The Prince's Wood

Published 'Sierra Heaven' 1996

There was a Prince who loved the river flowing through the beautiful birdsong wood. Although the Prince owned the wood, he wondered if he owned the river or, at least, that part of the river flowing through his wood or, at the very least, the river-bed under that part of the river flowing through his wood or, at the very very least, the edges of the river-bank.

Such considerations regarding the rights of ownership stirred him further to consider things—and one such consideration related to the air directly above the wood's winding river. Indeed, what about all the air in the wood? And then, of course, there was the sky itself above the wondrous wood—and one must not forget the earth reaching from below the wood towards the Antipodes—and beyond.

The Prince sat in his beautiful birdsong wood musing upon considerations that fed further considerations until his brow furrowed.

And while he sat musing, he dabbled his toes in the flowing river itself and, thus, he mused not only upon the edge of the river-bank but also upon the edge of the selfsame river-bank both by subject-matter and position of his posterior.

He wondered if, at the very very very least, he owned his own toes.

But further considerations ceased as, suddenly, the wood erupted with squawks of birds scattering from the Prince's trees into the wide blue sky.

Trooping the Colour

Published 'Footsteps' 1996


The disturbance at the dead of night was the sound of a nose-bleed. And Donald was so ashamed of the fuss and bother, he decided to make it up to his wife and, on the spur of the moment, said:

"How about going up to see Trooping the Colour in London, today?" He smiled, automatically fingering his nose which had caused all the trouble, testing if it had renewed its flow.

"Trooping of the Colour? You're not usually interested in all that brass band stuff and pomp and circumstance..."

Mary was genuinely bewildered by Donald's suggestion following close on the heels of their sleepless night with his nose - especially since he rarely took her anywhere. She recalled the way she had needed to baby her husband, after he'd woken up covered with blood. In the heat of the moment, his whole face and head seemed drawn out into the shape of a nose, not unlike a horse's. Indeed, she had wanted a bit of calming down herself, after the initial shock, but soon realising it was merely a nose-bleed, if a bad one, allowed her quickly to regather her matronly forces, as she vanished downstairs to find a cold penny to drop down his back.

"Come on, Mary, a day up in London will do us both some good. Blow away the cobwebs. And you always like seeing the Queen..."

The last time she'd actually seen the Queen in the flesh was on her succession to the throne back in 1952 - and, even then, Mary had not expressed a view one way or the other. She rarely did. It'd been far too hot, she recalled. Everybody was sweltering, kids flaking out - and, yes, plenty of nose-bleeds. It was funny how thoughts could run in circles, especially the thoughts of someone as round as Mary.

"We don't even usually watch it on television, let alone traipsing all the way up there to see it properly."

That was her last word on the matter, as she went off to see if she could dredge up any more kitchen chores to keep her busy.

Donald shrugged. He didn't even know himself why he'd plumped on the Trooping the Colour for an unfamiliar trip out. Perhaps it was because he had accidentally watched Beating the Retreat on telly the evening before. Soldiers threading between each other in always resolvable ranks. The bands keeping time to the unnaturally fast marches. Just a smidgin short of goose-stepping. Quick-fire changes of routine. All for what? Mary's phrase about "pomp and circumstance" came back to his mind as uncharacteristic of her. Other words like "ritual" and "ceremonial" came to him against all the odds of his feeble vocabulary of thought. The plush flags with motifs betokening brave actions in history. Killing fields where they cultivated the cropped corpses of men and horses. The officious shouts echoing across Horseguards Parade. The rigid stands-to-attention, held for periods on end. The endemic patriotism of the Englishman. And, again, he had to ask. Why?

He gingerly touched his nose again. Not as if he regularly suffered from nose-bleeds. The last one was as a teenager. The sweet sickliness at the back of the throat. The fear of a body drained of its fluids.

Mary returned bearing two cups of coffee.

"Perhaps, we ought to go out," she said.

"To Trooping the Colour?"

"Yes, why not? What time shall we get a train?"

Donald looked at his watch and absentmindedly remembered a dream.

Dreams were often either recurrent or obsessive, dependent on the guilt the dreamer felt and whether the dream controlled the dreamer or vice versa. A particular dream of Donald's, however, was sired by Obsession, out of Recurrence. The dream depicted his act of waking up to discover sleeping beside him, not Mary, but the Queen. The most frightening part of the dream was not the fact that the Queen was actually there beside him but that she snorted.

The air was like dead meat. Indeed, far from blowing away their cobwebs, the humid atmosphere festooned Donald's and Mary's faces with sticky strands of its own, with not even a single spider in attendance. Mary fanned herself with a folded Sun, as the train trundled northward through South London. The desolate expanses of British Rail land was a junkyard of disused tracks, whilst the rusting rails were still on equidistant parade for potential use. All the sleepers were worm-holed, except, Mary hoped, for the ones which the train clattered above. The scrawny trees trooped brown and green, with tower-block sentries as intermittent backdrop.

"Perhaps, it wasn't such a good idea, after all," suggested Donald, as he looked away from the fleeting frames of a no-man's-land where people lived and with which he dreaded getting acquainted. Central London was at least an oasis, where strangers, being straightforward cosmopolitans, weren't as strange as those true strangers of the inner suburbs. The sooner he and Mary reached London Bridge Station, the better. The sooner they returned home, even better. Excursions were probably a necessary evil, Donald thought. However, the less that people went out of their homes, the less evil would necessarily be evil. People wouldn't mug, murder or maim each other, if they stayed at home, considered Donald, studiously forgetting the domestic variety of violence. Yes, he hadn't hit Mary for several years now, even thought he physically loathed the tufts of old-lady hair that were now sprouting in odd patches on her erstwhile youthful face and body.

"Makes a change," replied Mary to his earlier comment, with barely a pause for thought. Thoughts were not her forte. However, she hoped the railtracks held up as long as she was on them.

"Makes a change," echoed Donald.

Makes a change? What ever does she mean? Who wanted change, anyway. These days, even change itself had changed. The world could do with far less of change, to his mind. Routines were not half so bad as they were painted. Like Trooping the Colour. And the train passed the open goal of one end of Tower Bridge, temporarily closed to traffic, he assumed. Yes, he remembered. An initial study had reported that its girders were corroded and badly in need of repair. It had been originally built for horse-drawn traffic to cross the Thames. Come to think of it, only a few years ago, the Queen used to ride her own horse in the Trooping the Colour ceremony, side-saddle, with a stiff-brushed white feather standing up in her tunic hat. Now she was too old. The soldiers were more regimented in those days, too. More colourful, despite being seen by most of the population in television's black and white. No hint of governmental Defence cuts, then. Nowadays, the Queen was dragged behind another horse in a phaeton. Everything had a more burnished look in the Fifties, more spit-and-polish. Even trains were smarter. There had been a certain nobility in the blood. And no scandals.

London Bridge was bustling with visitors, many just idling at a loose end, some with intent on their faces, a few who decidedly had the air of being complete strangers, making Donald's hair prickle up on the back of his neck - and he saw at least one stranger who had more in common with an actual animal than a human being. Mary was oblivious to such concerns, wanting to sit down and have a hot drink. Yes, hot, despite the heat. Both Donald and Mary were dressed for cold weather. One of the few affectionately secret jokes of their marriage was Mary's hatred of the cold - on his behalf and well as her own. Indeed, they had not plucked up the courage to remove a few things, as had the cooler, if uglier, customers milling around them.

The question neither had yet asked themselves was why they had come to London Bridge Station. Victoria or Charing Cross would have been far more convenient, bearing in mind the venue of the ceremony they had come to see. And, here they were, looking for Bank tube, having eschewed the station nearer London Bridge for no accountable reason other than that the Northern Line was too deep for them. The Central or Circles Lines from Bank would be better, less claustrophobic, especially on a hot day, they thought. But they hadn't told each other the reason, in case the one laughed at the other's madness.

The truth, which neither could admit, was that they were lost. They ended up walking round St Paul's Cathedral in a rather desultory fashion. They returned home, without having the nerve to do anything else, nor even to partake of a tea and a fancy-cake. Neither mentioned to each other the original purpose of their trip to London, not even when they later saw the news and discovered that there'd been a terrorist bomb at the Trooping the Colour ceremony, which, thankfully, missed the Queen by a whisker, but had maimed one of the horses. That night, Donald dreamed that he was woken up in the dead of night by the sound of clattering upon the roof above their bedroom. Followed by snorting noises in the general direction of the skylight.

In the morning, Donald saw that the roof slates were covered in something black and evidently sticky. Some white tufted birds seemed to be in a parlous state as they tried to hop into the air from off it, only managing it at great cost to their plumage. The bits they left behind looked more like hair than feathers. Mary, who washed the pavement outside the house every morning, shine or showers, was quite aghast at this outrage. She looked accusingly at Donald.

"I'm sorry," said Donald. Which was exactly the right thing to have said. And they went indoors for a nice cup of tea. Mary's looks were similar to the Queen's, he had always thought. He squinted through a silver tea-strainer at her. She was the only person in the world who was least like a stranger. He later gave her an affectionate peck on the cheek. The first for many years. She smiled, as if she knew the cold times were over. Or simply the smile knew.

At least Donald arranged a funeral with a token of pomp and circumstance: a local rag-and-bones horse borrowed for the morning, with tail-feathers and coxcomb mane specially groomed - and a bright red nosebag to discourage its head snorting around for chance titbits on the way to the crematorium.

Small Talk, Big Issues

(published '8th Issue' 1990)


The girl turned out to be seventeen, but she looked younger to me. She was working in a bread shop until her first University term began in October.

I had been staring meaningfully for days now, ever since first spotting her behind the crusty loaves and jam doughnuts. However, she had not met my eyes fully with hers, until one day I attempted small talk with her. I think it must have been on the subject of the amount of traffic in the High Street, since I always avoided mentioning the weather to anybody. In fact, I always think that people who hang a conversation on whether the sun is shining or not, are cheating somewhat. That’s mainly because, I suppose, the sun is ALWAYS either shining or not shining. Come to think of it, the sun is always shining, whether it’s behind cloud or not (or even when it’s night time).

She merely smiled half-heartedly and plopped the macaroons one by one into the brown bag, crunching up the saw-edged opening into a tight fuse of paper.

I think I must have bought more bread and its accessories that holiday than I would eat for the rest of the year. Eventually, she responded to my prattle with a willingness I would never have previously dared to expect. Her voice was as pretty as her face, although I do think it was the way that the bakery overall made her body strangely sexless which attracted me most. It was as if she had no pretensions to flaunt her charms, keeping them hidden like a surprise parcel for Christmas. I suppose she had no choice really, since all the girls in the shop had to wear such overalls. But the others seemed to be more careless with their top button or had bigger busts anyway as a result of nature rather than anything else.

I couldn’t see much of their legs behind the high counter, so comparison could not be made with my favourite in this regard.

One thing I could not explain was the fact that whatever time of day I arrived to buy bread, however long the queue was when I arrived and the speed it went through dependent on its demands, I was ALWAYS served by my favourite. She ALWAYS seemed to be the one who had just finished serving another customer when it became my turn. It was not intentional on her part, nor mine for that matter (how could it have been?), but this is what ALWAYS happened - without exception. And I visited the bread shop twice a day for a fortnight.

When my stay in the area was fast approaching its end (a particularly sunny one as it turned out to be, spending most of my free time lying on the beach), I decided I would need to pluck up enough courage to ask her out.

I had debated whether to wait until the bread shop closed of an evening and follow her home. Then, at least, I would be afforded a glimpse of her without her overall, thus, perhaps, releasing me from my obligation to ask her out. Whatever the reason, I did NOT want to tarnish her innocence. That was the last thing I wanted. Still is.

In any event, I did ask her out and she said yes straightaway, filling me with wordless excitement and surprise. During our little chats over the bread exchange, we had never reached anything more personal than that she was going to University in October (so she must have been at least seventeen, I suppose) and that I was on holiday, whiling away fourteen days until work started again. I don’t suppose she guessed how old I was.

Of course, she never turned up for our date. And on the Saturday, the last shopping day for me in the area, she was not to be seen behind the counter. I asked after her, but one of the brazen hussies merely shrugged and said she was off sick.

I was off sick, too, the first few days after my holiday. The doctor said it was constipation resulting from too much starch and carbohydrates, next to no green things and lack of exercise.

As far as my emotions were concerned, they were left relatively unscarred, since, if I am honest, I had been relieved she did not turn up for the assignation. I know she exists somewhere or other on the face of the Earth, even if I never see her again. And because of our relative ages, that will be for at least as long as I shall live. The thought unaccountably gives me enormous pleasure.

Simply Sick Again

Published 'not dead but dreaming' 1996

She had been through the hoop time
and time again, what with a series of
life-threatening illnesses, together
with more than her fair share of bereave-
ments, accidents and shattered romances.

Yet she made light of them. Her
heart didn't sink. Her mascara did not
run. Everything, good and ill, was part
of life's rich and varied tapestry.

So, here she was--simply sick again.

In her delirium, she recalled an
occasion many years before as a small
girl. She was skipping rope with the
other kids, well past the time when
twilight had given up its ghost to the
moon. Indeed, the street-lamps did
little to disperse the enroaching
darkness...

A tall man appeared at the entrance to
the cul de sac--swinging his own skipping-
rope in time with the children's.

She shuddered, remembering that time.
Today, she is in the process of suffering
her last illness, but she does not realize
how final it is.

Simply from past experience, she
fully expected there to be other ill-
nesses, other diseases queuing up to
infect her--like romances.

The sickroom door swings open and a
tall darkness stands silhouetted in its
frame; the tall darkness swings things
that look like tubes--in time with her
heart. A heart that skips a beat...

And later she might have wondered if
she were about to fall in love--yet one
more heavy romance--until the last saving
stitch dropped, making the embroidery of
life's tapestry run like painted tears.

The Ulterior's Motive

First published 'Beyond The Moon' 1994


The building, once a skyrise block, now sprawled along the horizon. Its central manse prodded the clouds with the short temper of a bed-ridden schoolmistress, whilst its outhouses and stables crept window- and entrance-less from either side, curving gently to fulfil an ancient ambition of the shellac snake swallowing its own masonic tail.

Knowing at once that this was the only part of the city which had been made independent of reality during one of the Tangential Wars, Glock had clambered here through stilted, stunted avenues of trees. Being participants in the Second Suburban civilisation, the inhabitants were glued to screens, screens which reflected only fuller versions of themselves. He need not bother them. He took no pleasure in surprising the unsurprisable. Time travel was to them only second nature in the fictional worlds they now thought they lived through. Yet Glock remained a hero in search of his heroism, even if this particular area of history was merely a way-station for other less insignificant, more heroic times.

"Who are you?"

He was startled by the brightness in the abrupt feminine voice. Wishing that he had managed to be the first to bring the same question to bear, he surveyed the questioner's face: a wanton, pointed vixen-like animal with shirley-temple curls, and loins so thickly bushed, he wondered whether the voice had caused him to jump to conclusions.

"I am Glock," he answered. He would have added, "Glock, an Ulterior who has been commissioned by the Future to de-haunt that building", if he had not already learned the big lessons in life: say as little as possible: and don't tempt synchronicity. She looked unaccountably relieved.

He pointed to the conjoined crescent building, now etched in marquetry against the most stage-struck sunset he had ever seen. The edge of the sky was almost audible amid its various interfaces of tertiary colours. Not one single sun, but several, dipped together as a well-drilled chorus line, gradually silting into the dewy-eyed pastels and oils that this particular universe had seen fit to massage into its moving parts. These suns eventually came together as one, to take the curtain-call of night, their overall consistency fast changing from raw jam to wild honey. Finally, with a magnificent feat of prestidigitation, the now combined sun wore a black top hat which was courteously doffed for the final bow and, more quickly than Glock anticipated, became as big as the whole sky's bowl.

"Pretty, weren't it?"

He nodded. He had not wanted to enter the building during darkness but now it seemed there was no option. Other than untested options.

"You will come with me?" he stated, rather than asked.

"To help clean it?"

He nodded again, knowing what she meant.

She took his hand into her slenderly fingered paw and led him along an unmarked path. Her sparkling eyes told him that she could see better at night than him. His friends, who worked for the Future in the past, had obviously primed her and planted her here as his guide, and he was truly thankful for such sweet mercies.

The building had once been a large stately house. It was now unusual in one respect, something he had indeed already noticed but not sufficiently weighed. The side stables had no apertures of their own, which meant that they could only be reached via the main central manse itself. He imagined wicket gates leading from the grand entrance hallway into the bestrawn areas, where whatever unlikely beasts were reared did nuzzle and feed, hinnying gently to lull the other inhabitants towards sleep. The livestock was taken in and out via the ornate central doorway, since they had no stable doors to call their own. The marble staircases and costly parquetry must be peppered with their droppings. All surmise, yet surmise based on the Future's map of hindsight in his possession.

Glock had indeed learnt, before embarking on this mission, that he was due to reach a cross-section of reality which was entirely independent of history itself. Unscarred by the Tangential Wars, it was thus teeming with such refugees and dossers that could not bear the brunt of chronology. It supplied haven of hindsight, even, for those who could not gain purchase upon any credulity elsewhere: for those whose outlandish exteriors were denied existence within most healthy precincts of time, since nobody really wanted to believe in nightmares. It was Glock's job to visit such pockets of resistance and rid them of any wrong-headed creatures inhabiting them.

He had no illusions. He was not brave. Knowing that hindsight was fighting from his corner, how could he possibly be defeated? Furthermore, he had a few old school-tie contacts amid the corporate machinery of FUTURE (Fate's United Timekeepers & Ulterior Reality Erasers). .

"I've got a key."

He could have hugged her. She knew her lines very well.

The double-doors swung wide open even before she could insert the key. Things were working out almost too well (despite the inopportune sunset). He was cruising upon a clockwork of well-oiled domino ratchets.

They stepped amid the candleflames that might have been lit to welcome them. The stench inside was quite unbearable: a heady ripeness which they could almost see hanging in the waxlight like honeycombs rotted right through. The dynastic oil paintings queuing up the winding gone-with-the-wind staircase dripped with a phlegmy-green pigment, particularly from the mouths and snouts of the depicted subjects.

"How do we get to the stables?" he asked, ever eager to get on with the job in hand.

She darted towards an antechamber and, by the time he had caught up, he found her scrabbling in the maw of a tall fireplace. The lizard-skinned ashes, he could just see, were sticky, and some dead flames were clinging to her behind like boiled sweets. He had always imagined corpse-fire to be more like flowers. This was the first time he'd seen it. Hindsight had never been able to deal with such impossibilities as cold fire.

With a teeth-grinding noise, she removed the back of the engorged chimney. Giving him her tail to hold, he followed into what he now took to be the stables. There were snorts and snuffles from every quarter: lambent eyes played peeky-boo with each other: feelers tickled his face as if he were on an old-fashioned ghost funround. How was he to see in such darkness, how cope with the exorcism of mutant reality with merely the sense of touch at his disposal?

"Are we in the stables, now?" he whispered.

"No, these are where the pets are kept. The wildstock is further into the side sheds."

He knew for a fact that he was not here to obliterate household pets. But he was now unsure whether she had learnt her lines correctly. Unaccountably, he half-mistrusted her.

With no warning, even to himself, he took his Lewis-gun and sprayed a splatter of ectoplasmic pellets in all directions of the sane compass, willy-nilly. The gnawing purrs and drowsing undergrunts became squawks and squeals of outright terror. The eyes extinguished one by one, each with a gut-wrenching sob. The noise screeched on: it could almost be seen as great swathes of darkness billowing like black flames of shadow: then tattering: finally silence. It turned out, more by Fate than Future, that he had managed not to hit his guide. But he could tell from the yellow wells that were her eyes rising up before him, that she was stricken with unconscious grief.

He felt her tail tug him on. Now she was not speaking. A female stoniness had settled on their relationship ... at least for a while, he assumed. More by Luck than Judgement, they reached the outmost stables by daybreak, tired and hungry. A silvery light filtered through the cracks of the wooden walls.

"But there's nothing here ... "

Only straw and a small empty manger, he noticed.

As he spoke, he swung his arms in unison, like a love-shy schoolboy. She stared at him fixedly. Her cunning-looking features snickered. She tweedled her whiskery snout: the saucy minx needed her rump smacking, he thought. Abruptly, with a flash of her flanks, she leapt upon him, scrambled up his uniform (using the silver buttons as gains of purchase), wrapped him round the chest with her pulsing limbs and forced her snout into his mouth, with the fever of some passion he could not comprehend.

Glock, with an Ulterior's body, wielded a vast crosspult, one loaded with a chunky lump of frozen ghost-vaccine: sprung upon a band of elastic spiritfire - and several bodily hair-triggers ready-cocked. Whether he was snooked accidentally into judder-recoil or, whether, indeed, he himself tipped the balance in all conscious righteousness of motive, he did not, nor want to, know. Less by Fuck than Fudge, Glock's grapeshot ricocheted beyond reality's range and brought, if temporarily, cross-concertinas of event into play...

He placed her in the single manger, where she flopped lifelessly, the maw in her furry belly having flooded with what looked like raw jam. Reluctant tears gleaming in his dark eyes, he curled himself up in the straw nearby ... waiting, waiting, waiting for the Future to send another less human Glock to rescue him from these trammels of out-history.

Tenderly, he shuffled some straw over the were's body in the manger.

Visages of Jade

First published 'Dreams & Nightmares' 1991


“Ask for me in my head,” said the doll to her mistress.

The girl tilted it and allowed the liquid to drip from the slowly blinking eyes.

Her toys ever spoke back to her, after she had already articulated their words in the mind’s eye. The doll’s name was Myrtle. The teddy Teddy. The Jack-in-the-box’s she’d forgotten. The rocking-home never had a name at the outset, which didn’t seem to matter today as the weather was so hot and she was spending most of her waking hours in the outside. The sky was so blue and the trees so green, she thought she was in a children’s picture book. A pop-up one, at that.

Rag harlequins and hand-puppet pierrots were stuffed into the toy cupboards of her memory...

Her elder sister was lounging upon the sunbed, the green perspex peaked hat making her face even greener and stranger than the colour of the grass, the skin down to the sharply pink nostrils dyed a hallowe’en mask.

The younger girl shook herself free of thoughts and returned to Myrtle. The doll was staring uselessly into the sky, for her mistress had left her in a position where the eyes could but open. A silver helium balloon, freshly released from a birthday party nearby, resembled a jet-liner shark, but with the waggling of its tether soon became a sperm...

It’s strange the way Myrtle thought, thought the girl.

She was able to hear the shrill voices from beyond the end of the orchard garden.

The chants of oranges and lemons made them seem outlandish: faceless children celebrating the turn of someone’s epoch. She wished it’d been possible to invite her.

The elder sister revolved on her spit, baking nicely in the over-ripe sun. The dark verdure had by now stained down the neck in ribbed smuts of seaweedy ozone.

The younger girl tried to budge, hoping in the end that someone would turn her face downwards into the grass, for the brightness hurt.

Look, Don't Touch

(published 'Not One Of Us' 1991)


William Fitzsimmons sat in the hamburger cafe, scrutinising the other customers bent double over their scratchings.

He speculated on the forces that had brought all these people, including himself, together at this single point in endless time. Why them? Why him? Why now? Why even why?

On the face of it, several people had arrived here to become inextricably mingled in this cheapskate, overlit, uncharacterful spot in the limitless universe. The number of other more deserving venues they could have chosen, for such an important conflux of destinies, was breathless.

William forked up a shy sliver of lightly fried egg and, chewing ruminatively, he tried to concoct a background for each of his companions in eating. But their identities at first escaped his grasp...

The dour-faced lady, with skewed spectacles, had been staring emptily into space, sporadically sipping at her cup of drink: the odd tinkle of less than best china picking itself out from the under-rumble of the cafe.

She sat straight opposite William ... but he was not the object of her gaze. It was something behind him, by the look of it. He turned quickly, only to find a reflection of the back of his neck in the wall mirror. He did not question it: nor the fact that he could no longer see the lady because his own image in the mirror was in the way. When he turned back, she had in fact gone; she had even cleared away the cup and saucer herself: a tidy mind, if even a vacant one, William mused. But surely she'd not had sufficient time to depart during that split second turn of his head.

He pictured her walking along the drab tawdry streets, umbrella unfurled against the endemic drizzle, her tears borrowing sparkles from the car lights. Her flat was a lonely place without her. It needed to be filled with a presence: to allow her meticulously arranged sticks of furniture to rally round and become more than just a soulless space of unassigned reality. For it was, at heart, a home.

She placed a small saucepan of milk on the back burner of the old-fashioned gas cooker: prepared to watch it swell into a mass of tiny cream-frothing bubbles for yet another drink. Almost erotic. But never consummated: she removed the saucepan just before its seething contents reached the boil and poured it sizzling upon coffee granules ... which in turn gave up their ghosts in running smears of brown.

William decided not to follow that train of thought to the conclusion which he feared he might reach. Instead, he turned his attention to another customer ... and this one did not look as if he were about to leave. Nor had the lady, for that matter.

The oval plate was piled up in front of the man with three burgers in their baps, tips of half-raw onion poking out from the sides like tiny children's lisping tongues.

The man had once been a father, but had killed such creatures who had made him such. There HAD been blood on his hands. William could see it also in the man's redshot eyes: evidently couldn't sleep because of the thoughts: those haunting thoughts which, real or otherwise, had used the man's mind as their own.

The man removed the lid of each bap and audibly squirted tomato sauce upon the wrinkled brown flannels within. Then, taking a knife, kindly provided by those that ran the cafe, he surgically separated a large wadge of "meat" and bap from the rest, speared it with the selfsame knife, opened his mouth as wide as it would go, showing a flap of the body which should be heard rather than seen, and enveloped the morsel in folds of munching flesh.

William could now hardly see the man's mouth: the lips were tantamount to a meagre rind of skin and the slit between them closed up like a healing scar. The cheeks bloated in and out. The eyes bulged, pricks of blood at their corners...

William turned away. He could bear it no longer. Staring hopefully at his own plateful as a source of comfort, the coiled frankfurter, with notches cut out along its length, looked almost akin to a diseased body part. In front of his eyes, it begun to unbend, eventually shifting a fresh tomato- half nearer to the edge of the plate. The tiny mound of softened onions weltered.

He could not endure eating any more. So, he looked towards the corner where he had not noticed before a young woman in a smart mackintosh sitting reflected by the interface of two wall mirrors. With a certain amount of relief, he convinced himself she was a nice person. The face was open and innocent, as well as disarmingly pretty, as she returned his glance. Was that a hint of a smile upon those carefully red-painted lips? The eyes, even from this distance, he could discern, were delicate birds' eggshells. The nose completed the inscrutable picture of Mona Lisa's second cousin, with an even more beautiful sister-in-sheen either side of her.

William had fallen in love with her even before setting eyes upon the young woman. It was as if Fate had once given him an advance glimpse, in a dream so readily forgotten as remembered, a memory never experienced until now.

The subtle mutual recognition lasted only for a second or two ... before a sharp-suited gent with a huge neck sat down between them. She spoke to the man as if she knew him and had been expecting his arrival Now, there was no doubting the quality of the smile.

William collapsed in upon himself. What he had previously managed to eat turned uneasily in his stomach, the various odds and ends melding as the chutney fermented.

It was getting late. The other customers had been leaving the cafe in dribs and drabs, without him really noticing. Whatever the rubbing together of various destinies had served to accomplish, it had not prevented any of them from extricating themselves from William's web and taking up their lives from where they'd left off before entering the hamburger cafe.

His last tale, evidently, was to be spun around the only customer he really knew to the bottom.

He pictured himself ambling through the same curtain of drizzle behind which the dour-faced lady had already disappeared. Then, fumbling for his keys which always turned up in the last pocket that he searched: inserting each key into the complicated lock system with which his wife had insisted burdening the flimsy front door: entering the gloomy hall where the dead bulb still faced downward from the dangling flex: keeping watch upon the steep stairs for a sign of anybody or anything waiting to cross down past him as he climbed up: finally, shaking himself free from the drag of the overcoat which, in turn, collapsed to the dowdy linoleum with the whimper of a huge drowned dog.

He saw the bodies of his wife and children lying side by side in the marital bed, their endlessly sluggish blood filling all the crevices under the floorboards: eager to start the sprinkler system that his wife had always wanted. He sniffed. No sign of that smoke needed to hide the ripe sweet savour of bodies too long dead. The fire he had left smouldering on purpose had burnt itself out before catching. The hamburger cafe smelled more like a crematory, in its own way: more like a charnel house than even a charnel house.



William Fitzsimmons came back to himself in the cafe. He had in fact never been a father nor a husband, neither loving nor loved ... with nobody so close to him that he could muster sufficent hatred to slaughter them. The loneliness was more than he could bear.

He may have to kill himself, as some kind of consolation prize in the league of passions.

There may have been no need, of course, if, soon afterwards, all the customers in the hamburger cafe on that particular evening, including him, died in severe pain of complications derived from food poison.

But no such luck, good OR bad, would allow him a way out. Only the ability to wander the city streets, staring at God's children.

Ancient Ponds

(published 'Dementia 13')

The moment Doug entered the room, he knew something was eating under the table. It was the sound of chomping and licking of lips...

The flat had not been tenanted for long and, as far as he was aware, he was the first person to rent its newly furnished conversion. The fact that it was an old house was belied by the dogs' dinner appointments and Art Nouveau decor of his living area. From the window he could see that the garden remained peppered with the stagnant pools of an unusually wet summer. He had often thrown his used tea bags from his kitchenette - in his mind, scoring according to which pool he managed to hit. The waste disposal unit was not good enough for Doug.

He scowled. The lease said 'No Pets', well, in so many words... and here was something or other having found its way into the living quarters...presumably from some other part of the large rambling house. Perhaps, the new tenant in the converted attic, whose arrival was indicated by a removal van stationed outside when Doug had gone off to work, had smuggled in an unknown animal.

Various thoughts fleeted through Doug's mind, as he stooped to investigate: why the removal men left odd items on the pavement, such as a piano stool and a magazine rack (whilst they went off for breakfast?); the old woman waving from her front plot, one of those downward movements of the hand that expressed exasperation at the sort of things that go on these days and the calibre of people coming to live in the area; why she should strike up even a nodding acquaintance with Doug, seeing that he was a recent arrival in the area himself.

His hands rested like splayed spiders in front of his knees, as he bent his head beneath the tassels of the tablecloth.

Doug had been brought up by sunday schoolteacher parents in a peripheral area of London which only got into the A to Z by the skin of its teeth.

He never liked animals then. He had been under no illusions as to their parasitic ambitions, even as a small child...their wheedling, whiskered faces... filling laps like warm liquid, their tea-brown eyes raised in self-seeking pity.

If the grown-ups were not watching, Doug would sooner strangle than stroke their glossy pelts. Or boil them for stew. He imagined their upturned weltering faces rearing on shafts of seething gruel, mouthing a silent pain. Chile Con Carne often had bits in it that one could turn into tiny faces, just with a little effort of the imagination. He would often stare into his hymn-singing mother's cooking bowls, forming nightmares for his dreams.

He snapped out of it.

The past is just another dream.

He shook his head vigorously... trying to clear the brain of fuzziness. He blinked his eyes to clear them of the overlarge lashes. But they were attached to something other than moveable skin.

He looked down: a large bone conjured the tatterdemalion of residual flesh...as he sank his jaws closer to the knuckle.

The old woman from across the way wandered over to fish the ancient ponds. Witnessed only by the new tenant in the attic, with tea-brown eyes.

The last thing Doug ate was his own tail.

Craters of Gills

Published 'Year 2000' 1994


Isabel herself swung an axe at a mighty bole. The sun lifted in unseasonable speed above the other shaggy trees, stage-lighting the forest-clearing in readiness perhaps for the grand re-entrance of a hero-buckler. Her voice picked out heart-felt ditties - ditties from those shanty song-cycles often forced out between oldster's crooning lips in despairing lullabyes, at dead of night when the deep pan moon floated into antique windows.

She kept a weather eye on the inn, where Mad Madge would even now be speaking half-truths to nobody but the ghosts. Then, wiping her face with the bottom of her blouse, Isabel turned in the other direction to see whether the ferry across the river was back in action. Old Ferdinand had been poorly for some days, so the cargo-stacks queued along both banks further than she could ever remember those henges to stretch. But most important of all, there was one area she scanned with more anxiety than the rest - the forest path along which her beau Claude had earlier departed with the earthenware jug. She hoped he would soon return it, brimful with the sweet coolness of golden spring wine.

Not long since dawn - even so, the giant silver welkin-fish which emerged opposite the sun were surprising for their punctuality. These were the carving mysteries of the heavens above, which Isabel had never questioned because, like the sun itself, they were simply always there. Her ancient parents, despite the blind spot of their lives between childhood and old age, said these smooth-lined fish had always brooded in the sky's heartlands, visiting Earthen by-ways within certain tolerances of timing. The plumes of fire from tails and gills were the strangest ingredients of welkin-fish flight. Isabel would often place her hand in mock salute above her big brown eyes, thus shading them from the glare, whilst keeping watch on those she suspected kept watch on her.

Today, again, she dabbed her watering eyes with the end of her blouse, fleetingly revealing the underswell of young breasts. At the back of her mind, she was intrigued and amused by the contrast between the ferry on its rust-cranking cross-river chain and the sleek silver creatures frictionlessly forging the sky.

Claude was longer than usual making my anticipated entrance and the grain of the wood seemed set against her strokes. Her skirt fell about her legs as if it had a sculptor's will of its own, the complex pleats changing like a map in motion above the pretty ankles. She was bare of feet, long since transformed by weathering into the appearance of fine-textured wood themselves. The other men who shifted around between fresh-cloven boles had only eyes for her, deeply jealous of Claude’s place in her soul. None noticed the hovering of one particular welkin-fish, in a proximity of which history had never spoken, even in the books which none now ever opened for fear of the pages being found welded together like spongy wood. The fact that none could read or write was another, secondary, factor.

The glinting underside passed over her head and then roofed the river. Even Old Ferdinand could be seen emerging from his hut, face raised at an impossible angle, curved fingers crabbing at the back of his neck. His ferry was the only way to cross - and his croaking words could be vaguely heard despite the roaring fires which cindered the tree-lines on the opposite bank. Mad Madge tottered from the inn, her drink slopping out of the tureen in her hand. She waved a fist at the intruder, her words, too, heard, but misheard, beneath the seething of the other welkin-fish even now settling upon the river's wide kiss.

Where was Claude? Isabel accepted everything in life, but not my absence. Adventures were pleasurable risks - whenever he was about to calm the nerves and stroke the nape. But, now, all was coming apart in her hands, fingers in snail shells to her smarting eyes. This squeezed prison of sight could thus discern pointed faces at the holes neatly arranged along the silver flank. Never even thinking that, one day, she, of all people, would be called upon to write new history books, the moment passed without her truly realising its importance. The humming monsters soared again into the sky, their plumes of fire eventually forming a corona of tails around the story-book sun.

After hours into days into bigger units of time than could be countenaced by brief existences such as Isabel, Claude’s body was eventually discovered near the spring. Her tears had already dried in advance of real sorrow's proof source and inner pain. She knelt beside the man she loved. Claude, was it? Wiping a sprig of hair from the tearless sweat, she kissed his dislocated lips with a passion that could only dig her deeper towards his mollusc soul. Claude had believed that the spring's golden flush held wondrous qualities of mind-change and, thus, it was his favourite haunt. His face was quite beyond recognition, but his buckled skins, freshly sliced each morning from dew-damp boles, were still clinging to his thews. His bone-case had become one with rank decay, however, my eyes blindshot and his inner carcass a taxidermist's false start.

Isabel married Claude, as had been planned, the corpse being supported (by the best) on limp limbs at the woodside altar. He was then placed to rest in the marriage cot, whereby for the years ahead, Mad Madge would help Isabel with the regular ablutions and worship of the human-soaked quagmire. As the age-blotched moon dipped to peep beneath the eaves, the two women crooned shanties, eager for the renewal of the river's rusty cranking - where Isabel never again chose to venture.

Not being able to read nor form words, her previously overheard recitations from the old books she had made to Mad Madge had merely been ad hoc pretence. Thus, the new history assigned to Isabel remained unwritten - even though the neatly slivered wood paper had been specially supplied for so doing by the forest workers who loved her. But the history was written, eventually - that is, when I, child of Isabel, spawned from my father's prolonged rigor-mortis on the wedding night, grew up and taught myself to write out her lullabies.

The silver welkin-fish have not returned, no doubt blaming the sky for an earth they now cannot surfly. Yet, at dead of night, ancient moons tend to ghost their way overhead into my dreams, with dead-pan eyes and , yes, craters of gills.

Pansy Pie

(published 'Cloth Ears' 1990)

There was a little girl, not much older than twelve, I guess, in a red dress, who came to my attention when I was selling cat’s meatfrom pub to pub for their bar food.

She skipped up to me and asked:
“What have you got in yer cart, mister?”

“I’ve got fat pipings of meat scraped from me ol Mum’s innards,” I joked.

She giggled an “Ooooh!” but, not really seeing why it was funny, questioned me again: “How much it cost, eh, mister? I’ve got a pretty shiny farthing in my pinny - is that ‘nuff for a tasty chewy bit?”

“It’s nowt a pound! But less of your questions, young missy. What your name then?”

“Pansy.”

“Pansy Floppy-Pants??”

“No,” she screeched in uncontroll¬able mirth, “Pansy PIE.”

“Pansy Pie?” It was my turn to laugh - for this name suited her down to the ground. Her face was as round as an apple pie, with a large spam forehead and eyes like large brown meatballs in lashings of milk.

I began to like this little mooncalf, despite her cheek. I decided o pull her leg.

“Who cut yer hair like that - your dentist!? Who set out yer teeth like broken fence-posts - the hairdresser, I suppose!”

She did not laugh.

She dipped her hand into the bottom of my cart and pulled out a particularly stringy clutch of valves from my mother’s lower endings. She also picked carefully into my tray of gnawing bones and positioning them carefully amid the other mess in her hand, she held it all up across her face.

“Is that any better?” she said, quite seriously.

A tear welled at the corner of my eye, for the pity of it all. I scuttled off to the next pub on my roster.

But she followed me, that little scare-flesh, through the encroaching murk of an early dusk.

My eyes flowed with something I could not explain. I turned round and looked at the dear Medusa of my heart - and realised that with no doubt I had fallen in love with her dripping mask.

*

Matthew Shakewell, the landlord, shook my hand as I arrived athe Jackass Penguin bar.

“Hi, Blasphemy!” he said to me, “how’s things? Got some juicy meatenings for my hungry microwave? It’s jawing on a wadge of used pork scratchings at the moment. It needs a lump of your choice cuts to suck…” He laughed.

I put my hand into my seeping canvas bag and pulled out the tenderest, pinkest steaklets. Shakewell whistled between his teeth and paid me a wow of a gratuity, which I immediately returned to him in exchange for a pint of the very best and a shovelful of scratchings.

I then sat in the corner and slowly sipped at my drink. But when I happened to look into the surface of the liquid, I did not see the reflection of my own face but the imploring eyes of my lamented mother. And whan I looked up at Shakewell’s humming microwave, I caught a fleeting image of the wide, white poppy face of sweet Pansy Pie, somehow desperately trying to tell me something with her haunting eyes.

Done To A Turn

(published 'Dark Matter' 1999)


The parlour’s silence (if a place could be silent as opposed to the things in it) was broken only by the coal embers speaking in crumbling and hissing. A flame’s lick had the last word, before darkness wedded itself to the parlour’s silence and became a ghost of something that hadn’t even lived.

Only two hours earlier, the place had been full of family life. The children had squabbled over the best position by the fire, the high-collared woman remonstrating with a boy who was the worst offender - that the heat did reach the couch if only he would try it. Not believing even his mother, the little scamp pushed his sobbing twin sister into the empty coal scuttle and hunched himself closer to the fire. The older twins were rather scathing of the younger ones and squatted on both sides of their father’s wing armchair… he, who, in turn, drew long wreaths of a cigar into his lungs and puffed them out again, as if there were nobody else in the parlour - unread book resting on his knee, eyes glazed...

Lizbie sat in the opposite armchair, shivering a little. As she was the middle child, she was accustomed to being left out of most games by the four others. After their mother had left the room, Lizbie decided to entice the others into a game of Dares. She really wanted to play Blind Man’s Bluff, but It was not yet Christmassy enough for that. In any event, the last time they had such a rumpus, blindness became too close to fact for comfort and Mother sent them all to bed early without a candle, as a punishment for not using a blindfold nor even eyelids.

Charades was a possibility, or even Postman’s Knock or Sardines, since make-believe was that family’s forte and they never had real toys, you see, or even Christmas presents. Yet life was far too real for miming and everything seemed to end in unspeakable forfeits.

“I dare you to play Dares,” piped up Lizbie, taking a sudden advantage of a lull. The younger twins were staring icily at each other in the Eyeball game (where the ultimate forfeit was said to be an exploding head if you were the first one to blink), whilst the older ones played Cat’s Cradle with Mother’s wool across their Scroogish father’s lap; the fire had settled to the point of optimum heat. Father’s eyes were now closed, the cigar smoke uncoiling in fairy words above his shiny pate. The other children, by their lack of response, indicated passive acquiescence to the game of Dares. The parlour drew quiet.

“OK, I’ll start off...” said Lizbie.

“Why you? The first one to roll a six should go first.”

Lizbie ignored the interruption and pointed to the girl in the scuttle. “I dare you to... put your hand as close to the fire as it’ll make a scorch-mark on it.”

The girl, without demur, as if Dares possessed a form of religious sanctity, clambered from the scuttle and made her way to the fire, using knees as feet, her small run-up of a frock riding upon white thighs. Tentatively, she edged her clenched fist as near to the glowing coals as thought possible

“Cowardy, cowardy, cornflower custard,” chanted Lizbie.

The fist edged even nearer.

The older twins had by now entangled their father in the machinations of their Cat’s Cradle game, like a fly in a web. He did not seem to care: a very pliable father.

As there reeked cooked flesh, Mother returned with the trayful of Royal Tea. Crumpets done to a turn, so thickly buttered, they swam on the plate. Dainty triangular canapes, each with an anchovy perched for swallowing. A silver teapot dressed in its cozy finery. A tier of various cakes, each one so full of itself, it dripped its innards upon the one beneath. And finally, a tandoori hand, on a bed of pilau rice, each finger smoking like a cigar...

During the wend of night, there were only stone eyes. The man’s ghost In the shape of stale smoke spoke silently about the agony of its erstwhile body’s searing lungs. And the parlour rasped its chimney-throat clear of last century’s Santa Claus - who had once dared to stay there forever.

The Hoop (5)

Written today and first published here


She was a Victorian lady turned by the designer museum into a model of the 21st century, with anachronistic props such as swish half-moon eye-shades that she sported on her nose and an over-large plastic hoop that she tried – in an ungainly pose – to spin around her bustle-skirted middle.

“Stand there!” shouted the queue-guide, as he paraded a small party of adults in jeans and T-shirts past the Victorian lady’s clumsy attempts to be both herself and a model of a modernity that she did not yet understand – hence these mis-choreographed cavortings labelled: “Welcome the missing back”.

The self-conscious audience stood ‘there’ as instructed and looked up at the epitome of an art ‘happening’ or ‘installation’: the biggest selling-point of which was that the lady was a real Victorian, still wearing the clothes she was wearing when snatched by a latter-day Time Machine and planted here today. Her spoken English was so quaint that it needed translation. With no evidence to the contrary, nobody had before realised that people must have used phonetics differently then.

Suddenly, unseen by the queue-guide and the rest of the audience-party, a little girl (just woken from bed judging by her appearance) passed along the edge of the gallery slowly bowling a hoop – a hoop smaller than the Victorian lady’s and made of wood.

The Victorian lady alone spotted this small plaintive figure and shouted with enormous passion a few sounds that could be configured into: “Petite Madeleine!”

And with an unlikely Proustian grasp of the Portuguese language shaped into an alien tongue, memories flooded back all skewed and warped. A Time Machine was evidently not a very efficient method to heal injustice or pardon guilt or secure innocence or order the correct course of events. Time Machines were the cause of their own non-existence. Once you had sufficient scientific know-how to create one, you simply knew that you would never believe that one could be created at all because disbelief in Time Machines would be suddenly inbred rather than learnt. Self-evidently.

The small girl was no longer to be seen.

The gallery was quickly emptied by the queue-guide, leaving the Victorian lady 'installation' alone with dislodged shades revealing a real blood-smeared teardrop streaking the white of one eye from within the eyeball rather than from outside it. The saddest sight of all. Tears that didn’t need tear-ducts to become tears.

The over-large plastic hoop later fell to the empty floor and rolled towards where the small girl had seemed to have stood by the wall, but toppled over with an echoey clatter before reaching.

By The Bootstraps

(published 'Silver Wolf' 1994)


She kept quiet for most of the day, except when she resorted to dark corners of the house and sobbed her heart out.

When she invited me to live with her, I was in two minds. How could I be confident that I was the one to pull her up by the bootstraps?

Relationships, in my experience, had tended to drag people down. And wasn’t I evidence of that very rule?

For years now, I’d visited Vera for quiet Sunday teas. Little more than a nephew visiting his aunt for understated conversations on dark afternoons. Except she wasn’t my aunt...it just seemed that way.

There was nothing more to it. We had originally met at night school and decided to score a few bonus points in human contact, before our results were totted up.

I was too old to be her nephew in normal circumstances, but the age difference was not impossible. I gave her flowers every time, for the price of a tea. But I would’ve given her flowers without the tea. And she would’ve supplied the tea without the flowers.

I forget now what we talked about. Sometimes it was what preoccupied the Sunday papers. Or library books we had exchanged the week before. Or, even, the weather which, needless to say, was gloomy whatever the time of year.

I’ve forgotten those conversations, since co-habitation has forced me to watch what I say even to the extent of surrendering what I once said to oblivion. A mind has only room for one set of obligations and emotional etiquette. Living with Vera brought into focus her utter sadness. She had successfully concealed this during Sunday teas. Now, I was made aware of the failed suicides carried around inside herself during the dusting, mopping and culinary duties which she assumed at the slightest excuse.

I began to blot out matters I once broached in preference to small talk. Such topics must’ve really brought her low. World news had been depressing at the best of times. And bootless badinage thankfully ensued.

Once television had run itself into the ground with interrupted jokes and even crueller slapstick, once the soap operas outgrew themselves with meaningful morals, I talked louder, mixing my own speech rhythms with those on the screen - in the hope that she wouldn’t notice.

Then we tried to switch back to ourselves: clumsy attentions towards each other... wordless shapes which weren’t really our bodies at all, perhaps... fumbling forms of darkness...

Predictably, Vera was begining to die. She was older than me, after all. We held hands, neither of us speaking... and, towards the end, it was for dear life.

I still don’t know which of us spoke last. And knowing that has no point in any event - thankful only that we had been given the chance to make such unlikely love.

Ruthven

Published 'Works' 1995

Ruthven had much pain to come. Once a rich man of the City, he now contemplated what remained of his short life. People to die, people he loved, and, finally, himself--racked with pain and pointlessness. He drew the covers to his chin and followed the cracks in the ceiling to their uneasy confluence of rivers. Suffering had been so far contained within reasonable margins, so he wondered whether the worst pain was incubating, moving slowly against fate's dam, threatening to overspill at any moment.

The bedroom window rattled in a sporadic wind, the only element breaking the only silence. And the only person, perhaps the only one in the world, dreamed everything, thousands of self-imposed dreams crowding nightmare's dam, threatening to break out in one fell swoop or, at best, simply seep through the haircracks in the ceiling--silver teardrop by silver teardrop like counterfeit shilling-coins.

There had been little rain: cold dry summers edging into endless winter. The sun was a dull orange stain upon the curtains, as if it were incontinent. He recalled the others who had shared his pillows--but even the pillows had been stuffed into the rucksacks of derelict ghosts, who were now traipsing into the distance of his fading imagination; the only remaining pillow under his head was sodden with dark sweat, into which he turned his only face with a sob.

There was more than just wind at the window. Fingernails cut their teeth upon it. They were not people, but monsters, the only monsters left to taunt the one monster who still called itself man. He turned bodily in his sleep, if indeed sleep it could be called. His dreams were of clean sheets, silk sheets--and the pillow full of teased satin feathers for a pillow-fight at a schoolgirls' midnight feast--and a body so soft, so luscious, so self-responsive, he was confident that love could outlast the night. He should have known money could not purchase such love when the chips were finally counted.

Then, through the billowing curtains, there came the creature--a huge monstrosity with huge flapping banknote wings, one huge searing searchlight eye and the smallest possible credibility--shaping out the arrival of night in its own shape, a shape the sleeper could not fathom nor, in a million years, have invented. This was the shape of pain to come, now finally come--dripping indeed with spent come. Only to find the bed empty. Empty of even the last dream. The pillow plump.

The cracks in the ceiling drew to a tangled doodle of tentacles--but nobody was left to tease out the final clear-cut image. The sleeper had departed in one final trial of nightmare--to reseek his fortune in the City, where it was said the streets were paved with gold--and the low lying motorway across the central City filled quickly with sea-water after marauders undermined the coastal dam--but the palace was water-logged and the pelican crossings impassable. The money-lenders foreclosed when the Exchange's plimsoll-line for narrow money supply fell short of the realizable residue of the readies.

Ruthven became senior dosser, on the southernmost bank, but did not have enough pockets to take what came floating down with man-made tides. Then there was the body in the water. Ruthven recognised the body that must have thrown itself in. A mock-up, a right Madame of a waxwork.

"Blimey, that body's me!" he screeched to the wizened woman who took alternate sucks with him on a bottle of pother.

"Now! Now! That can't be you, 'cos you are here." And she pointed to the bottle's glass neck which he French-kissed. "That’s your reason for living."

"But it sure looks like me bobbing like a corpse." The Thames twined between hard shoulders that were planned from time immemorial for its course. Large black inverted statues of fish creatures supped at its margins. In the distance, the searchlight on the top of the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral winked like a lighthouse, its beams crossing the whole of the city skyline "with the revolving spokes of qod on His one-wheeler,” some smart-arse dosser nearby whined out.

Professional wreckers were discerned combing the more outlying areas, in wait for bankers--craft to be lured into the darker canal regions--yet unplumbed by any upstart A to Z cartographer recently laid off in Venice. Dislodged pavement slabs with the gold plate flaking off stood on end like reefs. Floating merchantmen cast money-notes to the wind, in the hope that such inflation-ridden confetti would placate any robbers. They even launched giant coins in cork life-rings as some cosmic game of Shove-Halfpenny. The dossers gambled upon them eventually landing between the tramline territories. It was all a cheap way of keeping busy those who would otherwise be dangerous.

Ruthven turned over under the gummed banknotes that were unaccountably warmer than newspapers. He could not sleep properly, however, because of the hard currency in his back. There was old gold with which to enamel the city basin and hard loot to sink in venture capital: such were his waking dreams, born out of sunset, by high-rise. The wizened woman put a finger to his cheek--and sunk it to the bottom bone of spent existence, through the yellow waxy loam of his flesh. She felt his heart turn over like a sick house-pet in its sleep.

The Ferris-Wheel eye in the sky hovered--a huge silent Angel Helicopter. Even as children, they never had enough pockets for the money. She wept to see how shorter she had became than when first a child. The coins were now so huge and dragging, yet worthless. She idly counted the "blessings” as they floated upon the scummy river: ancient uncustomised vehicles which used to circle the City rather than dare cross it. She turned a blind eye and took suck at Ruthven's ribbed chimney-flesh neck, whence the head had crumbled. She believed that God was probably a Dosser who could not bear the flesh-corrupted body with which He had been saddled, so he flung it off him in skin-shit desiccations of gold--whilst the vast money-spider monster sat upon the Cathedral's dome, knitting its tentacles.

The dam which finally burst was not one of fate nor of nightmare, but that of death itself. Yet Ruthven's previous pain had not presaged a healing death, only more pain, a pain that was so painful he could only hope to share it amongst others. And upon the death of each human creature, the residual pain continued to grow for those still left alive. And still does. A tontine of torment.


¬

Folie de doute

Published 'Sierra Heaven' 1995

I am accused of gullibility. Yet it will not stretch into believing that anybody can be as paranoiac as Sandall.

I first encountered his existence at school, where both of us are cruelly bullied: a fact which fails to bring us closer, simply seeing each other as distant co-victims, too crestfallen to taken things further than that. Yet I can easily imagine Sandall telling me of the awful dreads instilled in him by a supposedly impending torture worse than having the fingernails ripped out one by one. I suspect, too, that he in turn empathises with my similar dreads, hoping the effort of cultivating me as an acquaintance, let alone as a soulmate ... is a sign of single-mindedness? A belief system unsaddled from paranoia? Or simply a tortured admission of schizophrenia?

After all, my name, if you can credit it, is Sandall.

The Ghostly Time

Published 'Ammonite' 1995




Madge sung as she spun. Motes of dust were hanging in air’s limbo - thus frozen by the laminar flows of her faultless wheel-treadling - whilst seasonal storms stung her cottage window with salt and the oil wick grew gloomier. Madge’s singing, like her spinning, was loomed upon the rote of memory — and even the darkness invading her parlour from the sea could not sway such mindless efficiency.

Abruptly, the wheel snagged and halted, as if something had become lodged between the wooden spokes. Her revery disrupted, Madge thought she had just seen the dead - or the dead had just seen her. The wind whined and pretended to be a thousand Hell’s demons wildly spitting upon the panes. She idly speculated that either the wick had turned the dimness pink or the very morling wool being spooled upon the floor by the wheel’s extruder was already dyed by its donor sheep. She imagined the coiling strands to be shredded threads of various husbands’ remains: those various husbands she had shorn of their manhood over the unreckonable years.

A retributive ghost, she finally assumed, had left its disembodied hand in the wheel, during a state of temporary semi-materialisation, the blood from its wrist stump dripping upon the spun wool. Madge smiled at this now more likely explanation - for well she might, the ghost having failed in its course of vengeance - and threw the barely warm hand into the fire grate as potential kindle. Then, she resumed her mindless crooning to the wheel’s relentless hum. She did not even bother to remember whether she had recognised the familiar feel of the hand’s sweaty grip.


Another day, another night, another misplaced memory. Madge squatted on the stool before the fire dreaming that she no longer existed or, at best, she was a ghost returned to find her stool empty. Perhaps, she had never lived at all and the series of men wedded to her between drowning tragedies had been no more than betrothed to a lick and a promise. She did not question how such words came to her in this state of rarification.

The sea’s sound was softer tonight outside her cottage. On those earlier occasions of storm when the rollercoasting fishing-boats trailed nets like desiccated wings, she was accustomed to stare through the fucus-spattered panes for a sign of her latest husband’s bobbing torchlit homecoming: but with no hope of catching the squelch of his thigh boots through the salty puddles. Yet, now, tonight, with the fire having doused its crackling, it would have been possible to hear his breathing at the distance of a speck on the runnelled horizon.

She had surrendered the merry-go-round of marriages after the feather-toed creatures of the sea had failed to return her last one. She had been granted simple mementoes of all previous husbands — a cheek-flap or a nuggetted finger or barnacled toe. Sometimes, the bits were delivered late, half-decades late. Tomorrow, the delivery may be a man’s sea-weathered privities on a silver tray, like an aborted Innsmouth lobster.

She wept. The privities might be those of one six husbands ago: the only man who had been able to service her better than she could herself.

The weeping made little noise, like a corpse’s. And as dawn broke, the knocking was fainter than the wings of an angel-fish; quieter even than the many squelching tip-toes that preceded it.


Now to my own story, the one I know best. You see, I once saw Madge standing and I likened her figure to a shrunken, blackened lighthouse with its one failed eye-beam flowing, then flapping down the torso like shadowy wings of a cloak. She was barely visible against a storm-cloud, the darkness of which fed upon a cross-section of the sea that was as straight, long and narrow as the distant horizon. It was strange that only a few seconds had passed since the sun first turned into a solitary purple bruise of a cloud.

She was awaiting, I assumed, the return of her latest husband who usually had to fish the sea until the last daylight was sucked back by the surfacing wreck-fish. This had been no raw deal on better nights when the giddiheads of thundercloud were nowhere near. But, today, she must have wondered why he was braving the onset of foul weather. The need for catch was surely not desperate enough for such measures. But, of course, recently, the salt-wine had scrawny fruit for fins and bones. Nothing but a mouthful of scales for breakfast

Wait, what was that shape at sea darker even than the storm? I crawled nearer to Madge’s skirts to catch her low mumbles. I cupped my fan-nerved hand to my ear:

“Ne’er-be-lickit is my belly’s tongue,
Cradle-clothes are stuffed within me,
Winding-sheets swaddle a love unsung,
And a funk-willie’s my man’s chimney.”

She faltered in her tuneless crooning, since the shape had by now become obvious to her, too. If I had known the words of her song of childlessness, I would have continued it. Instead, I made it up as I myself took up the strain:

“Hog’s lard, fear-babe and pricker-roach,
Sea-shade, blub-bring and earth-fly,
I must boil the sea, let them poach,
‘Cos gulpswollen is my birth-eye.”

The sea soon regurgitated its prey before the storm broke. I helped Madge drag it back through the sand-puddles to the cottage where we put it to bed together, like parents tucking in their only child.

Her tears were dry. I wondered if she even noticed me helping at all. Clambering to the window sill, I could see the storm had nurtured the tallest, most imposing lighthouse ever, sweeping the sky with a god’s flashing eyes. I sang, wordlessly this time, in the hope it would lull Madge into a dreamless slumber. Eventually I nuzzled up to her, to ease a bout of the shyfryngs. Seeing, my solitary birth-eye in the darkness, I assumed she knew I was the baby to whom she’d never given birth. Or was it that the past had no monopoly on ghosts?

Six O'Lantern Policemen

Another piece 'Lexophony' (written by me in the sixties) should be read in advance of the piece below.

SIX O'LANTERN POLICEMEN

Published 'Purple Patch' 1995



'Tell a mixture of
Truth and lie...
...Untill no one
Not even you
Can tell one from the other."
[Lines 2305/6, 2309/10, The Egnisomicon.]


Six o'lantern policemen in church-dome hats clapped me into the pisky nick down by the goblin shore and gave me luncheon from a truncheon. I can't understand why I'm here but since I'm here for as long as I can foresee, I ought to be able to shape out the events leading up to my imprisonment in as chronological and meaningful a manner as I can muster. So, once upon a time, there was a dipstick, who for current purposes you can call me, a long streak of nothing, a pair of trouser-braces in the tin bath. I got going somehow, did most of the right things in most of the right eyes, passed a few notches through those trouser-braces ... and ended up discovering The Egnisomicon. The Egnisomicon, you won't have heard of, but you've guessed it, it is a book, a book of sorts, and, like most books, has words in it.

I got married, naturally, had a family, one boy, one girl, and we lived happily ever after. That's one side of the story which I would prefer to end there. But promises are promises. It was my son who thought I was old before my time - surely he saw that I was giving it all I could, in overdrive to earn an honest crust and support a rickety roof of rattle-slates. My God, my two women, since my daughter surely got to be one, they faced me out about it, said I had to keep hold of the 3 cherries or the 3 oranges or whatever, for they dreamed of a one time jackpot when they could nudge me out. Their heads waltzed in my dreams like bouncing balloons. I woke with sweat soaking the sheets. I also dreamed of the Earth itself being a monster, full of curdling cream, and bouncing like a head through someone else's dream, a backdrop to someone else's personal mythos. I dug the garden too much that next summer. I still don't know why and for what. Perhaps I wanted to see how far down it was before the cream started spirting out.

"Get that dirty thing out of the kitchen!" So I took it to the loo instead. I scraped out the tin bath me old mum and dad sat in the 50's. This is where it gets harder to be meaningful, since chronology has been thrown out with the baby. I could say that we had stockpiled loads of tins of Irish stew, marrowfat peas, Italian tomatoes, haricot beans, ring spaghetti &c and I emptied their contents over the ghosts of me old mum and dad who, for all I knew, still sat in the tin bath, scrubbing the day away. I could say that I got in, myself, and started wallowing about. But that does not explain The Egnisomicon, does it? Was that a tin bath into which had been thrown all the literary preservatives and colourings that could be turned out of the pantry of words? Or was it a more important item than that, telling you of moments in the past and future that are about to meet in time present?

Significance is only self-evident after it has ceased to be significant. That's why I'm here today staring from a grinny window, mouthing silently, over and over again, the same words. And the two women and the young man who used to be my family, what about them? They think they have forgotten me, as I have indeed nearly forgotten them. Little fear, I am about to write The Egnisomicon all over again, so that it can exist for the first time. And what indeed are those words I silently mouth time after time?

“You live a day a day to put life in
Suck suck sucking on your own bleeding virtue
You live a day a day to put Christ in
Beg beg begging that death cannot hurt you."

And, down by the goblin shore, the six policemen in church-dome hats fail to wonder what it all means - but neither do they seem to notice that I eat nothing and spend all my time in the pisky nick's bath, the trouser-braces tightening notch by notch...


"What is factual is not actual."
[Line 1190, The Egnisomicon]

Synergies

There was no way I was going to kiss a self-confessed vampire, was there? She ran the Society of Vampires that I had decided to join - not because I believed in vampires, but because I appreciated the deliciously decadent literature surrounding the concept of the Undead: fiction all of it . . . except the story I have to tell.

She struck me as a gothic creature, combining . . . the fearful gullibility of a heroine who faced the mysteries of an ancient Appennine castle and its villainous owner with battlement brows . . . and the inscrutability of a dark-haired shadow-¬cosmeticked sharp-fingered black-garbed bangle-wristed pin-nosed creature that Satan might one day take as his chosen bride and sell as a hand maiden to God when finished with.

Her name did not suit either part of this forced synergy. Hilda. Yes, that was it. I’d nearly forgotten. Or something is trying to make me forget. Hilda. The one who ran the Society of Vampires. Not that any member believed in vampires. Except Hilda. And me, since.

Then being a rather sociable young man, one who considered himself in charge, even when he wasn’t, I soon worked my way up the hierarchy towards Hilda’s right hind - or should I say left hand? After a short stint as the Society Treasurer, I became editor of the house magazine and membership secretary. The latter position entailed vetting all applications for signs of crankiness - which was understandable, bearing in mind the interest group we attracted. In retrospect, I suppose it was Hilda alone who did not want people in the Society who truly believed in vampires nor, especially, those who had convinced themselves that the they were vampires. This was because she wanted to believe she was the only real vampire on Earth. She needed to be the king-pin: the Queen Bee.

As soon as I realised that she had taken a hankering towards me as a man, I began to back-pedal. It was all very well loving the rich seams of sado-masochism when simply in the form of words and literature - which mentality in many of the other members took the shape of comic strips or Dracula films - but, being face to face with it in Hilda, was tantamount to reaching beyond the well-head of the eye for the unknown regions of the soul.

Then, there was, of course, the occasion when everything came to a crunch. Some of us had been discussing various facets of vampires in Hilda’s bedsit - a dim, and dare I say tawdry, room in a building hidden behind other buildings off the Tottenham Court Road. A few resented how vampires were given a raw deal, whilst others were becoming concerned at the over-popularisation of vampires following the success of a film blockbuster. I cannot now recall who was present, other than myself and Hilda. That day, she had been more in the mode of Poppy Z. Brite/Anne Rice than that of Jane AustenlAnn Radcliffe or, perhaps, the other way round. Whatever the case, she was showing more of one side of her character than the other. She remained the ideal hostess, however, clearing away the scrunched-up silver linings of the wine-boxes we had consumed - before they began to litter the floor like dead duck-billed platypuses, or should that be platypi? Yet, as the evening wore on and the dark shapes of people peeled off one by one, she really got her teeth into one subject. Well, mention of Hilda’s teeth just had to arrive sooner or later, didn’t it? Which brings me back to the kiss I mentioned at the start. But I’m jumping ahead again, as if my thoughts are somehow readier for death than my body.

“I don’t know if we can explain why people like vampires,” I said, knowing this was non-sequitur, but little caring. I knew Hilda had been ranting on about Jung and the Collective Unconscious, but I couldn’t help thinking there was an uncollective unconscious of which even Jung was unaware. Very few people could tap into this more esotenc sump of the universal soul. If I was the only one who knew about it, I compared it to being on board a ship without any of the common passengers or Jungian crew knowing that I was on board. But I never said anything about it - either because I was scared of my pretentiousness being ridiculed or for fear of diluting the esoteric nature of the matter - or both.

“Donald” . . . there she said it, making me more vulnerable with the release of my name . . . “People love vampires because they fear death, and being a vampire is one way of escaping that big black hole.”

“Yes, but, down deep, they enjoy the horror - the thought of drinking blood with fangs et cetera et cetera.”

“The fact they enjoy horror” . . . she picked up the remains of what she thought was the last wine-box and wrung out a few dregs . . . “is like admitting that humanity is basically evil.”

“I’m not going into the old argument about all that!” I had already expounded at length on there being no possibility of the power of good without its balance. Perhaps that was why the others had sidled from the bedsit. Some on all fours.

It is at this point that I should make clear that Hilda had already, earlier in the day, made dubious overtures to me, even before she started emptying the wine-boxes. I suppose the old-fashioned term was “making a pass”. Needless to say, I did not reciprocate her advances in any shape or form, but, since I’ve had to clarify that point time and time again to the police, there is no harm in saying it here. So, when she suddenly lunged forward with her tongue too engorged for her mouth to contain it, I was ready to defend myself. That was the only reason I had the remaining unemptied bag of Burgundy concealed behind my back. It being still floppy and wobbly with wine, like a woman’s breast wrapped in wafer-thin aluminium, I managed to stuff it into her mouth, before she pinned my hands to the sofa with her fingernails. She was not to be foiled, however. I became hysterical with outrage at the unexpected sight of what I thought was a third arm coiling from behind her back - released, as became clear later, from a leather strapping that the flimsy frock concealed. This appendage was like a huge horny sting.

The rest is history. When the authorities undid her other thongs and bone-ribbed corsets, they discovered sagging there a sizeable sac of yellow slime. The doctors stated, in the cool light of reflection, that Hilda had been incontinent, a condition of which she was no doubt ashamed, being as young as she was. The death was deemed caused by reasons unknown. But I know different. She was what an esoteric like me would call an Earth Stowaway - not exactly a vampire, but the next best thing. But I didn’t have to enlighten the authorities - or should I say endarken? Giving me the benefit of the doubt (if anyone could possible wreak a benefit from such a negativity), they let me off with a caution. It is perhaps surprising that the Society has continued in being after Hilda’s so-called death. As I’m less gregarious now, members may be interested to know that I spend my time reading Jane Austen novels, desperately hoping that the words don’t turn nasty. Finally, I wish you well as the new editor of the Society magazine, hoping that you will find it possible to print this as a sort of epitaph - and warning.

Donald.

Mygold

Published 'Queen of the Mists' 1994

Mygold loved me more than I could imagine.

I first met her on bait market day, when the streets were caught alive with sea smells. The man I knew in the area - by the name of Fisher Codge - happened to be hanging hooks along his washing line, as I approached from a southerly direction towards the north-facing port village.

‘Goodja day, Ben,’ he called, as he proceeded to lay his nets to dry over the outside coal bunker.

‘Same to you, Codge, I’m sure,’ I rejoined, leaning over his backyard fence, ready to while away the rest of the day in his company. Might as well--better than going up to the wharfside where the market loafers were bound to be surly, with there not being much trade about these days. The fishmongers did a fitful business from their varicose veined slabs of marble, but not enough to warrant hiring someone like me to clean off the scale-curds afterwards.

‘There is a glut of bait, Codge,’ I said glumly, motioning towards the knot of wriggling worm-sized maggots in the wicker basket I toted.

‘There be more bait than fish, ‘tis true, Ben, an’ there’ll come a day, I be bound, when people’ll ‘ave to turn to bait isself to feed their tummies. Then it’ll shoot up in price agin, don’ be affeared.’

I nodded, bemused at his logic.

Then, suddenly, quite unpremeditated, Mygold lurched down Fisher Codge’s backstep which, if I only had my eyes about me, I would have seen had lately been donkey-stoned a waxen red. Indeed, being donkey-stoned. Better than being tickled with a bunny cloth any day. But all my eyes were for this unexpected vision of Mygold, not for the results of Codge’s elbow grease.

‘Ben, I’ll ‘duce yer to me nees.’

Codge pointed with a fish hook he had been sharpening with a huge rutted file. Her name be Mygold.’ I was temporarily speechless, unusual for a bait-seller. I knew her name already, by reputation rather than physical presence; she had come to stay with her Uncle from a village further up the coast. ‘Mygold, this be Ben, an ol’ mate of mine.’ And he touched me lightly on the shoulder with the file, as if he were knighting me. He didn’t know I had wandered in the direction of his homestead, purely to see Mygold for my own eyes. And I had forgotten.

She made a song and dance of ignoring me. Having started to pick fish fingers from the large bowl she was lugging and, laying them out in the sunshine on the corrugated roof of the outside privy, she hummed a tunelessness that matched her demeanour. I almost felt the live weight of her breasts, loosely hanging as they were within the sheerness of her blouse. The expanse of buttocks thrust its visage towards me, the mouth opening and shutting like that of a monkfish, as she placed the bowl on the ground to allow her to reach further up the privy roof. When she finally turned towards me, I was faced with the most memorable features. Once seen, hopefully forgotten. The peepers, although set back into the jowls, were large filmy oyster beds. The smeller, long and slender, with mean pinprick nostrils. The eater, wide and wet, with a slippery customer lolling inside. The listeners so petite they were tantamount to gills. The hair scrawled back into wayward plaits of bottle-green tendrils.

This Mygold smiled. Codge winked. I did not know where to put myself.

She returned to the house, expecting me to follow, as it was plain that she desperately fancied me. I cringed at the trail of glisten she left behind in her wake.

‘Come in fer a while, Ben, why don’t yer’?’ Codge took my arm. I felt the piercing jab of a fish-hook in the back of my neck, as he reached round heartily to lead me up the garden path.

‘No, Codge, I got to get off to the wharfside, to sell my wigglies.’

‘Can’t yer spare ‘alf an ‘our fer a nice cuppa with yer ol’ mate. ‘These ‘ere fish fingers on the privy roof may be piping hot by then and you can par-take of a few afore yer go.’

I could not free myself, since the curved copper claw had by now reached the nodules within my back. I succumbed to the fate that often awaited honest baitmen such as me. To be hooked and lined for sinkering before tea.

I got my own back in a sense, for while I was otherwise engaged, all my wigglies escaped to the privy itself where, finding not nearly enough sustenance to core through in the shit-butt, they had managed to crawl up to the corrugated roof and proceeded to corrupt the fish fingers thereupon into little better than helpings of fried bubble-and-squeak.

How I knew this was happening outside, I put down to second sight, but the fact was not enough to compensate for the pain I endured inside. It was as if all my bones were party to the same unbearable toothache, while the diamond-sharp tip of Codge’s abandoned hook penetrated to the one massive abscess within the marrow of my spinal column.

But all that paled into insignificance when compared to what Mygold did to me. Not exactly bubble and squeak: more like blubber and screech.

They did, however, throw me back into the turbulent sea of life, only slightly worse for wear. I cannot honestly claim that it’s a particularly hard life us bait-men have to lead.

I did lose one of my wigglies that day, however, which, in better times, would have cost me a pretty penny. I expect it drowned in the butt and got mixed up with the rest of the stuff in there.

The Ghoul

Published 'Black Lotus' 1993


The earth was easier to dig than the ghoul had feared after all the ground frosts of previous nights. Now, as if a thoughtful God were keeping vigil, the weather had taken an abrupt mild turn.

The solid silver trowel made easy inroads into the peaty soil, but with there being no watchful eye of the moon to oversee progress, there was no certainty as to the delving’s depth – other than the probes of the ghoul’s own fingers which consequently released the handle of the trowel whilst the other hand propped the body at the optimum angle upon the buttocks.

It was not obvious when the blade had met wood since there was no significant difference between the earthy mulch and the rotting coffin itself. But the ghoul’s testing fingers inadvertently threaded empty eye sockets and these sightless crevices sucked upon what they considered to be skirmishing worms – but quickly stopped because, surely, Death had no possible need of true hunger.

On the other hand, the ghoul did not realise how lucky she was to have been wearing gloves (albeit lacy, fashionable ones).