RUNWAY
Del Shannon inserted the A into the title before he sang his song and, once sung, sung again. And as Phoebe remembered the grooves of the disc flattening onto the revolving mat having fallen from the height of the autochanger’s elbow, she already hummed the organ’s solo interlude. Phoebe herself was the ultimate runaway, she felt, as she watched a simulation of an aircraft on the screen, a futuristic vehicle about to leave its own earthen grooves for the open skies. She threw herself open to the projection of self into a cockpit specially designed for those pilots who had not been taught how to control the dashboard properly. To be responsible for those souls aboard was a thought too far, as she shrunk back into her head, but any means of dispersal or, as they said in other places, diaspora, justified the ends. A dying planet was a dying planet, no getting away from it, she thought.
As the runway eventually formed its own vanishing-point perspective, she visualised rail tracks on either side, between which the river of airflows slowly became thermals and eventually buoyancy. But the rail tracks were real even if she wasn’t. There was a drag she couldn’t account for, and she remembered the crowds that had crammed into the seats in the hull behind her. Small boats were as nothing to this now spluttering beast she needed to tame. Time to withdraw from the simulation, before she found herself trapped. Shrieks behind her echoing the constant “Why… why-why-why-why-why” of the engines.
Phoebe examined the autochange arm closely and imagined it as a close-up photograph of something artistically unrecognisable. Its bent elbow was now blurred like an unsightly floater in the eye, becoming a configuration much like an A. And the music was the all screaming, all shrieking organ solo and no singing.
***
WHEN THE DOGS HAVE GONE
The flower shop was not called a florist for some reason. The meat shop was euphemistically just that, although men in aprons with axes worked brutally in the back room. The medicine shop had large wholly decorative bottles of coloured liquid in its front window. The clothes shop boasted still-life mannequins galore. The seaside town of Tantton seemed neither in the past nor in the future. And its learning place ever thrived with fresh little ones to stock its desks. And other people arrived from outside called day trippers who still fell over themselves to come and see Tanntton’s sights. A shame most of them, though, arrived accompanied by awful barking shapes on temporary leads.
The Tantton man called Arthur, who ran a food collection place he playfully called Chish and Fips, was ever busy with newspaper packages that seeped sour drips of salty brine. He even had special smaller portions for any visiting pets. But these were bigger than those packages offered for the little people more loosely towed in the wake of any longer strides. It was the way that Arthur spoke the words ‘the little people’ with a heavy Celtic lilt that made the holiday portals seem wider. He knew what he meant, and so, by sheer instinct, did many of his visiting customers. Those small fry called by that lilting expression, though, were often treated second class to the pets themselves, especially the now leaderless pets that kept on barking and dodging in and out of the Tantton residents’ feet! Residents who considered it likely that, in the various inland towns whence the trippers came, such ‘little people’ were few and far between, thus leaving many of the desks quite bare. Inkwells empty, too.
Arthur relaxed as dusk settled and the trippers with their yappers had already boarded charabancs out of Tantton. He whistled as he locked up the door of Chish and Fips. He walked the silent streets. He heard the distant cracking of bones in the meat shop even when those who worked there should have by now gone home, too. Such cracking often went on well past midnight. The flower shop was still open however, staffed by the apothecary who was moonlighting. Arthur decided to drop in and buy a posy for his dear patient wife. And a bottle of something or other that he claimed was medicinal.
***
PICKLED FENNEL
I once heard this was a recipe from the French Revolution, but I could never confirm the authenticity of the reference. Such a crunchy thing seemed like anathema to me, anyway. A theme to be obviated by any means possible for fear of what it may lead either by real ascertainable connections or the capricious means of word association.
Whichever way it was, the thoughts such algorithms evoked soon became a situation more fearful than a frayed ceiling confronting the lady who slept under it — fearing the ceiling’s flawed whiteness might be an actual ghost that she knew at heart could never exist. The click of knitting needles or what sounded to be a click of knitting needles from the opposite side of the otherwise empty bedroom did not help her trying to fall asleep. She was the sort of person who often stayed awake — not to count any sheep whence the knitting wool derived — but to count anxieties and, yes, fears.
There were commonly two kinds of knitting wool — morling and shorling wool, harvested respectively from dead sheep and live sheep. Respectfully done in either instance, she hoped. Half awake, half asleep, her thoughts became affected by both states in overlap, as she returned to the opening theme of pickled fennel. In her mind’s eye, meanwhile, she wound any wool-gathering into a tight ball of it from wide spools of wool, as she once did at the knees of her grandmother, a great knitter as well as a seamstress with a Singer machine. A woman now too old to be alive, having been born in 1899, long after the French Revolution, true, but before algorithms were invented for knitting patterns to be available on line in advance of reaching the needles. Jab jab jab went a smaller needle to the sound of feet on an ancient rusted treadle. The ash growing longer and longer on the cigarette in her mouth, as the old woman fed the material through with her fingers.
But that made no sense of the opening theme. Any coda needed a more difficult unravelling of the movements in the room around her so as to arrive back at the start. Some said ‘ravel’ and ‘unravel’ had the same meaning, but she had never understood that. Her mouth was now untidily crunchy with a strange spicy substance not unlike old chew-baccy. The Queen of Hearts smiled.
“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrariwise, what it is, it wouldn’t be, and what it wouldn’t be, it would.” – Alice in Wonderland
***
THE RETURN OF THE ROVERS
Corrie turned to her bestie and smiled. They were both needlewomen from the top drawer of hand-sewing. Skilful in the patches of make-do-and-mend for kids, more artistic embroidery and optimal vents in men’s tailored suits. But best of all they loved combining general knitting with their own psychological propensity towards cross-stitch. Quilting was still a no-no, though. But never say quit! Indeed, never say never, which makes a mockery of the first never!
The second lady stared across the room at Corrie and wondered why she never called her by her name. Maybe she feared getting the name of presidents mixed up. An in-joke that would soon grow stale. She could not possibly countenance the fact that a bestie like Corrie didn’t actually know her name. They had gone to school together, after all. But the mind in advancing age can play many tricks. Like the difference between stray cottonthreads and teased-out straggles and frayed edges and hung rovings. Those fiddly endings that often make a finished work so utterly un-neat. She often picked through remnants just to get them ready for Corrie and herself to make-do-and-mend as well as to optimise into finer handiwork. She pulled at the tantalising tassels and tortuous tags. Her teeth bit and tugged at resistant ravels and those everpresent rovings. The latter seemed to spread as soon as look at them, moving like ladders did in nylon stockings, except here such ladders left their rungs behind like impediments in otherwise smooth skeins. Rovings become intrepid rovers.
As the clock struck suppertime, Corrie replaced her needles in the drawer marked seven. Her bestie’s needles lived at number nine. Next door neighbours, after all these years of so-so relations with each other as besties often have. But most of the time, by many a trick or treat, they got on. Their husbands, dressed in cast-offs, waited for them at home. They had sat anxiously in threadbare armchairs for many years dreading the respective ghosts of their erstwhile widows to turn up their trousers again. The return of the rovers as ravelled in frayed sheets.
***
THE MACARONI PEOPLE
The Macaroni People did exist in fashionable eighteenth century history, but enough of them! You can look them up. This single mention is more than enough. I want to talk about the Macaroni People today or, as some call them, the Macaroni Madness, even the Macaroni Miracle, depending on one’s point of view. ‘Elbow Pasta’ — look this up, too! — is a form of Macaroni. Yet, when, in these days, politicians tend to be straight up and down, or soft in the middle, either divisive or all-embracing, it’s important to get terminology right. Covered in cheese. Or with sugar and raisins, as a more wiggly form of the rice pud one was given in the old school canteen. Macmillan was prime minister then. And he said we never had it so good. Well, I begged to differ. Now I begin to agree.
Only last night I was visited by figures on wobbly stilts and they sported what I can only call macaroons as heads. In the days of the Lyon’s Corner House, such cakes were part of the choice on silver tiered cakestands that stood among the teapot and teacups, when listening to the Max Jaffa ensemble in the corner of the room, a corner with a small c. A house made of corners, and cream cornets as companions for the macaroons. The architecture outside had a frontage of leering mascarons (look the latter up on Wikipedia!)
Indeed, Lyons without lions, just rows of gurning masks. And the Macaroni Medley played on mandolins for the teatime customers to swoon at. The clink of cup and saucer just one ingredient to accompany the arrival on stage of living mannequins upon taller, sturdier stilts, more like uncooked spaghetti than al dente manicotti. The scrape of chalk on some hidden blackboard made me think of the school canteen again, and the miniature dumplings that were often as hard as bullets. Treacle tart was only just around the corner. Daydreaming with a small d is never the same as being back in the Good Old Days for real. Towards the end of my life, I often soar with my eyes into the sky to see the true epiphany of Macaroni Madness as the shapes of people wavering like shadows with loose olecranons, miraculously as high as the clouds are. Look up at them!
No comments:
Post a Comment