THE BRASSO GHOST
Thanks to yesterday’s interesting young lady inviting me and four others into her well-seasoned engine room complex, a hub of engineering contained within the depths of the moored ‘My Friend’ ship, yes, thanks to her, a ghost story was prompted in me today. I’ve long been an admirer of Warhol, although most people laugh at me, but when I saw seemingly endless rows of Brasso canisters lined up in the engine room, one of which was upside down, I knew I had been right all along about my artistic tastes, if not my penchant for blank stories that were often encouraged by listening to John Cage music as a quelling of the chitter chatter around me! Even ghosts need their social interaction and the letting off of steam by mere exchanged gossip or, more emotionally, heartfelt explanations about their individual lives. And, looking around me, the green pistons and items of other heavy-duty leverage, too, seemed to mutter things to each other silently. The story told to us by the young lady involved an engine-room man whose obsession was such Brasso elbow grease, until some joker turned a single canister of it upside down amidst a neat row of them and the assiduous man literally died of a broken symmetry from the breakdown of the rules that his OCD dictated…. unless I got the story wrong. Whatever the case, the brass plaque to his memory in the engine room remains highly polished day in and day out without anyone now polishing it! And that’s where I assumed a ghost must be at play, and if not the Brasso man’s ghost it was the ghost of sound that emanated as seeming music from the huge red funnels on the ship’s decks as aided and abetted by the old Dansette record players and Bakelite wirelesses and tireless reel-to-reels that peppered the place from the top deck’s wheel house to the very engine room where I forged future memories for my own ghost story today. A steerage in frissons with spooks as well as spanners in the pipelines. A ghost that wandered the ether with sapphire styluses and tapes that jingle-jangled to the clatter of ancient tambourine men. It was there, in the ether, I eventually met the Brasso man face to face, and he smiled at my reference to pop art for the pirate pop ship that is our planet. And I smiled back at my new-found friend. I told him, as part of our emotional small-talk, that I had — unnoticed by the young lady and my four companions — turned the upside down canister the right way up.
***
THE ORLOP DECK
Humphrey Loader knew exactly what was meant by the orlop deck when he was ‘allowed’ to stow away on the Sixpenny Queen. The sailors he had been bevying with in a peninsula inn smuggled him aboard and then they pointed to the said deck as the site for his bivvy bag. He would not be comfortable, he was certain, but the thrum of the cables around him would keep him company at least. The destination of the ship would surely make his restless nights worthwhile. A destination that has no business in this narration. But the thing they forgot to tell Humphrey was the deck’s ghost, an overloop of rope still in the far corner being the means whereby it had ended its human days and become a darkly luminous spirit. Even if Humphrey had known about it, he would have shrugged his shoulders and simply hummed along with the thrumming cables and tried to sleep via such queer lullabies of the swaying deep.
The ship had set sail a day ago, after he had been semi-introduced to the captain whose blind eye to such matters was obvious by the look on the latter’s face. Humphrey was glad that he was an acceptable cargo, if an illicit one. Humphrey heard the last cargo’s loading and lading before the engine room below him made any thrumming imperceptible within such machinery vibrations. He had assumed, by first impressions, that it was a sailing ship, but now realised that the first part of the journey at least was aided by an engine. The noises of pistons had at last faded into silence and the only interruption was the more staccato creaking of the rigging, sufficiently aloud to penetrate as far as the orlop.
He somehow began to feel he had stowed away as a Visitor from Porlock to abridge any narration of the Sixpenny Queen’s voyage across unmapped oceans towards a destination unknown to anyone who only read about the voyage here. That would have been a far more durable story than anything that can be told about Humphrey Loader whose fable seemed to become fatally foreshortened — on the second night aboard — by a sudden glance towards a certain shadow of a rope. An overlapping shadow that was cast by an equally unknown light glowing lambently within the otherwise dark deck’s dire drumming of suspense.
***
THE FRANGIPANE ESCAPADE
Adam’s angina was often painful and, therefore, the body doctor had supplied him with a newly invented pump that ‘simply’ needed to be attached to an inlet valve from his left elbow to help the symptoms. It looked like an old-fashioned toothbrush that was used by Adam’s ancestors before means were found for them to floss and scale without the involvement of a hygienist. Why the elbow, one might have asked, without an isthmus already existing between arm and chest. The pump was supposed to be greased at both ends with specially sugared almond cream before a careful dual insertion and was allowed to act as an artificial filter that bypassed the shoulder joint by such a bridge below it. A filter that worked in both directions of flow, accompanied by a grinding noise that was more associated with a dentist than any other health professional. Why almond cream, one might have asked. But Adam assumed it was the well-known effect of almonds to lower blood sugar levels, to relieve blood pressure, and to bring cholesterol levels down. It was just that the blood pressure needed to be raised in some places and lowered in others, he guessed, as he listened to the sounds that severely set his teeth on edge. “A frangible plate D closes the end of barrel A, but blows out above a certain pressure to avoid bursting strain in the pump.” The instructions were unclear to him, and this is only one example sentence lifted from the leaflet typical of so many leaflets left inside medical treatment packaging that most patients were too impatient to read. Two-way filters always need a ‘frangible plate’ as a breakable baffle within it. Adam smiled. The pain had vanished. The whole procedure and its complications were sufficiently brain-numbing to disguise any terminal pains. A form of palliative care by confectionery easements. A pity about the figurative ague caused by a lifetime of tooth decay that endures as a form of pain to the very end.
Vincent Van Gogh’s Almond Blossom ‘as a fragile beauty’:
***
THE APPALACHIAN SUITE
Lee, a floating voter, is appalled by most of what happens these days. The craggy ridge that divides us, the seemingly endless ricochet of serial incidents that beggar belief. Who can possibly cross that ridge with unequivocal welcoming of each other, Lee wonders. Such wondering occurred to Lee while equipping the outer self with climbing gear galore. Once a wanderer of plateaux, now a wonderer at these so-called heights, Lee surveys the apparently neat graph-like rhythms of the range that, when closer up, would become an irregular ruggedness instead. How would Lee cope with such a land of misbegotten angles on the outer level and the hidden crevices on the inner? When appalled, people tend to believe they are indeed appalled. Lee was no different. Rage would literally take him across the rugged range. If there’d been less rage, Lee would have more likely failed at the first outcrop of impending cliff edge without even a sea to see. But such rage belied Lee’s encroaching age as well as an ability to cross the range that spread further in an arc before the aged eyes themselves. Floaters just bedevilled the perception, giving imagination full scope for dystopias to ferment. Pogroms at every corner disguised what was really going on beneath, as Lee even toppled into a pitfall between the peaks that were increasingly veiled by coils of mist and mystique.
Floaters were eventually able to exist without the need of human eyesight to see them. Time progressed and musical suites of calmative coping became serially endemic but without anyone around to hear them. The mindless state of being appalled was no more. Only the visionary craft in the sky remained; they resembled the mountainous motes that once ghosted through aged eyes. Instead of revival, Lee’s body was only exhumed. But by whom?
***
THE DOG PATH
Following uphill dog paths, parting hazels, crossing thickets upright, they reached the ridge of the woods. From here, they could see out. The sun, striking down the slope of trees, glittered over the film of green-white buds: a gummy smell was drawn out in the warm afternoon haze.” — The Death of the Heart (Elizabeth Bowen)
“….she squeezed along the dog-paths with her heart in her mouth and a cold and horrible feeling she was going to find a dead cat. […] It was full of secret dog-paths threading between enormous tussocks of bramble, underneath the brambles there were hollow places like caves; there were hawthorns one could climb for a survey and, about the middle, a clump of elders gave out a stuffy sweetish smell.” — The Jungle (Elizabeth Bowen)
Doglegs are sharp bends in paths or in roads or tracks or even in rivers. Just like those tight corners in the Queensway zigzag slopes near where I live in Holland on Sea. A concertina by Stravinsky, I often thought. Played today on a French accordion.
When considering doglegs, I wonder whether dog-paths are today’s unsurprising accompaniment to El…Bowen’s endemic elbows? Elbows sit below my head-resting hands, each elbow being a tight bend in itself, or are both representatives of the tightening bands around my chest?
Intentions started this off as telling a story, but thanks to Nicolas Ashley, it’s become a new searchlight upon the fiction of Elizabeth Bowen, with which I have been preoccupied for much of my life, as many of my readers will attest. Yet this is a story I am determined to tell, becoming eventually as fictional as fiction itself. A story with a happy ending when, after exploring the mazy jungle of dog-paths, I stagger into the weathered mansion where an aproned lady called Jane is preparing a silver-tiered carrier of cream cakes. The comforting tea is already infusing in the samovar with a sweetish aroma like confectionery that already seems to heal, by osmosis, any nettle stings I have gathered along the dog-paths.. And I am later sitting in the corner like an artificial invention of an intelligence that exists outside us all. Holding my chest as if suffering a severe attack of frangipane. I remember the particular overgrown dog path that, earlier today, led, as ever, to my named and now dying Yieldingtree with its twin doglegs, near the sea… Remembering my grandma, too, Alice Maude Whitear in Wonderland, born, just as Elizabeth Bowen was, in 1899. Resembling her, too.
I look up from my day-dreaming to see if Jane’s being mother vis à vis the tea pouring. And to see which bit was fiction, and which was real.
“Or, was the elder masking a secret gateway, outlet of a precipitous brambled dog-path to the river? […] Maud made her sedate way up to the house by the track used by the water-cart; not for her were dog-paths down one of which Jane had made her ecstatic descent. Instinct had not lied: tea was on the table.” — A World of Love (Elizabeth Bowen)
My gestalt reviews of all stories and novel chapters of Elizabeth Bowen : https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/31260-2/
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