Published 'Stygian Articles' 1997
She was a mother and a half. Padgett Weggs saw her as the rock in the stormy seas of his life. Admittedly, a rock slippery with seaweed and decidedly craggy in places.
He remembers her most sitting in bed. It was her place, her refuge from the TV downstairs, a TV that was ever staring blankly at his father. Indeed, she held court from bed, propped up on several pillows, with books and crossword puzzles scattered around like a rogue patchwork quilt. True, she had a penchant for romance novels, which she completely denied half the time, but, even if it were true, it was nothing of which to be ashamed, she said. It was not as if she dreamt of her handsome prince depositing himself by her side in this her throne-room. And, even if he did, she would not succumb to his advances.
Padgett Weggs recalls taking his boyhood problems to her. Hours of bedside chat over maths problems and general topics still haunt him even today - including a bizarre ambition to be a professional writer despite his excruciating inability to write English in a proper manner. His mother even received visits from his father for, in those times, the TV programmes had intervals for the potter's wheel or a kitten playing with the dangling wool, and his father used these opportunities to cat nap beside her, upon the very bed that was the domain and core of her femininity. She was not fooled, though; she knew this was not her handsome prince returned from the crusades, but only the man with gappy flies and eyes like blunt squares, who would doubtless die soon from mouldering bone decay.
Four blokes formed the Round-Headed Club; perhaps, it were indeed their heads, like full moons, but no doubt it was for some other reason.
One among them was clean-shaven with short-cropped brown hair: he smiled infrequently and looked uncomfortable in his green Harris Tweed jacket. His pint-pot three-quarters empty beside him, he seemed querulous as to the source of its replenishment, but the others were too busy in their chatting to remark upon his pained expression. The flat-skinned face bore a scar snaking horizontally across the forehead, well beyond the ears. With the requisite nose and mouth somewhat abandoned on the wide expanse of flesh and the foxing of encroaching old age fanning from below the heavy-lidded eye-sockets, his visage was like a cracked chamberpot reflecting the garish pub lights. The owner of such features was indeed the very Padgett Weggs who was daydreaming earlier about his mother.
Another spoke: "When I was a small boy, unconscionable years ago, I viewed the clouds as being in a race across the sky. One day, when this image first struck me - (I'll get you another drinky-poo in a mo, Weggs) - it had been a stormy day, and the clouds skimmed fast above. I'd been playing up the bullace tree, pretending to sword-fight flying dragons and, in a moment of respite, I had my wondrous vision. Ha! Ha! Ha! I was a bit of a loner, thenabouts..."
Blasphemy Fitzworth (Feemy for short) was the one talking about clouds. He, too, possessed a large round head, but generously bearded and sown with humourous wrinkles. Slightly balding (halted, he maintained, by a premature vasectomy), the hair remaining to him had been rat-tailed by many ill-applied shampoos, depositing "salt-and-sugar" on his buffered boots. His belly was a pudding-bowl (some said from consuming too many cat's meat curries) and, as he settled deep into the ingle-side, his flies gaped a little wider to reveal a shameful hint of knobble. Oblivious to this, Feemy continued his own brand of long-winded pub-talk:-
"Well, that day, I dubbed those first particular clouds as the leaders in the race. It was the start of an everlasting dash and any subsequent clouds I saw (however slow or large) were laggards - even to say, only a few weeks afterwards, when I thought of the race again, I could not imagine how that day's clouds could bear to be so behindhand in their endeavours. But, many years later, today even, I still glance up and Tut-Tut to see yet bigger laggard clouds. The earlier clouds, all those yonks ago, were, by comparison, right in the leading pack, right up with the chase. Think of it, the clouds I see today, they're not doing so badly aginst those yet to come. Makes you think. (A pint of the very best, is it, then, Weggs?)"
"And a packet of pork scratchings."
Whilst Feemy rose for a foray at the bar counter, another participant, Tokkmaster Clerke, still wearing his kettle-hat, spoke of maggot-pies and other such names that he had for common birds. He was proud of his green-bone suit (although he had seen better days in it), so much so that his eyes of holy-fire darted from corner to corner of his widening face in alert attention for the rogue splatters from careless tankards, so rife in pubs he frequented. The hardest man in the Round-Headed Club, Tokkmaster was reputed to lose himself in jokes, not see their points and create his own punch-lines in a very physical manner.
"I'm not saying the Mount is a-flock with many different sorts, but - you talk of clouds, Feemy..." (Feemy Fitzworth had by now returned with freshened drinks.) "Well, behind each and every cloud are whole families of what-shall-I-call-them. Birds is good a word as any. Wing folded behind wing. Joined tail to tail. In clumps, with rhubarby legs. It's a mercy that your cloud racing don't ever end, Feemy - because they'd have nowhere to make their nest behind. (Mine's a gin and tonic, not this muck, Feemy, give me breath, you've known that for years, your head's deeper in the clouds than you think!)"
The fourth and last member of the Round-Headed Club, who was known on most nights as Nial Hopper, was much younger and still nurtured ambitions to make somebody of himself. His face was a dinner-plate of open-hearted flesh, across which his emotions floated like Feemy's clouds. He was somewhat attentive to his dress, bearing an imputrescible rose in his lapel and a thin dark tie dripping into the top of his trousers from a sea-gull collar. He fancied himself, no doubt as a result of his dealings with the knobs and twiddles in his flat on the Mount, as a self-styled TV chat-show host. He drank a lac-lake cocktail that Feemy had almost forgotten to include in his round, mainly because he was embarrassed at requesting it across the feculent surfaces of the Jackass Penguin bar. Nial sucked gently upon a straw which emerged coyly from brolly clusters and gaudy fruit-ferns at the tumbler's rim, as if he were a barrage-balloon being inflated from a monsoony jungle. Nial Hopper spoke next, it seemed:- "Nuncle Tokkmaster, it's all well and good talking about these things you dream about up behind the clouds, but furnish me proof, yes, show me photographs. Let's get some journalistic reality into this discussion."
"Is this boy a joke-smith? I'll throttle you with your fancy-talk," blurted Tokkmaster, his arm abruptly passing round Nial's neck and squeezing him into the corner. "Before you breathe again, young snap-whip, I'll push you so hard into this very ingle-cheek wall, until you explode into sparks up its chimney-flue! They're up there, take my word for it, Great Rounded-Heads with Holy Beaks, all a-mustering, ready for the great big push. I watch them with my big telescopes on the Mount."
Padgett Weggs, quiet until now, strained to speak, to such an extent that his long scar reddened at the edges. He would stand no truck from the likes of Tokkmaster Clerke. "They're not birds, Clerke. They're older than that, stranger than that, so strange that human eyes like yours cannot even see them!"
"You think they're up there, even so, eh, Padgett?" queried Feemy.
"Yes, if there's not at least something somewhere, how can you possibly explain what is going on in this world? None of it would make any sense, would it, otherwise? Think of it - metal boxes shooting up and down the fast lanes, women masquerading as men in men's jobs, film star presidents, TV chat shows, squawking-head music, neighbours ignoring neighbours. Look around you, all is nonsense, a global punch-and-judy show, great big churning accidents, bakelite boxes full of violence and nasty body-bits - even, old Tokkmaster, here, making mashlum out of poor Nial. Yep, they're up there, OK, likely unseen, even unsuspected. We're all going mad, mad, mad because of their evil influences." Padgett took a swig and relaxed from speaking.
But Tokkmaster was not assuaged. "I'll get my great rutted file to your skull, Weggs, for the talk you shit. Those up there, ARE HERE TO CLEAR UP THIS GODAWFUL MESS - NOT TO MAKE IT!"
"I think Padgett and Tokkmaster are in basic agreement," tendered Feemy, "but from opposite ends of the argument. Or so it seems to me."
"And with that," chimed Nial, "I say good night, stay bright!"
As they staggered from the Jackass Penguin, a litle the worse for wear, all four mooned up into the starless sky. Padgett Weggs shivered, as he employed one of Nial Hopper's cocktail brollies to probe bits of chicken-claw from his teeth. Blasphemy Fitzworth (Feemy for short) felt the sharp frost infiltrating even to his vital parts. Tokkmaster Clerke stood like a holly-oak beside a goodman's-croft, as he whistled shrilly for those he knew would one day perch and brood upon his own upper-stiffening branches. Nial Hopper, always one to drag out conversations long after everyone else was bored shitless, spoke of the white feathers that had just begun to snow from the otherwise empty sky.
As a child, Padgett Weggs concocted stories about a character whom he invented called Thomas Hopper. At first, Padgett thought he was a Victorian draughtsman with an obsessive desire to redesign the whole of London without roofs before it was too late and these roofs had become roosted by space creatures. Ol' Tom Hopper, as he became, was a ticklish fellow (straight from the more earthy pages of the Bard) whom his peers called Nuncle, Spunkle or, despite his history of temperance, Drunkle. He became a boatman on an imaginary canal system which stemmed from a wider version of the Thames, fanning down into Surrey, Sussex and Kent like the very maps of the very brain vessels in Padgett's own head.
Ol' Tom Hopper took his Narrow Boats down these canals, exploring their surprising junctions and winding-holes. Such boats toted crates of live human heads, just with feet and nought else, and perhaps the odd squawk of complaint at their cramped freighting quarters. The space creatures that now perched on the monuments and ancient churches of London town had instructed him to take his cargo as near to the coast as possible, for they were planning to install a Garden Port near Canterbury for disembarkation of these crates. The heads were to be billetted there, since their tender brains were later to be carefully extracted like crabmeat and turned by some secretive process into a porridgy food for the tenant farmers who would otherwise die of boredom in front of their ever-blinking TV sets.
These farmers would then lift themselves from their own backsides, grub about for outdoor clothes, proceed to the chicken coops and pluck as many feathers as they could muster; then daub them in multicoloured oils (manufactured from the more secretive glands of the walking human heads) and fix glorious trailing feather head-dresses to their noddles.
Jollity would be the farmers' only raison d'etre, for the creatures from the skies wanted to fit out our green and pleasant land with the rainbow alliance of Morris Dancing and Hippy Folksinging.
Keep sucking hard on your brain breakfasts, lads and lasses, and the world will be a Catherine Wheel of delights again. The TV sets were thrown to the wind as if gravity knew no tomorrows.
With Padgett Weggs dead or, at worst, dying from a brain tumour, Tokkmaster, Nial and Feemy were mooning over sparkly beers in the Jackass Penguin. They could see brown faces bubbling up at them.
Feemy, the caring, sharing one among them, grimaced as the snow billowed into the pub from the outside every time the door was opened by other tipplers. Nial, well, Nial cared and shared as much as Feemy, but he was easily led into selfish ways and was at this very moment timing his drinking to match the others, presumably to synchronise visits to the necessarium - which was all important in view of absences being positive encouragement for the others to talk behind the absent one’s back, their necks twirling like tap water. Tokkmaster had no such foibles. He was the breed you found in low dives surrounded by ugly brain-damaged non-swimmers.
"It's all very well us sitting here, enjoying the evening whilst others outside are dossing in the snow," said Feemy, touching the knot of an imaginary tie.
"There's no point in worrying," Tokkmaster replied. "Everybody started life as babies and if they haven't taken advantage of life's chances, that's their problem." Tokkmaster's nose was so big, it almost looked as if he were sucking up the drink through his syphonic nostrils.
"But Feemy's right, Tokkmaster," ventured Nial. "Some people are born with a silver spoon in their mouths. Those poor blighters out there were losers from the start. What chance did they even have half of?"
"You have to make your own chances in life," resumed Tokkmaster. "I don't know about you but I'm getting mighty boned off with clambering across that human offal outside, just to get in here."
"Tokkmaster, Tokkmaster" insisted Feemy, "that human offal, as you see fit to call them, are your fellow human beings, all nature's creatures who fuck and fart as readily as the best of us."
"Feemy, you've worked hard all your life, haven't you?" asked Tokkmaster rhetorically. "You've turned your hand to almost anything, just to earn a honest crust. Those bleeders out there think work is just another four letter word."
"Tokkmaster's got a point there, Feemy," mumbled Nial as he took a mean sip from the top of his drink.
"Let me tell you a true story, you two," said Feemy. "When I was still young, I met a down-and-out. His name sounded like Yog Sothoth but that's not important. Well, he told me why he was a dosser ... because it was far more worthy to be that than anything else."
"I can understand that," said Nial, surreptitiously spitting into his own drink, watching the phlegmy wad float down to be hidden by the lees.
"Yes, Nial. Plain as you see me, I can see him now. And his words have stuck with me through thick and thin: 'I don't give a toss for what others think of me,' he said, 'because I am my own man.'"
"Just what Nial and I were saying ... piss lazy - and with a name like Yog Sothoth, a foreigner to boot!" sneered Tokkmaster.
"No, listen you two. He also said that he'd met his God eye to eye." Feemy paused for effect. "And his God walks this world of ours, making such a walking God even more believable than the airy-fairy Christian one."
Feemy had spoken as if he were the dosser himself.
With a deep-felt sigh, Nial slipped off to the necessarium, and Tokkmaster took the opportunity to freshen up his and Feemy's glasses. Meantime, Feemy maintained a monologue, ignoring the blasts of cold air which a bloke called Blake and his flurry of cronies caused when coming into the Jackass Penguin pub.
"Yes," muttered Feemy, "I have indeed worked my bollocks off, all my life, ever since I could stand on my own two pins. I've been caretaker, factotum, nightwatchman, daycleaner, stud butler, ghost hunter, wine waiter, insurance salesman, firelighter, cat's meat man, time traveller ... you name it, I've done it. But I look back at that fateful meeting with the proud dosser and I realise he taught me more than all the scholars and priests and two-bit johnnies the world over. And I almost felt that I myself was his God, the way he looked at me..."
"Hiya, Feemy, how yer diddlin'?" asked a voice from his beer. "You talk about God? Well I first met the likes of God on Lemon House Lane - he looked like a lamplighter until he got closer, his head a black balloon with bits of a human-like body trailing from it at peculiar angles. You could hear the stretched skin expanding with his breath. Cooing Cthulhus with each expended breath."
Feemy recognised Padgett Weggs as the face speaking from his drink and Feemy hid his mouth with his mittens, either to staunch a yawn or disguise a laugh, or perhaps neither. Possibly a sob.
"Are you laughing at me, Feemy old boy?" continued the face in his beer. "Well laugh away. It's better than crying."
"I'm not laughing, merely not saying anything. But how did you know it was God you met and not the Devil?"
"Because he had the most beautiful heavy-duty crucifix hanging around his neck and tattoos of the Virgin Mary."
"That's no proof."
"Fire's lighter than air, you know."
"So why do flames stay tied to the logs like flags?"
The Weggsian face in the beer ceased in a spray of burst speech-bubbles, leaving only laughter in its place and the repercussions of a real life that had seemed to Feemy like a dream. Fire's laughter flickered in Feemy's brain.
Meanwhile, Tokkmaster had returned with the drinks, closely followed by Nial who had left the necessarium ahead of schedule for once.
"Hey, Feemy, going to the match tomorrow?"
"More than likely."
"That new manager got them working more like a team. Whatever their talent, he's given them the will to win."
"Can't see them winning, though."
"I could score with that loose-limbed lovely!"
It was a pity that the beautiful floosie in question was attached to the bloke called Blake.
Later, Nial Hopper ventured off to buy a round. Feemy Fitzworth had a purple patch staining his lapel, overlapping on to the neck, where his drink had probably spilled. They did not spot the slew of despond seeping under the pub door. Diced dosser stew, having been kept piping hot on the back burner of the soup kitchen nearby, had evidently boiled over and was drooling big toes and undonorable kidneys across the carpet towards the necessarium. Bits of God, thought Nial with more meaning than he would ever give himself credit for. Yet, like most pubs, the Jackass Penguin was no cleaner nor dirtier than any other, the bar of which had been held up, as it were, by Nial Hopper's father Tom whose elbow was ever bent like a piece of sculptural architecture his mother had first carved within her womb. Thus, with all the other detritus, the unholy mess burping through the pub door was barely noticeable - and the small talk and pub chitchat and booze banter continued till well past closing time - amid the holy broken wind coo-looing from the direction of the necessarium.
Padgett Weggs wonders if his mother was pleased on hearing word that the English county of Surrey had fallen. On the other hand, Sussex was still hand to hand fighting with the jolly space creatures but with no greater hope than just temporary resistance. Whilst, in Kent, the creatures could freely fly the skies above the ungridlocked Hopper waterways in search of the rare roofs to roost, trailing bright banners and delightfully tasteless gesticulations with their various body parts.
Padgett had left home to join up with the vanguard of folk-singers in Ramsgate; they opened a harbour in jointure to a glorious delta of canal systems and welcomed in the garlanded harlequinade of boats bearing the creatures' wingless cousins from France. The harbour walls, indeed, were not dissimilar from some of the more imaginative skull cavities of that wondrous architect, Thomas Hopper.
Padgett's Dad? He sat stock still in front of the TV which had ceased broadcasting when the creatures covered the sky with a canopy of light, more fulsome, more permeating than that of the sun itself. There was no roof for the TV aerial, in any event.
Finally, Padgett begs your pardon if you fail to grasp the intricacies of his life, for his English is still excruciatingly second-rate ... but his mother knew that if a creature were brought to her bed for seeding, she would have to first kick out her handsome prince. She didn't realise that it was not a prince at all, but a mound of her own excreta that she had forgetfully moulded and shaped into her better half. Or a better one than Padgett's Dad, in any event. But, by then, Padgett was good as gone and couldn't pursue the thought.
Later, from the distance, she was bound to hear the faint jingling and clacking of the Morris Dancers approaching ... and Padgett knows she would smile, even if he were not there to see it. Whatever the case, with the canal systems of his head now curded over with all manner of holy and unholy tumours, he can no longer have time for sad songs. He haunts bars now or, rather, beers.
www.nemonymous.com
Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Diptych
Published 'Black Tears' 1995
The worrying thing about the area was that, despite being positioned in the same hemisphere as Feldspar's homeland, each night seemed to blend into the next one, with only a fleeting hint of dawn-dusk round about the time that his luminous watch indicated it to be midnight. In contrast, his homeland was roughly in line with the 20/20 day shift, where seasons only created a small adjustment in the ratio between light and dark. For the record, elsewhere, seasons were harder taskmasters and created wilder fluctuations from the norm. Such concerns should not have affected Feldspar - but, as the events still unfolded around him, he could not guarantee that irrelevancies would not become relevant and vice versa.
He was currently on a job for the Suspended Belief Conglomerate. Its head office was in the outskirts of his homeland, so that, when a child, he could see its tall buildings along the horizon like teeth of a comb. His parents said it was their ambition that he should become an employee of the Conglomerate, as soon as he was able to leave the house on his own two legs. Very good fluctuating emoluments and perks could be taken for granted. So, his awe, and even consternation, was overwhelming as he knelt by the bed and gazed at the distant pillars of his destiny gradually becoming snagged with the strands of night.
Later, of course, Feldspar was far more confident of his own identity. He had been with the Conglomerate for some years, and he was entrusted with their most important missions. His parents were still alive; but the outbuildings of the Conglomerate's original head office had encroached nearer to their house, threatening compulsory purchase in the near future. There was no stopping progress.
He was now located outside his homeland, surveying the lie of the land for a proposed site of another head office, with the eventual aim of moving all the staff from one to the other. Cheaper than renovation of the original head office, the architect had advised. He had already called back on the walkie talkie that the only drawback he could establish was the constant darkness: but, since the air conditioning of the new head office would control light/dark as well as heat/cold, he could see no problem: as long as the staff had all facilities under one roof and the relocation expenses were sufficient.
Despite having been steeped in the Conglomerate's self-effacement programme for three decades of his existence, he still had a soft spot for his parents. He believed the more he held back on criticism of this worrying area, the more it was likely that his parents would be left in peace. However, he could hardly recall what they looked like or what they may have turned into, and one of the vital ingredients of love, they told him, was visual communication between the parties. But that took no account of blind people - or, for that matter, people living, for lengths of time on end, in constant darkness: only at midnight, perhaps, could love flourish. He had conducted himself always in accordance with the Conglomerate's motto:
"Suspended Belief is your one great virtue;
For Dreams will never even start to hurt you."
As he sat shivering between the dark masses of land and sky, he could not guess if his watch told the right time. Then, with the suddenness of a single brushstroke of luminous paint across the sky, he saw the first distant skeleton of an office tower in the process of construction - and disciplined Indian Files of hooded figures trudging towards it. Obviously, the Conglomerate had taken his walkie talkie messages more seriously than he intended. And even more abruptly, it was night shift again, for the short storm of dusk-dawn passed on around the world. He fell asleep like a child at the interface of two nowheres. He called out: his parents did not come. They never had a walkie talkie (except Feldspar as a toddler, of course!). There was no stopping regress. He fell fitfully for sleep's enticing.
The night so far had been quiet, far too quiet. I cursed, for whatever happened, I wouldn't be able to sleep. If our baby started whining, then there was no hope even for a fitful doze. But the utter silence was worse. I sat up in the bed, brow glistening, ears pricking, worried that our baby would rediscover the squalls in its lungs at the slightest suspicion of its father sleeping. My wife snored beside me, although I seldom had the cruelty to describe her night habits, come the daylight.
Soon, despite my posture, I did drift off into some dream interruptions - about a cathedral with a dome and a woman I |oved more than my wife. I then paced what I can only describe as an alien landscape. The sun, if it ever had a sun, was not yet up, but a strange living fluid filled the air with an inhalable light. I noted that I breathed through gills in the sides of my neck and that I possessed a tail which dragged a trough behind my legs in the loamy grey sand. Someone had hung decorations from the sky and I heard the distant thuds of an impending storm. Before much longer, I came in sight of an estate house, like those often found when hiking in parts of Great Britain. Its windows were lit brighter than the pervasive glow, so I walked spritely to a lower bay window. Groups of people stood about in a large drawing-room, barely moving and talking no more than in desultory mumbles. I somehow knew they were mumbles, rather than words, despite the intervening window-pane. One woman had a bundle in her arms at which, from time to time, she cooed and purred. Whatever constituted the bundle, it was alive, moving of its own volition.
I was abruptly awoken by a squawking. It was my turn to see to it. Considering that my wife was still snorting like a beached whale, I withdrew my body from the bed, pulled on my stringy dressing-gown and approached the nursery along the dark corridor. Sometimes, I wished its mother had taken up breast-feeding. That would have enabled me to stay in bed whilst she went off to feed herself to the brat. But then, on second thoughts, I cringed at the thought of the milk mountains.
The night-light was still flickering in its jamjar; the curtains seeming to move, as a result. The cot cover budged up and down, as I went over to the tallboy, upon which we had left the creature's comforts. Eventually, when I lowered the teat, I found the opening straightaway and listened to the suck-suck while the clear liquid filtered down. Gradually, its short sharp breaths lengthened, and the guzzling became more of a ritual than a struggle for life and death. I knew the next thing would be the shit, but we could live better with stench than screech.
I replaced the still unwieldy udder on the tallboy, blew on the night-light to tease out its life for the rest of the dark hours, tucked in the cot covers around the gentle rise and fall of the mound - and, unaccountably, tested the strength of the side-bars, knowing babies couldn't fly. I laughed at my own dozy thoughts. Then it spoke. Not with a babyish gurgle, but a shrill voice. It actually negotiated its tiny tongue around real words. Words I understood. Could find in the dictionary, if need be. Write down. I listened unintently, since surely this must also be dream - surely I had drowsed off whilst giving it a nibble of my engorged masculine tit.
"Can you hear me?" it whined, amid a streamer of black phlegm.
"Yes," I found myself answering.
"Dreams," it continued, "within the mother's womb are commonplace, many experts say."
"Are they?"
"Within the watery world of tubes and black hanging things, listening to the mountainous thunderflesh, a dream can form like weather."
There was no chance to note my dream's undreamlike quality, since a storm abruptly struck with the breaking of red-flecked waters and an irresistible thrust upon a tiny body. The G forces were so powerful, the body turned wrinkly and unsightly, its mind fogged with fear, beshitted with memories gone bad...
The Elizabethans had a fixation about Death. And that's how most of them ended up. But one travelled ways so straitened, so full of blind alleys, that he ended up in corners of a London where time did not seem to matter, let alone pass. His name was Fieldspear, but today he's Feldspar and he roams City churches, like a noon-time shadow, a black aura huddled up to the church wall as if tapping its spiritual power for a further go on the dodgem of life. I first made his acquaintanceship when I was courting Freda. She was to be my girl and I wooed her even to the point of obsession. Other men often accosted me, by the scruff of my lapels, saying she was in no way my girl. But I preferred to believe in myself, not them. They were liars, in any event. You could see it in their eyes. Freda's eyes, on the other hand, were wide open and she said I could see to the bottom of her soul, and I believed her. I understood her. I was secure in her simplicity. But, then, of course, I had not accounted for Feldspar.
Freda and I, when walking out, often sat in the grounds of City churches, fresh from business lunches with the Exchange Brokers. Our favourite was St Paul's Cathedral, not least, on my part, because its dome looked like a woman's breast. Freda was full of ideas about her future career (as long as she could obtain the right contacts). Often, she expounded about the making of money and what she described as filling the space that a man inhabits with the irregular shape of a woman. But I knew Freda better than Freda knew Freda. She was all up front but, deep within, without outward admission, she saw Feldspar as well. Only Sensitives, I believed, could follow such fleeting hair-pieces which often darted up and down church walls like apprentice angels' dusters. People steeped in Stocks and Shares need not apply. Don't call us...
On the occasion we first encountered Feldspar, Freda was sitting on the gravestone of a City businessman who had founded a Coffee House which later transmogrified into an Insurance Company Conglomerate. She was holding forth in her mock-serious manner to which I had grown accustomed. "If we could demolish St Paul's," she said, "that would leave room for a few more Futures Exchanges or Eurobond Dealing Houses - it's about time this City shrugged off the loose appendages of the past. There are not enough Computer Mainframes for the Unit Trust or Put Option mega-yields to be accommodated - it's a scandal - nobody will miss St Paul's..." She rambled on in her attractive satirical fashion, and I laughed in spirit with her words. It all sounded too much like a speech to be true. I loved her, you see. She was a poet at heart - like me. That was why I brought her to the churches. I wanted to cuddle her, too. I needed someone as sensitive as myself to cradle my head to her soft bosom.
Suddenly, I saw him, creeping like my image of an Elizabethan. The only one left. Freda was at first unaware of his presence, with her back resting against the gravestone. His open mouth seemed full of black ice-cream which he sicked up all over Freda's power dress. He acted like an evil kid. A non-Sensitive would have said it was simply the night coming in sooner than the dusk. But we both knew that we had met Feldspar, a representative from another age. She could not admit it, of course - she pretended nothing at all had happened. And, even when I challenged her with it, she merely shrugged and said it was only to be expected.
We encountered Feldspar on several other occasions. He dug at the graves, black elastic hose stretching back to the church wall like thick kite strings. He followed us along Bishopsgate and Fen Church Street, loping between the shuttered foreign banks in the guise of an urban scarecrow. He swung from lamp standards in the vein of monkey-spiders, his eyes floating in the dark sorbets of Winter. Yet Freda was, from the very first encounter with Feldspar, quickly promoted, not staying in any one job long enough to be discovered as a true Sensitive, as I knew (and still know) was her real condition. She became Stockbroker General and instigated a whole chain reaction of fiscal meltdowns - but, as during an earlier war, St Paul's managed to withstand the decimation around it.
Freda has now begun to live with Feldspar and she does not have much time for me any more. It's like losing a mother, rather than a sweetheart. I still wander the wedges between leaning computer complexes, where churches used to squat. I feel that Feldspar is good for Freda no doubt, because he once lived in the Alchemical Age of Queen Elizabeth the Second where fifties met nineties. The true Elizabethan. One who followed Dickens. And even Churchill. A contemporary of Thatcher. The real McCoy of an Elizabethan. That era of history has much to teach us, since women were in control and there's still nothing like their soft touch.
The last time I saw Freda, I asked her if she remained my girl, since I still had a crush on her. Freda's mouth yawned wide to answer and black treacle stretched like split innards from tooth to tooth. Something moved inside her blouse. Evidently, she and Feldspar are more than simply good friends. But it's no good crying over spilt milk. I merely hope that they will find time, amid all their other civic duties, to visit St Paul's to disentangle it from the barbed wire with which the City Guild has seen fit to surround it. On the other hand, perhaps such fencing is to keep the Sensitives inside the Cathedral, safe from the outside world. And, albeit a man, I'm the only one left outside with the soft touch.
Meantime, either side of the dream, the baby blows kisses of black spittle, for me to suck.
Feldspar dreamed he had a new occupation back in the old days before real life itself became so dream-like - which was buffing up the drearinesses that seemed to build up when nice bright mornings drifted into the degeneration of late afternoons. He was on guard duty from 3.0 p.m., at which time darkness began to have the potential to wheedle its way into the daylight. So he grabbed his mop and bucket of sunlight liquid from the cupboard under the stairs and, by lunchtime, he had hung his uniform by the front door, with battery-lit buttons and luminous carnation in the button-hole. He placed his false ding-dong of a nose, bright red and bulbous, on the door-knob, to remind him to take it with him. But his mind wasn't in the right gear, somehow. He felt a trifle under the weather, despite the morning's sunniness. He looked from the window and saw a rocketship crossing the blue sky. It didn't look at all convincing. He looked down at himself and, come to think of it, and not to put too fine a point on it, he was not the fine figure of the man he thought he was. Who ever heard of putting the brightness back into twilight, anyway? He might as well go back to bed, he thought, because no doubt it's all part of a bad dream. But, too late, the rocketship suddenly slipped a gear, spluttered and finally stalled, crashing towards the house in which Feldspar stood and stared, now believing how convincing it was. Luckily it was indeed a dream (or else he did die and was subsequently dreaming whilst dead).
He looked at the vase of flowers on the mantelpiece (which his parents had arranged that very morning before light) wondering whether anything of such relative insignificance could be persuaded to take on a character larger than life. Tomorrow, his parents had been told, was to be his very first interview with the Conglomerate. He kept looking up and looking down, and each time he looked up, he felt sick and sicker. As if the motion of his head up and down was a flight of nausea on a tilting sea of air. Finally, he decided, too late, that he was, literally, going to spew. No time to reach the fire-closet. So he used the vase of flowers. Later, he switched on the TV set, but could not focus its flickering. He was not used to reading between the lines and a sense of nausea revisited the alimentary canal around which he was built. He sometimes felt as if he had vomit running through his veins, instead of blood. He failed his first interview, but passed a second one much later in life because the original failure became a valuable qualification, there having been a change of management. His parents would have been proud of him.
Indeed, I must have been dead, because I dreamed I was not Feldspar nor even myself. I was them. I was us. One thing was certain, I was older. But not wiser. The street was quiet except for the occasional tube train below. The lamps joined up worms of light in the darkness. Yes, the street was quiet, the distant drone of a rocketship several skies away. The lamps were finally doused in the early hours: all that could be seen was the sole glow of a first floor window in a ramshackle joint - and it was in that room where the Conglomerate's business resided. The "we" that "I" had become climbed on to each other's shoulder's to view a middle-aged man at a word processor. He was so intent on his task, that he did not hear the sash-window slip its lead, nor our ingress to the room. It was not surprising, for we were quieter than the spluttering of his veins. Outside, the street was quiet. Inside, the room held for a split second a shop-soiled tableau of our frozen dummies. He must have been deafer than a china vase for he did not hear one of us tripping over the lumps in the carpet. We would have to be more careful next time, for any slip like that could have caused a havoc and a half. What a man! He kept up the nimble fingerwork on the keys, oblivious of us. One of us eventually looked over his shoulder and read what he was writing. It was in English, so we could not understand it. Outside, the street was still there, but we had completely forgotten it. Inside, we ranged wide, rummaging beneath the bed for valuables amongst his night soil, rifling his cupboards for any noon meat that was still sufficiently undecayed to be handled, cleaning out his pockets for mind drugs amid the fluff. Not that we were common or garden burglars. He must have been dumb, as well as deaf for, on seeing us, all he could do was point at his mouth. One of us laughed at him and the other laughed too. It was difficult to tell whether his tears indicated laughter or not. Funny that! Outside, the street had imperceptibly broken its bounds into morning - with everything, except daylight, which morning entailed. Inside, we had killed the man, for we could not bear his incessant silent laughter. It was so disconcerting. He must have been round the bend. His eyes were luminous. One of us (probably me) did the job well, cut his throat with his own scissors, took the adam's apple between the two blades and snipped. His death sicked all over the red screen. Illegible in life, illegible in death. Like the noises from the street outside, all leading hard and fast towards noon; people, cars, trains, kids, sirens merging into an inchoate groan. The rocketships had been grounded, of course, till it was official night time again. Inside the room, we finished searching his bits and pieces. Now, what should we do? Listen, who did you think I was? I talked to myself, you know. Dispose of the body, before it's an incrimination. Speak up, won't you, I can't hear, for the noise in the street outside, it's so deafening: like the spluttering in my veins, the blood of my proud parents.
The sash window slid back of its own accord, yet I ignored it. I put the finishing touches to the words on the screen, English being a language with no hard and fast rules, merely taste and instinct and fear of the schoolmaster's cane. Better than flower-arranging. I was perhaps the only one awake in the whole silent Conglomerate of the worrying world; so busy, I was sure to miss the lightning flash that was both sunrise and sunset. A diptych of dawn and dusk.
The worrying thing about the area was that, despite being positioned in the same hemisphere as Feldspar's homeland, each night seemed to blend into the next one, with only a fleeting hint of dawn-dusk round about the time that his luminous watch indicated it to be midnight. In contrast, his homeland was roughly in line with the 20/20 day shift, where seasons only created a small adjustment in the ratio between light and dark. For the record, elsewhere, seasons were harder taskmasters and created wilder fluctuations from the norm. Such concerns should not have affected Feldspar - but, as the events still unfolded around him, he could not guarantee that irrelevancies would not become relevant and vice versa.
He was currently on a job for the Suspended Belief Conglomerate. Its head office was in the outskirts of his homeland, so that, when a child, he could see its tall buildings along the horizon like teeth of a comb. His parents said it was their ambition that he should become an employee of the Conglomerate, as soon as he was able to leave the house on his own two legs. Very good fluctuating emoluments and perks could be taken for granted. So, his awe, and even consternation, was overwhelming as he knelt by the bed and gazed at the distant pillars of his destiny gradually becoming snagged with the strands of night.
Later, of course, Feldspar was far more confident of his own identity. He had been with the Conglomerate for some years, and he was entrusted with their most important missions. His parents were still alive; but the outbuildings of the Conglomerate's original head office had encroached nearer to their house, threatening compulsory purchase in the near future. There was no stopping progress.
He was now located outside his homeland, surveying the lie of the land for a proposed site of another head office, with the eventual aim of moving all the staff from one to the other. Cheaper than renovation of the original head office, the architect had advised. He had already called back on the walkie talkie that the only drawback he could establish was the constant darkness: but, since the air conditioning of the new head office would control light/dark as well as heat/cold, he could see no problem: as long as the staff had all facilities under one roof and the relocation expenses were sufficient.
Despite having been steeped in the Conglomerate's self-effacement programme for three decades of his existence, he still had a soft spot for his parents. He believed the more he held back on criticism of this worrying area, the more it was likely that his parents would be left in peace. However, he could hardly recall what they looked like or what they may have turned into, and one of the vital ingredients of love, they told him, was visual communication between the parties. But that took no account of blind people - or, for that matter, people living, for lengths of time on end, in constant darkness: only at midnight, perhaps, could love flourish. He had conducted himself always in accordance with the Conglomerate's motto:
"Suspended Belief is your one great virtue;
For Dreams will never even start to hurt you."
As he sat shivering between the dark masses of land and sky, he could not guess if his watch told the right time. Then, with the suddenness of a single brushstroke of luminous paint across the sky, he saw the first distant skeleton of an office tower in the process of construction - and disciplined Indian Files of hooded figures trudging towards it. Obviously, the Conglomerate had taken his walkie talkie messages more seriously than he intended. And even more abruptly, it was night shift again, for the short storm of dusk-dawn passed on around the world. He fell asleep like a child at the interface of two nowheres. He called out: his parents did not come. They never had a walkie talkie (except Feldspar as a toddler, of course!). There was no stopping regress. He fell fitfully for sleep's enticing.
The night so far had been quiet, far too quiet. I cursed, for whatever happened, I wouldn't be able to sleep. If our baby started whining, then there was no hope even for a fitful doze. But the utter silence was worse. I sat up in the bed, brow glistening, ears pricking, worried that our baby would rediscover the squalls in its lungs at the slightest suspicion of its father sleeping. My wife snored beside me, although I seldom had the cruelty to describe her night habits, come the daylight.
Soon, despite my posture, I did drift off into some dream interruptions - about a cathedral with a dome and a woman I |oved more than my wife. I then paced what I can only describe as an alien landscape. The sun, if it ever had a sun, was not yet up, but a strange living fluid filled the air with an inhalable light. I noted that I breathed through gills in the sides of my neck and that I possessed a tail which dragged a trough behind my legs in the loamy grey sand. Someone had hung decorations from the sky and I heard the distant thuds of an impending storm. Before much longer, I came in sight of an estate house, like those often found when hiking in parts of Great Britain. Its windows were lit brighter than the pervasive glow, so I walked spritely to a lower bay window. Groups of people stood about in a large drawing-room, barely moving and talking no more than in desultory mumbles. I somehow knew they were mumbles, rather than words, despite the intervening window-pane. One woman had a bundle in her arms at which, from time to time, she cooed and purred. Whatever constituted the bundle, it was alive, moving of its own volition.
I was abruptly awoken by a squawking. It was my turn to see to it. Considering that my wife was still snorting like a beached whale, I withdrew my body from the bed, pulled on my stringy dressing-gown and approached the nursery along the dark corridor. Sometimes, I wished its mother had taken up breast-feeding. That would have enabled me to stay in bed whilst she went off to feed herself to the brat. But then, on second thoughts, I cringed at the thought of the milk mountains.
The night-light was still flickering in its jamjar; the curtains seeming to move, as a result. The cot cover budged up and down, as I went over to the tallboy, upon which we had left the creature's comforts. Eventually, when I lowered the teat, I found the opening straightaway and listened to the suck-suck while the clear liquid filtered down. Gradually, its short sharp breaths lengthened, and the guzzling became more of a ritual than a struggle for life and death. I knew the next thing would be the shit, but we could live better with stench than screech.
I replaced the still unwieldy udder on the tallboy, blew on the night-light to tease out its life for the rest of the dark hours, tucked in the cot covers around the gentle rise and fall of the mound - and, unaccountably, tested the strength of the side-bars, knowing babies couldn't fly. I laughed at my own dozy thoughts. Then it spoke. Not with a babyish gurgle, but a shrill voice. It actually negotiated its tiny tongue around real words. Words I understood. Could find in the dictionary, if need be. Write down. I listened unintently, since surely this must also be dream - surely I had drowsed off whilst giving it a nibble of my engorged masculine tit.
"Can you hear me?" it whined, amid a streamer of black phlegm.
"Yes," I found myself answering.
"Dreams," it continued, "within the mother's womb are commonplace, many experts say."
"Are they?"
"Within the watery world of tubes and black hanging things, listening to the mountainous thunderflesh, a dream can form like weather."
There was no chance to note my dream's undreamlike quality, since a storm abruptly struck with the breaking of red-flecked waters and an irresistible thrust upon a tiny body. The G forces were so powerful, the body turned wrinkly and unsightly, its mind fogged with fear, beshitted with memories gone bad...
The Elizabethans had a fixation about Death. And that's how most of them ended up. But one travelled ways so straitened, so full of blind alleys, that he ended up in corners of a London where time did not seem to matter, let alone pass. His name was Fieldspear, but today he's Feldspar and he roams City churches, like a noon-time shadow, a black aura huddled up to the church wall as if tapping its spiritual power for a further go on the dodgem of life. I first made his acquaintanceship when I was courting Freda. She was to be my girl and I wooed her even to the point of obsession. Other men often accosted me, by the scruff of my lapels, saying she was in no way my girl. But I preferred to believe in myself, not them. They were liars, in any event. You could see it in their eyes. Freda's eyes, on the other hand, were wide open and she said I could see to the bottom of her soul, and I believed her. I understood her. I was secure in her simplicity. But, then, of course, I had not accounted for Feldspar.
Freda and I, when walking out, often sat in the grounds of City churches, fresh from business lunches with the Exchange Brokers. Our favourite was St Paul's Cathedral, not least, on my part, because its dome looked like a woman's breast. Freda was full of ideas about her future career (as long as she could obtain the right contacts). Often, she expounded about the making of money and what she described as filling the space that a man inhabits with the irregular shape of a woman. But I knew Freda better than Freda knew Freda. She was all up front but, deep within, without outward admission, she saw Feldspar as well. Only Sensitives, I believed, could follow such fleeting hair-pieces which often darted up and down church walls like apprentice angels' dusters. People steeped in Stocks and Shares need not apply. Don't call us...
On the occasion we first encountered Feldspar, Freda was sitting on the gravestone of a City businessman who had founded a Coffee House which later transmogrified into an Insurance Company Conglomerate. She was holding forth in her mock-serious manner to which I had grown accustomed. "If we could demolish St Paul's," she said, "that would leave room for a few more Futures Exchanges or Eurobond Dealing Houses - it's about time this City shrugged off the loose appendages of the past. There are not enough Computer Mainframes for the Unit Trust or Put Option mega-yields to be accommodated - it's a scandal - nobody will miss St Paul's..." She rambled on in her attractive satirical fashion, and I laughed in spirit with her words. It all sounded too much like a speech to be true. I loved her, you see. She was a poet at heart - like me. That was why I brought her to the churches. I wanted to cuddle her, too. I needed someone as sensitive as myself to cradle my head to her soft bosom.
Suddenly, I saw him, creeping like my image of an Elizabethan. The only one left. Freda was at first unaware of his presence, with her back resting against the gravestone. His open mouth seemed full of black ice-cream which he sicked up all over Freda's power dress. He acted like an evil kid. A non-Sensitive would have said it was simply the night coming in sooner than the dusk. But we both knew that we had met Feldspar, a representative from another age. She could not admit it, of course - she pretended nothing at all had happened. And, even when I challenged her with it, she merely shrugged and said it was only to be expected.
We encountered Feldspar on several other occasions. He dug at the graves, black elastic hose stretching back to the church wall like thick kite strings. He followed us along Bishopsgate and Fen Church Street, loping between the shuttered foreign banks in the guise of an urban scarecrow. He swung from lamp standards in the vein of monkey-spiders, his eyes floating in the dark sorbets of Winter. Yet Freda was, from the very first encounter with Feldspar, quickly promoted, not staying in any one job long enough to be discovered as a true Sensitive, as I knew (and still know) was her real condition. She became Stockbroker General and instigated a whole chain reaction of fiscal meltdowns - but, as during an earlier war, St Paul's managed to withstand the decimation around it.
Freda has now begun to live with Feldspar and she does not have much time for me any more. It's like losing a mother, rather than a sweetheart. I still wander the wedges between leaning computer complexes, where churches used to squat. I feel that Feldspar is good for Freda no doubt, because he once lived in the Alchemical Age of Queen Elizabeth the Second where fifties met nineties. The true Elizabethan. One who followed Dickens. And even Churchill. A contemporary of Thatcher. The real McCoy of an Elizabethan. That era of history has much to teach us, since women were in control and there's still nothing like their soft touch.
The last time I saw Freda, I asked her if she remained my girl, since I still had a crush on her. Freda's mouth yawned wide to answer and black treacle stretched like split innards from tooth to tooth. Something moved inside her blouse. Evidently, she and Feldspar are more than simply good friends. But it's no good crying over spilt milk. I merely hope that they will find time, amid all their other civic duties, to visit St Paul's to disentangle it from the barbed wire with which the City Guild has seen fit to surround it. On the other hand, perhaps such fencing is to keep the Sensitives inside the Cathedral, safe from the outside world. And, albeit a man, I'm the only one left outside with the soft touch.
Meantime, either side of the dream, the baby blows kisses of black spittle, for me to suck.
Feldspar dreamed he had a new occupation back in the old days before real life itself became so dream-like - which was buffing up the drearinesses that seemed to build up when nice bright mornings drifted into the degeneration of late afternoons. He was on guard duty from 3.0 p.m., at which time darkness began to have the potential to wheedle its way into the daylight. So he grabbed his mop and bucket of sunlight liquid from the cupboard under the stairs and, by lunchtime, he had hung his uniform by the front door, with battery-lit buttons and luminous carnation in the button-hole. He placed his false ding-dong of a nose, bright red and bulbous, on the door-knob, to remind him to take it with him. But his mind wasn't in the right gear, somehow. He felt a trifle under the weather, despite the morning's sunniness. He looked from the window and saw a rocketship crossing the blue sky. It didn't look at all convincing. He looked down at himself and, come to think of it, and not to put too fine a point on it, he was not the fine figure of the man he thought he was. Who ever heard of putting the brightness back into twilight, anyway? He might as well go back to bed, he thought, because no doubt it's all part of a bad dream. But, too late, the rocketship suddenly slipped a gear, spluttered and finally stalled, crashing towards the house in which Feldspar stood and stared, now believing how convincing it was. Luckily it was indeed a dream (or else he did die and was subsequently dreaming whilst dead).
He looked at the vase of flowers on the mantelpiece (which his parents had arranged that very morning before light) wondering whether anything of such relative insignificance could be persuaded to take on a character larger than life. Tomorrow, his parents had been told, was to be his very first interview with the Conglomerate. He kept looking up and looking down, and each time he looked up, he felt sick and sicker. As if the motion of his head up and down was a flight of nausea on a tilting sea of air. Finally, he decided, too late, that he was, literally, going to spew. No time to reach the fire-closet. So he used the vase of flowers. Later, he switched on the TV set, but could not focus its flickering. He was not used to reading between the lines and a sense of nausea revisited the alimentary canal around which he was built. He sometimes felt as if he had vomit running through his veins, instead of blood. He failed his first interview, but passed a second one much later in life because the original failure became a valuable qualification, there having been a change of management. His parents would have been proud of him.
Indeed, I must have been dead, because I dreamed I was not Feldspar nor even myself. I was them. I was us. One thing was certain, I was older. But not wiser. The street was quiet except for the occasional tube train below. The lamps joined up worms of light in the darkness. Yes, the street was quiet, the distant drone of a rocketship several skies away. The lamps were finally doused in the early hours: all that could be seen was the sole glow of a first floor window in a ramshackle joint - and it was in that room where the Conglomerate's business resided. The "we" that "I" had become climbed on to each other's shoulder's to view a middle-aged man at a word processor. He was so intent on his task, that he did not hear the sash-window slip its lead, nor our ingress to the room. It was not surprising, for we were quieter than the spluttering of his veins. Outside, the street was quiet. Inside, the room held for a split second a shop-soiled tableau of our frozen dummies. He must have been deafer than a china vase for he did not hear one of us tripping over the lumps in the carpet. We would have to be more careful next time, for any slip like that could have caused a havoc and a half. What a man! He kept up the nimble fingerwork on the keys, oblivious of us. One of us eventually looked over his shoulder and read what he was writing. It was in English, so we could not understand it. Outside, the street was still there, but we had completely forgotten it. Inside, we ranged wide, rummaging beneath the bed for valuables amongst his night soil, rifling his cupboards for any noon meat that was still sufficiently undecayed to be handled, cleaning out his pockets for mind drugs amid the fluff. Not that we were common or garden burglars. He must have been dumb, as well as deaf for, on seeing us, all he could do was point at his mouth. One of us laughed at him and the other laughed too. It was difficult to tell whether his tears indicated laughter or not. Funny that! Outside, the street had imperceptibly broken its bounds into morning - with everything, except daylight, which morning entailed. Inside, we had killed the man, for we could not bear his incessant silent laughter. It was so disconcerting. He must have been round the bend. His eyes were luminous. One of us (probably me) did the job well, cut his throat with his own scissors, took the adam's apple between the two blades and snipped. His death sicked all over the red screen. Illegible in life, illegible in death. Like the noises from the street outside, all leading hard and fast towards noon; people, cars, trains, kids, sirens merging into an inchoate groan. The rocketships had been grounded, of course, till it was official night time again. Inside the room, we finished searching his bits and pieces. Now, what should we do? Listen, who did you think I was? I talked to myself, you know. Dispose of the body, before it's an incrimination. Speak up, won't you, I can't hear, for the noise in the street outside, it's so deafening: like the spluttering in my veins, the blood of my proud parents.
The sash window slid back of its own accord, yet I ignored it. I put the finishing touches to the words on the screen, English being a language with no hard and fast rules, merely taste and instinct and fear of the schoolmaster's cane. Better than flower-arranging. I was perhaps the only one awake in the whole silent Conglomerate of the worrying world; so busy, I was sure to miss the lightning flash that was both sunrise and sunset. A diptych of dawn and dusk.
Friday, July 04, 2008
Epilogue
(published 'Hadrosaur Tales' 1997)
Rachel Mildeyes had been writing for a living since she could remember. A bit like sleeping.
Her first novel, Love In The Sick Ward, had been a successful feminist horror novel. She never cared to read it, however, simply because she could not understand it any more. Her mind was too convoluted and twisted for a straightforward narration. A beginning, middle and end (in that order) was not at all what the shrink ordered. She was confident that she had something growing inside her head, something sharp and incisive, but which could only best come out bent and skewed.
Thus, after a series of gradually compounding fiction sequences under various outlandish pen-names, at the age of thirty-seven, she embarked on what she considered in advance to be her tour de force and raison d’être. Not that it was written in French. The working title was The Miscreant And The Moons ream. She tried out a number of her old pen-names, but none seemed to sit well on the title page. Eventually, she resorted to her own name, believing this to be as good as any — though, of course, nobody could credit that Mildeyes was her real surname at all, but merely an invention of a miscegenate heritage. She finished up calling the book, Miscreant Moon.
The last paragraph came first, leaving the rest until later. She did not own a word processor, only a wireless, continuously tuned into the Home Service, as it used to be called. She particularly enjoyed medical programmes, but that was before the National Health had grown sicker than its patients. So, without a processor, she couldn’t juggle paragraphs willy-nilly like the more modern moveable feasts with which creative writing seemed to have become endowed. What she committed to the old-fashioned typewriter stuck fast.
Miscreant Moon was not a horror work, despite her reputation having been built up, over the years, on plots with macabre incidents and bizarre cruelties. Some critics had called her pieces sick. Simply that. Sick. No mistaking that word, with its decided lack of innuendo; no double entendre nor finer feeling, there. No dodging responsibility under cover of ambiguity or deep symbolism. Indeed, Miscreant Moon was a romance, with any horror simply playing second horn in the wind band. It would doubtlessly be a disappointment to the fervent fans who were used to finding her works amid the latest splatterfests.
Her publisher clucked meaningfully as he listened to Rachers plans for Miscreant Moon. He had a businessman’s head, but pretended his heart knew something about literature.
“I’m afraid a cheap romance will not do, Rachel. You’ve got a duty to the ghastlier, gorier side of human nature.”
She stared at his domed head, sown with tussocks of grey hair. She found herself thinking of a sub-plot where a huge rhinoceros horn suddenly burst through the top of his skull, scattering shards of bone shrapnel across the boardroom table and splintering the oil painting faces of the publisher’s past directors. Thus, she failed to pay attention to what her current editor had to say. She did infer, however, that Miscreant Moon was to be relegated to the back burner of her fevered muse, until she had enough loot in the bank to finance it herself. But life was too short for earning money.
As she wound down the car window, the policeman looked puzzled. She was not the lay-by queen, after all. It was a complete stranger behind the wheel, with something missing. But what was missing, he couldn’t quite fathom. She asked him whether he needed to wear the tall domed helmet to hide his horn. It sounded to him as if she were speaking some form of French. He shrugged, patted her boot and waved her on. No clashing antlers with the likes of Rachel Mildeyes.
The night was so shallow, its dark wreaths were not much more than head height. Above this, as far as the eye could see, were apparent layers of a grimy sea of light. Salt-green shapes, at the same time like and unlike old-time aeroplanes, floated wirelessly through this luminous murk, lights flashing to warn off others. She wrapped her scarf tighter ‘round her neck, because the darkness through which she waded was cold to the skin’s touch. Red-flecked mist sprayed from her mouth as she breathed. Her feet were numb with cold, since they were deeper in the mire of the sunken night. Her head was feverish, but the fever derived more from the dreams therein than the relatively warmer light to which the head was closer. Her bones cracked with the same sound that often drifted from inside butcher’s shops at the dead of night.
She had awakened in a strange bed. The curtains were undrawn, allowing the milky sun to stream through upon her head. She could see seven hundred and fifty-five thousand six hundred and twenty-two dust particles riding in the slanted beams. Amazed at her perspicacity, she began to count the floaters in her eyes, the single petals on the wallpaper, the constituents of the bedsheets, the pores in the palm of her hand and the split seconds that passed in so doing. It was a pity she didn’t know how old she was. Or, it may have been a boon.
The door opened and a young girl, dressed in a uniform, entered with a trayful of breakfast. She called the one in the bed by the name, Rachel. Head lowering towards the tray, Rachel counted out the breakfast’s constituents: Gently coddled duck eggs fluted with the re-constituted ducks that had laid them; rare back bacon rashers interleaved with a sauce that was so strong that integrity of the bacon was in question; freshly squeezed citrus fruit laced with honey wine; doorstops of toast topped with whole kidneys and anchovies; a steaming urn with a medley of infusions from far off Erotica; and cherry tomatoes interspersed like iritic eyeballs.
Leaving the tray beside Rachel’s bed, the girl quickly turned tail, allowing a glimpse of the cut of her behind. The shape of her bosom had been concealed by her uniform, but Rachel had noticed it was over-large, no doubt, when unclothed, plum-tipped, and graspable.
Every speck of food Rachel counted down as she consumed it. Much harder eventually to count them out, she thought. She wondered if the young girl’s own juices had been squeezed over the food to season it. She recalled the dream of the half-hearted night, which, at the time, she had felt was so cold. The blankets now were warmth itself, between which she had been mbedded since she could remember. She was sick. Simply sick.
Having breakfasted heartily, she felt heavy with child, for the food seemed to take on a life of its own in her belly, squirming, kicking and, even, she was sure, squealing. Her bodily innards were strange creatures that passed in the night – a night of blood. When the slurry waters finally broke, several hours later, she feared for the integrity of the bed-clothes. Her headache was like an ingrowing horn.
She drowsed off during the late afternoon. She had given up hope of the girl returning to give her a blanket bath. Rachel was evidently sicker than she had originally thought and the girl, who was probably a National Health nurse, was far too busy to tend to a dream. The dead may die, whilst the rest live only by the words they exchange.
Rachel returned to the earlier dream, where night had fully taken back its own. She could no longer see the floating salt-green shapes nor even the cut of her own body. Impossible now, even to fish herself out from more than one dream away. No clashing hooks with Rachel in the moonstream.
The word count of Miscreant Moon turned out to be a thousand odd short, so she appended an epilogue as makeweight.
Rachel Mildeyes had been writing for a living since she could remember. A bit like sleeping.
Her first novel, Love In The Sick Ward, had been a successful feminist horror novel. She never cared to read it, however, simply because she could not understand it any more. Her mind was too convoluted and twisted for a straightforward narration. A beginning, middle and end (in that order) was not at all what the shrink ordered. She was confident that she had something growing inside her head, something sharp and incisive, but which could only best come out bent and skewed.
Thus, after a series of gradually compounding fiction sequences under various outlandish pen-names, at the age of thirty-seven, she embarked on what she considered in advance to be her tour de force and raison d’être. Not that it was written in French. The working title was The Miscreant And The Moons ream. She tried out a number of her old pen-names, but none seemed to sit well on the title page. Eventually, she resorted to her own name, believing this to be as good as any — though, of course, nobody could credit that Mildeyes was her real surname at all, but merely an invention of a miscegenate heritage. She finished up calling the book, Miscreant Moon.
The last paragraph came first, leaving the rest until later. She did not own a word processor, only a wireless, continuously tuned into the Home Service, as it used to be called. She particularly enjoyed medical programmes, but that was before the National Health had grown sicker than its patients. So, without a processor, she couldn’t juggle paragraphs willy-nilly like the more modern moveable feasts with which creative writing seemed to have become endowed. What she committed to the old-fashioned typewriter stuck fast.
Miscreant Moon was not a horror work, despite her reputation having been built up, over the years, on plots with macabre incidents and bizarre cruelties. Some critics had called her pieces sick. Simply that. Sick. No mistaking that word, with its decided lack of innuendo; no double entendre nor finer feeling, there. No dodging responsibility under cover of ambiguity or deep symbolism. Indeed, Miscreant Moon was a romance, with any horror simply playing second horn in the wind band. It would doubtlessly be a disappointment to the fervent fans who were used to finding her works amid the latest splatterfests.
Her publisher clucked meaningfully as he listened to Rachers plans for Miscreant Moon. He had a businessman’s head, but pretended his heart knew something about literature.
“I’m afraid a cheap romance will not do, Rachel. You’ve got a duty to the ghastlier, gorier side of human nature.”
She stared at his domed head, sown with tussocks of grey hair. She found herself thinking of a sub-plot where a huge rhinoceros horn suddenly burst through the top of his skull, scattering shards of bone shrapnel across the boardroom table and splintering the oil painting faces of the publisher’s past directors. Thus, she failed to pay attention to what her current editor had to say. She did infer, however, that Miscreant Moon was to be relegated to the back burner of her fevered muse, until she had enough loot in the bank to finance it herself. But life was too short for earning money.
As she wound down the car window, the policeman looked puzzled. She was not the lay-by queen, after all. It was a complete stranger behind the wheel, with something missing. But what was missing, he couldn’t quite fathom. She asked him whether he needed to wear the tall domed helmet to hide his horn. It sounded to him as if she were speaking some form of French. He shrugged, patted her boot and waved her on. No clashing antlers with the likes of Rachel Mildeyes.
The night was so shallow, its dark wreaths were not much more than head height. Above this, as far as the eye could see, were apparent layers of a grimy sea of light. Salt-green shapes, at the same time like and unlike old-time aeroplanes, floated wirelessly through this luminous murk, lights flashing to warn off others. She wrapped her scarf tighter ‘round her neck, because the darkness through which she waded was cold to the skin’s touch. Red-flecked mist sprayed from her mouth as she breathed. Her feet were numb with cold, since they were deeper in the mire of the sunken night. Her head was feverish, but the fever derived more from the dreams therein than the relatively warmer light to which the head was closer. Her bones cracked with the same sound that often drifted from inside butcher’s shops at the dead of night.
She had awakened in a strange bed. The curtains were undrawn, allowing the milky sun to stream through upon her head. She could see seven hundred and fifty-five thousand six hundred and twenty-two dust particles riding in the slanted beams. Amazed at her perspicacity, she began to count the floaters in her eyes, the single petals on the wallpaper, the constituents of the bedsheets, the pores in the palm of her hand and the split seconds that passed in so doing. It was a pity she didn’t know how old she was. Or, it may have been a boon.
The door opened and a young girl, dressed in a uniform, entered with a trayful of breakfast. She called the one in the bed by the name, Rachel. Head lowering towards the tray, Rachel counted out the breakfast’s constituents: Gently coddled duck eggs fluted with the re-constituted ducks that had laid them; rare back bacon rashers interleaved with a sauce that was so strong that integrity of the bacon was in question; freshly squeezed citrus fruit laced with honey wine; doorstops of toast topped with whole kidneys and anchovies; a steaming urn with a medley of infusions from far off Erotica; and cherry tomatoes interspersed like iritic eyeballs.
Leaving the tray beside Rachel’s bed, the girl quickly turned tail, allowing a glimpse of the cut of her behind. The shape of her bosom had been concealed by her uniform, but Rachel had noticed it was over-large, no doubt, when unclothed, plum-tipped, and graspable.
Every speck of food Rachel counted down as she consumed it. Much harder eventually to count them out, she thought. She wondered if the young girl’s own juices had been squeezed over the food to season it. She recalled the dream of the half-hearted night, which, at the time, she had felt was so cold. The blankets now were warmth itself, between which she had been mbedded since she could remember. She was sick. Simply sick.
Having breakfasted heartily, she felt heavy with child, for the food seemed to take on a life of its own in her belly, squirming, kicking and, even, she was sure, squealing. Her bodily innards were strange creatures that passed in the night – a night of blood. When the slurry waters finally broke, several hours later, she feared for the integrity of the bed-clothes. Her headache was like an ingrowing horn.
She drowsed off during the late afternoon. She had given up hope of the girl returning to give her a blanket bath. Rachel was evidently sicker than she had originally thought and the girl, who was probably a National Health nurse, was far too busy to tend to a dream. The dead may die, whilst the rest live only by the words they exchange.
Rachel returned to the earlier dream, where night had fully taken back its own. She could no longer see the floating salt-green shapes nor even the cut of her own body. Impossible now, even to fish herself out from more than one dream away. No clashing hooks with Rachel in the moonstream.
The word count of Miscreant Moon turned out to be a thousand odd short, so she appended an epilogue as makeweight.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
ODALISQUE
My (DFL's) comments on ODALISQUE (by PF Jeffery) as I read the novel weekly chapter by chapter.
The author of ODALISQUE has been kind enough to send me a CD of the whole novel. He started writing this novel in the nineteen-eighties. Recently completed (June 2008).
I hope to read this novel chapter by chapter on a weekly basis - and record some thoughts on THE LINKS BELOW. There are 50 chapters plus epilogue.
The author is happy for me to send to you a word-document of each chapter at any time, at your request. My address is bfitzworth@yahoo.co.uk
THE AUTHOR HAS ADDED SOME OF HIS OWN COUNTER-COMMENTS TO MOST OF MY COMMENTS. IF YOU ADD SOME COMMENTS OF YOUR OWN, PLEASE INFORM ME AT THE ABOVE EMAIL ADDRESS OTHERWISE I MAY NOT NOTICE (OR BE ABLE TO ALERT THE AUTHOR ABOUT) YOUR COMMENT.
I am a long-term epistolary friend of the author (handwritten letters from 1967 on a rough weekly basis).
I believe in ODALISQUE as a great fantasy/horror novel (spiritual, grotesque and humorous), but I am still in the personal throes of grappling with its strangely powerful (for me, almost alien) ethos -- greatly assisted by its beautifully silky style of expression.
==============================
NOW COMPLETE
CHAPTER ONE - Awakening
CHAPTER TWO - Love
CHAPTER THREE - Unease
CHAPTER FOUR - Departures
CHAPTER FIVE - Services
CHAPTER SIX - Enslavement
CHAPTER SEVEN - Travelling
CHAPTER EIGHT - Destinations
CHAPTER NINE - Torment
CHAPTER TEN - Barbarians
CHAPTER ELEVEN - Pregnancy
CHAPTER TWELVE - Lactation
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Sale
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Brothel
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Whoredom
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Rooms
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Whorlets
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - Transitions
CHAPTER NINETEEN - Toiling
CHAPTER TWENTY - Carting
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - Deliverance
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - Settling
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - Household
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - Concubine
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - War
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - Pollygoggers
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - River
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - Palace
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE - Unharnessing
CHAPTER THIRTY - Samples
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE - Lessons
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO - Ruby
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE - Cursed
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR - Trial
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE - Advances
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX - Dancing
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN - Training
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT - Solstice
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE - Masque
CHAPTER FORTY - Engaged
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE - Grim
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO - Intrigue
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE - Errands
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR - Marriage
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE - Rode
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX - Road
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN - Battlefields
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT - Ending
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE - Coronation
CHAPTER FIFTY - Beginning
EPILOGUE
2008 Interview with PF (Pet) Jeffery HERE.
===========================
The author of ODALISQUE has been kind enough to send me a CD of the whole novel. He started writing this novel in the nineteen-eighties. Recently completed (June 2008).
I hope to read this novel chapter by chapter on a weekly basis - and record some thoughts on THE LINKS BELOW. There are 50 chapters plus epilogue.
The author is happy for me to send to you a word-document of each chapter at any time, at your request. My address is bfitzworth@yahoo.co.uk
THE AUTHOR HAS ADDED SOME OF HIS OWN COUNTER-COMMENTS TO MOST OF MY COMMENTS. IF YOU ADD SOME COMMENTS OF YOUR OWN, PLEASE INFORM ME AT THE ABOVE EMAIL ADDRESS OTHERWISE I MAY NOT NOTICE (OR BE ABLE TO ALERT THE AUTHOR ABOUT) YOUR COMMENT.
I am a long-term epistolary friend of the author (handwritten letters from 1967 on a rough weekly basis).
I believe in ODALISQUE as a great fantasy/horror novel (spiritual, grotesque and humorous), but I am still in the personal throes of grappling with its strangely powerful (for me, almost alien) ethos -- greatly assisted by its beautifully silky style of expression.
==============================
NOW COMPLETE
CHAPTER ONE - Awakening
CHAPTER TWO - Love
CHAPTER THREE - Unease
CHAPTER FOUR - Departures
CHAPTER FIVE - Services
CHAPTER SIX - Enslavement
CHAPTER SEVEN - Travelling
CHAPTER EIGHT - Destinations
CHAPTER NINE - Torment
CHAPTER TEN - Barbarians
CHAPTER ELEVEN - Pregnancy
CHAPTER TWELVE - Lactation
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Sale
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Brothel
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Whoredom
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Rooms
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Whorlets
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - Transitions
CHAPTER NINETEEN - Toiling
CHAPTER TWENTY - Carting
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - Deliverance
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - Settling
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - Household
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - Concubine
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - War
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - Pollygoggers
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - River
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - Palace
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE - Unharnessing
CHAPTER THIRTY - Samples
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE - Lessons
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO - Ruby
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE - Cursed
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR - Trial
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE - Advances
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX - Dancing
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN - Training
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT - Solstice
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE - Masque
CHAPTER FORTY - Engaged
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE - Grim
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO - Intrigue
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE - Errands
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR - Marriage
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE - Rode
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX - Road
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN - Battlefields
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT - Ending
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE - Coronation
CHAPTER FIFTY - Beginning
EPILOGUE
2008 Interview with PF (Pet) Jeffery HERE.
===========================
Saturday, June 21, 2008
The Secret House
Published 'Unreal Dreams' 1997
The garden was higher than its flowers.
That was what Sybil described it, if in different words, because small girls tended to see things as larger than they actually were. She never questioned the garden's walls. They simply existed as a boundary. As simply as she.
As simply as her friends the roses.
There was a possible drawback, however—the other girls who lived in the garden. Little urchins, all of them, with nowhere better to live than ... yes, in Sybil's rose garden. But there was something comforting about the tall walls--so tall they seemed to have jagged ice along their top edges. Enough inhabitants here without having to invite more. Sybil shrugged. How did those other girls get in, anyway? They didn't have anything to say for themselves more than chatter. Never really answered Sybil's silent questions.
Sybil looked at her own skirt, like wings down-folded, too short to reach the knees. Far better to spend her gazes elsewhere, she guessed. The roses were always beautiful, since she had not lived long enough to see them die. They hung their heads; they knew that pride came before a fall. The involutions of petal in pink, yellow and white were startling because each flower had a little of each colour—tinged at the heart with crimson.
The ivy creepers that cushioned the inner garden walls towards the icy peaks of their towering horizon--these were choked with blossoms too, hybrid blooms that ivy, in normal circumstances, could not possibly bear. Bu, here, anything could grow alongside anything else that grew. Even the girls were, surely, hybrids.
Except Sybil knew no such words. Her world. Their world. Too simple for words.
Shelter was, however, a matter of concern—since the garden suffered weather, perhaps more than most. There were dens amid bowers of branches, where trees stood without fruit or flower. Beneath such interwoven hides, the girls, Sybil included, clustered—chattering, if not gossiping—for what was there to gossip about? Indeed, why chatter? Sybil supposed that young girls, such as herself, needed to chatter, even when there was nothing to chatter about. Little did she realise that, one day, there would indeed be something--an item of intensest gossip to last a thousand years of chattering.
But, first, Sybil wondered why none of them needed to eat. Perhaps, God had put such girls here on purpose—ones who were radiantly beautiful in their prettiness, with breasts on the brink of showing off their buds--ones who demonstrated a perfection which did not warrant alimentary canals to thread them from top to bottom. Sybil did not question how she knew that none of the girls needed to eat, without having ever eaten nor seen the word nor understood even the nearest concept.
Until one day of rain. Such rain as never had been seen, prefiguring a season that none had guessed or, even now, could visualise. So they didn't worry about the slats of sleet that the rain eventually became.
Other than the fact that Sybil grew sick.
Her limbs no longer worked, except in short sluggish bursts of stretching her skirt of wings wider than they had been intended to stretch. The wings, indeed, shrivelled. Her face took on the crimson from the heart of the rose. And the roses, in empathy, drooped. In rosy respect.
The girlish chatter grew louder than the splatters that fell from the sodden uplands of the tree-dens. The girls, thankfully, did not see this as the start of a rot.
One girl ill did not make a million.
Sybil would recover and the sun would return. The blooms would lift and take back the crimson as truly the régime of roses.
Yet Sybil knew better. Or worse. Inside. Deeper inside than it was possible to go in a girl so small. How deep could one delve in shallow shapes of flesh, blood and bone? Till the discovery of a heart more feathery than, if as beautiful as, an enfolded head of red-stained petals.
The sleet split asunder into a myriad flakes of silence: disguised as white noise. And the chatter became undercurrents of gossip and concern, instead of its pretty-eyed version, when rumour was nothing but excited renewal of interest. Now, rumour was scandal, as insidious as the avalanches of crumbly ice-frost that dollopped from walltop as well as from knotted branch.
Until one girl found a locked door in the tall wall: one that had earlier been concealed by the everlasting ivy, now stripped to its waist of bare whitened bones.
But no key.
Sybil pointed at herself and spoke for the very first time: "Chickens have wishbones."
Chickens, like other accepted facts of life, were mysterious archetypes that the girls knew as instinctively as being alive. Deep-seated collectivities of unconsciousness were far more powerful than real memories. Yet they didn't know that chickens could be eaten, except perhaps at Christmas. But what was meant by Christmas? And did Easter eggs come first?
"Painting is like taking somebody's face and putting it on a white canvas," Sybil continued.
The other girls looked at the now blinding landscape of snow that the garden had flattened itself out into--and realised exactly what Sybil meant by a white canvas.
Nobody suspected the delirium of illness or of Sybilness as the perpetrator of words about wishbones and canvases. The same Nobody did not take such words literally.
Sybil opened her legs a little wider to one of the smallest girls with the slenderest, yet longest, fingers: a girl, albeit so small, bearing breasts full enough to bedeck a near woman beneath her skimpy sheen of modesty--a covering that could not protect her from the cutting snow-wind of winter. This girl prodded a finger inside Sybil's body—whilst Sybil stopped herself thinking by thinking of the warm sunshine and the bosomy blossoms and the thymy paths of her erstwhile life in the garden. The girl's finger eventually withdrew from Sybil a key-shaped bone.
And everyone wished.
But before they tried it in the lock of the door, they waited for Sybil's face to grow as pale as death's liliness. Her breath was fainter than a fairy's. The girls took the spittle from a mulchy mound of plucked roses they had piled up for provender in the shelter—without knowing what provender was or even how to suck its juices for their veins. With this, they stick-lipped Sybil's mouth and rouged her soft cheeks.
They eventually abandoned Sybil there--a painting, if not a picture, of health and everlasting beauty. And, chatting about the expectation of wondrous story-books soon to be found inside the Secret House, they hastened through the newly opened door ... out of the Secret Garden.
The garden was higher than its flowers.
That was what Sybil described it, if in different words, because small girls tended to see things as larger than they actually were. She never questioned the garden's walls. They simply existed as a boundary. As simply as she.
As simply as her friends the roses.
There was a possible drawback, however—the other girls who lived in the garden. Little urchins, all of them, with nowhere better to live than ... yes, in Sybil's rose garden. But there was something comforting about the tall walls--so tall they seemed to have jagged ice along their top edges. Enough inhabitants here without having to invite more. Sybil shrugged. How did those other girls get in, anyway? They didn't have anything to say for themselves more than chatter. Never really answered Sybil's silent questions.
Sybil looked at her own skirt, like wings down-folded, too short to reach the knees. Far better to spend her gazes elsewhere, she guessed. The roses were always beautiful, since she had not lived long enough to see them die. They hung their heads; they knew that pride came before a fall. The involutions of petal in pink, yellow and white were startling because each flower had a little of each colour—tinged at the heart with crimson.
The ivy creepers that cushioned the inner garden walls towards the icy peaks of their towering horizon--these were choked with blossoms too, hybrid blooms that ivy, in normal circumstances, could not possibly bear. Bu, here, anything could grow alongside anything else that grew. Even the girls were, surely, hybrids.
Except Sybil knew no such words. Her world. Their world. Too simple for words.
Shelter was, however, a matter of concern—since the garden suffered weather, perhaps more than most. There were dens amid bowers of branches, where trees stood without fruit or flower. Beneath such interwoven hides, the girls, Sybil included, clustered—chattering, if not gossiping—for what was there to gossip about? Indeed, why chatter? Sybil supposed that young girls, such as herself, needed to chatter, even when there was nothing to chatter about. Little did she realise that, one day, there would indeed be something--an item of intensest gossip to last a thousand years of chattering.
But, first, Sybil wondered why none of them needed to eat. Perhaps, God had put such girls here on purpose—ones who were radiantly beautiful in their prettiness, with breasts on the brink of showing off their buds--ones who demonstrated a perfection which did not warrant alimentary canals to thread them from top to bottom. Sybil did not question how she knew that none of the girls needed to eat, without having ever eaten nor seen the word nor understood even the nearest concept.
Until one day of rain. Such rain as never had been seen, prefiguring a season that none had guessed or, even now, could visualise. So they didn't worry about the slats of sleet that the rain eventually became.
Other than the fact that Sybil grew sick.
Her limbs no longer worked, except in short sluggish bursts of stretching her skirt of wings wider than they had been intended to stretch. The wings, indeed, shrivelled. Her face took on the crimson from the heart of the rose. And the roses, in empathy, drooped. In rosy respect.
The girlish chatter grew louder than the splatters that fell from the sodden uplands of the tree-dens. The girls, thankfully, did not see this as the start of a rot.
One girl ill did not make a million.
Sybil would recover and the sun would return. The blooms would lift and take back the crimson as truly the régime of roses.
Yet Sybil knew better. Or worse. Inside. Deeper inside than it was possible to go in a girl so small. How deep could one delve in shallow shapes of flesh, blood and bone? Till the discovery of a heart more feathery than, if as beautiful as, an enfolded head of red-stained petals.
The sleet split asunder into a myriad flakes of silence: disguised as white noise. And the chatter became undercurrents of gossip and concern, instead of its pretty-eyed version, when rumour was nothing but excited renewal of interest. Now, rumour was scandal, as insidious as the avalanches of crumbly ice-frost that dollopped from walltop as well as from knotted branch.
Until one girl found a locked door in the tall wall: one that had earlier been concealed by the everlasting ivy, now stripped to its waist of bare whitened bones.
But no key.
Sybil pointed at herself and spoke for the very first time: "Chickens have wishbones."
Chickens, like other accepted facts of life, were mysterious archetypes that the girls knew as instinctively as being alive. Deep-seated collectivities of unconsciousness were far more powerful than real memories. Yet they didn't know that chickens could be eaten, except perhaps at Christmas. But what was meant by Christmas? And did Easter eggs come first?
"Painting is like taking somebody's face and putting it on a white canvas," Sybil continued.
The other girls looked at the now blinding landscape of snow that the garden had flattened itself out into--and realised exactly what Sybil meant by a white canvas.
Nobody suspected the delirium of illness or of Sybilness as the perpetrator of words about wishbones and canvases. The same Nobody did not take such words literally.
Sybil opened her legs a little wider to one of the smallest girls with the slenderest, yet longest, fingers: a girl, albeit so small, bearing breasts full enough to bedeck a near woman beneath her skimpy sheen of modesty--a covering that could not protect her from the cutting snow-wind of winter. This girl prodded a finger inside Sybil's body—whilst Sybil stopped herself thinking by thinking of the warm sunshine and the bosomy blossoms and the thymy paths of her erstwhile life in the garden. The girl's finger eventually withdrew from Sybil a key-shaped bone.
And everyone wished.
But before they tried it in the lock of the door, they waited for Sybil's face to grow as pale as death's liliness. Her breath was fainter than a fairy's. The girls took the spittle from a mulchy mound of plucked roses they had piled up for provender in the shelter—without knowing what provender was or even how to suck its juices for their veins. With this, they stick-lipped Sybil's mouth and rouged her soft cheeks.
They eventually abandoned Sybil there--a painting, if not a picture, of health and everlasting beauty. And, chatting about the expectation of wondrous story-books soon to be found inside the Secret House, they hastened through the newly opened door ... out of the Secret Garden.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Widow's Weeds
Published 'Beyond The Boundaries' 1997
A pity the war was so short, having represented the best part of his life.
His wife Emily was now dead, last heard singing folk songs along with her favourite long-play of Kathleen Ferrier. The place still echoed in fact with her murmurs of housework. Even the old wireless, still sitting in the corner of the parlour, its taut tuning-wire long since bereft of any power to differentiate between stations, seemed to break out into fitful life, re-broadcasting seasoned Home Service and Light Programme favourites. It was peculiar, though, the wireless having been unplugged for all this time. You would think it would know better.
Eric plumped down in the armchair. Soon, this very house, to which he had been wedded, child, chap and chairbound, for so long, would become more a burden than a home.
His eyes shone in the late afternoon, its sunlight studiously maintaining the integrity of its shafting beams with the complicity of the net curtains.
It turned too quickly from day to night. Conveniently forgetting to switch on the flashing strip, Eric had ample time to ferment the memories. The people he had once known passed by his inner gaze like the bowed strangers who would one day follow his funeral cortège. But most were long dead themselves, moved by busy-body worms into more than a corpse's area, buried deeper than the dungeons he had forgotten to dust: the hoover seemed to clog up on bones, anyway.
Years before, he had come out into the garden, expecting the sunshine to jolly him up with its contrast to the gloomy parlour—the birdsong airiness, the perfectly green lawn, the clean-living sheets gently sailing upon the washing-line, the near unbroken ceiling of blue sparsely sown with tufts of angel's breath. Then, the sudden spluttering into life of a lawn-mower ... curse it, this country could not boast of many such peaceful days, and one of Eric's clownish neighbours had decided to crop his grass-blades. Eric mentally threatened to go round and barber the clown's green fingers for him. Indeed, Eric had escaped outside, there being a decided atmosphere within the house...
Yes, congregated in the various rooms were all the relations who had arrived for next day's funeral. Ensconced in the kitchen were the culinary busy-bodies, the various aunts who had taken upon themselves the catering. The whole place teetered with stacked plates interleaved with serviettes. Darting from bedroom to bedroom were the hide-and-seek gang, some too old to be imprisoned in prams and others too young to sit quietly whilst practising the novelty act of balancing a cup-and-saucer on the knee and nibbling a manicured cucumber sandwich. In the dining-room, were the loud faced uncles launching jokes in various shades of blue upon the surface of their beers. In the parlour, were Emily and her mother hatching plots with heroines but no heroes.
There goes that lawn mower again. Eric had failed to notice that it had stopped momentarily, so the resumption was a double blow. Funerals were usually sad affairs at the best of times, but burying one's own child (who had just been old enough to call Eric "Daddy") was so sad, it actually ceased to be a real emotion. It was grief multiplied by no known human factor. He could not allow himself the normal outlet of crying because, if he started, he knew he would never be able to stop till he died himself.
Returning to the present day of old age, the sun had just given up its ghost to the moon. Emily appeared to sit in the corner, where the wireless had once glowed. She spoke with static in her throat and mis-tuning in her luminous eyes: bearing old news to her widowed husband who thought he was hearing it for the first time.
"Churchill says the war will end in two weeks...", the speaker by the wireless crackled.
Many old people usually did hold conversations with the media, complaining volubly at the newspapers, answering back the soap operas, debating turns of phrase with the politicians who would one day know better how to stutter. But Eric was talking to his dead wife. She to him. Belief is everything, if nothing else.
"It'll go on till you think it'll never end," was his studied response, "and then it'll surely end."
Memories of that day in the garden seeped back. He was much younger then, of course. He tried to concentrate on the birdsong rather than the backfiring of the underhauled lawn mower engine. It was like trying to remember only the good things in life: the love he once felt for his mother, the arrival of the Beano Comic every Thursday when he was endlessly five years old and his eventual success at riding a two-wheeler. Such things were to expunge his last memory of his small daughter: holding her tiny feet as he playfully cart-wheeled her around in this very garden. She liked nothing better than mucking about in the tool shed, so none of it was perhaps surprising...
Eric entered the dim and dusty shed, grabbed the old shears and looked for the large garden fork—but suddenly realised that the latter had now been removed from where it had been carelessly left standing on its handle in the shed's darkest corner.
Without telling anybody where he was going, he walked into the street and towards the sound of the mower. The blades would drink the gardener's blood, he vowed.
Meanwhile, the blades of Eric's own expanse of grass grew patches as tall as a toddler's knees.
After his wife had died, Eric fell in love with a niece.
One day, he looked at her sitting in the kitchen, mixing tea. Emily's sister's girl, Isabel. She had only come to absolve her guilt of not coming. She had brought her best friend with her to blunt the atmosphere. Tentative glances. Angles of blame. Misgiven glitter from the pots and pans. Talk that meant very little to Eric. About a person whose name sounded like Cankerous Mildeyes. Whose brother went under the name Odgod. Was his niece or her friend going to marry Odgod? It seemed so. If it were to be his niece's friend, Eric would not mind. She might as well marry somebody as anybody. But as to his niece (whose face spoke of nun's weeds), he could not bear the thought. She was too innocent, reminded him of his daughter who had not lasted beyond a half decade. He wanted to take his niece's hand and kiss it, tell her not to marry. Especially not to someone called Odgod.
The two girls, the niece and her friend, giggled. Made the gas stove turn itself on. He did not notice anyone turning the knobs. All four burners, like spirits, spirted. The only way to heat the kitchen. How many times had his niece urged him to have central heating fitted to this old house, and how many times had he refused, knowing the open fire made the parlour snugger than any damn radiators? The snow splattered the window, as if someone had had a cold time of it crying. No sun today: one day less without God's naked light.
Cankerous Mildeyes was apparently known to both girls from her relationship with one of their teachers. A scandal had brought things to light. The Head had said Mr Van Chrome was leaving on a personal matter. The assembly of girls, in their straw hats, had nodded rhythmically to the hymn that ensued, as the day wore its course towards first lesson: embroidery with Miss Esther: then Preparation For Adult Life with Mr Urgle-Wett: Biology was always just before lunch, for a reason too obvious to fathom. And why they always studied weeds in Botany, rather than beautiful flowers, was quite beyond them. Until Scripture and Scruples made it clear. The girls' nonsense almost made sense.
Eric's kitchen was emptier following their gabbled departure. He'd never understand what they were going on about. Tears filled his head. He heard the distant self-tuning of the wireless as a picture ghosted across the screen of its wicker speaker. He would have wished he were Odgod, if he had not told his niece not to marry Odgod.
The ancient memories now flooded back, having broken the gates of misery: the senseless clatter from the kitchen, the secret voices in the unlit hall, the unrecognisable faces on the landing, the acrimonious whispers at the back of the parlour's darkness, the jolly screams in the top attic ... it was too nice a day to be indoors.
Eric discovered his tiny daughter in the tool shed leaning quite peacefully upon the upside-down garden fork.
The neighbour's lawn-mower started up, as if its blades were thirsty: jealous at the fork's spokes.
It was an odd God who allowed such things to happen.
A pity the war was so short, having represented the best part of his life.
His wife Emily was now dead, last heard singing folk songs along with her favourite long-play of Kathleen Ferrier. The place still echoed in fact with her murmurs of housework. Even the old wireless, still sitting in the corner of the parlour, its taut tuning-wire long since bereft of any power to differentiate between stations, seemed to break out into fitful life, re-broadcasting seasoned Home Service and Light Programme favourites. It was peculiar, though, the wireless having been unplugged for all this time. You would think it would know better.
Eric plumped down in the armchair. Soon, this very house, to which he had been wedded, child, chap and chairbound, for so long, would become more a burden than a home.
His eyes shone in the late afternoon, its sunlight studiously maintaining the integrity of its shafting beams with the complicity of the net curtains.
It turned too quickly from day to night. Conveniently forgetting to switch on the flashing strip, Eric had ample time to ferment the memories. The people he had once known passed by his inner gaze like the bowed strangers who would one day follow his funeral cortège. But most were long dead themselves, moved by busy-body worms into more than a corpse's area, buried deeper than the dungeons he had forgotten to dust: the hoover seemed to clog up on bones, anyway.
Years before, he had come out into the garden, expecting the sunshine to jolly him up with its contrast to the gloomy parlour—the birdsong airiness, the perfectly green lawn, the clean-living sheets gently sailing upon the washing-line, the near unbroken ceiling of blue sparsely sown with tufts of angel's breath. Then, the sudden spluttering into life of a lawn-mower ... curse it, this country could not boast of many such peaceful days, and one of Eric's clownish neighbours had decided to crop his grass-blades. Eric mentally threatened to go round and barber the clown's green fingers for him. Indeed, Eric had escaped outside, there being a decided atmosphere within the house...
Yes, congregated in the various rooms were all the relations who had arrived for next day's funeral. Ensconced in the kitchen were the culinary busy-bodies, the various aunts who had taken upon themselves the catering. The whole place teetered with stacked plates interleaved with serviettes. Darting from bedroom to bedroom were the hide-and-seek gang, some too old to be imprisoned in prams and others too young to sit quietly whilst practising the novelty act of balancing a cup-and-saucer on the knee and nibbling a manicured cucumber sandwich. In the dining-room, were the loud faced uncles launching jokes in various shades of blue upon the surface of their beers. In the parlour, were Emily and her mother hatching plots with heroines but no heroes.
There goes that lawn mower again. Eric had failed to notice that it had stopped momentarily, so the resumption was a double blow. Funerals were usually sad affairs at the best of times, but burying one's own child (who had just been old enough to call Eric "Daddy") was so sad, it actually ceased to be a real emotion. It was grief multiplied by no known human factor. He could not allow himself the normal outlet of crying because, if he started, he knew he would never be able to stop till he died himself.
Returning to the present day of old age, the sun had just given up its ghost to the moon. Emily appeared to sit in the corner, where the wireless had once glowed. She spoke with static in her throat and mis-tuning in her luminous eyes: bearing old news to her widowed husband who thought he was hearing it for the first time.
"Churchill says the war will end in two weeks...", the speaker by the wireless crackled.
Many old people usually did hold conversations with the media, complaining volubly at the newspapers, answering back the soap operas, debating turns of phrase with the politicians who would one day know better how to stutter. But Eric was talking to his dead wife. She to him. Belief is everything, if nothing else.
"It'll go on till you think it'll never end," was his studied response, "and then it'll surely end."
Memories of that day in the garden seeped back. He was much younger then, of course. He tried to concentrate on the birdsong rather than the backfiring of the underhauled lawn mower engine. It was like trying to remember only the good things in life: the love he once felt for his mother, the arrival of the Beano Comic every Thursday when he was endlessly five years old and his eventual success at riding a two-wheeler. Such things were to expunge his last memory of his small daughter: holding her tiny feet as he playfully cart-wheeled her around in this very garden. She liked nothing better than mucking about in the tool shed, so none of it was perhaps surprising...
Eric entered the dim and dusty shed, grabbed the old shears and looked for the large garden fork—but suddenly realised that the latter had now been removed from where it had been carelessly left standing on its handle in the shed's darkest corner.
Without telling anybody where he was going, he walked into the street and towards the sound of the mower. The blades would drink the gardener's blood, he vowed.
Meanwhile, the blades of Eric's own expanse of grass grew patches as tall as a toddler's knees.
After his wife had died, Eric fell in love with a niece.
One day, he looked at her sitting in the kitchen, mixing tea. Emily's sister's girl, Isabel. She had only come to absolve her guilt of not coming. She had brought her best friend with her to blunt the atmosphere. Tentative glances. Angles of blame. Misgiven glitter from the pots and pans. Talk that meant very little to Eric. About a person whose name sounded like Cankerous Mildeyes. Whose brother went under the name Odgod. Was his niece or her friend going to marry Odgod? It seemed so. If it were to be his niece's friend, Eric would not mind. She might as well marry somebody as anybody. But as to his niece (whose face spoke of nun's weeds), he could not bear the thought. She was too innocent, reminded him of his daughter who had not lasted beyond a half decade. He wanted to take his niece's hand and kiss it, tell her not to marry. Especially not to someone called Odgod.
The two girls, the niece and her friend, giggled. Made the gas stove turn itself on. He did not notice anyone turning the knobs. All four burners, like spirits, spirted. The only way to heat the kitchen. How many times had his niece urged him to have central heating fitted to this old house, and how many times had he refused, knowing the open fire made the parlour snugger than any damn radiators? The snow splattered the window, as if someone had had a cold time of it crying. No sun today: one day less without God's naked light.
Cankerous Mildeyes was apparently known to both girls from her relationship with one of their teachers. A scandal had brought things to light. The Head had said Mr Van Chrome was leaving on a personal matter. The assembly of girls, in their straw hats, had nodded rhythmically to the hymn that ensued, as the day wore its course towards first lesson: embroidery with Miss Esther: then Preparation For Adult Life with Mr Urgle-Wett: Biology was always just before lunch, for a reason too obvious to fathom. And why they always studied weeds in Botany, rather than beautiful flowers, was quite beyond them. Until Scripture and Scruples made it clear. The girls' nonsense almost made sense.
Eric's kitchen was emptier following their gabbled departure. He'd never understand what they were going on about. Tears filled his head. He heard the distant self-tuning of the wireless as a picture ghosted across the screen of its wicker speaker. He would have wished he were Odgod, if he had not told his niece not to marry Odgod.
The ancient memories now flooded back, having broken the gates of misery: the senseless clatter from the kitchen, the secret voices in the unlit hall, the unrecognisable faces on the landing, the acrimonious whispers at the back of the parlour's darkness, the jolly screams in the top attic ... it was too nice a day to be indoors.
Eric discovered his tiny daughter in the tool shed leaning quite peacefully upon the upside-down garden fork.
The neighbour's lawn-mower started up, as if its blades were thirsty: jealous at the fork's spokes.
It was an odd God who allowed such things to happen.
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Folded Away
Published 'Mail Art - Wearwolf' 1996
The beach attendant had never known such a hot day.
If it were not for the latest skin cancer scare he would be working very hard indeed – and herds of sweaty folk spilling in and out of the regurgitated tides.
But then he stared at the mountainous piles of unopened deckchairs.
And smiled.
At least ghosts put them back even before they used them.
The beach attendant had never known such a hot day.
If it were not for the latest skin cancer scare he would be working very hard indeed – and herds of sweaty folk spilling in and out of the regurgitated tides.
But then he stared at the mountainous piles of unopened deckchairs.
And smiled.
At least ghosts put them back even before they used them.
Friday, May 23, 2008
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.
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.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, May 12, 2008
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.
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.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, May 09, 2008
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.
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.
“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.
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
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.
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.
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