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.
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