A Tale Of Two Todgers

PUBLISHED 'CRYPT OF CTHULHU' 1993



Old Todger serves many masters. His entire mentality is one of knowing his place - a place which he takes with him wherever he goes. He's fundamentally a shite-raker, yet most of his masters cannot muster muck enough to keep his hands full. "Have you got more slops and turn-outs for me to clear up?" he asks, wide-eyed and expectant. In the end, there's resort to keeping extra animals (and even extra servants) on the estate simply so that Old Todger can be given the opportunity to shovel their doings away.

And one future night beyond Old Todger's days, the village became quieter than most at twilight. As soon as the sun began to dip below the trees at the edge of the Green, there was a scattering of latecomers aiming for the doors of the Black Onion pub - via a meadow juxtaposing the Patrons' car park and past an encroaching elbow (which was the outside Gentlemen's by-pass). At the centre of this meadow was an upgrowth - not a tree, more a top-knot on someone's mop of tousled hair - which seemed to wear dusk like a hat. Some of the more fanciful villagers warily watched it turn from summery shrub to a benighted helmet wrenching in a sporadic wind. The legend - and it was wrong to call it more than that - had evolved over the years, embroidered in parts and even underplayed in others - concerning that Old Todger who used to be the village's Lavatory Man in the days of future's past. The villagers had feared him and scuttled into the rooms behind the sculleries when he entered their houses with his stink-pans. He came to unclog the tanks and tote out the sediments. As he passed in and as he passed out of the through-parlours, even the cats hissed and hunched their backs in the chimney-corners. And some said it were the cats that were the end of him. The helmet in the meadow was now believed to be the top of his head - the rest of his body stretching to the Core of the Earth, where certain others down there did out his necessaries.

Beyond twilight, most villagers snuggled up in the Black Onion hostelry, but others drew their curtains together in the upper storeys and waited for dawn beneath the bedcovers. A small minority squeezed in under the mattress. Young Todger didn't know why - just took it for granted - but he was one of those who resorted below the tilting rafters of the Old Onion. Young Todger did not need nor want to question it. He did not even worry that he bore the same name as the legendary lavatory man. A frothing tankard of local ale each night could not be bad. But then, it all came home to him, like a rifle shot from out a lace-trimmed cradle.

Young Todger cursed the day itself, for it was nearer day than night when it happened. He'd had to pass along one of those dark short-cuts around the church. He'd never liked it particularly, with the oversize stone gargoyles reaching out to touch his head. Framed between the sides of the lich-gate at the end of the path, he could see the helmet glinting in the dying light. His heart beat faster, as it appeared to be swivelling in the ground. He could've sworn it cranked and rose slowly like a drill-head. Then, screaming erupted from a nearby house, like a wild catfight, but was nevertheless decidedly human in its origin. Young Todger ran from and then towards it, in hesitant horror, and, after a bit, got nowhere. The butcher's boy had got in, before Young Todger's eventual arrival, and was found comforting the body in the washing-copper. A red spluttering face poked itself from the hatch, amidst the froth and still dirty smalls. It was Young Todger's mother's second cousin by obverse remove and Young Todger knew her only slightly. Enough, though, for him to say: "You be in a pretty pickle, Mrs Bobbin..."

She responed with a blurting cry: "The stink tank be alive with coily things..."

"What!" spat the butcher's boy. "Just now, on our marble slabs, the meat grew huge carbuncles - up they sprouted on the briskets and sirloins, with bloated blisters on the chops, yellow stuff scumming our knives and hatchets. Blimey, all's getting mighty peculiar."

"Why are you in the washing-copper, Mrs Bobbin? I've never seen my own mother in one," Young Todger thought to ask, tactlessly as it turned out.

"The tank did stink worse than ever and did churn - AND it'd only one day's doings in it. So, I thought I would be safer in here, with all my smalls. It seemed cleaner here, somehow." She burst into tears at the thought of the ludicrousness of her position. Illogical, but understandable, Young Todger had to concede. Finally, he put it all down to the helmet in the meadow. Old Todger's vengeance was no longer legend, but increasingly legion. Even later, in the Old Onion, Young Todger swallowed down his tankard of ale far too quick. Its lumpish contents slid down before he had the chance to take avoiding action. And no amount of alternate finger-poking at both ends could retrieve them.

Meanwhile, in history, before Young Todger was born, Old Todger could not remember exactly when he gave up being a Lavatory Man. Flushed loos were soon to be invented and then there would be no need for the stink-cart to call every now and then to collect the night soil. But, more important perhaps, people were to become so poor he felt that there would be no big job satisfation in dealing with just the meagre produce stemming from a diet of thin soup. Old Todger tramped to the city, to seek his fortune. But little did he know, his fortune was with him all the time. Everybody carried his or her Fate around with them, impossible, some averred, to shake off, hanging from the nose like an invisible symbolic dewdrop, more precious to the wearer than a diamond, an intangible satellite of the soul. And Old Todger had the biggest one in the world.

Having entered the city gates, he soon came across a sandwich man advertising what seemed to be a public hostelry called the Great Old One which, as he was very thirsty (and hungry) after his long hike, was an opportune encounter.

"Is the Great Old One far from here, my good old man?"

The man had a mouthful of fillings, so he couldn't answer properly but he managed to grunt out a few curt directions which, with a few hand signals, sent Old Todger on his way with an inkling of the various back-doubles he would have to negotiate in order to reach the said pub. But, soon, he was lost in a maze of alleys which were full of steaming laundries. Outside one, there was a white-aproned man leaning against the door sucking at an unlit pipe.

"Lost, eh?" The pipe stirred the mouth.

"Guess so," replied our hero.

"Where you off to, then?"

"The Great Old One."

"Never bleedin' heard of it - sounds like somethin' me ol' Grandmammy told me about in nightmares, when I was nobbut middlin' small."

"It's a pub, I'm told."

"Well, you been told wrong. No pub called that in these 'ere parts."

"Can you point the way to another one, then, my good fellow?"

"Might do - if you make it worth my while."

"I've got nothing - I'm on my way to seek my fortune and..."

"Fortune's ever just round the next corner, they say, just follow your nose ... and there it be."

"I wish I believed that. What if I gave you a bit of rustic wisdom, launderer? That'll be something I can give a townee of the likes of you."

"OK. Spill!"

"When the morning's a breezy one, your doings'll be long and coily, clogging up the works. When the day's still and calm, they'll be shorn chipolatas, hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, dotted about the bowl like lost souls. But when it's wet, your brown porridge will be darker and richer and go round a few more hungry mouths."

"Cor! That be wisdom indeed. And can you tell it t'other way round. I mean can you study your poo-stools and tell what the weather will be?"

"Yep."

"Well, mine was all yellow and runny this very afternoon and spotted with bog-bugs as big as walnuts doing the breast-stroke."

"No trouble, launderer. Tomorrow'll be a good day for putting the sheets out to dry."

"You're having me on!"

"Nope - the sun'll shine hot and long ... even during the first part of the night."

"Blimey, nuncle, I think I'll slap you on the back for the smart arse fellow you be."

Which he did. He didn't know his own strength, what with a whole lifetime of wringing and steam-pressing by hand. Old Todger spluttered and snorted, finding himself on the ground looking for something he didn't know he had in the first place and didn't know he'd lost in the second.

The grinning launderer shouted: "I was just joking you, sirree, about that pub. It's just round the next blind corner. There you'll find the Great Old One with wondrous big frothing pint-pots at its chest and a bellyful fit to feed a thousand poor people with more than just thin soup."

"Thank'ee, launderer," stuttered Old Todger.

And, on hands and knees, he rounded the corner only to discover himself staring at the mighty webbed claws which served as feet of a creature who forthwith gobbled him up and shat him out again almost instantaneously. Yet, at the turn of the century, some say that Time took one look at the forthcoming years and immediately decided to retrace its course, evidently flabbergasted at what would come to pass if it ever changed its mind and set its foot forward again towards the two World Wars and beyond...

Nanny Bobbin was sewing, at the quiet end of the day. From time to time, she looked down at her charge, the little girl she herself might have been, then glancing from the high window towards the orchard of bullace trees at the end of the garden. She knew this house to be beyond the tracks beaten by the peddler or the cat's meat man, and even further from the creaking Black Onion sign of the village where she once lived.

Could it be that dusk was seeping into the summer air earlier, much earlier, than yesterday? Todger, recently hired gardener and muckman for the estate, was still pottering amid the flowerbeds, yes, still wiping the grease of the sun from his bothered brows. Nanny imagined hearing his boisterous remonstrations as he entered the lower kitchens, at day's end. At day's end, which could not be far off, since the songs of twitterlight had turned in on themselves, even though the birds still perched peckishly in the blackening bullace branches.

Nanny tapped the shoulder of her young lace-trimmed charge squatting with her giggle of dolls by the empty nursery fire-grate and told her to look through the window at the dying light, for it was only then that one could fulfil the promise of the day.

Todger stood and stared up at the nursery window. He knew, if he did not put hurry into his boots, he would be trapped outside. "Come on, Todge, ol' fellah, you've not much time," he muttered to himself. Two white poppy faces hung at the nursery window, he saw, like the staring widening eyes of an old sightless one. A pack of blackness scattered into an explosion of wings from the bullace orchard as if seeking out further patches of itself, to sew the night.

The eyes soon extinguished and, no doubt, so would his chance of survival. On hands and knees again, this time because the toil of the day had taken its toll, he made his way towards the tradesmen's entrance, desperate for any form of shelter. He had never left it as late as this before. He could not recall the roof of the house looking so cluttered up. Huge roosting wings, with beaks prodding at things in their feathers, stood around the tall chimneystacks. Others hung from spiky cages which, one day in the future, would be television aerials, with long strands of a substance that the pecking and preening of the creatures had deposited there. One particularly blubbery blood-knitting of this bogey-goo puttered upon the back of Todger's neck as he reached the lowest step of the house.

He looked up, imploringly, to call his fellow servants. All they had to do was scoot smartly from the door, gain purchase below his armpits and drag him, if inelegantly, into the deepest reaches of the house, safe from whatever those creatures were hemming and threading the ridge-trees and gutters of the upper margins of the roof system.

Nanny Bobbin and her charge had, by now, of course, drawn the velvet curtains together, like dressing a wound. Since it was unseasonably chilly, they both set up a structure of blackened fire-wood in the grate, the sharper bits pointing up the chimney-flue. No need to set it alight, though, for they would soon be both curling cosily into the cot. In any event, neither were allowed matches.

The day did not give way too easily that night, and for too long they listened to the slow poignant guttering outside in the quarter-light.

The fulcrum of time had evidently been reached. Old Todger (ever to be Nanny's beau) would no doubt be conscripted when he became Young Todger again.

In future's present well beyond past's grasp, he had an unlit ciggie in his mouth. He seemed to be waiting for something to happen, but the corner of the field in which he stood was quickly filling with snow. Soon both night and snow would blanket him, but he welcomed the anonymity of invisibility. He spoke to one he thought to be himself: "I hated school. But I loved jog-raffy. I'm jog-raffy meself, you know. Me mouth has been dug in the earth of me face. A mountain the helmet of me head. Me chest be rivers of sweat. Me bum has a crack from the quakin' of me innards. Me feet grow in the soil, as corpses grow in graves. Me hairy part is fruit of a tree, growin' juicy, comin' in cream..."

Only his voice could be heard, but others had grouped around him in the night. Grey creatures, shaped out of the snow and darkness, mewed and shambled around the solitary speaking tree.

"I forgit me own name, you know, but I'm late of this village. I useta clear out the stink tanks of me neighbours, but they didn't want to know me. Only wanted me to pass through their homes like silence, to clear away their week's doings. They hid back of the wardrobes for fear of me. But they needed me. The houses would choke on themselves, if it had not been for me..." He shivered, for the cold was eating away at him, as if he were the church with the Devil's Kith clambering over it, sucking out the religion from his bones. "I wish I had never lived. What good was it all? I did big jobs for them, jobs that never ended ... months of poo-stools still to be collected. I wonder how they're gettin' on without me."

Out of his mouth curled the longest tongue that man had ever mustered, a long retching innard of despair and grief. But, at its tip, the cold took hold and spread to the rest of his bitter branches. One of the night creatures, settling like a cat beneath his body warmth, looked up and whined for love. He bent his willowy trunk to pluck this elemental from the frost-bitten ground, cherished it to his smoking chest but then felt its bones crackling like twigs within his cuddle.

"Have thee a spirit, like the teachers at school taught me? I feel thy whiskers, I feel thy life leavin' thee like a tooth fairy's wet kiss. Art thou dead now? Thou art gone down like a house of cards."

The other creatures that had gathered round him in the night left him alone with crumpled fur and bones pressed sensuously to his silent chest.

Some said that even death would not keep him from the tasks in hand. He had often considered himself to be a ghost. But most despaired of even ghostly help. The whistling through the branches of the earthbound tree to which, if half-truths were known, the ghost finally resorted, was ascribed by the deprived villagers to the wind. Even on sullen windless days, like most days now beyond the two Wars, the stench from unemptied tanks hung about in wreaths of foulness. Some people joked that Todger would come back as someone else again, one with fangs, a Dung Dracula ... but the joke soon turned sour as blood. Most remembered him, thankfully, as a Great Old One who was never young. And by dawn, the willow has become fibrous again, sappy tentacles rebudding. Spring, surely, cannot be far ahead or behind. The villagers wake and stare. One has dreamed of blowing down a balloon. Then, of mending a broken one. Another has dreamed of moulding shite-shapes. Yet another has dreamed of her own death in a makeshift mansion up the wooden hills of sleep - and, upon waking, finds it be true. The Black Onion does a roaring trade in gargle-oil, whilst those behind the house-curtains creep on, crap on and simply hope.

Panic Entry

Part One
(published 'Peace & Freedom' 1995)

Jeremy Journey, head hero of his very own story, stared at the palm of his left hand as if it was about to reveal something about himself that he did not already know. He was naturally aware of the date of his death (not too far off if you only count shopping days) but what was perhaps more surprising, he had incontrovertible knowledge of its nature in all its horrific detail. So what else could there be? Only minor details relating to his personality, the odd rough edge that he preferred not to recognise even in his most subconscious moments. Usually, he saw right back to where the Dark Mind started, but never dared pioneer those unexplored regions without the aid of a psychiatric prop or confidence booster ... and where, these days, could you obtain the likes of them? Shrinks were few and far between ever since the Wars of Self Revelation, for shrinks had felt so diminished.

There was knocking on the door: more sudden than the flash of enlightenment that occurs when one finally breaks an impossible code. Probably, another one of those ne'erdowell do-gooders, Jeremy thought, someone who wanted to nurse him through the worst of a mind emerging from a cocoon of the old ... someone who may even want to become Mrs Journey! He ignored the knocking, knowing from his palm that it would eventually cease and go away.

But it didn’t! The audible pain of wood panels being relentlessly beaten was hard to bear. He pinned the blame on circumstances, if odd ones at that. There was one item about himself, however, that was slowly dawning on him: he was fast becoming someone other than Jeremy Journey! Such realisation deserved more than one exclamation mark, but the sheer outrageousness had not quite yet hit home.

"Come in," he said, in a voice he no longer recognised. Still the plain knocking. Eventually, he got up and opened the door.


Part Two
(published 'Peace & Freedom' 1997)

There stood a dumpy woman in a floral frock with unshaven legs and feet that could easily be mistaken for cloven hooves. She held items of shopping in one hand, the other allowed freedom for knocking by the use of clenched teeth to hold her handbag strap.

"Blimey, Fred, you took your time about it!"

Her voice was harsher than his. He could see now that her so-called feet were not hooves, as such, but dressed in pretty outlandish clod-hoppers with which yet another self-imposed war of international proportions had caused the shoe-shops to stock up ... in some misbegotten campaign of frugality and mock utility. He yearned for the days when women dressed as ladies, elegantly and, yes, shapefully.

Fred lay beside the mound of his wife, wondering where he was. He had just woken up for the second time that night. She was snorting like a pig in labour ... no wonder he couldn't nod off. The advertising sign just outside the bedroom window slowly flashed on and off. He couldn't recall the nature of the latest logo that the electricians had strung up only two days before. It cast sufficient light, however, for him to examine his left palm. He couldn't believe his eyes. It was smothered in goatfur! He shrieked, running for the bedroom window...

He hung from the advertising sign like a dead puppet: caught on a green-pulsing inverted comma by the pyjama cord. Almost in slow motion, the trousers split as the rump forced its way out ... and the pavement drew nearer with tantalising dread. He never saw the sign was advertising a new brand of high-class, but heavy-duty, stays:-
Jeremy Journey's Boneless Corsetry.

The Resident (2)

Unpublished

It was the usually sub-conscious sense of roof that made life cosy and safe: a feeling hidden behind other instincts that home was not only where the heart was but also a place whence one could view the happenings of the world with an assumed immunity.

A damp patch had drawn Joe Carter’s attention to the all-important roof. It was a shock, therefore, when it dawned on him, following expert advice from a chirpy roofer, that the whole roof needed replacing … with all the resultant lack of security that then seeped through the various cracks of Joe’s mind. Worry flowed, like water, by default. Even foreign wars crept nearer to his street. Weather a constant news item. Winter ever on the horizon.

“It needs doing, Mr Carter, but don’t worry we shall make it fast at all stages of the work,” said the chirpy roofer, after quoting the cost of the job, but quickly spotting that the potential customer’s priority was more than just the money involved. It was as if one roof needed to be replaced with a new roof in a single swoop, tiles and battens and membranes and ridges fully in place like a conjuror’s trick, instead of the laborious dismantling and mantling that were actually involved.

Joe gave the go ahead to the chirpy roofer, despite the nightmares Joe envisaged. Indeed, without preamble, he was able to dream dreams before even dreaming them and, following the commencement of the building work, this phenomenon grew. One such dream became a separate entity: a dream Joe called ‘the resident’ that often squatted on the bedroom carpet, preening itself for the time which, it somehow knew, would inevitably arrive for its turn at being a dream within Joe’s head rather than outside it. A different dream was already in Joe’s head dreaming the potential onset of this new dream that Joe called 'the resident'. The Resident Dream on the carpet was an image of his bungalow’s roof with two proud dormer eyes like windows – a documentary view through a number of stills of the piecemeal de-tiling and the bare areas open to the elements with the work only slowly progressing as a result of contrary weather conditions that hindered the work itself as well as ensuring that any cracks in the armour left by the chirpy roofer in media res were laid bare to the selfsame weather conditions … eventually causing a tortured drip from a crack in one of the ceilings which the chirpy roofer (it has to be admitted) quickly rectified during the night (following Joe’s emergency call for assistance) by unkinking the membrane that should never have been left kinked in the first place, thus having earlier allowed the melted snow to run down a surreptitious vertical channel of least resistance between chimney-stack and dormer but now, after rectification, fluidly sloping into the gutter instead.

If time were our friend, one could convey the comical side of Joe’s character and the debates he had with himself as to his own dire anxieties. The chirpy roofer learned to handle his customer in the shape of Joe Carter by having more time to do so than us because of the delays in his work caused by the weather. The conversations between the two of them, perforce, sadly went unrecorded and, inevitably, in due course, unremembered. All that could be judged was that, despite his best intentions, the chirpy roofer’s reassurances fell by the wayside because Joe continued to see the Resident Dream picked out from the gloom of the bedroom by a wild-eyed anxiety that became itself a living creature with a luminous face amid imagined drips ticking like the gold fob watch that this creature kept in the top pocket of its dapper smoking-jacket. It is a moot point whether the chirpy roofer indeed was justified in trying to reassure Joe because he may have been a waster who couldn’t even skin a rice pudding by leaving it to go cold before eating it and Joe was quite right to worry as much as he did about the roofing.

The fact that the Resident Dream continued to develop while still outside the jurisdiction of Joe’s real dreaming process seemed to prove a point that things were not quite as comical as indicated so far. The thing with the fob watch was bodily absorbed piecemeal into the Resident Dream as part of its status as an ever-developing ‘virgin birth’ dream with no dreamer to disown its reality by waking from it and deeming it a dream or, even better, forgetting it completely as one normally does with many dreams. The dream was a mighty castellated dollshouse contraption with eyes softening out from the ill-shaped cracks in the new-laid wooden slats that constituted the whole dollshouse. It was largely nothing but roof. A dream topped by a wooden roof that was also the same roof from top to bottom of the dream. Even the eyes became nothing but inverse teardrops draining away into sock-puppet stitches. A dream too solid to channel within normal dream ducts – thus remaining an indigestible lump of psychic deadwood straddling the room like a ramshackle bridge or transitional shed above a torrential river of time. The dream developed as a narrative of change but remained stolid in its perseverance not to change its shape or existence as a Resident outside Joe’s mind.

***

“How are you today, Mr Carter?” the roofer chirped as the front door of the bungalow was opened to him. “It’s a nice day today. We should be able to get going a bit faster on your roof, especially as I’ve brought someone else to help.”

He indicated the dark shape behind him that the sunlight could not seem to undarken. This had been an introduction that needed no introduction because two hands had already extended towards each other and shaken.

The door closed after a few unrecorded civilities of small talk were exchanged.

The most frightening thing was that this was no dream. This was just a loose end. A forgotten coda. A lost motive between disconnected intentions. The Resident took out his fob watch and said: “We mustn’t waste the first day of Spring.” And that’s what he did … a curved swoop up to the sloping roof where he sat changing his chirps into cuckoos.

'Odalisque' by PF Jeffery (DFL's comments on Chapter 37)

Chapter 37 – Training

Although this chapter (and a number of immediately previous chapters) appears to be part of a single long period of the novel (judging by the space taken to tell it), it is in fact a relatively short period in real time compared to the hurly burly of years represented by earlier chapters in the first half of the novel. However, this current period is no stodgy oasis, if one fully appreciates that it is a new hurly burly told mainly by dialogue and incident and crafted narrations of narrations, a kaleidoscope of costumes (armour, dance etc), weapons (morning star, spanking hand, anachronous machine gun etc), the wonderfully conveyed subtle relationships (eg Tuerqui / Fluff / Bob Bosset (Bobbikins)), the emotions/ snookums / whore training, the festivals (Solstice, New Year), the plain role-playing, the role-playing of role-playing (!), the jealousies of attention (eg Modesty Clay), the dance of history, provenance, tradition, alternate world, war - as well as the dance of body movement and sex. A hurly burly, true, but a narrative that is well-aimed straight down a fast tube ... towards the breathless reader.


This reminds me of the morning star’s symbol as Tuerqui’s double-edged narration itself:

That day, Bob Bosset introduced us to the morning star. The spiked ball on the end of the chain weighed a great deal more than I expected, and proved difficult to control. Had it not been for the coordinated dance moves, I felt sure that I’d have injured myself with it. As it was, none of us hurt ourselves, but neither did we make much progress toward becoming mistress of the weapon.

Two other passages from the rich choice of exemplary passages:

Imagining myself riding into Surrey clad in padded leather and light steel cuirass, it seemed real for the first time. With little effort, I could visualise arriving at the University of Pain clad as a warrior. What would Tuerquelle make of me, or Lady Isobel? Smiling, I pictured my daughter’s eyes – round with wonder.

After changing, we set off for Eric Marsh’s armoury – an ill assorted group. Tipsi, Diqui and Barguin were in coarse shirts, leather jerkins and tightly fitted breeches – they looked like pantomime ruffians[1].
[1] Pantomime ruffians – the pantomime was a humorous stage play. One characteristic was that the parts of ugly women were played by men, and young men by attractive girls. Tipsi, Barguin and Diqui looked like attractive girls playing the part of young male ruffians.

-------------------------------

Didn’t really follow the sense here:

It seemed to me better for their relationship if each believed her or himself the first to whom I’d spoken.

============================================

Word docs of the actual chapters are freely available to readers of this blog.

The links to all Chapter comments by me are here: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2008/06/odalisque.html

od 11

DFL’S COMMENTS ON ‘ODALISQUE’ BY PF JEFFERY


Chapter 11 - Pregnancy

Many wonderful touches in the poignant scenes of pregnancy & childbirth. Tuerqui now has a daughter: Tuerquelle.

The artful whip-making, too, during pregnancy, is a detailed world all in itself: only this novel could treat of this or even dream of this in such a loving manner.

Some snippets that attracted me;

Alarmed, I placed my bowl on the floor. It was common knowledge that slaves were given drugs in their swill designed to promote docility. That much seemed acceptable – and inevitable. The idea of affecting an unborn child in the same way was another matter.

[Does the above mean that Tuerqui’s feistiness is wishful thinking on behalf of the narrator?]


Looking her in the eye, I saw that she did – indeed – have a freedom denied to the rest of us. For that I envied her. Continuing to gaze, I saw that there was a loneliness, too – denied the company of her kind. My envy was mingled with sympathy – and a strong sexual attraction – she was amongst the loveliest slaves I’d seen.
Something deeper drew me to Whipfelle, as I slowly realised during the following weeks. Having yet to frame the thought, at some level I recognised that my unborn child would have much in common with my companion. Whipfelle’s happiness reassured me. A mother needs hope for her baby.
Later, I was to discover that many pregnant bondlings comfort themselves with fantasies of escape or rescue for their unborn children. While they dream such nonsense, they pass the special spices to their wombs, ensuring that that their babies will no more desire personage than did Whipfelle. Lying to myself has never been my way, and I needed to be content that my child would share Whipfelle’s inner serenity.

....................
Once the first whip of my pregnancy was complete, I found myself assigned to make an ante-natal one, as used by our overseers. It was a delicate instrument, designed to correct – as befitted a slave – without damaging the unborn child. It was a relief to know that, however much my faults required a chiding lash, my baby would not suffer. The result of my work pleased me – a thing of beauty, and exquisitely painful.


Regarding the coarse elided dialogue of the slave Muqui – not sure if this entirely worked. And is she the exception that proves the rule regarding slaves not speaking coarsely?

Typo:
a tear in token my parting from Lady Nerys
==============================


Word docs of the actual chapters are freely available to readers of this blog.


The links to all Chapter comments by me are here: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2008/06/odalisque.html




1 comments
Submitted by Pet at 7/15/2008 9:15:28 AM
On Tuerqui's feistiness (or otherwise) she does seem more feisty after (in Chapter 28) entering a phase of her life during which she's unlikely to have received drugs to promote docility. I suppose, in any case, such matters are relative, rather than absolute. In Chapter 11, Muqui and Slutte seem imperfectly docile. In Chapter 12, we come to the curious reflection that drinking slaves' milk doesn't make Berenice Blackheart at all docile.

I think that Muqui is the only slave in the entire book to be represented as talking coarsely. I suppose she is so represented to illuminate the Muqui/Slutte dispute -- and to show how snobbery and inverted snobbery may persist after enslavement. Was that a matter worthy of (brief) exploration? I'm not sure.

Thanks for revealing the typo. Strange how these escape my eye on repeated proof reading.

'Odalisque' by PF Jeffery (DFL's comments on Chapter 34)

Chapter 34 - Trial

Schoolroom genealogy followed by the *hilarious* tale of the Pollygoggers’ jury trial, muchly goodly narrated by the author and the author’s cohorts (Tuerqui, Jennifer Petrie...) – except they are not really cohorts but I feel competing narrators within the Collective Unconscious of the novel. Tuerqui’s bashful need to keep her skirt as low as possible (while being duplicitously enticing, too?) and her expressly saying that to escape punishment is ‘good’ (when she evidently enjoys punishment?) – coupled with her father’s use of the word ‘Pah’ and his rather more repressed view of what women can view etc... makes me ponder and ponder. There is more to this novel than meets the eye. Some exemplifying passages:

She flexed her cane meaningfully, but – to my surprise – didn’t use it. In fact, I survived the entire morning, and the schoolroom lunch, without punishment. It seemed too good to be true. Mary and Phoebe hadn’t been quite so lucky

(typo: full-stop after ‘lucky’ needed).

Perhaps, I dared hope, the Duck’s Ford ruby had finished with me. A worse possibility remained as a worry – that it had reached through the dream world to ensnare Tuerquelle or Lady Isobel. Was such a thing possible? Briefly, I wondered whether to ask Miss Miles – who seemed to know something of cursed stones – but decided not chance my luck by doing so.

“About half an hour – plenty long enough for them to prepare. Prepare their case – pah! Prepare for the slave trimmer’s knife, more like!”

Such thoughts brought me to my responsibility for the arrest, trial and punishment of Daniel and Carp-Eye. Thoroughly regretting the business now, it was far too late for me to prevent it. Lisa-Louise was right – my revenge was the work of a slave wrenched from her mistress’ authority and consequently gone mad. The dominance that the elfin girl had exerted upon me was to be thanked for the clarity with which I could now view matters.

A nice simile:

as soft as scrumper’s shit

And a premonition of ‘zero tolerance’:

...it seems to me that I have been too lax, far too lax. That being so, for today at least, I will not ignore the slightest error. Every mistake will mean a spanking or the cane...

Elfin Lisa-Louise remains inscrutable and seems to be role-playing role-playing...?

=========================
Word docs of the actual chapters are freely available to readers of this blog.

The links to all Chapter comments by me are HERE

By A Whisker

Written today and first published here


Amid the noise of winds meeting, the woman awaited the man’s arrival – certain now that there would be a world for more than just winds to meet. The world had just been saved by the merest whisker, with many previously having predicted the end of life as they knew it.

She imagined a dark theatre in the old days where the audiences could only be assumed to be sitting in their seats by the many red spots provided by the ends of their lit cigarettes – a changing pattern as one spot went out and another lit. This had been the world experienced for an imagined eternity and, as she now watched a landscape exhumed by a genuine sunrise slowly taking mountainous shape beyond the sea, she expected to fall into her lover’s arms as he arrived simultaneously with the ever-spreading light. Not that there had been a shortage of sunrises in the recent past, merely a surplus of disbelief in them.

He believed he was the carrier of the single whisker that had saved the world. It nestled among the many other whiskers upon his face, some off-stage or aside from identity or expression. These he had allowed to grow without shaving, he claimed, as an example of uncharacteristic behaviour. She did not argue; she did not counter-claim that he had not been able to shave in the dark. Neither of them would claim he had created the beard (or left the shaving undone) for the sake of the world’s saving whisker.

The important question today was: which whisker? She vowed to tease it out with her loving fingers. But first a kiss of reunion – and she felt the unfamiliar whiskers scratch her own soft cheeks: a deep kiss that the global perils had long delayed. Other men and women were surely meeting in a similar manner all over the world – since belief was now strangely bringing sunrises to horizons on latitudes that were not due to have one at all, even to horizons still smeared with sunsets that seemed to have endured, on and off, for an eternity. Some sunsets, indeed, had even ‘acted’ as sunrises – but darkening ever overtook them eventually. But, now, there arrived sunrises galore – for real.

Following the kiss, she looked with a smile into the man’s eyes and said: “I must now find the whisker that has saved the world.”

Instinctively, she knew that the act of locating the whisker, isolating it, preserving it as, at best, a valuable palliative religious relic or, at worst, a curative panacea for future world crises, would become the crystallisation of belief required retrospectively to fulfil the good work it was now believed to have accomplished already.

He nodded. As owner of the face that needed searching, there was no way he would be able to find this ‘needle in a haystack’ – and a mirror would only risk confusing matters by inverting the chronology of retrospective effects. This woman whom he remembered loving an eternity ago was the only way the whisker could be found. Until then, there was a chance that the world might slip back into a single sunset continuously forming fitful failed attempts to be a sunrise.

“Ah, here it is!” she cried with a flash of triumph. “A whisker that grows back into the skin – making a tiny loop of hair...”

“Like half a zero?” he suggested, forgetting that, by moving his jaw to speak in this way, he risked the woman losing the whisker.

“Or like an eight,” she said. “All other numbers have tails or spokes. Only a zero and an eight have no loose ends.”

She was almost talking to herself, trying to blot out that she had now lost the whisker. She did not want to blame the man she loved for risking the world’s return to darkness. The nail-scissors she possessed would have to wait. The man and woman returned to kissing, until one felt the other leave, amid the noise of wind.

***
Elsewhere, millions of other women sought the single whisker on their loving partners’ faces. Careful Dalilas and passive Samsons in methodically staged operations upon disbelief.. The noise of wind was sporadic as were the sprays of red spots upon the various blankets of night after some scissors slipped and gouged cheeks – and, in my case, stabbed an eye almost as far as the brain.

The noise of wind or applause.

'Odalisque' by PF Jeffery (DFL's comments on Chapter 31)

Chapter 31 – Lessons

Lessons in and out of the schoolroom. Lessons for the characters in the plot, lessons for the plot-masters and -mistresses themselves and lessons for the readers. One wonders sometimes who are the puppets and who the puppeteers in this highly complex interaction of narration and narration-receipt (complex without being difficult even to the least experienced of readers, I guess).

The reader follows the quick-fire pecking-order of other interactions -- father and daughter, mother and daughter at a distance of separation, slave and person, person and person, slave and slave, teacher and student, time and punishment, female and male, Goddess and Goddess icon, jewel thief and ‘loose cannon’, love and submission.

Some passages in this chapter:

It was in line with her insistence that it was my inner being that enslaved me, rather than the presence or absence of a harness.

Lisa-Louise’s voice sank too low for me to catch the words, Barguin giggled. Dedicating the image to Our Lady of the Lamp as I worked, absorbed me into prayer. Naturally, the first requests I had for she embodied in the new image concerned Tuerquelle. Feeling the goodness of the goddess surround me, I felt that my alarm for my daughter’s safety was ill-founded – the alarm echoed by the menacing dreams of the night before.
(I didn’t fully follow the sense of the bit I’ve put in bold).

“Father,” I began, “you remember mother’s jewel boxes? You were kind enough to send them to me.”
“Of course I remember them, girl. It was only yesterday. I know you’re just a female, without a man’s capacity for abstract thought, but there’s no need to ask quite such stupid questions.”

My return to Surrey was an increasingly urgent issue. The images of Tuerquelle and my mistress called me – neither of them long absent from my thoughts. The ache where my daughter should have been had not lessened, and was not likely to ameliorate until our reunion. At the same time, all but demonic figures rendered staying in Lundin intolerable – my father, Miss Miles, the as yet vague outline of a future husband.
--------------------
Wasn’t ‘Fetcha’ (mentioned in this chapter) called ‘Fech’ before?

===========================================
Word docs of the actual chapters are freely available to readers of this blog.

The links to all Chapter comments by me are HERE

Cool Sunlight

Written today and first published here


It was the name of a product of two numbers. He peered closely at the packaging: COOL SUNLIGHT: he carefully unwrapped it. Beneath the inner layer of tissue there were a six and a seven made, judging by the smell, from coal-tar soap. He opened the next package of ‘Cool Sunlight’ and it contained two different numbers. Other identical packages had different and duplicate numbers inside them. The previous evening, he had tried using an eight in the bathroom sink, whipping up a rich face-lather that rather belied the otherwise less than promising unproductiveness of the hard soap from which the eight was manufactured.

The outer packaging was well-designed: a low sun on a lemon-tinged horizon with picture-book beams radiating geometrically from it. An inspiration of dawn in a brisk climate. Or sunset, depending on one’s mood. As an Advertising Executive of several years’ experience, he could not help trying to fathom reconciliation between the package and its contents, but he had not yet been able to mind-read the creative juices lying behind the concept.

His personal assistant sat in the desk opposite. She did not want her presence there to make things more contrived than they already were. She knew, however, she was only allowed the position in the office so as to be a gender stereotype and his sounding-board. Otherwise, his thought-process would have remained simply that – a thought-process privy only to the thought-processor.

“It’s a clever idea, do you think?” she said, meaningfully confusing a question with a statement.

“Yes, but I can’t for the life of me get why it is so clever!” His voice was pitched at such a register one could only guess he thought he was talking to himself.

“Hmmm.” She took up one of the packages for herself.

“I know what you are thinking,” he said. “It’s a gimmick so impenetrable, it’s tempting customers simply by appealing to their sense of life’s intrinsic mystery.”

“Not sure.” She adjusted the decorum of her skirt as she swung the chair round further into the window’s natural light. “I can just make out other smaller numbers on the big number. But they are so lightly indented, they would vanish after the first wash, no doubt...”

“It’s a bit like the whole concept of us discussing such a concept in the first place!” He smiled as he said this. She was a dish. He knew, however, that sounding-boards, like washboards, were not meant to be sexy, but simply practical in the skiffle noises made by them or the creamy suds generated to help shed light upon darkness.

“This product,” she said, “may be an allegory for a new purity that only mathematics can provide. A new dawn. Or a new end of day promising a new dawn of clean beginnings. A cool concept that is only cool by keeping its intentions to itself. An Adam and Eve binary system.”

She was aware that she was speaking his own words, to allow him to think of them in the first place. He, in turn, counted on her ability to feed his originality. Advertising was never straightforward. Customers were different from each other. No sales campaign would ever be wide enough. The secret was to create a combination of high and low common denominators in an attempt to optimise reactions to them as an overall pattern of desires and resistances rather than specifically targetting any one of them.

He turned away, knowing when he looked back, she would be gone, fearful of his intentions. She had done her job. Yet why had she not mentioned the fresh black marks on his face or was it an overnight growth of uncharacteristic whiskers stitched into his jowls and chin rather than having ends to cut?

Packaging, it seemed, had become the wherewithal. The product itself need not move sweetly along with the grain of the concept as long as the packaging of the product created the concept it was meant to perpetuate. She had not known he wanted to be told what he didn’t want to be told.

He swivelled his chair and idly watched the sweaty bankers outside the window in the new dawn of a new day slump in near-drunken figures-of-eight towards their exchanges. Each with a five o’clock shadow. They’d no doubt left their wives squatting beside newer more rocky banks to rub their husbands’ skid-marked smalls on washboards by the sluggish suds of sewage.

===========
EDIT (13 Oct 08): Sequel: BY A WHISKER: HERE

'Odalisque' by PF Jeffery (DFL's comments on Chapter 28)

Chapter 28 - Palace

Some goodly Shakespearean-like comedy, especially knowing Tuerqui’s previous plying of the flies - for example:

“My colleague and I,” Dashing Daniel said, rather overdoing the refinement, “are the Duke Daniel and Lord Smith, Marquis of the Great Smitherlands. We are western nobles – and the two boldest pollygoggers who ever ventured into Surrey – our exploits are legendary. We have here Princess Margaret, daughter of this august house, newly returned from captivity. Hurry, now – her highness grows cold and damp as you indulge us with your idle words.”
At the end of this speech, the mule brayed loudly as though to endorse the pollygogger’s claim. The guardsman shifted uncertainly, spraying rainwater almost like a shaking dog. His eyes were averted from me. Presumably, he felt that if I were Lady Margaret he should not gaze upon me clad in nothing more than slave harness.

This speaks, too, of increasing Shakespearean-like intrigue as Tuerqui is returned to her father with the repercussions of this pollygoggic ‘comedy’ still relevant. Her now returned status is also enticingly well-handled, i.e a mixture of mistressship and slavedom:

There was an audible gasp from the assembled slaves as I stood ready with the whip. Perhaps, focusing upon me more closely, they now recognised the fine workmanship of my slavewear. Possibly it was seeing me harnessed as a bondling, but overflowing with power. My feeling is that, paradoxically, the slavewear combined with my stance of authority made me seem doubly the mistress.

But now there is what seems to be a significant turning-point:

For the second time, glancing out at the parade ground, I saw the elfin girl. The rain was falling heavily with splashes like dancing fairies, their motion reflecting the girl’s. She was clearly very wet, short hair now plastered to her head, a close-fitting helmet. Almost immediately, she vanished into the shadows of a colonnade – again, I doubted the reality of the vision.

This is pre-figured in the author’s own comments on my Chapter 27 comments:
“I am delighted that you were especially struck by the passage about the elfin girl. This is the first introduction to someone who will become an important character. Revealing that much falls short, I think, of a spoiler – but I’d better not say more of her at this stage.”
I hesitate, too, to ‘spoil’. I only say this is Lisa-Louise – and I am struck dumb by the enormous power of her substantial (yet still incomplete) introduction in Chapter 28 and the mixed intrigue of emotions involved.

I think this should be ‘breach’:
this constituted a breech of military discipline

Too much dialogue in this chapter for my taste. But that is no criticism as many people enjoy dialogue. Still uncertain about some of the elided coarseness of some of the dialogue for some readers, however.

======================
Word docs of the actual chapters are freely available to readers of this blog.

The links to all Chapter comments by me are: HERE

'Odalisque' by PF Jeffery (DFL's comments on Chapter 27)

Chapter 27 – River

The Chapter as River? Lundin? (Peter Ackroyd?) One questions even the obvious while the narrative implicates an Alternate World with which the mischievous footnotes are in conspiracy;

Cigarette: A paper tube filled with dried weed. One end was ignited, and smoke inhaled from the other. This practice, known as smoking, was much in vogue during the Old Time, but has ever been banned in genuinely civilised communities. Lundin was the chief centre of smoking at this time and remained so until the city was placed under imperial control. Lady Jane Daventry, visiting Lundin in YD 730, described it as a great smoke hole. It has been suggested that smoking had a narcotic effect.

Tuerqui plies a pair of Pollygoggers’ flies, e.g.:

The business had proved less unpleasant than I’d expected. Although I took no pleasure in him as such, there was an unanticipated element of arousal in contemplating my revenge – the link between sex and power, most certainly. There may even have been a slight disappointment that he’d lasted no longer, but if so, it was my fault – with my skills, he could have continued for half an hour, had I so chosen. It felt good in itself to be that much in control – our battle raging on the field of my choice.

A telling passage, this, as are these two:

In Drizzlemoon, the goddess had – in truth – delivered me to my mistress and Tuerquelle. This time, I sensed, it would be a matter of delivering myself. My deliverance would require the goddess’ aid, but it would be my doing.

In personage, those I had considered my friends – one way or another – had turned out not to be. Jenna was the supreme example. As a slave, my ownership of nothing ensured that friendships were genuine.

A long passage worth dwelling on:

Long before noon, and making good speed, we passed the first ruinous shanties of outer Lundin. The squalid region seemed not to have changed since I’d last seen it. Rats scuttled through rubbish heaps, sometimes pursued by lean dogs. Ragged children pelted one another with filth – Carp-eye levelled a small crossbow in their direction.
“The first one to mess me boat – or the tow line slaves – is dead,” he called – his voice matter-of-fact, rather than angry.
The urchins seemed to believe him, within moments they were gone. A cart drawn by trimmed he-slaves brought a fresh load of rubbish. Circling gulls descended as its contents were tipped. Human scavengers appeared – it was impossible to tell whence they came.
As ever, a fog bank enfolded the West Minester marshes. With the gloom closing upon me, I shuddered – in spite of the company of my fellow slaves, this place remained frightening. Glancing nervously at the wraiths of swirling mist, I saw the vague outline of something bulky. It occurred to me that it might be the rock on which Jenna had initiated our first game of mistress and slave.

There is, as above, much of the inscrutable about this chapter for me. In a good way. As if working hard for the riparian rights tantalisingly held out by the author’s ‘truth’ in the fiction.

Like this passage, too, that, so far, remains unresolved:

A strange elfin girl, probably in her late teens, regarded us with an enigmatic expression. Her light brown hair was cut short and stood in a series of spikes. She was wrapped in a long dark cloak. In a blink, the apparition had gone, and I was left uncertain as to her objective reality.

I don’t know, but ‘discern’ for me is a question of sight not hearing:

The amplification was barely sufficient for me to discern his words.

Should it be ‘borne’ not ‘born’:

The hostility I’d born her not long before evaporated without trace.

--------------------------------------------

Word docs of the actual chapters are freely available to readers of this blog.

The links to all Chapter comments by me are here: HERE

'Odalisque' by PF Jeffery (DFL comments on chapter 26)

Chapter 26 – Pollygoggers


Just a reminder from a footnote in the previous chapter:

Pollygoggers stole slaves, who had formerly been rich or prominent as persons – to sell to their families, friends or enemies. (The name derives from polly – see chapter 11, note 1 and goggle meaning to look. A pollygogger was thus one who looked for pollies.) The pollygoggers’ business was often accomplished through an intermediary known as a head broker. Rich or prominent people would approach head brokers to secure the release of enslaved persons.


Our heroine snatched by the Pollygoggers to a Narrow Boat on the canal, we meet Dashin’ Daniel:

One end of the trellis arch was almost filled by a person’s back, clothed in a leather jerkin dyed bright pink. Perched above the vivid garment was an emerald green broad brimmed hat, decorated with a large purple feather. Beyond the figure swayed the rear end of a piebald ox – I was in an ox cart, the trellis work a frame designed to support an awning. When the driver turned to speak, a deep voice and a stubbly chin demonstrated that he was not a woman.

and we also meet Carp-eye and Juicelle. Mixed emotions and inferred mixed motives etc and further angst for Tuerqui. All tantalisingly yet clearly conveyed... a mark of this novel: complexity and clarity in symbiosis.


I also liked these two footnotes:

Heckpit was the abode of the wicked after death.

Breaking a mirror was said to bring seven years bad luck. The belief seems to relate to the idea that mirror reflections are spirits forced to mimic the actions of the population of the non-mirror world. Breaking the mirror released the spirits who then vented their spite on whoever had released them. After seven years, they would be sucked into another mirror.

But should it not be “seven years’ bad luck’” and ‘on whomever’ or ‘on whomsoever’?


And we possibly need a semi-colon or dash below rather than a comma:
Anything other was inconceivable, she radiated a degree of authority that no trained slave could defy.

I also liked passages below:

It’s munch as they pull for them on the towpath

However miserable I might be, I was also hungry and thirsty. The bread was freshly baked and thickly buttered, the cheese mild but with a sharp under taste. The salad was crisp and fresh, the pickle suitably spicy. Even the bitty ale was refreshing – neither too acrid nor too gassy.

The boat moved with surprisingly little effort – much more easily than Sam’s cart had done. It was easier, too, than my recollection of bow hauling Cap’n Gentle’s boats. There, probably, my perceptions were at fault – in those days I’d been unused to work. A memory returned to me, from years before, of Sir Thomas Shrew saying, in his pompous way – “Less power is required to move a body through an aqueous environment than over a dry one.”

And a wonderful chapter ending:

Pink from the sunset glowed increasingly faint on the bases of clouds. The planking of the hold felt rough under my back. A vixen cried, and disturbed ducks quacked their outrage on the water. Spiciness from the suppertime pickle lingered on my tongue.



Interesting look at discernible / discernable here:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071226112211AAsomL7

I prefer 'discernible'.
'discernable' is used twice in this chapter.

==========================

Word docs of the actual chapters are freely available to readers of this blog.

The links to all Chapter comments by me are here: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2008/06/odalisque.html

Dark Footnotes

A collaboration with Craig Sernotti

Pubished 'Dread' 1999




"I didn't catch your name earlier," I said.

"Old Robert E. Lee was a merry old soul...."

"What?"

"Robert E. Lee."

We were swaddled in strips of waxy material intended to protect us from coal mites—wound tight enough to tone up the muscles, without constricting movement. Even our faces had the stuff smeared on, leaving pathetic gaps for the eyes and only perforations for the mouth. However, I could see that Lee's hair was 'brylcreemed' in the old fashion and glistened ... while my storm-lamp created shafting beams around the surrounding craggy blackness. We painstakingly progressed among the flash-camera ghosts: sufficiently spooked to believe in the actual possibility of a ghost's existence. But any thoughts in this godforsaken hole were better than none.

I laughed. "Robert E. Lee!" I shouted out the name, appealing to him—a complete stranger until a few hours ago—to join in with my own secret joke about ghosts. If he were a mind-reader, here was his chance to prove it. As for myself, I wasn't a mind-reader at all nor did I know how Rubberteely spelled his ridiculous name.

"Yes?" His voice echoed more than mine. He was, after all, further into the tunnel than myself by at least a body's length, the mealy-mouthed torch in his helmet actually increasing the darkness.

"What exactly is it we are supposed to be looking for?" I asked.

"Signs of habitation, that sort of thing, you know what."

Yes, I did know what. Creatures of the dark, perhaps. But Slaver was nearer the right word. In truth, the target was an undercover agent who also happened to be a black marketeer involved in false history making. I had wondered why someone like myself had been entrusted with being an agent of a deeper level of undercover than the one we were investigating. Common sense told me, however, that there must be an even deeper level below Rubberteely and myself. Still, how could any one person evaluate his own common sense in a vacuum?

The ring in Rubberteely's ear-lobe glinted as he turned round towards me, a smile on his face, or so I guessed, the helmet torch blinding me as he did. "What was your name, anyway? It wasn't mentioned at the briefing."

"Getty."

"Getty what?"

I knew the name I was meant to give him, but a moment of sheer devilment made me concoct a new one. "Getty Bird." Or at least that's how I visualised it being spelt with letters that would have been more suitable spelling something else, perhaps. His torch nodded as if that was what he expected my name to be and he then proceeded along the tunnel—sloping downwards. Among talk of ancient miners, these workings were rumoured to lead to Hell, such legends only being believeable with the eventual authority of expended time—and fifty years was a drop in the ocean. The ocean itself was a drop in another one. Abraham Lincoln simply existed because, otherwise, too many people had pictures of him in their minds for him not to have existed. Sidney Sumter, too. Furthermore, ghosts like smoke often reached the surface from the fire burning eternally at the core of the Earth. After all, zombies made the best slaves.

Idle thoughts wandered fancy free through my more immediate concerns as we plumbed further into the heartlands of the mine, with both of us appearing to be ancient mummies in retributive search of the mindless creatures who had originally carried out the embalming of such mummies. Being an undercover agent took on a whole new meaning. My revery was interrupted by Rubberteely again turning to face me. I felt my teeth clench, rather than probe the perforations again.

"The ghosts. They are all around us. Can you hear them? Can't you feel them? They are everywhere. In the wind, under our nails, twisted in our hair. They hide in rocks and in children. They talk to you at night, when the moon is full and even when it is not. They are the crickets that chirp, the dogs who yelp, the paper that short stories are written on. They do not sleep, Getty Bird, they simply close their eyes and pretend to live."

His ramblings were rather disquieting. I nodded, agreed with him in silence, and searched the tunnels I travelled. Our storm-lamps did very little to illuminate our surroundings. The walls appeared to be moving in on us—slowly, slowly—as we descended further into the Earth. Faces screamed at us from the walls of the tunnels, complete with empty eye sockets and widely leering mouths. Whether the faces I saw were real or figments of a paranoid and slightly frightened mind I did not know. If they were real, maybe an insane artist went down these tunnels one day and never came out. He spent the rest of his life carving tormented faces every few feet (on both sides of the tunnel and even a few on the ceiling). If the faces were real, then the artist's skeleton was somewhere, somewhere close or somewhere in a different tunnel. But, if what I saw were only shadows and nothing more, then I needed to finish my job and get away from this horrible place. Fast!

Rubberteely was doing the same as I, walking and shining his light on to the walls, but he was talking, talking in his annoying and disturbing way. "Did you know I fought on you, at you, in you, for you, once, a long time ago?"

"Excuse me?" I pointed my lamp at the back of his head.

"It was 1863," he continued. "I commanded seven point five million troops. We didn't have so many at first. We knew the enemy would destroy us if we did not increase our numbers; they had so many! We had to cut every soldier in half, and attached each half to a half of a wolf. Our new animal men were eager for battle, bloodthirsty. They fought gallantly, and we almost won. But the enemy surprised us with barb wire and atomic bullets. Many died, and many more were captured. Less than fourteen thousand went home to their families. We had no choice but to surrender. It was a sad, bad day. It was Old King Cole who betrayed us..."

"Old King Coal?"

"Yes—the man we're after."

"Down here?"

His light nodded in an exasperated fashion, then disappeared as if he had turned a corner in the tunnel. I could hear his boots crunching somewhere vaguely ahead. Finally silence: a silence more complete than any silence could possibly be when above ground—even more than that numbing soundlessness between the darkest part of the night and the first signs of dawn. Indeed, my own bloodbeat and consequent surge of the labyrinthine ear had ceased.

I was mystified, but such obliquity was an occupational hazard, true, but never quite like this before in my whole undercover career. I visualised a single huge pitchy black shape in 'civil war' with itself—oozing half-hardened decompositions of vegetable, flesh and bone from its sump of a belly as weapons against itself.

Abruptly, my storm-lamp was doused with the ear-splitting sound of a camera shutter. I had inadvertently allowed the fail-safe cut-out to activate by releasing my finger from the handle's built-in jump-switch. This device was intended to guard against unknown gases in such parahistoric mine-workings and had the potentiality of working automatically as well as manually. I sniffed the air—clean as a whistle, there being no sign of even the heady mustiness of the other civil wars (Russian? English? Bosnian?) which I had experienced nor was there the dizzying redolence of clandestine wine-cellars (except for the slightest sensation of prickly heat within the nostrils). Indeed, the temperature had been relatively non-descript so far, hardly worth recording. Now, a fear of something I couldn't quite explain took sway over any routine thoughts—fear quickly turning to fright at the margins of terror. Fictional creations were, after all, not the most obedient of slaves, often turning against even the most omniscient, omnipotent of masters...

Such self-indulgence did not preoccupy me for long. My training had been designed to counteract the strongest emotions as well as the most trivial. Undercover agents were taught to eschew compassion, even for the self. My own fail-safe mechanism of the mind flipped down, casting all negative thoughts into a shadow of numbness as far back into my brain as consciousness could barely reach, but, fundamentally, I was still aware of fear's draining presence. Nibbling. Hinting. Inferring. Spelling-out. Snowballing. Unravelling. Bleeding. Giving and taking with the rest of my mind. Reminding me of dark places where millions had been gassed because nobody knew what they were or what they could be.

I fumbled with the latch of the storm-lamp hoping to re-ignite it. Trust me to bring a faulty one down here. I was now conscious of my own breathing. The canary in the cage started squawking as if it were pretending to be a large outlandish parrot creature. Yet the canary had completely slipped my mind until now, a creature the health and safety committee had insisted on accompanying all undercover work because canaries were more quickly prone to gas-poisoning and thus more alert to such encroachments. Sidney Sumter was the name I called my dear canary. I knew that was not its real name, but even an author has to compromise...

Until that moment, Sidney's presence had been academic. But, then, I heard a swoop of wings above my head in the darkness, each thought cannoning into the next. The wings were terrifying: wide-sounding and bony-ribbed.

"Robert E Lee!"

My training was showing through again, my tone being urgent, but officious—no sign of fear in its register, merely the awareness that fear was all around me and I needed to compare notes with my accomplice. But colleague would have been a better word. Accomplice implied that we were alike—friendly even—working towards an underhand objective, of which we two only understood. No—none of that applied. Complicity was a luxury that neither of us could afford. Hindsight, too. Wars had no hinterland. They were as immediate as death.

There was no response to my call. Simply the onset of renewed silence, broken only by the audible pain in my chest. I peered into unutterable darkness, not exactly knowing what I sought. I had surrendered any hope of Rubberteely. Even if I stumbled across him, I could no longer trust him. And that was fatal. Not only did I not trust him as a person, but also I had begun to lose faith in his existence as a separate phenomenon. With the black bandages woven around us both, like Satanic maypole garb, we could not be recognised one from the other, except perhaps for the lights we wielded without exchanging. Thought piled upon thought, causing the tunnel's darkness to shine out by comparison.

Indeed, this darkness mapped itself out like crazy-paving in front of me. Slightly darker margins marked where one piece of the pitchy puzzle ended and the other began. Shifting shapes of black, like huge boulders of psychic coal. I heard the grating and groaning of craggy surfaces slipping uneasily over each other—like the fly-wheels in a hellish clockwork contraption tangling and meshing. Or like the splintering roar of an earthquake's incipient migraine. Or like the birth pangs of a huge modern sculpture in Caeserean section. History in traction.

I suddenly felt that the bandages were intended to heal my humanity into something far healthier, on behalf of tunnel gods. Bones, as well as teeth, now tested the weave of my face bindings. I dropped the lamp and canary-cage to the ground so that I could press my palms to my ears to stop the deafeners getting in. I squeezed my eyes tight to enhance the new-found silence. I tentatively opened them again after only a few moments of self-consolidation.

Rubberteely had returned into view, his helmet trailing wispy glows and wormcasts of shudderingly visible air in the wake of its torch's motion. It was then I realised that I had been spooking myself. No amount of training could have prevented that.

The eyes in Rubberteely's slits shone luminous with the fear that lay behind them—as his meagre crown of twirling light picked me out against the tunnel's backdrop. I could see his mummified face was smudged with a darker sooty substance than blackness could ever possibly become. Tears streaked his woven cheeks in Satanic millstreams. I felt at my own stomach, only to find my hand delving into a grainy mulch that reminded me of the pulpy slag in my dear grandmother's old coal bunker, as cold as it was warm. She it was who had put my body underground rather than admit to my true value as vanquisher of death. But I had no thought for such reminiscences, as the dark plasma's birth burped from my body through the tatters.

Rubberteely bowed his head. I thought his hell-black tears indicated sadness for the canary, now flopped out on the seeds of its cage floor, staring up at its dangling mirror in the diffusions from his helmet's lowered light. Forthwith, I toppled permanently into a shadow of numbness and discovered undercover memories even Satan had forgotten.

"The worst fear of all is the fear that turns its victim into fear itself," I intoned parrot-fashion. But there were wads of winding-sheet lodged in my throat like the choke-chews I had once been taught to feed target agents during the course of my duties. And I ran. Ran and ran. I ran till I could neither see nor hear my own black soul. I flittered free.

Silence was three gutless fiddles. I was down here alone as ever—torchless, yet riddled with dreams of torches: Getty Bird, the Coal King, the Gas Gaunt. A splotch of hairy soot beneath the clogged nostrils. Jagged ebony fangs and a self-perpetuating lust for black blood. Embalmed within a consistency of ancient tortured darkness.

The only undead mummy alive.

"Rubberteely!" I cried.

Nothing. I waited and tried again. And again and again.

Finally: "Getty Bird! I found him! Come quick!"

I got my storm-lamp working. Its reassuring light showed me a path, one which I followed. Rubberteely's voice guided me to him. I was puffing and wheezing upon arrival. The distance travelled did not seem that long, but apparently it was.

He was shining his lamp on me, directly at my face. I squinted, put a hand up. My retinas felt like they were being stabbed malevolently by hot sewing needles. I gasped.

"Well?"

"Well what?"

"Where is he? Old King Cole? The traitor you've been searching for? The dealer of false history? The reason we are down here in the first place?"

I couldn't make him out. The brightness from his storm-lamp was overwhelming. I stared at his feet. Or, one would think, the area where his feet were supposed to be. I say that because I couldn't see his feet. Did he have them? Of course he does, how else could he have moved? OK, if he has feet, where are they? I couldn't answer that one.

"Silly man, I'm Old King Cole. That is just one of my names. I'm the traitor, the dealer of false history, the reason we're down here in the first place." He laughed. "You see, nothing you know or think you know is reality. I am the reality you believe in. I am a writer, The Writer. Over one thousand stories publsihed worldwide. The recipient of several awards and other honours. One of the most well-known names in fiction. But this, everything that has happened now, this is my greatest achievement. My magnum opus. Nothing ever written can compare to this. Nothing any god has done or will do can compare to this. End of the world? I can delete that from the future with a mere tap of the keyboard..."

While he was talking (raving is more like it), I reached to my belt and unholstered my pistol. I tapped the load button. With a dull click the three prongs parted and out came the thin barrel. Once I aimed it I would pull the trigger, and a death-beam would hit the madman standing before me. He confessed to the wrongs I was hired to right, and training specifically taught me that punishment for crimes against humanity must be carried out immediately.

I pulled the trigger. My gun fired. The sound of the blast echoed all through the tunnel.

His light disappeared. My eyes slowly readjusted to the dark. Did I hit him? I found my storm-lamp and pointed it ahead of me. Rubberteely's body was nowhere to be found. I had missed. Was that possible? How—"

"Old Robert E. Lee was a merry old soul..."



"Each story is one more civil war the writer has to face." Rachel Mildeyes (from "FOOTNOTES TO FICTION")

Treading The Boards

Published 'Roadworks' 1999



Other than the redolent aroma of her stew wafting from the unattainable past, there was nothing else to remind Strontian of his mother. The darkness parted like curtains on a stage, the revelations too slow to come. He remained standing with his eyes tight shut ... until he met a hand lightly brushing his trouser flies.

Strontian's eyes flicked open, the brightness blinding them for an instant, before darkness brought itself together again like curtains. A man's voice was the least expected outcome of his predicament; the words even more surprising: "I've come up from the audience to shake your hand ... I've always wanted to meet someone famous like you."

"Who am I?" Strontian asked, overcoming previous difficulties to utilise his teeth in the way phonetics intended. The illogic had a strange logic of its own. He also felt that, only moments before, he had been sitting in the stalls: eyes lifted in awe towards the proscenium arch. The shilling theatre ticket was still grasped clammily in his hand; if he wanted his bladder let this would then re-admit to the auditorium.

In fact, the ticket was still there. But it seemed as if it were held within someone else's hand; Strontian couldn't feel his own hand at all; on top of all that, he was desperate for bladder relief, his worst fears having materialised. He should have let it at least three times before the beginning of the performance. He closed his eyes again, because one darkness was as good as another darkness, and why waste the battery? The man's voice was closer, as its owner homed in with the aid of echoes: "Gee whizz, who'd've thought I'd ever meet a star of stage and screen. This is a real honour. Will you give me your autograph? Mark it for my mother, will you?"

All the time that the voice was gaining its bearings Strontian was losing his. He clasped his mad privates, partly to prevent them being interfered with again and partly to staunch an even madder bladder. He was shocked gradually to discover they were not his privates—they were, without a shadow of doubt, somebody else's altogether, completely the wrong shape; the teeth in his mouth were certainly bone-carved differently, too.

The applause took an upward flight on the wings of hands. Strontian himself hooted and whistled vigorously in appreciation of an artistry and fame to which he could never possibly attain. He had earlier climbed the stairs into the old theatre. A series of oval mirrors on the walls rose with his reflection opposite each other on either side, making it seem as if he were looking into a diminishing tunnel of reflection ... except that his head was in the way to get a proper look. He dodged the head about believing he could see round the stranger whom he had only just recognised as himself. Strontian was bewildered, since mirrors had previously left him cold.

Life's a musical, he thought, noises picked out in asides, wordless undergrunts on the human hoof, unknowing looks, random rhythms, tripping sighs, melodies strummed on tangled harps, proscenium's flies ... and the auditorium was a temple of rusty golden wood. Other happy clappers who were to constitute the one-off audience were trickling into their tip-up seats, leaving wide gaps of empty ones with the best view—the latecomers obviously being more pushy than Strontian's co-arrivals. His own seat was in the middle of two strangers—complete strangers. Next door to this threesome was a row with seat-lids still raised, and then four other less complete people arrived, all of whom seemed to know each other very well.

He had bought a tub of vanilla ice in the foyer, but had lost the wooden "spoon". He stared at the runnelled cream-hard surface, wondering if he could scoop some out with his finger. Better not. The lady next to Strontian had eyes in the side of her head, despite the opera glasses with which she was practising by pointing them forwards at the safety curtain. However, he discovered a big splinter—harvested from his wooden high-sided bed at home—a splinter which had lodged itself in his trouser-zip and, eventually, he used this as a spoon for the ice cream.

Strontian often speculated about safety curtains. If one was raised too early, the audience's communal mind would be sucked into an endless horizontal pit. That was why they were called safety curtains. Meanwhile, the groundling orchestra had taken the strain and he could just discern the tip of the baton below the footlights; the curtain rose steadily and the houselights dimmed to an echo of darkness. The staged scene was brightly lit, by contrast. Actors sidled on, like real people; one of them raised a voice above the normal pitch; the face that owned the voice took a surreptitious glance into the black disguises of an endless audience. In sympathy, Strontian began to slap his hands together like lumps of steak. The others in the audience did not follow suit!

The ice cream felt cold at the core of his lap. He had once applauded on his own like this during a radio broadcast symphony concert when he thought the music had ended. Since then, nobody had spoken to him and merely glared shiftily. It was as if the whole Earth had been listening to his faux pas. People often felt that their embarrassment was so great that they wanted the earth to open up and swallow them. Strontian knew the feeling, if from the opposite direction.

Tonight's musical play continued. Or he assumed it did, since he was taken from the dark auditorium by an officious foreigner in an uniform who then set Strontian walking in the direction of the soup kitchen. There, he begged for the best bowl of vittles that they had.

"Do you think I'm made of dreams?"

Strontian looked bewilderingly at the speaker who acted as if he were handing out promises and fancies rather than bowls of stringy stew with doorstops of aging bread. Strontian had been kicked from the theatre into a world of dossers who, amazingly, possessed even less teeth than the erstwhile audience with which he had rubbed shoulders. He recalled his dear old mother asking a similar question about dreams, when she used to shell out for his pocket money from her shift work. "Dreams don't grow on trees, dear," she would also say. Strontian, being a small farthing of a chap, had peered through the window at the twin towering poplars, trees that had always stood upon childhood's endless horizon. She was right, of course.

The individual standing behind the stew trolley smiled with slanting lips—about to tell the story of his life. Being one of those ne'erdowell do-gooders, this character had to obtain the full benefit from the down-and-outs he serviced. "My own mother," he said, as if reading Strontian's mind, "had a heart attack during labour and I only arrived just in time, before she died."

Strontian nodded humouringly. The man scrutinised Strontian to gauge whether he was taking the mickey, but gave him the benefit of the doubt, much as Strontian had done for the man.

"I was adopted," the soup-man continued, "into a family of orphans. Down by the Fast Canal, where they've put up those unearthly blocks of flats."

Strontian's thoughts were wild. The Earth was the one planet which astrologers seemed to ignore. It was all very well the transitting Uranus being on the cusp of Scorpio whilst in trine with a natal Jupiter. It was the Earth at your back that counted. You could never turn to see the Earth protecting you. It is about time people realised—the earth might possess a shadow, but it definitely lacked an understudy.

Thoughts were medicine for the brain, and only nasty medecine cured. Strontian took out his large sharpened crucifix, which he often used simply as a stage-prop ever since it had lost its iconic power—more useful for cutting the bread into bite sizes and for stirring the still burping stew. "I bet you live in a posh house," Strontian sneered whilst brandishing the cross at the soup-man.

"Blimey, mate, put that away—anyone watching us would think you're threatening me." After a well-staged fracas in the flies, the soup-man wheeled his trolley into the wings.

Strontian was left alone treading the motherboards, about to fulfil the insistence of the plot. But, with a few death-bed lines left, there was, sadly, still a pair of sharp fangs in his mouth to tangle his voice. Of course, in any event, Strontian, being a vampire, was bound to act out a very unlifelike death. Blood-letting was his business. Corpsing his crime. God’s creamy red Correcting-Fluid his commodity.

Death, whatever its certainty or final sting, seldom gives warning of its final slicing blow that fells the body like timber; if there is a warning it’s not one that anybody believes. Nobody really expects to die; they think it only happens to other people—until it happens to them: which it will: it definitely will. A single member of the audience clapped vigorously for a short while; then the rest in desultory fashion more akin to silence than applause.

(The corpse, in extremis, pisses itself; even a blooder has a bladder.)

The Stranger's Tale

published 'End of the Millennium' 1999


Edgar Filbricks Esq., 7 Arbroath Terrace, Cleminster, Warks - but who ever used Esquire when fixing a recipient's rank and gender these days? So when the letter arrived, hand-written address on the envelope, with 29p excess postage to pay, Edgar wondered who could have sent it. He swiftly slit open the seal and found the letter within was from a complete stranger which meant, of course, that Edgar was a complete stranger, too, because it takes one stranger to recognise another. It takes at least two of them to tango. And, familiarity would no doubt breed contempt.



Dear Sir,
Once upon a time, there was a land of waterfalls, one leading to another, with precious little grazing land between. The place was peopled with folk with straight locks. Their garb pleated vertically. They wandered beneath the sheltering rocks peering through curtain after curtain of spray and white water. Some were arm in arm, some holding hands; others purposefully averted the head, whilst a few deigned to talk to each other. A handful even snubbed their very own selves as they proceeded with noses aloft - almost as if the act of despising was a solitary pursuit like patience.

There was one such person who, in hindsight, I am ashamed to say was worse than any of them, by dint of walking on the water's wild side. He took in the vast views, having penetrated the surging walls, leaving the others rockside to fend for themselves in the shimmering gloom. This person's vestments soon dried in the sunlight, stiffening with a starchy bloom. The hair became matted with an airy saltiness that wafted in from seas that seemed to surf themselves. Waves actually had waves. Fish delighted in being watched washing their fins. And, soon, this person forgot all about the others, learning to wave his own hair by back-combing with bristly crustaceans on the beach. Only turning now and again to check the whereabouts of the waterfalls - fearing that they may be on the move towards him.

Then, one day, after long negotiation with the land mass that began to poke up through the depleting waves, this person decided it was high time to return rockside. There was something decidedly unsavoury about the increasingly mountainous sea-bed that infiltrated the once straight horizon. The sky took on a tinge of rust. The sun no longer a powerhouse of expectation. The fish flopped ashore, unsure of whether they could fly without the oxygen of publicity.

He stumbled towards the nearest edge of misty spray. And found that there was nothing beyond it but a vertiginous valley of Angel falling upon Angel. Their locks and pleats complete. A shallow shift of cold white ribs of sand.



There the letter ended without signature or clue as to authorship. Edgar pondered the whole matter and put it down to being merely a mystery. The Filbricks clan had kept themselves to themselves for most of their history, and it was a wonder that they had been able to perpetuate themselves without resorting to inbreeding. Edgar was the last in the line. A stranger to himself. A starched shirt on horseback. He imagined Sancho Panza waving his arms like windmills though the rain-swept window ... wanting to finish the tale, but only becoming another mystery with which to contend. Edgar waved back with his pen. No more fish in the dried-up stream. Or only dead ones, enveloped in steam.

Like A Deflated Rubber Doll

by the Six of the Clacton Writer’s Group




We are Six.

But that’s another story. Below is the real story. The real magic.

At first glance they didn’t look like twins. One was round and lumpish; the other was skinny and gaunt. If one was to deflate the round twin or inflate the thin twin, then it would be come apparent they were identical. There was the same snub nose, thick lips, scrubby wire hair sticking out at odd angles, and large bulging eyes. Not a pretty sight. As nobody else found them attractive, they lived solely in each other’s world. There was safety in numbers, namely two.

It was their birthday and as usual, time for a treat. It was the roly-poly’s turn to choose. Her name was Sheila, shortened to She. Her collapsed equivalent was named Hermione, shortened to Her. Having no one to contradict them, they decided to have two birthdays a year in honour of each other. Her had already had hers in April. She had planned a mystery expedition this time and both were very excited.

They set off down the road. One bounced along, the other shuffled behind, like a stick bowling a ball in front of it. They gabbled at each other incessantly and to the untrained ear, incomprehensibly. She always referred to herself in the third person singular, as did Her. Hence, when Her complained: 'Wait for Her, She, Her is getting tired,' She replied: 'Well, She can’t wait to get there, and it is her birthday!'

They caught the bus to town and had to stand because there weren’t any double seats available. They always sat together or not at all. The town was very crowded. It was nearly Christmas. They risked getting separated, but thankfully the building She had in mind was near the bus station. It wasn’t long before She led the way to the entrance of the Town Hall.

'And now for the surprise,' She enthused.

The Town Hall – unsurprisingly in these depressed times – had seen its best days. In fact, strictly speaking, it was no longer used as a Town Hall proper. A few odd Council committees still took advantage of the aging rooms for meetings. The Fish & Fowl Federation was in fact on site at the moment when She and Her entered. Also, as the twins later discovered, the Cycle Pathways Steering Group was in a decrepit backroom arguing about the piles of used Bicycle parts that had become an eyesore along some of the town’s canal towpaths.

None of this seemed to be anything to do with a birthday surprise. Indeed the twins had perhaps forgotten who was surprising whom. Such confusion was not unusual. It didn’t seem to matter as they would both politely show surprise in case they were the one intended to be surprised. It would have been difficult, in any event, for any bystander to make out who among the two twins was gabbling what words to whom, as they wandered through the dim corridors of the near-disused Town Hall followed by one fat shadow and one thin shadow.

Suddenly a few individuals in lycra passed noisily along the end of one corridor apparently carrying armfuls of old pumps, trill-bells and saddlebags. There was to be no closure for their emotions – it appeared – within the walls of the slowly morphing municipality of the building in which a lot went on but little happened.

The birthday surprise had eventually passed them by without notice before Her and She emerged into the bright sunlight of the town square. Neither would raise the subject of surprise, for fear of upsetting the other. But this would be a birthday neither would forget, and somehow each of them, in their own way, would make sure of that, because, without further hesitation, they boarded a bus without first looking at its destination board.

The bus conductor was an old-fashioned one who visited all parts of the bus’s two decks reeling off seemingly endless spools of ticketry from his contraption.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked the twins not sure who to direct the question at.

‘Her doesn’t know.’ One of them replied. A confused crease broke out on his face. He wished it wasn’t a Monday and he was at home reading the juicy novel beside his bed.

‘Just give me a destination,’ he sighed.

‘Make it a surprise for She’s and Her’s birthday!’

‘Great’ thought the conductor, ‘looney cases.’

There was a pause where he folded his arms and stared at the twins unsure of what to say. He wasn’t trained for this sort of behaviour. Funnily enough How to deal with different shaped twins that don’t make any sense? wasn’t in the bus conductor’s manual of knowledge.

‘She has arranged the surprise at the Town Hall and wants to go back there because She remembers it now.’

So they squeezed past the conductor who was thinking about his favourite sport – cricket – all of a sudden. This was probably because the twins reminded him of a bat and ball. He continued down the aisle of the bus as if he hadn’t met them.

She and Her were at the Town Hall again with renewed hope that its municipality would be invigorated by a renewed sense of constructive fantasy that the recent long period of world peace had otherwise deflated by its underlying sense of impending war.

From this revival of magic reality, She remembered that the surprise was something to do with the Cycle Pathways Steering Group so they went back towards the backroom. The Group seemed to have finished their discussion about bicycle parts and were starting to depart. A thin young man about their age bumped into Her.

‘Sorry, He didn’t see you there.’ He spluttered.

‘Nor did Him.’ Another man larger than the first one was following not far behind. It took the twins a few moments to realise they had met their match.

‘We saw you earlier,’ He said, ‘Didn’t we?’ and he turned to his companion.

‘He did. Him didn’t,’ said Him. ‘Him was busy adjusting the gears but Him did look up when He said “They’re here”.’

‘Do you have it?’ she queried.

‘Have it? Have it?! Of course we have it. That’s what Him was doing, adjusting your gears.’

‘Adjusting She’s gears?’ said Her. 'I didn’t know She had gears. If she has gears then Her has gears too. We’re identical, see?’

‘You don’t look identical,’ said Him. ‘She’s fat and she ain’t.’

‘Who’s “she”?’ said She and Her together, both sensing, identically, the lower case ‘s’ that Him had used.

‘Oh, don’t mind Him,’ said He, ‘he gets confused very easily. Look, I’ve got an idea. To avoid this confusion what say we – that’s us, Him and He – what say we call both of you just “Ladies”?’

‘Ooh, and we can call both of you “Gents”. How’s that? Said She, beaming at this new-found possibility of conversation between Them and other parties.

‘If you’re going to be Them,’ said He, divining She’s intention, ‘then we’ll be Us.’

‘Sounds confusing to me,’ chorused She and Him together.

‘And this, He believes – no, Us believes, is Her birthday present,’ and he pointed towards a tandem leaning against the wall.

‘This one?’ said Her.

‘No, that’s Us’s,’ said Him.

‘This one, then?’ Her walked towards a flurry of pink paintwork, deep pink saddles and adorned with pink ribbons fluttering from the pink handlebars.

‘I’ll take the front,’ said She, pushing past Her and taking hold of the handlebars. ‘It is your birthday present, after all, and the one at the back doesn’t have to work so hard.’

‘But then you get to steer.’ Her pouted. ‘And I want to steer.’

‘Oh. All right then.’ She stepped back and Her took the handlebars and threw her leg over. She threw her own leg over behind Her and they were ready to go.

Him took the handlebars of the plain black tandem and soon Him and He were ready for the off as well.

‘Where are we going?’ Her asked.

‘Down to the canal and then along the towpath, I thought’, said He.

‘Sounds good to me,’ She said. ‘Come on Her, get a move on.’

Him and He took the lead down the hill which gave Her and She an opportunity to discuss these strange men they had just met.

‘They’re a little odd,’ Her said.

‘And that’s a problem because ….’

‘No, no problem at all. In fact I rather like odd people. You and I are so normal that it’s nice to meet people who are a little different.’

‘I thought so as well,’ She said. ‘That’s why I arranged this meeting.’

Her nearly fell off the bike. They careered across the road, narrowly missing a mother duck and her offspring and catching the kerb on the off side of the road before Her managed to get the tandem back in control. ‘What do you mean, you arranged it?’ she asked finally, a little breathless and just a little bit trembling.

‘Part of your birthday present,’ She said, smugly. ‘Blind date.’

‘What, Him and He are our dates?’ Her asked.

‘Not ours. Yours. This is my present for you. The ability to wake up!’

She glanced at Hermione. Hermione glanced back and they screamed.


‘I’m Hermione’ She screeched. ‘Now what’s happened?’ She asked turning to face her brother. ‘You’re now me. No, you’re changing again. Stop it. Stop it. Who are you? What’s happening?’

‘Are we still dreaming?’

‘No!’ A voice from the ether called softly to them. ‘Settle down under the bedcovers and I’ll tell you a long story but one that will be finished by Six.’

The story was one of a magic mythic reality that transcended the fantasy by paradoxically using fantastically strobing twists of narrative thread that tangled and untangled with multitudinous municipalities and stand-in names and mistuned twins and proxy denouements and other pro-nouns amid many replacements for reality that were more real than reality itself.

Two tired bodies snuggled under their “his and hers” matching eiderdowns preparing for sleep. By Six, the voice, soft and low spoke of ideas, worlds and people that the cousins had yet to meet in a long dangerous life. All those Cycle and Psycho Paths ever steering back on themselves.

Sleep did occasionally claim them as they innocently wandered between hearing the voice, being warmed by deep slumbers, tossed on light sleep, pumped by deep breaths disguised as snores and very occasionally – short periods of wakefulness.

The voice, for so long just that, had started to take the shape of the most beautiful person ever seen – the Narrator called Six. This apparition smiled down on the boys while floating over their heads. The soft voice of Six filled their ears and filled all available orifices in the room with gentle padding.

He held her breath as once again he (in the shape of the Six) glided over the sleeping forms as they metamorphosed between being children, assorted sexes, pigs, sheep and several real and mythical or magical or municipal creatures that had no reason at all to be where they were. In fact, if their Nanny had found them in bed she would have scolded them most roundly for cheating when throwing sixes on every turn.

‘The …’

The apparition called Six said in a voice loud enough to disturb the slumbers but not strong enough to break the spell.

‘…rest …’

Six spat, placing a prawn between lips who’s colour matched perfectly the flesh of the fish.

‘… is …’

Six added another word, holding the cooked morsel daintily between finger and thumb with nails that reflected the colour of the unfortunate creature.

He bit and she swallowed.

‘… silence …’.

A Sixth Sense that only twins could manage.











=============================

Clockhouse Mount

Published 'Dark Eyes' 1998


I MUST TELL you of how I came to Clockhouse Mount, the first being a year last Spring, I think. Do you know the area? Yes, it's in the outer South London suburbs, in Surrey really, but you have to climb a very long hill out of Cullesdon - and when you get there, you see the Green, fronting a run-down parade of shops and, further out the 'Pail Of Water'. Mrs Dobb, landlady of the Pail, she knows all the gossip of the Mount. About the Sawdusts of Number 4 Rich Land: Jackie Sawdust once blew his nose, you know, in public view - he blew it so damn hard he just stared into his hankie not knowing it was his brain wriggling there. He stared a mere few moments, yep, before he dropped down dead. About the Clerkes of Long Land; their younger son was levanted by the Surrey press-gangs for labour in far off spice fields. About the losers and the winners of the terrible family feuds. About this and that...

There is a snooty golf-course on one side, some other cul-dc-sacs leading to small holdings and desolated fields, staring-eyed horses, tangled woods Ruffet and Big, deadfalls, overgrown bomb-holes, rusty discards of squabbles, and other rich residues of life's harvest, if I can be so bookish in my attempts at describing everything for you. You know, they say that the clouds swag and belly heavier over the council house roofs of Clockhouse Mount - and, as I plodded up, that day, in the hope of my first homely tankard at the Pail, large drops spattered from a previously clear sky. Even at noon, dusk gathered itself and some laggard golfers stood alongside the road holding their clubs like spears, making funny faces beneath tartan berets and wriggling their chequered trousers as if in some crazy fashion show. They would soon be off, no doubt, before the light finally seeped away.

I looked across at the downbeat parade and spotted that the shops were shut, not for lunch as I had thought, but because I, a complete stranger, had loomed up from Cullesdon and they feared what they considered to be my unwholesome custom. I shivered, for had the Pail, too, locked its lounge and saloon doors? The locals were inside, apparently persuading Mrs Dobb to let them have further illicit flagons of home-made brew, as I forced my entry through an unoiled latch-door. The bobbled heads lifted, scowls muttering across their faces, and one signalled me to sheer off.

"Dear Sackalive!" cried Mrs Dobb, from behind the bar, a friendlier aspect indeed appearing to fleet across her countenance. "I didn't think you'd make it."

"By cock!" I replied, banging my feet on the floor, "That was a long walk up from town."

Meantime the locals gathered closer to me and one even fingered my turn-ups in some strange rite of inspection. I surveyed the posters and the customary wall-scrawl, to see if this was indeed the day of the darts match that I had been promised before I had promptly forgotten about it. But, no - imagine my despondency, when I saw incomprehensible messages pertaining to a Wicca meeting, destined for that very night - and further bills bearing such things I cannot now spell; Cuthloo, Shib-Shubbing in the snug, Yogger-Noggin’ in the saloon. Azza-Toth in the lounge and. what was it, an outing at the weekend to a pub called the Goat of a Thousand Young for a turdle-eating contest.

I skipped pretty niftily from the Pail, for, as they say, you shouldn't outwear a welcome you've never had nor turn a heavy stone if something's moving it from underneath.

I ran - but it was difficult, for what I had thought originally to be rain was in fact now great bulbs of bursting liquid cascading from, not clouds, but shifting, floating monsters in the sky, They extended and retract«d, in turn, long arms of blackness, from several interlocked central bodies and, if I were religious, the nearest I could get to describing them would be a Hell's brood, an overnourished confluxion of sky and fox flesh betokening the fall of the old disgraced gods - and several smaller versions were creeping over the brim of council-house roofs ...

I ran - but golfers and pub locals surrounded me. One, of the name Tokkmaster Clerke, as he later told me, wielded a massive rutted file, its frightful crenellations glinting in the flash of sky¬shutter wings. I was held fast by one whose nose dripped as Tokkmaster moved the file across my skull. At first, my hair fell away in clumps and dropped to the pavement, followed by the skin. He grated it up and down, scratched, sawed and ground. I could feel the hideous vibrations, reverberations stunning and splitting my head. The skull scrunched. Teeth were on edge, as the grating wore on, as he honed my bone. The file stropped and serrated my pure white skull. It ground and rasped. Against the grain. Gnashed and scored. Etched and furrowed. Rutted and chafed. Scrubbed and gnawed. Eroded and kneaded. Chiselled and chewed.

I ill recall most of that but live now with the Sawdusts and they call me Jackie. They make me worship the great old gods. The top of my head is like the skin of cold stew, so now I have to wear a hat; Mrs Dobb made it, kindly, out of vinegar and brown paper - and the filing Clerke, he says he's my pal now.

Yet before I tell of any further eventual outcomes, my second visit needs expounding. And, in case you have forgotten things beyond the bookmark, I need to lug up that long, long hill out of Cullesdon. The rundown parade of shops, the golf-course on one side, the tracks leading to woodfalls and derelict smallholdings, and the strange mixture of council-house and semi-detached owner-occupiers - all these made it an indefinable, outlandish place, at one overfed and prevalent, but at two disturbingly barren and bare-gnawn. Through the Southern Mysteries beyond Balham, it was soon that one met the Surrey Badlands at the edge of South London, and that area was to me by cap and root the core of such Badlands. Yet none of this, nor the ever-rising memories, oould stop me returning, specially with a real job waiting for me there. The run on the pound had not dared reach Clockhouse Mount...

The golfers and pub locals stared imbecilically at any newcomers; the girls begawed and bedecked themselves with flirting ribbons and enticing cockadilloes; the contraband lorries unloaded the cock-ale - delighted in by the local taste-buds; and the churn-owls swooped and whooped with the early dying of the afternoon light, betoken the preparation of other entities and elementals to squeeze themselves from between the sticky thighs of night.

That second occasion I arrived, after further initiation from the shapes in the sky, they doctored me to their ways. The clan leader, Tokkmaster Clerke, who also acted as doctor, served me the medicine and the mending and kept vigil by my several nights of bed-evil that ensued. He continued to move the bed on its ill-suited legs, muttering that the devil did rock my cradle, did cully my fever and did keep the bloody-flux at bay; but his hush-a-byes sure did beflum and bamboozle my thoughts for a while.

After, I stayed with the Sawdust family; they knew my history and why I had been called there. I was to be chief taster for those Societies that met at the Community Hall, standing across the road from the shops, a bit like an army barracks, with the letters of its name above the entrance mostly fallen completely or dislodged into a word I could not fathom. The cabals and brotherships that there stretched their limbs from bodies politic within the big and small halls and lesser meeting-rooms feared sabotage from outsiders.

I gained reputation in the Square Hills further north as sniffer-out of poisons at the credence tables of nobility and middle-class alike. I had cocked a tongue to many a dire tidbit and toxic tiffin, and winked across to those sitting above the salt; telling a tale of treachery with my mere glance.

The Sawdusts tried me out with every particle of local fare; the sometime bad toddies served at nearby Woodman-Sterne, the even more ill-reputed carrier worms dug from beneath nearly deadfall trees in Big Wood (considered a delicacy in parts of the Badlands) and, finally, the scuds and curds that intermittently plummeted from the sky in crazy fibrous shapes which monstrous Irreducibles said to be above the clouds sculptured from their own droppings.

And I passed muster with every test.

Tokkmaster explained how the word above the Hall's entrance, C-t-h-u-l-h-u, was pronounced and what it implied; inside he showed me several huge black-skinned volumes with gold clasps and arcane titles, hidden with the drama props under the stage; whispered in my ear about the coming of even narrower fellowships and masonries to the area; and I was to be Chief Taster and Factotum to any such.

One day a huge banquet was held. Of course, Tokkmaster Clerke was at the head of the huge oak trestle, being host and breaker of bread. The wine, deeply red, flowed down swift gullets. The food ¬great gristles of flesh, yellow fat and hairy skin lining the rare sides of boeuf and lion; even greater cow udders, baked and prepared with the greasy tubes intact, the undersides green-fleshed and pocked with broken bubbles of melded fat; windfall fruit, knotted and almost branched with unwholesome sprouts of stale seasons; plates of flopping fish, still alive but unbelievably putrid, their fins pickled in vats of udder-grease as scaly extras; further dishes of octopus with inflamed, ridgy pores, squid with mutant tentacles, horny lapfish, swordfish bent and skewed, splattered blowfish, gasfish, rancid roe - the food was enjoyed at every hand.

All had passed across my credence-table for pre-tasting and, suddenly, a great boar's head, over baked and brainless, spoke the last word from the trestle: "Burp!" And spew poured from its sickly mouth.

They all looked up at me - and stared icily, realisation dawning. Doctor Tokkmaster pressed his stethoscope to his own chest - to hear the devil in there. He grimaced and raised his file angrily at me ...

I left that night, my job done, down the long, long hill. I knew in my heart that I had only visited the Clockhouse Mount once only, unless my heart mistook me. That did not account for that poor fellow who I'd thought was me who made the first trip and suffered under the surgeon’s saw-blade. If that had been me, I was a Dutch Uncle, or, at least, his miscegenate nephew called Klarkashton.

Clean flakes of snow settled over me as I approached Cullesdon. I sought some far-off pub to quaff a pint of their very best bitter and to partake of a packet of pork-scratchings. I pulled down the flaps of Mrs Dobb's hat. Unlike most people, the brains in my old clockhouse would never escape. I tapped my bonce and noddled a smile.