Lost Endings (2) stories by D.F. Lewis

 CONTINUED FROM: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/lost-endings-1-stories-by-df-lewis.html

THE WAVES 

He enjoyed having a bath more than anything else he did. He lived in a large Victorian mansion, where the plumbing wasn’t up to very much, full of draughts this time of the year coming through the sash windows and creaking floorboards, and the bath itself was a huge one on rusted claw feet of a larger-than-life mutancy of appearance, and he found it difficult to climb into and even more difficult to climb out of that bath. He often cringed at the brown running lines of yellow or brown that made its once white innards more like the skin of a diseased zebra than anything else. It showed the potential of the real mucky having once been in it.

The hot tap croaked upon turning but did allow in a good flow of scaldingly hot water at a generous, if stuttering, pace. Naturally, he had to ensure that his later turning on of the cold tap worked equally well as the hot one — otherwise he would become nothing better than a boiled lobster, if that’s not too hackneyed a phrase to use. The trouble was that the cold tap was not very dependable and often gave up the ghost even before it had croaked. Then, he would be left with a good hour or so sitting on the edge of the bath in his stringy dressing-gown to allow the water to cool to a level hot enough but not too hot. But once in, he was in. Croaking ghost or not.

He loved his ducks, he loved the soap he collected in all manner of carved shapes, that would now be blurred by the lathering he loved smarming himself all over with. He loved his scrubbing brush, too, now a bit worse for wear, its bristles having become more like the bottom of a newly dredged quarry. But it did set his skin tingling and his teeth on edge simply to look at it and anticipate its first contact with his skin.

The water swished and swilled around him as he luxuriously allowed its warmth to take away any memory of the chill in the air. There was one mystery however that he had never solved. However much he loved creating waves with the gentle pumping up and down of his knees, the waves were never satisfying enough. But he knew a wave would not be a wave at all if it was strong enough to spill water over the edge of the bath. That would be a self-defeating wave. A wave to be a satisfying wave needed to be strong enough to lift up the loose bits of his body but not too strong so as to drain the bath of water. Tonight it was cooling anyway, and he would soon be forced to struggle out, torso turned and knees down to assist a handle upon such leverage.

No, the actual mystery was of a wave that occurred in his bathwater without him causing it. Often he would relax, sprawled out as far as he could, only the barest amount of face left above the water like a nosy island, resisting the onset of the bathroom’s chill that the water was now absorbing, and he remained still for at least five minutes, stock still, until he felt the mysterious wave swirl gently over and above him till it splashed across the face with a cheeky mucky slap. He never knew how that wave had generated itself. He often joked that the bath itself on its outlandish claw feet was a living creature. But that didn’t hold water.

***

THINK OF THE FUTURE

Edna knew she had three dolls that she called Dandy, Mandy and Andy – because, well, she liked names like that, rhyming, flowing like a river. If she had more dolls she would have called them Handy, Shandy and Pandy – but then she remembered that Pandy was Andy’s surname in the old kids’ programme from Fifties TV called ‘Watch With Mother’, something Edna was old enough to have experienced in real-time.

She was old enough, too, to have dolls to play with again, though she refused to acknowledge she was now entering her own second childhood. Picture Book on Mondays. Andy Pandy, Teddy and Looby Loo on Tuesdays. Bill and Ben and Little Weed and the House That Did or Didn’t Know All about It on Wednesdays. Rag, Tag and Bobtail on Thursdays. The Woodentops on Fridays. Nothing on Saturdays or Sundays. The rest of daytime hours had the Test Card or Welsh speaking programmes – but Edna lived in England!

Dandy suddenly sat up and said: “Stop daydreaming about the past, Edna. Think of your future, instead.”

Edna was startled. None of the dolls had spoken before. Perhaps she was a doll herself, one that didn’t rhyme or flow like a river. Dandy, Mandy, Andy and Edna. Didn’t really go, did it? Perhaps she was Hannah, instead? But that didn’t work, either, whichever way you looked at it.

She felt tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. Mandy was now stirring. These were things that were happening that shouldn’t happen — a human being such as Edna being watched by dolls to see if she still moved.

“Are you OK, Edna?” asked Mandy.

Andy had begun to crawl on all fours towards Elenor.

“Can I do anything for you, Edna?” he asked. “You look as if you need a hand.”

Edna strained her eyes to look down at herself. She couldn’t have seen her hands because they were hidden under a cushion as if they were ashamed of being hers. Her dress was down to her ankles and, of course, she couldn’t have seen her face, being behind the face itself – and the angle of the mirror over the fireplace couldn’t reflect her at all, it seemed. 

Then Looby Loo suddenly came into the room. And all the dolls froze. They couldn’t be seen to be alive. Maybe the house knew something about it. Its mirror, too. But that was that. 

Looby Loo dragged Teddy across the carpet by his ear. And placed him next to Edna. Except Looby Loo never called her Edna, not even Hannah. She called her Handy. And when Handy was tilted in a certain direction, her eyes opened wider to cry tears but they spilled a mucky river instead.

***

IT JUST IS

I do not know why they called it an Edwardian Pram; it seemed quite timeless to me, more 1950s than anything. But then someone suggested to me that it might have belonged to someone called Edward, with that being the era of the so-called Teddy Boys in Britain — guys in lounge suits, winklepickers and quiffs named after a King Edward who gave the word Edwardian its derivation…or have I got my history completely wrong? Not that Edward owned the pram as such, if that was the name of the baby who was originally pushed around in the pram. That particular jurisdiction of ownership was down to Edward’s parents who hopefully bought the pram from a posh shop pre-dating Mothercare… 

If I could travel back in time to the 1950s, you’d probably call me the Doctor. Well, I am a doctor, but not that time-travelling sort. A Doctor of Philosophy. Not philosophical philosophy as such, because, frankly, I don’t know my Kant from my Descartes. No, my degree was in the philosophy of ghost hunting. And that Edwardian Pram seemed a fine case study. And, yes, you’ve guessed it. It was the pram itself that was the time-traveller. Or is. 

Time travel, you see, is intrinsic to ghosts being able to exist at all. Not that I ever really found a ghost proper, even by finding it first, then hunting for it later!

The clever question to then ask, I suggest, a question worthy of a Doctor of Philosophy like me, is that, if the Edwardian Pram can travel through time, does that necessarily mean that any occupant of that Edwardian Pram will go with it to wherever or whenever it is going? We do take certain ideas for granted, but my research meanwhile is intended to question them. When we see those Edwardian gents board an HG Wells type contraption like the one he called a Time Machine, we always assume that it will take those gents with it and one day they may become Teddy Boys in the 1950s or modern people with nothing but computers and iPhones today. But my strong factual belief is that only inanimate things like a pram or other contraptions can travel through time — but the human passengers of those contraptions will simply be left behind. That is why all those stories about the Tardis carrying passengers through time is so far-fetched. But again that takes no account of ghosts, was my thesis.

You may feel that I am exceeding the brief of my doctorate in studying matters like who or what can time travel. But why I am here today, in front of you all on the stage in this lecture hall, is to demonstrate that such things are vitally entwined with the very fibre of our social interaction from the Twentieth Century onward, a period of our history when most of us here were born. You see, you were hand-picked to be invited to this lecture. This is really an experiment, rather than a lecture, but it’s probably both. Ah, I see you are shuffling awkwardly in your seats. You obviously think I am mad, or at least eccentric. But be patient. All shall become clear …eventually. But do feel free to leave if you wish. Good. I see that only one person has left. More or less as I expected. 

Well, before I reveal the Edwardian Pram itself — indeed it has not yet arrived — let me tell you one further thing about yourselves, assuming that all the small talk among you before I arrived on the stage has not already revealed a certain specific common factor true to everyone here, even to that person who has just left the hall. 

You may think some of you look slightly older than others, and therefore some look slightly younger than others, too. But you must have at least realised that you are all likely to be from the same generation. But let me tell you that there is one particular year in your era of birth, a year that all statistics and subsequent research has shown, with the give and take of some good fortune and some bad fortune in what has been made available by successive British governments since that year, yes, that year, when all of you, yes each and every one of you, was born, yes, that year, your year, was the luckiest of all years to have been born, when taking everything into account. Yes, I now see you all looking at each other and smiling as realisation dawns. Each of you already knows in which year you yourself was born, and now you know in which year everyone else around you here now looking at you with a knowingness in that look was born. Yes, that year can no longer be a secret, that year was 1948. 

But I know it wasn’t all good to have been born in that year. Some of you have had hard lives, harder than some others here. I think you can tell which of you have had the hardest lives simply by looking at each other, searching the eyes of your near neighbour in the audience. That’s the way of life. But generally speaking, when taking the rough with the smooth, by the law of averages which is more than an average law, it is definitely true that 1948 was the best year to have been born in the Britain of recent generations. So congratulations to you all. 

I just heard someone call out that some people born in 1948 are already dead. Yes, you will all die in all probability relatively soon, especially as you are today older than you once were. How lucky is that, I hear you ask with some degree of irony.

But that takes no account of the Edwardian Pram. 

Don’t look mystified. There is no mystery about the Edwardian Pram. It just is. It just was. And it always will be. Moving from generation to generation, or even leapfrogging generations. Itself created in a lucky or unlucky year of manufacture like your good selves. 

I’ll let you meditate for a few moments… 

Don’t look round: it is trundling down the central aisle from the back where the entrance to the hall is. Some of you at the back have already seen it pass by your row of chairs, and those of you at the front will see it soon. Don’t look round, I said! It is unlucky to look round and see it before you were intended to see it. Its wheels are squeaking, groaning even. Well, after all, it’s older than you are. What do you expect? 

But now it’s gone. It has moved to another year, another generation, perhaps even to the end of time itself. It can’t collect passengers as passengers cannot travel in time; only things can do that. That’s my genuine factual belief. Even if it could take passengers, it would have to be a baby, because only a baby would fit. Or two babies at a push. Or a million ghosts.

But did you see someone pushing it just now? I see some of you at the back nodding. Forgive me, but you at the back look happier now than those in the front. It’s as if you at the back have realised what life is all about, what my experiment here today for my doctorate is all about, too. Proving something against the grain of one’s original factual belief. You at the front should feel happy too. So long as you didn’t look back. 

Ah, I see what has now happened. But I didn’t see it when it happened. It just is. Perhaps it always has been. Emptiness often creeps up. 

You were the luckiest, after all. Not just some of you, but all of you. Gone to wherever forever. 

Anyway, just think about it. If a large hall of empty chairs can think about anything at all. You were definitely the luckiest year’s generation. Still are. Always will be. I envy you. But at least I have the satisfaction of a successful counter-factual experiment and my doctorate assured. Sometimes you have to make the best of a bad job. The best of a bad year to be born in. 

By the way, I know I am now lecturing to nobody at all, only to those rows of empty chairs, as psychotherapy props, but I can at least tell you, O chairs, that the pram you saw or at least heard was the pram my dear late lamented Mother pushed me around in, a pram that was then secondhand and still in use from the Edwardian times of HG Wells. And she was still pushing it today, from what I could see of her from up here on the stage. A pram with slowly turning vanes on its hood.

Anyone got a tissue for my tears, or a vessel for my own emptiness? Perhaps the audience member who left early would be so kind. The one who looked a bit dressed up like a Teddy Boy of yore. A bit undignified at our age, though, I thought.

***

THE SHADOWY THIRD PROGRAMME

There was a definite atmosphere in the old-fashioned parlour – except there was nobody there to feel it. The ancient TV seemed dead and gone in one corner, perhaps never to have been invented at all, but the huge wireless set in another corner, lit up like a cruise ship, was playing very quietly a programme of late string quartets, but even later it seemed autonomously to tune itself to a gap between stations, a gap that added a hiss to the atmosphere instead of the barely audible music.

A ghost was sitting in a third corner like someone’s grandmother used to sit there, and indeed the hiss had clacking knitting-needles added to it.

On the floor was a glint – and the ghost bent to pick it up, intending to add it to the woollen waistcoat she was knitting, to see if the silver button suited it, and to judge its position for sewing it on, given the materials.

There were many shadows in the parlour, although the light-bulb hanging from the ceiling rose was not switched on. There was, you see, sufficient glow from the hissing wireless to set shadows free. But one dark shape in the fourth corner was not a shadow at all; it was a coal bucket beside the companion set that looked like a man in armour with the shovel, brush and tongs hanging behind it, glinting, too, from the wireless glow. This bucket’s hills of nuggets were of a blacker black than itself, those hills themselves setting free their own shadows against the chintzy wallpaper.

A pity there was still nobody there to soak in the atmosphere, not even one ghost hunter, and now even the ghost itself had been subsumed by the gloom, absorbing, indeed, its own human shadow like dark blood. The ghost was now so impersonal, it could no longer be called ‘she’, no longer someone’s grandmother. And without her, there could be no hope of anybody to remember what or who had been there at all. Casting on, casting off, casting on, casting off, to the sound of silent needles. 

But if no ghost hunter had been present, who wrote this? 

***

AIAIGASA: LEAVING A GHOST IN HER PLACE

I was one of the very few people who took time out to stop when passing the pavement bench on which Trampy Pammy was sitting with her collection of shapeless bags and parcels. She was a fair weather tramp; she was never around when it was too cold or raining and I often wondered whither she went on those days, or was it simply back to whatever (god)forsaken place she spent each night. She would never tell anyone where her lair happened to be, unless it was to tell her fellow baggies. 

I was nothing but a passing stranger, a seeming office worker who once worked with giant desk calculators near St Paul’s but now in Surrey with smaller ones, a younger man, as I was then, in a sharp suit and carrying a neatly rolled and colourful Legal & General umbrella. A fair weather implement, that umbrella, she would think, as it seemed to her irretrievably rolled, a pretentious over-the-top ornament rather than a practical article. The description of her as tramp was also a misnomer, she thought. It was as if she had read my mind when I earlier referred to her with that word. 

I often wondered what Pammy must have been like as a girl or fledgling woman. I tried to picture her all those years in the past, as I visualised her face slowly transforming as we trod back in time together. She, I knew, also tried to imagine my thus visualising her, as I stood for a short while making small talk. She sought in my face any giveaway signs of my turning her into a beautiful young woman. Not undressing her with my eyes, as the rather crude saying goes, but peeling back the years, dislodging the encroached grime upon the outer casing of the bag lady, to reveal the slender figure of someone quite different underneath, if ultimately this was the same person made out of two people that only time divided.

Once she had promised to show me a photo of when she was younger. And eventually she did so. I suppose that was the day when we both proceeded well beyond mere small talk. I had a longer lunch break than normal, or was that my way of saying that I had been made redundant and escorted off the office premises that very morning? A golden handshake, mixed unnoticeably with the same colour as gold but softer, smellier…

She would have felt sorry for me, if I had told her. Yet, I sensed that she knew exactly what had happened to me. She had a kindness beneath the hard-bitten look of age and experience, and as she fished into one of her bags, she said something I couldn’t quite catch, something about a farm where she spent summers as a girl, and there in the old black and white photo, I could make out a slightly podgy creature perched on a stook. I don’t know why — because black and white photos are harder to identify as place and time than colour ones — but the scene looked more like autumn than summer. Or on the cusp of both, like today.

As I more closely examined the image, I wondered who could have wanted so much to take a photo of Trampy Pammy. Photographs were taken very sparingly in those black and white days, you see. They also needed delayed development in chemists. And I now discerned she had a crumpled bag which she had put in front of her face. Or she might have done that precisely at the moment when the camera clicked.

I shivered, as the rain started and I unrolled my previously unrolled umbrella to shelter us both. But she had slipped away, leaving me with the photo.

***

A RIGMAROLE FOR NO PURPOSE

The shop was a relatively ordinary one, with cracked paint on its frames revealing it was not a terribly successful business but with wide and healthy glass in its show-window, an old-fashioned bell to indicate its door opening or shutting, with all manner of bric-a-brac being sold, some items useful, but most of them useless while still quite desirable dependent on your taste in collecting things. Yes, relatively ordinary if slightly unworldly, this shop did equally have an extraordinary position in the city, beyond a side-alley that most prospective customers hardly noticed, if at all. The actual alley wherein it could be found was in an alley off such a side-alley, this second alley also having an entrance hardly noticeable, if at all. Effectively a double chance of nobody ever noticing it, if at all. And such a double chance was tantamount to never being noticed. Your guess is as good as mine.

Still, you found it one day, didn’t you? Against all the odds, you discovered its whereabouts by almost blindly following your nose. The wide and healthy window, seemingly newly cleaned, with not a smear in the sparkling sunlight, a condition of weather that hardly visited the city these days, if at all. A sign in the window caught your attention, one with these words neatly written upon it: “Boy Balloons, newly in stock.” This, of course, mystified you, as it would have mystified me, no doubt, or anyone else. The items you could see on display were nothing that looked like balloons. There were a few dinky toys in their original boxes, a large Victorian doll in a condition that looked like new, and a few pot plants, some flowering. And, oh yes, thanks for reminding me, there was a faded painting in a gilded frame that looked as if had just been put around it, dressed to dazzle, with its own glass. The image was of a woman, you noticed, a woman who looked a bit like you. You put this down to coincidence. A lot of people looked like you, judging by the amount of friends and relations who often told you that they saw someone they thought was you in a place and at a time it was impossible for you to have been there.

It is no secret that you are bit devilish, or should I say mischievous, because the word ‘devilish’ is a bit strong, I suppose. You see, I now know that you had determined, after a while, to stride into the shop and ask the shopkeeper if he had any GIRL balloons! You loved nonsense like that.

The bell tinkled as you opened the door but there was nobody behind the counter. Meanwhile, you looked at some of the small things on the shelves and the larger things that stood around on the floorboards. A whole treasure trove of a boot sale from heaven. Every one an old world bargain that would send the eyelashes aflutter on FLOG IT, the TV auction show. But still no sign of any balloons or even a shopkeeper whom to ask about them. You wondered if the balloons would be already blown up, which begged a question about durability. An antique that started to sink into itself soon after you bought it did not sound like a bargain to you. Maybe you should simply buy that painting from the window as a keepsake, a souvenir of this occasion when you had found, against the odds, such a charming old world shop in itself. Richer people than yourself may even have thought about buying the whole shop itself as an antique in itself… And you thought to place such a shop on your mantlepiece at home, with someone staring at you from its window. You cleaned the glass every day, inside and out. You took out the neatly written sign, though, with its job now done. A sign used as a double belt-and-braces chance to reach a meaning. But that was a crazy thought or simple day dreaming on your part, yet you had no time to accuse yourself of being crazy or even to decide otherwise, as the shopkeeper at that moment entered from a door you had not previously spotted behind the counter, although it was almost certain that that there must have been a door of some sort there all the time. You expected a wizened old man, one who enjoyed writing invoices and accounts with several purple carbon paper copies…

But this was a woman as young and as beautiful as yourself.

“Can I help you?” Her voice was plummy like that of Sylvia Peters from early 1950s television.

“Yes…” You hesitated before deciding to continue with your planned devilish mischief. “Yes, I see from the notice in the window that you have some boy balloons fresh in. But really I am more interested in girl balloons. Have you got some in stock?” You found it hard keeping a straight face.

You then noticed that the door behind the counter was covered in a bead curtain that you hadn’t heard rattling when Sylvia Peters had come in from the back of the shop. Yet, they were not beads at all, you soon noticed, but tiny blue balloons, each individually inflated, and running in their hundreds, shaped like cocktail sausages, down the many curtain-cords from ceiling to floor. One or two sagged as if leaking air. They must have taken a lot of time and patience to inflate and fix.

“Yes, we have one left.” And Sylvia Peters proceeded to shout these words: “Pammy, the lady wants a girl balloon, not a boy one. Can you bring the last one in.”

And what seemed to be a huge mauve ballon, nipped together at the middle, proceeded to nudge through the now squeaking curtain-cords.

You managed to escape before whatever it was could emerge completely into the shop. The bell above the exit door, exactly as when it was an entrance rather than an exit, tinkled busily upon opening and shutting. But you felt ashamed at such a flight, and you re-entered the shop, igniting another double-tinkle.

The woman called Pammy flicked a sudden swarm of buzzing bluebottles away from her face. She seemed to have an increasingly small choice of things to sell. Only some old-fashioned stationery, such as sheets of purple carbon-paper doubling as sticky dreamcatchers. And thousands of extremely tiny foot-pumps.

You suddenly remembered that your late uncle had been big on the variety shows in the Square Mile of London at the turn of the century. How could you have forgotten? A magician, in the main, but his act also featured bendy balloons that he made into what he called sculptures. Squeaking raspberries upon one another’s skin as he manipulated such inflated balloons into conjoined and intertwisted shapes that could be recognised as objects, animals, even human limbs. The children in the audience loved him and often cheered their encouragement as the balloons were torqued and tortured into a single outlandish shape of shapes under his nimble hands. A gestalt of shapes. A huge dome with a cupola? Or the effigy of some ancient god in need of violins, flutes and drums to supplement the balloons’ squawking surfaces? But who were you? 

Pammy hadn’t even heard one doorbell tinkle.

CONTINUED HERE: https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/lost-endings-3-stories-by-df-lewis.html