High Suspicion (2)

 

Süssmayr’s Simple Formula

Franz Xaver Süssmayr, the composer born in 1766, is only remembered for completing Mozart’s famous unfinished Requiem, a Requiem that was effectively a High Mass for Mozart’s own death as a simple formula by Mozart to delay his own death indefinitely by deliberately leaving this Requiem unfinished so it would never need to be a Requiescat in Pace. Mozart in fact failed to foresee Süssmayr’s malicious guile in using a competing formula to prolong the Süssmayr legacy that would otherwise have vanished altogether by now if it were not for his having completed the Mozart Requiem when he did.

Strange how the set structure of music history can melt and morph to the twelve tone technique of serial alternate worlds. 

The Susceptibilities of Sight and Sound

Toby worked for Blind Eye hidden in plain sight within the umbrella of High Suspicion, except he had the benefit of two blind eyes to turn instead of one. He thus had susceptibilities of sight unknown to many, a vision and visibility that were akin to a philosophical insight or inner eyesight that made whatever views visible out there clearer and more real than actually seeing them by means of physical eyes with optic fuses.

We, as a group, were given the job of repairing the rifts in the roofs of structures downward, rifts that had been induced by the softening entropy of music. Melody we needed to turn into noise as baffle or buffer, tonality to its opposite, creating 12 tone techniques as healing embodiments via the serialism of alternate worlds. 

Even now, I can visualise Toby looking from the battlements of the castle that we had been commissioned  to renovate simply to preserve glorious views from such a high surveillance point where Toby and others were now situated, views that stretch  into the distance with the ownership of a blind magician who  knew that he could see further than any of the others beside him up there. 

As ever, I had been given a job down below, not even a case of low surveillance but more a case of an inching, secretive suspicion of telepathy and, by this means, constructing words to describe what the higher ones suspect they can see, viz. huge waves of time with Solution via painterly landscape, Method and Means for even Artificial Intelligence (cloistered within the organisation) to flourish without endangering those of us who had somehow created them.

Above all, the horizon was populated by slowly moving miniatures half by half and half again, miniatures as massive giants, only miniature by dint of distance, their big heads dipping to the Dying Fall within every music piece imaginable, an interim paradox of New Hope and Happy Ending. Meantime, the Schoenberg created AirPod shocks disguised as a clatter of piano keys. And I pushed the buds even deeper into my ears so that I could see better what the others saw. In this way I was first granted the Power of Suspectibilty, as I now call it.

Footnote: I think, based on research, these miniatures demonstrate the first ever uses of ‘High Suspicion’ and ‘Suspectibility’ outside the more esoteric elements of the Medical and the Scientific fields respectively.

The Ironic Oubliettes of Lockdown (an intermission)

In the last few days, I’ve heard so much about governmental dysfunction and bullying during the pandemic, and therefore I have been impelled to include a few observations here in my High Suspicion project to include due elements of Blind Eye and Hidden in Plain Sight — as well as my coinage of the word Suspectibility as a power that has recently coarsened any susceptibilities to respectability or to any vestige of dignity since castle walls were erected by Trump as inspired by Brexit, resulting in further strips of inflamed land together with pockets of chaos and claustrophobia.

Who Scuppered the Scapegoat?

The question of who scuppered the Scapegoat now comes as the next point in the agenda when dealing with High Suspicion, and Blind Eye, although many consider them effectively to form the same body. But for the purposes of this miniature within a massive whole, I shall deem them as separate. How else could anyone proceed? A rhetorical question.

When I first encountered the ruins of the crucial castle within the forest, I was staggered by how it had settled into a shape quite different from what it had been when upright as a castle, in contrast with structural ruins, ancient or otherwise, that normally maintain the general configuration of the original structure. Take the St. Botolph’s Priory Abbey ruins in Colchester as the optimum example of normality as a roughly maintained configuration, as shown in most textbooks containing studies of evolving ruins through history. So I immediately set up a Strategy Committee that we stationed — near the ‘abnormal’ ruins of the crucial castle — a purpose-built Portakabin under the direction of Sir Toby Easement. You may remember him. You don’t? Well, I shall proceed and maybe fill in any blanks in retrospect. You surely must know he had been nicknamed the Scapegoat when High Suspicion had finished with him. And, oh yes, he was famously blind from birth, giving him many specialised  skills that the rest of us don’t possess while he obviously lacked the skills derived from eyesight. He was also primed to absorb readily any loose blame so that others would would not be blamed when Music again turned into its own virally negative Pandemic without any authorities professional enough to mitigate or suppress it (or even spread it in the hope of herd immunity) and this was because of the idiots and charlatan and quacks they had put in charge.

Why did we employ a blind man? It seems ironic that hearing or listening was not considered to be relevant in any way. The medical condition of Zombie Ears was the proof of that, and anyone who had suffered Music after a certain date when it became a Pandemic automatically developed a syndrome that was later known with this name of Zombie Ears as you know. You shake your head? Well, I shall leave you to study the relevant documents at the back of this file that I shall leave with you. And, I can now tell you officially that the Sir Toby’s pink Portakabin has now been moved here so that you can examine every part of it and, oh yes, I see that, at this juncture, the miniature memorandum headed ‘’Who Scuppered the Scapegoat’ has reached its statuary limit of size, and I shall return with the next memorandum when you have finished the initial work. But please do remember that even words, like structures, have ruins, too, and the original of this miniature itself as an official document later to be filed may become quite reshaped, even partly rewritten, after a while, as their ruins as words accrue different purposes with different grammatical and semantic structures. Well done. Good luck with any cocooning should there be further waves of the Music syndrome and do have a fruitful time in your work here and please don’t bang your head or trip over unexpected things when it’s dark! 

High Suspicion (1)

 

HIGH SUSPICION

Things needed a change, a turning of a corner, a breaching of a cusp, a logging of a watershed. So, I prayed for no more topless mansions, no more vertical eyes, no more attic-brained complexes, above all, no more long words catalysing the evolution of sentences. Yet, something went quite awry in the first sentence, I guess, my prayers left unanswered, so I took myself off to see the sentence shrink in the hope he would ease my contorted expressions into more simple ones and to do this with the least pain possible. I’ve booked an appointment for late in the day in the hope that I will be able to finish this piece before being sluiced clear of the prose style that has fitted me for decades like a comfortable hairshirt. However, the appointment has now come and gone. I have a high suspicion that whatever treatment he has given me will be a slow process, allowing me to finish my final pretentious text before the medicine he injected into me fully kicks in. And so I duly feel a painful simplicity overtaking me. And I am done.

Sussing Out

I had heard that Toby had developed in himself a high suspicion of approaching blindness, with all that such a condition involved. How he knew this was about to happen was a mystery to all his friends and, although I’m not a particular friend of Toby, I was called to his place to suss out the situation in advance of a doctor being consulted. It was thought better first for a quack’s verdict such as mine with a steely instinct, as that may well disperse suspicion of any superstition involved in Toby’s self-diagnosis. 

I always try to keep things simple but I am required to do justice to this complex situation. So in the early days of my rapprochement with Toby, I feared I may well wander into territory that was so subtle, much more than simple simplicity would be needed. However, as far as I can now tell, simplicity had won out straightaway. So, I just told Tony not to be silly. He shrugged, and that was the last we heard of the matter.

To be blind, or not to be blind, was no more difficult a dilemma than whether simply to believe in the condition of blindness or not.

If you know anyone claiming to be blind, ask them to prove it beyond any shadow of doubt. Their word of mouth is simply not enough.

A Simple Formula

Let me explain the background on how we sell to the existential market, and the ludicrous wordplay required. 

The highest suspicion we can all harbour is that of eventual death, but none can prove it, or none have managed to do so yet, in whatever hindsight that is allowed. However, as professional quack, I never ducked the issue when facing those dying. I have been both a spiritual and medical charlatan, but I had an instinct stemming from such loose thinking to outweigh my own fallibilities.

I just told them to maintain a lateral certainty against any contrary evidence that had been provided to test and thus strengthen their faith in both body and soul. And this formula worked better than any proof. A better method even than Pascal’s Wager (i.e. the safeguard in believing in God just in case He exists), although such a wager will always be useful as a supplement to the formula.  

A body’s own fallibility to grow old along with its brain is best believed to the last moment of consciousness, but one never knows when that moment comes however much the mind becomes garbled or prone to a brink-of-death’s misguiding. This process of paradox can be maintained longer than a mere faith in God, a faith all too easily shaken to the very core. 

The perceived ultimate truth also derives from further supplements of absurdism and self-fiction, especially when the mind wanders into previous blocked-off areas that ever-impending death makes available for anybody to enter, a truth that  becomes half of a whole, and that whole a half of another whole, and so on, ad infinitum. You can then proceed to quote a cost for converting these broad ingredients into a tailor-made spreadsheet. Would you like to buy from me a franchise in this formula, so you can also become a death-defeating charlatan and quack like me, with your very own gullible clients, an invaluable pricelessness crucial to a never-ending life for you as well as for the client? A gullibility thus transcended. Any crass wordplay needed is contained in a separate folder, within the inclusive price quoted. But don’t forget — keep it simple. Get immortality done.

Of Miniatures and Mammoths

Once upon a time, there was a massive castle duly with its own battlements that had suffered many battle scars over the years. I had worked for High Suspicion since the 1960s, so I also had become experienced with such exploratory sites and how to record the history embodied in its markings. Hidden in Plain Sight was another organisation for which I had worked, more part-time than even half, but this was genuinely an extraordinary case for the first occasion in my experience, because the castle had started off life in a famous ‘fairy tale’ and I would’ve thought many of its readers like me must have already made a visit. Today, in the very place that had inspired the tale’s author to write about it, the territory was indeed overgrown, and I felt myself to be foolhardy even to try excavating its actual whereabouts. The clues as to its position in reality were peppered throughout the tale in question, but it took a special tuning-fork brain like mine to absorb and collate them correctly. Now, here I was, at last, flustered but glad I had conquered my foolhardiness. Disguised in the text, I knew, were the author’s crucial passwords to various personal websites, so he must’ve known what dangers he ran – and an organisation like High Suspicion was eager to cull such information. Having also done some free-lance work for Blind Eye, I turned such an eye vertically to the inferred purposes of High Suspicion, as I was well-paid and the missions and projects it gave me were beyond the boundaries of a computer screen. It got me out of myself, as it were. In this one example of a castle, I set about taking rubbings from the various scars on its ancient walls (a massive task) and then prepared to return with these rubbings to headquarters, but I usually sent advance photos of these traced rubbings by means of my smartphone. However, the signal was dead and its power bar already half shrunk. The scars were like cave art or gravestone etchings, with animals like mammoths and matchstick humans with bows and strings. I had to listen, meantime, because many of the structure’s secrets seemed to be musical, a sort of cross between Sir George Dyson’s Violin Concerto and Sir William Walton’s Cello Concerto, a fact I could check alongside the music downloads of these two concertos on my phone. My AirPods may have mangled the now two or four separate pieces, if you see what I mean. I watched the bar shrink further, as the structure’s mediaeval brickwork melted in the sunbeams allowed in piecemeal fashion through the thick trees — melted into bowstrung music before my very ears and eyes, and my emotions weltered as I watched figures upon the battlements, like notes upon a stave, then sinking into the very music that had been created from them. The point came when I knew I had to return before I, too, was morphed into music, but the Bluetooth Buds were stuck in a sort of musical glue; they had no noise-cancelling facilities. The war of attrition had started, with communications cut off as a punishment, no doubt, for not being more suspicious and less foolhardy. There being no other point to the tale made for the saddest possible ending to its narrative. I was only thankful for the bar, however far it shrunk, and that the AirPods should become genuine silence-inducing earplugs, purely because of the substance that glued them into the ears, my heartbeat’s nocturnes more like Xenakis or Stockhausen than the gentler side of Walton’s Agincourt. But I was later asked by the secret Stufflebeam splinter within the High Suspicion command why I usually sent photos of rubbings electronically miniaturised rather than sending photos, equally miniaturised, of what was actually scarred upon such castle walls whence my secondary rubbings derived. Well, I can only think I must be a mere middle man, not a principal or supernumerary. Perhaps at best a massive miniature with ear tusks. How many levels down I was placed in the organisation was merely a half of a half of a half… as if forever. 

It Came Out The Other Side

 Your table had an oil can sitting upon it like a still life whose shadow on the wall looked rather like a recherché teapot that you imagined to be bone china or soft tissue japan or tracing-paper meissen or blood ceramics, its slender spout a shimmering skin peeled from around a bubble containing a dream. 

You then altered the direction of the anglepoise light-source and a different shadow on a different wall made you think of an animal with its trunk or tentacle rising to fend off a predator. Again, you twirled the anglepoise beam that carried thousands of flying mites in its shaft, the weather being so warm for the time of year. And now the shadow of the predator itself emerged with the oil can’s spout becoming part of the predator’s main body, turning in on itself like a rivet, nail or screw, one too long as its end came out the other side. 

You punched down with your finger upon the oil can plunger and saw spirts of fluid ease themselves in slow motion, like much larger flying mites with molten edges. You were experimenting with time, seeking travel, if not travail,  into the future, but each manoeuvre needed to be unplanned so as to form an art installation or avant garde happening. And you unexpectedly switched off the anglepoise, so that no shadow was thrown, but creating one huge engulfing shadow instead. 

And the oily dream bubble was inside your head as you felt the trunk, the tentacle, the skewer touching the inner bone of the skull, tentatively testing for an exit, undecided whether to plunge in or stop stock-still at the very point of plunging. The room’s dark, meanwhile, was not a plain smooth surface of black but a stitched or pixelated swarm of time as a substance, refined ready for lubricating your path into the seamless future darkness. And you felt a light touch on the back of the neck pushing you on. “Boy Balloons” were the words on a sign you saw first and the shop with this sign was a relatively extraordinary one, with still sticky and smeary paint as well as dry and cracked paint on its frames revealing it was not a terribly successful business but somehow 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 useless if still quite desirable dependent on your taste in collecting things. 

Yes, relatively extraordinary and slightly unworldly, this shop did equally have a barely believable 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. And, also, why were there some mansions lining a nearby street in an area that was otherwise so oily and smeary and cracked in appearance?

Still, you found this shop again 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 new sign in the window with fresh paint 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 an oil painting of a mansion with craquelure, a painting within a frame that looked as if had just been put around it, dressed to dazzle, with its own polished wood around fresh glass. The closer-up image was of someone standing outside the mansion, a figure who looked a bit like you when you were younger. 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.

    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, or even Hell. 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 go floppy soon after you bought it did not sound like an antique to you. Maybe you should simply buy that significant oil painting from the window as a keepsake, a souvenir of this occasion when you had found, against the odds, such a shop from old fiction books. Richer people than yourself may even have thought about buying the whole place as an antique in itself.

But that absurd thought quit your mind as soon as the shopkeeper entered from a previously unseen doorway behind the counter. He was so ordinary looking, you were surprised at how you hadn’t seen him or even known him before. Surely, you must have at least glimpsed his type of individual thousands of time on the city streets, so hardly an individual at all. These types were neither passers-by who warranted noticing nor, for that matter, passers-by who were impelled toward noticing you, especially as you customarily dressed down to sink into any background.

    “Can I help?” His voice was high-pitched yet somehow oily, too, a voice so extraordinary you wondered if yours would by comparison make you seem uncharacteristically masculine as you carefully enunciated: “I was passing by and saw the notice about boy balloons in the window…” Your voice now felt uncomfortable, as if it didn’t belong to you. The shopkeeper visibly winced, as you continued: “I just wondered if you had any girl balloons as I already have plenty of boy ones.” Each word was a labour for you to utter, as if forcing prematurely swallowed sweets back up into the mouth from where they had got stuck in the throat.

“No, I am afraid I only have boy balloons in the new delivery. There seems to be no call for girl ones these days.” You suddenly remembered that your late uncle had been big on the variety shows in the city 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 strawberries if not raspberries upon one another’s skin as he manipulated these inflated balloons into conjoined and intertwisted shapes that could be recognised as objects, animals, even human parts. The children in the audience loved him and often cheered their encouragement as the squawking-together balloons grew into an ever more outlandish shape-of-shapes under his nimble and seemingly lubricated  hands.

Words for you are a bit like that, until the whole configuration suddenly explodes. And you abruptly left the story, like the shop, without realising you had been in one, via a huge can of WD40  labelled ‘Lift to Hell’. With a plunger for a thumb down. Hitchhiking, eh? Well, you gave it up years ago, before the world gave up hitchhikers and expected them to get real jobs and real cars, not that some of us will ever give this up, whatever the dangers. For you, it was a sore thumb, making you settle down, not wanting to stick out, not wanting to seem different. You know, when you get older, you can never remember back fully to when you were young. To that foreigner who once possessed your body and called it theirs.

But then, just before they put you away, put you away for good in some godforsaken home, you had the chance to go hitchhiking again. You would never have believed that an old crock like yourself could oil its limbs sufficiently to walk at all let alone have the gumption to find a carriageway carrying cars and lorries that were likely to stop when seeing a bent silhouette at the last old fingerpost next to the smooth blue motorway sign with letters and numbers. 

Where did you want to go, you ask? And why not catch a train? Or, better, a bus pass instead, using a card with your wrinkled face on it, a card they gave all oldies like you allowing us to travel free and easy. No need to stick out your thumb at all in the cold cold days that you called your winter. Once an early autumn now come out of the closet as winter. But it was my thumb’s plunger, not yours.

But I did not want a lift to any old place. I wanted a lift to Hell.

Not that those travelling the bus-passes and bypasses of our land were likely to want to go there at all. They were probably going to some posh mansion to see some friends or relatives posher than them. I’d have to persuade someone I stopped behind the wheel that it was in their interests to take me somewhere else, instead. Somewhere where they didn’t want to go.

I was sitting there watching the cars and lorries speed by. How could I even hope to stop them short of my stepping in front of them, and then the brakes would not be their real brakes screeching under their foot, but my own flesh and bone snagging between tyre and concrete, with no lubrication left from whatever life I had already lived?

But I did manage to stop one car. I guessed it thought it needed my oil. It had a driver sitting stock upright in the front seat, a flashing sign saying the passenger airbag balloon was switched off. I shook my head, I refused his offer of a lift. Beggars could be choosers, I thought. The right lift would come along sooner or later. I just didn’t like his face, whether or not he liked mine. I tapped the side of his car and he drove off. I resumed my bent silhouette at the last fingerpost, thumb stuck into the air. I did did not want a lift to any old place. I wanted a lift to Hell. With airbags as safety balloons to cushion me when I finally crashed..

Then, all of a sudden, another oldie, even older than me, came hobbling along the carriageway towards the same hard shoulder where I was sitting. His trousers sagged and sat ill against his scrawny thighs, a dark patch as evidence of the slowness of getting lifts these days, and I asked him why he hadn’t found a quiet spot, a dignified darkness, to relieve himself along this stretch of the highway. He shrugged and said something I couldn’t catch. Something about his home’s roof having been removed under cover of darkness?

Soon, there were a number of other roofless oldies gathered on the same hard shoulder. Looking into a sky sown with starlight like a vast screen they could not control. They knew somehow where I was going. Something had told them as it had told me. And they all wanted to hitch the same lift as me, to reach some covenant or grail, all of them become bent silhouettes like me, each with a thumb joyfully upraised. An odd finger, too, on their own version of the holy oil-can. Or tacky Tardis.

They didn’t want a lift to any old place. They wanted a lift in a different direction from wherever they’d all just come. They wanted a lift to Hell.

The lift to hell, the lift to hell.
I went on the lift, on the lift to hell
I pushed the button, the button well
But just before, just before it went
Another came on board, heaven sent.

Me to hell, you to heaven,
What the hell, God in heaven,
The lift to where it was, where it was.
We looked and we looked again,
At what would happen next
What did happen next,
Just another repeat,
Another repeat
A shudder down, a shudder up,
Many a slip between lip and cup,
A shadow of death, a shaft of life,
You could cut the air with a carving knife.
And the lift to hell knew hell was hell,
That heaven, too, was the same as hell,
But which hell was up, which hell was down,
So the lift shifted left then shifted right,
Never shifted up or down, up or down,
But then went round and round
Till spinning back, spinning black,
In and out, in and out of sight.
A safety airbag, a nozzle of night,
A balloon of oil, a balloon of shite,
A topless mansion with ceilings white,
And vertical eyes bright with fright.

The lift to hell was hell from not knowing where it went, where it went,
The lift to hell was heaven sent, heaven sent.
Straight then bent, later than seldom sent
Like putting stars at war with stars.
But better stars than climbing stairs,
You said, I said, both of us together
Each breath heavier than the previous breath
Each force meeting the same force head to head.
You’ve reached your final floor the lift’s voice said.
If you are dead, then you are dead instead.
The lift to hell, the lift to hell,
no one said it quite so well.
And no one said it quite so well.

Found in Sight of Each Other

 Untimely gloom descended as it stood ready chiselled in the middle of the market square overlooked by the reflective mansion on the hill – a pipe in its mouth, a hat with flaps, a nose as long as Pinocchio’s nose, a cravat and waistcoat. All chipped, chiselled and carved from stone.

I shivered as rain began to threaten with ominous grumbles from thunderheads along the visible part of the tall horizon where stood the mansion.

But I was not shivering alone for long, as a woman, one of the locals, had arrived close by without an umbrella – and she told me that it had stood there for donkey’s years. But, to me, the real life thing looked pristine, unweathered, as if newly chipped, chiselled and carved. It stood in the afternoon appearing as if it had been made in the morning. And I told her so.

During her thinking time, let me tell you that I was on tour of this foreign principality, seeking curiosities. This being the most curious of all. Even the queer animal with large ears skulking in a downtrodden restaurant nearby depleted in its curiosity by comparison.

The woman, meanwhile, gave the impression that she had walked into the square prepared … by pulling out a sepia photograph that she plonked under my nose. It looked as if it had been hastily ripped from an album as the four corners still bore their sticky separate corners.

“Look ‘ee, that was taken afore not afar the war, and proves what I say,” she said.

Lo and behold, it was exactly the same statue, complete with flappy hat, Pinocchio nose, even buttons on the waistcoat I had failed to notice in real life…

“The cravat has gone,” I suddenly announced, having just noticed this fact by dint of comparing the real-life photo with it.

“Ah well, yay, that was added by a chipper master,” she said, with a proud, preening gesture.

“How can you add stone to stone and still make it look continuous?” I asked. 

I forget how long it was to take me to think of the question. Her answer, too.

“Ah, the scarf was dug outta its chest,” she said.

I did now notice that it was more a scarf than a cravat, and that it had a sunken chest upon which sat the scarf like something that began to look like something that wasn’t a scarf at all.

“Why was that done?” I asked absently, sensing disinterest creeping upon me.

The woman looked blank. Then she spoke again, as if she were making things up as she went.

“The town wanted it changed each year as a mark of time’s wear and tear.” 

She seemed more in command of her words, despite the hesitation.

I then proceeded to examine the new-found dips and dingles that were all over its inner stone, presumably where things had been dug out of what had once been outer stone. I thought I was glimpsing parts of a human body under the clothes. I am sure it had not been like that when I first noticed it in the square.

I glanced back, I remember, at the sepia photograph – and the woman was in it – instead of standing beside me. And I felt a sudden pain in my belly, felt it with my hand, as it sank further into the stone.

Except it eventually felt more like bone than the stone of a statue on a plinth in the square that now was me. Even wood would have been in its structural frames and rafters, too. All ended with a flash of lightning across the horizon. And the defenestrated mansion is now burning on the hill like a beacon.

Dysbrexia

 Names can’t break you. But they stuck to her clothes and hair like burrs. They were broken points she had felt – during this particular war of life or any previous campaign – and if they were typical of the enemy’s weapons then she should really start saying her prayers, assuming she had any prayers left to say, or any God left to say them to. Life was a thing. Time breaks it, time and time again. But large limbs do not snap easily.

As a child, she had been told by her mother that she was a bull in a china shop, as the saying goes, but her mother’s phrase became, seeing that she was a girl, a pink cow, not a bull. There was something about this new phrase that suited her demeanour, her body being thick-set, highly pink like school blancmange and foraging around, as it did, saggily large limbs in gauche fits of unnaturally slow passion for any child. Her mind took strange turns as she negotiated the by-ways of her youth and the changing patterns of self-image. Furthermore, she’d never entered a china shop. There weren’t any china shops in her childhood town in those days. A department store did sell some odd pieces of fine china and and some less-than-fine crockery … but it also sold lots of other things for a Britain in those days before Britain breaks it…. breaks itself.

This store didn’t, however, sell venus-shells. They didn’t know that anybody (including themselves) knew about venus-shells and that they might need to sell one, if they had known about it. Supply derived from demand, but you couldn’t demand something that hadn’t been advertised for use. Unless you invented something new in your mind and marketed it as part of a business plan.

A venus-shell was what her mother called the family’s favourite piece of crockery in the childhood home. She wondered why it was called a venus-shell – but she and the other children (in turn by age) used it as a piggy-bank. It was shell-like, though, and the old denomination coins rattled around in its udder, as she later grew to name one of its appendages. Much later, she (and her siblings) were older and could use words they couldn’t find to use as children; they hadn’t known that many words existed so they hadn’t even previously looked for them. Words came naturally — unspecified except by the way they were used and the context given. Venus-shell was one such portmanteau word. The most likely scenario is that someone had told her mother that it was called a venus-shell – and that was told her mother by a man. He was a stranger to the girl, since he had left the scene soon after she was born. The house where they lived was so large it could have been called a mansion, hence the attraction to all and sundry. He had been a man who in this way was magnetised to appear in the frame of this mansion’s front door accompanied by the shadows that seemed to follow him – indeed shadows that followed him and nobody else. A cove. A cad. A bounder. A rough diamond. Whose leaving present was what he called a porcelain venus-shell. Most shells of the sea variety weren’t readily breakable … unless you took a hammer to them with a purposeful gusto. Nobody appreciated it was fine Chinese porcelain until he told them – otherwise they’d have taken more care of it. Who wants to be the one who breaks it.

The stranger was eventually sent packing. She still remembers her Mum telling her about the dark form of this stranger slouching away down the garden path along with his battered brown suitcase of china wares he sold from door to door. The soft luggage sagging along in his wake. 

She suddenly recalled that the venus-shell probably wasn’t a leaving present at all. More apt to have been a coming present, a stranger bearing gifts of grooming. But her mother had inexplicably allowed this rogue to come across the threshold on the strength of such a weak token of honesty and bonhomie which the venus-shell, on the surface, represented. It was an item that, the daughter assumed, could be bought in any local market (or car boot sale as many such markets had since become). 

Even in those days, war or no war, still young, she prayed to a God that she knew failed to exist rather than to another God that she knew definitely did exist. But she prayed that the stranger had never been part of her past, unaware exactly how that part in her past had panned out and how many years it had taken. She was too young at the time to remember the stranger at all, and only heard about him from the lips of her mother, in between quips about china shops and about (even as a child) the daughter’s resemblance to a pink cow. His name? We may never be told.

The years passed. The stranger never returned and her Mum kept telling her that she was a pink cow in a china shop. She was the only one of her children who had any signal failing – so this pink cow accusation gave her a complex and she became what she was called. Words stick to you like burrs, it seems. Which brings us back, in a timely fashion, I suppose, to God. A God who — as a sort of dubious present — had granted her such abject clumsiness in both expression of verbal communication and articulation of the physical joints. Dysbrexia was not even in it.

I lived round the corner from her and her mother and the other siblings – and I eventually followed in the footsteps of the missing stranger. I felt sorry for the whole crowd of them and I took her Mum out to dances. It was nothing more than that. I also picked on the daughter for special treatment and took her ice skating. The other children in the family, whose faces I forget, seemed far more self-sufficient than her. She had accidentally smashed that venus-shell, you see, and was never likely to be forgiven. An accident in the making you might have said. Her Mum calling her a pink cow in a china shop must have been very upsetting – but, in hindsight, it was unclear which came first, the accusation or the breakage, as she ever breaks it, breaks it, breaks it, forever more, although I earlier assumed that the accusation had naturally been instrumental in causing the breakage rather than vice versa. And to deem the shell as fine porcelain was just another means to accentuate the pain.

“Hiya, gal,” I said as I watched her beaming moonish face bound to the open door on one of those mornings when I came to fetch her to go ice skating. Except the bound was more a thud thud thud like giant apples falling from an apple tree. After all, I was a shadowy third to her and her mum. And her Mum loomed from behind her and gave me a grateful smile. I knew her Mum liked me, but not enough for me to share her bed. I had accepted that and surrendered any hope in that direction. You’ll bring my daughter back in time for tea, her eyes asked. I nodded.

“We’re going to skate together today,” the daughter said to the open air, hoping that the open air and I were the same audience. I took her by the hand and pointed to the sky, as if the weather would be to blame if we skate together. She stumbled along, her huge frame swaying from side to side.

We had several quiet, private conversations, so I can’t repeat them now. None of them predicted our future together as business partners. Or more than that. But it was implicit, I guess, in all we said, as if the future was mapped out, frozen and immutable. I hung over her more like a cloud than a shadow, but either would have been spooky enough to an impressionable lass.

Apparently, she had stuffed the venus-shell too full of pennies; it was never designed to be a piggy bank, and literally imploded. I could have warned them about that, without even seeing it. And I never did see it. Knowingly.

Relatively late in life, she went into porcelain as a career. She eventually ran a very popular website where you could order her wares. No door-to-door for her. I was her shadow and partner in this business. I suspect all this was her way of exorcising the past, a way to tug out the stinging-nettles: all the unkind taunts from her family about lack of coordination. To be able to earn a living from fine fragile artefacts that needed to be shipped in carefully designed packaging was both ironic and triumphant. “Thin and vulnerable as the flattened bones of fairies”, she often said, her turns of phrase having grown a maturity along with her business expertise. Not that she wrapped the goods herself. My own part in the business was the packaging department which comprised of many girls from the local neighbourhood, all humming as they wrapped and stickered. The area benefited by our concern in terms of employment, a fact of which I know she was very proud. Her side of affairs was the marketing and finance. Another partner somehow turned up and was responsible for ‘manufacture’, someone I could never quite fully see except for the soft luggage it carried. I do recall its presence as it squatted like a giant toad at Board Meetings. 

She, meanwhile, was now running – with my help – the ultimate china shop and she was the archetypal bull, in more senses than one. Not the pink cow at all. It was rather a large jump in the scheme of things from that smashed venus-shell to this growth into a soon-to-be-international corporation manufacturing and marketing fine porcelain. Indeed, it doesn’t seem like yesterday when we opened the first factory – where the product was further researched by experts in the trade that we had managed to poach from other concerns…and we had a big market throughout Europe. We sent the luggage toad to Brussels as our representative. Maybe the act that finally broke us.

She doesn’t spend much time with the business these days. She is into politics and I wouldn’t be surprised if one day she became Head of State. I hear she’s having dinner with the current Prime Minister this very evening. He a broken pastry face of a man with a sneer and she a clumsy woman who once lived in a now demolished mansion. I’m sure she’d be considered the most important catalyst: even more central to the Prime Minister’s machinations on breaking Britain. Or was she an agent provocateur or a Machiavellian in attempts to continue trading porcelain with Europe. A disguised buffer against imports from China.

Eventually, her heavy body skated too far on thin ice. The years flew by too fast and missed sticking to the sides of memory. I lost sight of her, and even history itself forgot she ever existed. And meanwhile whoever is in now in charge of Britain is still hoping to mend a broken shell’s varicose vessel with pink cow gum.

Her Mum eventually took me in, though. Pity we’re both past it. But I fear I am to be deported, anyway. A stranger in my own country, soft luggage sagging in my wake as I leave. Yet, the darkest ever shadow has entered you already by means of your having been groomed to believe fiction such as this, even if you don’t.

The Mansion’s Mission

 The waiter placed an empty plate in front of me. “There’s a time and a plate for everything,” he said, as if this were the best joke in the world.

I laughed politely. Polite laughter is never the same as real laughter. But it was real enough to elicit a small breaking of wind. He left for the kitchen. While waiting for the meal to be served on the empty plate, I looked at the skin of the hand that sat in my lap next to the other hand. The knife and fork either side of the plate would soon be taken up by each hand, I assumed. That skin in the game was mine. Those hands were things I could move. But such thoughts gave no real clue as to whom those hands belonged, other than a sense they were mine and thus part of me. The thoughts themselves were mine, too. How could thoughts be otherwise. Thoughts were more certain of who owned them than the hands were, because hands could not think.

By this time, he had returned from the kitchen pushing a trolley and several platters upon it. “Roast beef on pancakes,” he announced. I looked at the food he had brought and confirmed to myself that his description was not a million miles from the truth. But did eyes have thoughts, if hands didn’t? 

I lowered my face to smell the food. My nose was usually more certain about things than any other part of my body. But the aroma was too tenuous. Beef and pancakes had no recognisable strength of identity. Other than perhaps identity by taste? And by texture — and any texture within the mouth was more aligned with the sense of touch than with the sense of taste, I thought.

The food had not yet been loaded upon the plate. The restaurant, I knew, had a sign outside it saying: ‘The Time and the Plate.’ A good name. Why had nobody ever called a restaurant by that name before? It was too good not to have been used before. But this was not the time and the place to explore such avenues of brand name management. 

And, after it had been served, I tucked into the roast beef and pancakes. Not really a pancake, but a sort of pudding without roof, only walls and a floor (like a Yorkshire mansion), visibly filled with meat, fibrous blood rather than gravy soaking into it. And my fingers. The knife and fork having been eschewed.

Later, with the waiter’s patience of waiting expended, there was nothing I  could do other than to ring the bell of the mansion where my mission somehow led. I stared steelily at the door number. Was this the correct address? The mansion had a name, but what a name! ‘Roast Beef and Pancakes’ on a plaque decorated with flowers. The flowers and the name and the name’s screwed-on letters did not seem to be in decorative line with each other, but that was not the real point. It was the door number that seemed wrong, with empty screw holes left in the flaking paint of the door frame where a number had evidently fallen off. I looked to the ground to see if it was still there. There was a time and a place, but this was not the time. Alternatively, this was the time but not the place. But, then again, time and place needed to be together, in line with each other, by which means I  would have found the fallen number still on the ground by my feet.

As I continued these peculiar thoughts, the door opened and a man peered out at me. He looked very sleepy, and indeed he was still in his pyjamas. And yawning upon massive teeth, or so they seemed to me. Most people slept at night, I thought, and this was nearly noon. I looked at my watch as if to question the state of this man. It was a prolonged silence, so prolonged, I wondered how two strangers such as myself and this man could remain silent for so long, without one leaving or the other shutting the door. Peculiar seemed a better word than stranger. We were not complete strangers to each other, but ‘complete peculiars’. I laughed at this conceit of mine behind my hand. 

Who was the one to be most feared? This man at the door, yawning, remaining inscrutable, vociferously unquestioning of the silence between us? Or myself whom you fail to know as a person since this story is the first time you have encountered me? At least I know my own name. His name remains a mystery. We’ll call him Archie. For no reason. But we do know definitely where he lives or is now where he appears to live, in a mansion with a missing door number and a name plaque decidedly peculiar.

Eventually, I offered the man an envelope. One that needed to be delivered by hand and accepted by the intended recipient’s hand, it seemed — rather than simply being put through the door. At that stage, we had not yet noticed that the door had no letterbox, a very peculiar fact that would have changed our view of the letter I held out to the man. A summons, or an important missive that needed to avoid being lost in translation, as it were. You even expected me to open it and read it aloud to the man, perhaps in a language he would understand, and in an accent appropriate to that language. Or with emphasis on certain words that might change the whole meaning.

It was at that point I smelt the cooking. Not a breakfast smell, as was betokened by the man’s appearance of having just got up. No frying bacon sound, or sizzling eggs sunnyside up. More a Sunday dinner smell, from those days when people listened to ‘Two Way Family Favourites’ and ‘The Billy Cotton Band Show’…

“Wakey! Wakey!” I suddenly shouted.

The man started. He was visibly shaken. He and I must know one another, we now began to think. A previously estranged couple. That would explain the prolonged silence as each eyeballed the other’s eyeballs. The man’s bloodshot, and moist. My eyes no doubt steely. One set of eyes to cook the other, as we hummed and haahed.

But you could not see our eyes. People like us who tell stories are intrinsically not there at all. Words are blind. Numbers, too. Only the seeing of things counts. Only being there counts. A number fallen off the day’s date changes everything. Even a number blinking off a digital time display. Only hands can tell the time. Assuming there are two hands there to tell us. To sign us, by miming, or ventriloquising. Or passing this story to you in an envelope, rather than electronic digital means.

Whether we shared a collusive Sunday dinner together does depend on the time and the place. A coincidence of these two parameters as well as many other things thus targeted. And the question of what we ate of us. Who ate what. What ate whom. And what or who visited what or whom for Sunday dinner.

Time now for ‘Educating Archie’, that followed the Billy Cotton Band Show. At least we knew the dummy’s name. Yet, you listened to this ventriloquist ludicrously performing on the wireless, if barely audible to you from the attic above. At least you had the sun shining on you through the gaps in the mansion’s estranged roof as you waited for ‘Sing Something Simple’ with the Cliff Adams Singers. You could not believe your ears, let alone your eyes.

OHM

 I needed a new circuit in my mansion. Oh, by the way, my name is Francis, spelt in the male way – ‘is’ not ‘es’. I requisitioned, therefore, a specialist electrician as the circuit had lost the efficiency of its ohm resistor and thus required a new connection. I loved connections, even accidental ones, and when you were summoned to my call as electrician, you told me you were called Francis, too. This sort of thing boded well. All seemed right and destined to be even better. You took one look at the old ohm resistor, then tickled its inner wires gingerly like a bomb disposal expert.

“Ah, Francis,” said Francis (we had already struck up a first name relationship). “This part of your circuit needs replacing altogether and a new connection installed, what we in the trade call the Foreign Connection. We don’t often have to use a Foreign Connection, but here we most definitely do.”

I stared at you and nodded like a hypnotised puppet. I am a version of a flâneur and live most of the time in an inherited mansion near Oats Lane. And I knew very little about electric currents. You looked into your cavernous bag with many compartments and pulled out a device like a far eastern letter of the alphabet then, eventually, a series of such letters joined together, an intricate pattern of intersecting lines, curves and dots forming a complex piece of equipment in a language that we did not need to speak as we had ourselves achieved an unspoken connection, a telepathic communication that only potential lovers seem able to master.

This was the first time for me with a tradesman. Most of my previous connections were with artists or writers of a sophisticated persuasion. Sometimes with similar individuals of wilder or more anarchic charms. I felt defiled by loving an electrician after only a few minutes of connections and intervening shocks. And as you worked on my circuit, fitting the Foreign Connection precisely by touching tab with tab, lead to lead, plug to plug, most of these appendages seemed unimaginably small. No wonder you boasted of bomb disposal skills at the coalface of death.

I could no longer resist you. A complex circuit, one to the other, both of us with the same name, a name spelt with line, curve and dot with a line through it rather than the same configuration but with two dots instead of one. In electrical or electronic terms only, we were a male and female socket and plug in a perfect inscrutability of discipline, joining each to each, a ruthless work ethic from the opposite curve of the world’s circuit to our own curve of existence. A force or source of concupiscent current to expunge wars of whatever blame or cause. I hoped later to dispose carefully of the bomb you left. But, too late, when I suddenly realised what the anagram of the unconnected letters of ‘mansion’ was!

I Married My Teacher’s Pet

 My darling sweet, my darling sweet, we have known each other for many years, have we not, but when we first met, in that tiny playground of the school, we were so young and now almost forgotten as the people we once were. The photos that were taken are what we have to go on, thank goodness, filling in the gaps; even snapshots in black and white can carry the souls of the beings we once were, two tiny kids. To celebrate our long time together, my darling sweet, I am about to supply those sweets we once enjoyed so very much, sweets that you can’t buy these days, and although tiny sweet shops with weighing machines and jars and triangular paper bags still exist, they are rare, and even if they do exist their sweets are different. Sweets that do not have the smell of the 1950s about them. The feel of those old times surely no longer exists as sweets, you think. Stickiness that got stuck somewhere in the past, leaving us with flat and unsharp and smooth and unsticky ones today. But I have found the original sweets still edible but with the smell and stickiness of the 1950s still clinging to them in dreams. Can you believe it? You know how you have been able to trust me over so many years of happy togetherness. But first you need to find these sweets in the same dreams as mine. This is a game like the ones we used to play. A laughter of tricks and clues. And co-vivid dreaming. Ah, you have found them too easily, my darling sweet. You are so clever, always have been. No change there. But I meant you to search all night, but you are as ever too clever for me. Your smile is as sweet as it ever was, my now seeing you gaze in disbelief at the sweets you’ve found for yourself in our dreams, without my help, but sweets not as sweet as your smile, I hasten to add. A teardrop at the corner shop of your eye, a sign of joy, not sadness, of course. I try to return your smile with my own, but it cannot compare with yours, I’m sure. Ah, you do not need to open your powder compact for its mirror. I believe you, as you believe me. And I am fain to say more, now the game of laughter has tripped your smile into further ricochets of hiccuping. Always the same hiccuping hilarity, and I know you are as happy as Chloe. Yes, do open the triangular paper bags, to see the sweets more clearly. To feel their stickiness on the tips of your fingers. Sorry, they are not in proper 1950s paper, stiff, and crimped. Pinked by pinking scissors. And drizzled with sugar grains. But being in sleep’s cellophane, you can see the sweets without first getting yourself too sticky. Fruit drops, penny chews, humbugs, bull’s eyes, pineapple chunks, pear drops, lemon sherbets, and rhubarb-and-custard pieces just for you tasting like school dinner puddings, and yes, I know, not all those were quite the same or even available at all in the old days, but a pick-a-mix today is as good as a choice of beautiful pastel or even primary colours in sweet jars all those years ago. We used to get our faces covered in stickiness, I remember, thus allowing our kisses to seem to last almost forever.  Or are these kisses merely in our dreams today, kisses that never happened at all? I watch you touch the sweets gingerly. Testing out the bags for further openings that have inadvertently been ripped into them during your first excited rush in getting at them, after long calm moments of pent-up anticipation. Try first the rhubarb and custard ones, my darling sweet. I think you will be pleasantly surprised at their surge of gentle flavour. Even longer moments of nostalgic hindsight as you allow them to seep into you with their essential sweetness of distant past time’s premonition of our loving life together… Go on, suck hard, do not chew. You have to watch your teeth. Ah, I am so pleased. Sweets for my sweet. And your sweet smile itself can now hopefully last in eternity for me, even beyond the peaceful end of your laughter. Close your compact, my darling sweet. Keep your powder dry.

I feign to say more, as the future unfolds into age, but in truth I actually do, viz. there seem be at least ghostly sweets visible in it, but whether that means it’s a task of depths that is dead easy to plumb or it’s an impermeable complex of folds in cellophane that sits on my desk in our mansion, but I am not sure which, easy or complex. Except it’s clear; it is clear, too that there is no container on my desk at all, because there is no container at all upon my desk as I sit here looking at the desk’s wood-grained expanse with nothing at all upon it, not even a piece of paper or a pen. Just an empty ink-well sunk in one corner, an aperture for when writers used to scratch out handwriting with a nib that they dipped into it. Ah, it’s an empty cellophane container I sense to exist, I suppose, of sorts, even though it is not on the desk but in it. But usually when you say that something is in a desk, it usually means it is something in one of its drawers. The inkwell as container is part of the desk itself, carved into the wood of its surface, and roughly finished to allow an inner non-wooden container to be inserted that would itself hold the ink. But being an empty part of my desk, it was neither on or in it, but an intrinsic aperture like the slots into which the drawers are inserted and such drawers usually represent a miracle of workmanship whereby nothing gets stuck like sticky sweets get stuck, but moving as if on smooth or well-oiled runners, even though it is wood moving upon or within other wood, without any lubrication between. Not loose, but fitting exactly, and no perceptible gaps, yet avoiding any groans or grindings when pushed in and out, a prime example of the carpenter’s art. Even dampness fails to make it work less efficiently. And my study is beset with a decided dampness, ever since you died. Why that should be, I have not had long enough since your death to discover. On a sudden impulse, I put my finger into the empty inkwell hole in the corner of the desk, a runnel running off from the side as a method to hold pens and pencils within its groove to stop them rolling down the desk, or, suddenly, I thought, to allow excess ink or any other fluid to be irrigated along as an escape route… But where would it have gone? Only down the slope of the desk-lid toward whoever is sitting at the desk. Ah, that’s the first indication I have received that this desk does not have a flat writing surface but a gradient of a desklid that is openable upon a whole cornucopia of contents beneath it. There are after all no smooth running drawers in this desk, as I originally indicated. My thinking has become confused ever since I lost you. This desk is an old schoolroom version, with one sloping desklid and metal joints below to cage my bare legs. I look around and see whole rows of such desks around me, each with a bent head above it. I quickly look away as this does not seem to be my study at home at all. And I finally extract my finger from the inkwell and find it dripping blue-back Stephens ink. Yes, Stephens, not Quink. The firm of Stephens once made sweets as well as ink, few seem to know. How can I be so sure? Well, I have touched the tip of my tongue with it and I certainly know the taste of Stephens when compared to that of Quink. “Boy!” shouted a voice from the front of the room, “what on earth are you doing?” I must have looked confused, and my underpants felt suddenly damp, and while the voice was otherwise abruptly engaged with another child’s emergency in the classroom elsewhere, I lifted the desklid slope to hide my blushes. There is seemingly nothing inside, I thought, wondering for a moment where all my school books must have gone. My head smoothly running inside with no gaps between, silently I had shrunk to a single cell within a cell pushed shut from behind me by the teacher towards a final darkness inside, without even a single groan of bone on grinding bone in the procedure of entry. You, my sweet, never liked drawers left open, but was never strong enough to push them shut. Would I find our leftover rhubarb and custard lozenge lodged stuck into one of the desk’s dark corners. In any such spectral form of fane, a shrine to my Platonic sweet surely should be found.

Prelude to Pearls

 Chopin wrote 24 Preludes, one for each hour of the day, but I always played them when there was a full moon. There was something plaintive about them, methodical, as if all was right, bright or even rightly, brightly dark about the world. When there was a misty ghostly moon of any size, I played his Nocturnes that then seemed appropriate. But a clear new moon made something spring or jump inside my spirit, and I played new music, atonal, some might say a load of noise, but I always found something musical in it, something secret, something classical, something that normal melodic music couldn’t reach. 

But when there was a clear gibbous moon, I couldn’t play any music at all. I knew I couldn’t, so why did I try to do so and fail? When there was no moon at all, I thought the Chopin Mazurkas or Waltzes would be perfect, but as I sat down to play them in such circumstances out came a single unknown Chopin Prelude. The notes seemed to play themselves, even more beautiful than the official accepted canon of Preludes. It was almost as if I were sitting at a piano with a piano-roll that was cut into by the finger strokes of Chopin himself. They were my own fingers that followed the keys as they indented one by one, as if the music played me and not vice versa. The perfect Prelude. I stared into the starless, moonless sky as I followed the notes or the notes followed me. I guessed it was so utterly black because of cloud cover. But at heart I knew it was the perfect blackness. The perfect prelude to death. But then my mansion’s silence, following the unknown prelude, broke out with an unknown voice…

“I wonder if an utterly  black oyster can culture a black pearl rather than the more usually clouded pearl, its pitch black outer shell hinged to another such shell, and tightly contained within them are its slimy innards and a now bullet-hard pellet shaped into a tiny sphere whereupon all the seas and lands mapped upon it are as black as each other…” The male-sounding voice took a few moments to catch breath, before continuing… “That was my dream, to cultivate and market black pearls, thus to provide necklaces for everyone’s sweethearts to show up on their fair-skinned necks. But then one day they told me I could not do this as it would be seen to conflict with the social norms of tolerance and inclusivity. Everything needed to be available to everyone, to show up on every skin colour.”

I nodded knowingly, having glimpsed his face was facing my face. Before I played Chopin, I had been an oyster-catcher of the first water and he was here as a half-breeder open for my stock of such wares. I poked a finger into my purse and brought out for his inspection the most perfect pearl I had as a lucky keepsake. One I had not been able to sell. It was no colour at all, yes, a colourless pearl like a drop of water. I offered it to him with my own voice the sound of which was unknown even to me …

“This is the only pearl of its kind but I now have the methodology to re-create it, given your investment to catch other oysters the same colour as water. Think of it, a necklace of pearls like beads of sweat, or gentle perspiration — each pearl fused to the skin without the need for a thread or string. Such pearls have the attractiveness of glowing upon the skin and no laws are contravened. Even mermaids can wear them, say, like a belly-dancing delight just above where their skin ends and the tails begin.”

He looked at me as if I were mad, but decided to trust me. I had helped him before to discover dust that did not need dusting, food that did not need excreting, see-through hats, clothes that made one thinner than one’s body otherwise made possible, and false moustaches for women.

“Ah ha,” he had then said, “aren’t you contravening the rules of universal availability by offering false moustaches for women? They need to be available to men, too.”

We had always come to an agreement – always a compromise. 

“Black pearls,” I said, “have always been a difficult choice, both to cultivate and to fulfil social justice strictures. Normally, I found, black oysters produced pearl-coloured pearls just as pearl-coloured oysters did, too, each producing a pearl that I see as a rich pinky white that glows like Heaven’s light, and with an imagined soul of utter perfection emanating from within. But others see that colour and soul differently. And none of us can really know what the others see.”

I matched my poetics with his. I knew the business pearls had helped me live in this mansion, idly playing Chopin Preludes on the black and white keys of a grand piano! I smiled, before continuing…

“After all, God is colourless, see-through, and sometimes comes down as a certain kind of rain, and is neither man nor woman.”

We were now speechless, the whiteness of our eyes a faint Botticelli pink. Silent together, at least before that moment when he left the mansion hand in hand with whoever he thought he had been talking to.

“We’ll need a belt as well as some braces,” I said, to myself, retuning my fingers to the piano.

I was not fearful but I looked askance at where an unknown woman seemed to be sitting. What did she know about a man’s need for a belt and braces? Seventy-six years of life and I still thought that anxiety was a word you set in spelling tests. 

If one thing fails, then you have the other to hang on to, I always tried to explain, the belt and the braces of self and unself amid the shifting shadows of precarious time. So imagine my surprise when she suggested holding up my Chopin music score stretched-out in front of the grate for inducing the flames of a fire into the banked-up coal and wood in the hearth, just like the help of the up-draught of a similarly stretched-wide newspaper in front of the start of smouldering flames, just as I watched this happen in my childhood. Dangerously flammable, looking back on such ancient domestic fire-making practices. I could never keep up with conversations nowadays, because I had to remember what someone had said at least a a minute or so before I tried to remember it — and that was becoming more and more difficult.

What had happened, was that the electricity had gone out, and all the mansion-lights with it. And by belt and braces, she meant a torch and a candle. We had to climb the stairs to bed, a veritable challenge more characteristic of Everest these days. Especially in an unexpected darkness. I imagined those shifting shadows of my life now transposed to the landing, especially if lit with a candle.

“No, not a candle,” I said. “A torch will do.”

“We need one to find the other,” this woman counter-claimed. “Otherwise we will find neither.”

I nodded as if I understood. Understood that she was the ghost of my wife or indeed my still living wife, Except it was too dark for her to see me nodding. This was a rum do, I thought. Both of us sitting in the darkness, thinking the other one would go to find a candle. Or a torch. Whichever was more readily to hand. 

Needless to say, our preparation for such an eventuality had turned out to be pitiful. As we realised at the same precise moment that the belt had failed and so had the braces. But having just thought that, I’ll probably forget it later. My own flickering inner light was blighted with shifting shadows. And I mused as I watched them for a while or imagined watching them as we continued sitting in silence. Good job I would again recognise her voice as I had no other evidence about with whom I was sitting in the sitting-room. Sitting side by side or opposite each other, I could not remember. I stretched out my hand in all directions and fumbled with a vertical elasticated strap over someone’s chest. Didn’t feel like my wife’s chest. Must be mine, then. Though the waist and its threaded belt felt far too huge to be anyone’s at all. Must be a giant, I thought. I resisted feeling beyond the clothes, if only to find the pearls under the neckline above the bosom, pearls that I had once given her. The light would be back soon.

And it was then I heard a movement in the corner of the room, a shuffly, shambly friction. And the sudden blooming of candleflame amid new shifting shadows, and a face lit up. I squinted to see if it was my wife’s. I was sure it was her face, the one that had been lived in for longer than anyone would care to think. My own face was weathered, too. I wonder if she could see it from where she now stood, with that relatively distant candleflame. If it was her at all. Which it must be. It would be an intruder otherwise. An intruder wearing braces. 

I laughed to myself. Strange what shifting shadows can do to the mind. And I thought of my own trusty torch that I thought I carried about with me at all times — for just such an eventuality. Its pinprick beam ever primed. But all I’d feel would be my mobile phone which I had never been able to use properly ever since someone gave it to me and showed me how to work it. It might even have its own torch beam, I now suddenly remembered. Strange what one remembers, and what one forgets. I believe I forget more than I remember, but I am never sure.

I suddenly stood up with a creaking of pain, without apparent volition, to feel better about my person and to seek whatever double security of well-being I could re-establish. And my trousers immediately collapsed around my ankles with a silence from which any friction had already escaped. I picked them up and held them in front of the dead fire instead of the Chopin score.

“The light is coming on.” The unknown woman’s voice. But I didn’t hear it. The light was coming out, instead! The root of the light fitment had come away from the sudden strange white glow of the flat ceiling. And the rest of the lightshade was precariously hanging beneath. The visibility had become its own shifting shadows out of my sight up there, risen there automatically like swathes of bright heat and smoke. I couldn’t even remember, meanwhile, whether I was still alive. Only the feeling of someone’s fingers loosening the pinions of my clothes. So I could escape through them. Then loosening the sinewy belt and braces holding all the baggy skin to the bones. I was to be cared for by my better half to the very end, I thought — even as I remembered the sensation of it all ending but not quite ending yet. “How do you spell anxiety?” asked the giant, before the mobile phone broke into light, having already started to vibrate. I had come to the final state of sieving the 24 pearls by shape rather than by colour. Just as I hoped soon to hear the sweetly atonal notes from Heaven itself, not Hell.