POST-GESTALT DFL FICTIONS (7)

 CHANCERY AVENUE

A man who could only count to twelve and blew kisses with a ‘have on you’ outburst of spittle, passed by but not before ushering in the story of George in an ill-go-rhythm of words. 

Indeed, for this George, ‘chancery’ was an expression he used to describe life itself, life being a phenomenon that was never subject to any conceivable law, but simply a rash of randomnesses, yes, a chancery of mazy mischances! A happenstance of devils and gods masquerading as rulers under their own laws, but really they were agents of enforced angles for angels that did not exist. George’s own spiritual geometry was certainly not a whimsical set of conspiracy theories, but his sense of chancery was paradoxically steeped in a yearning for such certainty —  that an after life was already waiting for him. Death was one further shake of the dice for his counter to be moved to a different board of ruled-out squares. George mischievously sniffed at the fate he set himself to follow while all along believing in it faithfully. Snakes and ladders made a ludo of everyone, once upon a time. Geology a loess of nous or gneiss.

But how can such ‘certainty’ of a yearned-for after life be reconciled with any sense of chancery in the terms that George had prescribed it? A lawless law that filled every court of the land now prevailed and, as some may say, had been increasingly demonstrated towards where such a loss happened for real today. Judges in wigs who were just as fallible as George sat in benches of illogical infallibility disguised as the ultimate logic of logic itself. Teachers for third-formers in schools had set squares that bent and wavered with every quirk of character and opposing personality. The only real certainty, George finally realised, was the art of mathematics. This ‘art’, like other arts, was, however, just another moving feast of interpretation about uncertainty leading to an aesthetic pleasure at such crafted designs of beauty or constructive distastes for dystopia. His template of contemplation, meantime, became as abstract or amorphous as what made him have the thoughts that are adumbrated here in his name by the imprecision of words. The empirical rigour of experimental rules that now told his story by a snort of disdain from a passing stranger instead of by an intoning of evidence gathered for scrutiny.

George sat in his wig, presiding over the guilt or innocence of every jury member that had been brought in before him, gathered off the street by chance choice in such a grouping of twelve, each of them staring up at him with passive eyes. No single person among them to be tried, except all or none of them. A few jurors he seemed to know, the others not, or forgotten. They spoke, by a unison voice, their vows of ‘nothing but the truth’ to an intrusive usher with a bible. Witnesses were called, but none of them come to this façade of something deeper than what is plainly told. 

“Nothing but the truth,” George echoed in a ritual refrain, again and again. And he muttered to himself of irrational numbers and the value of nothing in the quadratic avenues of algorithms disguised as school algebra. Were there candelabra in heaven? Fiery torches in hell? Protractors within the otherwise empty clockcases of time? Even a sad judge like George had a speck of Judas in his soul, as he placed a pitch black cloth on his head, and sneezed into the open courtroom of twelve jurors without intervention of hands or hankie. The latter was already aloft on his wig. The formers’ fingers making signs of blessing.

***

THE BRICKLAYER’S DILEMMA

Or 

The Disconnecteed Diptych

(i)

They carefully laid the vinyl recording of ‘Suite Italienne’ on the gramophone turntable. The hole in the middle of the dog and horn label neatly fitted the short spindle, after a judicious wiggling of it into place. No autochange device for them as that might have damaged the vulnerable grooves. 

In those old days, one did not need to specify the ‘vinyl’ epithet to disconnect it from the more compact version that eventually — we now know — followed it. And ‘one’ was an even more fitting  pronoun than ‘you’ to distinguish ‘them’ from me.

As the sapphire needle hit the grooves running, they awaited the seemingly untypical Stravinsky sounds to delight them, having forgotten that the suite’s actual ‘tunes’ derived from the more familiar name of Pulcinella. 

The day-job on the site had taken a lot out of them, and now was the time to relax with music. A hod full of back-breaking bricks on their back had to be managed skilfully so that the unbroken bricks stayed unbroken. Their own back, too. An occupation of two distinct disciplines: the first of loads and balances in a heavy-lifting exercise of utter strength and the second of Dick Whittington marching off to London with his small bag of belongings as ballast to the shoulder stick he forgot was resting in his hand, the downward pressure of which was, as if by magic, a counterweight to what belonged to him, then the skilful yet disciplined laying of bricks into set patterns of formulaic stability — the cement between being the story material that held all these disconnected building blocks of plot and character together. 

(ii)

In the old days, just after the cusp of heavy-lifted 78s became lighter-weight 45s, there were songs about seeing an alligator later, about purple people-eaters. Johnny with his hurricanes. Charlie Gracie’s butterfly. Duane’s bass guitar. Buddy’s pointy leaves. And a not so familiar name these days, thus forgotten, who had a one-hit wonder with The Song of Builder Matilda. You could hear all such songs – even Builder Matilda – on mighty wurlitzers of the musical spirit called Juke Boxes each with a tentacular arm taking its pick from the shuttling whorl of black discs and slapping it down … the disc’s middle missing: punched out – and, indeed, in those days, one never heard a single middle, but just the beginnings and ends. Like the whole of life, with things going blurred with strangeness in one’s twenties and thirties — and since dying in one’s fifties those fuzzy years became your lost middle. The middle that was punched out to make a bigger empty hole … so that the brimming music could be threaded by the chunky central spindle as it dropped with a plop upon a round rubber mat that all those Juke Boxes had at their spinning heart. Where the revolutions per minute were, should they be counted. Where the grooving was. Where the friction was. Where the needle was. Where the needle sometimes got stuck, hanging from your pick-up like a huge foreign insect with a tubular torso. 

Yes, that was their lost middle. Once upon a time, though, they woke up to find themselves barely forty-five, let alone fifty, however much judicious wiggling they did to make themselves even younger at thirty-three! They looked downhill in both directions of coming and going. Yearning for the spires of an imaginary Heaven, not London Town. Finally, they even hoped to meet their God and Maker, their own Builder Matilda in the skies. A ‘continuous performance’ of old cinema days.

You’d forgotten your name. But it came back to you briefly when you reached the magical age of seventy-eight  – before you forgot your name or its replacement code yet again: this time forgotten forever. ‘Forever’ here is doing a lot of heavy-lifting for just one word’s meaning, I guess.  A back with countless backs to carry.

***

SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUSTBIN

There was no mishap for it, Brad thought.  The lady, blousey and boozy Louise, was not his girl friend simply because his ex had dumped him for another dude, but good old Louise was someone he would have dated anyway, even if his latest ex had never been his ex in the first place or now remained a prospect who he hoped one day would become an ex ex. 

He really must put that particular ex in the final exit of his mind, and to concentrate on Lady Louise, or Big L as he thought of her, a woman with an even bigger heart, and to settle down for a while, when such whiles, these days, could last for a lifetime or at least for a hop, skip and jump of time which would seem like a lifetime.

Brad had done Big L a big injustice; she was never boozy at all. He just liked the word that seemed to go with ‘blousey’, the latter epithet only being true in plainly objective terms by dint of the fact that she often wore a floral one — with a skirt to nearly match it and with far more make-up than his previous ex would ever have considered for temporary  use on her face let alone as permanent tattoos on her legs and arms. The nose rings were common to both ladies, it had to be said. All such marks and trinkets, meantime, told their own backstories, which he needed to ‘read’ as far as possible before even contemplating linking up with their fronts. No, if the real truth were told, it was Brad who was the boozy one. Lazy, too, unlike either lady. 

He tried to scribble all this down before he became a self-induced write-off and to get his thoughts as straight as the lines of the eventual printed version, while casting himself in the third person singular. Nothing could be made up, and with no false appendages, but merely to set out the unvarnished truth. But he needed sustenance to get the awkward text skimmed off to reveal a more unpretentious clarity. The beery belly was his downfall, though, in his room empty of any ladies, let alone invented ones! Shortlisted for the slush pile with one mishop of love’s rebound into his own softening footprints behind him. A surly lady with earrings on a stool had raised a red flag, anyway. He should dust himself off before he became the has-been he had always been.

At least, with regard to the beer, that was his measure beyond which he never went, so thankfully he had never resorted to anything harder. This was difficult enough.

***

THE ALEXANDER QUADRANGLE

Alexander once loved Hannah, until the palindromic novelty of her name wore off. Which is hardly the correct context for later when he coincidentally — because of his own name — encountered the ‘The Alexander Quadrangle’ terminology in textbook of medical exercises, and he immediately thought of some painful sessions in the wrangling out of already existing pains by a mathematical theory involving four sided shapes, that inevitably meant four different angles of manipulative traction. The mediaeval rack was not even close. The impending incentive of a morning star that would kiss his brows if he did not comply was only at the back of the mind, if a consideration at all.

No, none of these things, and Alexander soon gathered the terminology related to a place that really existed. A geometric area of walkway between the buildings of a college that the students called a quad. There had been some demonstrations, with flags, about it not being called Alexandra, but such demands soon died a death after the Big Change. One little old lady with a red flag stating ‘We want DER not DRA’, however, did remain upon sit-in but she ended up being a diaphanous bag-lady whom everyone turned a blind eye to. She probably was never there at all. Often, later  she returned as a real ghost present at one angle of the rhombus shape that was between the science block and the English literature one, the library at another angle, and shoppery in yet another, and she was known as the ‘earring lady’ because she often rang each one in front of the student accommodation that towered at the end of the liminal space that she then occupied in the said quad. The hindsight fact, though, was that everyone wanted the DER alone and not the DRA, the latter to be airbrushed from history, even to the extent that nobody knew there once was a Princess Alexandra in England, a stately lady who gave out degree certificates without anyone blinking an eyelid. No connection with the so-called earring ghost, however.

Alexander sighed, just as he terminated his research there. He had not realised that tinnitus could be a terminal disease. The Belltower of Babel the climbing of which gave him vascular vertigo that no amount of misangled yoga could cure. A pain he could not bear, until he changed his name to Barbara.

***

CIRCULATING LIBRARY

The Babel Stockroom was the most useful part of the library with carrels galore to use for private study, as silent as the name wasn’t! I ways had to laugh at that. But even serious bibliophiles needed a sense of humour when wading through dusty coughs of tome after dusty tome each with hard covers, all spines embossed by letters of gold. Paradoxically, their dry contents often brought a smile to the ugly face, as I thought of my lead Professor who had set me the task of trawling such boarded-up texts for knowledge for which he would later take credit. His name was Asinine, or at least that was how it sounded when on the gleefully whispering lips of my fellow students ambitious for would-be degrees as Masters. Well, to be serious for a moment, Professor Asternine was a wise old soul but a bit set in his ways. Whatever we told him about the carrels from within which the library seemed more like a dizziness induced by a screen than a steady book in the hand, it was like water off his duck’s back. We called it the Great Giddiness, as the whole world, outside of the words we pored over, seemed to go round and round, while the studious carrel in which we sat remained as still and silent as a forgotten pin-cushion in these library galleries with meaning-opposite names. Imagine my consternation, when, one day, I heard the pad-pad of old Asinine’s slippers, evidently coming to check on my progress. I quickly took to studiously riffling the pages of the biggest book I could muster from the pile of volumes on my carrel desk. Only to find it wasn’t a book at all but a sort of ring-folder with foxed and crimped papers clamped in a dissorted pile within it. So not exactly a ring-folder but a box-file, this being a developing situation, as I turned my face up to give the new arrival a weak smile. It was a ring-folder, after all, as I heard the beginnings of why this was the Babel Stockroom, with a quasimodo of peals making iron echoes in the humid air around me. Volumes with volume. I clamped my hands to my ears, and closed my eyes. I always wondered why these relatively small carrels needed a revolving chair more fitting for an open-plan office rather than it being a static seat on firm wooden struts, an antique chair on four legs if possible, I now asked.  I felt a touch on my elbow as if to staunch the developing situation developing any further. At least this was sanctuary from the more inimical worlds outside, spinning uncontrolled beyond these relatively peaceful groves of learning inside the library. I had been steadied in my student anxieties by one single touch on the elbow, enabling me to ignore what went on below the plimsoll line of a typical student’s mental ill-health as caused by such a boarded-up lockdown. Even the pealing bells had been blocked. I started coughing again. To be serious for another moment, I had forgotten I had bluetooths hidden in my lugs. Oh, to be in one of the library’s Vertigo Rooms further up in the attic area. A mansion, if not a tower, without roof or chimneys. The air would be fresher, if colder, but with teetering views at which to scream! A sense of humour, remember.

***

PENITENTIAL PSALMS

Those designated as Penitential Psalms are numbered 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143. And when Danielle looked at these numbers, she was convinced she saw a mathematical sequence in them. She had originally been brought up in the religion for which these psalms were important. But today, in middle age, she was aggravated by such a religion, and scorned it as strongly as any lapsed member of it could possibly do. She had become more interested in numbers and their nature than in the ineffable or the numinous she had been taught as a child. This new interest was not a conspiracy-theory sort of numerology, but a genuine belief in the power of numbers being greater than words. Numbers themselves ordered with consecutive letters as Providential Psalms. Algebraic  psalms that had (a), (b), (c) &c. as their reference points. Her new boy friend — one in a long line of others — looked askance at her methods of self-worth, and he declared suddenly that he was an avid faith-healer, and before she could knock the relationship on the head at such an admission, he explained that he used the Penitential Psalms as an instrument in cleansing and thus healing his clients, and perhaps such a coincidence proved that they should stay together forever. She had struggled long with the aforementioned sequence of Psalm numbers in the Bible, and now she was shaken to the core, that her interest in numbers, in actual fact, could be fully in synergy with religion, however numinous the latter was. Danielle picked up the Bible she’d owned since the death of her parents and naturally started revisiting it via the Book of Numbers until … meaning, meaning, words written in a mysterious hand upon her bedroom wall, soon trickling off into meaningless numbers. Amen.

He got his coat. 

***

ALICE LEAVES HOME

“And what of the multitude who will believe anything if only the lie is big and noisy enough? Who cling to their leaders who prepared the evil, and saw the evil through, and made a worse evil to follow it, and are even now tired and helpless before an evil by the side of which the other would be good?” — Oliver Onions, from THE ROPE IN THE RAFTERS (1935)

Till now, of course.

And what of Alice? She never found her own wonderland wherein she could rule the roost over red-hearted queens and teflon pans. “Six sixes are thirty six,” she often intoned to herself, in a refrain that could last forever if she had enough breath to mutter it under. Afternoon teas spreading around her like nostalgia sweetened by angels. Beneath the tablecloth, just bare wood, stained with older meals when the noisy individuals were under her thumb, and public bars were crowded just for her flirting banter. An invisible smile upon her face disguised as a real one. She had their measure, these evil rulers of big cities where such tyrants sat in offices and counted as far as ten. They could not multiply, only divide by intent and arithmetical error. Till they zoomed off to goodness knows where, perhaps a raftered attic that became an open plan workplace, a virtual vista upon money-making without resort to the foul breath of other mortals. If Alice had lived long enough, she’d’ve never worn a light blue mask but welcomed everyone with a kind kiss or, at least a handshake still dirty from travelling. Elbow to elbow would never be a thing for her, had she lived long enough, I say, had she lived long enough, I say, her wayward grandson’s own repeated refrain.  

She once treadled the Singer machine with cigarette ash growing from the filter end lolling in her mouth.  She’d sometimes laugh and do a defiant jig, and then left home for her own open plan vista, a reality far below of small houses and trains, a place to which she hastened, before the tyrants learnt to lie through their teeth with the conviction of mad hatters. All became evil compared to her good. And there was another refrain forgotten even upon the point of remembering it. Alice did come home again, however, but to whose home? She now the queen of red hearts. And where is she now? Tatting and tutting, no doubt. Playing in her post-advancement with the patience of biro wordgames, as was her regular wont down here. I do the same, sort of, in my miniature way, while still advancing, but just as wayward as her.

There’s always hope after the latest now. Not too small, not too big. Home again, home again, jiggety-jig

***

WHERE ZELENKA AND ZORN COME TOGETHER

Trigger warning: this Miniature of mine in several keys ends with a bathetic neologism. Jan Dismas Zelenka, the Baroque composer, somehow found himself listening to the Beatles. He had heard nothing like it since creating, painstakingly on handwritten staves, his own version of ‘Dixit Dominus’ but with a unique ‘Amen’ as imprimatur for posterity. He had studied all the Psalms, true, but why he chose no. 113 as his baseline remains a mystery, bearing in mind that those designated as Penitential Psalms had been numbered 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143. A magical sequence of mathematics to die for, give or take an occasional Visitor from Porlock — a tantalising run of numbers  that 113 could only occlude, scholars said. 

John Zorn — the avant garde jazz musician of much later in the essential sequence of words and numbers if not in the normal timelines upon our world — was also said, by scholars, to compose in the ‘classical’ idiom, thus straddling the styles as well as the chasms of history, whereby, quite unpremeditatedly, insects scaled up from between the symphonic staves of Kalevi Aho and, surely, given impossible hindsight, such crawling notations became the monsters that overtook a human dystopia that once had already claimed victory over the humans who had caused it in the first place. At source. Then as well as now. A palimpsest of Z with Z, and the rest of the alphabet cloaked in a defunct future of hopeless salvation.

Ah, men. Two dismal-looking old ones could be seen scrabbling in the wastebin at the park’s entrance near where I lived, struggling to seek I know not what. I peered through my watchful binoculars, through which I blamed many things that I saw, and chuckled when they voraciously tugged out piles of musical scores but nothing I assumed they could have wanted to find to eat. Ah ha, how wrong I was. I found myself, in fact, treated with a viable vision of visionary visible music as they took blowable and scrapeable and bangable implements from their pockets, therefrom to soar with the figurative angels into space, our only means of space-craft with the name Psalmation embossed on its side, as it turned out, to escape what we had irretrievably done to the world, i.e. that  perfect storm of synchrocities with consequent diaspora, all aligned with what had also crept upon us, almost unawares, from every point of the compass. Points that had become unaccountable numbers, not the usual letters of N, S, W, and E. Music in ricochet with music and a recurrent ‘big bang’ to hang onto until the closing Amen. The last chance Psalmoon. 

POST-GESTALT DFL FICTIONS (6)

 SHOWER TALK

Angus knew many people had their best thoughts when showering themselves at the beginning of the day. Many, too, sang songs there.  A few, though, actually talked to themselves, as if addressing nobody but the power-driven spray that spread over them in fleeting seconds of time and then vanished down the outlet grille. Angus’ opening gambit of speech — after first stepping into the blinding palaver of potential lather that became as ephemeral as life itself — was to enunciate in a false voice of adopted slang: “Hello, John’s gotta new mottah!” The ‘o’ in the corrupted spelling of ‘mottah’ being strung out beyond temporality to represent ‘motor’ as a stretched limo. ‘Hello’, too, extended into gustily drawled syllables of mock Cockney. He somehow knew subconsciously that this word was often spelt as ‘hallo’ or ‘hullo’. Rarely the latter, although he’d seen it thus in official print.

Then, as if any sort of behaviour were allowed without being called weird, he told himself short stories in the shower — aloud!  Short stories that were  shortened into Drabbles — the latter being the official dictionary term for witty caprices of prose comprising exactly one hundred words each. Soon as spoken, though, forgotten. Otherwise, Angus would’ve had a million such Drabbles to impart to paper and posterity. Alexei Sayle, the instigator by means of his song’s expression serving as the title of each one, would be proud to have been such a prompter of potential literature via the whimsical auspices of Angus himself, even though any such triggered Drabbles tended to fizzle out into the residual dribbles of the shower’s now spent motive force. An unseemly spluttering that became a single drip that dangled seemingly forever from the drooping head.

The actual caprice above was not a Drabble at all, Angus guessed by miscounting its words. But it was one simply about one — a miniature doubled down upon paper in the showy longhand of official perpetuity by someone else whose proper name posterity falsely shortened to John.

***

A TOWN CALLED FARRAGO

I find myself gradually becoming more forgetful. However, it is fascinating to study, in real-time, the gestalt of this personal entropy phenomenon from within myself. A slip solipsism during which process my acts of music listening, dabbling in photography and writing fiction miniatures are an invaluable support along with the equally invaluable support of my close family, closely followed by my on-line ‘friends’ whom I ‘follow’, some of them quite closely, who may be closely reading this. Closeness as a form of unknown beyonds. Reading or reviewing fiction books, processes increasingly beyond me, with concentration now creating farragos of meaning and purpose instead of synchronicities and serendipities. Connections only disconnect, yes, no big deal. Just wanted to put all this out there.

Although your fresh fiction books are now bereft of my attention, they will still exist without me. As does everything else, but where does truth stop and fiction begin, the exhausted stranger wonders, checking his watch to see if it’s his best time he’s done today or not. Closely followed, he stares into a shop window and becomes a breathless character in a story that this should have been at the start. A shop window with nothing but minimal residua behind it, and most of the other shops are shuttered, but many people still mill about on the sea front or flap about in the sluggish sea, especially today when confusion reigns as a synonym of an earlier word I have now forgotten. The pier still thrives and the sea front’s gardens are well cultivated but the town’s hinterland is more of a conundrum. A fiction miniature that becomes a mock marathon of Innsmouth amphibians like wild mini-brains scattering from the Pavilion Bowl intent on winning the marathon race in different directions of marked-out routes, with breaths lost at each beat of their presumed hearts. It is what it is forever; you can even read it beyond its finishing line because the words can chase themselves beyond the throwing arcs of an umpire’s time measurement — even after the author of this forgotten farrago has vanished and thus ceased writing it. Closely followed by what never followed it at all. And I try to disown most of its racing beyond its own beyond, but I know the invaluable paragraph above this second paragraph still stands. Its ink never running.

***

THE BLIGHTED WRANGLER

Candlelight hardly ever works well on dark breezy beaches. Whether it was dealing with disputes between people or the handling of horses, there was no doubt that Edwin could be called a wrangler supreme. I suppose that was because he was effective at both activities, if not simultaneously! Georgina first met Edwin when she, too, was groomed to be a groom while at an important racing stable doubling as a ranch in the USA. And they both got involved in political divisions amid the rest of the stable staff, a climate of prejudices that prevailed at that time and in that place, and the nature of the bitter polarities involved can now be easily empathised with. Since then, history has passed on, as it always does, and the pair of them coincidentally parted company on the cusp of the Big Change. But, by complete chance, they met again in England during this country’s latest Civil War, on the north east Essex coast, where they happened to be employed as camp adjutants on the edge of an erstwhile seaside holiday resort. A camp once called Butlins long before either had been born. They had been issued with neighbouring chalets that were more like bivouacs, and Georgina could not help noticing that Edwin had aged considerably, far more so than the number of ensued years should have accounted for. A strawberry mark in the shape of a tiny face had appeared on his right elbow as if it had always been a birthmark. But she knew it wasn’t, until, she began to doubt if he was the same man, despite having common memories with her from when they were supposedly in America together. There was something slightly ‘off’ in his behaviour or demeanour that nagged at her.  Something out of kilter with the man she used to know. Not a previous fling exactly, but certainly a friendship that went beyond friendship. It was no accident that the word ‘blight’ was only one letter more than ‘light’, or the latter one letter short, and which of them articulated this oblique conceit remains a type of mystery that one stares into the grey waves of the North Sea to somehow solve. She imagined herself back into the old days on the so-called ranch, wondering which branch of destiny each had taken since then. Both self-evidently seemed to have been through the wringer. On later scrutiny close-up, she saw that the tiny face on his elbow was hers. Still, she often tended to see faces in the clouds when anybody else would see none. It depended on the light, and whether the light was coming or going. A glow, glimmer, twinkle or direct beam in equine eyes to be tamed. A scarlet sparkle from a fire’s reflection in a stirrup cup of celebratory wine. And Georgina heard Edwin’s whispers about wars. Wars for her ears alone. Strangely calming rather than inflaming whispers as they shivered — shilly-shallying together on the cold sand — wondering whether to break open the tins of beef-jerky they had stolen from a beach hut near the open concrete wastes where the Butlins holiday camp used to be situated before the Big Change was finally flung across the Atlantic, later to slowly infiltrate England. But it was the latter country that had already snuffed out its light by more than just the figurative red sea’s division from nearer neighbours across a far narrower body of waves than the Atlantic. Whispers can be mangled in both directions of sound, squeezing echoes into roughly ranged ranks of tamed insistence. Mark my words.

***

SPIKY BALLS

The singular star rose prematurely, even before dawn was possible. Then another, and another, static meteors or asteroids, as they sparkled steadfastly and, once risen, remained in perfect stasis. If stars’ sparkles could be described as spikes, these were the nearest to the latter that George had witnessed to being such. He had himself risen before dawn, thinking tritely that it is ever darkest just before dawn, but, even now, dawn seemed as far away as ever, with no sign of its presence moving like a glowing worm along the still invisible horizon.  

To imagine finite borders to reality was as easy as daydreaming within durably daydreamy minds. George perched himself on his bungalow’s stoep and tried to outstare the stationary stars. Were these signs that the borders of anyone’s mind had already been transcended and he was witnessing something his mind did not understand even if he himself did. If such distinctions were possible.

“Hey, George, why you up?”

The voice he heard from the eaves area of the bungalow was one with which he was long familiar. But he had only started mourning its absence since an untimely passing a few months before. 

“Just morning star-gazing, my dear,” he heard his own voice respond.

“It is nowhere near morning, George. Get back to bed!”

By now, the spiky points of light had sphered out into blobs or bobbles, as tiny as they were circular. They were no longer bearing suspect outer streaks as appendages or pointing fingers that betokened whatever journeyed forth upon their beams had already left and were even now stooping towards where George sat chewing on the fat of old age, as if all cockpit airlocks within each star had turned shyly in on themselves. Not that George was fat at all. His own bony fingers pointed inward like ulna drifts.

He smiled as he felt a touch on his elbow as she had always touched him when wanting him to turn round and have a hug.

***

BELLEROPHON

Ralph worked as a bellhop in an American hotel where such assistants-for-guests were still called bellhops. Ralph being of Welsh / English stock knew that bellhops were once called bellboys in London in the heyday of hotels such as the Regent Palace, and eateries such as the Lyons Corner Houses that had silver tiers of assorted cakes to go with infusions of tea just like the Ritz. His English father had played in a Palm Court Ensemble in one such Corner House. Ralph’s Welsh mother had returned to Llanelli, hoping one day the Olympics would arrive there and she would be asked to be umpire for the Long Jump, and furnished with a stool together with flags of red and white to wave. This had been her forte. Which word returned Ralph’s thoughts to the Forte restaurant group that once employed him as a scullery assistant. How he had become a bellhop in America is a longer story than this one. 

The New York hotel in question had  suites named after Greek mythology such as Chimera and Pegasus, and somehow Ralph knew instinctively that reality was made up of connections and synchronicities that could not be accounted for by common sense. His mother had taught him this about life, while his scorning father once told him that he had his head in the clouds. But, defiantly, he said he hoped that would always be the case.

One day, he had to answer a call to the guests in the top floor Chimera suite and to fight off all manner of sexual importuning. But that was not important enough, however, to mar the rest of his life, but he carried thereafter a vague burden of boredom, but he obviated it with imaginary wings instead of his elbows and took a long run before escaping each day into the wide wide sky with a wild bray of abandon. Silver tears often ran down his leonine face. Somehow, though, his face should have been equine. Any consequence of the tears sculling along cracks in both cheeks below were merely coincidental even when hardening as an argent mineral. Meantime, from the mazy associations of thought, the random boreholes of fateful lucky-dip, the mingled destinies of desire, the chance encounters of wartime and the often obscure corners of history, there always arrive better things via the byways of intrinsic hope. He had learnt that from himself, and no one else.

***

HENDERSON’S ROTATOR CUFF

He knew, as Hender’s son, that whatever adversity affected the shoulder would end up creating audible creaks in the rest of the arm as well as visible winces aloft. He toyed with the gold fastener that clipped the bottom collar of his bad arm’s sleeve, an item of scape-coat that terminated with such a collar at the wrist, while primly covering the rest of the arm above, including the unmentionable joint on the way down, between the shoulder and the wrist. Hender had once taught his son that such a wrist collar should be like a turntable for a train, only turned when there was a train upon it who wanted to change direction on a single track. Hender had once written a text book about it and actually made some money from it when people used to buy and sell things on-line, long out of fashion since the Variable Wrist Syndrome was virally repetitive enough to stop people risking stationary mid-arm ulna drift. This compelled them to revive pen and paper devices before the fingers followed any unmentionable joints or hinges towards their own bony winces of pain and decay and ultimate namelessness as aforementioned fingers. Hender, by the hindmost of lost hindsight, if he were still alive, would no doubt feel guilty about his son’s ear that he had euphoniously muffed for not listening to him — incubating an infection that soon spread along the neck to the upper arm, after having the ear clipped if not muffed and, then, wrenched round as if there were no gracefully artful way to train pain into tamer symptoms or to reclaim, by cropped rotation, those bigoted people still stuck stationary on the same track all their lives without pen and paper to describe their reasons for such stubbornness. Why the ‘shoulder’ alone — with its traditional label still intact — was left incriminated (the arm having by now vanished, through being blocked  from the mind up its own solipsistic sleeve) was something Hender had hypothesised about in his notable book, i.e. that something, before it escaped, had to, well, ‘accept’ blame with its proper name!

***

THE PINCERS’ RETURN

The scrutineer took the screenprint about crustaceans in hand and sighed. He, for one, knew well enough that ‘pincers’ as a tool was or were always pincers whether singular or plural. Unlike pincers on insects. Pincers as tools differed significantly from pliers in meaning and use. However, he did not want this to be a pedantic study in prescriptive wordplay, but how does one change a screenprint once it is a screenprint. Scrunch it into a ball and throw it away, he thought, then go back to the computer, make any alterations, then create a fresh screenprint. He wasn’t paid much as a scrutineer, so any extra time spent would be ill-spent, so he decided to let the screenprint stand and advise the customer how to attach it later as  photo or pdf document. Cutting such corners however meant that the photo fell off the album page and he would have to go back to Boots the chemist for another negative. A further saving he made was not having a darkroom. But don’t waste macadam for a pennyworth of tar, as he thought the old saying went. He mused on his dilemma, considered the conundrum of pincers and whether they would ever be found again, having been lost in a bottomless tool chest in the garage. So he decided to bring in the Recruiters, a voluntary organisation of half seekers of lost changers and other remotes, and the other half being accomplices of the lost items themselves. Such individuals would be half the battle won at least. They knew where the pincers were, even if they weren’t letting on. He visited their office with Recruiters and Suppliers emblazoned on their barcode above the door that jingled when you opened it. Men looking like the Two Ronnies were standing behind the counter and staring as if they dared the scrutineer to fully enter and approach where they stood. They obviously had ‘find’ facilities on their handhelds as shortcuts, having omitted much of the narrative exchanges that intervened between recruitment and eventual supply of the lost item. And there is no way that the lost details can be supplied, as this is a screenprint, not an editable document. IMPORTANT: Hold it between the teeth of the supplied tool for fear of contamination via the fingers as prehensile pincers themselves. Maybe too late by now.

***

KINDRED HATS

They are kind, very kind. Gwen knew that the members stood or fell from that sense of hat, a togetherness they imparted to others, a complicity of like with like. That hat in particular, the Platonic Form of Hat with its intrinsic rouge radiating out in several directions toward other hats of various styles and fashions, some more fascinating than others. It was usually a pipe dream most of the time, but today it had become real. Gwen knew she was not allowed the luxury of ‘dream’, whether a pipe one or not, because dreaming only happened by accident as well as with a degree of self-indulgence that bordered on solipsism. Everything could be explained away by dream, but that was far too easy; it was that hat that mattered — that hat that sat as the optimum crowning of the day, whereby Kings and Queens were born. Gwen welcomed the other members of the Kindred Hats with a smile, as she knew instinctively it was a red letter day. A special epiphany, untarnished by religion or other false hopes. It just was. It was not only optimal, but perfect. Nobody spilt anything, nobody backbited during the manicured cucumber sandwiches, no quibbles of who was mother when the teapot of infused redbush took its turn in the proceedings, no quirks of unchiming humour over what was happening in the day to day world, indeed no political debate at all. It was a stasis of how she had ever dreamt a Kindred Hat day might be able to pass. With smiles and bonhomie, followed by a pre-organised trip to the zoo.

But, of course, that was where it went wrong. The turnstiles of entry were stiff to turn, indeed rusted up, the attendant surly, the giraffes with the shortest necks she had ever seen, tigers muted by their own mewing, and there was, of course, the essence of elephant itself. An elephant that had been left unmentioned in the room where they earlier had tea. Not a way to finish off this otherwise perfect expression of what had happened. An elephant with a huge smoking pipe in its mouth instead of a trunk. ‘Tsk, tsk,’ said Gwen, irritated. 

***

OLIVE VILLA’S DEMISE

Is a large house with a frontage-wide balcony always a villa? The eponymous lady — who sat sedately on a bench in Clacton seafront’s ’Spanish Garden’ near the pier — often loved words for their own sake, and somebody she once knew bore a name that was in strong assonance with an alternative word for ‘passing’. She herself had been roughly named after a large balconied house in a small town just along the coast from where she sat; the town had Naze in its name, and the house in question was near a different pier belonging there from time immemorial. She remembered a small boy who lived in the house in the early 1950s, and, even further back, she summoned up a residential houseboat called ‘Onward’ moored on the Naze-named town’s backwaters, where, as it happened, the lady imagined she had lived with her own mother for a while during what they called ‘the war’. But that begged many questions of who begat whom in a seedy top-floor flat above what is now a Baguette shop even closer to the pier than the large house. How it was possible that the oasis of unworried time in the large house — with often friendly ghosts on the landing — should have thus happened between the seedy flat and the abode that has yet to be invented in this ‘storylet’, i.e. a small downtrodden terraced back-to-back —  near the backwaters that flooded it during the 1953 storm — where the young boy later lived. Even the Baguette shop is now something different. Everything changes. Even wars bore their own alternate assonances. So, onward, soldier from Wales. Never falter, friendly ghost. The old lady lifted herself from the Clacton bench on a sea’s wide frontage and imagined where she had lived, throughout her life, abode by abode. Her last being on the tip of the Naze itself — unless she was beguiled  by some well-begotten blend of life and death that made places and people in life, as collateral damage, seem confused by the words used to name them. Words for inanimate things, too, are often misnomers. The title given me by someone called Denise, however, prompted such craft afloat, whatever the passing storms of mind and body borne upon or within them. Each mooring-place is for pausing. And who knows if pauses ever pass. Each mother who gives shelter to another mother.

POST-GESTALT DFL FICTIONS (part 5)

 THE BRASSO GHOST

Thanks to yesterday’s interesting young lady inviting me and four others into her well-seasoned engine room complex, a hub of engineering contained within the depths of the moored ‘My Friend’ ship, yes, thanks to her, a ghost story was prompted in me today. I’ve long been an admirer of Warhol, although most people laugh at me, but when I saw seemingly endless rows of Brasso canisters lined up in the engine room, one of which was upside down, I knew I had been right all along about my artistic tastes, if not my penchant for blank stories that were often encouraged by listening to John Cage music as a quelling of the chitter chatter around me! Even ghosts need their social interaction and the letting off of steam by mere exchanged gossip or, more emotionally, heartfelt explanations about their individual lives. And, looking around me, the green pistons and items of other heavy-duty leverage, too, seemed to mutter things to each other silently. The story told to us by the young lady involved an engine-room man whose obsession was such Brasso elbow grease, until some joker turned a single canister of it upside down amidst a neat row of them  and the assiduous man literally died of a broken symmetry from the breakdown of the rules that his OCD dictated…. unless I got the story wrong. Whatever the case, the brass plaque to his memory in the engine room remains highly polished day in and day out without anyone now polishing it! And that’s where I assumed a ghost must be at play, and if not the Brasso man’s ghost it was the ghost of sound that emanated as seeming music from the huge red funnels on the ship’s decks as aided and abetted by the old Dansette record players and Bakelite wirelesses and tireless reel-to-reels that peppered the place from the top deck’s wheel house to the very engine room where I forged future memories for my own ghost story today. A steerage in frissons with spooks as well as spanners in the pipelines. A  ghost that wandered the ether with sapphire styluses and  tapes that jingle-jangled to the clatter of ancient tambourine men.  It was there, in the ether, I eventually met the Brasso man face to face, and he smiled at my reference to pop art for the pirate pop ship that is our planet. And I smiled back at my new-found friend. I told him, as part of our emotional small-talk, that I had — unnoticed by the young lady and my four companions — turned the upside down canister the right way up.

***

THE ORLOP DECK

Humphrey Loader knew exactly what was meant by the orlop deck when he was ‘allowed’ to stow away on the Sixpenny Queen. The sailors he had been bevying with in a peninsula inn smuggled him aboard and then they pointed to the said deck as the site for his bivvy bag. He would not be comfortable, he was certain, but the thrum of the cables around him would keep him company at least. The destination of the ship would surely make his restless nights worthwhile. A destination that has no business in this narration. But the thing they forgot to tell Humphrey was the deck’s ghost, an overloop of rope still in the far corner being the means whereby it had ended its human days and become a darkly luminous spirit. Even if Humphrey had known about it, he would have shrugged his shoulders and simply hummed along with the thrumming cables and tried to sleep via such queer lullabies of the swaying deep.  

The ship had set sail a day ago, after he had been semi-introduced to the captain whose blind eye to such matters was obvious by the look on the latter’s face. Humphrey was glad that he was an acceptable cargo, if an illicit one. Humphrey heard the last cargo’s loading and lading before the engine room below him made any thrumming imperceptible within such machinery vibrations. He had assumed, by first impressions, that it was a sailing ship, but now realised that the first part of the journey at least was aided by an engine. The noises of pistons had at last faded into silence and the only interruption was the more staccato creaking of the rigging, sufficiently aloud to penetrate as far as the orlop.

He somehow began to feel he had stowed away as a Visitor from Porlock to abridge any narration of the Sixpenny Queen’s voyage across unmapped oceans towards a destination unknown to anyone who only read about the voyage here. That would have been a far more durable story than anything that can be told about Humphrey Loader whose fable seemed to become fatally foreshortened — on the second night aboard — by a sudden glance towards a certain shadow of a rope. An overlapping shadow that was cast by an equally unknown light glowing lambently within the otherwise dark deck’s dire drumming of suspense.

***

THE FRANGIPANE ESCAPADE

Adam’s angina was often painful and, therefore, the body doctor had supplied him with a newly invented pump that ‘simply’ needed to be attached to an inlet valve from his left elbow to help the symptoms. It looked like an old-fashioned  toothbrush that was used by Adam’s ancestors before means were found for them to floss and scale without the involvement of a hygienist. Why the elbow, one might have asked, without an isthmus already existing between arm and chest.  The pump was supposed to be greased at both ends with specially sugared almond cream before a careful dual insertion and was allowed to act as an artificial filter that bypassed the shoulder joint by such a bridge below it. A filter that worked in both directions of flow, accompanied by a grinding noise that was more associated with a dentist than any other health professional.  Why almond cream, one might have asked. But Adam assumed it was the well-known effect of almonds to lower blood sugar levels, to relieve blood pressure, and to bring cholesterol levels down. It was just that the blood pressure needed to be raised in some places and lowered in others, he guessed, as he listened to the sounds that severely set his teeth on edge. “A frangible plate D closes the end of barrel A, but blows out above a certain pressure to avoid bursting strain in the pump.” The instructions were unclear to him, and this is only one example sentence lifted from the leaflet typical of so many leaflets left inside medical treatment packaging that most patients were too impatient to read. Two-way filters always need a ‘frangible plate’ as a breakable baffle within it. Adam smiled. The pain had vanished. The whole procedure and its complications were sufficiently brain-numbing to disguise any terminal pains. A form of palliative care by confectionery easements. A pity about the figurative ague caused by a lifetime of tooth decay that endures as a form of pain to the very end.

Vincent Van Gogh’s Almond Blossom ‘as a fragile beauty’:

***

THE APPALACHIAN SUITE

Lee, a floating voter, is appalled by most of what happens these days. The craggy ridge that divides us, the seemingly endless ricochet of serial incidents that beggar belief. Who can possibly cross that ridge with unequivocal welcoming of each other, Lee wonders. Such wondering occurred to Lee while equipping the outer self with climbing gear galore. Once a wanderer of plateaux, now a wonderer at these so-called heights, Lee surveys the apparently neat graph-like rhythms of the range that, when closer up, would become an irregular ruggedness instead. How would Lee cope with such a land of misbegotten angles on the outer level and the hidden crevices on the inner? When appalled, people tend to believe they are indeed appalled. Lee was no different. Rage would literally take him across the rugged range. If there’d been less rage, Lee would have more likely failed at the first outcrop of impending cliff edge without even a sea to see. But such rage belied Lee’s encroaching age as well as an ability to cross the range that spread further in an arc before the aged eyes themselves. Floaters just bedevilled the perception, giving imagination full scope for dystopias to ferment. Pogroms at every corner disguised what was really going on beneath, as Lee even toppled into a pitfall between the peaks that were increasingly veiled by coils of mist and mystique. 

Floaters were eventually able to exist without the need of human eyesight to see them. Time progressed and musical suites of calmative coping became serially endemic but without anyone around to hear them. The mindless state of being appalled was no more. Only the visionary craft in the sky remained; they resembled the mountainous motes that once ghosted through aged eyes. Instead of revival, Lee’s body was only exhumed. But by whom?

***

THE DOG PATH

Following uphill dog paths, parting hazels, crossing thickets upright, they reached the ridge of the woods. From here, they could see out. The sun, striking down the slope of trees, glittered over the film of green-white buds: a gummy smell was drawn out in the warm afternoon haze.” — The Death of the Heart (Elizabeth Bowen)

“….she squeezed along the dog-paths with her heart in her mouth and a cold and horrible feeling she was going to find a dead cat. […] It was full of secret dog-paths threading between enormous tussocks of bramble, underneath the brambles there were hollow places like caves; there were hawthorns one could climb for a survey and, about the middle, a clump of elders gave out a stuffy sweetish smell.” — The Jungle (Elizabeth Bowen)

Doglegs are sharp bends in paths or in roads or tracks or even in rivers. Just like those tight corners in the Queensway zigzag slopes near where I live in Holland on Sea. A concertina by Stravinsky, I often thought. Played today on a French accordion.

When considering doglegs, I wonder whether dog-paths are today’s unsurprising accompaniment to El…Bowen’s endemic elbows? Elbows sit below my head-resting hands, each elbow being a tight bend in itself, or are both representatives of the tightening bands around my chest?

Intentions started this off as telling a story, but thanks to Nicolas Ashley, it’s become a new searchlight upon the fiction of Elizabeth Bowen, with which I have been preoccupied for much of my life, as many of my readers will attest. Yet this is a story I am determined to tell, becoming eventually as fictional as fiction itself. A story  with a happy ending when, after exploring the mazy jungle of dog-paths, I stagger into the weathered mansion where an aproned lady called Jane is preparing a silver-tiered carrier of cream cakes. The comforting tea is already infusing in the samovar with a sweetish aroma like confectionery that already seems to heal, by osmosis, any nettle stings I have gathered along the dog-paths.. And I am later sitting in the corner like an artificial invention of an intelligence that exists outside us all. Holding my chest as if suffering a severe attack of frangipane. I remember the particular overgrown dog path that, earlier today, led, as ever, to my named and now dying Yieldingtree with its twin doglegs, near the sea… Remembering my grandma, too, Alice Maude Whitear in Wonderland, born, just as Elizabeth Bowen was, in 1899. Resembling her, too.

I look up from my day-dreaming to see if Jane’s being mother vis à vis the tea pouring. And to see which bit was fiction, and which was real.

“Or, was the elder masking a secret gateway, outlet of a precipitous brambled dog-path to the river? […] Maud made her sedate way up to the house by the track used by the water-cart; not for her were dog-paths down one of which Jane had made her ecstatic descent. Instinct had not lied: tea was on the table.” — A World of Love (Elizabeth Bowen)

My gestalt reviews of all stories and novel chapters of Elizabeth Bowen : https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/31260-2/

DFL POST-GESTALT FICTIONS (Part 4)

 THE PERIWINKLE WATERFLOWER

It usually grew near — or even in — waterfalls. Mainly near, because it didn’t endure long enough to be seen when actually budding in such downward rushes. Why am I so concerned to impart this information? I told Sally why, but she’s too shy to tell others in case they engage her in conversation. Maybe it was her size that made her self-conscious. Or the flecks affecting her skin. So I thought I’d better write at least some of this down before my knowledge of matters would be lost.  Periwinkle is a colour between blue and purple as well as an item of nature study in itself. Bless its heart. Brings out a smile when I think of it, especially as a colour that Sally often wears as the colour of speckled designs in her frocks. She often called it lavender, not periwinkle. But I insisted on my terminology. And she gurned in assent, and she now calls it periwinkle. Here, though, in the main, I use the word as an adjective of colour, not as a noun representing a non-invasive plant common to our lands, waterfalls or not.

Sally, a wallflower? Well, true, I first encountered her sitting at the side of a dance floor watching the various couples sweeping by her in ostentatious waltzing motions. Her best frock, evidently, but nobody noticed.  Except me. And I engaged her in conversation, because I had been too long idling in the shadows or sidelines, nursing a half drunk half a bitter in a dimpled glass. I sat one seat away in a whole row of otherwise empty seats, and set in motion my only chat-up line. Sorry, that sounds a bit of a crude expression, as I only wanted to bring a smile to her face, with no other intentions present in my mind. Ice-breaker is better than chat-up line. I might rewrite all this. But it is important to get it straight first-off, my frame of mind changing by the moment. All needs to be conveyed as part of what I initially called the Periwinkle Waterflower. Nothing can shift that, as I somehow believe myself to be the only one that survived the ice age that followed the planetary exodus ironically caused by constant invasive heatwaves. At least it is known that human life survived. Or at least whoever wrote this survived.

I look down as if into a mirror of lavender-tinged water and see, below it, seeming sheets of frozen freckles end to end, very twinkly with dimples and woken stars eager to become suns. And I smile at my own perverse misnomers simply written down to mislead you towards a denial that words and any who read them will inevitably vanish. And, like a newly launched galleon, I watch her sally forth, in blue, upon the universal dance floor of an even bluer sky. Large enough to allow mere mortals to see. Bless her heart.

***

SHALLOW WATERS RUN DEEP

Not sure Sarah’s friend Huck Finn got this common saying right, but it was good enough for Sarah. It made a sort of oblique sense, not as clear-cut as the ‘still waters’ version, but with a pervasive wisdom that reached truths otherwise unfathomed. Huck was much like that himself, with open signs of simplicity and a down-to-earth nature; he was old enough to not only suffer this nickname on everyone’s lips when meeting him but also to take credit for digging deeper than most other souls were able to manage. To the third level if not the fourth. It was as if his awkward turns of phrase were part of a birthright as an ‘oracle’ who had earned such a word to describe him through many years of a life walking the common ground so  close to it as to be, yes, ‘down to earth’.  Not only oracle, but also uncle to Sarah, thus avuncular enough to be a trusted friend, too. ‘Mon oncle,’ she quipped in honour of  the Jacques Tati film with that title, and they both laughed at memories of going to the cinema in France to see this film not long after it was first made, a fact that also gave a clue as to Sarah’s actual age which somewhat belied her young looks. And this prose description of them grows deeper on the page if not its inner meaning which remained as shallow as it seemed, with no real point other than to help the words flow  towards a premature or inconclusive ending, extending higher and higher above and lower and lower below the mark or point of where a few may have stopped after reaching it. Until the narration reached the seemingly lowest level, if the seabed can be thus called as a base so grounded that it seemed an unquestionable ending. Huck could be vaguely discerned to be moon-walking holding the hand of his adopted niece. Both smiling that someone had been kind enough to create them and make them live. Until the limit of lines, as levels or marks, reached the point where they had been left above while things rambled on quite a long way below even that, after everything should have finished beyond the very final plimsoll mark of what can only be called a second seabed. Rambled and meandered amidst the lower depths whereto even Jules Verne never sent his Captain Nemo. But the place certainly existed then, where the sea creatures grew wilder, more colourful and were quite unknown to science and impervious to logic. At a third level where only those privileged enough could even imagine existing. Verne was French, too, like Tati. Unlike Twain. One wonders whether Verne used binoculars. It remains certain, though, the two authors were almost exact contemporaries. Tati was ever away on a time-share holiday, so he probably didn’t count. All three of them wore a monocle. Some of this is still true.

“Hark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell.” – The Tempest

***

WHIFFLING THROUGH THE BROAD LEAVES

Oh, M.R. James had it right, but that does not prevent our wandering into the byways of the boy who was given a shilling instead of a sixpence and the creature created from linen sheets that rose on the bed next to the bed where we slept. And what happened to us afterwards? If you have not read the source work, please don’t count yourself one of us! You can sidle off with just a sixpence. And count yourself lucky. No more loud creating by the likes of you. Even sounding out as a form  of creating-like-hell  should not be sharp and sibilant with plosives, but softened with fricatives, to allow gentler spirits to follow us from the otherwise deserted beach that was grey and striated with groynes. When does a shriek grow blunted enough to become an understated groan?

The book had broad leaves, one of those large-size omnibuses of ghost stories, yet this one was strangely without any illustration. So why such small print upon its coffee table proportions? My head was often ‘lost in the clouds’ or ‘slow on the uptake’ that members of my family told me to ‘wake up and smell the coffee.’ This book taught me that those who ‘whiffle through the broad leaves’ are very much akin to such an uptake of the slow wit, with any knowingness in its wake. I have spent most of my life thus ‘whiffling through the broad leaves’. Whiffling like the sound of bicycle wheels on hardened sand. And I guess we all are whiffling like this to some extent. Pleased with half a crown, because  that is better than no crown at all.

The ghostly bed linen yawned, and held out a hemmed edge scrunched up like  a hand open-palmed for a gratuity. Any coin would suffice for it to bite through. Milled along its circular edge or not. A book’s pages are initially just another form of white sheets. Oh, M.R. James, in person, points at me for several sullen hours and then puts this finger into his stifling white collar. A collar not circling the neck but broadened into a dangling bow on his chest. Ah, the wide margins so empty deadly blank they are. Oh, the sounds of pages riffling are so soft, silence imitates them if only with bravado. Which of us will become sharper in uptake to haunt him? Nobody answers except the sea. And I remember I spent most of my early years with a print of Millais’s ‘The Boyhood of Raleigh’ on the wall above my bed.

***

A BECKONING FROM THE FOREFATHERS

The King of All Points of the Compass relaxed back into his seat after receiving the expected phone call, and knew he had been given yet another temporary reprieve with regard to his health and longevity. This one, in itself, was good news, but soon enough there would be another phone call he would need to await with anxious expectation, and so it continued into the always unknown number of futures that criss-crossed beyond anyone’s scrutiny. Even his own. 

The ‘all points’ in his title ironically encompassed only a finite number of event-symptoms in whatever future it was that chose to become pre-eminent. A human being was a small mite compared to this vast complex clock-tower as a metaphorical symbol, much of which required renovation. He smiled at the irony. Inanity was always preferable to insanity, if not irony.

He needed, after gathering his thoughts, to rise from his seat and inform the Squeaky Queen about the phone call but she was in another part of the turreted  mansion. He had to avoid the part where the roof had collapsed overnight, a fact making him negotiate the already busy kitchen area.  Many chefs and cook apprentices acknowledged his passage between the hobs and ovens by bowing, then towing themselves back to the tasks of plucking and gutting. 

He threaded through an attic area he never knew existed until today.  He sensed he was on the right track, however, as he heard the bony meeting of joints that, these days, were more like creaks than squeaks. Still, he and the Queen had come through all manner of heavens and hells, and again he smiled at the irony of life. And that included the vista of the sky that even penetrated as far as the cellar to which part of the mansion he had been diverted by ever-changing circumstances. Attics and cellars seemed often on the move, changing their identities at a whim.

The Squeaky Queen was eventually reached at the point where all directions multisected. Where all clock-hands, too, merged as one in a vast fountain of bricks. Cook-hands, too. Then, the couple knelt in obeisance to the invisible forefathers who beckoned forth the couples’s bi-directional prayers so that where these prayers precisely crossed each other in the ether a new future was sectioned. Thus, inanities were hospitalised if not, ironically, the roofs.

***

GUSSETS FOR GHOSTS

Charmed by the gossamer of dream, Kate fumbled to the  side for the discarded nylons, tucked between the under-sheet and the mattress. Who cared about the ladders? Why worry about the denier or size? They were magical ones that eased her from waking into sleep then back again, via dream. They were nylons for the arms, not the legs, after all. A new fashion style that had replaced high-fashion gloves in the ranks of society. Still, these stockings were just as vulnerable, it seemed, as the more common ones for the legs. Perhaps, even more so. Arms were involved in all manner of tasks that legs were never privy to. Certain jobs that rich folk needed to do for themselves, and cooking as well as shaking hands with others. Not to mention the unmentionables that were otherwise more appropriate during discussion held privately for hidden areas of the human shape. They all had their own form of bespoke coverage by ulterior versions of gloves and stockings, some intricately fitting interstices that even Kate obviated. 

She rose from the bed at last, with the morning already pushing hard into the afternoon. Time to open a new packet of arm slicks, so lightweight she hardly expected them to have transposed from dream into reality without growing coarser. Once opening the packet, she needed to acknowledge the time deadline of pulling them onto her arms.  A few seconds too late and they would clog upon the elbows and sit awry in scrawny wrinkles…

Kate heard a loud ‘tut! tut!’ as she awoke sufficiently to have her own volition. But this was the noise of the sheathes tearing; it was not her new-found voice complaining at her own clumsiness. Soon there may be next to nothing at all between where her arms joined the body.

“She bowed her head, acceptingly, then folded her arms, consoling the elbows.” — Elizabeth Bowen