The Mansion of Existence

 ’A Symphony in Three Movements’

There was no doubt in my mind that I was being stalked — and this was by a creature which, if it had been human, I would have, at all costs, tried to throw off my trail at the first opportunity.

There is nothing worse than someone who seeks an essence of hope from you for their own use while following you from street to street even as they try to seek attention from you beyond their initial attempt to converse on subjects with which you cannot at all sensibly engage. Even worse, when you cold-shoulder them, they continue to hang at a greater distance from you but still visible in pursuit of engaging you in conversation and feeding off your positive attitude to life. The very worst, however, is when they give the impression of vanishing (tail between their legs) into the night but you remain aware that they continue to keep you within their sights — surreptitiously — from behind each cold, damp corner. Still hopeful for your attention.

An essence of hope. A phrase that kept going around inside my head even while the sun was now doing its hidden-by-clouds routine. But I knew it was still there and I sensed that clouds could only veil rather than obliterate me from the follower’s persistent gaze. A stalker that stalked from the sky was at a decided advantage when compared to a landlocked one. A helicopter I could have handled, especially with the clattering noise it made. Or even a balloon with a basket, a finite and distinct craft as that would have been. But an all-pervading silent sun as stalker was a different ball-game.

I am home now in bed, thank goodness. Odd that I am now beset with hopes, hopes, two by two, as if entering an ark of hopes, pairs of hopes that I experience as if from outside of them, objectively recognising each pair of hopes as hopes but knowing that at least half of my mind is hoping them for real — quite unlike the sense of a stalking sun that was earlier so tangible and so unhope-like, nightmarish with more a heat-death than warmth.

The latest pair of hopes involved the old jacket part of my school uniform, then called a blazer. A blazer unlike the sun! It was from fifty years before and the badge on its front pocket denoted to which of the four School Houses I belonged. You had rediscovered your school badge, now detached from the blazer, in an envelope: and you were sliding it out into view, as if you had travelled back with it from the land-where-lost-things-lived. All your life, you knew, there had been things you had hoped for but sadly lost; other things that had been merely utilitarian and quickly forgotten after losing them; more things that you never had in the first place but they still claimed ownership by you; and a few things, oddly, that even claimed ownership of you. Or permutations of such things, residing in the land where lost things always resided. Like that school badge. And at that thought, you wept uncontrollably.

****

‘Claps of thunder, flaps of weather, flaps of leather, at the end of my tether.’ I sang to myself – like a sudden sun out of darkness, without rhyme or reason: well, there was some sort of rhyme, but you know what I mean – as I sat on the top of the double-decker bus. I sat at the front, hoping that boyhood would soon be something better, pretending that I was driving, holding the window safety-bar and pushing it in one direction or another but, I guess, I imagined it was a tiller of a canal-boat, because I pushed it to the left for the bus to turn right and pushed it to the right for the bus to turn left. 

‘Claps of thunder, flaps of weather, flaps of weather, at the end of my tether.’ Suddenly, the bus…

Before I tell you exactly what happened, let me reminisce for a while. The opposite of hope. On top of most buses in those olden days, there were signs saying things like “no spitting”, “no standing” etc. and on the back of each seat below a five-inch metal ratchment there was a sign saying “stubber”, although it acted both as a stubber and a serrated surface for red-headed lucifers. Each match a burst of a tiny sun. In view of that stubber, you can assume there were no “no smoking” signs. Also, there was a circular mirror-thing or porthole in the top right hand corner at the front. I often wondered what that was. An empty cold grey glass sun, as it were. Invariably, there were other passengers upstairs. Like today. I turned and flapped my tongue at them. I didn’t spit, though. I definitely didn’t spit, m’lord.



There was one particular man toward the back who bent forward in his seat and seemed to be rubbing the front of his forehead quite fast along the seat-back that was in front of him. And hence on its stubber. Back and forth, it went. Flaps of this, flaps of that.

 A few minutes later, I sensed something had happened behind me as I momentarily took my eye off the road ahead to check what that something was. A hubbub that was worthy of its name even though there was only one person who made this hubbub. The man’s head had burst into flame.

 I pointed to a sign close to the ‘no spitting’ one. “No butting”, I read aloud officiously. No butting, no cutting, no grubbing, no rubbing. 



Meantime, the side of the bus had scraped sickeningly along the side of an old mansion wall. I blamed myself. But blame was irrelevant really. Blame is often a waste ‘in extremis’. Blame is the opposite of hope.

 Eight small jagged pieces of the mansion’s roof cluttered a runnel, just in front of my personal bus windscreen up top.

I thought of a demon barber stropping his blade along my tongue. And a train window that had a leather tongue inside. At least a train needn’t be driven by passengers. Trains had a man at the front to do that, a man with a huge face covering the whole front boiler. Each coal in his tank engine another sudden burst of a less tiny sun. Followed by billows of steam. 

The last thing I think I thought was the circular mirror-thing in the top right hand corner of the bus’s top-deck – with a single huge vertical  eye blinking in it. Beady beady, greedy, greedy. 

Suddenly, the sparks milling through the open side-window caught me alight. A pity I couldn’t spit on myself.



Heaven and Hell are situated on the same storey of existence’s own mansion, not Heaven above and Hell below, as many seem to believe. So, for one of them you need to turn left to reach, the other right. But I did not know which was which. 

I hoped, yes hoped to strike lucky.

****

You were praying to whomsoever might listen to hopeful prayers for the sun to arrive. Was it there, with either the blended yellows and bird-speckled oranges or curdled greys and shades of white cloud, depending on the weather, to disperse the shifting blacknesses of night: thus providing both the prayed-to and prayed-for as a singular sun?

Praying to the sun for itself, you soon found your prayers answered by means of a tiny glimmer of non-night starting to stretch along the sea’s horizon from a pin-point where you guessed the sun was due eventually to rise. Somehow the bus ride had taken you here from the city. The next night, however, you assumed, the sun would not come at all – every hope gone – so, whose prayers would go unanswered, whose turn indeed would it be to expect the sun but never to see it, because the one who prayed had died or because the sun itself as the one prayed-to and prayed-for had died instead, or because the prayer had died upon your very lips even as you spoke it, all of us becoming a singular non-existence pre-dating the night itself? An essence of prayer’s hope extinguished. Or prayers crossing in the night like collisive ships.

But do Dawns and Dusks as well as Days and Nights themselves pray to higher levels of prayer-receipt — praying for their own very existence, praying to souls such as yours in the form of a prayer-answering service that was higher even than God’s when based on their belief that you did not believe in God, thus making you theoretically supreme in your own being, in your own mansion of existence? Or did prayers merely answer other prayers? The prayers and hopes of nobody. Collusive, as well as collisive.

And as the sun’s dawn finally rose as it always has done so far, you knew that any essence of hope is that hope is always followed or stalked but hope can never be fulfilled, never reached . For if hope is fulfilled, then hope is stubbed out. You waited at an empty bus stop.