Disconnected Miniatures (2) by D.F. Lewis

 CONTINUED FROM: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/disconnected-miniatures-by-df-lewis-1.html

***

A MOUSEFUL OF PINS 

The parlour was as quiet as a mouseful of pins. In the depleting light, a pair of armchairs seemed peopled with stares. There had already been words spoken of ghosts and frights, but neither set of eyes had flinched. The fire had dyed itself black, in recognition of the coal that had given it birth. A knock on the door or an unseen hand brushing against the shoulder might have startled their revery. Yet the simple scrabbling of a pointy creature in the wainscot was hardly worth the mention, let alone the pricking of ears — until one of them took up a second spate of speaking:

“I travelled in a train — an ordinary day — except I listened to a number of ladies from behind me in the neighbouring part of the carriage. I couldn’t see them, but I guessed they were middle-aged or above. They had spent the whole journey so far chortling, gossipping, prattling off — wait for it — knitting! The train juddered northward uncaring, it seemed, of signals and stations — an express in every sense. Their banter ranged from treatises on back-stitches to belly-laughs on chain ones — every combination and convolution of the art of clicking needles together, weaving a web of action or reaction, of colour’s shade or husband’s size, stitches loose or tight, grip or wield, cast on or off. What a nice gathering — how very civilised in this day and age, I felt, listening to a knitting group on an outing. I’d never overheard such laughter and jollity surrounding doubts regarding brown against orange in a knitting pattern — and something about tail-end wool. Then, as I heard the chunky clunk-click of large stitches being made, I wondered if they knew about the two main varieties of wool: shorling or morling, and the difference between them. It hadn’t arisen in their conversation — which was a surprise, since everything else plain and purl had been chewed over and skittishly aired. Well, let me tell you…” The listener nodded, eager to hear about the difference in the full-shrunken light of the parlour, and then the speaker continued, after a pause: “Shorling is wool sheared off live sheep, morling that off those already dead. There is, believe it or not, a difference in feel. One is more suitable for men, the other women, but not necessarily for all men or all women.”

The parlour wore an air of indifference, until the one who had been listening, now spoke:

“I myself was also on a train once — the only time, in fact. Being an agoraphobic, I found it hard to travel. As the oil seed rape glanced by and further yellowed the sunshine, I speculated on my own loneliness in the world. Yes, alone in the whole wide world. For many years, people have believed that several dread diseases only needed a merest flesh-to-flesh contact to flourish. So, today, as we reach the end of the Millennium, there are no handshakes, no fleeting kisses, no rubbing together of shoulders, nothing like this can possibly be countenanced, not even the slightest brush of skin on skin — even with clothes between. Hence train seats have become single ones. This has led me to wonder whether all people other than myself are a dream. I have no means to prove otherwise, as you can appreciate. The simple act of dialogue has never been able to disprove this dream theory of mine. So, that day on the train, I was beset, as ever, with an attenuation of reality. No prestidigitation of philosophy could fully bolster the inferred substances of an otherwise rarified life, even when I took thoughts to the most dependable areas of logic. Simple touch between doubters would have been sufficient verification, but touch was simply out of the question. Yet, as the benighted city landscape made cruel overtures to the yellow meadows, I felt a caressing hand upon my padded shoulder … but it was sheer imagination, a touch of Harry in the night…”

The first speaker had tried to interrupt. Yet nothing came from the mouth, as if it were full of tangled choking wool. A snouty thing skittered across the carpet and plummetted up the cold parlour chimney towards the cloudless, yet starless, night sky. Airborne and thus immune to dying and disease.

***

UNCLAIMED BY DEATH

He descended the stairs, his head, but not the rest of his body, hidden by the shadows. He had entered the large rambling mansion at the dead of night, because it presented the only shelter from the torrential rain. It was called ‘Cloisters’ on the inbuilt gatepost. He had trudged dark hills for days, letting barns and hollowed-out haystacks suffice — but, tonight, he was desperate for proper dreamless sleep, crisp sheets to loll within, warmth from new wakened grates and a proper roof.

Cloisters was indeed an answer to his dreams: uninhabited, perhaps, but in no way derelict. The front door swung easily open on its hinge edge making him wonder what held it fast to the doorframe at the handle edge. Having approached from over the low hills, he felt sure that the mansion was configured of Stonehenge returned to its original home, monolith resting on monolith, edge to edge, shoulder to shoulder, chest to chest, back to back, not one crack of moonlight between. When he shone his torch, even from such a distance, it lit up the tall chimneystacks left exposed at the top and caused the windows to glint. In this uncertain light, the mansion appeared to be a series of twouptwodown terraced backtobacks from Britain in the Thirties — forming a vertical jigsaw. In the fever of exhaustion, he imagined lesser chimneys inserted neatly into cellars in an everpresent interchange of smoke and dust blacker than the purest soot. The impenetrable hill darkness literally glowed by comparison with the greasy substances that made the constituent cottages inch up to each other without the slightest grind or grate.

He shook himself free of such ill-considered thoughts. Having breached the building, he decided the best course of action was to clamber to its top. Without understanding why, he predicted increased safety near the real proveable roof. It entailed squirming through narrow hatches and crossing between the sloping dark beams of many barely illuminable lofts. Eventually, he found himself descending again, down barely understandable stairways, his head once more hidden in the darkness whilst his eyes could discern the rest of his body and his own feet glowing upon the treads as they negotiated the half-dismantled stair-rods. He could not recall reaching the very top of the building, having expected there to find a master bedroom or, at worst, servant shacks, where he could ravel those yearned for sheets around his aching bones.

He decided to peer through the next outside window he stumbled across. But the curtains once swept aside in shadows of dust, he discovered that it merely connected with another room. This one was dimly lit. There was a large cat. Then he saw that a woman was seated on the bed, slowly removing stockings. His bed, he thought — folding back his sheets, so crisp he could hear them crackle from the vantage point behind the window. The figure was female, if only by virtue of its silhouette. The beauty had to be concocted from its arching prehensility. Her back was faced toward him and the torch had no power even to meet the other room’s light head on. Her legs swung from the floor and, in a movement akin to scissor-blades, she dived between the sheets, causing the mattress to sag through the springs in several spirals of damp stuffing – or so he imagined.

.

She was too drained to bear any more. Her discarded stockings lay crumpled like see-through dog dirt on the bedsit floor. Their ladders started short of the more heavily coloured tops. Their seams’ scribbling was a knot of ladders. Everything seemed to be running down.

Her latest ‘steady’ had threatened to ditch her a few days before. But the pig wasn’t even worth the poke. Indeed, he never knocked. Came straight in, eyes wandering, hair uncombed, hands wriggling in his trouser pockets. Only here for one thing. And that frequently wasn’t sex – not with her, anyway, it seemed. If only she’d had the get-up-and-go to ditch him first. That would have given her some credibility.

Her cat was curled up on the bed like a big black rose, purring so heavily it concealed the aeroplane drones as they idled above her flat, accentuating the loneliness. Hers was the only bedsit in the whole block of cottage constituents. All the other doors were unnumbered. Or was that one of her dreams? She couldn’t quite remember.

The knock startled. Both turned heads towards the door. Nobody there. She couldn’t be bothered even to check the squint-hole. She could only summon enough energy to stare at the radiator which, to a blazing log fire, was worse than metal fatigue. The curtains hid the windows, moving in a draught, like the eyelids of someone gradually waking. The cat resumed its snooze — now lain out straight as a poacher’s gutting.

The knocking came again. There must be at least somebody there. She shrugged. It was not possible to be her ex-steady, as he would have walked straight in. She tried to recall happier days. He’d never taken her out. Nevertheless, the relationship had a certain something. A vicarious mode of living. One notch above loneliness. As if a saving stitch had been sewn in at both ends. The right words eluded her. There could be no give without take. But that wasn’t right.

“Come in.” The voice was hers, but she did not recall opening her mouth. She craned towards the cat. It had scooted into the kitchenette, without the preamble of a stretch and a yawn. The door opened upon hinges she had never before heard squeaking. A guy walked in without even the least attention to recognition. His clothes were too baggy for a body to fill them — dragged off some autumn piles long since left unclaimed outside a charity shop. The shoes had their tongues showing, insects of black thread hanging from the joins. Another figure followed: this one of indeterminate gender. Then two more, of dubious humanity, let alone gender.

“Detective Inspector Ludd,” announced the first one, snapping open his identification locket. “Please excuse our intrusion, but we understand you have been going steady with someone we seek…”

As yet, she could only guess to which ex-steady Ludd was referring. She was rather non-plussed, if not a little annoyed. One of Ludd’s sidekicks budged the stocking heap with his foot, as if the key to the mystery lay underneath. His nose twitched. The others were rifling her drawers. She should ask for further identification. But she couldn’t be bothered. These “people” were, if nothing else, company.

They soon departed, however, leaving a waft of damp in their wake. One had actually planted a kiss on her cheek where she feared something worse than a simple pimple would grow during her next incubation period.

The cat had returned to the snugness of the bed, where it proceeded to tease out the loose ends from the threadbare quilt, making a horrible scratching noise with its claws, that stayed inside her head even when it had finished. The stockings were alive, having found the awareness that they had always sought, tiny faces coming and going in the trammelled mesh.

Someone came straight in, without knocking. This must be the steady in question. It could be none other. He found her curled around her cat, thumb squatting the mouth. The pussy was dummied on its tail.

Missed the rozzers just by the skin of his teeth. The steady smiled, slowly drawing one hand from inside his trousers. The other stayed put. The silence was pearl perfect. He knew he was worse than all lonelinesses placed end to end. It was just a question of coming alive. And, as always, he needed blood more than he needed sex. He picked the pile of stockings from the floor and inspected them.

An aeroplane tried to hover above the flat, in reconnaissance, but having lost its helicopter disguise, soon veered off and crash-landed in another part of the city with a dull thud. Nothing could be kept up for long, these days. And so, sadly, she was still unclaimed, even by death.

.

The man originally witnessed arriving at Cloisters was now knocking on the window to her room. Her head abruptly turned on the pillow. Her eyes seemed blinded by his torch, since she had only just before switched off the room light, after acting out some blind mime with shadows and the throwing of men's voices masquerading as policemen. His knocking had earlier matched her own improvisations. Now, she stared along the torch's beam, until the man could feel the shock up his arm.

He felt as if he needed to scream on her behalf. An intruder needed screaming at. But she remained either steadfastly silent or was muffled by yet another intruder already in her room. Her mouth was certainly wide enough to encompass the wildest scream. Before he had moved the torch away, it was a black oval, like a mirror for a miniature of the devil.

The man did scream. The walls shifted around him in their sockets, meshing and unmeshing, the irregular tunnel shafts between them caked with the blackest sticky dust, moving up and down, to and fro, crashing brick gears, belching shadows of smoke, in and out of each other — as if the original masons had intended the endemic earth tremors as a trigger of their first setting the building’s foundations.

He found the front door again, but this time it was way above the ground floor (and the floor surely was being ground). Before he could jump, he was seized by his hair which was long enough for a series of sporadic tugs to bring him backwards into the arms of the creature behind him…

.

He was surprised at the way things had built up. Being his first visit to the city, literally everywhere was strange. And being a street made of a single mansion converted into terraced twouptwodowns, this street was the strangest place yet — supposedly the one matching the address he had in his head.

But which number? The streetwiser who had passed the address to him by word of mouth had suffered from too much tongue. So the number had been ambiguous – somewhere between 1 and 27. Probably 13.

Number 13 was in the vicinity of the widening, except, as he soon discovered 11 and 15 were adjacent. 12 and 14 were opposite — at the widest part. He shrugged off his superstitious upbringing and peered down the alleyway between 11 and 15 — darker than a tunnel with none of a tunnel’s virtues such as weatherproofing.

If he had more than one option as to his next action, then he did not realise he had. He did not exactly feel brainwashed, more dabbed with a damp flannel, and plunged down the gaping alley. The rain was seeping at a faster rate than a drizzle but still barely noticeable to someone of his absent-minded approach to living. He tripped over a clump of tall weeds that had grown in a particularly dank section of the alley – and landed headfirst in a doorway.

He would have looked up from his bruised and dissheveled body, rubbing his eyes as he squinted through the dripping gloom, and discerned the number 13 in Gothic digits upon the door, if it hadn’t opened before he could establish this — and was attacked by a creature that had more slobber than teeth, more guts than filling, more Ludd than anything else. It crawled on hands and knees (as if it had not learned to crawl in any other way) – its purpose blurred by the internal forces of its own mind as well as by the rain driving into its furry face.

He felt as if he were inside a glove-puppet, except it was not just his hand. His whole body was within a pantomime horse, except it was not a pantomime, nor a horse for that matter. It proved to be a living being which was utilising his mind as motivational energy, except he did not think it was his mind being utilised — it was simply an easy way of harnessing his very bones.

Barely visible through the hairy-lashed apertures of the creature’s eyes, he spotted the end of the alley — whether it was the opening into the street where Cloisters sat did not appear to matter. Abruptly, he realised he was not looking from the eyes but through the nostrils. Perhaps this creature did not have any eyes in any event. His thoughts were growing stranger all the time, as if the mind was adapting itself to a sudden unexpected evolution.

Then, with a sudden shaft of self-awareness, the creature distinguished his body shape framed by the alley’s end, topped by bleary-eyes from too many sleepless nights in dosser-stacks. Feeling utterly sick to the back teeth, the creature’s innards vomited, with one giant gulping hiccup, into its correct apportionment of time and space. There could be no argument with corrective reality. Nor with the fact that it was feline – and female. Stuck all over with see-through nylon laddering.

.

He had escaped the city and shone his torch upwards to examine the craggy interfaces of the moon, to while away the rest of of what he considered to be a peaceful night. He did not notice the dark edges of cloud building and straightening along the tops of the mountains behind him. It would yet be quite a time before the rain started in earnest. Meanwhile, Cloisters was quietly narrowing — buildings edging nearer to each other so as to cope with closing alleys and abandoning dreams. Voices at bedroom windows called, between the cat-fights, for crisper sheets. Then silence. 

***

THE HAUNTED TIREDNESS

Sleep had long been serialised as quagmires of broken sweat and lucid dreams. The opposite of spit is swallow. There’s an animal in the room that’s gnawing the legs of the bed.

I  woke with a start — with those two fleeting images: all that remained of my dream. Indeed, I usually remembered nothing of what events my sporadic  sleep surrounded. 

But tonight was different. The darkness glowed brighter than the  luminous clock beside the bed. There was a lambency filling my eyes. I was unaccountably crying — the tears acting like tiny lenses, focussing the dull shimmer upon my retinas, almost blowing the optic fuses. I felt sick. But not with food. More with an over-fill of my own saliva — welling up like clear syrup from every corner of the body, along with mysteriously relentless urine in sore spirts. My pores seeped this fluid, too, like the slow-motion eruption from very tiny volcanoes. Surely all this was the dream and the animal-thing gnawing the legs of the bed was within real life: an event I’d left behind each time I fell at least partially asleep? 

But, in my real life, there should not be any animal in the whole house, let alone in my bedroom. Was the real life I’d left behind — to fall asleep and enter this dream of dull shimmer and bodily regurgitation — derived from earlier intakes of food? 

The real waking life I’d left behind surely must have an animal gnawing at the legs of my bed … because I was soon half-awake and half-dreaming and heard it coming from outside the dream.

I must now fully wake up. To face whatever it was. I called this animal (whatever it was) the Night Gnaw. But that was only because I called it this name from within the dream, the dream from which I was now trying to escape in order to cope with the danger represented by the Night Gnaw. I would no doubt call it something else in real waking life. To call it the Night Gnaw was decidedly a very dream-like thing to call it. So surely I must be dreaming to call it a Night Gnaw at all. Meanwhile, I was terrified that my sleeping body — the body that contained the mind that called it a Night Gnaw — was threatened by the thing in real waking life that I currently called the Night Gnaw while dreaming.

I was sweating, plain and simple, with dripping drops. My sleeping body felt slicked and slippery enough for the Night Gnaw to slowly — oh so slowly — swallow me whole, like a python with an ass. Then for it – even more slowly — to extrude my back out, covered in the thick curds of the Night Gnaw’s own bodily fluids — like a slow motion salivation now without appetite.

I must wake up before this happened. I  needed to battle against the Night Gnaw that I did not dream about but knew existed somewhere. And the darkness lost its lambent glow. My snores were no longer the dry gunning that they once were but more the rhythmic, rhyming gnaws of some animal with deeply irritable bowel syndrome, each of my limbs transmitting spasms of pain towards a new day’s haunted tiredness. Meantime, I knew the creature was to be reborn when I tried to sleep again. One day, I thought, it will vanish for good, and I managed to smile.

***

FLAT IRON

I am a classical composer of music; by adding ‘of music’, though, is perhaps unnecessary, for what else do classical composers do other than compose music? However, it is necessary to clarify this in my case, because many people do not class what I compose as music at all. Some call it utter rubbish, being, to their unacclimatised ears, a noise or racket of alarming ugliness. Yet … I still compose it. I sit in a serious stance with my old-fashioned nib poised over the staves, believing every note I write is a mark of genius. 

Concerto for Ping Pong ball and Orchestra. Black Elegy for flute and zither. Wild Onions, a chamber opera for water sounds and Welsh harps. These are just a few of my works, as you know. There are many more as yet unplayed, unperformed, unheard. Most reside in my head, giving off their own vibrations to the skull. I am serious about my music having a deeply aesthetic value as art. And I am proud to report that a few unlucky souls turn up at my concerts and pretend to enjoy the sounds they open their ears to. 

Edna was one of those. She did enjoy it, I’m sure; either that or her overtures to me as the composer were completely false. If she did not wallow in my music like a whale enjoying a bath in its own blubber, then she was a good actress at pretending to do so. She even bought the CDs!   Edna couldn’t help being fat. These were CD times, as well as pre-woke, as you can see.

Well, it was she who suggested the flat iron.

Now, I ought to make it clear. I was never completely in love with Edna, There was something quaintly homely about the tender caresses she often gave me. She was a touchy feely person. One day, I would reciprocate, I vowed. But it was always put off until tomorrow.  It wasn’t because she was fat.

She had been married in the past to someone she called Alfred. Apparently, he was fan of pop music and endlessly played the Everley Brothers in the bath. They had not really got on. That was a pity, I’m sure, because Edna was a fine housewife, one who cherished the dusting and the washing and the ironing. She had a thing about ironing, even in the age of drip dry and non-iron shirts. 

The thing about the flat iron happened during the interval of the biggest success I’d ever had with my music. A concert which was more than half full in Huddersfield, and only ten people got up and left during the performance. One even shouted ENCORE! at the end.  I was sitting with Edna at the back, watching the heads move in time to the music. Wild shakings and noddings that had no rhyme or reason. Even their clapping was ragged and ill-coordinated. Yet, most of them stayed the course. And the reviews were singular in their acclaim. Reading between the lines.

Throughout the first half of the concert, Edna had rested her plump hand in my lap, where I let it stay. I often unplumped her hand from its berth upon my body, but tonight I was thrilled by the reception of my music. Tonight, I even felt warmth towards those to whom I owed warmth (like Edna), as I had often given undeserved warmth to those who had ridiculed my music. It is often difficult to explain such skewed emotions. I suppose my music described my emotions best. Tonight I tried to be more human, and let my words and face express my inner feelings, instead of my music.

So, I smiled at Edna, encouraging her to speak. We very rarely had real conversations, especially at my concerts. Silence seemed to be the best option; indeed, some of my pieces incorporated that very silence into the fabric of the sound world I was trying to recreate through the scoring for various instruments. Instruments both conventional and outlandish. One whole movement of my Siren Suite depended solely on the ambience of the audience and concert hall. Each cough was an audience-inspired moment.  Even farting.

Still, the intervals allowed more scope for non-art communication. We could shift away from the pretentious modes of stony-faced listening and become less self-conscious and less stylised.

“Have you thought about using a flat iron?” she asked.

“For what?” I was half-listening to her, whilst trying to catch the eye of one of my faithful sponsors. A sponsor who was deaf, but seemed to enjoy patronising penniless composers like me. I wanted some more backing. But my heart melted. I was in a good mood. I had actually replied to Edna’s question, albeit with another question. I may have said it or I may have thought I said it, viz:

“As a percussion instrument?”

I smiled again. Two smiles in one evening were unheard of, but I instinctively had pricked up my ears at the suggestion of a flat iron. I actually tried to extend the audit trail of the conversation, much as a viola often does in conventional String Quartets.

“You mean hitting it with a metal hammer?”  I could actually hear the chunky clink inside the bone basin that served as a container for my brain. All composers, I guess, have these strange ideas and words for feelings they feel about their own body. Only ordinary people think of the head merely as a head. There’s something special about artists in all walks of art, or they wouldn’t be artists at all. Even one’s limbs became ownerless appendages, given the all-consuming force of art that takes over the mind as well as the body. Still, Edna was a simple soul. I never really troubled her with these preoccupations.  She had enough to cope with, being so fat.

“Do you know what a flat iron really is?” she asked, with a mischievous look about her. I stopped staring at a woman in a low-slung ball gown (you didn’t often get those at avant garde concerts) who was tackling a huge cocktail at the Interval bar. I could see what Edna must be driving at. It was quite an arresting thought, and the thought drove out all my wayward desires. A flat iron kept the heat after being left among the red hot coals, kept the heat whilst you ironed the clothes. It didn’t run off electricity. It was an old fashioned way of storing heat. And, so, if it could store heat … the logical continuation of the thought need not be made. Music was just like heat, wasn’t it, a storeable force. So an acoustic musical instrument that could store the music played on it during live music was a brilliant conception. And I owed it all the Edna. I gave her a peck on the cheek.

We would have made love that night, had the second half of the concert gone to plan or even just followed the example of the first half. But there were several illnesses that beset the audience during the abrasive coughing movement of my Aubergine Dreams for French Horn and Prepared Piano. The after-shocks and echoes that had been pent up all evening in the sound-box of the hall’s rafters suddenly erupted with full force and rained down plaster (some claimed it was asbestos) upon the audience, Edna and myself included.

She had scowled at the state of my shirt’s detachable collar and I could sense she imagined the terrible creases of its tail. But love is often tantalisingly unattainable — although my dreams, later that night, homed in on the woman in the ballgown at the bar. Edna’s flat iron was entirely forgotten for a long sleep of complete bliss as I dreamed of better leaner fish in better deeper seas.   Edna was only indeed one such dream that only sometimes escaped into the real world outside of dreams…….

I was rudely woken in the morning by screeching seagulls and car klaxons betokening a new day, new accidents, new encounters, new sound systems and dustcarts clanging as they collected the world’s rubbish. I washed and shaved in a daze, and then I pulled on my scored wrinkles, without even a single thought for my erstwhile young body thus wrapped up in them. Irons have sharps, as well as flats, you see. 

A END

***

A WEB ACROSS THE DOOR

As I was walking up the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there.

He didn’t even comb his night-strewn hair. His face was not ugly, nor was it handsome. His figure was without even a sign of portly or lean.

His clothes were drabber than they were smart; so drab the darkness could hide them in further folds of themselves. His voice picked out words from silence, words which meant little more than the creaks of the floorboards. His touch was like touching one of my own hands with the other. I put him down to nothing but a haunting thought – or, perhaps, at least, the ghostly residue of some man who had once anciently been an infant chimney-sweep since become a man.

When I reached the top, I looked back to see his back backing off down the stairwell, disappearing into nothingness — if something could disappear that was never there in the first place.

I lowered myself into half-a-kneel, half-a-bend, all mixed with a crumpled crouch, and picked up from the tousled stair carpet a loose strand that must have floated there from his head of night-strewn hair. I held it closer to my child-young eyes and watched it scribble like the filmic interference on old celluloid, in shapes of words that meant nothing to my childish mind beyond their mere audibility as softest carpet-slipper sounds.

”What you doing dear?” asked my mother, as her tall figure half-filled the slanting yellow shaft of her half-opened bedroom door.

”Following myself up the wooden hills to Bedfordshire,” I said as pipingly plaintive as possible. After all, I had a childish image to maintain.

“Don’t be a soppy and go to bed. It’s high time, darling, you were in dream land.”

My mother’s voice was the only one that could hold sweetness as well as righteous anger.
I dropped the hair that wasn’t there. I let out my lungs with breath blacker than the sooty air and sucked in a new draught, one that was tinged with the yellowness still left there by my mother’s now extinguished light from her now shut bedroom door.

I was suddenly a child again, one that no longer needed any childishness to remain my mother’s darling. But upon reaching the door of my erstwhile childhood lair, I found it wasn’t there. Only a mop of hairy air. 

Just like any woman,…we weave our stories out of our bodies. Some of us through our children, or our art; some do it just by living. It’s all the same.” 
― Francesca Lia Block

CONTINUED HERE: 

https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/disconnected-miniatures-3-by-d-f-lewis.html

Disconnected Miniatures by D.F. Lewis (1)

 CASKET

The procession was as silent as the proverbial grave. It moved in pairs, each pair moving as if it were a single person, each participant with a black hat, with each step timed by another’s – the road seeming to be surfaced with cotton wool, so delicate were the pinch-toed hesitations before completing each step. 

The casket was carried upon the shoulders of the last three pairs: a highly engineered support in well-oiled traction. Indeed, all the pairs moved as a single pair, believing they each carried the casket, even though only the last three pairs actually did so.

I stood, however, alone, walking in equal aspirations of uniformly timed steps, immediately behind the casket, my hand raised so as to steady it should it teeter back from upon the six shoulders who already bore it so ‘frictionlessly’ as it were; there was no need for belt or braces but they said I should be there in case of unsynchronised mishaps. Every procession, however solemn, should have its own troubleshooter. I was bit like a sweeper in football … or full-back in rugby … a procession’s watcher and waiter.

The townspeople lined the pavement in honour of the casket’s contents. Their children were well-behaved, many pigeon-toed as they tried not to over-balance from the kerb, some of the youngest squatting – uncorrected for the silence’s sake – in the gutter. A few tourettes cooed (if quietly for them) and this did not seem to alter the solemnity of the occasion. I scowled meaningfully at the worst culprits, having assumed this was a job for the procession’s watcher and waiter.

There was no special uniform for me.

“You’ll have to dress in black like all of us, Gollum,” I had been told.

I had stared back at Chine the head processioneer – resenting the nickname he had used, one that had stuck ever since I could remember, as well as the unwelcome news that I could not dress for the part according to my own taste.

“OK, Chine,” I had said, biting my lip. I was no sound-leaky tourette. I did, however, have leaky thoughts, admittedly. My poker face did not stop me cursing Chine from within with a made-up madness of spells derived from ‘The Nemonicon’.

Chine must have known that magic book, because he had seemed – if sub-consciously – to withstand the bombardment of wish-fulfilment I had put in train vis à vis his worst interests. He merely smiled and later told me to stand at the back when the procession moved off and not to wander wilfully beyond my duty as back-prop.

Chine was at the front of the procession – too tall to be an actual casket-bearer – and I knew he couldn’t look back without breaking the pattern of synchronised solemnity. I hated his smug handsomeness. I also resented the rings that sparkled from his fingers. The rouge on his cheeks. I was not allowed jewellery or cosmetics. I did rather think his whole souped-up demeanour was out of place as I watched him jab and jolt his limbs in time to the steady drumbeat. He was the least coordinated of all of us. He thought his black hat would hide a multitude of sins beneath it. Already my spells were working. It needed the perceived present (not the past) for their full power to be revealed. Transported from pluperfect to preterite for their insidious clarity of righteousness to then be able to blazon forth, even if insulated by being seen as having happened rather than still happening.

I suddenly see it is even more now than before. I’m here … still at the back of the procession but eager to dodge and weave in the game of death. The pavement spectators – as I call them – are all now turning ugly and sporadically vociferous. The procession’s many pairs peel off from their erstwhile single-minded synchronicity into wild displays of randomness attacking perfect plans…

Chine turns – his face black with rage. We eye each other as if we have been sure forever that this was the duel the town had been waiting for, ever since death faced life in the ultimate battle that awaited us all in some inscrutable past disguised as the future.

”Gollum!” he asks, “What have you done?”

“No sooner he had asked it
Then he became the casket,” 

I reply solemnly, raising my hand again to steady it.

***

SHIRTY

Weekend cottages were a luxury, in those days, and I could hardly afford the cost of the journey from London, let alone the rent on the journey’s actual destination. I always took a different companion with me, people I liked either for their conversation or for their body, but rarely for both.

It is delightful to tell you of one of the occasions when it was both. You’re probably othinking that I am concocting an easy style to convince you of its truth or this is effectively just a diary of wishful thinking! Well, think what you like, but the weekend I spent with Shirty is worth living through again, at least for me.

London is a big, big city, with big, big men
Who sit in offices and count to ten

And one of these men was the one called Shirty. A pure crisp whiteness with ice-diamond cuff-links, starched detachable collar, high-tight tie, chest-pocket where he kept his mobile and a body-shaped neatness. He was a cool merchant banker. Or whatever.

With stylish trousers possibly too short for Shirty. The only flaw.

And I took him to my weekend hideaway, because I liked the cut of his jib as well as the gift of his gab. Financial wherewithal was not even a consideration. Two handsome heads being talked with from each plump pillow of a country cottage’s feathered bed with a shiny wit between them as well a shared sleek skin – well, that was what it was all about with Shirty and me. A single moment. A focus of passion.

The place was haunted by a dog. I knew that. I have no excuses for not warning Shirty. This dog was a relic of a previous century and probably far beneath the attention of a modern couple like me and Shirty. A nagging bark that sounded from beyond the skirting-boards. I did not believe in ghosts. But how explain it otherwise? Only my easy style can gloss over the contradictions. I simply wanted to concentrate on this single prize of a weekend with Shirty. Next weekend would be time enough to worry about ghosts when accompanied, no doubt, by a more down-to-earth form of humanity than sharp-eyed Shirty.

He sat bolt upright at the first sound of snuffling beyond the bedroom wall.

“What’s that?” He was not used to being startled in his daily life. He normally had all corners covered. But not tonight.

I smiled. I secretly enjoyed the chink in his armour. I saw him sit bolt upright in the vague moonlight bidden by inefficient curtains. He had quickly slipped the previous day’s shirt over his head, hands struggling through the still linked cuffs. How could he otherwise exist in public view without a shirt? This was his persona. This was the way he kept his guard up in the bank’s boardroom. He even started counting backward from a whole pen of sheep he had just counted towards following our earlier pre-sleep relaxations together.

Then there came the slow relentless barking.

He jumped from the bed and walked over to the wall whence the noise seemed to be coming. 

“Don’t worry, it’s only the ghost.” I smiled to myself. I had forgotten how satisfying this was – to watch my ‘guests’ become bewildered by something so outlandish, something so utterly un-London.

Ghosts are traditionally white glimpses of intangibility.

Ghosts are surely not guttural sounds like any old dog that has lost its way in the time tunnel.

Over the years coming here, none of us (my guests and I) get much sleep after the initial disturbance. Tonight was no exception. Shirty was grumpy as he wandered round the kitchen muttering incomprehensibly to himself of this and that. Probably the first time he was at a loss for real words. Not in character at all.

I’ve just remembered why the Shirty weekend was one to remember. This was the first occasion when the ghost dog actually appeared, rather than just bugging us with its barking from behind the wall. A wall dividing what from what? That’s a good question. It was the bedroom wall but it was difficult to know what was on the other side of it because I had never been slim enough to slide between it and another wall that was half built into the hillside and half purely exterior to the open air of the countryside. A dank, dark slot where God knows what might lurk.

The dog turned out to be dressed in a ruffly shirt befitting an earlier century. 

I drove back to London next day alone. Shorty Shirty somehow no longer seemed to matter, as if I had forgotten he existed at all. Only writing all this out for you has reminded me about him. They now tell me, too late, that he was richer than rich!

They do also tell me a dog now haunts one of the bank’s boardrooms in the City near the Dome of St Paul’s. But that is only hedge fund hearsay, because nobody has actually seen it for real. The barks however are quite useful as a sort of abacus of sounds that befits financial or political calculation.

And I have gained a new pair of sparkling cuff-links. I shall probably give them to my next ‘guest’ for a country weekend … to show how much I care. And with the dog exorcised, we could both relax and enjoy things without any grumpiness.

***

THE SECRET HOUSE

“How shall a man find his way unless he lose it?” — Walter de la Mare

When he saw the secret house he knew there was a key to it somewhere. The map hadn’t shown any properties at all in the vicinity, but perhaps it wasn’t a map that would have shown them even if there had been any properties to show. He wondered why he had bothered to bring the map, as he hadn’t really been following it. He had simply been following his nose – shorthand for misguided instinct, and sometimes one needed a misguided instinct to fetch up anywhere at all one wanted to be. Indirect meant direct, when one least expected it. He smiled. This was the house he had been seeking all his life. He shrugged the rucksack to a hopefully more comfortable position on his shoulders as he approached the front door.

He decided knocking would be too easy. He ought to go round the back. This was typical of much of his life: always taking the more difficult course in the hope that it would end up being the easiest. If he’d been let in at the front, he may have thought he was intended to see someone who was never meant to be involved in his destiny at all and he may have missed seeing the person whom he reallyneeded to see when  entering by the kitchen entrance at the back. 

Halfway round the back of the house, he simply changed his mind – and returned to the front door. He had seen a tree growing that was a horrific sight. Its roots had been rudely revealed by the unconsidered digging at it by seemingly a large animal that had left its bristles behind: and the tree’s branches leant against the side of the house. It was still growing, as a tree, but it was the unwholesomeness of the whole situation that perturbed him, as the house and tree were held together by some backward state of misguided synergy. An awkward situation that augured ill for the route he had chosen. He thought the tree was smelling rankly of its own self-cultured cankers or growths.

Having returned to the front door, he decided that he should have ignored the tree and continued reaching the back entrance. But direct once it had become indirect could then become more indirect than indirect itself if several changes of mind were experienced, involving walking back and forth for several hours to the front and rear of the house, even skirting the tree when the tree’s side of the house was chosen rather than the other side of the house where there was no tree at all leaning against the house. If he had chosen the treeless side of the house in the first place to reach the back of the house, then the whole quandary would not have arisen. He would have gone straight to the back and entered the house via the kitchen, thus taking his fate within two positive hands.

He eventually managed to enter the house, because one of the servants took pity on him or, more likely, suspected him of loitering with ill intent. But having passed over his credentials, he entered the house officially at 6.05 pm when dusk was settling upon all visible surfaces. The entrance used was the one on the treeless side of the house which he had not previously noticed till now! A secret door. Only obvious as a door on the outside when opened from the inside. The servant was holding a balding broom ready for use, as some excuse for having opened it, but he knew she had really opened it because she had seen him wandering around the house on his own for some hours and, furthermore, he reckoned she must fancy him. She was a dowdy miss. But he was pleased for any excuse of making a grand entrance.

“Thank you for letting me in,” he said. He felt handsome, even if he wasn’t. He smiled knowing that it was a winning smile. “As you know, I have come to clean the chimneys.” He opened his rucksack to reveal the various interlocking rods and the shock-haired head of their business end.

“Madame must have forgotten to tell me you were coming,” she said, blushing.

“But first of all.” He held his chin pensively. “Can you tell me about the tree at the side of the house? I am in favour of nature and its preservation. Recycling. Birds. And animals. But nothing seems to live in that tree. It seems to kill all it touches.”

“It holds the house up,” she suggested while she made as if to sweep the floor with the bald excuse for a broom.

“More like the house holds it up!” he rejoindered. 

Later, as dusk approached optimum density-point, the chimneypots, one by one, gave birth to a spiky growth. While  two bodies, in a secret inner room with no key, lived their last moments of love as supported by each other’s hirsute arms.

***

LATE ARRIVAL

The clown was essentially white-costumed, even given the black hemispherical hat, the broken golden-hoop large enough to be a wide belt or sash, black slip-on shoes, bleached face containing tiny red lips and drooping black eyes …. sitting upon a huge domed mushroom mound …. awaiting the promised arrival of a blue tree embedded within a solid glass cone. Surely, a snow-globe to shake would have been better to amuse the clown or to amuse the children who might also arrive soon for Christmas – or, better still, another clown as company, bearing in mind the children were not promised to arrive at all. 

A smile threatened to shatter the real face the clown was wearing as a frozen mask. Thoughts of sadness often made clowns smile and a Christmas without children was one such thought of sadness. Broken thoughts were mended, mended ones broken. Labelled thoughts were unlabelled, later unlabelled ones labelled. Thoughts of optimistic puppets in the morning, thoughts of pessimistic puppets in the afternoon. Thoughts of black humour when the time had come for going to bed. Erotic thoughts at night to fill the dreams with more than just soft mushroom mounds to sit upon. And by dawn, the more urgent thoughts of meltdowns and golden cummerbunds … then thoughts about promised arrivals being always late: little different, the clown supposed, from never arriving. 

The clown’s silent smile forced a love of lateness, accepting that the only promised arrivals were a blue tree in a glass cone and the clown-here-already-so-never-needing-to-arrive-at-all and that both could never be contained within a single thought at the same time. It would make no sense to imagine such an unimaginable companionship. Not even fiction could attempt it. Even music, be it baroque or classical or modern or simply tinkling with snowflakes, failed to conjure such a dual impossibility. The clown’s smile meant there were no false hopes. The roads seemed impossible, the snowy precipitation having formed a ground zero rather than a cone of scintillating light. Lateness was not just for Christmas. 

***

KEPT BEHIND

“An apple for your thoughts,” announced Miss Western in a moment of remorse amid those interminable kept-behind hours of dusk which come to all schoolchildren who strayed.  

She watched the child in the front desk lean its head on the exercise book. It straightened its back into a yardstick, its eyes unblinking. 

“Can I go home now?” its small voice asked. 

“Well, I don’t know – you’re meant to be here finishing off the sums which you didn’t do at the right time.” 

The child resumed its desultory scribbling. It was not the only one whom Miss Western had kept behind this afternoon. The Gostridge kids, Paul, Susanna and Josey, had been sitting at the back of the formroom only a few minutes before, complete with smug we-don’t-mind-if-you-keep-us-in-till-Kingdom-come expressions. She eventually sent them home because their mother would complain at them being victimised yet again. They certainly did deserve it. They used to be gypsies. But that was not the reason. 

The nameless child was now re-doubling its efforts to encourage monsters to doodle self-portraits in the arithmetic book. There was a certain peculiarity in that she’d completely forgotten the child’s name. She would need to check it in the attendance records but the lines of black circles and red ticks told her nothing except perhaps that there were underlying patterns to existence in the small town where she’d decided to work as a schoolteacher. The Gostridges had more black circles than most, but that was only to be expected. 

Miss Western was suddenly aware that a stranger was sitting in one of the tiny desks – at the back of the classroom, where the depleting afternoon light could not now reach. 

“Yes? Can I help you?” Her voice sounded distant … even to her own ears. The moment of fright had been exceeded by annoyance at the intrusion. 

“No, but I feel I can help you instead.” Whilst his voice was louder than hers, it was like the undercurrent of a conversation in a house next door. 

Miss Western turned back to the child to see if it had noticed the exchange, but its head was back on the desk-slope, eyes still wide open, whirls and coils of its exercise book doodles appearing to flow directly from its brow. 

The stranger — taller than the confines of the desk would have seemed to allow — left the back of the room and slowly advanced down the aisle, passing via varying degrees of shadow. If it had not been for this intrusion, Miss Western would have by now lit the lamps, for it had quickly turned too dark too early to see very clearly.  

“I’ve got some homework to give you, before you can go, Miss Western … about visions of meadows, endless childhood summers and the meaning of fruit-stones and flowers.”  

The voice had become more like an old 78 rpm record with a dog and horn on its label … hissing and cracking in rhythm to the accompanying steps. 

“Who are you?” Miss Western asked, with fear now gradually dawning on her. 

“I’m the one who can teach you of none-so-pretties, soft hobmadonnas and cuddle-me-to-you’s, and pick them from under sun and hedgerow – and, later, with all learning done, we can play frog-hop, scotch-skip and dibstones for an everlasting gossamer twilight…”  

The spoken subject-matter belied the speaker’s attitude. 

“Who are you, please?” the teacher cried, sitting as straight as a wooden set-square, protracting the hushed pause while the stranger manicured its claws and continued: 

“I know the fairies who play in the pippin orchards. I spin tales at night from beneath the bed-clothes, where further down I dare not reach my toes for fear of hurting the coily things by the footboard. I’m a version of thee, I’m a version of others yet to come … and soon I will join the procession between the night daisies, joining songs of such sad beauty…” 

Inexplicably, the words gave to Miss Western thoughts of tiny faces each with one finger placed on their pursed lips and of tenantless see-saws at sunset pivotting amid the twirling translucent girders of the golden hill-beams. 

“WHO ARE YOU?” 

He replied as quietly as he could. So quiet., it was easy to forget one had heard it in the first place. Miss Western’s eyes weltered with tears at the fading memory of his answer. There were now only shadows moving in the early evening breeze which entered from the window. She looked at the nearest desk scored with the anciently inked runnels, the incomprehensibly scored languages and graffitic tales of unlikely love. The pages of an arithmetic book fluttered over, full of nothing but interlocking black circles in meaningless patterns half-concealed by careless blots. 

The following day, with the weather turning back towards winter, Miss Western shivers. One of the Gostridges has just asked if she believes in ghosts. There was meaning in the questioner’s eyes. But at least even the Gostridges cannot summon sufficient courage to ask about curses and ancient gods and arcane rituals and such matters. The other tiny children giggle as they place their palms together like pink fleshy moths closing their dusted wings, this being morning prayer. Miss Western prays, too, that she will truly forget the tall stranger’s response to her frantic WHO-ARE-YOU last night. He had merely pointed at the empty desk with the scribbled-in arithmetic book fluttering upon it. 

***

I BLAME THE MOTHER

I knew George when he was a small boy. He was kept out of harm’s way in his father’s study, the window barred by the diffused but still articulate rays of the summer sun, a sun which always seemed to shine, probably because George was not allowed into the orchard garden to enjoy it. The glinting spines of the ranked books became a prison wall, insulating the boy from his god-given right to fresh air with the intellectual headiness of poetry and frowsty learning.

How did I know him? I was imported from a family of miscegenate second cousins to play ludo, snakes & ladders and, later, monopoly and whist. My role was the archetype boyhood chum. Pity I was a girl. But they put trousers on me and smarmed my hair down, dividing it with a ruler a third of the way across the hump of my skull.

I fell in with their designs. I pretended to like rugby and cricket, whilst sympathising openly with George’s lameness which prevented him from enjoying such formative activities. He had three legs. I cannot describe him properly, my selective memory having dulled the effect. My love for him I had to conceal, you see. It did something terrible to me … and, inevitably, to him.

He showed me some of his father’s books. George’s favourites were on the subject of female gods, for whom wars were no longer fought. Each time that he slowly extracted a volume from the shelf, he fleetingly placed his lips to the spine-top’s open slit to suck whatever was released by the mustiness. Then, returning to the desk scattered with board-game counters, he’d open the covers with an audible crack. One special book contained diagrams of the female form, which he’d try to explain. He was old for his age. I didn’t tell him I knew half of it already. But it opened my eyes. Many of the pages bore heavy foxing.

One day, George wasn’t there. Why they had transported me all the way to play with him, I cannot now remember. There was a bit of him left though – a lungful slice of stale breath where that special book had once sat in the shelf between two others.

I peered through the window to see a woman pegging out dirty clothes on the washing-line in the orchard garden. I could not see clearly enough to determine the anatomical nature of the skid-marked underwear blowing with the fitful sunless winds.

***

A MERE FAREWELL

It was like drowning in memories. Not those words about the whole of one’s life flashing by before your eyes as you suffer death by drowning. Because I could never swim in any event. Equally, I could rarely remember much about my life – but like most people, memories of things reside on some back burner waiting for their turn to take a curtain call. Except mine were fast asleep dreaming of things not themselves. Memories with memories of their own. False memories. My real memories having unreal memories as dreams. A concept I could hardly grasp. I’d rather depend on the old familiar places rather than places that never ever existed other than in the pipe dreams of those very familiar places hatching up unfamiliar places for themselves. Unfamiliar places disguised as familiar ones. Unfamiliar, I claim, because, they never existed. Until now.

I look out from inside my head away from these thoughts on paper. And wonder if I am the same person who wrote them down. I look down again to read them – and the print has changed in the meantime. The words now say different things from what I originally intended. Except they seem to be the same words. But words with different meanings – and when they are linked together in what I can only describe as sense-patterns, they keep flashing from one narrative sense to another, like a pulse. Or a strobe. Memories strobing. Faster and faster. Could I really be drowning in memories? The words seem to indicate that I am so doing. Slowly enough to record the process. But too quick to understand what is going on. People’s faces flashing by. Loves and hates interchanging. Various stages of myself stripped out in separate essences of self, none connected between. The only consistency is the ladder or tear in the very texture of the words as laid out in the page. They seem to be dividing like a Red Sea to leave an emptiness among the sense-patterns. A false syntax. A gap-strewn paragraph of thoughts and misthoughts. Memories taking over my mind with a force my mind can’t withstand even though it is the same mind that is creating this strange onslaught on itself.

One of the faces — flashing by in a trite stream of consciousness that I drown in — is you as a mere farewell. Simply that. The whirling onslaught slows to a silent last gasp of meaning. A face I recognise. It starts out, however, as a face without a feature. A white empty plate or recently emptied bowl. Then gradually a couple of eyes prick out. Wide rolling eyeballs that radiate an expression of knowing. Knowing me, if not itself. I say ‘it’ because there is no other word for a gradually emerging ghost of a person. Once it’s fleshed out by the ever-building flashes of identity that become stuck to it then I can begin to decide on he or she or me. I suggest me because I’m not yet convinced it’s not a mirror I see flashing into a steady state of existence. Rather than an explosion or implosion of a big bang.

I look down at the words again. I leave the slowly emerging features to thicken and define themselves. I feel the words may give me some clue as to the true resemblance of the face to whom or to what. The face itself is deceiving me as well as itself. Only the words can tell. The words will tell me who it is. And I notice that the crack in their texture has widened as if the tectonic plates of the sense-patterns are ever shifting to reveal a more meaningful pattern that is a white shape rather than a set of words describing a shape. A real shape rather than a shape imagined by the words I write. The whitening crack discards letters as if they are dead insects while it lays the paragraph into a flatland of nothingness. Alphabets fall off the edge of the paper like dead lemmings in full zombie flight. I shriek inwardly with fear. I seem to be heading towards some old familiar places that I once inhabited but had long since put out of my mind’s memory for fear of returning to them in the full flood of true present memory. Memories that are forming as new memories even as I think them. When does a memory become a memory? What is the time lapse needed to make a present event into a memory. A new unfamiliar place into an old familiar place. Place or face. Because a face is a sort of place. It has its own geography, its own secret alleys and hidden corners. Its own inhabitants sitting behind the eyes as if the eyes are windows to some apartments in a city’s high rise property. These little people look from the two eyeballs in the face, their own eyeballs rolling in their heads as they see some old familiar places for the first time. One hangs a huge rubbery nose between the two eyes as if hanging out a flag for a jubilee or something like a jubilee. A Mardi Gras. A trout stream. Or a fancy-dress festival that the city holds every year. The city is a strange one to them. It’s certainly not one of their pet old familiar places. Faces that find themselves in a foreign place.

I have taken my eye off the ball. The words have escaped my pen into new uncontrolled configurations of syntax and non-syntax, with that ever widening gap or crack that forces me to believe the meaning cannot bridge such an hiatus. And I have raised the head where I live in despair at controlling the words, raise it towards the ceiling, rising not with mere sight to see the rivers of geography in its cracked white plaster surface (otherwise blank). But the head actually rising in the air along with the sight itself to see it closer up. Either my neck has elongated like a giraffe’s or the head has actually separated itself to float like a fish towards the ceiling.

One particular crack in the ceiling is so deep I can see daylight through it to see a mansion’s roof fixed with faulty concrete. And my sight or the head that carries the sight escapes through it into the open air – and I am a mere speck of consciousness being wafted by the wind. At least I am safe from those words now. And from the old familiar places of meaning that each word familiarly contains, despite the horror that they would otherwise convey with the unfamiliar meanings that they felt themselves dutibound to convey to the unwary such as I who releases them on to the page. Each dot, each pixel of the marks being just another me. Just another beginning of a face. Drowning in memories, in anarchic thoughts and in the forgotten white airinesses of space where familiarity breeds contempt for any steady state or big bang. Because neither is right. The old peculiar place of dreams dreaming dreams that is the truth stream of Existence, yours and mine. The place that launched a thousand tench … no, an infinite number of familiar faces towards their inevitable sinking and drowning in the white water frenzy of words. 

Better drowning in words of any shape or colour than in a mere well called Heaven or Hell.

***

SO, M’LORD, WHAT COULD I DO?

The blanket that my grandmother (and my mother after her) had knitted from at least a century of tail-end wool was one of my most cherished possessions. Its brightly coloured squares were sewn together with no concern for matching, but beautiful nonetheless. Its beauty not only stemmed from such sentimental attachment but also from seeming to be a living creature which delighted in lying on top of me, blunting those shadows sharpened from the winter darkness. 

The rot set in, however, when I got myself a husband. It had been knitted upon the bone-needles of my mother and grandmother, who had lovingly clicked whole nights away watching it grow faster than any child of theirs, and so I knew the blanket could not be suffering from jealousy. It was a proud tradition in our family to marry, after all. No, I assumed that the stitches were loosening (and even laddering from square to square) because the blanket disapproved of the man I had chosen, not the fact he was my husband. It little cared to protect him from the cold. 

What option did I have then, m’lord, when I saw the unravelling, the pitiful thread-barren, the fraying and teasing out, the sheer worrying of its texture into straggly tangles? At first, I lay awake at night, listing to him snoring, my fingers fiddling uncontrollably with the tantalizing bobbles of wool, weaving the loose ends into cats’ cradles of torment: knotting and unknotting mischievous strands which should have stayed unknotted and knotted respectively. 

Luckily my conscience remained untrammelled. I pulled the blanket off him night after night, hoping he’d catch pneumonia from Jack Frost himself. He merely tugged it back in his sleep with a greater strength than that he possessed during his waking hours. In many ways, some of the blanket’s unseaming must be laid at the door of such antics. But not all. The blanket literally loathed my husband. 

So, m’lord, what could I do? I merely watched it suffocate him. You see, it didn’t need my help. How could I have managed to tame such a bucking monster with my own small hands? No, it were the blanket, m’lord, that killed my husband. How else could it have become threaded through him from one end to the other?

***

CEILING ZONES

How long that particular ghost had been a haunter and I had been its hunter, nobody knew but me. I lived in a mansion wherein my ancestors had spread seed for many generations. I was the prime stock, the elder brother, the one who, however long in the tooth, would take over when various deaths had worked through various layers of red tape.

The other siblings, some of still indeterminate gender, clustered at the foot of the television, mooning up at the screen. They cared little for the future, except for the scheduling of programmes. However, a girl among them, Edna, had only one eye for the flashing screen in the corner of the parlour: the other eye was for the more hazy, slightly less understandable, gradually more noticeable flickerings in the opposite corner by the hallway door. Being the Nineteen Fifties, reception was brilliant in neither corner. None of it was in colour, of course.

I knew about my parents’ bedroom in the higher reaches of the mansion, where they kept themselves to themselves. I was the only one allowed into its sanctity, where sleep was punctuated with what I later understood to be fitful conjugation. As I came upon them from the landing, breathless after the ascent of the steep stairs, I was eager to tell them of yet another sibling’s mysterious arrival, yet one more set of eyes to feed, a further reason to buy a bigger television to prevent arguments over viewing positions.

The parents would wave me out of the master bedroom, indicating the paltry postal order left on the tallboy by the oriental wardrobe: as if it were the end of their responsibility: and I would, with hangdog face, slouch back down the stairs towards the lower floors.

It was the darkest landing of all, midway between the attic and the cellar, that I saw Edna in company with a haunter (a ghost that had “come out” without fear of the consequences). She appeared wanton, lounging across several treads of the stairway. The haunter was equally relaxed, hanging from the false ceiling which a previous dynasty had built to prevent the stairs becoming frighteningly precipitous.

I could not be jealous but, being the elder brother, I felt responsible for my sister’s  life, especially when it involved associating with the long dead. The haunter seemed a trifle too laid back for its own good, as Edna coquettishly moved her head in its direction.

“Be off with you!” I boomed. The echoey darkness took away the edge of urgency. It was merely one more noise that time held endlessly in its maw, its only significance being in retrospect, when all the fateful twists and turns had been aggregated and assessed.

The haunter found it easy to ignore my interruption for, to such an entity, I did not exist. Wishful thinking or a state of in-denial by a ghost to block its would-be hunter, I guess. It must have  hear the undergrunts of the television a few floors below, but that was more like the unbroken hum of reality. By contrast, the odd punctuations by those such as myself, who had broken the rules of fate, well, they were merely to be shrugged off: and, as soon as ignored, forgotten: as soon as forgotten, never to have existed at all.

I watched the black and white shapeless whirligig assume dominion over the stairway. The fuzz and static of false hopes, condemned, derelict dreams and misguided visions made the whole area throb with bewigged and bepowdered figures. Escaped from one historical moment when heritage was only just starting its process of self-­perpetuation, these figures were the scions of the house, the long lost brethren who had knitted a whole skein of cousin arteries with few, if any, dropped stitches. It was a pity they had only twenty years in which to work and develop, since the mansion had only been built since just before the Second World War. During the blitz, ghosts had become more plentiful, but they were not of the right calibre, merely preening dandies, fancy dress pranksters, masqueraders of false-­bottom history…

As ghosts always faded behind truth, Edna herself became another ceiling, straight as a die, a smooth white slope, with mock-baroque scrolling as it turned corners: the mock stucco…

I descended to the television room and blew on the screen to brighten up the image. This was to allow the remaining siblings to see in closer to the heart of things, where a tube swelled, a valve fluxed: a box of tricky ghosts: and somebody banged on the ceiling to complain about the volume. 

I sobbed, for Edna had never existed. Her death wish was never to be granted by never having lived in the first place. If I  had known she was never to be my sister, I could have tried to love her properly.

I still had one dream to live, when I might become a haunter too and walk as if on air, between the boxes that now contained those who once sat outside staring into them. Or perhaps I was just another breed of ghosting as part of a small screen’s snowy shimmer.

.

 “Ghosts often disguise themselves as coved and cambered ceilings.” — Walter de La Mare, in a story he never wrote.

***

CONTINUED HERE: 

https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/disconnected-miniatures-2-by-df-lewis.html

Lost Endings (3) stories by D.F. Lewis

 Continued from here: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/lost-endings-2-stories-by-df-lewis.html

HOLE IN ONE

Whole and haven. Hole and Haven. Haven is only one letter short of Heaven. A place named Holland? Perhaps the Netherlands, the Heathen Lands, the Heaven Lands, the Heaving Lands after some holocaust of tides and coastal warming. Whole with a w is quite alien to the concept of hole without a w. But most unlikely it is the Holland as in the flattened and the windswept, those fens and dykes of the Below Lands, a place that, in the Double Dutch tongue, in that untranslatable Weirdtongue, has a name usually employed to label the wastes of time and space as threaded by all lost sailors of the living world. 

Yet we know the name more simply as Waterworld, a land hidden by unseasonable tides, a land that we all dream about from time to time, and, even if this name is lost in translation, we know it is some kind of haven or harbour for our boats when storms unexpectedly cause us to race towards Waterworld’s shimmery coast, a coast that some of us call Haven or Heaven, others of us call Hell or Hole.

Juses stood upon that unstable coast as only one with that name could stand upon it, as part of it, liquid coast and liquid man as one, juice with juice, mixed like a cocktail without a stick. He was once a Dutchman who had painted landscapes, but it was so ironical that his fate was to harbour himself in a land without landscapes at all. He raised a slanted edge of hand to his watering eyes as if in salute, but it was to protect his sight from the bright core of coastal warming positioned above where distant sea met a rippling horizon of distant sky. He had seen one of our boats plying its way toward the part of the coast where he waded in it. Or where it hugged him higher than wading boots could ever reach.

Juses had prepared himself to welcome the sighted boat into the relatively safe harbour or moated arbour that he called Holland Haven. He visualised the painting he might once have painted in oils or acrylics, but now in the water colour of his imagination: a seascape with a single solitary sail melting into or melting out of the worms of coastal warming that wriggled along the horizon’s length, such worms’ core or singularity firming and forming somewhat into a greyly coiled sun setting for the night amid its own tides of encroaching darkness. It was good that the boat looked as if it would soon reach the part of the coast wherein Juses’ feet were sunk, reaching it before any light in the Dutch Master’s water colour painting finally died.

He watched me carefully as I eventually disembarked from what had once been a boat. He dared not assist me, in case he sank into me, or me into him, thus prematurely destroying any separateness between us. I felt relieved that I had managed the voyage at all, reaching this relatively firm coast before the liquid light had spilled from the vessel of the sky.

I had been travelling forever, it seemed, during the rocking dreams of sleep that my fixed waking body had undergone while still on solid land. I had reached Holland Haven at last, I thought. I was on the brink of a wave’s culmination, the cusp of moment with moment, juice with juice. No sea defences needed at Holland Haven, because the sea and land had become at last an inevitable whole. Holistic, as description as well as name.

A torque of two doppelgängers. A ghost having now found its hunter.

***

GO GENTLY INTO THAT GOOD LIGHT

When I came downstairs in the middle of the night in the early Noughties or – as it turned out – very early in the morning, I discovered Edna in the living-room, squatting on the couch in her nightie, intently watching BBC News 24 on the TV. I had not previously noticed her going down the stairs from her room at such an ungodly hour – but, thinking back, it probably was that movement in itself having caused me to wake and feel the need for a visit to the loo which was in those days only downstairs and not also upstairs as it is now.

It felt as if I were entering a Science Fiction film scenario because the wide screen of our TV was showing flashing lights over the St. Paul’s Dome in London which the commentators could not explain. There was a hushed feel to the broadcast. Although live, it was taking its time to piece through the awakening awesomeness. A documentary in real time. And I gazed out of our window to see the beginning of the same slow lights and glints of metal in the sky above our own bungalow house that I called ironically a mansion, coming and going through a shimmeringly numinous blanket of what I assumed to be cloud. A milky grey, filled with a pulsing glow, one that contrasted with the blackness of the sky behind it. An aiaigasa of a threatening light show’s  self-encounter now being opened up above us, an arch of woven arches that not even a then future AI artist could possibly depict as straddling time itself.

Edna did not speak nor even slightly acknowledge my arrival in the room, having presumably been infected by the hushed whispers of the TV out-and-about commentators as they exchanged observations with the equally hushed anchor man in the studio. Obviously most of their reporters were still asleep or were already on their way to new reporting positions, rudely awoken by their mobiles. One disembodied female voice was even now discussing the huge slanting shaft of cathedral light (words that I’m sure she actually used to describe it perhaps as borrowed from what I had already written above) and her face eventually appeared on the screen as if to claim the description as hers. One could see the vast beacon or spotlight stretching from sky to earth behind her. She did not look scared. She did not look anything but business-like. I admired her. She fingered her ear as if the sound-plug had worked loose in the pent-up excitement of the occasion. It was whistling in her ear, I guessed. I called her Miss Earwhistles. Until I realised how rude that was.

It’s trite to say this now, but it all seemed like a dream. Edna and myself in the living-room staring at the TV screen which soon turned to its own form of lambent glow without the faces or voices to map the usual geography of news. Just the gradually emerging further images of the night sky’s light show that was duplicated through our window.

It was then I noticed the obvious. One sensed that it was as obvious as the original need for going to the loo but had taken its time to make itself known. My left foot was missing. I was amazed how I took this information as coolly as I did. There was a stump but no blood was present … and I must have used this leg – without any sense of pain – to walk down the stairs. Using it like a fixed walking-stick or crutch. A thick knee-knotted branch from a Canterbury Oak. I now saw Edna was hugging a foot as if she was the legendary log lady from Twin Peaks. But her dislocated appendage was as tall as the knee. Or the knee had become the foot itself. It must have been her own left leg as I could see only the single right one coming from the bottom of her nightie. At the point where the bent left knee should have been a part of the ridge of her lap was no evidence of blood from the thigh stump. Whatever had caused these injuries had been gentle enough to prevent major blood loss. But if Edna had her leg to nurse like a log (with St Elmo’s Fire playing along its bony rigging), where was my left foot? 

Back to the anchor in the studio…

Thank you. Reports are coming in of a dream sickness affecting the whole population. A whining whistle that makes each ear as big as a balloon. Bloated with a fine scrimshaw of veins like low-key rivers flowing with hushed currents towards a sea of white noise which, in turn, shafts like heavenly light from the dream to the very edge of reality which the dream fails to contain. Or fails so far.

Edna smiled. She had caught me in her dream. Or she in mine. How rude, like transgressing on Facebook, I thought. If we’d been sharing the same bed, this may never have happened. This would punish us for spending the night in separate rooms. All loving couples should make up their quarrels before the night begins. One should not go to sleep with the sound of unkind words still in your ears. Arguments should not be carried on beyond sleep. However, we had made up to some extent. A desultory forgiving. Symbolised by the hushed whispers. Thankfully, there was no blood. 

The cowed glances from the dream reporters and they now had little to say, it seemed, despite the world-shattering events going on around them. The lambent glows. The erstwhile earwhistles which were inferred as so high-pitched that silence was their only sign of existence. I switched off the TV with a sense of defiance. It vanished to a dot.

Yet my missing foot nagged me. But there it was on the sideboard next to the real world’s bowl of fruit, each toenail neatly manicured. It was slowly turning to soft wax threaded with a tracery of thin earth-wires which Edna limped over to light as if it were a candle with tangled wicks. Go gently into that good light.

We kissed. And smiled wistfully at the renewal of our love. Turning deaf ears to a slow leakage from reality to dream or vice versa. 

I do not know if we made up properly because later when the dream was completely forgotten by both of us: I said something to her: and she turned to me and said something so outrageous about the future, I assumed she was pulling my leg. And so it goes on. We dare not turn on the TV ever again. Except we did. And the anchor had gone.

***

MOTORWAY ARCHES

Hitchhiking, eh? Well, I gave it up years ago, before the world gave up hitchhikers and expected them to get real jobs and real cars, not that some of you will ever give this up, whatever the dangers. For me, it was a sore thumb, making me settle down, not wanting to stick out, not wanting to seem different. You know, when you get older, you can never remember back fully to when you were young. To that foreigner who once possessed your body and called it theirs.

But then, just before they put me away, put me away for good in some (god)forsaken home, I had the chance to go hitchhiking again. You would never have believed that an old crock like me could walk at all let alone have the gumption to find a carriageway carrying cars and lorries that were likely to stop when seeing a bent silhouette at the last old fingerpost next to the smooth blue motorway sign with letters and numbers. A motorway crossing counties like an arch with thick yellow smog hugging it was then only just a dream. These motorways were real, but each harboured such a future ghost of itself in spades.

Where did I want to go, you ask? And why not catch a train? Or, better, a bus pass instead, using a card with my wrinkled face on it, a card they gave all oldies like me to travel free and easy. No need to stick out my thumb at all in the cold cold days that I called my winter. Once a perpetual autumn now come out of its closet as winter.

But I did not want a lift to any old place. I wanted a lift to Hell.

Not that those travelling the bus-passes and bypasses of our land were likely to want to go there at all. They were probably going to some posh place to see some friends or relatives posher than them. I’d have to persuade someone I stopped behind the wheel that it was in their interests to take me somewhere else, instead. Somewhere where they didn’t want to go. You see, I wanted a lift to Hell.

I was sitting there watching the cars and lorries speed by. How could I even hope to stop them short of stepping in front of them, and then the brakes would not be their real brakes screeching under their foot, but my own flesh and bone snagging between tyre and concrete. 

But I did manage to stop one car… It had a driver sitting stock upright in the front seat, a flashing sign saying the passenger airbag was switched off. I shook my head, I refused his offer of a lift. Beggars could be choosers, I thought. The right lift would come along sooner or later. I just didn’t like his face, whether or not he liked mine. I tapped the side of his car and he drove off. I resumed my bent silhouette at the last fingerpost, thumb stuck into the air. I did did not want a lift to any old place. I wanted a lift to Hell.

Then, all of a sudden, another oldie, even older than me, came hobbling along the carriageway towards the same hard shoulder where I was sitting. His trousers sagged and sat ill against his scrawny thighs, a dark patch as evidence of the slowness of getting lifts these days, and I asked him why he hadn’t found a quiet spot, a dignified darkness, to relieve himself along this stretch of the highway. He shrugged and said something I couldn’t catch. He, too, though, I guess, wanted a lift to Hell.

Soon, there were a number of other oldies gathered on the same hard shoulder. Looking into a sky sown with starlight like a vast screen or arch they could not control from where they stood as anchors. They knew somehow where I was going. Something had told them as it had told me. And they all wanted to hitch the same lift as me, all of them become bent silhouettes like me, each with a thumb joyfully upraised. An odd finger, too. Even a left leg lifted by one of us who was female.

They didn’t want a lift to any old place. They wanted a lift in a different direction from wherever they’d all just come. They all wanted a lift to Hell.

***

GOD HAD ONLY ONE ROOM IN HEAVEN

The Stood Bedroom was a single story. 

Standalone, a bedroom house, a house with only a bedroom, and four exterior walls and two windows halfway up or halfway down as formed by corners like sharp, right-angled bays, with curtains inside to match and pull in different directions from halfway across. Commonly called a Stood Bedroom.

Inside, it was indeed a bedroom with no sign of its doubling as a bedsit for the purpose of entertaining guests. Meanwhile, it was only guests who knew that there was a whole catacomb of rooms beneath this single bedroom, with stairs leading down to them, and thus such extra rooms were naturally below ground level.

Kitchen, bathroom, sitting-room, even a hall and a music room, but, of course, no sun lounge nor conservatory. Although there was a type of garden-shed at the end of the cellar area. Where tools were stowed. The walls were provided by the earth itself. So repair work was minimal. Even though parts of it were real mucky.

This Stood Bedroom stood close to a council housing-estate. The houses there were normal two-up-two-down ones that sat above ground level, back-to-back as in the old days. (The clearance lorries and demolition workers only seemed to do work in other towns and cities nearby.) This estate housing had single sash-windows in most walls, except where the walls had been subject to defenestration laws. The inhabitants do not count in this story. Their views not sought. Their ghosts never hunted. Such abodes never had ghosts anyway, not even cellar ones, as they had no cellars. Just lofts without ladders. And asbestos in their roofs.

A modern mansion proper stood on the brow of a hill overseeing it all, and it is easy to imagine envy of its status and of those within it, till it was discovered it was made from faulty concrete. Then laughter rang out, instead. And being modern, no need to mention that this mansion had not even the provenance of ghosts. 

The Stood Bedroom, meantime, was only understood by its guests below stairs they never climbed, for want of grounding.

***

DEATH IN THE ATTIC

It was meant to be in the mansion’s roof, of course. But that was not a given, because there was no easy way to find a door upwards into its cavities. Hey Joe, the latest hit by Jimi Hendrix, was playing on Pick of the Pops when Edna again mentioned the status of her home’s attic: “It’s gone.”

“What’s gone?” I asked, knowing full well the answer to my question. Since reaching old age, she had specialised in recurrent identical statements, all of them referring to the supposed missing attic.

“Let’s spend the night together.”

That was not Edna – nor, me, for that matter. It was the next record being played on the wireless. It was considered to be a very naughty record in those days. I need not tell you it was by the Rolling Stones. Or perhaps I do. Matthew and Son was soon to be the next one, by Cat Stevens. And Edna’s cat she called Mew wound itself round the chair leg, pervasively purring against the noise. Not very good wireless reception, with there being much static on the medium wave, no doubt caused by someone electric-mowing outside somewhere. The much complained-about neighbour. The static sounded even louder than the mowing.

After a long considered delay, and with brows creased, Edna elicited a noise herself. A ptcha or a tut. Not sure which. A cluck of the tongue, at least. That filled in for a thousand words I had heard from her during previous visits. Over cups of tea and choice iced slices.

Mew was now upon my lap — to make a change, I assumed, from curling up like a black rose on hers.  

The attic gone missing, she said, used to be reachable from one of the landings at the top of the stairs. Full of bric à brac, she said, and old toys she played with from the ground zero of her life. I don’t now remember which of us first used that rather odd expression, but it seemed to suit a certain no man’s land of life before memory was able to begin.

I had gained the impression that Edna’s family had closed up any such attic following a police investigation about an event, deliberate or accidental, that had occurred there. But closing an attic should not entail that attic actually vanishing. I never managed to get her to clarify it to my satisfaction. It was something I am sure she ached to tell me — if she could. But I did wonder whether there was a scar left where a door or some other sort of hatch had been sealed up. There were two main landings to consider and I had often stood at each position staring up at the ceilings and imagined all manner of shapes and sizes of decorative realignment. I had also stood outside staring up at the top of the house to gauge where the attic must have been when it was an attic.

“I am a believer.”

That again was neither of us speaking but just the last record on Pick of the Pops. The number one record that week by the Monkees. She liked the programme’s DJ, Alan Freeman, she claimed. Fluff, some called him.

I heard the loud click as Edna switched off the wireless after the record finished. Even so, I tested out the thought as I stood on the optimum landing examining the optimum ceiling, repeating the words of the last song title.

Edna called up the stairs, asking if I was alright. I did not reply. I had clambered up somewhere she would never find me, as if I wanted to be the last memory she would ever have. But a loft ladder does not always lead to a loft. And an eaves cupboard can never be called an attic.

The last sound I heard was just the cluck of a tongue. Oh my, no one ever died in that house. Only memories of people and who they were, or still are.

I crouched up there on the open rafters with Joe. Hopefully, Matthew, too. And an odd organ grinder’s monkey. Surrounded by the mewing of Mew. I shall go eventually even higher towards the roof and change the old story title above to a new one. It never represented a familiar enough song you could sing along with, anyway.  But seemingly Mew knew where the wireless’s aerial was situated, to achieve the optimum signal. The whole reason I was up there at all!

The pervasive mowing suddenly stopped outside.

***

YOU WILL KNOW WHAT YOU WANT WHEN YOU SEE IT

The attic in question was one where you would expect a ghost to reside – well, at the time I had no real experience of the attic to judge that was the case, as I had not yet visited the attic. It was simply in hindsight that the ghost appeared in it after I had visited the attic. It wasn’t there at the time I visited the attic, but I sensed that a ghost would be visiting the attic after I had left it. Perhaps ghosts are like that, after-the-event visitors, and this is why nobody ever really sees a ghost or can prove that one can exist. There are ghosts, though; it’s just they are in places when I am not in them myself. Yet the places have a feel that a ghost is coming to visit it later. 

In the attic – my spinster aunt’s attic – I found a case in point. She asked me to fetch something from it as she was now too old to climb up there.

“OK, Auntie, what’s it you want from it?”

I had never been to her attic before, so I could not visualise what she might want from it. For all I knew, it was completely empty. Or it was full of things that would be difficult to get out as they had been put up there before the attic’s hatch had been reduced in size during a period of rebuilding and redecoration. Or it was full of toys and old dolls and other personal things – which was a more likely possibility than the other two!

She stared at me for a few moments and said: “You will know what I want when you see it.”

I looked quizzically, and so did she. I shrugged to myself and got up to start my mission to the attic.

It was indeed a difficult climb – with a ladder that creaked louder than any ghost, I thought.

I did manage to clamber through the hatch – but there was no attic light. I felt cobwebs or all sorts of imaginary fingertips touching my face. Auntie had not told me to take a torch. Common sense now told me, however, that I should have made better plans. And I could not get her to hear me or me her, although I had left her at the foot of the creaking ladder. So, how could I possibly guess what she wanted me to bring down when I had nothing I could see to choose from. Then, I realised I was in the wrong attic. She must have forgotten to tell me or, on second thoughts, I had forgotten that she had told me that there were two separate attics in this mansion with no connection between them. The ghost must have been in the other one. And always would be. 

And she must have been standing at the foot of a quieter ladder somewhere else.