THE TEAPOT MOVED

The stranger wondered if the rest of the hotel’s users thought he was a stranger.  The rooms were of a style suitable to the passing trade so in fact all the guests should have been strangers.  This particular stranger was no different.  One never considers oneself to be a stranger. All the others were strangers, surely. The others were real strangers inasmuch as they were not only strangers to each other but, strangely, to themselves. 

The stranger was without a name, although he could remember signing the guest register at the reception desk earlier in the day.  Now being nameless was not a good sign.  Perhaps he was a stranger, after all. Just like the rest of them: sitting solitary in his bedroom: dependant on room service and the entertainment from the TV and the use of en suite facilities and the trouser press.

He hadn’t taken advantage of room service as yet but he continued to inspect the tray of free goodies alwaysleft by good hotels for weary strangers with which to refresh themselves.  A few individualised bags ofinfusable tea or coffee. Scattered tabs of milk or sugar. Wrapped gingernut biscuits. Strangely, for such a set of freebies, a bone china teapot was set upon the tray: to be used for steeping rather than just a teacup directly open-mouthed for a tea-bag’s dunking. An electric kettle was already full of water.  He wondered how long it had been stagnating there.  He could see the only source for water was from the sink’s cold tap in the bathroom.  Strangely, despite travelling all day with few comfort-stops, he had not yet been forced to use the bathroom’s facilities.  He shouldn’t have been surprised.  Only true strangers would be unaccustomed to the relative strength of their own bladders.

The red glow of an advertising sign just outside his room’s window was relentlessly pulsing.  Strangely, thewindow possessed usable shutters rather than curtains. Strange for England. He stood up and stared down at the city’s main-street. Despite it being the rush hour, there was very little traffic along it.  Only an odd taxiturned up outside the hotel with guests: more strangers, no doubt.  He shrugged.  He was determined not to slip into being a stranger himself.  It would be all too easy to become someone else’s stranger, a person who simply shuffled about a hotel bedroom at a loose end, listening for others behaving similarly, given thesufficient thinness of the walls between them. 

He returned his attention to the tray of freebies.  He had already given a cursory glance at the room service menu, but he was always reluctant to use it. It always made him feel self-conscious and slightly awkward.  He never knew what to do with the dirty plates after he had eaten.  Whether to give a tip or not.  Despite having plenty of money, he always resented paying through the nose simply for a waiter to bring the food to his room.  ‘Never’, ‘always’: he couldn’t possibly be a stranger to be able to use such words about his general behaviour and feelings.  That rather satisfied him. Maybe he would venture downstairs later to see if he could find the hotel’s dining-room.  There was no reason, of course, why he would not be able to find it.  But there was always a doubt.

He then heard the stranger next door shuffling about.  Having been sitting on the bed, the stranger next door was probably visiting the en suite bathroom.  The TV next door could not be heard through the wall, so it was probably still switched off.  Possibly for fear of accidentally igniting the Porn channel rather than the News one. The former made him feel dirty.

‘Dirty’ reminded him. He needed freshening up in the bathroom.  he hoped it would also be full of freebies.  But nothing was really free, was it?  Room rates always included overheads.

When he returned, the trayful of freebies was glowing more readily in the onset of dusk from outside whilethe advertising pulse continued but at a slower shutter speed. He suddenly saw that the teapot had been moved.  Never had the stranger been so frightened before.

 

When the teapot moved not once but twice, you realise that the first time it moved could not have been as imaginary as you had originally imagined, given the evidence of the second time.  You have often been in situations with inanimate things moving where there is no obvious cause for the effect. All to do with mirrors, lights, angles, tiredness. Nothing supernatural or psychokinetic. Only you watching.  But when it happens out of the blue, you often take a double-take.  Did it really move?  Probably not. It would take a ruler to measure any give or take in the situation.  But if it moves as a result of you looking at it, even without you consciously willing it to move, it becomes obvious that there are strange happenings abroad.  The darkness settled in early, despite the clocks going forward an hour the day before.  You wonder if it's a clotted cloud formation, rather than the leading edge of night's blanket being used to make your bed, tucking you in as comfortably as possible so that premature sleep might explain any subsequent dreaming.  And, surely, you thought, the act of seeing the teapot move on the tea-table before the dream started would surely make you wonder if you were dreaming that you were awake.  The window was now blacker than if you had painted the glass with an opaque gloss stolen from a dead person's cupboard.  Night was never that dark, was it?  The bulb hanging from the kitchen ceiling didn't even swing. It was stock still. But it was dimming faster than the sun must have done in the last few minutes.  Dimming, however, was not a movement as such; dimming was never as strange as an object like a teapot budging of its own volition. The stewed remains within settled into a coagulation of leaves and black space. There were exactly one thousand tealeaves and you wonder who had taken the trouble to count them into the teapot before pouring over the scalding water. It needed other eyes to see what was happening inside the pot, as yours were busy watching events from outside. One single abrupt jolt, and the first movement was complete.  You only now needed – with the requisite suspense – to await the second movement ... except you were unaware that there was due to be a second movement, especially as you thought you had merely imagined the first one.  You decided it was time for bed. You pray a thousand prayers to a God addressed as thou or thy or thee.  You must have assessed the passing of time differently from its reality.  And if time is misjudged, you were unsure that the time correcting itself might cause objects to move, as if you had moved the teapot during the period of time that had now been blocked or short-circuited so as abruptly to change dusk into night.  You were now found to be in your bedroom, not the kitchen, pulling back the blanket ready for your body to be finally laid to rest.  Steeped in sleep, infused with dream, cosied by darkness, motionlessly reaching out for a silent prayer that you ached to pray but couldn't. Wedged in by a sodden mass of dead insects which, even beyond a dream's unreason, were still alive and eager to become your single-minded stew of consciousness - a spout for a thousand thoughts or a thousand thous. Dead ... until I moved.

I sat up beside the teapot. It had been placed there by a servant and I’d been told to let it ‘stand’ for a few minutes.  Steep? Infuse? Draw? Brew?  No, ‘stand’ was the word I was sure I heard the girl in the pinafore say as she plumped the teapot down on my bedside table – rather rudely, I thought, in hindsight.  

  

And now I noticed she’d forgotten to leave the tea-strainer with the cup, saucer and teaspoon.  I called out: "Strainer!" in my long drawn-out high-pitched voice which I’m sure the servants found irritating, but I had not told the servant girl to forget something, had I?  Indeed I wondered if she had forgot it at all but deliberately didn’t bring it.  Again: “Strainer!”

  

It was then I noticed the teapot moved.  Only slightly but clearly enough.  I was staggered. I stared at it to make sure I was not mistaken, willing it to move back to where it had moved from, in an illogical hope for its previous standing as the status quo. I might then have been able to imagine it had not moved at all. 

  

A teapot moving of its own volition was certainly an anxiety that a bedridden person like me would find difficult to cope with.  It was best I did not believe it at all.  “Strainer!” I shouted again, in an attempt to cloud my misperceptions with a recognisable routine rather than to elicit the missing strainer.  This was not the first time that the strainer had been ‘forgotten’.

  

“Stop your whining!” the teapot suddenly said with a righteous gurgle of its innards. 

  

“Pardon?”  I said automatically, thinking that the servant must have returned with a different voice.

  

“Just stop your whining. The stew I’ve got inside me today doesn’t need straining.  Get on with the pour!”

  

I was more upset by its distasteful reference to ‘stew’ than by the fact the teapot was talking to me at all. This represented more of a certain settling into a customary mindset of denial, I suspect, when I now look back at the events.  I had also forgotten that the servant girl had forgotten the dunking-biscuits.

  

Was there a ghost inside the teapot – a ghost capable of moving it as well as speaking for it?  This was not a question that occurred to me at the time.  Only since.

  

I put the eiderdown over my head, hoping to blot out not only this single segment of time encompassing the teapot incident but also the whole of reality itself now and forever.

  

But the voice persisted: “I’ve got good quality stuff inside today and the longer you leave it the more it will stew.”

  

My head re-appeared over the top of the eiderdown like a bedraggled puppet or worried clown. It was easy to imagine myself as this downbeat figure through lack of any mirror in my room.  Only the tiny curved bowl of the teaspoon gave any chance of a reflected image.

  

The spout of the teapot waved in the air like a tiny snake with, I imagined, a certain wild desperation to perform its duty of pouring: its only reason for existence.

  

I hastened to do its business. I can’t now understand what possessed me.  I picked up the teapot.  At least it could not now move of its own volition without me feeling it wriggling or twitching in my hand.  I thought that pouring out tea – a generally tasteful art-form of upper class people like me – would expunge any remnant of uncouthness in the creature that I had earlier considered as out of my control.  Civilisation is all to do with control.  Taste and good breeding, too.

  

But instead of a golden shaft of healthy infusion, the spout exuded a syrupy blood-like substance into the teacup.  I heard myself cackling with uncontrollable delight.  I snatched up the teaspoon in haste.  But it dropped to the floor.  My head wagged from side to side like a funfair target and shouted: “Dunk it!”

  

I had obviously let things stand too long. They’re still standing now: waiting for hindsight to kick in – or waiting for a dream strainer.

When I met him, I saw straightaway that he was full of story.  It was as if he existed simply for the benefit of story.  No point in describing him, as that would take away from the story. And he did tell me story after story, when we sat together, draining a bottomless teapot.  

  

And before I forget, there is not much point in describing me, either. 

  

I was only there to listen.  And, well, to drain tea. 

  

One story that still sticks in my mind (literally) was one he told of when he was employed as a chauffeur in Paris.  Well, I assume it was about him.  But whether it was him or not, it was only a story, after all. 

  

  

  

  

“I had been without work for several weeks, and was coming to the end of my money in the last cafe under the last Parisian sky of (what now seemed to be) my last sojourn in the city drinking the last cup of tea that perhaps I would ever drink in France.  The French frowned on tea, but I managed to find where they brewed it best.  I preferred it to any other sort of drink.  So it was with mixed feelings that I accepted a job that entailed driving a car and drinking something other than tea. But I would now be able to stay in Paris a little longer.  The man had sat down opposite me at my table as I drained the dregs of my cup on that (what had seemed to be) my last day in Paris. It was like Fate.  I was to drive a Princess.  Why me?  Well, he said it had to be me.  I fitted the story.  But I must drink alcohol quite a bit of the time, he insisted.  That was part of the job.  I shrugged.  I didn’t mind drinking alcohol so that I could later afford to drink tea in Parisian cafes.  Sitting pensively in Parisian cafes drinking tea gave me inspiration, led me to all sorts of creative thought for my next story.  So, to cut a long story short, I allowed myself to take to heavier drinking while driving the Princess to fashion shops and to cafes where in fact she drank tea, I noticed.  I didn’t much like the company she sometimes kept.  I also turned a blind eye to the baggage she carried. I am not one for gossip.  Only story-telling. Well, on the big day, I needed to drink several hard drinks before taking the Princess on a trip that, unlike the previous trips, was more of a mystery tour. I can tell you that, even with alcohol in my veins, I am still a very good driver.  So when our car managed to crash in the road tunnel, it was not that I lost control for no reason, but I suddenly saw a little girl bowling a hoop across the road in the tunnel, and I swerved to miss her...” 

  

  

  

I put my teacup down and stared at him.  

  

“A hoop?” I said. 

  

“Not really,” he said with a smile, “that was only part of the story.” 

  

And I blinked.  He was no longer sitting opposite me.  I must have been drinking tea with myself.  The little girl in the tunnel, perhaps, was the ghost of the Princess; a happy creature that wished she’d never meet a Prince.  But then without such a meeting, of course, she’d not have been a Princess at all or, if that were the case, even the ghost of a Princess.  I poured another cup from the bottomless teapot and stared into the darkening Parisian sky.  A faint circle of stars like a distant UFO slowly wheeled behind the clouds. 

TREAD LIGHTLY (2)

“Kid’s sleeping in his kennel, so tread lightly, as you won’t want to wake him up.”

I looked askance at the woman who had spoken to me. Her purple jodhpurs had put me off her even before I had heard the hoity-toity voice.

“Is he dangerous, then?” I asked tentatively, expecting the woman herself to bite me!  You know owners can get very uppity about other people making critical implications about their pets.  This woman was probably no exception.  

I’d better explain. I was a professional plumber – a scarce breed in those days – and I had been called in to fix something pipe-ish on this woman’s property.  (By the way, I am not a professional plumber any more, but that’s another story).

“Kid’s not dangerous, I simply don’t want him woken, thank you,” she announced with some pre-emptive waves of the hand.

What a silly name for a dog, I thought.  Kid!

I looked warily into the kennel as I passed it – and I seemed to sense a huge bulk that literally seethed and humped with dangerous pre-waking symptoms. It seemed also to give off old yellow-smelling steam.  Kid was no kid.

So, did I tread lightly?  I sure did. One part of me wanted just to scarper. Plumbers were indeed thin on the ground.  I could get a better customer simply anywhere.  Could she get another plumber at short notice? Probably not.  But another part of me thought I could not risk retreating past Kid without having done the job.  So I plumped on towards the outhouse where the woman told me the pipe-ish problem awaited a so-called working-man’s attention.  I saw myself as a man with professional skills.  She saw me as a navvy, I’m pretty sure.  I bet she would never have guessed I later retrained as a Solicitor.

You will have guessed (by what I’ve already told you) that – whatever else happened – I must have escaped Kid’s clutches to live another day. Well, half true.  And if half true, your assumption is also half false.  Stands to reason.  

I have taken my own working-class brand of verbal expression into the World of Jurisprudence, but I am now slightly better spoken simply by virtue of there being a higher class of folk with which I now mix.  That’s my way of explaining to you why all this seems to be half basic working-man’s chitchat and half sophisticated description worthy of any old posh book.  

But not exactly half of what I say is pure basic chitchat, while the other half is pure posh talk.  It's more a mixture of both.  A hybrid that probably– when I come to think of it – doesn’t sit well on the page.

I mended the pipe-ish thing.  It didn’t need much to do.  Just a teeny-weeny leak that I gummed up with plumber’s tape.  And I did remember to tread lightly on my way back past Kid’s kennel.  And he did not wake up.  I over-charged the woman, because ... well, I simply didn’t like her hoity-toity voice.  I’d hate to think I over-charged her simply for the money.

But I had not trod lightly enough.  Because that night I had a dream of Kid waking up as I trod lightly past his kennel.  You can’t tread lightly in dreams. But that’s enough about dreams.  Dreams have no place in what I have to tell you.  Dreams are fads and fancies that some of us simply use to spice up the style of telling things, by diverting truth into fiction. Dreams are mere chimeras.  They simply bend reality in the direction theywant it to go, rather than in the way reality wants itself to go, by its own default, towards a predetermined end. 

Forget the dream, then, forget the image of Kid as a huge looming yappy monster of doggish form, eager to maul me with its furry fondles.

 The dream was leaking sheer doggedness within a great spurting force of yellow-eyed sleep ... despite all my efforts to wake up from it, to staunch its canine flows. The question is: did I ever wake up from it? 

Today, I sit at my desk in the Solicitor’s Office, idly fingering tangled ribbons of plumber’s tape. I then let my nicotine fingers lightly walk through Yellow Pages seeking a good professional shrink. Far and few between. My secretary smiles as she sits typing nearby.  Unaccountably, she wears purple jodhpurs.

SNAIL TRAIL (2)  by DF Lewis

Coco was in the library before any of his companions had a chance even to take off their coats in the hall.  He was led by the smell of foxing.  He remembered exactly why they had been invited – to catalogue the largest collection of books outside the ownership of the State or of the Royal Family. Yet the house was worth a few gasps, the others thought, before getting down to work.  No delay for Coco, however, as he chose his own carrel in an alcove between the works of Dick and Dickens.

Sir Arthur Mezanthus was in charge of the cataloguing party together with his even more famous sister Amy Ewbank (writer of children’s stories for those untutored in her works) - yet Coco was really the practical bibliographic brain upon whom they depended.  The group was renowned as ‘shock troops’ in book-collecting circles: ready to pounce on any dusty lines of disordered spines.  There were emergencies, for example, when a library-owner suddenly died and his or her creditors were poised to sell off all the possessions at short notice.  That was when Sir Arthur and his cohorts usually received a surreptitious sniff of a collection’s potential for a book recovery ambush … and here they were today, scouring even the smallest rooms of the house for hidden tomes.  By now, Amy had flounced into the library, slightly annoyed that Coco was already ensconced there before she had the chance to survey the scope of the task. Arthur and a few others (including dowager twins) were still opening broom-cupboards elsewhere in the large rambling house, leaving any spectacle of the core collection (usually in a room called ‘library’ but not always) until last.  Savouring the anticipation.

“I see you’ve bagged your carrel,” said Amy, and she put her bag on one of the reading-tables.  She stared at him as if she snubbed his very presence.

“There’re plenty more,” answered Coco, pointing towards a set of private study areas – admittedly more like box-pews in an ancient church than carrels – and he slipped his feet from his shoes, as if settling in for the duration.  Not only had the pungent aroma of old books been able to lead him here before all the others but it also filled him with an old-fashioned delight: with visions of fiction he was yet to read: but he kept that to himself: he was mocked enough already for some of his more clownish antics when on a literary campaign such as the one unfolding today: foxed and signed with unreadable inscriptions.

Not only that aforementioned aroma, then, but also a trail of insects or even larger creatures that often beset books with nibbling and silver sticky trails.  The threading of the corridors had been rather Hansel-and-Gretel, but he could not yet imagine having refreshment – quite yet. Peppering of crumbs that would help them find the kitchen. They would need to pick straws, in any event, to choose who was to rustle up cakes and tea – and he did not want to abandon his carrel so early in the day, short of any unexpected call of nature involving a rethink.

By now, Sir Arthur himself had puffed and bellowed as he found them in the library.  He was hard of hearing unless you got on his right side.

****

A number of Sir Arthur’s party were later lounging in the drawing-room.  The dowager twins had been unlucky enough to be find themselves on kitchen duty – the strange thing being that this was invariably the case on every book foray in which they had been involved.  Coco had abandoned his carrel and sat in an armchair throwing a ball from hand to hand.  He had been brilliant in organising the day’s cataloguing and so deserved a little recreation, he thought.  This was relaxing. Even more relaxing, paradoxically, when he threw another ball into the physical calculation.  Then another.  Till he was literally juggling.  Each ball a ricochet of thoughts.  One book, he recalled, he had found quite unfathomable, its condition almost mulched beyond recognition as a book; yet the signature stared out at him on a particularly integral space on one page:  it was opposite the barely readable title of the book:  DO DROODS DREAM OF ANGELFISH?  The supposed signature was stained purple ink veining into the vexed texture of the text of an apparent introduction or preamble.  It may even have been the prologue of the novel itself.  And Coco was sure it was a novel despite suspicions of non-fiction in the illustrations and pressed flowers..  Squashed bodies of flies did not help the scrutiny. If every book had been like this one, the cataloguing would have lasted months.  

The cake and teas were brought in by the dowagers.  A rich array of choice pastries on silver tiers more like candelabra than culinary devices.  The tea infused in a giant samovar, filling the air with a new aroma of dusty streets in modern Samarkand.  A few manicured sandwiches, and these would indeed be easy to digest with the rind removed from the fillings.  Sir Arthur was now ensconced in an armchair and was already munching noisily.  Amy, his sister, was subconsciously abridging the whole scene ready for children to read.  She did not risk her own digestion on foreign food even at the best of times.  She did not know where it would lead.  So why be led?  A bird’s appetite needed little sustenance. And she had solitary midnight feasts in her own bedroom in honour of her schooldays.  Crisps and crinkly-sounding toffee wraps and dandelion & burdock.  That was enough to keep her going.  There was very little money in cataloguing the tomes of the dead.  So she treated it like a hobby.  She had plenty of Royalties from the pocket money of her young readers.  Sir Arthur was her agent, so he shared the pickings, too.  Most of her fans however were now dead.  Dead to anything but Harry Potter.  Diminishing returns.  Yet they hardly noticed.  Too busy in strange forgotten libraries countrywide to realise that tomorrow would be the last time their bank manager would be polite to them.  Royalties were dying, too, in old Paris tunnels or the back of coaches on the way to yet another Coronation. One long run with Elizabeth but now all was staccato: ricochets of personality juggling their own motives to become the next reality prince. Harry’s son Edwin was next in line.  Hard to imagine what a parlous state the monarchy had reached.  Chimney children with black faces as if the past had gone full circle and become the present again.

Coco gulped down his tea, eschewing the cake and sandwiches, determined to return to the library and reclaim his carrel. Which he did. But it all now looked rather forlorn.  In the morning, even his own solitude had been up-beat.  Now he longed for the others to return to grace the long dark wet afternoon with at least a smattering of repartee.  He stared at the book he had left cataloguing.  This was not the mulched book of Drood, as he had actually skipped that one in disgust.  No, the book now under scrutiny was one which was stickier than his own fingers from the cream cake he had picked up but thrown away after looking more closely at it.  It was about a circus. And there was an illustration which would haunt his dreams forevermore.  Huge snails circling the inside of the ring and a ringmaster in the centre with a whip as if he were controlling elephants.  They left a silver trail in their wake.  Coco could even hear the baying of the crowd and the distant roars from the menagerie; large-maned faces mooning at him.  In the roof of the shadowy big top, a trapeze artist tried to maintain his or her purchase on the spinning tricks of body and soul, fearful of dropping towards the safety-net beneath wherein a giant spider awaited the trapeze’s body with chittering glee.  He slammed the book with a shuddering thump: throwing dust into his own face and sticking to his make-up.

He preferred hot chocolate to tea.  He would tell the dowagers later.  He continued in a desultory fashion to sift the books one by one; as they came off the shelf, half-expecting the others in the party to arrive at any moment, to relieve him.  He was however the bit Amy had abridged.  And he wept black tears.  He’d left no crumbs.  In  fact, he had no crumbs to leave.

The Hoop and the Teapot

A vast area of land in the centre of England known as Cone Zero was given over to memorials marking all those one-hit wonders of mankind’s music.  We always need to remember in this way that everything in life (or in what seems to be reality as we know it) defaults to music at the end of the day.  And music can be intended as joyful, life-affirming as well as sad, death-embracing.  I am afraid the particular music-memorial Ifear I may remember forever from my brief visit to Cone Zero was one that ‘celebrated’ probably the darkest dirge that ever had the fortune to become a one-hit wonder.  For the music ‘personally’ it was counted a fortune to be thus commemorated, but for the many who heard the music it was a misfortune, no doubt.

I was accompanied, that day, by Mitchell Much. He knew all about Cone Zero.  Although he was a friendwhom I had known for many years, I assumed that he was also to be an official guide for the steep tapering invert of a mountain or pyramid I envisaged the place to be.  It was simply lucky (coincidental) that I already knew him.  He said Cone Zero was almost impossible to negotiate on foot. I nodded knowingly.  My dream of the place had been one of pumping my legs against the slope just to stand still.  We needed a lop-sided ‘golf buggy’ of sorts to make any progress towards the stone memorials crammed in the bottom corner of the empty cone.  After shuddering with delight as well as awe at my first sight of Cone Zero, he motioned me to step into the official ‘buggy’.  We travelled for days, and my spinning head thought it was back in the earlier dream.  I wouldn’t call it dizziness.  A better expression would be disorientation between dream and reality, but, for this disorientation not to be counterproductive, I needed a convinced undercurrent of knowledge(knowledge rather than belief or faith) that there was nothing being dreamed about this at all.  Mitchell had instilled this conviction of knowledge by a whole series of training sessions prior to our visit.  I had watched screenings of Cone Zero being built from the remains of Birmingham’s spaghetti junction, slowly being carved into the welcoming ‘arms’ of the earth, as if such a down-towering slot of slants was simply, inevitablynatural.  Like, in a rather trite comparison, a classic sculpture had always lived within the primeval stone from which it was eventually released by the sculptor.  Or, more relevantly perhaps, a piece of music that already crouched within our ears waiting to be sprung by the composer into ordered sound from the random surroundings of noise.

“Are we there?” I had to ask.  It was never certain where you truly had reached when within Cone Zero.  It was as if my question was an announcement that I knew we were there.  I didn’t expect Mitchell to answer.  His grey beard was so certain about unspoken matters that he didn’t even need to nod.  I could hear the cacophony of the combined music of the memorials. It had already been rising towards me for several hours above the engine noise of the buggy.  It was possible (I knew from my training) to use one’s sight to focus on a chosen memorial which then served to focus its music alone towards one’s ears.  I had already wanted to concentrate on the celebrated hit of darkest despair from the menu of memorials Mitchell had shown meduring training. I believed that any despair was the most efficient path towards hope.  Mitchell had not tried to dissuade me.  The music was a pretty silly British cover version of an American hit novelty record of the sixties.  It was sung by a group that was once famous but now completely unknown (unknown either by having been straightforwardly forgotten or by entering a mental blockage that was stronger than simply forgetting).   As I speak now, it’s just not there.  I just can’t hope to remember the name of the group.  It is possibly irrelevant, anyway.  Mitchell does nothing to help.  He probably suffers the same blockage, but he would never admit this fact, I guess. However, by this time, he was nodding.  Nodding not to indicate communication with me but nodding to the beat of the music.  I feared he might soon start whistling along!  God forbid that he should suddenly stand up in the buggy in some wild unspeakable outburst of karaoke!  Mitchell was in danger of losing all dignity. I put my face in my hands and wept.  The music was so utterly utterly wrong.

Having once focused, I now instinctively knew that I couldn’t pluck my ears from the memorial’s music in favour of another choice.  I was aghast as it dawned on me that Mitchell’s training had not warned me about any of this.  I cursed him under ... my breath?  No, it was under my own humming-along! As we both joined in the music’s chorus in some unholy unison, I pounced upon him, eager to punish my friend-turned-enemy.But it did not stop our harmonising.  Even planting my teeth in his neck could not interrupt the flow of mutualsing-along.  Incredibly, the bubbling blood seemed in tune with the arcane rhythms to which Cone Zero had bought us closer.  A novelty sound-effect that was both laughable and tragic: the ultimate despair.  And Deathgradually shrouded my bodily senses one by one as I yearned lovingly for Death’s silence while remaining utterly terrified by the selfsame silence. 

Mitchell Much shrugged as he drove the buggy back up the open slants of Cone Zero. He pulled the plugs from his ears with a smile. Never trust anyone when it’s either you or them about to face the ultimate despair.  He knew that fact as well as me, I guess. He looked down as the diminishing tunes studded like tombs on a stave.  He knew that a sixties novelty record could not justly commemorate the Fallen of life’s ultimate war.  The Horror was ever in the mix. Bad taste smothering one’s awareness even beyond the toe-tapping of Death.In shame, he poured himself blood-tepidly into the cup of his own open mouth. Meanwhile, I am, finally, at peace, thanks to Mitchell Much, because, gratefully, I feel I no longer exist.  

MISSED OPPORTUNITIES by DF Lewis

Somehow Michael knew a good opportunity was about to arise by chance and that he would inevitably miss it.  Indeed, he never recognised a bandwagon; and he reckoned the only one he’d ever board would be the one they loaded him on feet first.  However, until now, he’d managed to board other sorts of vehicle disguised as bandwagons (often with invisible folk blowing posthorns from the roof), thinking here was a gravy train on track to paradise … only later to topple off the back of the decrepit lorry which the bandwagon had mysteriously become by dint of Midnight’s chiming and to be gathered up by crooks eager to palm him off as the real McCoy.  Everybody, including Michael, was invariably disappointed.

    Today, he wandered down his local high street after one such escapade.  Not so much missed an opportunity but had become one.  A mugger’s joy.  Michael beaten black and blue … and red – and nobody noticed his parlous condition or, if they did, they made conscious efforts of being blinkered Samaritans eager for better lost causes round the next corner.

    The next bandwagon he was due to miss was the ambulance.  The paramedics took one look at his face and zoomed off with blue light slowly pulsing and horn blaring long-drawn-out hoots of derision …as if he were the patient they needed to discard in preference for different more worthwhile less onerous physical emergencies.  Or, indeed, they thought Michael was the emergency itself, one they needed to escape – his appearance causing mayhem: children to scream and mild-mannered passers-by to pass out with the frightening sight of the cruel battered face he wore: stirring up panic in the streets. A victim unvictimised.  

The crime-bait stood accused of the crime. 

Stigmatised by the very pity that was missing.

Not suicide.  But aimless wandering through the streets – laying himself open, thus leading to opportunities for criminals not to miss.  The easy target.  Michael.  The one who tempted crime to the streets.

“Hiya, Michael,” called an onlooker whom Michael recognised as an erstwhile friend by the name of someone he had forgotten before he became a friend.  Michael got confused with faces, especially those battered beyond recognition.  The onlooker recognised Michael’s face, it seemed.

“Hiya, how you doing?” Michael responded in his typical drawl of post-traumatic slow motion.

“You ought to get that seen to,” the unknown friend said, pointing at the face Michael couldn’t see but felt like a painful suet pudding, as if it had been battered by the combined forces of the Mafia and other various criminal groupings that knew no Godfather let alone a God. The blood on his hands must have come from the face’s various abrasions – evidence of a clumsy attempt, when rubbing his cheeks, to cover up the tell-tale tracks of crime as well as the crows’ feet under his sagging custardy eyes.

Michael felt too old for most things.  Especially for help in the shape of a passer-by’s platitudes.

“I’ll be OK,” he said.

“OK, but if that’s OK, is OK enough?”  

With these words, the unknown friend disappeared into the unknown.  A mist of forgetfulness and fickle futures.  It was like watching an angel disappearing into the arms of God.

Another missed opportunity.  Michael was determined to grab the next one whatever its shape or form.  Grasp the nettle.  Seize the day.  

It was a young lady.  Far too young for Michael to have any hopeful hankerings after.  Probably about 21, give or take a decade. Michael was never one for precision, much to his cost.  He was probably not as old as he felt.  Age always came out in the wash: the mangle of time.  Ten years older or ten years younger didn’t seem to matter – and how many opportunities during those missing ten years had he actually missed?

“Hiya, Michael,” called the young lady.  She evidently knew him somewhat.  Probably an assistant at a care home.  Not that he needed any care.  He was just another loose cannon who could fire all sorts of ammunition rather than accept his own shortcomings.

“Hiya, back, Miss,” Michael responded.

“What’s happened to your face?”

“Nothing much.”

“Who did it?”

He nearly said it was not his face but someone else’s face that had quite taken offence.  Fear prevented him, however, from saying anything quite so damnably eccentric.  His face had given offence with its frayed edges, there was no doubt.  Confusion was better than silence.  Talking in itself, whatever the talking’s topic, was a comfort.

“Some footpad who wanted my wallet,” he eventually replied.

    “How much was there in it?” she asked absentmindedly, as she watched a bus disappear into the distance.

    “I don’t know.”  Michael was genuinely puzzled by her concern regarding the contents of his wallet.  Only himself to blame.  He had, after all, down-played his face.

    “Well, look after it better next time.”

    “He didn’t get it.”

    “Oh, that’s all right then.  Buy me a drink to celebrate.”

    She indicated a local pub.  But that went without saying.

    “OK,” Michael said, as they automatically headed in that direction.

    The inside of the pub was a blur – contrasting with the clear-cut sunlight outside in the street.  Several shapes seemed to scuttle into corners as they entered the stained-glass gloom, each shape an opportunity for conversation that had slipped the net of chance encounter.  The barman stood his ground, though.  A man of few words.  The young lady only lingered long enough for Michael to buy her a drink.  She soon wandered off to join some shadows with her own.  Some lumpen conspiracy concerning crime or politics, he guessed.  Drugs were defunct these days.  So it couldn’t be any drug deal.  Drugs had been hallucinated out of existence.  Drugs against drugs.

When Michael got home, he was more or less recovered.  His face was peeled like a mask when he looked at it in front of the mirror– sunburn as it were gone acidic to a thin caul, a veneer or veil of flesh scurfing off.  It was soon as new.  It must have been his imagination – the attack.  He washed his hands in the bedroom basin without looking at them first. It seemed the appropriate thing to do.

    The walls were very thin in this tenement block.  He could often hear his neighbours in the next door apartment to the right asthey bickered or binged or made love.  A moving population of tenants, a moto perpetuo of emotions, with Michael as the steady central source of observation.  The tenants above him, meanwhile, sounded out footfalls on the ceiling – footprints of changing identity as opposed to fingerprints.  The tenants on the floor below often thudded in tune to the rock-breaking chain-gangs of blockbuster heavy metal – mercifully at peace tonight or simply out.

    As to those often horizontally challenged folk immediately next door to the left, he could often catch the very words they clumsily articulated.  Tracing the audit trail of such conversations was like following the interacting instruments in an item of modern chamber music – and tonight was to be no exception.  A new pairing of aspirant lovers had seemingly moved in on the left since Michael’s mugging escapade in the open air.  Hatching a plot, no doubt, whoever they were, he assumed.  He shrugged.  He might as well listen – so he turned off his tap.  No chance like the present for gathering potentially useful information.  After all, no information could only be wasted.  This may be his one chance to crack the code of Fate, to corner Destiny in its earth, to utilise the feedback from the many one-night stands and fitful marriages of lust and love that these apartments often harboured.  Not missed opportunities so much as missed or missing links…

    You see, the walls were so thin and he could hear every bare word as if it were spoken in his own room.  As for himself, he didn’t dare cough or fidget or even finger his nostril.  At night, Michael stayed rawly awake most of the time so as to ensure he didn’t snore – catching up later, as he did, on most of his sleep patterns upon the ribs of park benches during daylit hours.  So, tonight, ashe silently stirred his thick pea and ham soup, he snatched an overheard conversation which evidently and astonishingly referred to someone who must have known him.  They referred, you see, to a certain Michael Archer – i.e. him – being  an acquaintance of an acquaintance of a said party.  This party was called Avril Hart, which, in his mind, was spelt h-a-r-t, but he couldn’t be certain.  He felt earwigging was as dangerous as not earwigging in these uncertain times.

    “Avril Hart always liked Michael Archer…”  A woman’s voice.

    “No, she didn’t,” rejoined a man with gutturals so ugly Michael wondered if the man’s throat were made from tree bark.

    The conversation – if the piecemeal utterances of inconsequentiality could be dignified with that word – meandered on for a while until one of the voices (Michael couldn’t tell which) came out with some words that were spoken neutrally but yet with pointed meaning, as if acknowledging the audience of one a wafer thin wall away.  It was as if eavesdropping made itself obvious however silently it was conducted, eavesdropping often calling up, as it did, kinetic supernatural forces of guilt-ridden poltergeists.  The words in question have faded now but Michael recalls them as being something like:
    “A pity Michael had to die in such a horrible fashion.”

    He was stunned out of a doze.  He had indeed collapsed upon his counterpane, neatly self-smothered under a grubby pillow –initially gasping for breath but staying, otherwise, as quiet as a church mouse, as he regained some well-earnt hedged bets of sleep.  Whether the words he thought he heard – those deadly words – were part of a dream or not, he was soon wide awake, having been startled by the sound of a key being tried in his apartment door.  He held his breath yet again, listening to the lock’s tumblers stubbornly refusing to be budged into falling, despite the slow sickening turn back and forth of the key in an attempt to wheedle entry, as opposed to forcing it.

    Michael felt decidedly iffy. Dead sheep had be known to feel livelier, he thought.  Lack of sleep for days on end had culminatedin this sense of unreality or dream.  He was being stalked by one of his erstwhile partners in lust or love. The better half of a misjudged tenement union.  Indeed, having missed her own version of opportunity earlier, through bouts of misunderstanding and a mind lanced through by a foreign substance, Avril Hart had now regrouped, it seemed, since the pub, and become focussed upon her single-minded goal: to exhume the body which these four tenuous walls had boarded up while hour after interminable hour trod their precarious path into a growingly unsteady future.  The cabinet of a grandfather clock often has a key in its side to wind it … or even its very clock-face a key spindle to be turned …and, in some sense, Michael’s face was being rewound, rewounded –rewakened into a reincarnation of himself, into a new Michael Archer.  Or possibly unwound, unwounded…

The voices continued to drone next door, left and right.  Even up and down. The beat music having finally never started up again.  The words now blurred into each other due to excessive slowness of utterance.  Motion stood still.  Emotion crystallised into a core.  A bandwagon trundled along outside in the shape of a council dustcart.  There was sudden silence and Michael heard voices in the street now, followed by a slump or a thud as an item was thrown into the back of the cart.  Heavy metal gates clanging as they pressed on the raw rags and bones.  

    Other voices,  Other heels clip-clopping along the brittle pavements.  A confusion of sounds that meant something to someone … somewhere.  Then a clump.  A shriek.  Another street mugging.  He felt safe in his cocoon of memory.  A victim uncriminalised.  Adrug hallucinated out of existence.  In the distance, emergencies going in and out of focus like sirens.

    “Hiya, Michael.”

    “Hiya, back, Miss.”  

He could never remember her name by heart.

    He wasn’t sure if the voices were next door, upstairs, downstairs, in his lady’s chamber … or outside … outside of reality … or, even, in his head.  Clouded issues circling its prey.  He felt his chest desperate to hear a beat.  No wallet there! Humph!  Not someone’s missed opportunity, after all.  Opportunities that cancelled each other out.  The lessons of life were learned though its many missed opportunities. And perhaps death, too. An opportune mist … an angel disappearing into the arms of God.

    But he had no money…