SHOWER TALK
Angus knew many people had their best thoughts when showering themselves at the beginning of the day. Many, too, sang songs there. A few, though, actually talked to themselves, as if addressing nobody but the power-driven spray that spread over them in fleeting seconds of time and then vanished down the outlet grille. Angus’ opening gambit of speech — after first stepping into the blinding palaver of potential lather that became as ephemeral as life itself — was to enunciate in a false voice of adopted slang: “Hello, John’s gotta new mottah!” The ‘o’ in the corrupted spelling of ‘mottah’ being strung out beyond temporality to represent ‘motor’ as a stretched limo. ‘Hello’, too, extended into gustily drawled syllables of mock Cockney. He somehow knew subconsciously that this word was often spelt as ‘hallo’ or ‘hullo’. Rarely the latter, although he’d seen it thus in official print.
Then, as if any sort of behaviour were allowed without being called weird, he told himself short stories in the shower — aloud! Short stories that were shortened into Drabbles — the latter being the official dictionary term for witty caprices of prose comprising exactly one hundred words each. Soon as spoken, though, forgotten. Otherwise, Angus would’ve had a million such Drabbles to impart to paper and posterity. Alexei Sayle, the instigator by means of his song’s expression serving as the title of each one, would be proud to have been such a prompter of potential literature via the whimsical auspices of Angus himself, even though any such triggered Drabbles tended to fizzle out into the residual dribbles of the shower’s now spent motive force. An unseemly spluttering that became a single drip that dangled seemingly forever from the drooping head.
The actual caprice above was not a Drabble at all, Angus guessed by miscounting its words. But it was one simply about one — a miniature doubled down upon paper in the showy longhand of official perpetuity by someone else whose proper name posterity falsely shortened to John.
***
A TOWN CALLED FARRAGO
I find myself gradually becoming more forgetful. However, it is fascinating to study, in real-time, the gestalt of this personal entropy phenomenon from within myself. A slip solipsism during which process my acts of music listening, dabbling in photography and writing fiction miniatures are an invaluable support along with the equally invaluable support of my close family, closely followed by my on-line ‘friends’ whom I ‘follow’, some of them quite closely, who may be closely reading this. Closeness as a form of unknown beyonds. Reading or reviewing fiction books, processes increasingly beyond me, with concentration now creating farragos of meaning and purpose instead of synchronicities and serendipities. Connections only disconnect, yes, no big deal. Just wanted to put all this out there.
Although your fresh fiction books are now bereft of my attention, they will still exist without me. As does everything else, but where does truth stop and fiction begin, the exhausted stranger wonders, checking his watch to see if it’s his best time he’s done today or not. Closely followed, he stares into a shop window and becomes a breathless character in a story that this should have been at the start. A shop window with nothing but minimal residua behind it, and most of the other shops are shuttered, but many people still mill about on the sea front or flap about in the sluggish sea, especially today when confusion reigns as a synonym of an earlier word I have now forgotten. The pier still thrives and the sea front’s gardens are well cultivated but the town’s hinterland is more of a conundrum. A fiction miniature that becomes a mock marathon of Innsmouth amphibians like wild mini-brains scattering from the Pavilion Bowl intent on winning the marathon race in different directions of marked-out routes, with breaths lost at each beat of their presumed hearts. It is what it is forever; you can even read it beyond its finishing line because the words can chase themselves beyond the throwing arcs of an umpire’s time measurement — even after the author of this forgotten farrago has vanished and thus ceased writing it. Closely followed by what never followed it at all. And I try to disown most of its racing beyond its own beyond, but I know the invaluable paragraph above this second paragraph still stands. Its ink never running.
***
THE BLIGHTED WRANGLER
Candlelight hardly ever works well on dark breezy beaches. Whether it was dealing with disputes between people or the handling of horses, there was no doubt that Edwin could be called a wrangler supreme. I suppose that was because he was effective at both activities, if not simultaneously! Georgina first met Edwin when she, too, was groomed to be a groom while at an important racing stable doubling as a ranch in the USA. And they both got involved in political divisions amid the rest of the stable staff, a climate of prejudices that prevailed at that time and in that place, and the nature of the bitter polarities involved can now be easily empathised with. Since then, history has passed on, as it always does, and the pair of them coincidentally parted company on the cusp of the Big Change. But, by complete chance, they met again in England during this country’s latest Civil War, on the north east Essex coast, where they happened to be employed as camp adjutants on the edge of an erstwhile seaside holiday resort. A camp once called Butlins long before either had been born. They had been issued with neighbouring chalets that were more like bivouacs, and Georgina could not help noticing that Edwin had aged considerably, far more so than the number of ensued years should have accounted for. A strawberry mark in the shape of a tiny face had appeared on his right elbow as if it had always been a birthmark. But she knew it wasn’t, until, she began to doubt if he was the same man, despite having common memories with her from when they were supposedly in America together. There was something slightly ‘off’ in his behaviour or demeanour that nagged at her. Something out of kilter with the man she used to know. Not a previous fling exactly, but certainly a friendship that went beyond friendship. It was no accident that the word ‘blight’ was only one letter more than ‘light’, or the latter one letter short, and which of them articulated this oblique conceit remains a type of mystery that one stares into the grey waves of the North Sea to somehow solve. She imagined herself back into the old days on the so-called ranch, wondering which branch of destiny each had taken since then. Both self-evidently seemed to have been through the wringer. On later scrutiny close-up, she saw that the tiny face on his elbow was hers. Still, she often tended to see faces in the clouds when anybody else would see none. It depended on the light, and whether the light was coming or going. A glow, glimmer, twinkle or direct beam in equine eyes to be tamed. A scarlet sparkle from a fire’s reflection in a stirrup cup of celebratory wine. And Georgina heard Edwin’s whispers about wars. Wars for her ears alone. Strangely calming rather than inflaming whispers as they shivered — shilly-shallying together on the cold sand — wondering whether to break open the tins of beef-jerky they had stolen from a beach hut near the open concrete wastes where the Butlins holiday camp used to be situated before the Big Change was finally flung across the Atlantic, later to slowly infiltrate England. But it was the latter country that had already snuffed out its light by more than just the figurative red sea’s division from nearer neighbours across a far narrower body of waves than the Atlantic. Whispers can be mangled in both directions of sound, squeezing echoes into roughly ranged ranks of tamed insistence. Mark my words.
***
SPIKY BALLS
The singular star rose prematurely, even before dawn was possible. Then another, and another, static meteors or asteroids, as they sparkled steadfastly and, once risen, remained in perfect stasis. If stars’ sparkles could be described as spikes, these were the nearest to the latter that George had witnessed to being such. He had himself risen before dawn, thinking tritely that it is ever darkest just before dawn, but, even now, dawn seemed as far away as ever, with no sign of its presence moving like a glowing worm along the still invisible horizon.
To imagine finite borders to reality was as easy as daydreaming within durably daydreamy minds. George perched himself on his bungalow’s stoep and tried to outstare the stationary stars. Were these signs that the borders of anyone’s mind had already been transcended and he was witnessing something his mind did not understand even if he himself did. If such distinctions were possible.
“Hey, George, why you up?”
The voice he heard from the eaves area of the bungalow was one with which he was long familiar. But he had only started mourning its absence since an untimely passing a few months before.
“Just morning star-gazing, my dear,” he heard his own voice respond.
“It is nowhere near morning, George. Get back to bed!”
By now, the spiky points of light had sphered out into blobs or bobbles, as tiny as they were circular. They were no longer bearing suspect outer streaks as appendages or pointing fingers that betokened whatever journeyed forth upon their beams had already left and were even now stooping towards where George sat chewing on the fat of old age, as if all cockpit airlocks within each star had turned shyly in on themselves. Not that George was fat at all. His own bony fingers pointed inward like ulna drifts.
He smiled as he felt a touch on his elbow as she had always touched him when wanting him to turn round and have a hug.
***
BELLEROPHON
Ralph worked as a bellhop in an American hotel where such assistants-for-guests were still called bellhops. Ralph being of Welsh / English stock knew that bellhops were once called bellboys in London in the heyday of hotels such as the Regent Palace, and eateries such as the Lyons Corner Houses that had silver tiers of assorted cakes to go with infusions of tea just like the Ritz. His English father had played in a Palm Court Ensemble in one such Corner House. Ralph’s Welsh mother had returned to Llanelli, hoping one day the Olympics would arrive there and she would be asked to be umpire for the Long Jump, and furnished with a stool together with flags of red and white to wave. This had been her forte. Which word returned Ralph’s thoughts to the Forte restaurant group that once employed him as a scullery assistant. How he had become a bellhop in America is a longer story than this one.
The New York hotel in question had suites named after Greek mythology such as Chimera and Pegasus, and somehow Ralph knew instinctively that reality was made up of connections and synchronicities that could not be accounted for by common sense. His mother had taught him this about life, while his scorning father once told him that he had his head in the clouds. But, defiantly, he said he hoped that would always be the case.
One day, he had to answer a call to the guests in the top floor Chimera suite and to fight off all manner of sexual importuning. But that was not important enough, however, to mar the rest of his life, but he carried thereafter a vague burden of boredom, but he obviated it with imaginary wings instead of his elbows and took a long run before escaping each day into the wide wide sky with a wild bray of abandon. Silver tears often ran down his leonine face. Somehow, though, his face should have been equine. Any consequence of the tears sculling along cracks in both cheeks below were merely coincidental even when hardening as an argent mineral. Meantime, from the mazy associations of thought, the random boreholes of fateful lucky-dip, the mingled destinies of desire, the chance encounters of wartime and the often obscure corners of history, there always arrive better things via the byways of intrinsic hope. He had learnt that from himself, and no one else.
***
HENDERSON’S ROTATOR CUFF
He knew, as Hender’s son, that whatever adversity affected the shoulder would end up creating audible creaks in the rest of the arm as well as visible winces aloft. He toyed with the gold fastener that clipped the bottom collar of his bad arm’s sleeve, an item of scape-coat that terminated with such a collar at the wrist, while primly covering the rest of the arm above, including the unmentionable joint on the way down, between the shoulder and the wrist. Hender had once taught his son that such a wrist collar should be like a turntable for a train, only turned when there was a train upon it who wanted to change direction on a single track. Hender had once written a text book about it and actually made some money from it when people used to buy and sell things on-line, long out of fashion since the Variable Wrist Syndrome was virally repetitive enough to stop people risking stationary mid-arm ulna drift. This compelled them to revive pen and paper devices before the fingers followed any unmentionable joints or hinges towards their own bony winces of pain and decay and ultimate namelessness as aforementioned fingers. Hender, by the hindmost of lost hindsight, if he were still alive, would no doubt feel guilty about his son’s ear that he had euphoniously muffed for not listening to him — incubating an infection that soon spread along the neck to the upper arm, after having the ear clipped if not muffed and, then, wrenched round as if there were no gracefully artful way to train pain into tamer symptoms or to reclaim, by cropped rotation, those bigoted people still stuck stationary on the same track all their lives without pen and paper to describe their reasons for such stubbornness. Why the ‘shoulder’ alone — with its traditional label still intact — was left incriminated (the arm having by now vanished, through being blocked from the mind up its own solipsistic sleeve) was something Hender had hypothesised about in his notable book, i.e. that something, before it escaped, had to, well, ‘accept’ blame with its proper name!
***
THE PINCERS’ RETURN
The scrutineer took the screenprint about crustaceans in hand and sighed. He, for one, knew well enough that ‘pincers’ as a tool was or were always pincers whether singular or plural. Unlike pincers on insects. Pincers as tools differed significantly from pliers in meaning and use. However, he did not want this to be a pedantic study in prescriptive wordplay, but how does one change a screenprint once it is a screenprint. Scrunch it into a ball and throw it away, he thought, then go back to the computer, make any alterations, then create a fresh screenprint. He wasn’t paid much as a scrutineer, so any extra time spent would be ill-spent, so he decided to let the screenprint stand and advise the customer how to attach it later as photo or pdf document. Cutting such corners however meant that the photo fell off the album page and he would have to go back to Boots the chemist for another negative. A further saving he made was not having a darkroom. But don’t waste macadam for a pennyworth of tar, as he thought the old saying went. He mused on his dilemma, considered the conundrum of pincers and whether they would ever be found again, having been lost in a bottomless tool chest in the garage. So he decided to bring in the Recruiters, a voluntary organisation of half seekers of lost changers and other remotes, and the other half being accomplices of the lost items themselves. Such individuals would be half the battle won at least. They knew where the pincers were, even if they weren’t letting on. He visited their office with Recruiters and Suppliers emblazoned on their barcode above the door that jingled when you opened it. Men looking like the Two Ronnies were standing behind the counter and staring as if they dared the scrutineer to fully enter and approach where they stood. They obviously had ‘find’ facilities on their handhelds as shortcuts, having omitted much of the narrative exchanges that intervened between recruitment and eventual supply of the lost item. And there is no way that the lost details can be supplied, as this is a screenprint, not an editable document. IMPORTANT: Hold it between the teeth of the supplied tool for fear of contamination via the fingers as prehensile pincers themselves. Maybe too late by now.
***
KINDRED HATS
They are kind, very kind. Gwen knew that the members stood or fell from that sense of hat, a togetherness they imparted to others, a complicity of like with like. That hat in particular, the Platonic Form of Hat with its intrinsic rouge radiating out in several directions toward other hats of various styles and fashions, some more fascinating than others. It was usually a pipe dream most of the time, but today it had become real. Gwen knew she was not allowed the luxury of ‘dream’, whether a pipe one or not, because dreaming only happened by accident as well as with a degree of self-indulgence that bordered on solipsism. Everything could be explained away by dream, but that was far too easy; it was that hat that mattered — that hat that sat as the optimum crowning of the day, whereby Kings and Queens were born. Gwen welcomed the other members of the Kindred Hats with a smile, as she knew instinctively it was a red letter day. A special epiphany, untarnished by religion or other false hopes. It just was. It was not only optimal, but perfect. Nobody spilt anything, nobody backbited during the manicured cucumber sandwiches, no quibbles of who was mother when the teapot of infused redbush took its turn in the proceedings, no quirks of unchiming humour over what was happening in the day to day world, indeed no political debate at all. It was a stasis of how she had ever dreamt a Kindred Hat day might be able to pass. With smiles and bonhomie, followed by a pre-organised trip to the zoo.
But, of course, that was where it went wrong. The turnstiles of entry were stiff to turn, indeed rusted up, the attendant surly, the giraffes with the shortest necks she had ever seen, tigers muted by their own mewing, and there was, of course, the essence of elephant itself. An elephant that had been left unmentioned in the room where they earlier had tea. Not a way to finish off this otherwise perfect expression of what had happened. An elephant with a huge smoking pipe in its mouth instead of a trunk. ‘Tsk, tsk,’ said Gwen, irritated.
***
OLIVE VILLA’S DEMISE
Is a large house with a frontage-wide balcony always a villa? The eponymous lady — who sat sedately on a bench in Clacton seafront’s ’Spanish Garden’ near the pier — often loved words for their own sake, and somebody she once knew bore a name that was in strong assonance with an alternative word for ‘passing’. She herself had been roughly named after a large balconied house in a small town just along the coast from where she sat; the town had Naze in its name, and the house in question was near a different pier belonging there from time immemorial. She remembered a small boy who lived in the house in the early 1950s, and, even further back, she summoned up a residential houseboat called ‘Onward’ moored on the Naze-named town’s backwaters, where, as it happened, the lady imagined she had lived with her own mother for a while during what they called ‘the war’. But that begged many questions of who begat whom in a seedy top-floor flat above what is now a Baguette shop even closer to the pier than the large house. How it was possible that the oasis of unworried time in the large house — with often friendly ghosts on the landing — should have thus happened between the seedy flat and the abode that has yet to be invented in this ‘storylet’, i.e. a small downtrodden terraced back-to-back — near the backwaters that flooded it during the 1953 storm — where the young boy later lived. Even the Baguette shop is now something different. Everything changes. Even wars bore their own alternate assonances. So, onward, soldier from Wales. Never falter, friendly ghost. The old lady lifted herself from the Clacton bench on a sea’s wide frontage and imagined where she had lived, throughout her life, abode by abode. Her last being on the tip of the Naze itself — unless she was beguiled by some well-begotten blend of life and death that made places and people in life, as collateral damage, seem confused by the words used to name them. Words for inanimate things, too, are often misnomers. The title given me by someone called Denise, however, prompted such craft afloat, whatever the passing storms of mind and body borne upon or within them. Each mooring-place is for pausing. And who knows if pauses ever pass. Each mother who gives shelter to another mother.
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