Torque of Turbines

 Some may call it a mansion, others a house, even, rarely, a bungalow, but sometimes I forget which is which. I was shown a locked door leading into the hall corridor where was situated one of the mansion’s locked rooms. But, really, hand on heart, did a locked door make a locked room what it was? Necessarily, did one lead to the other? I knew he was  the owner of the mansion and, as an unspoken secret between us, there was also the further knowledge that I was willing to buy the mansion and he was willing to sell the mansion … if the right price struck both of us simultaneously as the same right price. It was as if our respective (perhaps vastly different) perceptions of the locked door represented each other’s facial expression upon shaking hands … and the locked room was something we both concealed behind those very expressions.

So, the locked door was where reality met unreality, as it were. A two-way filter. One leading to the other and back again. Thoughts that were not in keeping with what I was really thinking. No wonder my tongue got carried away with its own flag-waving.

A room as an echo of its door was soon to be put to the test…

“This is the locked door to the late Mrs Archer’s room,” he told me, as he banged thunderously on its panels.

“Trying to wake the dead?” I laughed. I bit my tongue to remove the unfeeling quality of what I had just joked about unwittingly. A key to removing nonsense from reality.

He was an enormous man, made from ill-seasoned forest timber, as he towered over me…shaggily. I understood his day job was at sea on the turbines. Could such unequals as us ever strike a bargain? I tried to keep the question from my eyes. Business, in a housing slump, was more a game of poker than a straightforward transaction. He echoed my laugh. He had told me to call him by his forename rather than Mr Archer. I supposed this to be a mock friendliness to mask mixed emotions – the bittersweet feeling he must still possess about removing this house from a future where he had expected to continue living with his wife…until she had died so unexpectedly.

Neither of us spoke as we watched each other. Laughter had died to the last echo of the ceiling beams. Against any possible better judgement, I expected to hear a key scrabbling at the lock from the other side of the door… I was, however, small enough to clamber through the keyhole … into the vast locked room. Only so vast, because I was so tiny. Mr Archer had lifted me and inserted me slotwise toward the darkness beyond the door. Halfway, my tongue managed to slip the tumblers one by one, as if I were the solution to every possible puzzle tree. He entered through the now open door, seeking, in utter denial, his departed wife. And he found me already primed to ignite a disease of toxic fundaments – ready to strike a deal for the next lease along the pecking order of infected conveyancing. The Spanish Flu killed many millions in 1918. Covid killed a few more in 2020.

###

The living-room was crammed with a lifetime’s knick-knacks and keepsakes in a jumbled order as orderly as one could imagine it to be. But Mrs Archer who had ‘ordered’ it wouldn’t need imagination to do so: she knew. Perhaps her mind was jumbled – thus making the jumble seem orderly to her. I looked at her. This was her living-room. She had lived in it for sixty years until she grew as old as she was that day; the husband of a distant lifetime whom I had once met and knew by his forename, was quite gone, but, for her, less gone than simply gone. But who pre-deceased whom, I continued to wonder.

The jumbled order comprised many photographs of children and grandchildren, dusty ornaments, encyclopaedic books – plus nods to modernity with a pile of music CDs and a TV screen that seeped grainy colours into each other through lack of proper reception, on a low volume because even at a high volume she wouldn’t have been able to follow it properly. The place was a shrine – a place where, against all hope, hope still existed. The mind’s own mindset did tune better than the TV signal despite her own jumbled words when speaking. The thoughts were clear, the words were not.

Tapped into dual waste systems of disposal, she was her own living-room, pure and simple – where everything was self-contained if not self-perpetuating – and there were trolleys and zimmers galore to support her vagaries of movement, followed, necessarily, by visits from local authority nurses and carers and, perhaps, from the odd visitor like me. Time runs on as if it runs on forever for all of us. Each with their own jumble that they deny is jumble or they claim is jumble whichever rings truer amid each day’s self-restraint or self-pity. A projection inward or outward amid an ancient shrine of now.

I left the house, after kissing her farewell, silently wishing for her a comfortable self with whom she could continue to live. Later, it was imagined silence or simply felt silence when her TV flickered into the whispering background of the air’s deafness, if not of her own deafness. She heard nothing as she quickly flicked through the newspaper I’d brought for her to read after my departure. Meanwhile, she ordered jumble around her in the half-light of an Autumn dusk; and it was obvious that she would soon struggle to use a trolley to reach a light-switch and draw the curtains. Then, suddenly, she heard the sound of heavy steps.

But I had gone. She must have known it couldn’t now be me. A miracle she heard the steps at such a low threshold. This was an imagination that peopled jumble with a roomful of living solid souls. Or a belief stronger than imagination that jumbled people into a single solitary figure who, after kindly drawing the curtains, stood silently – wrapped in glistening wings like a Christmas present.

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It was with the same heavy steps that I walked the lower promenade for perhaps the last time after many years of thus brushing my existence each morning along beside the sea’s edge: free-lance constitutionals as well as more specific errands such as shopping or (before I retired) regular work in the pier’s town. Today, the pleasure pier itself, as ever, grew larger as I approached the area where stood the abandoned Amusement Arcade, a dirty yellow building of some considerable magnitude, with a decided ramshackle tackiness that was not, in turn, a condition ramshackle enough to have yet crumbled against all the buffeting that the sea’s weather threw at it over many years. It was just a grizzled seediness that stood prouder than I thought it had any right to be, even (or especially) with its tall skull-totem denoting the erstwhile entrance to Arcade of Amusements inside.

I laughed as I looked out to sea for perhaps the last time. I had forgotten about Mrs Archer and what I might have done. And played with an Amusement involving a locked door to see if that reminded me. It took an old penny to see a skeleton emerge from a cupboard. Outside the Arcade was a strange previously unseen structure on the horizon beneath a random set of black-and-blue, bilious clouds that had the sun barely breaking through. Was it sail-less schooner on the spice-trade trail to distant Samarkand? But the distant structure was stock-still. I knew it had been in the same position for some days, but I now forget how I knew that for a fact when I hadn’t seen it before in any position at all. Or a gibbet? Or a skeletal ghost of a pirate radio-station from the Sixties when these very inshore non-territorial waters provided airway sources for illegal pop music? Or a crane like those small mechanical cranes that used to be in the ancient Amusement Arcades hopefully to pick prizes clumsily, its handles for young kids to grapple with or crank up and down? A kid like I once was.

A kid walking always with heavy steps towards being grown-up. In those days, the prospect of being grown-up was like a sort of death. Because death as defined in the dictionary never existed at that time: quite beyond even the powers of imagination or of dread. Being grown-up was enough to be going on with. An end in itself. Perhaps.

Life is an abandoned Amusement.

###

The mansion was set back from the road and, although I enjoyed reading horror stories, there was no possible way I could conjure any weird or ghostly atmosphere from this place. It was somebody’s idea of a joke. And I knew who that someone was. You see, I had an email yesterday from an old friend called Archer, who I called by his surname as that was what he was called at school and the email had a photograph attached, a photograph of his parents’ mansion in the suburbs of the city half-hidden by trees but clear enough to reveal the most unprepossessing building it had been my misfortune to notice, to be made to notice, if you see what I mean, because my friend knew I dabbled in landscape painting on a (if I say so myself) talented but amateur basis – and he wanted me to paint his parents’ house so that he could give the painting to them (framed) for Christmas. Paint it from the photo, he said. He’d give me a good price for this commission. To buy time, I emailed my friend and said it was impossible to paint it from the photo he had provided, especially with the trees in the way. Could he give me the address? I’d visit it (I vowed to myself) so as to wreak some real atmosphere from it for my painting.

 My friend didn’t really appreciate horror stories, as I did, but I’m sure my imagination, when in full view of the house, would compensate for any lack of imagination from the mansion itself! Buildings with genius loci were far and few between. But an artist surely could create a spirit of place (albeit a creepy one) for any setting where, in reality, a spirit of place did not exist. Imagine my disappointment when – after making a difficult bus ride mixed in with office commuters on their way home – I approached the mansion down its leafy avenue. A central position between like-minded residences. I first had to ensure I got hold of the right place so I had to peer at the gates for the correct address-number before committing my artist’s gaze towards the potential subject. You may have indeed imagined my imagination, but it was nothing compared to my real feelings. You may safely read between the lines. You surely can imagine the place for yourself as easily as you imagined my initial feelings about it. No need for me to describe it with words. In any event, I actually needed to preserve all my artistic strength for (later) painting it for real, with paints and paintbrush. I was not intending to erect an easel on the surburban pavement, mind you. Commuters still tramped either side of my stationary figure towards their own residences along the avenue as the dusk thickened. They clasped brief-cases and cast sullen glances towards one they assumed to be an inexplicable loiterer. No, I would weigh the mansion within the balance of my surveying, then remember it as I rode back on the bus so as to attach its residues of last impressions to further interpretations of the photo once back in my studio. But I was disrupted from the image’s steady imprint upon the sensitive backdrop of my prospective memory by one of the commuters brushing past me more roughly than the others – only to disappear up the garden path towards the very mansion in question. It was then I suddenly realised that the memory  I had of the actual residence did not match my memory of the photo. You see, it seemed to have no roof in one of those memories, unless this was a visual illusion.

The shape up the garden path did not look old enough to be one of my friend’s parents. Perhaps, I had got hold of the wrong residence after all. Had my friend given me the wrong address-number? Even the wrong avenue in the wrong area of the suburbs? I took the photo (that I had earlier printed from the attachment my friend had sent by email) from my wallet. I had not wanted, for artistic reasons, to compare it directly with my real-time view of the house but, now, I had little option. I needed to cross-check the trees and gate colour and distant walls of the half-hidden house. And whether indeed it had no roof at all.

Perhaps the shape of the commuter I had seen disappear up the garden path was my friend’s younger brother (if he had a younger brother at all) who still lived there with his parents. To my amazement, I was stirred from such unverifiable speculations by the photo itself showing a mansion that was quite different from the mansion I remembered being depicted in it when I first saw it on the computer screen and now showing a mansion that strongly resembled the very mansion up the garden path of which I was now being led by the commuter with the brief case who soon reached the front door – evidently a locked door and he had no key. All this I assumed from the body language. A locked door to a mansion with no roof.

I heard the front door bell ring. Meanwhile, I felt myself become more and more exposed in this embarrassing position, lurking in the front garden, uninvited and eventually misunderstood. I tried to merge with the shrubbery. If a meanwhile can have its own meanwhile, I did have the self-possession to maintain a critical gaze towards the mansion because – come what may – I still intended to paint the unpaintable, viz. a residence so ordinary beyond its size, even the windows sunk back into their frames with a sense of paranoia. It would have seemed out of place in any picture-frame, out of place on any chocolate or jigsaw box. I would go as far as to say it would find no window of opportunity in even the least self-respecting of any photo album. In extremis, it would find no place anywhere – as mansion or mansion’s image.

Yet, despite all these factors, it did at least have the security of a locked door. And a bell that rung but was never answered. I heard heavy steps behind me – as if I was in turn being followed – but by somebody who did not have the same surreptitious grace as me to maintain a low profile within the shrubbery. I had proceeded on tip-toe. This person had heavy steps. I had the human feelings of fear and obtrusiveness. I was something that could not be avoided by power of sheer bodily existence. The one with heavy steps was a ghost, no doubt – because, when I turned, there was nobody there behind me and, when I turned again, there was nobody at the front door. In any event, thank goodness for that locked door. It was something that made the mansion a family house. Impenetrable but truly there. I had begun to wonder, you see. But still uncertain of my own position, I threw all caution to the wind and tore the photo into several pieces and then threw them after the caution. Imagine my dismay when I suddenly realised that the attachment was still attached to the email in electronic space. And I returned with more heavy steps down the garden path led by the prospect of painting the unpaintable, having just failed to describe the indescribable. And what commission I might have committed inside. Later, there was no bus waiting for me.

###

First, that mysterious ‘thing’ out at sea in the resort where I now lived appeared more distantly on the horizon than another of my photos indicated. It’s been there a few weeks: something I spotted on my near-daily constitutional between Holland-on-Sea and Clacton. I compared it to many things … but in truth it’s probably some sort of crane because I have since realised the nature of it in a wider context. The North Sea, day by day, has indeed since then become peppered with more strange contraptions, crane things and non-crane things, some small, some large, some stubby pins of striated silhouette along the horizon, some things moving positions between one day and the next, some stubbornly fixed … the whole expanse turning into tantamount to a giant deep-flooded building-site.

I now gather via some news-osmosis that they are building a wind farm of turbines out there. How does one gather the wind, though? Reap it? Rape seed oil it? Where’s the wind’s stockpile of winter feed for the cruel months ahead? One of the contraptions out at sea does indeed look like a giant ploughshare, another one a giant (although tiny to me on the shore) feeding-trough (full of mussel stew?). Over the years, I’ve heard the wind moaning down my chimney like a beast of burden troubled by its berth in the sky … by its need to be milked. The sea’s waves themselves are configured in my imagination like giant lemmings, finishing each of their lives upon the edge of the present moment in a collapsing spray … escaping the windfarmers and their cull. But the more I think of it the more my thoughts touch the blurred margins of fiction, a fiction that is possibly realler than truth, as most fictions surely are. Shorely are. I laugh as…

…once upon time, a windfarmer whom I only knew as Mr Archer — who had recently been billeted in the residence next to mine and mysteriously replacing my previous neighbour without weather warning or explanation other than convenience of the state machine — spoke to me not only of the state farming the winds, as they were, but manufacturing more winds than were naturally formed by the weather – a gusty cycle of fronts, the first set of perpetual-motions known to man. Farming methods that blow into existence the wind that it later farms, one feeding the other, leading to a huge time-frame of wind and winter: tossing what I’ve always seen as the living, breathing ‘sea-monster’ into a set of furious moods that eventually become a single mood that we, as people, will soon share by shore or by ploughshare. My new neighbour called Archer was worried and hoped I would write about it on my blog so that everyone would then know the repercussions of farmly flatulence that was about to bring every stink-gull home to roost from the funnels of sea-stench, a stench previously disguised by careful godly weather-systems that had the human good at heart, ie. benign weather-systems that would soon be swept away by state-kindled miasma and force-ten farts. Heavy steps towards another locked door of woke dreams. The heavy footprints of new beasts of burden rearing from new-born monster waves to trample our real arable and dairy farms with the cloven hoofs of gale and stink-gull. 

This must be stopped! Halt the wind farms, I say! Before it is too late. Let’s live instead in a better fiction than this, a fiction which art our true heaven. Not, I claim, a heaven becalmed upon a Sargasso Sea, as such, but one at least beached upon a balm-breezy death that we can favour with our eager anticipation for its softly flighted glider-angels. Rather that, I say, than fear for a storm-tossed death of utter nothingness mis-fictioned with imaginary fright-hurricanes, all in turn sown with braying hoof-herds and croaking stink-gulls with fishy Lovecraftian tentacles hanging from their beaks. And a woman called Mrs Archer who happened to be my wife now staring at me from the roof of our bungalow, surrounded by solar panels. The equivalent to a  Mansion’s Torque of Turbines creating wind instead of using it.