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.
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