened into a silence, a long silence, as we stared at each other.
When someone says “Don’t say anything” to you with a certain emphasis on the words, the meaning is often clear. Do not dare to say anything as anything you are likely to say in the present circumstances is bound to incriminate you even further or make that someone who said “Don’t say anything” even angrier with you. And that was how she said it. And that was how I took it.
But who was to break the silence that was still lengthening even as I dwelt upon these thoughts? By saying “Don’t say anything” to me, she sort of imposed the same constraints upon herself, I felt — as if anything she decided to say at this precise juncture would also incriminate her or make me angry.
This is what I call a pivot moment, as if we sat at each end of childhood’s see-saw balanced upon the fulcrum of our relationship. A relationship that had lasted many years — and now it seemed, as if by some retrospective objectivity, that we had always been at this pivot moment, with silence stretching back and back and back and back till we couldn’t remember ever speaking to each other.
But, as I say, who was to break the silence? Who would dare to utter the very words neither of us wanted to hear?
Death is a shadowy third, a sort of pivot moment, too, when Autumn finally ends, along with your whole life being balanced out by an enormous weight of silence that is about to fill the future.
I felt myself hovering in silence. Years had passed since we first noticed the incurable dampness of the dark corner. The seat opposite was now empty, but the pivot moment continued, as I did not dare to break the silence by saying anything I had been forbidden to say, even though there was nobody in the room now, nobody other than myself, nobody there to hear the deadly words I wanted to speak.
I sobbed as I realised that I had not noticed the seat opposite emptying of its occupant, emptying gradually — with her body starting at first to grow slightly ghostly, then more ghostly, until she was so ghostly I could see through to the back of the seat, and then I saw nothing but the back of the seat.
I had been gradually sinking lower and lower on my end of the see-saw as my trusted counterweight at the other end had grown lighter and lighter … higher and higher —
But which way Heaven? Which way Hell?
The shadowy third still embedded in the mansion’s damp, dark corner finally broke the silence with the answers. But I did not hear them.
***
KISSING AS THE ART OF MARKING VICTIMS
Some god looked down at us — or looked up at us? — with a beady or vertical eye, and this god’s so-called helper angels wore opaque clattering vanes instead of soft translucent wings. And we felt watched as if by Greek gods made by more modern myths. The wave and the kiss. But who was it who wrote the ‘story’ below and called whoever it turned out to be as me? Never the ghost I really sought.
***
The wave was huge, a tsunami of humani, each with its hand raised and wavering in unison. They told me to watch out for any of the many wavering out of tune, so that each could then be picked out, taken out and dealt with. Kissing as the art of marking victims. That was my job.
One of them, I saw, a young woman about my own age, was seen to be deliberately wavering out of synchronicity. You could not tell this clearly, but I was practised in recognising such rebels, and I went up to her and, before she could respond, I kissed her gently on the mouth, and then the invisible officials soon came out of hiding and roughly took her away.
In many ways, a kiss is a sign of love, making any exit from the wave easier, insulating the pain with a temporary connection between two humani and then it is almost as if the other one takes on the responsibility of your self, and you of theirs. Just a split second while the enormity of behaviour is realised and then quickly forgotten. And later you get back or someone like you gets back simply to keeping watch on others in the wave.
In many periods, of peace and war, the kiss has been disguised as a moment of mental or physical passion about to happen between willing or unwilling partners in synchronicity, or just one more politeness that makes we humani tick. Deep or shallow, a kiss is the friendly poison transferred.
A tidal rhythm that remains uniquely conscious only through its unbroken unison. And its keepers of the kiss who sacrifice themselves with each kiss simply to keep that rhythm going.
The one I had picked out created her own story of being hidden away in a dead body. Then that dead body hidden away itself as a matter of diluting decomposition — wavering imperceptibly between saliva and tears. Lips puckering too late. Humani, humanus, humus.
***
THE WAVE AND THE KISS
I wasn’t clear what the young woman was doing in the window opposite, sitting there as she did all the hours of the day that I was sitting in the window opposite hers. But I guessed that she was working at her desk, just as I was working at my own desk while writing about hunting ghosts such as her.
The street below was always busy but it wasn’t always busy with the same people being busy all the time. I couldn’t see the people inside the cars driving them, so there being different drivers was a safe assumption to make, unless the same cars and the same drivers were going round in circles all day, following the city’s inner ring road of which the street below was part. However, I often did study the pedestrians walking along the pavements below and I could safely say that they were not the same people all the time, but I did often recognise some who had already walked past hours before and were walking past again. Some even returned within minutes, but that wasn’t often.
I often became bored with my work on the desk at which I sat and I would daydream, sometimes idly staring at the young woman opposite who could obviously concentrate more easily on the work at which she was staring downward. She never seemed to look back at me. Which was a shame as I could plainly see, just from her profile, that she was attractive. I even uncharacteristically gave her a name: Edna it was. Old-fashioned, though such a name was. Even literally demeaning.
My daydreams, meantime, might turn my gaze to the passing pedestrians on the pavements, some of whom would often suddenly dash across the street, dodging the vehicles that had invisible drivers, or at least invisible to me from up above. I wondered, with quite outlandish bouts of wild imagination, whether some of these passing people spent more time scaling the sides of the buildings, including the building wherein I sat on the seventh floor, than they did actually walking along the street. A bit like spidermen or spiderwomen. In this city that combined both St Paul’s dome and the giant shards I called sharks, with helicopters precariously buzzing between them,
I looked back at the young woman in the window opposite and she was still sitting at her desk, of course. She had been sitting there for two years to my certain knowledge. I had only missed keeping watch during my toilet breaks but I ate my sandwiches sitting at my desk and I was never sick and I couldn’t remember the last holiday I had had – but, of course, I couldn’t keep watch when out of office hours. And down in the street, if I happened to walk along it during the evening or the small hours of the morning, I couldn’t see anyone at all sitting in her window because that would be impossible to discern from where I stood down below staring up. At these times, the city was relatively deserted. Indeed, I didn’t often have cause to pass along this street out of office hours, as I commuted daily from my home in Coulsdon an hour’s train journey away and I would have had to stay up in the empty city deliberately – and my wife would have wondered.
I continued daydreaming and wildly imagined human fingers curling over the edge of the ledge in front of my gaze a few inches beyond the glass of my window. Not that it was my window. It belonged to the building.
But having glanced up to carry out this act of wild imagining, I abruptly spotted that the young woman opposite was staring back at me staring back at her, not that I had been staring at her until now, this precise moment of staring back at her following my act of wildly imagining human fingers curling over the edge of my window ledge.
This was an apocalyptic instant of life, it struck me, after such an extremely long period of time without any response from the attractive young woman to my own staring. And her face now in full frontage turned out to be not only attractive but stunningly beautiful, even without a smile to enhance it. And indeed it continued not to smile. A newly inscrutable Mona Lisa bobbing on waves about which I told you before. Ready for a kiss but tantalisingly floating past.
What should I do? Smile back? But would that be impertinent without her smiling first? With some connected impulse, I decided to wave, but before I had started waving, she was waving. Not a gently regal wafting back and forth of her hand but something far more frantic just before I heard the sudden noise of my window cracking: the last thing I ever heard before watching the crack widen around the fingers that had first created it: the last thing I ever saw. The sight of Edna waving across the way: the last thing I ever thought. Except I somehow saw the crack grow ever wider and taller, so I knew a soupçon of me remained to see it.
CONTINUED HERE:
http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/lost-endings-2-stories-by-df-lewis.html
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