More Disconnected Miniatures (1)

 Continued from here: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/disconnected-miniatures-3-by-d-f-lewis.html

EPILOGUE

Rachel Mildeyes had been writing for a living since she could remember. A bit like sleeping.

Her first novel, Love In The Sick Ward, had been a successful feminist horror novel. She never cared to read it, however, simply because she could not understand it any more. Her mind was too convoluted and twisted for a straightforward narration. A beginning, middle and end (in that order) was not at all what the shrink ordered. She was confident that she had something growing inside her head, something sharp and incisive, but which could only best come out bent and skewed.

Thus, after a series of gradually compounding fiction sequences under various outlandish pen-names, at the age of thirty-seven, she embarked on what she considered in advance to be her tour de force and raison d’être. Not that it was written in French. The working title was The Miscreant And The Moons ream. She tried out a number of her old pen-names, but none seemed to sit well on the title page. Eventually, she resorted to her own name, believing this to be as good as any — though, of course, nobody could credit that Mildeyes was her real surname at all, but merely an invention of a miscegenate heritage. She finished up calling the book, Miscreant Moon.

The last paragraph came first, leaving the rest until later. She did not own a word processor, only a wireless, continuously tuned into the Home Service, as it used to be called. She particularly enjoyed medical programmes, but that was before the National Health had grown sicker than its patients. So, without a processor, she couldn’t juggle paragraphs willy-nilly like the more modern moveable feasts with which creative writing seemed to have become endowed. What she committed to the old-fashioned typewriter stuck fast.

Miscreant Moon was not a horror work, despite her reputation having been built up, over the years, on plots with macabre incidents and bizarre cruelties. Some critics had called her pieces sick. Simply that. Sick. No mistaking that word, with its decided lack of innuendo; no double entendre nor finer feeling, there. No dodging responsibility under cover of ambiguity or deep symbolism. Indeed, Miscreant Moon was a romance, with any horror simply playing second horn in the wind band. It would doubtlessly be a disappointment to the fervent fans who were used to finding her works amid the latest splatterfests.

Her publisher clucked meaningfully as he listened to Rachers plans for Miscreant Moon. He had a businessman’s head, but pretended his heart knew something about literature.

“I’m afraid a cheap romance will not do, Rachel. You’ve got a duty to the ghastlier, gorier side of human nature.”

She stared at his domed head, sown with tussocks of grey hair. She found herself thinking of a sub-plot where a huge rhinoceros horn suddenly burst through the top of his skull, scattering shards of bone shrapnel across the boardroom table and splintering the oil painting faces of the publisher’s past directors. Thus, she failed to pay attention to what her current editor had to say. She did infer, however, that Miscreant Moon was to be relegated to the back burner of her fevered muse, until she had enough loot in the bank to finance it herself. But life was too short for earning money.

As she wound down the car window, the policeman looked puzzled. She was not the lay-by queen, after all. It was a complete stranger behind the wheel, with something missing. But what was missing, he couldn’t quite fathom. She asked him whether he needed to wear the tall domed helmet to hide his horn. It sounded to him as if she were speaking some form of French. He shrugged, patted her boot and waved her on. No clashing antlers with the likes of Rachel Mildeyes.

The night was so shallow, its dark wreaths were not much more than head height. Above this, as far as the eye could see, were apparent layers of a grimy sea of light. Salt-green shapes, at the same time like and unlike old-time aeroplanes, floated wirelessly through this luminous murk, lights flashing to warn off others. She wrapped her scarf tighter ‘round her neck, because the darkness through which she waded was cold to the skin’s touch. Red-flecked mist sprayed from her mouth as she breathed. Her feet were numb with cold, since they were deeper in the mire of the sunken night. Her head was feverish, but the fever derived more from the dreams therein than the relatively warmer light to which the head was closer. Her bones cracked with the same sound that often drifted from inside butcher’s shops at the dead of night.

She had awakened in a strange bed. The curtains were undrawn, allowing the milky sun to stream through upon her head. She could see seven hundred and fifty-five thousand six hundred and twenty-two dust particles riding in the slanted beams. Amazed at her perspicacity, she began to count the floaters in her eyes, the single petals on the wallpaper, the constituents of the bedsheets, the pores in the palm of her hand and the split seconds that passed in so doing. It was a pity she didn’t know how old she was. Or, it may have been a boon.

The door opened and a young girl, dressed in a uniform, entered with a trayful of breakfast. She called the one in the bed by the name, Rachel. Head lowering towards the tray, Rachel counted out the breakfast’s constituents: Gently coddled duck eggs fluted with the re-constituted ducks that had laid them; rare back bacon rashers interleaved with a sauce that was so strong that integrity of the bacon was in question; freshly squeezed citrus fruit laced with honey wine; doorstops of toast topped with whole kidneys and anchovies; a steaming urn with a medley of infusions from far off Erotica; and cherry tomatoes interspersed like iritic eyeballs.

Leaving the tray beside Rachel’s bed, the girl quickly turned tail, allowing a glimpse of the cut of her behind. The shape of her bosom had been concealed by her uniform, but Rachel had noticed it was over-large, no doubt, when unclothed, plum-tipped, and graspable.

Every speck of food Rachel counted down as she consumed it. Much harder eventually to count them out, she thought. She wondered if the young girl’s own juices had been squeezed over the food to season it. She recalled the dream of the half-hearted night, which, at the time, she had felt was so cold. The blankets now were warmth itself, between which she had been mbedded since she could remember. She was sick. Simply sick.

Having breakfasted heartily, she felt heavy with child, for the food seemed to take on a life of its own in her belly, squirming, kicking and, even, she was sure, squealing. Her bodily innards were strange creatures that passed in the night – a night of blood. When the slurry waters finally broke, several hours later, she feared for the integrity of the bed-clothes. Her headache was like an ingrowing horn.

She drowsed off during the late afternoon. She had given up hope of the girl returning to give her a blanket bath. Rachel was evidently sicker than she had originally thought and the girl, who was probably a National Health nurse, was far too busy to tend to a dream. The dead may die, whilst the rest live only by the words they exchange.

Rachel returned to the earlier dream, where night had fully taken back its own. She could no longer see the floating salt-green shapes nor even the cut of her own body. Impossible now, even to fish herself out from more than one dream away. No clashing hooks with Rachel in the moonstream.

The word count of Miscreant Moon turned out to be a thousand odd short, so she appended an epilogue as makeweight.

***

HEADLESS HALL

Headless Hall was the large mansion on the hill, during your childhood. You would look up at it from the school playground, never questioning its presence and as time went on, none of you hardly noticed it at all. It’s like all places where you’re brought up: you take many of the landmarks for granted, however peculiar they might appear to a stranger; all the quirks and nooks, winding alleys, architectural peculiarities, long walls without entrances, squares with fountains amid the statuary, and the line of terraced houses where you yourself had been chosen to live.with stylish, out-jutting windows and carved ornamentation more akin to gargoyles than one would think typical of the Utility Years…

But you never really noticed anything.You played being a steam-train along the lines in the pavements, as you wended the familiar course to school; or decided that the blue-mottled paving-slabs meant death if you trod upon them, so you had to hop over those for fear of your very existence … Until you reached Temperance Street where, if you but realised it, the school itseld was a peculiarity, with its squat bell-tower, endless redbrick walls, and two playgrounds, one for the boys and the other for those who were at that time a mystery to you (they called them “girls”, but that’s all you knew, other than they seemed to dress slightly different), and teachers with pea-brain whistles and an unaccountable desire for filing in two by two, looking older than they really were (whether that was the strain of the job or comparison with your insultingly young age, you still wonder), and playtime where you had to pinch your nose for fear of the ripe stench in the Boys’ Bogs, followed by games such as Denno and Slavechase amid chants of “fight fight fight!”, whereupon a teacher would arrive breathless from the frays you later learnt took place even within the sanctuary of the staff-room, to tear apart, limb from limb, those ruffians partaking in a catspit scrap, and other games, yes, like flicking cigarette cards so they flew off as bodiless helicopters into corners of the playground where, on different occasions.you would sometimes sit with a crony or two debating the nature of existence and whether “girls” have willies.

Those were the best days of your life, you think, but the horror is you cannot really remember them with any degree of clarity.

Let me remind you …

One day, on emerging from the Boys’s Bogs, deeply inhaling the comparatively fresh air of the playground, you looked up for once at the large mansion with a tower that stood on the hill. Headless Hall, they called it. A teacher, during PE that day, whilst the brawnier lads dragged the thick bristly exercise mats from the bicycle sheds and the weaker morsels toted the bean bags from the Boys’s Bogs, told you (as he said, you were the only one he could trust), that the house was haunted. You stared back quizzically, not speaking, for you hardly ever opened your mouth and, thinking about it, that’s probably why he trusted you so much. You can still see him now, standing there, staring at your three-quarter length trousers, which demurely hid your knobbly knees. His eyes were blue — funny what sticks in your mind — and he looked younger than the other masters. His horn-rimmed spectacles reflected your own face twice over …

For several months after that, you were intrigued with Headless Hall. You began to notice it more and more. You went to the library to read up about it, searching archives of local history, questioning the spinster who sat at the front of the reading-room, staring into space most of the time.

She told you more than any of the books, which seemed more concerned with personalities that had passed through the annals of the Town Hall (which, you supposed, if you had the time, would prove to be quite an interesting building in itself to study, with its gothic clock-tower and yet unrepaired war damage). It was perhaps because you remembered more about facts given to you by word of mouth, as if you literally ate up the sounds, recompensing in due course, you hoped, for your own silence. She knew what you needed to know, without really being asked. She must have read it in your face like an open book.

Apparently, she said, parts of the school were older than Headless Hall. The bell-tower was in itself the oldest part of the whole town.

From the boy’s playground had emerged some of the world’s leaders, such as Disraeli, Cromwell, Churchill, Thatcher and so on. You ate it all up.

But when you heard about Headless Hall, your mouth gaped open and stayed like that throughout. It had ghosts, true, many had seen them. Some even said, she told you, that it had been built actually to house the ghosts that already populated the bare hill.

“What sort of ghosts, I hear you ask me,” she continued (and you can now actually recall what she said precisely with that strange Welsh underlilt), “They came from all walks of reality. Wilde’s Canterville, Lewis’ Bleeding Nun, Hodgson’s Hog, Harvey’s Hand … Benson stays locked up in the room in the tower, scribbling social comedy novels. M.R. James even today sits in its bookroom, illuminating clues upon all the fly-leaves, sometimes confiding with Carnacki who has taken to roosting up the library chimney. Lovecraft has left to go to a better place, but he has abandoned many of his more striking creations in the shuttered attic, where lesser monsters do not dare to go. Sitting in the kitchen, is one with a remarkable resemblance to Poe, polishing the silverware as he dreams…”

None of the names then, as now, meant anything to you, but it was all so perfectly mysterious, each word fell into place like a massive jigsaw that would keep you busy for at least a decade of Christmases.

You cannot remember ever noticing Headless Hall again. The teacher who had drawn your attention to it was never seen again. There was a rumour doing the rounds in the Boys’ Bogs that he had been sacked for venturing into the “girls” playground.

You never even again noticed perhaps the hill upon which the hall once sat. Life took on a new urgency; things were happening to your body that you feared you would never understand; events leapfrogged; exams seemed all-important, for you wanted to follow in the footsteps of the famous Old Boys of the school …

Now you’re older and, you hope, wiser. You thought you’d left that town far behind you, both in mind and body. The image of Headless Hall has not crossed your thoughts for all these years of helping your own children sort out the giant jigsaws…

Until now … I’ve come to haunt you with memories, memories which you perhaps hoped had slipped away beyond recall. I’m a ghost from the irretrievable past, bringing it all back with me like the black lace train of a funeral dress: I’ve come to teach you that the past is all-important, should not be filed away in a forgotten drawer, you should rifle through the old yellowing photographs that your eyes once snapped; like the reflections in a pair of glasses; I shall renew the mysteries of the Opposite sex, which, at the best of times, you never really plumbed; I shall show how you can now tread fearlessly on the blue-mottled slabs; and, whatever you do, I shall continue to live (sometimes shy, sometimes voluble) in the shuttered attic of your brain, never fear.

***

NO LIGHT TO TRAVEL FASTER THAN

Boys were insects. Or so it seemed to Major as he weaved his way among them to put a stop to a scrap between two of them at a thinly frequented part of the schoolyard. This was his fifth tour of playtime duty in a week and he wondered why teaching had to be his vocation. Nobody had forced it on him. Still, it was a nice day today, good to be outside under a clear blue sky – even if surrounded by insects.

“Idle White!” He had caught a single pugilist by the juicy earlobe.

“Yes, sir?” said a thin boy with thick grey trousers down to his mid-shinbone. The other scrap-merchant had scuttled off, but Major could guess who it had been. Then, Major’s ruminations were interrupted by the outlandish sound of a mechanical roaring from above. All the boys not implicated in the peripheiy of the fight’s repercussions had their faces parallel with the cloudless sky, volcano-cone noses poking upwards.

Idle White took the opportunity to wriggle free from Major’s pincer fingers and legged it across the playground, seeking out the boy, who’d just been Idle’s companion in fisticuffs. The most likely place was within the heady confines of the Boys’. Both Idle and his co-pugilist had decided that it was in their interests not to pay too much heed to the mysterious roaring from above; they could not afford to be left exposed in the open, with Major on the warpath. Thus, eventually, inside the dank, seeping darkness, Idle White felt his way tentatively to the nearest cubicle door and rattled the latch as he called: “Jules, Jules, are you in there?”

He could still hear the roaring noise, but now it was muffled, lugubrious with its relentless under-rumbling. There was no answer. Idle White was nonplussed. The motions of his mind were far too slow to support finer feelings. Sometimes, he wondered whether he was who he thought he was. His whole life had been playing arse-up to his father’s belt, dangling his baby sister above the water butt in the garden and drawing intricate grids across the pages of his schoolbooks rather than read them meaningless words. If his friend Jules wasn’t in the lavatory, where the heck was he? Idle White did not want to punch Jules again; one bout of fisticuffs was enough between friends, for a while anyway.

Idle White must have been thinking; time passed without touching the sides. Could Jules have been outside all the time, risking punishment from Major, maybe believing that he hadn’t been identified? Major did not really scare Idle White. Why then was Idle White skulking inside the Boys’? Surely not to avoid the likes of a mere teacher. He lifted himself from his haunches, rubbing at the damp patches on his trousers. There was silence outside. Unaccountably, he thought of the family back home. His real mother; she had died years ago and he could not recall hide nor hair of her. His father, the despot who tried to keep the rest of them from existing. His sister. His half-brother. Idle White, half himself. 

The schoolyard was deserted. The whole sky was of metal grey. It was easy being a teacher when all the boys had disappeared. Major ambled towards the staff room.

Boys will be boys. That’s what Idle White’s real mother would have said when he got up to mischief. His step-mother spanked him.

Idle White’s friend Jules often doubled as an enemy, one of those boyhood companions remembered forever, though he may never be seen again after the age of seven. Most faces were non-stick, easily passing through the memory and out again. Jules was different. One of the games they used to play in the school playground was called ‘Girls’. The adult Idle White couldn’t recall much about it since the mental fusewire of the experience had blown ages ago. Idle White could see many faces from the corner of his eye, hustling in from all quarters of the playground, watching him and Jules at their games. He recognized none of their ill-defined features, nor could he pick out actual words from their hubbub.

One stark staring day the call of “Fight, Fight, Fight, Fight” bounced off the ancient school walls, like ghosts of a future football crowd (for in those far-off days, football fans did not chant yobbishly but waved scarves and twirled rattles). Idle White and Jules were playing the ‘Eyeball’ game, where opponents would crouch knee to knee, face peering intently into face. The first to blink would be the loser. They must have stared at each other’s eyes for the good part of a dinner break; an irresistible force meeting an immovable object…

Time was frozen then. The future’s grown-up version of Idle White would be able to jump back into that moment whenever he liked and he often did so when an adult existence wore him threadbare. He re-entered his own body as a snotty-nosed boy, easing into the comfortable clothing of the past. All was silent, desperately silent. The wire of memory was as taut as a piano’s. Incredibly, Jules’ two separate eyeballs were of different colours, one a glinting ruby, the other an emerald. Then Jules’ head audibly shattered, scattering splinters of bony blood and curds of brain to every corner of the playground. Idle White had won, and the cheers erupted around him.

He would always see Jules’ face staring back at him, a suspicion of growing sadness in Jules’ eyes. Idle White recalled it clearly, had studied it in obsessive detail; that frozen unblinking moment of childhood. Boys will be boys and never will be men…

Idle White removed from his cluttered pocket what resembled a squat, round pillbox. He sat in the fork of a tree, looking down upon his home town, distantly laid out in the valley like the models on his bedroom carpet in one of those very houses below him. The town’s tall factory chimney did not belch smoke on the Sabbath. He wondered why the Old Fathers had decided to build it at the centre of town, where the grids of terraced twouptwodowns were at their thickest. Perhaps to ease the journey for those who worked at the factory, which used to be 98.4% of the inhabitants. Now with unemployment spreading, in rich seams of cancer and coke, the working proportion slid down the temperature gauge of the soul towards a new ice age.

Idle White was old for his years; the kid philosopher of his times. He knew more about life than most, soaking in mental energy emanating from the town’s pantile roofs, willing it not to wane. He saw himself as a deity. More so even than Major, the teacher, especially more than Major.

Most of the other boys spurned Idle White, they did not like how he looked at them; not unfriendly, but all-knowing, almost pitiful of what he saw in their eventual fate. Today, Idle White opened the pillbox and withdrew a roll of narrow paper tape bearing raised circular blemishes spaced equally along its length. He put it to his bubbling nostrils, the smell had an underlay of potential.

He was interrupted by a flash of sun on one of the tiny windows opening below. Someone had spotted him from down there, seeing Idle White as an insect in the only tree that had survived the recent wind storm. White’s feathery tentacles were slipping on the frictionless summer sky, the trunk and knobbly jagged branches a skeleton of an alien space creature etched upon the hill ridge. Let them look. He could outlook them any day. He had nothing to hide.

Inserting the narrow roll of paper into his silver cap gun, he artfully wove the strip between the spindles, allowing just a short tab to protrude under the hammer. Satisfied with his accomplishment, he caressed the trigger with his index-finger, testing purchase upon it. Yet, for some unknown reason, he could not find impetus to yank it.

Many years later, Idle White is a dreaded grown-up himself. He yearns for one more snort of that redolence blossoming from a burst caphead. Recollections of times past unhindered by modernity might retrieve his lost youth. Through the open window an old Idle White looks and looks and looks, until he outlooks even his dreams. He sees the ancient tree still there, only budged to the side a few yards (or a few inches judged by his current perspective) in the intervening years. The ridge itself has been slightly weathered into different contours. Unbelievably, the insect is still there in the fork of its branches, waving its hair-trigger feelers. Then a flash, as if lightning has hit the tree, or even come from it. The old man flinches as he hears the tall factory chimney crashing to the ground nearby, another echo from times past. He dons his old Davy Crockett hat, and sleeps.

Idle White and Jules peered from each other’s eyes and saw stars sparkling like scattered gems. It was as if a careless, or self-disgusted, thief had left them in his wake. The boys wondered if they were perhaps really looking down upon a town, where deepest night had failed to douse the glimmer from erstwhile neighbours’ windows.
A short sharp dose of hindsight told them they were indeed inside a roaring, sometimes stuttering, star-hopper, built by ambitious inhabitants of a world similar to ours. They had the gumption to outdo their own abilities, unlike the grown-ups who squatted down below within earthbound skulls. Grown-ups sometimes dreaming that they might hatch into full-blooded butterflies; wings wide, and strong enough to reach the strange yet shimmeringly beautiful heartlands of the universe, but instead ever retreating into the petty incestuous reality that money and matter engendered.

The spaceship hovered for an eternity of misbegotten, misbegodden entropies. Its engines now humming semi-silently on underdrive, reluctant to leave the slight gravitational ghost of attraction from the planet below. Night had slipped around the corners of the world, sliding like obliquely opaque slime.

The town, that had once been the stars to those on board, crept with incipient insect life. The various self-contained beings down below, ones that called themselves grown-ups, wove intricately curved grid-patterns which were obvious to Jules and Idle White in the sky, but entirely unknown to those below who actually constituted them. The two boys pointed down to the schoolyard where they had once flicked cigarette cards. Other boys scattered across its concrete surface, whereon white lines had been painted as demarcations of various ball games, but the games that the boys played without the supervision of teachers seemed underpinned by nothing except illogic and disorder. Were these different boys than had played here only the day before? Were they ghosts of those who once played here, with whoops and unstructured chants? Only Major, the sole teacher on playtime duty, desperately tried to reimpose the patterns …

It was now Jules’ turn to nudge Idle White. There, down below, was a boy evidently playing truant, entangled in a tree at the rising edge of the town, a spider roosting in the web of its winter branches. Even at this range, they recognized Idle White, and they wept. Perhaps they were the ghosts, and the real Idle White and Jules were down below. Yes, ghosts, or at a push, angels.

The spaceship shuddered as an unseen pilot placed a huge humped version of a child’ s gun-cap into the craft’s triggerhold turret, which in turn swivel-aimed the barrel on its grinding plinth. The flash was blinding and the town’s tall factory chimney crumbled to the ground. Nobody on board, however, noticed that in the school’s playground a particular boy’s jewel-eyed head had been shattered too, as if by collateral ricochet. The spaceship roared off, into parts of the universe where there was no light to travel faster then.

***

DREAM NOTES

I scribble a few notes about my dream. I was squatting on a hillside, having climbed through steep woodland, at the bottom of which I had left my son in the park. He was playing on the roundabout, in the care of someone I could recall neither in the dream nor now during the note-scribbling. I watched the gliders taking off and landing on a raised airstrip across the valley. Each soared into the sky like an angel in splints, crested the thermals, as it dropped the winch-line and circled over the model town in the valley. 

My notes fail to cover the precise nature of the town and are very sketchy concerning the duration in dream time — but, in writing the notes, new visions come, ideas for future dreams and undercurrents of old forgotten dreams which will otherwise never see the light of the day. 

The sky gradually filled with gliders, sunlight sparkling on their wings like loose stars on a clear night. I was strangely unhorrified to see two gliders collide and cartwheel down. 

That was when I woke — or so the notes tell me. I am concerned about my son whom I apparently abandoned ill-attended in the park. My own real-life children are now too old for such worries. 

I look across at my wife who knits in front of the gas fire. But it is not my wife at all. I study my notes for clarification — for comfort — for some clue as to whether I am now embroiled in a new dream without the prior warning of falling asleep. 

The woman masquerading as my wife seems to knit her own brain as it coils from the spindle of her revolving ear. The white glistening wormthread is clotted with headblood. The finished product of the extrusion flows over her lap and becomes the yellow grid of the gas fire, the blue flames of which flare ever upward along the wormthread. She smiles and says: “Time for bed.” I cannot remember the exact words, nor do the notes help, since they are merely marks on the paper in a language too sculptural for translation.

A paper aeroplane skims past my nose, obviously constructed and launched by the creature with the brain knitting. She stares imbecilically with one smile on two quivering lips. The dart glided into the next dream, where he still squatted on the familiar hillside, and plummeted with a crumple to his feet. He picked it up and read its message: “Your son has a broken back – unless you hurry down.” 

Some gliders still hung in the sky, hovering like silver dragons, so close he could actually see the dream aviators, smiling, waving — at him. 

The distant airstrip bore the glistening groundling craft, and men, as small as insects, careered hither and thither, busy rewinding the various winches into the shape of a childhood cat’s-cradle game. An arc of a new moon rose early above the activity. 

He felt compelled to hurry down to the park — he had ignored the message on the origami dart for at least half an hour of dream time. 

But he woke before he could start off on the wooded slope — which he was suddenly desperate to descend, since he dreaded that whom he most loved in the real world was in dire danger. The child who was the man.

The utter frustration of pulling out of a dream too early was like not pulling out of a dive early enough. 

The sky was below; the ground above. He soared speedily towards a small child whose weight was being tested on a see-saw by a strange woman wearing what appeared, at this distance, to be a red felt hat. Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin.

***

A DARNING OF DARKNESS

Berghaus had his own armchair in the alcove. Mr and Mrs Swindon had become so accustomed to his presence in the parlour — following a dozen exhausted rent-books — they almost forgot he was a lodger. His face, after all, owned a generous brow teased by the tousled ends of his hair. A real gentleman, they conjectured, despite his intermittent designer stubble. There were even dimples which seemed to sink to the bone in his most lightsome moments. 

Berghaus did not need to say anything to radiate his feelings, sad or otherwise. Mr and Mrs Swindon treated him as their own son, or at least a son-in-law. He possessed pride of place under the standard lamp, with an open Dickens on his lap. Listening to music with a pair of heavy-duty headphones long before bluetooth was invented, and he tried to ignore the flickering images on the TV screen that the bleary-eyed Swindons found time to watch so avidly. 

He had tried to interest the old couple in one of his passions: Grand Opera and, despite being set in their ways, they had at first sat patiently, closely attending to his views on this rarified subject … until they realised it was all about raucous noises that only riled rats. 

“I prefer the stylised beauty of Mozart to the more overt gothicism of Wagner or even Puccini.” 

The couple nodded in unison, whilst pretending to keep close examination of his lips and at least one eye upon the silent screen and its teletext subtitles for the deaf. 

“And I’ve always thought that there was more to Bellini than Norma.” 

Again the couple made a studied aknowledgement while humouring each other with regard to these things that went over their head. 

One day, the Swindons’ daughter Petula returned home, having had a hard time with someone who was fast becoming the best candidate for her first ex-husband. The Swindons, of course, bustled round her, tending to their darling’s needs, making oodles of heart-warming tea, clucking sympathies twenty-four to the dozen in their endearingly incomprehensible way, and maligning that brute of a man she had been enticed into marrying. They also flicked glances at Berghaus so that he, too. would try to bolster their daughter’s spirits because, despite being a lodger, he had all the duties of a family friend. So, Berghaus smiled knowingly from between the noisy ear-vice of his head-phones. 

He had met Petula only once before, during her brief Christmas visit with the now soon-to-be ex-husband six years before, when she had been a delight to behold with many split skirts: one for each of her moods. The husband had been all mouth and trousers, true, but was very generous with his money, giving the Swindons large Christmas presents and Petula costly jewellery. The marital problems that had now overtaken them, Berghaus guessed, were ones concerned with the source of such riches having dried up. The husband had been summarily dismissed from his employment for breaking the Data Protection Act — was what Berghaus gathered. He didn’t like the look of the barely noticeable bruise on Petula’s upper left leg. It seemed to portend more than what was on show. 

A day or so later, Berghaus found Petula sitting in the kitchen darning one of Mr Swindon’s socks over a wooden mushroom. The old couple had gone to what they delightfully called their Doorpost Club which happened every Wednesday afternoon: a tea dance affair by all accounts. 

“I’m sorry to hear that things have not been going too well, Petula.” Berghaus shuffled, embarrassed at finding himself alone with her. 

“Thank you.” She looked prettier than when she had arrived in a flurry of tears and luggage. Calmer, too. More stoic and forebearing. 

“Shall I make us a pot of tea?” he asked, as he inadvertently discovered a loose tooth with his tongue. 

“I don’t like to drink tea any more.” She had evidently not had the heart to tell her Mum and Dad this fact, since a strong hot cup of the stuff was the first thing that had met her when arriving upon the parental doorstep. Berghaus suddenly saw a face at the kitchen window: whiskery and scowling. That was all he remembered. The moment had been very short. 

Scuffing his feet by the sink and realising that Petula could not have seen the face —her back being turned to the window — Berghaus was naturally perturbed by the incident. There had been an uncanniness about it but one which he found difficult to define: marginally this side of normal: the safe side. He hastily poured himself a cold drink and left her weaving the midget loom she had already erected over the head of the wooden mushroom. 

When Mr and Mrs Swindon returned from the “Doorpost Club”, they were blushing with elderly excitement. Grunts and grimaces, as they told of this and that: Marjorie had broken her ankle in the ice last week; Claudette was seeing a little too much of Mr Smith-Bobrowski; Charlie Musker had died of something strange; Dame Florence sent her kind regards to Petula and would like to see her at the club some time (men were getting younger and younger all the time the Dame had said); the brass band had got lost in the snow, so they’d danced to records (not quite so satisfactory, since the dance floor’s vibrations were more attuned to live music); and, by the way, Charlie Musker had left a lot of money to someone in Redditch; what’s more, Lady Dora Slight was coming round tonight to see Petula. 

The brass band roaming the icy steppes of Hertfordhshire seemed an amusing concept to Berghaus, whilst Petula seemed irritable at the last piece of news regarding Lady Dora. Berghaus was then abruptly granted another glimpse of the whiskery face, followed by loud fumblings at the back door. Mr and Mrs Swindon didn’t notice, but Petula visibly blanched. There were no vocal accompaniments from the budding intruder and the door eventually came to rest on its hinges. The storm was over … at least for a while. 

Berghaus looked as sympathetically as possible at Petula. She returned his glances unalloyed. Having been told to grin and bear misfortunes all her life by suffering parents, she was now reaping the reward of such lessons. She even began to smile when Mr Swindon cracked a joke about her darning, and he wielded her wooden mushroom, pretending to be a conductor of one of those opera orchestras so dear to their lodger. 

Berghaus decided to leave them to it and enter the security of his sound-proof ear-phones. Verdi was already on the turntable, so there was little fuss and bother. Eventually, a while later, he re-emerged from the armchair’s sanctuary, only to hear the voice of a strange woman coming from the kitchen-diner. It sounded shrill and strident as if she were rehearsing a recitative from a Rossini opera. Must be Lady Dora. 

Supper was a memorable affair. Lady Dora had been invited to share the meal, together with a gentleman companion with whom she had originally arrived. He was evidently her latest beau, a portly individual with scrupulous table manners. Although his conversation lacked point, he certainly made up for this with the number of words he used to fill in the otherwise embarrassing silences. Lady Dora and Berghaus were the only ones who made fitful attempts at repartee, whilst Petula and her parents found sufficient pleasure in merely eating. Petula in particular appeared unwilling to speak even when spoken to. Berghaus kept glancing at the window in case he missed another glimpse of the chap with side chops. It was dark outside now, so it was difficult to imagine the golly-black shape that would probably indicate the chap’s return. 

Nevertheless, eventually, there it was, a shadow sucker upon the glass. 

Berghaus stood up and pointed. Petula screamed. Lady Dora and her companion were left with silent open mouths. Mr and Mrs Swindon turned towards where Berghaus pointed … but, too late, since the shape had disappeared. But the door’s hideous rattling resumed from late afternoon. This time, Berghaus held out no hope for the hinges as he watched them buckle. Again, however, the din subsided and there was noticeable relief upon all the faces inside the kitchen, despite the fact that some of them failed to realise what it was they were supposed to be relieved about. 

Lady Dora scuttled between the two elderly Swindons, calming them, laying her hands upon the tops of their heads and purring like a big cat. Her gentleman companion stood behind Petula, his hands sliding down her shoulders towards the breasts, clucking with sympathy. Berghaus was the only one physically disconnected from at least one other person present. He was reminded of a sextet piece from Rossini’s La Cenerentola. Or was it Bellini’s Norma? He had uncharacteristically forgotten. 

He took up the discarded wooden mushroom still bearing the half-finished sock and waved it about like a magic wand. He was slightly perturbed that the window now framed a full moon, more bright than he’d ever recalled ,with markings quite different from those he recalled from his childhood astronomy book. At least, it must have stopped snowing. 

In the distance he heard the sound of a brass band playing carols … as the door imperceptibly began to revive. Berghaus yearned for the refuge of his trusty ear-phones. But nightmares woken into are more dreadful than those waken from.

 Petula walked to the back door and opened it. She kissed a wolfish thing standing there with blue teeth, and waving its tail about — hugely howling, as if it wanted to scorch the lining off its throat. Or to strip its skull-lining as if it were old wall-paper revealing ancient scored atonalities beneath.

Mr and Mrs Swindon, together with Lady Dora and her limping consort, fled past the now dissolving shape of shagginess, as if they believed staying in the cosy house was more horrific than risking the night outside. Petula turned towards Berghaus with a smile on her lips, her face webbed over with a darning of darkness and her toadstool tongue poking for a second kiss. Berghaus held one long note of baying bestiality, as if performing a pre-scored solo at the dead stereophonic centre of his own head-space of sound. But whose voice was it?

***

THE TEA LADY’S URN

Ashley Lime worked in an insurance company and arrived daily in the office mausoleum at precisely seven a.m., early enough to catch the batting-lady still passing a feather duster over the desks. She topped and tailed the loose ends, freshened up the jotters, primed the blotters, stirred the pots of correcting-fluid, laid out the virgin sheets of carbon paper…

=

Ashley’s parents had been surprised at his arrival, since all their astrologers, clairvoyants, mediums, marriage guidance counsellors, radio phone-in experts, agony aunts, social workers and old friends had all said that, in the circumstances, Mrs Lime’s pregnancy was not even a possibility. 

=

“Morning, Mr Lime, I’m just off now, back to me ol’ hubbie,” said the batting-lady. “Have a nice day, love.” 

Ashley sat down at his own personal desk, dealt out the insurance documents for the day like clock patience and, lastly, while resting his chin on the bridge of his hands, he kept a weather eye open for the bustling arrival of his colleagues. 

=

Mrs Lime’s belly had been as flat as a pancake, her body-clock as regular as Uncle Tom’s fob watch and, in any event, she had often been sick in the mornings since that summer camp with the girl guides when they force-fed eveybody’s bacon and eggs down her gullet simply for the sake of a silly joke. 

Ashley’s father had put his arm around her and said, never mind, all children are the cruellest beasts that God ever created and, furthermore, it is no good harbouring resentments against your own body. 

She had bitten her tongue, before not saying that she felt like chopping off his whatsit and putting that in the cot instead. 

=

Ashley should give home a tinkle to tell his wife that he had arrived safely at the office. No doubt, there had been some holcaust on the railway that morning, simulcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation, and she would be worried about his being mixed up in it somewhere along the line. 

The relentless telephone tone jabbed his brain like the needle of a slow motion Singer sewing-machine. 

There was no answer! 

=

So, when a baby did arrive, against all the odds, Mrs Lime called it Ashley and cradled it in her arms, trying, from time to time, to adminster the kiss of life. She then plunged what she thought was its face against her dry pap – but, eventually, she gave up and went to the bathroom to wash off all this pre- and after-birth that had erupted from her body with no sign of a real baby amongst it. 

=

Had he dialled the correct number? She always picked the phone up after the third ring. Dial again, Lime! And he did – but still no answer. 

Today was suddenly taking an untidy tangent and, to cap it all, colleagues had by now started trooping into the open-plan office, gabbling about the day’s disasters. Thousands killed here, thousands (different ones) killed there. A nuclear meltdown a day keeps the doctor away. 

=

My name, I think, is Ashley Lime. 

The world is all around me like a mystic vision. I try to learn from the senses, but my eyes, ears, nose and fingers simply belie the evidence of their own reality. 

=

He dialled home all day, even questioning the integrity of the whole telephone system with Directory Enquiries. They gave him an alternative number, but that only ended him up on some damnable radio phone-in where he was expected to comment intelligently on a local epidemic. 

When the tea-lady came round, whom he usually knew under the name Gladys, she pretended to be a complete stranger, saying that it was more than her job was worth to pass the time of day with the likes of Ashley. 

=

Am I monster? Or, at worst, man? I wonder if God, were He alive, would He recognise the likes of me. I doubtless fall short of His ideals. Nevertheless, what more can I do to match them? I’ve done enough, surely, to rest assured. 

And death, if nothing else, is assured. 

=

The batting-lady arrived to find him still in the office, the last one to go as usual. She “did” around him and then helped him stack up his index cards in a neat pile. At least she was familiar. 

He asked her to drain the inkwells and remove the sediments to the Ladies. She did not care for this job — worse than stomach-pumping Gladys’ tea urn or scraping out the waste bins — and she gave Lime an old-fashioned look fit to set him reeling back on the balls of his feet. But she had a certain fondness for him, and no mistake. 

=

So, I seek only one thing: a sign of myself: because my original parents have denied me birth, have slaughtered me before I was old enough to stop them, even before they forgot about me by first changing the past itself. 

=

He travelled home, heart in mouth, fearing what might face him in the shape of his wife. 

But she was there as usual, puckered lips as ever raised to greet him. Then he noticed a blemish on her left cheek, like a wen. It was not worth making a fuss about, as there was only one stiff hair sprouting from it. But, that was not all, her arm hung pathetically shrivelled by her side like a shameful part. 

No wonder he had got a wrong number that morning, in view of such evident dis-figurement. 

=

At the sea’s bottom, the lissom weeds sway in a slow dance with darting colourfish and, among them, Ashley crawls, crab-like, dragging the disease-riddled foetus of his twin brother. 

=

He put his wife to bed, in the hope she would improve by morning. He kept vigil the night through, tending to the weeping sores that broke out around her front-loader. 

He must have dozed off, because following the dream of the sea creature, he saw the bald head of a vile bird forcing itself through the bedroom wall, as if from a giant cuckoo-clock. Its neck was long, indeed, but before it could reach out to give Ashley a peck, its snapping beak abruptly hinged back on itself and swallowed whole the wattled head whence it came. 

Ashley glanced at his wife who was at that moment tossing in the bed —and she cried out in evident desperation to what had become a blurred image of her husband: “Ashley, everything in me is coming free and flopping about…” 

Ashley Lime shrugged —he put it all down to what he called “things he couldn’t possibly understand”. He would ask the batting-lady about it first thing in the morning. 

=

And if death is the most certain thing in one’s life, the natural conclusion is that everything else is more uncertain — even the fact of one’s birth. 

=

But the next morning, there were many insurance documents awaiting Ashley Lime’s urgent attention, so all such thoughts fled quickly from his mind. No impulse, then, of course, to ask the batting-lady whether blood is God’s version of a correcting-fluid like tippex or snopake.. 

There should be a piping hot carton of tea at precisely eleven a.m. and Gladys, the tea-lady, might ask if Ashley’s wife was well, as she often did. Then, he should be able to get to the bottom of some things — to the bottom of body-clocks or what might not live amongst the dead tea-leaves in Gladys’ huge slopping tea-urn. He’d even fathom why most memories are false, but when faced with the only true memory being Death, then why is it always forgotten? Why is the only connection between people an interruption?

***

NOSEBLEED

The parlour was so sticky, its wallpaper seemed to be sliding off, even as I watched. But for what reason the woman had put me in the parlour I did not even question—since I had not seen the rest of the mansion.

She had given the impression of being in charge — not as an owner, more as a caretaker — whilst I had not yet taken the opportunity to examine the parlour. However, although I was someone normally averse to details, I did notice that the décor was decidedly choosy and chintzy — if blemished by blisters and peelings.

The woman suddenly re-entered with a feather-tickler on a stick, evidently uncaring whether a visitor might be disturbed by an environment of domestic chores or a pervasive aura of mansion-pride.

“Are you comfy for a moment?” she asked, digging, as far as feathers could dig, into one of the four top corners of the parlour — if such corners were indeed corners at all, judging by their being rather more like rounded alcoves-in-the-air. I nodded at her, failing to understand why a mere moment of my comfort was her concern.

A mere moment passed without duration … and neither comfort nor discomfort were important during such an arguable length of time. Yet I nodded again and the whole room seemed to nod with me, by some quirk of eyesight.

I knew that a question needed an answer even if the answer was only necessary to ensure the question was asked. Any answer would have sufficed to square the circle.

Meanwhile, time did not fail to pass, in spite of consisting of nothing but overlapping moments. The woman drifted from my consciousness while, presumably, she had a go at other rooms nearby: rooms which I hadn’t been able to check for sufficient viability or tenability as rooms, let alone the dust to warrant such an attack from her duster.

And I started to have a nosebleed: a nosebleed in the true sense where my whole body bled while my nose stayed essentially dry-nostrilled. The nose, being merely a conduit, bled only inasmuch as its attachment, the body, bled. The nose wasn’t cut. Something in the body gushed forth, employing the nose as an outlet. Unlike in the case of a nose, a finger could only bleed if the finger itself were injured. My nostrils were simply straws or syphons.

“Are you allright, my love?”

The woman spoke, upon returning to the parlour, in evident search of her yellow duster. She had noticed my distress: a distress which was redoubled by her use of an affectionate affectation of me being her ‘love’. And the sickly backflow taste at the root of my nostrils was causing me to gag on the breath I couldn’t quite catch.

“I’ll put a cold copper coin down your back,” she added, “since nosebleeds can otherwise be a devil to stop.”

Abruptly, I choked on a spasm and threw a spray of abstract strawberries upon the wallpaper.

“There’ll be a devil to pay,” she continued, making me think she was hung up on devils.

It eventually dawned on me the reason for the existence of the choice of the decrepit chintzy room and for my presence therein. I saw it in her eyes. I saw that I was seeing her skull from inside her skull, a sight that effectively followed the drift of the brain’s own sight of seeing it. Better get on with the housework, before my husband comes home from the office. I must scrape the grey grime off the innermost alcove with the edge of the hoover nozzle — then let its vacuum suck up the wayward thoughts with which poor women like me are beset.

Meanwhile, am I simply her fancy man, for when her husband’s away? Or am I a night creature of complex motives, intent on sniffing out the fading residue of her good heart as something to feed on?

No answer from the room. Only the sound of a hoover breathing, the gentle popping of embolisms from under the wall-paper and bone china cracking in the distant scullery and steaks in the cold larder shifting on their rumps. The start of the mansion’s own nosebleed.

***

THE PAINTED LADY

What I can really remember first is our clambering through a mountain landscape thickly covered by dunes of thick snow, the level of this snow seemingly becoming even thicker the further we proceeded towards the horizon. I wondered if even our furry thigh-boots would be sufficient by the time we reached the tree line, still quite a long distance away. It was extremely cold and my clothes seemed insufficient to prevent the stabs of painful wind from penetrating them. I do not know whether the others felt the same. In fact I didn’t seem to know who the others actually were, their large goggles hiding their features, just as my own goggles must have hidden my own features. And voices were muffled, or a better word would be ‘dead’, as if I had been almost completely deaf since birth. Dead voices, deaf ears. Not a good combination, but I’m sure it was the scarves that covered our heads and mouths. Luckily, it hadn’t actually been snowing fresh snow for some hours.

We eventually reached the trees, except it wasn’t exactly a straight line of trees, but more groupings of them that gradually depleted the further we trudged through them towards what I gradually discerned as lights …. and imagine my astonishment as we reached what appeared to be a street at the edge of a town. Astonishment because I had assumed that we had been getting further and further away from civilisation not nearer and nearer. Not only that, but the street itself seemed to have been cleared of snow, if it had settled here at all, not because it was warmer, as I felt the cold stabs of wind even more as we stepped from the extremely thick snow of the wood on to the hard smooth cobbles of the street.

It was a relief not to need to wade through unforgiving swathes of wintry precipitation that we had been doing for hours — but now allowed to walk quite freely, but still clumsily enough in our large boots, and swaddled like huge bears. I took the scarf away from my mouth and nose and felt the cold cut of the air searing into my cheeks, but I could now smell something chemical. I’m still not sure what it was but I assumed that it was some form of treatment mixed with the grit that they had used to clear the street of snow. I quickly replaced the scarves.

I now noticed that the roofs of the houses, in the half dusk, weren’t covered with snow either. Was this the edge of a town? Or just a chance community of a few houses? Yet, how could it not be a town, having street lights as it did. They had just been turned on, from some central source presumably, shining on all our goggles — and I guessed I heard muffled laughter from the glinting firefly faces as they all tried to speak at once.

Passing lumpily, despite the now smooth cobbled surface underfoot, along this strange street, one of us soon extended a blunt hand to indicate a pub called the Painted Lady. Surely, I thought, we had not travelled such a great distance through a snowy mountain pass just to go for an evening-out at a pub. But, now we were here, I could think of nothing better than a warm saloon or public bar and tankards of hoppy foam to wet the whistle, allowing us all to divest of our lumpiness and our goggles and scarves… All the better to see each other and toast the journey. The Painted Lady looked a bit down market, though, with milky privacy-windows vaguely lit from within; we beggars couldn’t be choosers, I guessed. The slow-moving silhouettes of the local drinkers within at least promised life if not liveliness.

I took one last look at the dunes of darkening snow beyond the tree line now behind us, away from the town, a landscape which we had just crossed. And I felt, even through the swaddlings of outdoor clothes, the welcome heat as if a from a boiler room that was the open pub door, a burning rush of air when compared to the iciness we had just experienced. A sadness, too. An unaccountable sadness that we were not still crossing those frigid wastes but were now entering the warm hubbub of the pub.

I felt like being perceived as a stranger in my lumpy shape. I guess my companions must have felt this also, as rather lukewarm greetings met us from those already squatting on high stools by the bar. We tried to be jolly in return but many of us had not yet unwrapped our scarves — and our voices must have come out as dead as the eyes behind our goggles. I looked beyond the still opening door through which more of my companions were still arriving and I saw that it had started snowing again. The street outside would soon be covered, I assumed, whatever chemicals they had treated it with. Signs of a blizzard starting and we wondered if we had left it a little later whether we would have reached here at all.

Eventually, the pub door was shut and we all began working ourselves loose from our outdoor wear. I managed to remove my goggles backward over my head before removing my headscarf that I had forgotten was back in place. 

The snow hiker next to me — someone I sensed had been beside me most of the way — started removing all her paraphernalia, too. I was surprised it was a woman. I don’t know why. I looked away from her, feeling bashful as I did. I suddenly saw a painting on the Painted Lady walls. A bit crusted over with the passing trade — as if it must have been there many years, but I could just make out through the bulging grime a pretty face, itself painted upon painted flesh. A made-up face, and then made-up again. Nobody that ever existed; painted from imagination rather than from a life model. Once alive, now as still as death, but painted full of life to last, to outlast even the tracky grime of centuries. Flesh still tied in flesh-coloured bundles. With screaming white fuzz as canvas-backing’s primer.

I walked to the bar where one of us was already taking orders for a round of drinks. Not that he was paying. We always worked a kitty, I now recalled. The local drinkers had left a gap for him to reach in and catch the eye of whoever worked behind with the pumps and the optics and the dusty wine bottles and the rare vintage port that nobody would ever be able to afford. Well, certainly none of us snow hikers.

I can’t remember who first mentioned the fact that one of us was missing. How we had not noticed this fact is now beyond me. Nobody could remember this happening before. But most of us had stopped caring about anything by that time, soon being out of it, what with the drink … and the woman who had travelled by my side brought her face close to mine. It was immaculately made-up, despite the scarves and goggles that she had earlier worn for hours on end rubbing against her skin. And, after all that care and attention to the maintenance of her facial looks, I sacrilegiously managed to smudge her lipstick by bringing my face even closer to hers than she had brought hers to mine…with a tantalising brush of a kiss, faintly tinged with chemical.

It did not seem to matter that her body was as lumpy as the outdoor clothes she had worn over it. A body made for two. I was out of it or never there at all.

I sometimes think she must have been painted centuries ago by Lucien Freud. At least his studio had been warm all those interminable hours she had needed to pose, stock still. Frozen like death warmed up.

When we returned through the mountains, we failed to notice that the sun was already rising over the snow plains. Deaf ears, dead eyes. We had lost count how many times we had lost count. And so we trek on seeking ugly paintings to love.

***

THE COLOUR OF PAIN

Each type of pain has its own special colour. I do not think I am the first one to have claimed that. And it is too clever clever for this to be a genuinely clever observation.

Well, the first person to define the colour of pain was someone whom I shall call by his alter ego’s name of Pain Threshold. His real name sounded like a real name, but this alter ego’s name sounded far too fabricated to be real. He was a pain therapist. Plain and simple. Not a doctor or psychiatrist, but a pain therapist. Dealing with pain at all levels and natures of being felt. Mind or Body. Mind AND Body. Mildly nagging pains to excruciating ones. And upon the entrance to his clinic were the words PAIN THRESHOLD above the lintel. Are you ready to be introduced to him? Just follow me…

The room’s walls are covered in framed certificates. In every style of calligraphy and quality and colour of parchment and paper, with flourished signatures and named academies galore as representatives of those who have accredited his ability to practise pain therapy. But your eye is soon drawn to the man sitting at the desk before us. Depending on the degree or position of your own pain, you hobble towards the seat that he has placed for you in an optimum position to catch his gracious gaze. Still, I have just remembered, you are following me, aren’t you, not me you. You will have to stand behind me as I, not you, take the seat for the consultation. In fact, Mr Threshold does not seem to see you at all. His eyes are only for me. As if he has already sensed the juicy pain which I have brought into his room for his diagnosis of such pain’s ecstatic or exquisite qualities. 

To suit his colourography, his first foray into the realms of your pain is simply to chart its artwork of various hues and shades, till homing in, via a gradually realised blend, towards a condensed single colour for his focus. 

My own focus, meanwhile, is upon him. He who is the pain centre in a grey suit, and a shaded face to match. He shows me all manner of colour charts, and their mix-and-match facilities, as if he is a domestic paint-blender in a do-it-yourself department store. Apparently pain can be assuaged by matching its colour with the colour of the medicine used to assuage it. At least that is what I understood from Mr Threshold. Until later.

It was at this point that you intervened on the concept of paint. You came from behind my chair, stepped forward and addressed Mr Threshold directly, as if you were about to halt a Monty Python sketch that had just got too silly to continue.

“Aren’t you confusing pain with paint?” you asked.

I had not even noticed, till now, following your question, that pain was only one letter short of paint. What else had I not noticed? That my pain had gone? I closed my eyes, and knew somehow it had indeed gone. And by closing my eyes, swirls of colours began to merge with the optic floaters, and as I squeezed my eyes even tighter, these turned into a configuration of shapes and forms, and once these latched into a certain picture of a potential peopled landscape or still-life, that picture eventually froze indeed into a painting, a hallucination of healing, a self-persuasion that I was cured, painless, so painless I was numb. Dreadfully numb. Almost unable to breathe. The pain had been part of me, a part that was now missing. A part that made me tick.

You and Mr Threshold spoke in unison as if in a single voice that surrounded me. Can you remember what you said? Yes, that’s right. What you said was, “Open your eyes.” Words that would have made more sense if they had been heard rather than seen. Said rather than written. Each of us usually has two eyes…

Each of us was one of a set of two eyes.

At least one of us was out of pain. The painting’s picture made sense. 

But the other one, you see, was colour blind. And the picture that formed no longer made sense. Just shades of amorphous grey with no demarcation lines to depict figures or trees or vases or fruit. We are no longer you and me, but only me. Not clever clever. Or maybe too clever by half.

The limbo of all pain thresholds forms the door to the room that you thought you entered, the door you did enter, just in time, below a descending threshold’s lintel. But you were ever alone, after all. And offered a medicine bottle with only cloudy calligraphies of dream to drink. Dulled the hurting at least. But it never really dulls to nothing. Ever painted into a corner of pain.

***

YETI

January has yet been decidedly unsnowy this year. Day after day, with a madness of mildness and hangdog expressions and children who no longer play properly. The sleds are kept in the sheds. And Jack Frost is now a dream, with his craziness gone from the panes. Icicles are dangled from gutters at Christmas as glass replicas. Nobody, though, had yet… Yet what? Nobody knew what they hadn’t yet… hadn’t yet … it was so difficult to finish a … to finish a …

A paragraph? Someone once dreamt of taking part in a universal tontine but nobody took part because nobody had yet… Everyone had not yet … understood what a tontine is? Naturally the children were still on the point of… But even old people were starting to … Starting to what? To die? Well, not yet. Not in any way would I die, for one.

There were so many unfulfilled yets. Yet this, yet that. And then suddenly one day, as January turned into February upon the back of Winter, a white glaze settling over what I could see. But I could not yet see … hah!

I just added a word after yet. I could not yet see … could not yet see what? A strange shape began to emerge, at first a vision of Jack Frost with limbs as broken icicles. Then it became a jigsaw of crystals, forming a mound like an unfinished elephant. The face was abominable. I could hardly look at it. The children shouted at seeming snowflakes that billowed to become like analog static over a screen. Normally the children would have shrieked with delight at the renewed onset of a wintry day upon oodles of precipitation. But the face scared them by peering at them through the blizzards of some nightmare, my nightmare, not the nightmare of anybody else. I had won the tontine, it seemed, but what was the point of winning as I sat atop a pyramid that had been crudely carved from the last ever igloo.

What’s the point of winning when there is nobody left to see you winning it? 

I peered into cascades of icy clutter, synchronised shards bouncing off a coat of fuzzy whiteness upon serendipitous sheds, and I was trying to see where everything began and ended. Until I could make out, to the sounds of flutes, drums and violins, the reflection of an abomination upon the underbelly of a glacier. But the glacier eventually melted before I could see the reflection properly. But it has not yet fully melted. Never yet. A yetinfinity

CONTINUED HERE: 

https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/more-disconnected-minitures-2.html