Post-Gestalt Fictions (12)

 HARTSHORN

Abel Martin was never sure whence his mother knew the word, but she used it when raising old-fashioned comestibles of a bready or cakey nature. Not that these yummy cookies were all raised; some remained defiantly flat and crisp from pressurised baking, as was her unspoken wish. No other additives required. A far reach from more modern cookies, let it be said, with which we are recurrently faced when negotiating the pervasive web. Shivered and slivered, as a similar process of the kneading digits. Meanwhile, the substance in question, which he learnt was flaked horn of hart, was good for the human heart, a means of revival, too, especially when old spinsters flounced off into faints, far more efficient for this purpose than any smelling salt, not that he ever noticed salt smelling of anything much, nor spinsters fainting. He did not know much about spinsters and whether he actually knew any. His mother, though, often had a fit of the vapours when he was caught stealing a cake before she thought it cool enough to eat. Your goodies are always cool enough to eat, he responded, however hot they may be. The parlance of his schooldays was ever worth enunciating in its full form rather than merely texting in shorthand. Time as an essence was its own high pressure method to bring people down lower, while we suppose that Abel, in his own precocious way, was as old-fashioned and conservative as his mother’s cooking, with all such personality traits ably assisted by the various vats of collective unconsciousness that still surround all of us in our daily lives, even though only a very few know how to access it without a strong password or even where the tiny spigot, useful for tapping it, was situated. Atomising as a means of becoming one’s own ghost, serving up a seemingly irrelevant thought. Abel, meantime, was able to know things without first knowing them, and this feat was via the chance portals that frequently turned up invisible to most as well as unbidden, a fact that was somehow inherent within his widening knowledge of himself. Mother smiled at him, as her unspoken words came through loud and clear, i.e. not to let any old ghosts arrive through such portals into the land of the living nor to allow anything already valuable today to seep away into them, because, whatever the pressure of time’s unruly storms, you could hardly ever get such valuables back again through any portal at all upon their discovery that the still living past was able to be so much more amenable for weathering than the storms of the present day — any hartshorn cookies included, his dear mother added with an abrupt laugh out loud. Salt-cellar ghosts are quite another matter, she added with a shiver — in hindsight, the last flaky additive of all.

***

ROMAN CASCADE

The Roman villa should bear future witness to a cascade of blinds, the collective noun for especially Venetian ones when in a raw, unhung state, blinds being of finer taste to Alex, instead of what he considered to be the more usual vestigial clunkiness of shutters upon any villa otherwise worth its salt. After popping a few of what he called cardamons, he decided his ambition would be to own such a villa, whether shuttered or blinded, it little mattered. As long as there was  a portrait of a face at the foot of its main  stairway, whether male or female. He soon discarded Olive Villa in Walton-on-the-Naze, Essex, as the building’s up front date of construction proved it was likely not to be Roman. There were, though, many proven Roman villas in England, and most of them were, of course, in Essex, including a singular example at Alresford that Alex eventually could afford, but it had neither of his prerequisites. It had a creek, though, one more suitable for the sound of shutters than blinds. So he painted his own painting, one with a cubist face and modernistic scarring, framing it with as expensive a frame as he could muster from a Clacton charity shop, and he somehow salvaged a so-called cascade of disused blinds from a Shelter Sale on Canvey Island, a place which he had never visited but he knew its infrastructure still must bear the same scars from the 1953 storm as the part of the coast where Alex himself lived. He had  managed to buy these blinds through an indirect method that must remain mysterious. Be assured it was nothing connected with the salt marshes near West Mersea that also housed its own Roman Villa.

Blinds were cheaper than any shutters, even mock ones. He had never really understood the highways and byways of history, especially history as distant as the Roman invasion of Britain, an event which assiduous teachers tried to teach him at Colchester Royal Grammar School using blackboards and rubbers. Everything that was scrawled up was erased, just like his own mind with clouds of psychological chalkdust, just after one teacher actually threw a hard-edged board rubber at him to catch his attention, but knocked any attention out of him instead, in what can only be called a cascade of blinds. From that point onwards , his mind spluttered like a damp candle, of the Roman variety, of course. And, later in life, Alex’s self-portrait at the bottom of the stairs stared back at him just as the visionary fountain of ghosts rattled the villa’s exterior blinds — an ambuscade of whitened shades borne upon a wind that the creek created. But more a haunted  breeze than any empty gales that history still harboured.

***

GELLING AGENT

Whether by means of sugar or agar-agar or even some other industrial complex beyond cooking, our own freelancers knew what they must do — blend the two: a culinary ingredient plus whatever chemical semi-solids are manufactured, as a by-product, for the mass market economy in manufacturing waste products just for their own sake, a process just as industrial as steelmaking or iron smelting. The essence of being freelance was ever thus especially with such eventualities envisaged by the darkest dystopias imaginable.  Gelling Agent, by name, gelling agent by actions. This particular maverick shall remain nameless other than by this self-assumed title that gave him rank as well as kudos, a chutzpah mixed with panache to give a most pliant charisma moulded into shapes by a thousand other selves, or many more, some of them actual elves as near-miss avatars that thrived both in the real world and on-line. Gelling Agent himself masqueraded as a popular chef on Tv, opening posh restaurants in his real name, but also as a magician with sleights of hand, he called legerdemains, and prestidigitations galore. One favourite trick of his was to line up a whole row of Brasso cans —Brasso being a common household cleaner of  many metals that needed polishing, yet his way of polishing was polishing off. An agent provacateur as well as Government spy, but which Government, and by whose instigation? To cut a long line of such cans or could-bes short, he replaced one of the Brasso containers with an old-fashioned salt-cellar full of what appeared to be its namesake substance suitable for sprinkling should it be turned upside down. Yet ithis substance seemed more pink than it was white. He stared at the studio camera and said to those watching from home: “Which of these containers is a ghost?” And he waved his hand along the line from one end of the studio to the other, as if they had, in hindsight, been set up in preparation for some form of domino rally, whereby tipping the end one over would set all the others upon their own tipping-points, only to halted by the steadfast salt-cellar, which would need to be hurdled over in order for the rest of the ‘dominos’ to complete their collapsing.  The deep and dark metaphor for today. Dank and depressing, too. A negligent and inelegant eglantine as a seemingly fragrant thorn between not just two roses but a whole endless queue of them. Who could complete the trick of vanishing now? Who the catalytic agent? Not this semi-solid cooper’s barrel in his famous fake fez, that’s for sure.

***

PURPLE ROSES

Goodbye Gladioli, hello Roses,’ said a latent Dalena in muted tones while slowly returning to a more substantial existence above the hand-mirror’s reflective surface that by now she could actually hold upright by her own will-power in opting for its use in surveying her face, still scarred despite the healing cryonics of the mirror’s glass where her existence had mostly lived for so long.

Tantamount to being resurrected to cultivate blue roses following her earlier success with gladioli, Dalena discovered, time and time again, that they always turned out to be purple.  Not even close to blue, in her fastidious but determined eyes. Likewise her rivals in this activity. Yet, she had reached the nearest cross-breeding liable to produce blueness in roses than anyone else, but she refused to sit back on her laurels, even if she was quite unready, in any event, to ‘own’ sufficient of her retrieved body to sit back on anything. 

Meanwhile, her apportioned apartment in the centre of Birmingham overlooking the central library, was literally littered with purple roses all discarded, in random splays and sprays, as not being blue enough. There were even other examples of her splicing, grafting, cleaving and breeding as trials for hard and fast colours that did not run loose nor lattice with soft light just as ladders in low denier stockings, often with colourless frailty, sometimes did.  These offcuts and offshoots approximated various shades or hues that real roses had never been able to flaunt. More or less successful examples of Florentine florescence, but never entirely blue, as they slowly shifted into corners where Dalena dared not peer for fear of the swelling purpleness incubating therein. The whispers were the worst.

Crying, she eventually retreated into her hand-mirror, leaving a hand, whether her own hand or someone else’s, holding it still upright. Therefore, she could not see that, reflected in its upward-facing glass, there was the purest essence of a blueness subsuming the whole room she’d just left. The whispers turned out to be those of ‘goodbye, Dalena’, hushed words sounding quietly gladiatorial in some sort of paradoxically victimless victory. Thumbs up, in irony, from some latter-day Florentine Caesar first salting then munching on his own named salad, thus, by such manoeuvres, causing the mirror to clatter from his now perceived grip to the petal-carpeted floor. Purple bruising, not scars at all. Or was it a quick turn-around into a thumbs down at the sudden shivering, then a bodily upheaval of shuddering at the cusp that bordered some edge of icy-blue cryonics?

***

SINKERS

Sinker anchor ballast bob counterbalance counterpoise counterweight mass pendulum plumb bob poundage rock sandbag stone. The nameless author went to town on the provision of the word ‘sinkers’, indeed he took it to heart, took it hook, line and salted doughnut! Until he, too, was tugged from being sunk by his own Slough of Despond, this being at least a little progress of the pilgrim that had been him. A slow mud that bubbled as if to cook him with coldness. A doe, a doe, a sweet sweet doe, limbs akimbo brought eventually into the light as an old and doddery man, coughing his soul out rather than swim against the thick tides that the light of day had threatened to become. Saved by a sinker. Helped by a bell. Straight after the first line of print as a hook for readers, and now he felt repeatedly in the thick of the text’s tense density. Only his thoughts available as needful counterweight to an unbalanced body. A sandbag against the encroaching weather outside. Wind and rain made as prehensile as him. Fraught with voices.

Yet the anchor tangled his feet, just as he got up for ablutions. The cough as insistent as the moist backwash that pursued him. He needed words to calm the soul, to ease the house’s plumbing that often seemed conjoined with his own, a spirit level with no sink gauge, not even a float accumulator, just a steady-state aura that the letters of Ghost Opter would have optimised as their own when merely fraternising with the spirits or spectres that were meant otherwise to be expunged — the photoset of grottoes, the hoopster in the ghettoes, the catalytic spotter from among the poorest of the poor. And more.

The swing shaft’s halt-line of the gateaux. The density of doughnuts remade as crocks in alleys. The stealth bombers soaring above the hobbity and the hop hop. The spirited plumping by the doddery residues of the swamp monster. Sinkers that the world around the author reskins as the would-be souls of bodies plunging and lunging through hidden grief and greed. Health and wealth weltering in the holy sinkhole of space. 

The pendulum at last swings the other way. The ballast of being who one surely is. The author thankfully as his own final anchor. 

***

MARSHMALLOW

There is a difference between marshmallow and marsh mallow, but which one most needs the intervention of the raconteur Gelling Agent to create? The story he told one day seemed to cross the boundary between both, but dealing with exactly neither of them.  The pale flower that straddled both entities was an ingredient in just one of them, too, that being the well-known sweet and sticky comestible  of childhood, and his story was in itself a sort of confectionery in words as after eight mints of meaning as well as of people and events within such meaning. This is not that story, but it is the story of its making. People and events that stood outside his story that ended up in it.

Except the people had not yet been given their names nor a means of identity — those details will come later in a future, as yet unwritten, story that will be just as miniaturised as the packaged sticky sweet in a crinkly bag of many others perfectly like them. And the event had not yet happened, but merely on the brink of happening should they be able to extricate themselves from the white glue that would stitch the pages together. One of these people, with a pale flower in his or her buttonhole, stuck a probing finger into the still slightly tacky glue and put the tiniest dob upon the tongue to savour what was assumed to be its sweetness. Yes, oh so utterly, butterfly tactile and, yes, sugary. The words themselves were manufactured from the darkest chocolate of high cocoa percentage, that when melted of their meaning, would cover any amassed retrievals of still pliable epoxy, and, lo! the buttonhole bloomed with its own endeavours to be what it was meant to be, an efflorescence of memory disguised as a schooldays nostalgia that never happened. 

Gelling Agent put down his pen, uncertain of the fixatives of his fiction, whether it was yet to be written and, if so, where was it now. Whether it marshalled further attempts at archiving a plot to be spun like candyfloss before committing its strands to a ghost story in potentially indelible print in celebration of All Hallows. Or merely a shallow exercise in something else altogether. A miasma of a million marshy landscapes without profile or definition. Even ghosts, however low-key or will-of-the-wispy, bear real half-sewn buttonholes — tangibly a series of death’s missutured wounds, each bearing a pale flower with possible purple middles. Gelling Agent never even reached the middle of his to tell.

***

MASKING THE BOATS

One of them was called Flbbitigibbet, another Träumtrawler, but most of the boats had their names masked by nets on the day that she visited the coastal town as her next port of respite. Her own face was, of course, masked by a skein of scars with which she was born, a collectible phenomenon known as a caul, similar to David Copperfield’s caul that was later auctioned off as a talisman for 15 guineas, if the Dickens plot is recalled correctly. Or was it a raffle, not an auction? 

It was no accident that ‘caul’ rhymed with ‘trawl’, Dalena thought, peering at the nameboard on one of the boats that Dalena could see clearly. Today, indeed, she was hypnotised by the sea’s waves against the harbour wall, a sporadic soporific, a comforting down, comforting down of her turbulent thoughts, a confection of spiritual gelling that she had sought, it seemed, for centuries. No accident that some of her thoughts and expressions were repeated, time and time again, a tidal refrain, an incantatory swaying, a refrain of swaying, just saying.

 Scarred faces galore appeared on the surface like a scum of salt that, if dried out, would be fit for sifting, then bottling in cellars. Scarred faces, scarred faces, and then more scarred faces. A dream or a trauma, who knows? A whole swarm of  flibbitigibbets come to ease her despair at still unfinished ambitions. Her fingers dredged the scum for some message, only to find the whole hand squashed painfully between the side of a nameless boat and the harbour wall. But it ended up more a winding ravel than a knotting anguish.

Where she had skimmed the water, its tides seemed to recede leaving a saline mirror, unruffled by sea’s undertow, a surface in which  she saw her own face as if for the first time. She had ‘masked’ all her life, whether with a pile of shutters or a cascade of blinds, and, here, despite the salt’s clouding, or because of the salt’s cleansing, she saw clearly who she was. Her knuckles had been raw, too, but now healed after the boat’s abrasive ambush of flesh against harbour wall. 

Stripped to the bones of truth, while everything else was also scoured by a sudden wind. It was not Brasso as an oily substance or even as an agency for gelling, but somehow the paradox of a frictionless astringent. Not a medicine for inflammation from Boots but more a reflective moonshine that added buoyancy to boats and their sympathetic chemistry with water. Some waltz from Die Fledermaus in continuous loop. The gallows humour of the hearty songs of stevedores about her at the harbour wall  adding to the effect of resolutions unravelling. Shantih Shantih. Now more a whisper than a loud rhythmic chant.

This wind was a movement of earth’s breathing that swirled with increasing repetitions of onomatopoeia till it blew itself out. She made a smiley, as clouds vanished from around this cheery crease expanding through crusted skin. More than just a riffle. It was sheer unction. 

***

LINOLEUM GAMES

When children were children and not screen-hogs, they put dusters on their bare feet and slid about the lino as if it were a rink. When they grew older into adults, they busily spent hours dusting things as this was before screens were invented to keep them otherwise stymied. And if they managed to grow really old, they were then enabled to be hypnotised by the clunky black and white versions of the future’s tinier screens that were sure later to entrap their grandkids and the latter’s grandkids alike. And these old ones remembered the days they put dusters on their feet, laughed out loud at things that other people said face to face, flesh to flesh, in the same room, and ended up, as they imagined, with flattened features for faces  to match the weather-scarred windows of their homes. The first Olympics I really remember watching was the Rome ones in 1960. The previous Melbourne version was broadcast too bittily for me to remember from the black and white TV  of the day, with ill reception and fading definition, if there was any definition at all to be discerned through the snowy interference. Nicks and scars within the screen — a flickering up and down beyond the reach of the TV’s vertical hold as well as of its horizontal one.  Revolving like a fruit-machine display with no colours to differentiate apples from oranges. It was as if a cascade a blinds were sporadically shuttered down across not only my eyes but also the window of my whole face — a rhythm of shadowy blemishes that any broadcast glitches as stitches failed to give any long-term healing for my large white face as a naturally featureless flatness. Today, the old man who once was me grabs the dishcloths untidily near to hand and attempts to wrap them around his numb and tingling feet, eager for the linoleum rinks of yore. Yet, they keeping falling off, and there is only a sort of new-fangled linoleum in the hall, far too narrow for figure skating or those earlier somersaults made to the music of Bolero more suitable for gymnastics than any other Olympic sport. He still proudly held the gold medal, though, he once won in Rome for curling. He felt his head still bore a handle on top for ease of its polishing the floor, his face now more scared of bumps into skirting boards than scarred by them. He got up to give the floor of his icy living-room a speedy sweep with a broom; it was covered with irritating crumbs from his latest vision of a  bacon sandwich. Dust in invisible eyes, instead of tears. 

***

LLANELLI RISING

fighting for justice

those in the formroom whom the writer monitored were doing just that and he had thought he would get in quick with fighting for justice as the title so he would not need to think about it later making it fit with what he had already written and he was indeed writing a manifesto for the pressure group or what they used to call ginger groups whereby they battled for righteousness and strove for fairness or argued for consensus of conflicting views in as balanced a way as possible even while he still scribbled these turns of phrase that meant the same thing but he realised he need not have worried about what to actually call his manifesto or what was now becoming a mission statement for let it be said here halfway into his screed as well as upfront as its title fighting for justice and he decided that was all that needed to go upfront because what else could be said about it question mark and he had now forgotten what particular injustice was to be fought against in other words behind all the words he had already so far written and indeed he could not stop his pen writing towards a conclusion when all would become clear and the injustice resolved simply by reaching a final sentence for the writer who had once committed the injustice more loosely called a crime of coercion for its readers to acknowledge the common sense of what had been written at all 

The milkman was early that morning 

exactly that no quibbles no argument not even any hyphen to interrupt the flow of narration amidst  the rattles of bottles the click at the gate or did the click happen before the rattles sounded out question mark and I could not be sure as the double clink of two milky white pints met the front doorstep while I still remember the third of a pint we were each  given at school with straws and all heads bent over amidst sucking noises while teacher was rubbing the chalk off the blackboard swish swish and I was milk monitor and suddenly I thought about the man today who left the milk bottles on my front step as now involved in these memories of my old school days when I was in charge of which pupil received which bottle of milk as it is now too easy to assume that each bottle was identical but far from the truth as some were warmer than others having had more of the sunlight upon them and after the clink clink I heard the gentle brushing to and fro of something soft across the outside of my front door swish swish and surely was this not a ghost since literally nobody delivered milk these days let alone early that morning question mark

Do not go lightly

not too lightly into the night for punctuation to be airbrushed like the ghosts they surely were with each full stop a white salt grain that could haunt a whole mansion the odd comma a curl of creepiness question marks written out in full to make a mockery of doubt even while a few actual words helping the haunting by turning themselves into italics as laterally slanting wormholes in contrast to the rising workaday handicrafts of human love even with spectral tambourine men on board and further hauntings and wraiths each battling for so-called justice against monsters who hated the ghosts and welcomed the mother of all battles and the call of a word that made no sense but sounded like the town in the main title above by which they’d rather be spooked than eaten alive so please do go gently into that good night oh milk monitor amidst schooldays of recorders sucked or blown and tambourines tapped in our tiny hands with jingles not clinks and piano accompaniment by teacher for any words we sang as a welcome in the mountains often using words from a nonsense sounding language being words swishing spookily echoing more than just the  sensible truths of justice but something far more intrinsically wayward as an accidental truth truer than most other truths while the milky-white haunters of the haunted watched out for any risk of being monitored by the hyphen that he just forgot to airbrush and the hyphen remains visible should he raise his reading eyes back to the final grain of truth or grain of salt in which form’s shape the hyphen justly still resided as a third of its proper size after widening into a short straw or was it the last straw question mark

he forgot to lightly airbrush the apostrophes

***

A MIXTURE OF MERMAIDS

Merfolk collectives were most commonly known as pods or tribes or schools or herds or aggregations but just the female versions of these creatures were often paradoxically or ironically called a ‘mixture’. If only.

As if these creatures existed at all in the land of the living — other than just as ghosts or if deemed as dreams or even when they were trusted truths within childhood fictions that were read with bated breath at the child’s creation of real ‘imaginary friends’ appearing in every corner of the nursery dormitory — even if without sufficient saltwater available to buoy them up particularly when the child was fully awake.

 IF is a big big word. AS IF are even bigger ones — especially when placed together. WHEN was weaker than either of these, as its truth was needed to be tested against a competing IF.  Which brings me to introducing today a new character whose real andadopted name was ALIAS, or AS for short when called in short order or impatient demand for his attention — if or when he happened to exist as a reality being quite another matter. He matters now! 

Alias could seem to turn a feint of a faculty as soon as blinking at him. As tall as a totem, by dint of twitching beneath his gaze. Alias was also as quick as a shut blind when investigating an exterior shutter. He was, indeed, as slippery as an eponymous mixture of heroes and villains, as well as flounceable in his own right as a singularity of unbroken scales, with a choice of beauteous butts, and an urgency of ugly uppers hiding softer apertures lower down. Nevertheless to say, he was as stolid as an accomplice pair of private eyes that never flinched, alongside quick fire reactions within a body that actually moved more realistically on two legs than any amphibian actually trained to strut upright for eons and eons.

 Ifs were one matter, but there seemed no need for purposeful whens, as AS (or Alias as he was sometimes called) was obviously made for action as an action man as well as invested with an instinctive sense of constructively iffy optation and a judicious exegesis as a mutual exorcism. Ghosts were never truly ghosts, but something in between as parallel phenomena. He was based in Llanelli, ever since his first successful case of investigating an infestation of seeming sea-creatures that clambered from the local docks as if in the shape of a mixture of mermaids disguising themselves as a swarm of grim residuals that had survived from when Llanelli’s name was Y’ha-nthlei, and someone called Pth’thya-l’yi had ruled over the people there. No need to tell the whole story as I seem to have already destroyed any suspense by prematurely using the word ‘successful’ somewhere in the text above.

Alias now resorts to investigating, nay, literally hunting or haunting me as the legendary Spoiler fit to rival someone else’s Joker — a plotbreaker as an unreliable villain now cast as a reliable narrator whose presence I myself created in such a role when this very villain’s domino rally of motives became set at its tipping-point to topple all his successful tales one by one into an aggregated mixture worthy of any writer worth his salt or salt-water. No ifs, no buts, no tails.

***

PINTAIL

At first Alias (whose own actual alias was disarmingly As for short) thought about a  childhood game — often conducted between sporadic bouts of Forfeits and Charades — and that game was called Pinning the Tail on the Donkey which was a cross between Blind Man’s Buff and close-up Darts. As we all know was a gracious man of many roles, and he kept up the illusion that these were memories of games rather than happening at this very moment all around him via some method of being beamed there and back. Arguably, any children involved were never children at all, so any coercive cheating involved remained consensually competitive between the grown-ups whose memories of being children were fake regressions. Have you noticed there have never been any children in Dr Who? As you were. As effective as salt on a bird’s tail. Stand by your beds. Time to duck.

***

IS IT A TENCH?

Alias as his alias As was called anonymously to investigate a lump of lumber that had been washed ashore near Clacton, and when he was taken to the spot by a beachcomber of his acquaintance, he heard this crude rhetoric from a third as an onlooking busybody: “Is it a Tench?”

  Alias gave this interfering gongoozler the finger, and then said to him and to the beachcomber alike: “Not one whiff can I detect from it. It has just been shaped and shorn by cruel currents into what looks fishily like something that might give off more than just a salty aroma!”

All three laughed, as the apparent lumber gave off a low hum, as if wishing to make contact, while its wood grains were straining to send gurgling words to its evident mouth in shadowy thirds of whole meaningful words. Then it managed these words as gargled as clear as clear could be: “Google the title as an entirety and you will see a sign.” 

The gongoozler, a genuine saltsworth, a self-styled powerhouse with words, busy as a mind if not a body, immediately snatched out his phone to see first if it had any signal at all this far east in Essex, let alone the ability for it to connect something with something else. But bingo! — the tiny search box and keyboard appeared.  Meantime, the other two men had vanished from the site, having been confused as to who was the alias of whom. Neither of them even left any spore as evidence of prior presence.  And the gongoozler had forgotten to use inverted commas around his search term, so he shrugged and anonymously left the scene. This was his eventual response, alas, to everything in his life, whatever any near-miss revelation might have been upon the horizon’s very edge. A benchmark as cusp.

Post-gestalt fictions (11)

 THE IMPROPER GANDER

Dalena stared back at herself in the mirror quietly intoning phrases like ‘hold your horses’ and ‘whiffling through the broad leaves’ — and ‘a sure opportunity for helicopters’, the latter being, for her, a brand new out-loud recitation of a poetic earworm as an unwitting portal. She scrutinised her own face for scars, but instead of those haunted sutures to which she had grown accustomed as a language of her life that had been writ large enough throughout the decades, the face itself was now relatively clear of scars or any nicks at all. A perceived process that seemed to be working in reverse since the wormhole’s era of what many people called the Big Change. This was similar to the losing of memories: a natural sea-change that old age eventually brought. The ghostliness of backroom staff in the hinterland of the brain, left unspoken.

The opposite of proper is not improper, as the latter tends to indicate a sort of human perversion rather than a reversal of what is proper in the actual scheme of reality itself.  Dalena now whispered ‘what is bad for the goose is bad for the gander’, which seemed to pervert the alliterative resonance of the original homily. These words indeed seemed to constitute an impulsive rebellion against the power that onomatopoeia wielded as a means of semantic cut-through — or was it  simply a spell of indoors weather?  Finally, she spoke, more loudly, more defiantly, more insistently, without repeating herself as an incantatory refrain: ‘Goodbye, Dalena’. And she left the mirror’s jurisdiction for the chores of the day. 

Who had got her gander, and was he still in the so-called lady’s chamber? Whetheroriginally upstairs or downstairs, Dalena could never relocate the whereabouts of such a regal boudoir, although the attic spaces she knew had by now spread above her were left unexplored. And as she heard the churn of many rotor blades circling her roofless mansion, she failed to intone the only words she knew would work against their noisily pervasive spell of spinning locks and barrels. Without even one hook, line or sinker between them.  

She realised, by now, that her voice had vanished, along with all her facial scars, and what she had last spoken out loud would prevail forever, the sound of which would also be lost forever, too. 

***

SAVELOY

Many people thought Jack to be a theatrical lovey of the most precious variety, acting out all sorts of ghostly mysteries just for show, but recently he, as the darling of his audience, had come to terms with the thought that every turning of fate, in a series of stages in one’s life, was not a free choice, but  a pre-determined one. 

Today was not a lovely one for any darling of stage or screen, as he stared at the ugly helicopter the shiny, sharply shivered blades of which would soon be spinning with the offlandish sound of loudly frictionless churning, a sound fit to grind down the bravura of even Honoré de Veil himself. A foreshortened helix to be opted for by the outline of ears alone, as the stumps — that his legs now felt like — were set to stumble aboard because he simply needed to go somewhere faster than any other semi-exorcists in the days of gridlock and panic  that preceded Big Change. Not that he knew about the latter’s future alternation in existence then.

Jack waved at the ghostly face of Anne now staged as a picture of sorrow at their home’s window screen, a shuddering pink shape of features behind real net curtains to replace the false ones, an aperture also denuded of shutters as the neo-defenestration laws had by now forced on all who needed to be spied on. Not that bricks were easier to divert seeing through than glass, but who knew what the next docketed stage would be after the issuing  of Dalena Mirrors as ways and means of providing concealed rearviews without the need to turn the human head. Periscopes as flat devices to replace the very windows themselves. Blinkers as optional extras. A saveloy just a common law to encourage buffers (or filter baffles) to rescue the existence of a building’s rudely vestigial plumbing that made urban photography the highly focused force of art it was truly meant to be.

Jack now noticed Anne’s window veils were already scarred and torn like net stockings by tinier, barely visible rotors that echoed those of the mother copter, and he equally feared that the tips of the bigger blades atop the now veering vehicle that he was about to board were within touching distance more than just to decimate the whole building let alone just blindly widen the few windows that the walls still managed to maintain against the odds around Anne’s last scored vestige of a face.

 The rotors’ clatters shattered the shuttered silence with a sudden disregard for narrative piety. No way was the next change of paragraph a deliberate choice any more. Nor was the narrative to end where it actually did end, with the marching crowds in the urban byways sensing a significant paragraph change towards a longer history of our times, if not a change helped through an even bigger one triggered by plagues or politics. They indeed became tantamount to a dystopia mob salivating over hot dogs in mustard buns rather than a singularly theatrical chorus with wands of Elgar, as they now uttered muddled screams a few of which, when merged, sounded — under the harsh clattering above — like ‘Jack is a lovey!’ Munch munch.

***

THINGMEBOB FAIR

At first Honoré de Veil thought it was a misspelling of thingamabob or even thingamajiggy. He hummed a tune of thingamabobbers set to fish out sweet bleating chilvers that had fallen in the rushing river. Indeed, he knew the fairground he sought was near such a river, except the locals called it the raging river, instead. 

He was not due to man the commonplace apple-bobbing game, as he had been told, but, at the last minute, his mission was slipped to him that managing the Ghost Opter was to be his duty. To stand outside a giant optical illusion that had replaced the old fashioned Haunted House lesser fairgrounds boasted. Ordinary rides or games were not for the Thingmebob Fair. Its scream school for innocents had been rejigged as what he now scrunched up into a ball of paper to hide the name he had been slipped. He hoped nobody had written it down and despite what the message’s signature letters indicated he was only to remember simply the simple acronym, the simple illusion itself.

Go, go, go, he chanted, as he quickened his pace past the teeming riparian currents that nothing owned, not even the banks. The sweet chilvers themselves would rather cope with unauthorised adventure playgrounds than such a maelstrom of directions.

He hurtled through a flock of bleating chilvers, and then he spotted the dreaming spires of several skelters, and the revolving joined-up windmill sails of deep-cast iron — the famous Ferrous Wheels of Thingmebob Fair, emitting screams of delight as well as fright, scaring the wild life into even wilder escapades of disorder. Not that the chilvers themselves were wild, having been farmed by would-be shepherds of a conscientious breed for many centuries in the environs of Thingmebob Fair. Nothing could be tamed, especially the sweet faces of our growing ghosts. Go, go, go, Honoré de Veil insisted as the manner in which he went.  Acronyms aloft like spinning blades. 

Go, go, go! And so he simply did.

The last we hope we ever hear his name, having jumped in the rejigged river, along with all his misspelt chilvers.

***

GRIMWADE’S GHOST

Jack Blanche was Ghost Opter, a title given to him after the name for the building that once served as a fairground ghost house, while all the time it was actually a real ghost house masquerading as a scary holiday prank for children and their carers. He rather relished the idea of optical illusions being real, and realities being merely optical. He had begun to search history for more examples of his namesake job title, so that he could channel any ambivalences in the past to strengthen his unequivocal powers as a moderator of hauntings today. Neither a believer nor a disbeliever, neither an antagoniser of spectral phenomena nor a pacifier of them. More an alchemist than an exorcist, more a catalyst than a collaborator.

The task in hand was a big hardback book he had stumbled upon that dealt with the life of the so-called Honoré de Veil, who was said to be the very first Opter, someone who had used a number of aliases, alter egos, even doppelgängers, the most ludicrous of which was by the name of Arthur Grimwade. It seemed hardly the gold standard of an alias, sounding to Jack very much contrived, almost a clunky memory of old children’s TV in the 1950s. Or a member of Dad’s Army. But possibly a name ideal for being hidden in plain sight. 

Jack thumbed through the book that was heavier to handle than his familiar Anne, the latter now merely a reflection in one of his Dalena mirrors, a description which was a euphemism for her transubstantiation into stuff other than flesh, a sort of blacksmithery that Jack claimed was not black at all. Glassmaking with flat shiny bubbles. White magic, at most. Such mirror devices indeed outshone themselves and helped the few Opters worldwide with the descrying of ghosts — a means of reflection far more efficient and respectable and shinier than the more traditional crystal balls. Yet, the big book did not weigh as much as it otherwise seemed heavy. It obviously was the property of a poltergeist, for easier lightweight throwing about the room to scare residents of the house opted. The final paragraph left the best for last.

Jack turned to the end of the book where such a paragraph would reside. And it was where, in fact, he read about the circumstances of Grimwade’s folly being crystallised. The ridiculous revelation that  the real person was Grimwade and de Veil the alias. Jack thought back to the old days of children’s black and white TV. Who then was who, and what then was what? In his pale-faced panic, he recognised Anne’s gentle reflective hand comfortingly entering his own hand, but with simultaneous gruff and grating whispers in his ears instead of the customary sweet nothings he had expected. Alchemy with only dead clay to turn into the potential of dross. The whispers hinted of Red Indian rights, and black masks around scarred eyes. With what damned smithery was he smitten?

***

OPTIONAL FEET

Anne Shona Stanley was written upon her birth certificate but her friends were more familiar with a nom de plume that followed her like a tiny pet dog on a lead. Its yapping was her signature tune as well as an unavoidable avatar clinging to her like a veil of afterthought, the latter even seeming to outdo the prominent elbow shapes of her body’s real shadow.

Anne had tiny feet but relatively large hands, and she often opted to overbalance rather than stare anyone in the face, a means to avoid small talk as well as any interactions with fate itself. Acting giddy, never to engage except in what she called her Dalena mirror, its reflective surface comprising an inner silvery base that managed to conceal any blemishes that her complexion might otherwise bear. But what of the barely healed scars and the near namesake scares exhibited as facial creases of which her frown had been the only example of indelible carbon paper at the once sweet level of flesh? In my lady’s chamber, a loose meander, upstairs and downstairs, a cooper’s barrel purpose-built as an easement for any bodily accidents of overflow, even of night soil. Thoughts that raced to reach their meaning, before anyone else did.

“Who go there?” she suddenly blurted out, having sensed a shadowy third as a new presence, and her own thoughts having returned like a homing pigeon to her mind.

“Bless yer, Sister”, said Honoré de Veil in a wounded tone, this being the one occasion he accosted her in the narrow urban street between two identically consecrated and constructed churches. 

To which church he belonged was identified, in a sacred whiteness, by the dangly bow-tied ribbon he bore around his neck instead of a circular collar that would have engulfed the whole of Anne’s dog’s nominal body let alone just its neck. In fact, de Veil’s ribbon seemed more like a frayed plume than a man-made fabric. A fraying that mimicked the feather of a large bird  instead of the sole token of his holy status. The church that was not his own church comprised a company of holy men who bore circular collars instead of frayed ribbons, so Anne knew straightaway the sect of the church that was de Veil’s church, but which church was on which side of the street she had forgotten. And, if the truth were known, so had de Veil! Even the collars got muddled, in the aftermath.

So, Anne was confused about the church for which she should opt in order to seek sanctuary in it from de Veil. As he continued to dog her up and down the single pavement that the whole street’s width had now almost become. Nothing to choose between apparently identical shoes for any tiny entity witnessing such manoeuvres from way down at the street’s own level of the humans’ feet. One figure shapestalkng, the other not. Outshadowed by widening white wings shifting stork-wise far above — creating darkness, despite their intrinsic colour. Poe or Hugo, eat your hearts out. However sharp your respective elbows are. 

And there is the sound of two churches pealing their bells, a feat of outbidding each other as if they comprised all things tubular ever used in centuries of symphonics — fierce rivals to each other in the granting of sanctuary to any character whose unveiled naming might be better casked within a vintage wine of words than a barrel of laughs as a case of socks-off.

Whichever of the two aspiring steeples is opted for from either side of the ever-narrowed street that will make them one. Feet into inches.

***

FLETCHER DARLING

Anne worked at the David Livingstone Hospital where she was in charge of the arrows doctors pulled out of dead bodies and then it was down to her to cleanly dispose of them. She laughed out loud at herself. The thought that she was a reverse fletcher was one that occurred to her, a thought more suitable for the quiet thinking she preferred when working from home via zoom. Her on-line avatar or password was, well, it has been told already above; it was the whimsical, even affectionate, title of a book that Honoré de Veil wrote over a century ago, in the mode of the Prophets of the Old Testament.

It was ‘Dalena Fletcher’, not ‘Fletcher Darling’, though, on further study. Also, not African arrows, by the way, but Red Indian ones. And, what is more, Anne was not the Ghost Opter as many had assumed her to be; it was always a ghost itself who was the Opter, indeed the latest one that had chosen Anne as its familiar, a sort of reverse exorcist, as well as effective de-fletcher for tiny thin vampire stakes. ‘Save our souls’, the Ghost Opter had imparted by an even more tenuous means than the mirror worlds of modern screens. Speaking what sounded to be foreign words after saying ‘save’ the second time: ‘eloy eloy llama sabacktarmy’.  A chilver had been a female lamb, so perhaps it was ‘lamba’ instead of ‘llama’. A holycopter with its namesake illusion of spinning blades instead of what gets you through light fastest.

When Anne was recalled to the hospital, she was most disturbed by the hubbub of noise and ached for a return to working from home. All those faces to meet, all those bad breaths to breathe in secondhand. No longer in her earlier rôle, she was given a position as a motherly midwife, midway between checking the baby was either glans or glut and actually wet-nursing these babies after most of their mothers had passed over whence they had come. The babies were mainly dull. But one was so pale faced it shone brightly. With tears in her eyes, she christened it ‘Jack’, after checking his quiver. 

The ghosts swept round to thank her as the chosen one, but no sound — not even laughter out loud — could they emit for human ears to hear. So they opted for a default of haunted holy silence forevermore, merely pleased with just working from whatever invisible shapes they called their homes. Well, at least until Jack grew up full-fledged.

He had seen and heard the ghosts clearly from the very start.

Post Gestalt Fictions (10)

 RUPERT IN PINK

Rupert invariably donned faded tartan trews, but with shiny black spats lodged on his insteps below the otherwise crumpled corduroys. It had to be said, though, that he  could not bear certain materials against his skin, so whatever garb he did finally decide to sport, there was ever the thinnest layer of shimmer he called ‘selkie’ between the coarse material of his near colourless clothes and his own tender pink skin that covered men like him, at the turn of the century in England, a layer of so-called shimmer in the form of scarcely viable smalls that needed rinsing out by his dear mudder at least twice a day for fear of smells. This was a carefully preserved secret that never made it into the history books, nor even into any accounts of social fashion habits dictated by each era. Rupert’s era, for him, was now. 

For us, Rupert’s ‘now’ was that lived in the period just ended before each of us was born — until what was later to be called the Big Change changed all that. Meantime, Rupert was the original brinkman, a term that gave its name to brinkmanship. He loved ice-skating on frozen lakes, especially on the cusp of Winter and Spring. His face shone in the early sunlight upon such a day, forgetting how cold he would feel without his judiciously positioned clothing. In fact the moving ruffs and creases upon his skin gave him a sense of false security, as if warmth within gave comfort from an absolute zero without. Whilst, in fact, unknown to him, the air around him was unseasonably warm, as the ice threatened to bend and bow under his skidding weight, his pace too fast across, though, to actually rupture at any point.

Rupert’s fate was literally sealed, however, as a certain pinkness initially seeped through his outer layers. The spats, meantime, stayed a pure glossy black. The cusp had evidently been sharper than it looked. We were born the day afterwards. Our squawls of projected  pain at a life’s as yet unravelled histories sounded more like those of animal animals than human animals, more like sea beasties than placental babes, all this happening just after the midnight of the previous day had been breached. 

As it happened, a shapeless shape bearing a piece of coal was our first visitor as it entered over the newly donkey-stoned steps at the front door. Our dear mutter had been on bended knees all night thus burnishing them. The coal was to keep us warm, we had assumed, with Spring barely unsprung.

***

CHINESE POTTING

Many thought the second word was a devious international plot to be disguised as a typo. The Ghost Opter knew, however, that it was simply a code or a password that was easily memorable but outlandish enough not to be guessed by strangers. The space had to be removed, of course, while the two upper class letters religiously retained. And, oh yes, a number added at the end. Any random single digit would work.

But all that begs the question — who or what is the Ghost Opter? They would describe themselves as a cross between Ghosthunter and Ghostfinder, the latter in the school of Carnacki. The former? Well, there are many candidate likenesses of Ghosthunters  in the annals of literature or cinema, and in actual historical fact, too. 

A second question would then inevitably be begged, like ghosts pleading on their knees to be hunted and then found, for whatever their existential reasons happen to be, as well as any real humans yearning for ghosts as signs of an after life. Non-human animals, too, have ghosts they seem to seek (and vice versa in mutual endeavour), as psychology students of such would attest. And that second question, along with its answer, is beyond a wall, not exactly an on-line newspaper’s so-called ‘paywall’, but a passworded website that is arguably more equivalent to a tenuous mansion than to a digital construction.  Whose password, though? Yours or its?

Even screens have their  methods of  haunting themselves by gazing up into their human users’ eyes staring glassily back down at them. But as to the Ghost Opter, thus capitalised? We shall find out precisely their métier and their identity in future miniature glimpses, following today’s big change. Needless to say, our careful séances during civilised afternoon tea sessions — invitation only events that tantalisingly prick the nostrils with infusions of oolong poured delicately through mesh into fine china — remain suitable cases for upper-classification or for those of us who have simply mis-keyed the single digit number. 

***

BUZZING SAND

Mining bees usually infest soil not beaches, but as Jack had to opt for the most comfortable billet each night, if there otherwise was silence, he could be heard humming in all manner of mineral bases. Mostly powdery elements, or melted, or pre-being smelted, even while hardening as he slept like the special clay used by sculptories.

Jack was not a bee exactly, but a ‘be all and end all’ type of man, although there is another expression on the tips of tongues that might have suited him, proving that those owning such tongues are not ‘know it alls’ at all. He did dress up as a bee, however, inspired by the bee sculpture to ‘save all bees’ currently cropping up in various public places, huge models of bees revolving on plinth pedestals. One in the railway station of a seaside town near Frinton. Families arrived there with their kids clutching buckets of sand to add to the sand that was already there. Making beach mountains they called mine forever, even though these kids left to go home by train without knowing that the tides would take their mountains  as the sea’s own — with whatever used them (as buzzing billets or humming hives) possessing all the ghostly optics that such a sound vision entailed.

Jack was an all-tradesman, a coster of every mongership, a man with a chosen mission, neither an optical illusion nor someone available to be verified by touch. His striped mask had slipped, as it often did. His face, Anne thought, was pleasant enough. She sat next to him on one of the now empty benches at the part of the promenade near the pier. They watched the kids’s mountains swill away into the dismal dusk of the near horizon, a washing away like wasps whispering, with another shimmer of sound that were the miners dying. And she wept. Listening to the last train leave the aforementioned station with the similarly fading echo of an empty aeroplane moving across the sky, having dropped its payload of Buzz Bombs one by one. Jack grasped her hand, with sweet nothings for her nearest ear. At least his own touch somehow proved he was real to at least one other. Not the last we have heard of either of them.

***

THE WOMBATS ARE COMING

Shona  was at home when she first learnt about wombats in the new discipline of Anthrapologies (sic), having been co-opted for Zoom lessons rather than attending college in person. Like some of her teachers, she’d never been the same since Covid, and now all was co-visual in the visual sense of Screenology. 

Her inscrutable neighbours Shona only knew as Anne and Jack having realised surely they must have become accustomed to her always being at home, with delivery vans of different sorts arriving every half hour or so. Everything went in and nothing came out.  Shona suspected all her neighbours, not only Anne and Jack, were ghosts of sorts that had succumbed to the Big Change, that some called the Unfleshing. And her new range of studies that she had opted for were specialist optics within that contextual frame. The refleshing, not refreshing, of screens. The Wombats as mistaken for Rombots or sometimes brands of coffees served as Shona’s reading matter between the chicklit and the romcoms that she enjoyed as a necessary therapy. She learnt also that wombats pooped in cubes, and that their teeth never stopped growing. And that their official collective noun was a ‘wisdom’ of wombats. So different from the new collective terminology for women as opposed to wombats. But a collective so much more complimentary than the collective for men, whom she now never met in person. The two genders had long grown, in the teeth of wilder mating, even less than barely complementary for each other.

All was now in delicate balance, though, with no further sign of a tipping-point … until an unexpected knock came on her disused door. Delivery men had an oubliette into which to tip her orders, one with a coded opening like an old-fashioned coal-bunker situated at the angular root, not unlike an elbow, where the brutalist wall met the ground zero of her homebase. Who’s there? Jack, disused if not diseased from next door, it seemed. What do you want? All spoken thus muffled by the door between them. Anne has had an accident, can you help? Shona stayed silent, fearing anything she said would be wrong. Wrong for her as well as for Jack and Anne. Could ghosts have accidents? Whatever wisdom that had been co-opted by Shona induced her to withdraw to her designer purpose-built cubist cubby-hole where she kept the latest home delivery of do-it-yourself dental and mental kits in smart array, as well as means for quiet evacuation. She could sit out a siege there, but for how long? Till she grew older in years, or even longer in something else?

***

AIR ON A G STRING

Jack was an Opter, Jack was a Scryer, Jack was plainly once an Exorcist, but now Jack was a Saviour of Ghosts, indeed, Jack had been a Hunter as well as a Finder of Ghosts, and, moreover, Jack was, as some said, a Ghost himself, making this developing career easier as an unstemmed flow more unstoppable than the thrusting thermals of air that his activities engendered under the auspices of climate change. Anne, meantime, was Jack’s familiar, not  a cat, not a shadowy third, as there was no shadowy second, indeed, Anne was  a woman who had been a ghost of a dead person but one that had re-hardened into flesh, and now laced through with several lives, if perhaps not as many as nine, but she was a continuous thread through eyelets while maintaining a string  theory that she tightened now and again within the sewn leathery appearance her acquired skin was said to have grown into, since changing from ghost particles into guts and garters. She was now air flows with G strings woven through them, as a complement to Jack’s more tenuous skills of insidious occultation.

Their first subject was a near neighbour called Shona, who had been a living retreat, a sleep-walking hermitage as a shell of what she once was. Her face scarred and livid, with nicks that Jack could ‘read’ as a Scryer Supreme. Once invited in, Jack helped diminish the souls of Shona’s shoes that now seemed to haunt Shona’s apartment, because when she had been a socialite she had spent all her money on fancy footwear, fashionable in their era and often high-heeled, as well as various types of walking boots and they had now silently decayed in her wardrobe, but their souls had escaped along with strings of ectoplasm laced through their virtual eyelets. Anne — being a ghost-insider, as it were, while Jack, after all, had never been a ghost himself, despite masquerading in certain circumstances of surveillance as a ghost — advised  against utter upfront confrontation with these ghosts that Jack hoped to Optimise rather than Exorcise, but to snip, at strategic points, the laces that bolstered them — such a snipping being a mere means of ‘holding horses’, ‘breaking and taming unruly pigs’, as it were, rather than outright war with them.

Shona faded into the background as Jack proceeded to curate all manner of scissor devices on the floor of her apartment, with Anne looking on facetiously from the open doorway to the hall that linked Shona’s apartment to Jack and Anne’s own. A preparation for whatever the night would bring. Arches and aches, and several false starts. Tongues and levers. Nobody knew when the task had been complete, other than the tags and tassels of grey matter that littered Shona’s carpet. And hardened souls now with skid-proof ridges in shapes of more than just a cubic design. As if the once discardable boxes were the items for sale and the shoes were now used as wrapping to contain these boxes.

Jack and Anne returned to their own apartment, sure they had been successful in Optimisation of what once had been Intimidation by shoestrings without their leathery bodies. But Shona, freshly shod, was not so sure, as she shed other shoes more like new-born than anything that had been fully tamed. She superstitiously resisted making any predictable joke about virtual re-booting, though.

***

GUNFLEET HOTEL

…this being an establishment known as the Low-Key, where not one ghost had been glimpsed let alone had made a disturbance in residents’ sleep patterns. Even ghosts that had once been guests who had met a violent death kept a low profile, too. There was, however, the  steady hum of the sea at night, and the stripped-down yachts softly clinked their masts’ residual rigging in a moon’s fleeting breezes that its moonshine induced, and thus these silhouettes of sea craft subtly made themselves apparent in the yard just below the windows of the hotel’s front guest rooms. And birds shifted or fidgeted wherever and however birds did tend to shift or fidget out of sight after darkness had fallen, a few of which birds being blurred shapes that gave birth to the notion of black gulls haunting the environs of Bonnyville-on-Sea.

So low-key was Low-Key, it tried to avoid its own official name, but not only that, the guests or residents themselves were encouraged to opt for remaining nameless both to each other and regarding what they had written in the reception register. But they did leave, in encrypted form, details of forwarding contact, in case of hindsight problems of their stay. It could be guessed, however, the identity of at least three of these guests in the context of such opting for anonymity, especially in the context of haunting and self-haunting and transubstantiation and half-hearted culls and/or rescues of such ambivalent entities rumoured heretofore in our annals. So they will remain nameless here, too, in the spirit of low-keyed aspirations.

The real name of the hotel itself has, self-evidently, already been blurted out up front, so the rest of this particular annal is merely damage limitation. However, meantime, there was no hope in concealing that name, anyway, nor that of the actual town where the Blue Apocryfan pub was so sought-after as a centre of letting one’s hair down, thus an irresistible draw for day-trippers to arrive at the town’s railway terminus equally famous for its Big Bee sculpture that was stationed on the entrance to the platforms. However, daytrippers simply failed to make hotels happy. They needed more than just transients. Hotels yearned for stay-overs and sleep-insiders to help pay their way in the economy of spiritual exchange for which this seaside resort was known. If anyone knew where to find it, in any event!

Chekhov was famous for the maxim that if a gun is rigged up for appearance or even mere mention in a plot, it is bound to be used in anger at some stage in that very plot. Hence the rechristening of the hotel as Moonfleet: an encryption via an otherwise irrelevant novel for children. The rest is up to you. A low profile is no doubt the optimum stance for man or moon.

***

WOODSHED

Why Steg was called Steg concerned some nasty incident during her now ancient schooldays, a past now too easily forgotten. The sound if not sight of a firework whooshed intrusively from the next door garden into hers. At least it showed Steg that someone still lived there, as she watched a hooded figure, after it shooed off an indeterminate pet, perhaps for kind reasons of preventing the latter being startled by the ignited Catherine Wheel, as it turned out. Whether a pet or a pest, Steg could not be sure. She could not be sure of anything these days, other than she ever glimpsed shadowy thirds coming and going next door, sometimes making a whole one. One shadow often shouted out the names of Jack or Anne, and the other two shrieked  ‘Shona!’ As if calling back a wayward cat. Or was Anne the cat, and Shona a senile wife wandering too near their own woodshed for comfort? Steg opted for there being  up to three actual people ensconced next door as well as a nameless wild cat adopted for purposes unknown. 

Steg’s real name happened to be Catherine, but the irony was lost on her, and, like many others these days, she lived hand to mouth. She needed the bonus of a heating allowance in order to eat at all. Every garden in the terraced row had a landlord-locked woodshed in its back garden, and shooing rights against anything that might wander into the wrong garden. Few realised, mainly because they were too old to climb, that the attics inside the various back-to-back twouptwodowns had connecting attics without partitions above the bedroom ceilings. Even the houses opposite each other across the road had some sort of concealed connection between them. Whether underground or not. Or by some other means facilitated by whatever each woodshed contained. Steg often wondered whether a woodshed was called a woodshed because it was hewn from wood or because it contained such wood to help refuel the debit side of her accounts after the loss of the government heating allowance, if only she’d remembered the password the landlord had given her to the woodshed’s lock.

Once Steg thought in old-fashioned terms that she was being wooed by the landlord, because in her younger days, she felt herself to be quite attractive. But since the Big Change, he had become more of a ghostly figure one could never contact. Elusive as much else in her life. Including the inscrutable relationship of her nearest neighbours. Steg occupied an end-of-terrace house, rather than in the middle of two such ‘tunnelbacks’, as such abodes were once called. And so her own  woodshed assumed a greater importance, as it should.  Another firework was ignited under the lighted hand of a Jack or an Anne (or even a Shona, depending on the time of night.) Steg heard it hiss and splutter before three separate fireworks from a single fuse  whooshed up to the blacked-out sky with somehow sparkly but low-key hues, one of which at least landed in flames on her woodshed. It gets, Steg instinctively knew, to the darkest point of night just before dawn. Steg would show soon that she had been only one step away from remembering something important, as she felt something else with a tail slip past her between her feet. As another thing, even darker than the blacked-out sky, could be glimpsed skimming, with unlit fuse, from roof to roof, across the road.

***

WINDOW SHUTTERS

But they usually had firm fluent speech, without one sign of such hesitation, their inner curtains as a special form of alveolar or tongue process. The handle to open and shut it might have been a means of controlling what entered or left through it, and this window in question today that the Ghost Opter investigated was decked with outside shutters, as if it were emulating a continental version. The shutters, initially, seeemd vestigial, with no purpose other than a cosmetic one. But where a blatant cruelty of outright exorcism encountered, in a grey area, a sense of salvage or rescue of whatever spectral entity happened to be framed within it as a seeming reflection of what was neither outside or inside the glass that had crumbling putty along its edges, the Opter soon realised he had reached the end of some sentence too early. The whole phenomenon described above, in hindsight, with his having just used the word ‘spectral’, seemed to be the perfect example of ‘spectrality’ that, until now, had been hidden in plain sight.

The next event was the Opter’s ear clamped to his mobile phone seeking advice on how to proceed from someone who was overheard from his own lips to be called ‘Anne’. Is it jammed? The shutters seem rusted at their hinges. Are they shutters similar to what were used in antique cameras? Don’t think so. So they are just for show? Look like it. Take photos, send them to me  and I’ll make a decision, Jack, don’t do nothing without my say-so. 

The next event that could be observed was the Opter taking photos with his phone of the lock device on the inner window handle as well as the shutter hinges, but all he seemed to get was low-resolution images of his own reflection in the smeary glass, half-pervaded by the striped translucent bars that had been stuck to the inside of the glass as a mockery of net curtains. The glints that outshone the sun did not help. 

He suspected this was where the essence of the ghost resided, still pressed against the translucent bars. He scried, from outside, each narrow viewpoint of clarity, seeking, high and low, for signs of faded fingerprints of where it had suckered onto the glass. He muttered something to himself about ‘shutter speeds’, but what he meant will never be discovered. Just as his phone rang back, its timer had abruptly expired, and just the slice of what happened truncated at both ends of what had been written down about it above. What should have been an open and shut case had evidently lost its window of opted opportunity for resolution. Lucky, at least, to have reached this stuttering stop

***

THE PASSIONATE VELOUR

Shona knew that velour often had a nap, but so did velvet, and she was never sure of the different qualities of sleep each granted her. When using a velour pillow, she dreamed of the usual ghosts, but they were more tenuous and stretchy. On the rare occasions, she managed to get hold of a velvet pillow, she saw the ghosts for real in the room around her, even when fast asleep. Not that each pillow was made entirely of either fabric, but were filled with feathers of different birds, sometimes a mixture, sometimes the feathers of a single breed of bird, and she could never tell which was which. In some senses, the pillows themselves were part of her dreams, but when she woke up, she ever forgot the dream so as to remember to check out the pillow upon which she had, the previous night, opted to collapse her partially unconscious head. Opted being the operative word, of course.

These were in the days she had already encountered, for her, the still nameless couple of whom some of us already know the names. This man and woman themselves were in her dreams, but not yet identified for who or what they were; maybe they were those who exchanged teeth for coins under children’s pillows, or who were, indeed, on some nights of Shona’s slumber, those whom she somehow adopted as a formulation of poltergeists as pillowghosts — particularly on the more brave occasions when the better part of velour was half the battle towards a more restful sleep. Velvet often meant nightmares, not dreams. Velour, on the other hand, stretched credulity as well as the membrane of a nap into a passionate oblivion, if that is not a contradiction in terms. 

On the night in question, meanwhile, Shona was still a child and, upon waking, she hastened to turn her pillow, not for checking its fabric, but to discover whether her milk tooth was still there, or a shiny shilling instead. She guessed two fairies had conducted a passionate quarrel about it, as it was still there, but its tiny pliable whiteness was somehow  broken in two. She shook her head in dismay and in hope of forgetting the passions inherent within any vale of sleeping at all, she bravely proceeded to open the bedroom louvre upon the daylight outside, which act of defiance foreshadowed, for her as a singular breed, a future that featured shutters.

***

BOWLING THE BONCE

The game of Tombola gave Tom his name, because his parents went to the Bingo most weeks, and the family name was obviously implicit, too. Well, there you are. Arthur and Joyce Bowling were often at the Hippodrome in Colchester, eyes down, specially provided pencils with indelible lead arteries akimbo over numbers printed on harsh paper stubs of different pastel hues, eager and excited.for the easy win during an ancient era where National Lottery jackpots were as yet unknown. And ghosts sat in adjoining booths, similarly arched over their stubs, pretending to be real people, going for broke rather than succumbing to hopelessness and despair. Some words were superfluous, other expressions  tautological, lessons unlearnt as well as untaught, with their taut tightropes of fate as broke as the clasps on empty purses or wallets that they carried. 

Going for broke, opting for it as a means of optimised choice. Friends with Jack and Anne, and other ghosts equally hoping for the bounce of ‘bunce’ as an unexpected gain that was as expected as it never emerged. Informal terms for heads, meanwhile, were frowning with concentration, not concern, over their adopted numbers. Noddles and bonces bowed, as two women gabbled in the booth next to that of Jack and Anne who frowned at such noise while gripping pencil stubs in their fists over rough paper. Shona and Dalena were the women, as an item even in days when items were acceptably settled stones as set in different items of expensive finger rings, as opposed to nose ones. 

Today, Arthur and Joyce Bowling had brought along youthful Tom, to instruct him in the lore of soon to be lost lotteries. He was bored, hardly able to concentrate on the numbers being called by a huge bearded bonce sitting behind bouncing balls in a transparent bowl, all the while whirling within it, on the stage up front.  Microphone in hand, its voice echoed round the horsedrome like a braying hinny being held against its wishes. And Dalena suddenly emitted a hoarse ‘House!’ And all gasped and gawped in awe and envy, as the Bingo hall’s checker ticked off her crossed-through numbers as pre-printed on crudely cropped paper. She was given the nod, and her now blousy excuse for a head veiled in nothing but a low denier nylon mask that she blinkered with her own now tenuously thinning hands rose to claim her now fading promise of a prize.

“Goodbye, Dalena”, shouted youthful Tom in her wake, having already fallen in unrequited love with her.

Arthur and Joyce hustled Tom home, without even saying goodbye to Jack and Anne. Tom never accompanied them to Bingo again. And it was already too late to forget he had seen, with the youthful sharpness of  sight, that each bouncing ball, whirling about in the see-through bowl, had his own face imprinted upon it instead of a number, each a miniature of the adopted slang  for his own big head before it had grown a hirsute beard. Needless to say, in this tale of superfluous tautologies, nobody knew what happened to Shona. Or what feckless fate had opted for her, instead.

***

THE COOPER’S MOTHER-IN-LAW

From timber staves he made them, ‘jolly little barrels of fun’ that he playfully called ‘Mothers-in-law’. Sold by the dozen each day to dealers, most of his output of such a product having been ‘cask-driven to the gut-level’. A technical term about which you should not worry your pretty little head, dear Shona. You are to be a bride again, once a costermonger’s darling daughter, and a former furrier’s first hand lady till he died, and now, today, a cooper’s co-opter in wedlock, ghost to ghost, till death do us meet, married in a haunted chapel under the auspices of an invisible curate, with guests galore in the box pews; no accident what guests are, but ghosts themselves. Including your mum, dear dead  Shona. Rings on our invisible fingers, like gold marriage bands bent round caskets to make them even rounder coffins.

“Look ‘ee, here,” said Shona, proffering a hollow out-stretched palm, and ruffling her wings as if they were a prized wedding dress with a long train — and pages written about this train as well as smaller pagers lifting it from the ground. The cooper chap coughed and nearly  croaked again as he unrolled his smartest hand-made bucket to reveal a bouquet for Shona’s empty palm. She sighed with some relief, and showed the slow flow of these pretty flowers to her mother, sitting in the back view of a third row pew, that her groom was worth more than had been valued by either of them, as Shona repeated, under her breath, what she had said before (“Look ‘ee, here”), this time to her mother, not to her co-celebrant of a future husband dressed in riveted trews, carking and carping under his breath at an ominous future as a pervasive presage that she could see in his eyes. And if truth be said, the truths they told each other as a bucket list of vows paled into near insignificance before the solemn sullenness of the invisible curate, as if the latter had now been curated out of nothing into something not sacred at all, but something to be scared of. 

But just as the chapel’s sexton opened the doors  for the sun to shine upon Shona within the otherwise darkest apse possible and what else the outside world brought in on waves of such a sexton’s expectation of symbolic standing, just as the curate conjured out of the air, as it were, the words of a question  to those in the pews: “Does anyone know why these two should not be riven together?”

 The only sound was Shona’s mum piping up within a tiny vat of her own inner vows to unbend the unriven ribs of truth that would otherwise prevail, and it was clear that as an ‘in-law’ at all she would never be seen. Never indeed to be named after one of that cooper chappie’s bartered ‘barrels of fun’, let alone to become one his more paltry pails of appalling lifelessness, a state of shrunk paleness that all members of humankind do reach in various stages of untimely deconstruction from integral vessels of life. And the playful sun went out abruptly, lock, stock and chapel.