All those lessons back on Farnsworth Planet were now next to useless. To be a human being, they told him, you had to get up on your hind legs, wear an expression that denied your real thoughts and utter nothing but non-sequiturs.
Now, all that was out of the window, along with the good intentions which, as an alien, he had earned here in a brain fundamentally ill-designed, as it turned out, for Earthly living.
He squatted on the Persian carpet in front of a lady human whom he had been nuzzling with his nose, only to be spurned for maladroit foreplay.
The sitting-room was going round and round. Evidently, they (whoever “they” were, he never really understood, other than that they had investments in Farnsworth as well as Earth) were forthwith taking him back home - incredibly utilising the house where he happened to be situated as the transport vehicle.
His recently acquired lady friend was too frightened to be angry. When she saw street-lights flashing by her sitting-room window, it crossed her mind that she must be drunk rather than frightened.
Beyond the reaches of the Known Universe, a few miles from the Untenable Universe, there are bedraggled streamers of reality known as the Cat-Tails. Between one particular fork of two such streamers of reality, sat the Farnsworth Planet, flashing on and off as it rhythmically passed in and then out of each existence. Those who lived there consequently taught their offspring with alternating history books. Much confusion was relieved by such means.
They were a pretty clever race and managed to set up scenarios where it became sensible (and even possible) to send some of their number to other worlds in the particular reality they were, at the time, living through. The rationale was now of course unknown, because it happened to be recorded in history books currently not in existence. But as long as they knew there was a rationale (like human belief in God) they believed in it wholeheartedly and waited patiently for re-enlightenment.
They forgot for a while, in fact, that some of their number had been sent off on trans-universal reconnoitres. They didn’t notice they had forgotten, since their minds were fully occupied with deep philosophical yearnings.
The particular sun-star which serviced Farnsworth Planet was not so reliable as the one to which humans have grown accustomed. But when a semidetached house from Purley, Surrey, England, rose slowly above the horizon, its strangeness was sufficient to surprise even those up early jogging on all fours.
However, what they might have seen through its bedroom window, if it had not been curtained over, would have changed what later in fact became quite a significant religious experience into something far more down to earth.
Or vice versa.
(published ‘Mystique’ 1995)
www.nemonymous.com
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Saturday, October 23, 2004
Sunday, October 17, 2004
Joy Rider
I have asked the same question several times. They tell me I am an alien or, at best, a mutant android. Never ever in my wildest dreams to be even a cyborg. But the fact that I can dream makes me question the whole matter. Why cruelly feed me dreams and memories of a human being, if I am inhuman? There is another entity beside me in the pod as I warden the man-made movements through the universe. Most traffic is cargo being transported from galaxy to galaxy in tin pot spaceships and our sole job is to police the lanes to ensure one way routes stay that way. The other one’s name is Joy. She is beautiful, as well as happy, believe me.
Craftman snuggled down under the bedclothes, trying to make the world forget about his existence. There was once a Russian novel in which a character called Oblomov spent chapter after chapter in bed, failing to summon the will power to get up. Once he started down the slippery slope of wallowing in his own mattress, he found it more and more difficult to summon up the friction. But sooner or later, Craftman had to go to the dentist. So he struggled from his pyjamas, dressed and shambled down the road, squinting against the bright sunlight.
Craftman had forgotten the whereabouts of the dentist's but, being a small town, he eventually found it impossible to miss. He was shown into the waiting-room by the lift boy and there he found a circle of faces staring ahead into the middle distance, colour supplement magazines growing stale upon their laps. Despite being the last to arrive, he was immediately called into the surgery by a sweet nurse in a uniform. He perked up a bit at the sight of her. She fitted in with his dreams of one called Joy.
However, the dentist himself was not a sight for sore teeth. He towered by the long recliner, a metal implement poised in his hand as if he were shaping up for a rumble in the beer belt. He motioned Craftman into the seat, where the patient was to be set back with a violent jerk.
"Well, Mr... What is your name? Your card's got a stain on it, where your name should be."
"Craftman."
"Well, Mr Craftman, I don't like the look of your teeth at all."
Without further ado, he wrenched Craftman's mouth open with a crack, and started drilling at the first tooth he saw. The grinding of metal on bone spread to the skull itself, as if the whole upper extension of his neck needed filling. Then, the dentist decided that the tooth would have to come out instead. The nurse pushed her thighs against Craftman's side as she yanked his mouth wider to ease entrance by further implements in the dentist's thinly veiled hands. Another tooth was seemingly gripped by a vicious vice, and not even the strength of the tall dentist, nor the crooning noises of encouragement from the nurse, could entice it to budge, as if it were conjoined to the spine itself. However, after several minutes, it crunched sickeningly, enabling the dentist to gouge out the root in bits with a pair of draughtsman's compasses for the next hour or two, taking delight in a job finally well done.
"That's shifted the little bugger."
It felt to Craftman as if the dentist had been chiselling out wedges of jaw bone.
"Have you got it all out?" he managed to ask, whilst spitting on splinters. The dentist took great delight in matching up the red raw chunks upon the white enamel rinsing-bowl, so that Craftman could see that it was all there. He fainted, his head lolling upon the nurse's bosom, which reminded him of Joy's.
"Blimey, he's completely flaked out," she muttered. But how did I know that?
The Pod's called Oblomov. I wonder why they didn't name me. Even Joy has the privilege of a name. And that's because she's probably a real human being, despite the matchless beauty she disports. Having said (or thought) that, I can report that my own teeth feel like long pearls. Hers must be an irregular saw-edge of white miniature tombstones, to prove she really is human. Her eyes look reflective and vulnerable. My eyes are glassed over with lenses or, perhaps, glass all the way down to the optic fuse.
Oblomov skitters momentarily in a rare space gust, thrusting me against Joy's cushioned thigh-bone. I struggle with the control-stick for a few seconds, until it actually seems to take control of my hands. And then we're on an even keel again. Shepherding a recalcitrant star-freighter towards its destination, beyond any of the smugglers' side-channels, is not conducive to day-dreaming.
"Listen With Mother" was Craftman's favourite wireless programme when he was a toddler. He used to settle down on the floor under a blanket with one who called herself Nanna. He often said he loved her more than all the money in the world (plus sixpence). After listening to what was incomprehensible to one so young, a soap opera called "Mrs Dale's Diary", in which, after the harp strains, someone with a motherly tone of voice was always worried about her Jim, the comforting sounds of something far more understandable (despite being full of nonsense nursery rhymes) was broadcast, so damn interesting and calming,
Craftman often fell into a nap which seemed to overtake both him and Nanna for the rest of the short afternoon ... until high tea and the roaring of the coal fire - a fire which someone-called-Father stirred with violent up-draughts created by a single double-sheet of newspaper stretched across the yet barely flickering hills of cobbled black that had sat in the grate since the century began, only to end up providing shuddering orange silhouette-shows against the queer news stories which filled those far-off days stretching pitifully into an uncertain future.
Everything was endlessly contorted make-believe - until Craftman grew up, listening to Del Shannon records and other black singles which slotted down one after the other on his spinning Dansette auto-changer. His mind was on the brink of acting without its own volition. He could hear every scratching note. But when deafness finally settled upon his head like large padded ear-phones, all he could make out were the sounds of Hell's underground seas. He could no longer listen with mother. The fires had died in the hearth, and nobody had life in them to fight wars, let alone die in them. Father was one of the few who vanished towards the rumour of a war and nearly died of disappointment when nobody would pay him anything for the useless hand to hand mauling that had transpired. They would not even let him have a demob suit to hide the fact he was now shankless and fell out.
Nanna, despite everything, could not listen either, because she was inside the very sound-box of Craftman's plugged-up head, screaming to escape from a tangled tapestry of memories which would never end. And when the nonsense rhymes started up again, Craftman found he could actually understand, as well as hear, them.
Joy places her hand in mine, thus interrupting my revery. We have a juke-box in the pod's cockpit and I key in an appropriate number to get my favourite Del Shannon record, "Runaway", on to the turntable...
There was a tall narrow shed on the edge of those backwaters where Craftman played when still young enough to recall feeling fresh-buttocked from the nappy-changing. A boy slightly older but dim-witted and gangling enticed Craftman into the shed. The boy said he had a secret to share. He proceeded to show a thing which he said was bigger than Craftman's. Craftman ran from the shed, before he could have the enticing opportunity to flaunt his own.
Next day or next decade, Craftman wandered the dank streets of the dock area in a large city. He knew no home nor comfort and had surrendered hope even for one called Nanna. The yellow fog was lower tonight than he could ever remember. It even came close to easing down the drains and then along with the gutter slurry. Dark figures passed by on either side wrapped in night clothes in spite of the lateness of sunset. They ignored Craftman, for they were intent on arriving home in time for high tea. If he had been able to catch their eyes in his like he used to catch sticklebacks in jam-jars, he may have enticed one of them into conversation.
He reached the edge of the wharf where a henge of crates was stacked against the hull of a loose-planked river freighter which dipped up and down in the sluggish oil the river had long since become. And the rubbing, the creaking of the crates made him think of the old days when his childhood bed had seemed like a vessel afloat on dreams. He had often imagined Nanna and Father, together with his several best friends and even a stranger of two thrown in for good measure clambering on board his bed with him ... to drift amid nothingness for an interminable period of survival and camaraderie. Yes, they needed to load cans of food and the other imperishables of life along by the bed's foot-board, in the hope that such provisions would last till the journey ended or the company broke up by hitting the maturity-line, when dreams could safely fade.
All the dangers of the disaster dream-movie would be neutralised merely by the communion of togetherness. But the bed being loaded to the seams, it had creaked, despite the nothingness through which they floated. He set the company tests on arithmetic, general knowledge, capital cities, spelling. That passed the time. Nanna enjoyed that, but didn't like the unfairness of his marking, and threatened to alight.
Now, Craftman inspected the crates on the dockside. More like coffins than cargo. The lids screeched on rusty hinges. In one was a friend from early childhood, but he couldn't remember the name. Whoever the friend was, he had grown older, so Craftman could hardly recognise him, and the body was too big to fit, hunched up and foetus-like in its last resting-place. In another crate was Father, a sheet of newspaper stretched across his face. Nanna slept sedately in another, staring icily into Craftman's eyes, as if he had let her down in one way or another.
In other crates, there were people he did not even begin to recognise, since he had not known them, except perhaps in a forgotten dream: a middle-aged woman with glasses and two dead babies of either sex pressed against her dry breasts in one, and a frilly-dressed gentleman in another who had a date stamped on his forehead. These last ones were the strangers, no doubt, who were the makeweight crew.
One long crate, resting on two others like the top of an ancient gateway, had a gangling lop-sided body in it that was almost alive, grinning imbecilically, with a protruding tongue that was engorging.
There was a single empty crate. Better load the others on the freighter first, though. He'll be in dire need of rest, then.
Such memories echo off the close-formed walls of floating darkness, as if they only have ears to suck them back, like unshared secrets. By now, Oblomov is stationary in night cover. Both Joy and myself have long given up being mutually affectionate. It was all show. How can she ever love something like me?
Craftman's only significant dread was that his eyeballs would one day swivel round in their sockets one hundred and eighty degrees and they (or was it he?) would only be able to see the frightening blackness of his head's cavernous innards. He did not allow this reasonless phobia to mar the day to day conduct of his life, of course. That way would lie madness. However, he did have certain preoccupations concerning these his windows-of-the-soul. He always wore shades, so that the eventual fulfilment of his dread would be less marked, by comparison. Also, he would never allow girls to look winsomely into his eyes, as many other couples allow each other to do, while they waft off on wings of true love. Whether this was purely a selfless act, even Craftman was uncertain. Not that girls ever wanted to cann9odle in this way with him, anyway.
Even as a boy, in one of those archetypal school playgrounds - where the cracking of conkers were often louder than that of boys' skulls in boisterous play hitting the arcanely white-lined concrete - Craftman would never dare enter an "out-staring" game with his friends in case the final Big Blink was not quite as fail-safe as one would normally expect. Opticians, to Craftman, were far more a gross-out than the worst conceivable dentist.
One day, in the local pub, Craftman picked up a loose-limbed lovely whom he christened Joy in honour of his dreams. As usual, all the signs were there. He found himself staring at the blonde down on her legs, travelling up the curves with his eyes, mentally unravelling the knitted dress as he (or they) went.
"What you giving me the eyeful for, mister?" Her voice was as coarse as her body was beautiful. But Craftman was literally trapped by her gorgeously unclouded bowls of sight, mooning out towards him, weltering in cosmetics. "Well, feel my knee!" she crooned loudly, as he shuffled nearer on the legs of his bar stool, knowing instinctively that this was exactly what he wanted to start doing. At least, she couldn't possibly be a qualified optician, with a voice like that. But, when he bent her arm up behind her back in some apparently motiveless nostalgia for the good old boy's school playground (or perhaps he thought she was a fruit machine), he saw the writing on the wall. She kicked him hard in the crutch ... and he found himself teetering above a bottomless pit of black slime seething and burping between the stalags of his own gigantic brain.
Joy is awake, even if I'm not. She has startled me with a jump-start from unconsciousness. Indeed, we require a watch-out, like carnivores need back teeth. The freighters find it easier to give us the slip at night, even though the degree of darkness is unchanged. It's something to do with moods, or with half-chances, because the art of surreptitiousness needs only a tiny twiddle on the tuner for the programme to change. The juke-box whirrs in the background, its needle only a fraction of space and time between hitting the scrawling tracker-groove of "Hats Off To Larry" by Del Shannon and hovering there forever like Pod Oblomov itself.
Even awake, it's difficult to land thoughts.
The voice was clear and bright, like freshly hammered bell steel. Craftman could not believe what his ears told him, for he was ensconced alone in a sound-proof booth, acting as a guinea pig for an experiment in solitary confinement. For days now (it could have been weeks for all he knew or grown to care), he had rested on his back, connected up with relatively silent in-and-out drip feeds which penetrated the sides of the coffinish booth through light-tight valves. Only the sound of an odd muffled bubble had infrequently broken his dreams.
How he had been landed with this job began as a long story. Suffice it to say, he was stony broke, loveless and careless. Hence, the job would give him warmth, sustenance and physical comfort for as long as it would take to use up several dole cheques. So, until the novelty wore off, Craftman was in clover. He had yearned for such an opportunity when not needing to get up nor exert himself either physically or mentally: a perfect memory in the making.
Then (and how!) the darkness grew darker in his eyes, the silence a dead weight, body and non-body alike a mass of aches and mental prickles. They'd told him (and he'd forgotten who "they" exactly were) the various drugs contained in the food streams should prevent any bodily discomfort. But, he began to suppose, that's what the experiment was designed to discover: the efficacy (or not) of such medication and, indeed, the adaptability (or otherwise) of the human condition.
It was strange how he became philosophical under the increasing strain. At one time an "ordinary, relatively normal" member of the human race - listening to the football results come a Saturday afternoon, getting his end away (or leg over), coping with the wear and tear of entropy (though he called it balls-aching old age) and negotiating the trivial, transient matters of which most lives are constituted - he was now speculating on the Existence of God (and why God was so goddamn important to warrant speculating on His (god)forsaken existence), the undependability of the senses (speculating even on the uncertainty of Craftman's own existence), the mind-body dilemma until the thoughts tailed off as if they couldn't be bothered any longer to stop disowning Craftman as the thinker thinking them.
But, then, as the symptons of discomfort infiltrated from each and every angle and as Craftman actually discovered that his body was jacking against the pinions which shackled it, his haywire mind would slip out of gear and become entrammelled in the labyrinthine syncromesh of premature senility. So before such an onset, I should introduce myself as the one running the Oblomov Experiment, with one beautiful assistant, true, but she's currently off sick with glandular fever. So, it's predominantly me with a notepad on my knee that posterity will have to depend on. Sleepless nights galore, all for the sake of science. One dead of night, I will hear the bell-clear voice ringing out at the same time as Oblomov's moving graph pen indicates that the man screams from inside the sound-proof booth. But I fear that the screaming will come from my own mouth, penetrating places where even the Richter Scale fears to tread. Then I'll be dead, or entombed, I don't know which, but not before I have a chance to finish a real dream.
Dear Pod, You feel good in my hands, as I thread you through the channels of space. It just needs the slightest touch on your controls which, by means of the craftily positioned pulleys and gears, shifts your majestic rudder in wide sweeps ... thus drawing as much friction as is possible from the vacuum that space surely is, without the need of fiction.
And you're like a person to me, Pod. That's why I'm addressing you personally. We've been together, it seems, since eternity itself began all those years ago, man and boy. Or is it man and something else? Whatever the case, we took off when I was but a mere stripling and, as you know, I hadn't experienced love. Thinking about it, they (whoever "they" were) were rather cruel sending the likes of me on an endless task like this ... but all's well that ends well (if at all). I've at least known your love, dear Pod, and that I cherish more than anything in the whole world (plus sixpence). The world? What is this thing called World? Only a mind can hope to know, if only via its own filter of reality.
I often speculate on the channels of space through which we thread, dear Pod. I've always liked that "we", makes me feel cosy, but, one day, perhaps, I'll call us me, then we'll never be separated, I'll never be us again, or some such words, if you get my drift, dear Pod, ramble though I'm prone to do. Yet I have nagging doubts. I often wonder if these are but channels in my dreams and if the freight be cargo-cults of memory ... that you don't exist at all ... utter benighted solitude ... just me, in an imaginary impersonal coffin-cask, shifted from pillar to post amid the mere quirkish stalactites and stalagmites of my own brain ... that's a thoughtless doom to face. Not surprising that I'm fed up to my back teeth with consciousness. So, must sign off. Time for sleepy-byes. I can rest long and easy because you'll keep me safe, won't you, dearest Pod. And, surely, you love and care for only me. You see, automatic pilots, by definition, are mindless as well as shankless and old Craftman is no exception. In comparison, I'm a real I-ful, am I not? A real loose-limbed lovely handful. The ultimate lovecraft.
Control is so very very sweet. With that last thought, I sign off, dear Pod. Yours adoringly, Joy Stick.
(published 'Monomyth' 1998)
Craftman snuggled down under the bedclothes, trying to make the world forget about his existence. There was once a Russian novel in which a character called Oblomov spent chapter after chapter in bed, failing to summon the will power to get up. Once he started down the slippery slope of wallowing in his own mattress, he found it more and more difficult to summon up the friction. But sooner or later, Craftman had to go to the dentist. So he struggled from his pyjamas, dressed and shambled down the road, squinting against the bright sunlight.
Craftman had forgotten the whereabouts of the dentist's but, being a small town, he eventually found it impossible to miss. He was shown into the waiting-room by the lift boy and there he found a circle of faces staring ahead into the middle distance, colour supplement magazines growing stale upon their laps. Despite being the last to arrive, he was immediately called into the surgery by a sweet nurse in a uniform. He perked up a bit at the sight of her. She fitted in with his dreams of one called Joy.
However, the dentist himself was not a sight for sore teeth. He towered by the long recliner, a metal implement poised in his hand as if he were shaping up for a rumble in the beer belt. He motioned Craftman into the seat, where the patient was to be set back with a violent jerk.
"Well, Mr... What is your name? Your card's got a stain on it, where your name should be."
"Craftman."
"Well, Mr Craftman, I don't like the look of your teeth at all."
Without further ado, he wrenched Craftman's mouth open with a crack, and started drilling at the first tooth he saw. The grinding of metal on bone spread to the skull itself, as if the whole upper extension of his neck needed filling. Then, the dentist decided that the tooth would have to come out instead. The nurse pushed her thighs against Craftman's side as she yanked his mouth wider to ease entrance by further implements in the dentist's thinly veiled hands. Another tooth was seemingly gripped by a vicious vice, and not even the strength of the tall dentist, nor the crooning noises of encouragement from the nurse, could entice it to budge, as if it were conjoined to the spine itself. However, after several minutes, it crunched sickeningly, enabling the dentist to gouge out the root in bits with a pair of draughtsman's compasses for the next hour or two, taking delight in a job finally well done.
"That's shifted the little bugger."
It felt to Craftman as if the dentist had been chiselling out wedges of jaw bone.
"Have you got it all out?" he managed to ask, whilst spitting on splinters. The dentist took great delight in matching up the red raw chunks upon the white enamel rinsing-bowl, so that Craftman could see that it was all there. He fainted, his head lolling upon the nurse's bosom, which reminded him of Joy's.
"Blimey, he's completely flaked out," she muttered. But how did I know that?
The Pod's called Oblomov. I wonder why they didn't name me. Even Joy has the privilege of a name. And that's because she's probably a real human being, despite the matchless beauty she disports. Having said (or thought) that, I can report that my own teeth feel like long pearls. Hers must be an irregular saw-edge of white miniature tombstones, to prove she really is human. Her eyes look reflective and vulnerable. My eyes are glassed over with lenses or, perhaps, glass all the way down to the optic fuse.
Oblomov skitters momentarily in a rare space gust, thrusting me against Joy's cushioned thigh-bone. I struggle with the control-stick for a few seconds, until it actually seems to take control of my hands. And then we're on an even keel again. Shepherding a recalcitrant star-freighter towards its destination, beyond any of the smugglers' side-channels, is not conducive to day-dreaming.
"Listen With Mother" was Craftman's favourite wireless programme when he was a toddler. He used to settle down on the floor under a blanket with one who called herself Nanna. He often said he loved her more than all the money in the world (plus sixpence). After listening to what was incomprehensible to one so young, a soap opera called "Mrs Dale's Diary", in which, after the harp strains, someone with a motherly tone of voice was always worried about her Jim, the comforting sounds of something far more understandable (despite being full of nonsense nursery rhymes) was broadcast, so damn interesting and calming,
Craftman often fell into a nap which seemed to overtake both him and Nanna for the rest of the short afternoon ... until high tea and the roaring of the coal fire - a fire which someone-called-Father stirred with violent up-draughts created by a single double-sheet of newspaper stretched across the yet barely flickering hills of cobbled black that had sat in the grate since the century began, only to end up providing shuddering orange silhouette-shows against the queer news stories which filled those far-off days stretching pitifully into an uncertain future.
Everything was endlessly contorted make-believe - until Craftman grew up, listening to Del Shannon records and other black singles which slotted down one after the other on his spinning Dansette auto-changer. His mind was on the brink of acting without its own volition. He could hear every scratching note. But when deafness finally settled upon his head like large padded ear-phones, all he could make out were the sounds of Hell's underground seas. He could no longer listen with mother. The fires had died in the hearth, and nobody had life in them to fight wars, let alone die in them. Father was one of the few who vanished towards the rumour of a war and nearly died of disappointment when nobody would pay him anything for the useless hand to hand mauling that had transpired. They would not even let him have a demob suit to hide the fact he was now shankless and fell out.
Nanna, despite everything, could not listen either, because she was inside the very sound-box of Craftman's plugged-up head, screaming to escape from a tangled tapestry of memories which would never end. And when the nonsense rhymes started up again, Craftman found he could actually understand, as well as hear, them.
Joy places her hand in mine, thus interrupting my revery. We have a juke-box in the pod's cockpit and I key in an appropriate number to get my favourite Del Shannon record, "Runaway", on to the turntable...
There was a tall narrow shed on the edge of those backwaters where Craftman played when still young enough to recall feeling fresh-buttocked from the nappy-changing. A boy slightly older but dim-witted and gangling enticed Craftman into the shed. The boy said he had a secret to share. He proceeded to show a thing which he said was bigger than Craftman's. Craftman ran from the shed, before he could have the enticing opportunity to flaunt his own.
Next day or next decade, Craftman wandered the dank streets of the dock area in a large city. He knew no home nor comfort and had surrendered hope even for one called Nanna. The yellow fog was lower tonight than he could ever remember. It even came close to easing down the drains and then along with the gutter slurry. Dark figures passed by on either side wrapped in night clothes in spite of the lateness of sunset. They ignored Craftman, for they were intent on arriving home in time for high tea. If he had been able to catch their eyes in his like he used to catch sticklebacks in jam-jars, he may have enticed one of them into conversation.
He reached the edge of the wharf where a henge of crates was stacked against the hull of a loose-planked river freighter which dipped up and down in the sluggish oil the river had long since become. And the rubbing, the creaking of the crates made him think of the old days when his childhood bed had seemed like a vessel afloat on dreams. He had often imagined Nanna and Father, together with his several best friends and even a stranger of two thrown in for good measure clambering on board his bed with him ... to drift amid nothingness for an interminable period of survival and camaraderie. Yes, they needed to load cans of food and the other imperishables of life along by the bed's foot-board, in the hope that such provisions would last till the journey ended or the company broke up by hitting the maturity-line, when dreams could safely fade.
All the dangers of the disaster dream-movie would be neutralised merely by the communion of togetherness. But the bed being loaded to the seams, it had creaked, despite the nothingness through which they floated. He set the company tests on arithmetic, general knowledge, capital cities, spelling. That passed the time. Nanna enjoyed that, but didn't like the unfairness of his marking, and threatened to alight.
Now, Craftman inspected the crates on the dockside. More like coffins than cargo. The lids screeched on rusty hinges. In one was a friend from early childhood, but he couldn't remember the name. Whoever the friend was, he had grown older, so Craftman could hardly recognise him, and the body was too big to fit, hunched up and foetus-like in its last resting-place. In another crate was Father, a sheet of newspaper stretched across his face. Nanna slept sedately in another, staring icily into Craftman's eyes, as if he had let her down in one way or another.
In other crates, there were people he did not even begin to recognise, since he had not known them, except perhaps in a forgotten dream: a middle-aged woman with glasses and two dead babies of either sex pressed against her dry breasts in one, and a frilly-dressed gentleman in another who had a date stamped on his forehead. These last ones were the strangers, no doubt, who were the makeweight crew.
One long crate, resting on two others like the top of an ancient gateway, had a gangling lop-sided body in it that was almost alive, grinning imbecilically, with a protruding tongue that was engorging.
There was a single empty crate. Better load the others on the freighter first, though. He'll be in dire need of rest, then.
Such memories echo off the close-formed walls of floating darkness, as if they only have ears to suck them back, like unshared secrets. By now, Oblomov is stationary in night cover. Both Joy and myself have long given up being mutually affectionate. It was all show. How can she ever love something like me?
Craftman's only significant dread was that his eyeballs would one day swivel round in their sockets one hundred and eighty degrees and they (or was it he?) would only be able to see the frightening blackness of his head's cavernous innards. He did not allow this reasonless phobia to mar the day to day conduct of his life, of course. That way would lie madness. However, he did have certain preoccupations concerning these his windows-of-the-soul. He always wore shades, so that the eventual fulfilment of his dread would be less marked, by comparison. Also, he would never allow girls to look winsomely into his eyes, as many other couples allow each other to do, while they waft off on wings of true love. Whether this was purely a selfless act, even Craftman was uncertain. Not that girls ever wanted to cann9odle in this way with him, anyway.
Even as a boy, in one of those archetypal school playgrounds - where the cracking of conkers were often louder than that of boys' skulls in boisterous play hitting the arcanely white-lined concrete - Craftman would never dare enter an "out-staring" game with his friends in case the final Big Blink was not quite as fail-safe as one would normally expect. Opticians, to Craftman, were far more a gross-out than the worst conceivable dentist.
One day, in the local pub, Craftman picked up a loose-limbed lovely whom he christened Joy in honour of his dreams. As usual, all the signs were there. He found himself staring at the blonde down on her legs, travelling up the curves with his eyes, mentally unravelling the knitted dress as he (or they) went.
"What you giving me the eyeful for, mister?" Her voice was as coarse as her body was beautiful. But Craftman was literally trapped by her gorgeously unclouded bowls of sight, mooning out towards him, weltering in cosmetics. "Well, feel my knee!" she crooned loudly, as he shuffled nearer on the legs of his bar stool, knowing instinctively that this was exactly what he wanted to start doing. At least, she couldn't possibly be a qualified optician, with a voice like that. But, when he bent her arm up behind her back in some apparently motiveless nostalgia for the good old boy's school playground (or perhaps he thought she was a fruit machine), he saw the writing on the wall. She kicked him hard in the crutch ... and he found himself teetering above a bottomless pit of black slime seething and burping between the stalags of his own gigantic brain.
Joy is awake, even if I'm not. She has startled me with a jump-start from unconsciousness. Indeed, we require a watch-out, like carnivores need back teeth. The freighters find it easier to give us the slip at night, even though the degree of darkness is unchanged. It's something to do with moods, or with half-chances, because the art of surreptitiousness needs only a tiny twiddle on the tuner for the programme to change. The juke-box whirrs in the background, its needle only a fraction of space and time between hitting the scrawling tracker-groove of "Hats Off To Larry" by Del Shannon and hovering there forever like Pod Oblomov itself.
Even awake, it's difficult to land thoughts.
The voice was clear and bright, like freshly hammered bell steel. Craftman could not believe what his ears told him, for he was ensconced alone in a sound-proof booth, acting as a guinea pig for an experiment in solitary confinement. For days now (it could have been weeks for all he knew or grown to care), he had rested on his back, connected up with relatively silent in-and-out drip feeds which penetrated the sides of the coffinish booth through light-tight valves. Only the sound of an odd muffled bubble had infrequently broken his dreams.
How he had been landed with this job began as a long story. Suffice it to say, he was stony broke, loveless and careless. Hence, the job would give him warmth, sustenance and physical comfort for as long as it would take to use up several dole cheques. So, until the novelty wore off, Craftman was in clover. He had yearned for such an opportunity when not needing to get up nor exert himself either physically or mentally: a perfect memory in the making.
Then (and how!) the darkness grew darker in his eyes, the silence a dead weight, body and non-body alike a mass of aches and mental prickles. They'd told him (and he'd forgotten who "they" exactly were) the various drugs contained in the food streams should prevent any bodily discomfort. But, he began to suppose, that's what the experiment was designed to discover: the efficacy (or not) of such medication and, indeed, the adaptability (or otherwise) of the human condition.
It was strange how he became philosophical under the increasing strain. At one time an "ordinary, relatively normal" member of the human race - listening to the football results come a Saturday afternoon, getting his end away (or leg over), coping with the wear and tear of entropy (though he called it balls-aching old age) and negotiating the trivial, transient matters of which most lives are constituted - he was now speculating on the Existence of God (and why God was so goddamn important to warrant speculating on His (god)forsaken existence), the undependability of the senses (speculating even on the uncertainty of Craftman's own existence), the mind-body dilemma until the thoughts tailed off as if they couldn't be bothered any longer to stop disowning Craftman as the thinker thinking them.
But, then, as the symptons of discomfort infiltrated from each and every angle and as Craftman actually discovered that his body was jacking against the pinions which shackled it, his haywire mind would slip out of gear and become entrammelled in the labyrinthine syncromesh of premature senility. So before such an onset, I should introduce myself as the one running the Oblomov Experiment, with one beautiful assistant, true, but she's currently off sick with glandular fever. So, it's predominantly me with a notepad on my knee that posterity will have to depend on. Sleepless nights galore, all for the sake of science. One dead of night, I will hear the bell-clear voice ringing out at the same time as Oblomov's moving graph pen indicates that the man screams from inside the sound-proof booth. But I fear that the screaming will come from my own mouth, penetrating places where even the Richter Scale fears to tread. Then I'll be dead, or entombed, I don't know which, but not before I have a chance to finish a real dream.
Dear Pod, You feel good in my hands, as I thread you through the channels of space. It just needs the slightest touch on your controls which, by means of the craftily positioned pulleys and gears, shifts your majestic rudder in wide sweeps ... thus drawing as much friction as is possible from the vacuum that space surely is, without the need of fiction.
And you're like a person to me, Pod. That's why I'm addressing you personally. We've been together, it seems, since eternity itself began all those years ago, man and boy. Or is it man and something else? Whatever the case, we took off when I was but a mere stripling and, as you know, I hadn't experienced love. Thinking about it, they (whoever "they" were) were rather cruel sending the likes of me on an endless task like this ... but all's well that ends well (if at all). I've at least known your love, dear Pod, and that I cherish more than anything in the whole world (plus sixpence). The world? What is this thing called World? Only a mind can hope to know, if only via its own filter of reality.
I often speculate on the channels of space through which we thread, dear Pod. I've always liked that "we", makes me feel cosy, but, one day, perhaps, I'll call us me, then we'll never be separated, I'll never be us again, or some such words, if you get my drift, dear Pod, ramble though I'm prone to do. Yet I have nagging doubts. I often wonder if these are but channels in my dreams and if the freight be cargo-cults of memory ... that you don't exist at all ... utter benighted solitude ... just me, in an imaginary impersonal coffin-cask, shifted from pillar to post amid the mere quirkish stalactites and stalagmites of my own brain ... that's a thoughtless doom to face. Not surprising that I'm fed up to my back teeth with consciousness. So, must sign off. Time for sleepy-byes. I can rest long and easy because you'll keep me safe, won't you, dearest Pod. And, surely, you love and care for only me. You see, automatic pilots, by definition, are mindless as well as shankless and old Craftman is no exception. In comparison, I'm a real I-ful, am I not? A real loose-limbed lovely handful. The ultimate lovecraft.
Control is so very very sweet. With that last thought, I sign off, dear Pod. Yours adoringly, Joy Stick.
(published 'Monomyth' 1998)
Thursday, October 07, 2004
The Manifold Kindnesses Of Mitchell Much
Most faces, these days, are kept behind glass, since folk have become too scared to venture into the city streets.
Still, they yearn for the outside, hence their mooning faces stuck to the inside of the wintry windows like posters ... seeking sights, often locking on to others of their kind in the windows opposite, then tracking the movements of any diminishing souls who do brave the urban phobias ...watching with clouded eyes.
The streets grow empty, the streets grow dark and, even come the mornings, the streets only grow vaguely less empty, only vaguely less dark. As the cold closes in, too, the smeary ears of those windowfaces can only hear oil-slicks upon the seas of white noise.
The folk behind such faces are realistic and tend to condemn the art of imagination. So, when one of their number sees what she considers to be an elfin creature outside kicking its jingly-jangly foot in the gutter during its apparent saunter between two nowheres in particular, yes, when she thinks she has just witnessed something more fitting for her dreams - dreams which can only occur when she manages to sleep between her lengthening shifts of window watching - she looks imploringly towards another face, another of the windowfolk (yet of the male persuasion), in the bedroom window of the house opposite ... in some attempt, no doubt, to cross-check.
#
And thus the cross-check. The parlour was a straight up and down place, with wall hangings which looked like bath towels and thick-pile carpets that sank to the ankle. Each angle was a right one, especially the perpendicular furnishings which only real people could soften.
They had elfin names, yet strutted human. Murk - as opposed to Musk - believed that, many years before, an extraordinarily ordinary family lived in the same house, the ghosts of which family still haunted the various rooms, despite, as people, the members of that family were probably still alive somewhere else. Murk's belief stretched into an obsession of listening to the walls, ear pressed tight like a fleshy elfish flower, allowing him, he maintained, to hear the soul of the house beating like a heart. He thought it was a detached house - but viewed from outside, there was, at least, circumstantial evidence of it being semi-detached, even terraced. Not believing in ghosts, Musk humoured Murk, if referring, without humour, to Murk's so-called ghosts as irritants. But, upon cross-checking, like most houses, there had been more than one “family” inhabiting it over the years...
#
"I'm dying for a cup of coffee," Edwin said, squinting towards the churning darkness of a glass-covered bubble.
"You're suffering ... withdrawal," Honor answered with a smooth toss of her head. "People don't know what harm it does them.”
"What people?" Edwin's beard masked a scar as well as the expression of his mouth. "I suppose you mean the people who think only tobacco and alcohol are harmful."
"Yes, but a harm here and there is OK," Honor suggested, employing the hand at which she was staring as both a mask and a fan.
"Living itself is harmful and when I give something up, I have to give it up altogether, or it keeps creeping back as more and more again," he said, conscious of his own awkward sentence.
"That makes as much sense..." both of them began by saying, if not exactly at the same moment to prevent overlapping, but with sufficient synchronicity to warrant a silent worship at the altar of chaos. The expressions of the four snail-ball eyes spoke with meaningful soundlessness, more than the mouths ever could - speaking, indeed, of the artefacts that made up their home ... all pretence: their parlour and kitchen being nothing but downstairs to upstairs. Even the portable television set had solid innards appropriate to its correct wielded weight of expectation. The furniture was comfortable despite such furniture not being furniture at all. Edwin wondered if Honor was less than human. He may even have wondered if he himself was less than human. And vice versa. But neither wondered if either was more than human - or even if reality itself was a mock-up. Edwin decided that only a letter would suffice, since conversations were too transient.
#
Dear Honor,
Assuming life isn't already one seamless block of infinite mystery, I've always wondered why actions, however kindly meant, always lead to unintended results. Some call it Chaos Theory. I call it Sod's Law. But I'll leave it till the end of this letter before unveiling my own explanation as to how this law works. This is because I don't want to colour your reaction to such a startling concept before leading you gently towards it. Indeed, a too sudden exposure to my philosophy would possibly burn out your mind. Therefore, I need to insulate your thought-processes with foreshadowings, extrapolations, positive digressions, guided tangents and constructive deconstructions - padding, call it what you will.
"Why in a letter?" I hear you ask, Honor. Well, I suppose it's a gut feeling on my part that the most effective ideas stem from two-way correspondence. The comparison of just two viewpoints, the teller and the told, where both are fixed identities, sound and sounding-board, can bounce to and fro until they are of one mind on the subject, yet underpinned by a solid base that only the written word and duality can supply. Anything else, like an article, would merely get lost in empty space somewhere, read or unread according to whim and opportunity. Here, with a letter's target audience-of-one, the known intimacy becomes a hell-proof hotbed to incubate too-hot-for-the-press dilemmas. Stories, novels, essays, poems, sermons all suffer from too broadcast a dissemination, spread too thinly, not eye-to-eye ... or, in this case, hand-to-eye with the permanence of print ... a hand-to-mouth existence between two souls: a triangle where the two correspondents at the base balance the leaning sides and the apex becomes the idea - the Platonic Form of Idea: the idea that shall eventually become clear when the point of rest meets above the circumscribed, nay, triscribed area of thought and debate ... even before either of the correspondents realises that that very point is reached - at which cross-section, valedictory and kisses can be appended to round the triangle off, as it were.
I'm sorry if I'm repeating myself, but conversations, by contrast, are too transient.
Permanence is most important - specially where I am trying to solve a mystery concerning kindness and its unwelcome spin-offs. You were kind to me. I was kind to you. So where did it start going wrong? Do kindnesses have inbuilt cruelties? Do you recall, indeed, why we got married, Honor? For others in our own image, that’s why.
#
"Marriage is built in Heaven," Honor said, speaking to herself - whilst Edwin's attention was distracted by the arrival of Mitchell Much who did odd jobs for these he called the "old couple", a collective expression denoting individualities who had long since merged into marriage. But not odd jobs as such but jobs he did oddly. They could not complain since the only payment he seemed to expect was Honor's smile of gratitude and a cup of coffee.
Today, Mitchell Much promised to clear out the bric-à-brac from under the old couple's double bed - bric-à-brac that had accumulated since the time when their wedding vows of love and cherishment were first enacted upon that very bed. Indeed, the old couple were still careful to preserve the bed’s joints even when passions were spent straining their own ones.
Before Mitchell Much did any work, he often conducted a game of small talk, whilst sipping at the cup of coffee.
"What are you writing about today?" he asked.
"I'm writing about you, Mitchell Much, interrupting my flow of concentration," answered Edwin.
"Well, I like that! Here I am to unbury all those things you've had piled for ages under your bed - and all you can call it is disruption." Mitchell laughed because he was only joking in the same way he assumed the other was joking.
"Interruption - not disruption, Mitchell Much." Edwin's face, as ever, was dead pan.
Disruption was like a splatter gun - whilst interruption was a well-nocked arrow in the perfect bow aiming at a single steady target - assuming that the person who wielded such a weapon was as solid as a rock, himself. Or herself.
Soon after this interchange, Mitchell vanished upstairs to deal with the realms of the bed's open oblong tunnel. The old couple could hear him scrabbling about ten inches above the bedroom's floorboards where the bric-à-brac starting piling downwards.
#
Dear Honor,
Every time I restart this letter, I have to remind myself to whom it's addressed. When you interrupted to ask "Why in a letter?", I wondered if you knew that Mitchell Much was about to visit - as if you were predicting his interruption with your own interruption - as if you had decided that two closely following interruptions would cancel each other out, thus spiking my guns. How could I complain when the second of the two interruptions was another of Mitchell Much's manifold kindnesses, one that took the blame from you? In any event, interruptions, in whatever shape or form, are the only means of communication between folk.
#
The pen was lifted from the paper, upon hearing the sound of busy scurrying in the room above - Mitchell Much's fingernails now having reached right through the bric-à-brac, scratching and scraping like claws on a bone roof.
#
One wild Wednesday, it is, with winds of snow travelling up the river to the conurbation as if on a conveyor-belt. The windowfolk are settling in for a seemingly endless ice-watch, when the playing of out-staring competitions with each other across the city squares is the most amusement for which any can lightly hope - and, even then, all of them secretly yearn to lose such competitions without making it too obvious.
It is then that Honor's face first hears the elfin bell-pad's earnest approach - and whips of wind weep winter from a sorrowful dusk, as her face finally sees the ambling cockiness of the tinkle-trod imp.
Faces that are kept behind the frost-mapped glass are quickly warmed with the flames of sight that are switched on from some spigot in the soul.
Indeed, the snow has already turned to sleet and, now, to a fast-laced rain ... in which the faunish entity is seen splashing its gutter-groovy pitter-patter paces of jingling joy.
Singing in the rain, I'm singing in the rain, what a glorious feeling... It trills with the tune's runes tingling the facefolk's newly pricked-up hear-holes, their window-glass cleaning itself not only of the frost but of its smears of sound-proofing, too.
And they all join in with the chorus.
But, then, the faces and their worst fears are reunited. They watch the creature being mugged by one of the plug-ugly bruisers whose crimes of brutal street robbery are so self-defeating in keeping the city rat-runs free from the wealthy footpad folk whom the faces used to be.
The imp's next plaintive song is a plea for help but it goes unheard as warmth wilts from the windows. Honor’s face and the face cross from hers, both unpeel...
#
Kindnesses piled on kindnesses, dear Honor - like finding our erstwhile love letters, letters thought lost forever, found under all those romance novels you since devoured and thrust under the bed when finished with. Trust Mitchell Much to drag things from the past under the guise of rat-catching: reminders of that one special rodent which buried itself in your womb, Honor. Childless couples are suckers for misbegotten memories: they only possess the right number of innards and bodily parts between them, give or take the odd biological leaning towards scarce resources...
#
The scrabbling on the floor above was reaching fever pitch.
#
...Mitchell Much's damn rummaging is the last straw from this pig-sty world, I'd say. We have not spoken anything but small talk for years, ever since that day of the irredeemable row, but how about it, Honor? Let's do Mitchell Much a kindness for a change. Let's square the circle. Short-circuit birth and death. He'll find your body (if not you), my dear, soon enough, anyway. After he's tugged out the surprisingly heavy picnic hamper from under our bed...
#
Doodles spread down the page like insect trails. Edwin didn't append an incriminatory valedictory to the letter - nor his name.
The old couple had loved, in preference to hating. Indeed, neither admitted to the other their suspicions. They made the best of it. Give and take. Like all relationships. Once the truck of truth was deprived of an inch, falsities just piled up behind.
Like the baby screeching for its food.
"Wants it milk - wants it more and more," Edwin said with a nod towards continuity in all things, even in the pointless small talk of married people long past their long tooth day. Not that they could now have a baby, unless it were a grandchild. Or a foundling. An orphan. A foster kid. A phantom birth. A changeling. A pigeon and pair.
Whatever the case, Honor trundled off to the kitchen to warm the milk bottle. Her breasts had dried up ages ago - and she smiled in preference to crying.
Beneath the disguises, there was nothing to disguise. Only false faces ever creeping back into position at the window or windowscreen. The old couple had once sent Honor's smile inside a poisoned pen letter to Mitchell Much. But there was many a slip tween cup and lip. As between glass and glass.
#
The coffee jug bubbled in the corner, as it always bubbled day in, day out, should anyone's craving for caffeine become too much. The bottle-bank, in the other corner, bubbled, too, as it took mock fermentations to the optimum of crystallisation and distillation. The half-breeder, however, in the window alcove, was the biggest bubbler of all: part-way into putting together, it was hoped, a foetus of a face whence another Mitchell Much might be mulched. Another stinking seed-bed oozed between the hamper's wickerwork and, after permeating the brown-stained ceiling, fell upon an old man’s splattery pate's archipelago of discolored warts.
#
"Are they noisy today?" jeered Musk, his face seeming as normal as a face could be without straining identity as well as credulity whilst his clothes picked him out as a impish shape.
"Yes," answered Murk, without first complaining about the paradox in the question. His shape was also not a lot to write home about and, on top of which, left much to be desired - neither back nor front, but plenty of face.
Some ghosts were so quiet, they must write letters to each other instead of talking. But then, what about the extraordinarily ordinary family the residue of which underpinned Murk's belief in the ghosts?
#
Amid the gently seething percolations of the house, life went on living, in preference to dying. Another family checked their crosses.
#
"Daddy! What you doing?"
A girl stared at her daddy, believing him to be the person responsible for her, despite him acting so irresponsibly, with his ear-lug plastered to the parlour wall.
She was dressed ready for bed, ten years old and eager to see her favourite television programme. She heard her mother in the kitchen putting the finishing touches to the washing-up. The girl’s brother was in his bedroom, deploying his mind before the computer screen. In another era, he'd probably be reading good books.
Meanwhile, father had stood up and was about to humour his little daughter's question with an answer - when he realised that he couldn't remember what he had been doing. Children were ever asking awkwardnesses, he thought. Like the Creation of Man. The Reason for Woman. The Existence of Ghosts. The Emptiness of Death. The Memory of Eternity. The Meaning of the Millennium. Emptiness was like having the TV screen blank. Being ten years old, she should have grown out of such curiosities and be getting on with an ordinary straitened existence. He didn't know which was worse: his daughter's prying or his son's burying himself alive in the room above. His son thought he should be waited on, hand and foot.
"Switch off the telly manually, will you?" he said to his daughter, in point-blank refusal to be drawn on his actions. After all, he hadn't been doing anything worth asking about. Only looking for the telly's remote control.
She decided it was politic not to pursue the matter but noted it in her commonplace mind for general reference. Her daddy having a few slates loose was yet only a suspicion. She'd have to grow herself a little older before she'd realise the full scope of the demolition by her father of the family's safe haven...
#
And Musk, thus hearing the ghosts of father and daughter speaking, even thinking, was in a dither as well as a quandary. He couldn't see a way to turn. He finally abandoned the house having despaired of ever being able to supplement his own eccentricity to complement Murk's. All the whispers and glances, too, from neighbours, regarding two people of the male persuausion living together without the hope of procreation, hadn't enhanced the bonhomie of those whispered and glanced at. However, there had been a growing acceptance, with even the woman from next door striking the comforting sparks of small talk upon their bristly cheeks. Indeed, kids no longer screamed up and down the alleyway next to the house - nor made crude catcalls regarding Hell and its creatures. Nevertheless, Murk had no real friends in the area and now - with Musk vanished into the mass of human inhumanity elsewhere - he felt lonely ... so very lonely, he even felt the need to leave himself alone to wallow in the brooding gloom. So Murk vowed to abandon house, too - leaving it to the echoes and the ghosts, none of which had been able to take the edge off solitude. Murk waved at himself before he shut the front door behind him. The dither and the quandary were involved with not knowing who was who.
#
Or which ghost was which
And Edwin was similarly cube-rooted, if that was the right expression - which he doubted. His daughter was past her bedtime - which was obvious by her lack of presence - trying not to be noticed - vanishing into her own huge yawn. His son was still above, turning a deaf ear to the virtual reality of his bedroom, while his screening of noise images - with specific reference to non-emphasis - primed the available visual space for the next computer game.
Honor - currently in the kitchen where she belonged - was calling out for her son to come and help her with the chores. Both her husband and son wanted to be waited on hand and foot. Mucky pups! If it were not for her daughter, Honor would have truly become the remote control that her husband always lost between channel-blinking. At least, her daughter kept her mother sane. Or as sane as sanity could be in the foreshadow of senility.
#
Sleep was necessary even for wide-eyed computer boys. Sleep should have been the contrast of darkness that light needed to exist. His latest computer game was about two demonic creatures in a struggle with ghosts. They were called Mork and Musk, or suchlike.
He never woke up from the squared screen of dream, because he'd never fallen asleep as a prerequisite to waking. Or he had not been alive in the first place - having mishaunted hindsight. Or perhaps his mother and father had murdered him: by planting a future with a past's failure to consummate a soul. The pixel ghosts of feasible families squatted the Narrowing House - hoping against hope that a remote life, if not love, could fashion them.
#
And Honor mourned her memory of a kindness. Scratching her head, she smiled. A thousand ordinary smiles, each shared by a million other faces.
#
There are no valuables upon the elfin body for the plug-ugly bruiser to steal, of course. None on the outside. And the imp's singing-in-the-rain continues with a strangled rendition of I Did It My Way (or much of it anyway), a plaintive voice that can only be switched off by means of a spigot in its soul ... if Lord Muck’s digging fingers ever reach that far.
Honor, this time, does not bother to cross-check. She simply knows.
(Published ‘At mos faer’ (KADATH PRESS) 1997)
Thursday, September 30, 2004
No Circumstances
Feeling well-born, yet fallen from grace, the Duke needed to pretend he was someone other than the Duke, rather than face the shame. Someone ordinary. However, he drove a long black car, which, tangentially, was a more dangerous activity during daylight hours than at night, for the not so obvious reason that people’s first reactions were geared in inverse ratio to their pupil size. Also, he passed himself off under the name Ralph, for no other purpose than to further his non-descriptness. David and Charles and Peter were such commonplace names that well-grounded suspicions would have been engendered in others from their misguided suspicions as to his pecking-orders of bluff.
His Royal pedigree was so deep-seated, Ralph had given up doubting it. Yet the very act of non-doubt could often lead to smug acceptance which was in turn a precursor to plain forgetting. He did not even bother to rubber-stamp his identity with the requisite self-recognition when he eventually woke every morning after the seemingly interminable night. Certainty, as ever, was tantamount to ignorance.
And such ignorance forced him out some nights, instinctively fearful as he was of waking up as someone completely different. Yet, it was an instinct common to all werewolves, particularly those with noble blood in their veins, incubated somehow within the dark side of their natures: and, like all instincts worth their salt, it failed to touch the actual consciousness of the beast.
Ralph’s forays were, of course, upon fullbright nights, when the less catalytic white moonrib, that betokened birth and beginnings, was merely a memory that had slipped through the mental grasp like a bloody stake through an amateur vampire-hunter’s hands. No, it was the yellow-engorged ripeness of a mother-fucked moon that drew such creatures as Ralph from his bed. His skin became a pelt of costly ermine or mink that had escaped the fur-haters’ hate; eyes like crown-jewels; cloak a murky mane of miscegenate majesty. His courtiers, the suburban fox and other critters that townsfolk inferred from upturned dustbins, followed in his wake. Cats with pinprick eyes of druggy green - tired of pretending to squeal in long drawn-out pain after sparring and spitting with each othe - did open deep the pink of their throats to return colour’s favour that day had granted them. All had their place and duty. Nature meant giving as well as taking. As a man with his body.
Yes, today of all daybright days, Ralph feels fur unfurling, tip-toeing from the deepest pockets of ancient puberty. This is the first time the transfiguration has occurred outside of night’s jurisdiction. He staggers garageward to find his car still black as the rods and cones in his sleepy eyes. He needs to drive and drive - until it is night. The courtiers of his dark dukedom are curled in a sleep as unstirred as death within dens that day-timers can never suspect, let alone discover. So, with no followers, the Duke is his own rebuke.
He cannot believe his dreams are day-dreams nor the nightmare true. He is a werewolf of the old school. Not the next best thing to a King. The steering-wheel shudders in his hand, even before the engine has choked into life, as if man-made beasts have souls to speak of.
He twists his head with an instinct born from dullness. There is a passenger of sorts laid out in the back like a casket - handles and epaulettes of gold, silver cross, carved vine-leaves, heavy nailed lid. The casket’s woodwork is so close to its dark Spring, there sprouts, not foliage, but rich fur itemised like human hair. A coiffured coffin.
He fears that his duty has always been to drive the town’s only premature burial hearse - and, today of all daybright days, he is to be both undertaker and corpse. A sad outcome for a Duke, since, only at night, could there have been the full regalia of a Royal funeral, him being, at the beginning of the day, nothing but a pauper, a down-and-out, a cloudy-eyed dosser. Poor in spirit and - (he feels his head) - yes, completely bald. Like most of us, he has died too late, with no pomp and certainly no circumstances. But, happily, nightmare is king.
(Published ‘The Darklands Project’ 1997)
His Royal pedigree was so deep-seated, Ralph had given up doubting it. Yet the very act of non-doubt could often lead to smug acceptance which was in turn a precursor to plain forgetting. He did not even bother to rubber-stamp his identity with the requisite self-recognition when he eventually woke every morning after the seemingly interminable night. Certainty, as ever, was tantamount to ignorance.
And such ignorance forced him out some nights, instinctively fearful as he was of waking up as someone completely different. Yet, it was an instinct common to all werewolves, particularly those with noble blood in their veins, incubated somehow within the dark side of their natures: and, like all instincts worth their salt, it failed to touch the actual consciousness of the beast.
Ralph’s forays were, of course, upon fullbright nights, when the less catalytic white moonrib, that betokened birth and beginnings, was merely a memory that had slipped through the mental grasp like a bloody stake through an amateur vampire-hunter’s hands. No, it was the yellow-engorged ripeness of a mother-fucked moon that drew such creatures as Ralph from his bed. His skin became a pelt of costly ermine or mink that had escaped the fur-haters’ hate; eyes like crown-jewels; cloak a murky mane of miscegenate majesty. His courtiers, the suburban fox and other critters that townsfolk inferred from upturned dustbins, followed in his wake. Cats with pinprick eyes of druggy green - tired of pretending to squeal in long drawn-out pain after sparring and spitting with each othe - did open deep the pink of their throats to return colour’s favour that day had granted them. All had their place and duty. Nature meant giving as well as taking. As a man with his body.
Yes, today of all daybright days, Ralph feels fur unfurling, tip-toeing from the deepest pockets of ancient puberty. This is the first time the transfiguration has occurred outside of night’s jurisdiction. He staggers garageward to find his car still black as the rods and cones in his sleepy eyes. He needs to drive and drive - until it is night. The courtiers of his dark dukedom are curled in a sleep as unstirred as death within dens that day-timers can never suspect, let alone discover. So, with no followers, the Duke is his own rebuke.
He cannot believe his dreams are day-dreams nor the nightmare true. He is a werewolf of the old school. Not the next best thing to a King. The steering-wheel shudders in his hand, even before the engine has choked into life, as if man-made beasts have souls to speak of.
He twists his head with an instinct born from dullness. There is a passenger of sorts laid out in the back like a casket - handles and epaulettes of gold, silver cross, carved vine-leaves, heavy nailed lid. The casket’s woodwork is so close to its dark Spring, there sprouts, not foliage, but rich fur itemised like human hair. A coiffured coffin.
He fears that his duty has always been to drive the town’s only premature burial hearse - and, today of all daybright days, he is to be both undertaker and corpse. A sad outcome for a Duke, since, only at night, could there have been the full regalia of a Royal funeral, him being, at the beginning of the day, nothing but a pauper, a down-and-out, a cloudy-eyed dosser. Poor in spirit and - (he feels his head) - yes, completely bald. Like most of us, he has died too late, with no pomp and certainly no circumstances. But, happily, nightmare is king.
(Published ‘The Darklands Project’ 1997)
Sunday, September 26, 2004
Parcels
When Flit Heardol saw brown paper parcels in various shapes and sizes being smuggled every night into the pub by the customers who then shared them out between them, he wondered if this could be anything to do with the Government’s recent measures against the buying and selling of human organs for transplant operations. He surmised that there would now be a black market in them and he expected at any moment to see blood dripping from the ill-fastened wrappings. There’s no smoke without fire. No image without object.
But he had unaccountable thoughts all the time, so he shrugged it off and continued sipping at his beer - until a parcel was dropped in his lap by a large figure of a man who just passed in the crowd without a word.
He merely sat and stared at it, not even daring to feel it. He left it on the seat where no doubt a bomb warning would result.
Back in the flat, he stewed over the incident. It may have been valuable, something that could have gainsaid the erstwhile meaning of his life. The crazy idea about human organs did not hold water. It had been the drink thinking.
The next evening, he returned to the pub, heart in his mouth (as they say), wondering whether there would be any repercussions.
“Oi! Oi! You with the tall hat! You left your specimen ‘ere last night.” It was the short-arse landlord shouting, handing over the package from under the bar, miming its stench. However, Flit was not the sort of regular whom anybody recognised or welcomed with a friendly “Hiya, Arsehole, how yer jiggerin’?” He was a non-entity. A solitary drinker. One who could never summon the wherewithal to strike up an exchange of sayings with complete strangers.
When was a stranger not a stranger? He’d seen many of the faces in that pub for years now. He’d overheard the tribulations of their life histories, the ins and outs of their business or marriage, the vicarious football expertise, the ludicrous sayings that emanate from typical pub-talk, even the political and religious debates, foundered on shifting sands of misaligned prejudices, which often ensued in public bars. He felt he knew them better than himself. But none of them knew him at all. He expected they wondered what such a lacklustre individual did with his life when beyond their limelight. None of them broke the dry ice. He may as well have been dead (or never born) as far as they were concerned.
Except there was sometimes a lady who also seemed to be a solitary drinker. There were not many of her breed. A matinée idol's wench from a wet afternoon's cinema-going. She would quite often look up from the surface of her drink and, Flit suspected, half-smile at him. But he never smiled back, in case it was not intended for him. He couldn’t smile, in fact. His mouth was set in a thin line which he could not bring himself to change. It would have been tantamount to admitting that he was kith and kin to the smuggling customers and wanted their company. Strange, he never questioned why he went to the Rocking Horse pub in the first place.
On the evening after the parcel incident, he returned.
She was in the corner. This time she was exchanging sayings with a gentleman. They both seemed deep in set routines of talk that excluded all else. Suddenly, she seemed to point at Flit, and the gentleman looked up to follow the direction of her viewfinder.
Flit supposed he must have been seen blushing. He got up to leave, his beer only half-finished. But there was an ugly incident at the door.
He must have looked silly, bobbing up and down in his seat, as if he were a lout on a Works outing.
The parcels were still being passed around - more than he could ever recall on previous occasions. Even the titchy landlord was a recipient of one.
When people look back on life’s matters, they usually have a good grasp of their own personalities and motives. But, here Flit was quite mysterious even to his own thoughts. He knew more about the pub regulars than he did about himself (he may even have known more about those others than they did about themselves, which is another mystery altogether, quite irrelevant to current concerns). So, yes, he could describe every one in detail, down to their last dream. He was the inscrutable one, the intangible element in an otherwise quite understandable scene. If he could just get to the bottom of himself or, at least, round to the back...
He shook himself vigorously and, braving the off-stage fracas at the door, he left for the loneliness of his flat. Not that he was less lonely in the pub.
One evening, months later, he stirred and decided gratuitously to go to a pub other than the Rocking Horse. He wrapped up the animal part he was planning to have grilled rare for supper and took it with him. He hoped, for the first time in his life, that an action he was about to take would break the ice and create sayings of his own which others could share. But he kept the parcel in his carrier bag, never daring to take it out for, of all the evenings he could have chosen at random, he recognised several of the Rocking Horse regulars who were here in the Garden Swing Inn, apparently, to witness a needle match between the two pubs in a quiz league competition. Each had brought a parcel which they proceeded to pass round.
Flit left, of course, toting his own parcel with him, desperately glad that it had not got mixed up with the others. He was unaccountably sad that the lady had not been there. But she may have been. He supposed she could have been in the parcels.
(Published ‘Auguries’ 1993)
But he had unaccountable thoughts all the time, so he shrugged it off and continued sipping at his beer - until a parcel was dropped in his lap by a large figure of a man who just passed in the crowd without a word.
He merely sat and stared at it, not even daring to feel it. He left it on the seat where no doubt a bomb warning would result.
Back in the flat, he stewed over the incident. It may have been valuable, something that could have gainsaid the erstwhile meaning of his life. The crazy idea about human organs did not hold water. It had been the drink thinking.
The next evening, he returned to the pub, heart in his mouth (as they say), wondering whether there would be any repercussions.
“Oi! Oi! You with the tall hat! You left your specimen ‘ere last night.” It was the short-arse landlord shouting, handing over the package from under the bar, miming its stench. However, Flit was not the sort of regular whom anybody recognised or welcomed with a friendly “Hiya, Arsehole, how yer jiggerin’?” He was a non-entity. A solitary drinker. One who could never summon the wherewithal to strike up an exchange of sayings with complete strangers.
When was a stranger not a stranger? He’d seen many of the faces in that pub for years now. He’d overheard the tribulations of their life histories, the ins and outs of their business or marriage, the vicarious football expertise, the ludicrous sayings that emanate from typical pub-talk, even the political and religious debates, foundered on shifting sands of misaligned prejudices, which often ensued in public bars. He felt he knew them better than himself. But none of them knew him at all. He expected they wondered what such a lacklustre individual did with his life when beyond their limelight. None of them broke the dry ice. He may as well have been dead (or never born) as far as they were concerned.
Except there was sometimes a lady who also seemed to be a solitary drinker. There were not many of her breed. A matinée idol's wench from a wet afternoon's cinema-going. She would quite often look up from the surface of her drink and, Flit suspected, half-smile at him. But he never smiled back, in case it was not intended for him. He couldn’t smile, in fact. His mouth was set in a thin line which he could not bring himself to change. It would have been tantamount to admitting that he was kith and kin to the smuggling customers and wanted their company. Strange, he never questioned why he went to the Rocking Horse pub in the first place.
On the evening after the parcel incident, he returned.
She was in the corner. This time she was exchanging sayings with a gentleman. They both seemed deep in set routines of talk that excluded all else. Suddenly, she seemed to point at Flit, and the gentleman looked up to follow the direction of her viewfinder.
Flit supposed he must have been seen blushing. He got up to leave, his beer only half-finished. But there was an ugly incident at the door.
He must have looked silly, bobbing up and down in his seat, as if he were a lout on a Works outing.
The parcels were still being passed around - more than he could ever recall on previous occasions. Even the titchy landlord was a recipient of one.
When people look back on life’s matters, they usually have a good grasp of their own personalities and motives. But, here Flit was quite mysterious even to his own thoughts. He knew more about the pub regulars than he did about himself (he may even have known more about those others than they did about themselves, which is another mystery altogether, quite irrelevant to current concerns). So, yes, he could describe every one in detail, down to their last dream. He was the inscrutable one, the intangible element in an otherwise quite understandable scene. If he could just get to the bottom of himself or, at least, round to the back...
He shook himself vigorously and, braving the off-stage fracas at the door, he left for the loneliness of his flat. Not that he was less lonely in the pub.
One evening, months later, he stirred and decided gratuitously to go to a pub other than the Rocking Horse. He wrapped up the animal part he was planning to have grilled rare for supper and took it with him. He hoped, for the first time in his life, that an action he was about to take would break the ice and create sayings of his own which others could share. But he kept the parcel in his carrier bag, never daring to take it out for, of all the evenings he could have chosen at random, he recognised several of the Rocking Horse regulars who were here in the Garden Swing Inn, apparently, to witness a needle match between the two pubs in a quiz league competition. Each had brought a parcel which they proceeded to pass round.
Flit left, of course, toting his own parcel with him, desperately glad that it had not got mixed up with the others. He was unaccountably sad that the lady had not been there. But she may have been. He supposed she could have been in the parcels.
(Published ‘Auguries’ 1993)
Monday, September 20, 2004
Death Sweat
“Can I have a pot noodle, please,” asked the last customer of the day.
“Sorry, sir, I’m afraid we’re fresh out of Pot Noodles - only got prime Scotch Beef Rump Steak. I can let you have a goodly slab of it for the same price, ‘cos it’s on special offer, you see, sir,” answered the shopkeeper.
“I don’t know - I really fancied a Pot Noodle tonight.” And with that he left, evidently planning to forego his supper altogether.
* * *
The shopkeeper spent a disruptive night, tossing and turning in his bed, stewing in his own sweat, for he couldn’t help worrying over his customers. Did the poor lady who bought the tin of cat food end up actually imbibing it herself? In which case what happened to her cat? And why did all those kids from Meadvale Junior High want so much glue - surely not to repair the storm damage on the school roof, as they said? what about that elderly gent who bought three Tampax? And, above all, what had become of him who was hooked on Pot Noodles? Could that gent now be starving, because of his, the shopkeeper’s lack of foresight in ordering sooner? And, oh yes, all those to whom he sold cigs and booze -he was effectively killing them off gradually, just for the sake of their custom, encouraging incipient nodules to poke their flickering tongues of cancer into the spongey grooves of their innards.
He would at last drift off into fitful sleep…
That night, he saw an aged wizard, draped in a cloak of special offer coupons and sanitary towels, waving a string of pork sausages that had magically hardened into a wand and bearing an oversized Pot Noodle container on his head. In fact, the wizard looked a bit like him.
In front of him was the shop counter, not the usual sort with which the dreamer was accustomed, but a slab of marble with old-fashioned brass scales and assorted weights. On the wall behind was one of those wartime Bisto adverts, where two boys in large caps had speech bubbles coming out of their mouths that were full of seething brown sludge, making the words as they spoke them completely inaudible. A rotten rasher crawled across the parquet floor of its own violation, evidently fleeing the bacon slicer in the corner. Potential customers were peering in, wondering why the window display of the shop appeared to be a model of a cobbler with a shoe on a last and a hammer poised above it. Presumably, the window dresser, recently employed by the wizard, had not yet been told that this was a food shop. Taut wires stretched across the ceiling bearing canisters of loose change as they rattled along at great pace from corner to corner for no obvious reason. Perhaps, this corner shop had aspirations above its station.
The dreamer’s attention soon returned to the shopkeeper wizard who was passing his hand evocatively over what appeared to be.... yes, it was, a Pot Noodle, which seemed quite out of context. And the words he intoned:
“O, Pot Noodle, O wondrous Pot Noodle, full of scrumptious cup-o-soup granules and nodules, rubbing shoulders with dried-out diced vegetable ready for scalding into instant biteabilities…”
The wizard licked his lips, drawing in a fleck of wholegrain noodle that he had been trying to masticate into something he could actually swallow. His mouth was in fact chewing away busily at wadges of what looked like live ‘E’ numbers, that together had the consistency of squeaky chewing-gum.
In real life, the dreamer had never heard of the word ‘Alchemy’, let alone known its meaning. But, as soon as the wizard allowed this enticing word to escape from his mouth, floating in the air like a small triangular bag for boiled sweets, he raised his dream arm, plucked it from the wire it had caught upon and placed what looked like a pear-drop into his own dream mouth. And the meaning silted through his body like a flavour that caught the magic of childhood…
He knew, as if instinctively, that the wizard was attempting what had heretofore been impossible: i.e. to convert dehydrated dross into something approaching real food!
The cobbler in the window turned his head to the dreamer, smiled and brought the hammer down with a resounding thud…
***
The shopkeeper woke with a sudden ending. Dawn was already seeping through the bedroom curtains. Still being in a bit of a state, he went to the window and was shocked to see the last customer of the previous night staring up at him. His eyes were haunted; sweat poured off him like gravy thickening. He could even be dead, despite just standing there.
The shopkeeper looked up and realised that the whole sky was crisscrossed with the wires which were bearing aeroplanes on intercontinental travel. His next dream would be one where they didn’t need the wires!
(Published ‘Works’ 1991)
“Sorry, sir, I’m afraid we’re fresh out of Pot Noodles - only got prime Scotch Beef Rump Steak. I can let you have a goodly slab of it for the same price, ‘cos it’s on special offer, you see, sir,” answered the shopkeeper.
“I don’t know - I really fancied a Pot Noodle tonight.” And with that he left, evidently planning to forego his supper altogether.
* * *
The shopkeeper spent a disruptive night, tossing and turning in his bed, stewing in his own sweat, for he couldn’t help worrying over his customers. Did the poor lady who bought the tin of cat food end up actually imbibing it herself? In which case what happened to her cat? And why did all those kids from Meadvale Junior High want so much glue - surely not to repair the storm damage on the school roof, as they said? what about that elderly gent who bought three Tampax? And, above all, what had become of him who was hooked on Pot Noodles? Could that gent now be starving, because of his, the shopkeeper’s lack of foresight in ordering sooner? And, oh yes, all those to whom he sold cigs and booze -he was effectively killing them off gradually, just for the sake of their custom, encouraging incipient nodules to poke their flickering tongues of cancer into the spongey grooves of their innards.
He would at last drift off into fitful sleep…
That night, he saw an aged wizard, draped in a cloak of special offer coupons and sanitary towels, waving a string of pork sausages that had magically hardened into a wand and bearing an oversized Pot Noodle container on his head. In fact, the wizard looked a bit like him.
In front of him was the shop counter, not the usual sort with which the dreamer was accustomed, but a slab of marble with old-fashioned brass scales and assorted weights. On the wall behind was one of those wartime Bisto adverts, where two boys in large caps had speech bubbles coming out of their mouths that were full of seething brown sludge, making the words as they spoke them completely inaudible. A rotten rasher crawled across the parquet floor of its own violation, evidently fleeing the bacon slicer in the corner. Potential customers were peering in, wondering why the window display of the shop appeared to be a model of a cobbler with a shoe on a last and a hammer poised above it. Presumably, the window dresser, recently employed by the wizard, had not yet been told that this was a food shop. Taut wires stretched across the ceiling bearing canisters of loose change as they rattled along at great pace from corner to corner for no obvious reason. Perhaps, this corner shop had aspirations above its station.
The dreamer’s attention soon returned to the shopkeeper wizard who was passing his hand evocatively over what appeared to be.... yes, it was, a Pot Noodle, which seemed quite out of context. And the words he intoned:
“O, Pot Noodle, O wondrous Pot Noodle, full of scrumptious cup-o-soup granules and nodules, rubbing shoulders with dried-out diced vegetable ready for scalding into instant biteabilities…”
The wizard licked his lips, drawing in a fleck of wholegrain noodle that he had been trying to masticate into something he could actually swallow. His mouth was in fact chewing away busily at wadges of what looked like live ‘E’ numbers, that together had the consistency of squeaky chewing-gum.
In real life, the dreamer had never heard of the word ‘Alchemy’, let alone known its meaning. But, as soon as the wizard allowed this enticing word to escape from his mouth, floating in the air like a small triangular bag for boiled sweets, he raised his dream arm, plucked it from the wire it had caught upon and placed what looked like a pear-drop into his own dream mouth. And the meaning silted through his body like a flavour that caught the magic of childhood…
He knew, as if instinctively, that the wizard was attempting what had heretofore been impossible: i.e. to convert dehydrated dross into something approaching real food!
The cobbler in the window turned his head to the dreamer, smiled and brought the hammer down with a resounding thud…
***
The shopkeeper woke with a sudden ending. Dawn was already seeping through the bedroom curtains. Still being in a bit of a state, he went to the window and was shocked to see the last customer of the previous night staring up at him. His eyes were haunted; sweat poured off him like gravy thickening. He could even be dead, despite just standing there.
The shopkeeper looked up and realised that the whole sky was crisscrossed with the wires which were bearing aeroplanes on intercontinental travel. His next dream would be one where they didn’t need the wires!
(Published ‘Works’ 1991)
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Jean’s Soirée
"A thousand writers should be killed annually," said the man on the tube.
He looked up from the book to see to whom he had spoken.
I was not going to be the culprit so I pretended to turn back to my own laptop book.
But, too late, because, briefly, our eyes locked like oysterish antlers.
Strange words had captured us for their own. And, as if hypnotised, we left the carriage together at a stop neither of us had intended.
He told me he would like me to meet his girl friend Jean. I told him that perhaps I could make overtures in her flat.
Until then, I didn't know I was a composer.
"Composers, too," he said. "But they should be strangled every time one is born."
We both laughed upon reaching the rain-swept blackness that was recognisable - or, at least, conceivable - as the upside.
The escalator faded away as our memory of it was expunged by the encroachment of more important memories.
Jean, however, was to remind us of it.
We had, by now, arrived at her flat where I would learn, eventually, that the most important memory had always yet to be remembered.
"Have you wondered why there is frequently a strong wind down that escalator...?" she smilingly asked one of us, whilst knowing that her pouting features and pinprick dimples endeared her more to the other.
"A thousand painters should be hung, drawn and quartered every day," was the sudden non-sequitur of someone else - previously unnoticed as he sat near Jean's television set. "At least," he added with the utmost emphasis.
When the night lengthened (almost into itself as if daylight was growing more distant at both ends), the four of us got on famously. Not talking the night away, but more its opposite.
We covered the various art forms, stating why each of us loved music, painting, novels, poems, operas, plays, symphonies, sculptures ... but hated those who created them.
"You know," Jean said, "there'll come a point in the lifetime of the planet when there'll be more people that have died than there are yet to live."
Despite her clumsy use of words, the other three nodded in agreement, knowing she had made a point that actually justified the execution of artists or, indeed, of anybody else even with the pretence of artistry. It could also be seen - with a blinding flash of intuition - that the moving staircase image could be applied to concepts, such as existence, as well as to the tangible things that existed.
"Constructive illness is the opposite of euthanasia," I said, this being my contribution to the tail-end of the discussion.
"Suicide bombers are members of the deconstructionist school..." the man near the television set started to say.
"Only when an art gallery - let us say, for the sake of argument, the Tate Gallery - can actually itself become a work of art when it's devastated by a bomb," announced the man I had originally met on the tube. It turned out to be his parting shot, as, soon after, he departed Jean's flat along with the man previoulsy near the television set.
Jean and I kissed as I unbuttoned her blouse. The lacy bra was tantalisingly brief - as was the subsequent sex we both shared. I suppose, when and if I remember the occasion, I will decide that I was rather put off by Jean's tattooes ... and the way her spine moved up and down. Her eyes tasted like shellfish.
The rest of that night was spent watching the programme that the man previously near the television set had also been watching. It seemed to be on endless repeat.
The only way to know when morning had broken was upon hearing the first tube's sporadic passage under the block of flats, like the end of Sibelius' fifth symphony ... or the beginning of my first. Then, thankfully, the words let us go.
(Published ‘Orbis’ 1997)
He looked up from the book to see to whom he had spoken.
I was not going to be the culprit so I pretended to turn back to my own laptop book.
But, too late, because, briefly, our eyes locked like oysterish antlers.
Strange words had captured us for their own. And, as if hypnotised, we left the carriage together at a stop neither of us had intended.
He told me he would like me to meet his girl friend Jean. I told him that perhaps I could make overtures in her flat.
Until then, I didn't know I was a composer.
"Composers, too," he said. "But they should be strangled every time one is born."
We both laughed upon reaching the rain-swept blackness that was recognisable - or, at least, conceivable - as the upside.
The escalator faded away as our memory of it was expunged by the encroachment of more important memories.
Jean, however, was to remind us of it.
We had, by now, arrived at her flat where I would learn, eventually, that the most important memory had always yet to be remembered.
"Have you wondered why there is frequently a strong wind down that escalator...?" she smilingly asked one of us, whilst knowing that her pouting features and pinprick dimples endeared her more to the other.
"A thousand painters should be hung, drawn and quartered every day," was the sudden non-sequitur of someone else - previously unnoticed as he sat near Jean's television set. "At least," he added with the utmost emphasis.
When the night lengthened (almost into itself as if daylight was growing more distant at both ends), the four of us got on famously. Not talking the night away, but more its opposite.
We covered the various art forms, stating why each of us loved music, painting, novels, poems, operas, plays, symphonies, sculptures ... but hated those who created them.
"You know," Jean said, "there'll come a point in the lifetime of the planet when there'll be more people that have died than there are yet to live."
Despite her clumsy use of words, the other three nodded in agreement, knowing she had made a point that actually justified the execution of artists or, indeed, of anybody else even with the pretence of artistry. It could also be seen - with a blinding flash of intuition - that the moving staircase image could be applied to concepts, such as existence, as well as to the tangible things that existed.
"Constructive illness is the opposite of euthanasia," I said, this being my contribution to the tail-end of the discussion.
"Suicide bombers are members of the deconstructionist school..." the man near the television set started to say.
"Only when an art gallery - let us say, for the sake of argument, the Tate Gallery - can actually itself become a work of art when it's devastated by a bomb," announced the man I had originally met on the tube. It turned out to be his parting shot, as, soon after, he departed Jean's flat along with the man previoulsy near the television set.
Jean and I kissed as I unbuttoned her blouse. The lacy bra was tantalisingly brief - as was the subsequent sex we both shared. I suppose, when and if I remember the occasion, I will decide that I was rather put off by Jean's tattooes ... and the way her spine moved up and down. Her eyes tasted like shellfish.
The rest of that night was spent watching the programme that the man previously near the television set had also been watching. It seemed to be on endless repeat.
The only way to know when morning had broken was upon hearing the first tube's sporadic passage under the block of flats, like the end of Sibelius' fifth symphony ... or the beginning of my first. Then, thankfully, the words let us go.
(Published ‘Orbis’ 1997)
Tuesday, September 07, 2004
The Next Files
"Life is in itself a form of apprenticeship," suggested tunicked Tom to this particular girl-in-every-port, as the tardy afternoon began to try on its evening wear. His words.
He was on shore leave: the Captain's favourite crew-member, simply for his more than just a spark of intelligence compared to the rest of the sailors. He had often been invited to the Officers' table, to spin a yarn or two, to plait a tale, to hold forth on all matters philosophical, spiritual and mundane. The port which the ship was visiting on this occasion was an occidental one, well beyond its beaten track in search of new clients. The arrayed cranes, lifting in angles from the dockside, were huge stick insects: totems to some higher industry quite beyond the comprehension even of someone with an uncommon nous like Tom.
His birth-place was tucked away cosily in the gleaming gulf of the Home Territories - a harder trip east than the ship's occidental clients could ever imagine. Thus, it was not surprising that these new recipients of the ocean spice-trail trade here in the waters of western Europe and the providers of such wares from the eastern Home Territories could never allow their cultures to meet eye to eye.
Tom had discovered the western girl lolling against a large bollard, mooning the time away till she could ply her own trade more properly in the darker suited hours. Not his words.
He was immediately attracted to the uncanny planes of her face, in contrast to his own race's high cheekbones and sunken narrow eyes. Her eyes were wide and innocent-seeming: he read the lines of her features as he would a mandala or natal-chart at home. This dreamboat's voice, too, was deep for one so fair, with a lilt and dialect fit for a fairy-tale princess. He found it difficult to follow her drift, because of the quaintness of the speech rhythms; but he took it with a pinch of salt, as he tracked a deeper index within her. He was confident that her mental tackle would be able to trawl anything with which he chose to sow her feminine tides.
His lobster-pot of a head beamed beardly, as he continued: "And life being an apprenticeship, one should endeavour to learn everything one can before embarking on the voyage of death."
"Eh, wot yer say, guv?" Her words.
Tom winced. This was the first time he had encountered one who answered so readily. It was off-putting to talk along the knife-edge of such a sensitive audience. Her responses were so very much to the point.
Yet he resumed his diatribe: "By logic, there can only be one religious faith, that which represents the belief in the positive aspect of death. A faith without this as its paramount tenet would not be worth the parchment it's written on. Accept that as an incontravertible prerequisite, then all religions become a single faith. God is that faith. Faith is that God. Yet God is not an entity with omnipowers, not an anthropomorphic puppet-master..."
"Gor blimey, mate, has your brain swallowed your tongue?"
By now, the sun had risen elsewhere in the world, probably in the Home Territories, he surmised; the mist gathered apace, linking sea and land with translucent mountains of dream, the coloured decklights of Tom's ship bobbing spasmodically in the uncertain tide. A chill clung to his bones. He decided it was now high time to offer spice as a reward for her kind attention. After all, as well as the provocative esoterica of philosophy, it was also in the nature of tunicked Tom's breed to issue flirtatious cockadilloes to the local totties in new client lands. The spice would no doubt hotten her bland stews. He passed her a free sample packet, with a smile.
"I hope this complimentary gift supplements thy already warm heart..."
"Ey up, guv, is't bleeding hard stuff?"
She snatched the packet and darted off into the skid-marked underclothes of the night. No-one's words.
Another day, another universe, she’d’ve refused the gift and probably stayed to make a match.
But as this particular moonstruck Tom rowed himself back to the ship, the gentle rippling of the oily sea as music to his ears, he determined to retain at least some of the girl's wisdom for the benefit of the Officers' table ... and for later life, when, by then, Old Tom's house in the Home Territories would be crumbling around him...
*
Old Tom nipped each problem in the bud, either by hiring a handyman or, at the last resort, actually getting his own hands dirty. Yet today, he felt like a little boy with a digit in a dam, as he stood in the garden probing the pointing of some external bricks with a chiselly fingernail. The whole place teetered on the brink of something far worse than collapse. Its wooden stilts were becoming as good as one with the morass whence they grew. And, with unaccountable abruptness, he remembered that European ex-girlfriend from the ancient days of his youth when at sea with the spice trade.
First thing's first. His wife had left him, but on second thoughts that was probably the best of it. Or, on first thoughts, was his wife yet to meet him? No, what really bugged Tom was the speed with which he seemed to be heading towards that selfsame death about which a younger Tom had been so coolly detached and philosophical. The house was simply symbolic of such personal ruin. The house was also instrumental. Entropy had a lot to answer for. Not that Tom understood such strange English words.
He removed his finger from the bare brickwork and sighed. The roof lifted up slightly where the gutter divided pantiles from stucco, revealing the grabbing paws of an oriental teddy-bear: a giant version of the friendly old creature that had once shared Tom's playpen. It beckoned some Pandora to put her fingers in the toybox that Tom's house had suddenly become. Not that Tom was Pandora, nor tall enough to reach that far up. He realised that the loft was full of his old playthings. The rocking-horse. The easel and paintbox. Whip and multicoloured top. Wooden hoop. Meccano set. Pick-a-stix. Jack-in-the-box. Spice-rack.
He took one last look at the stilts, literally daring them to topple and ran towards the French windows. But he was refused entry by a large tin soldier who creaked rustily as it aimed its bayonet at Tom, saying:
"This is private property."
The soldier's grimace was painted on and his voice was more a thought process than that audible irritation of the air which speech tended to be.
"Yes, you are quite right," announced Tom, "it's mine!"
"This house belongs to the gods of dilapidation and decay. You no longer have any jurisdiction over it."
This last statement was not the soldier's but a more bouncy voice emanating from a closed box behind him. The soldier was equally startled by the intervention from such an apparently unviable source. How could boxes talk? Unless ... unless ... it was a Jack-in-one. And, no sooner contemplated, the lid flicked up and a rubicund clown-on-a-spring laughed up and down like a boomerang yoyo.
Tom was at least certain about one thing. He was not dreaming. He did not need to draw blood from a pinched arm to prove that point. The whole episode was, in truth, nothing more than symbolic. And symbols were dreams made flesh. Metaphors had real meat. Similes actually were what they were like. Nothing could be simpler - nor more complex. Even entropy took a back seat. Words taken as read.
Tom smiled as he proceeded with what he felt to be stilts down the garden path. Indeed, his face was on a swing-leg easel: a walking portrait that lived forever, since the acid in the air was merely for things that breathed and for people who believed only in paintings that wore and tore. And as he reached crazy-paving's end, where fence divided real fairy-tales from false accounting, he turned round to admire his house. The girl on the roof was playing cat's cradle with the television aerial: a girl he would recognise, if his old age was not now even older than the person it aged. His smile became the sob it was. He failed to realise that Pandora was the girl he'd once loved before he was her husband and she his wife, neither becoming the person they were meant to be - because metaphors kicked the bucket when they no longer meant anything whilst similes simply compared truth and non-truth, without coming off the fence. But the sentence was too long. A life sentence.
The teddy-bear tried to regain the slit-eyed rag-doll that he had once loved. Tom screamed from the island of his playpen for yet more toys. Playpens were worlds unto themselves. Doll's houses, too. And the properties of life and death were private properties - both in law and physical insularity. Occident met orient, in the same way as death met life, cancelling each other out. Not that Tom could now understand anything, let alone such symbols. He put anything complicated, and hence meaningful, as far from his mind as possible. He forgot, too, that, when he had looked again, he had witnessed the girl thrashing about as she was skewered on the TV aerial, her melted blood trickling into the gutters and down the soggy stilts. Her space was spice.
A voice pitifully gurgled: "Blimey, mate, help me down!"
Tom shrugged. The girl was evidently in renewed birth throes. Left on the roof by a giant stork.
In his universe, opposites, once met, were male-merged and filed - and an Ex-Lover was always the Next-Lover...
“Pretty good, at his age, eh, sweetie?”
Jackinthebox words, not Pandora’s.
(first published The Ex Files Quartet Books 1998)
He was on shore leave: the Captain's favourite crew-member, simply for his more than just a spark of intelligence compared to the rest of the sailors. He had often been invited to the Officers' table, to spin a yarn or two, to plait a tale, to hold forth on all matters philosophical, spiritual and mundane. The port which the ship was visiting on this occasion was an occidental one, well beyond its beaten track in search of new clients. The arrayed cranes, lifting in angles from the dockside, were huge stick insects: totems to some higher industry quite beyond the comprehension even of someone with an uncommon nous like Tom.
His birth-place was tucked away cosily in the gleaming gulf of the Home Territories - a harder trip east than the ship's occidental clients could ever imagine. Thus, it was not surprising that these new recipients of the ocean spice-trail trade here in the waters of western Europe and the providers of such wares from the eastern Home Territories could never allow their cultures to meet eye to eye.
Tom had discovered the western girl lolling against a large bollard, mooning the time away till she could ply her own trade more properly in the darker suited hours. Not his words.
He was immediately attracted to the uncanny planes of her face, in contrast to his own race's high cheekbones and sunken narrow eyes. Her eyes were wide and innocent-seeming: he read the lines of her features as he would a mandala or natal-chart at home. This dreamboat's voice, too, was deep for one so fair, with a lilt and dialect fit for a fairy-tale princess. He found it difficult to follow her drift, because of the quaintness of the speech rhythms; but he took it with a pinch of salt, as he tracked a deeper index within her. He was confident that her mental tackle would be able to trawl anything with which he chose to sow her feminine tides.
His lobster-pot of a head beamed beardly, as he continued: "And life being an apprenticeship, one should endeavour to learn everything one can before embarking on the voyage of death."
"Eh, wot yer say, guv?" Her words.
Tom winced. This was the first time he had encountered one who answered so readily. It was off-putting to talk along the knife-edge of such a sensitive audience. Her responses were so very much to the point.
Yet he resumed his diatribe: "By logic, there can only be one religious faith, that which represents the belief in the positive aspect of death. A faith without this as its paramount tenet would not be worth the parchment it's written on. Accept that as an incontravertible prerequisite, then all religions become a single faith. God is that faith. Faith is that God. Yet God is not an entity with omnipowers, not an anthropomorphic puppet-master..."
"Gor blimey, mate, has your brain swallowed your tongue?"
By now, the sun had risen elsewhere in the world, probably in the Home Territories, he surmised; the mist gathered apace, linking sea and land with translucent mountains of dream, the coloured decklights of Tom's ship bobbing spasmodically in the uncertain tide. A chill clung to his bones. He decided it was now high time to offer spice as a reward for her kind attention. After all, as well as the provocative esoterica of philosophy, it was also in the nature of tunicked Tom's breed to issue flirtatious cockadilloes to the local totties in new client lands. The spice would no doubt hotten her bland stews. He passed her a free sample packet, with a smile.
"I hope this complimentary gift supplements thy already warm heart..."
"Ey up, guv, is't bleeding hard stuff?"
She snatched the packet and darted off into the skid-marked underclothes of the night. No-one's words.
Another day, another universe, she’d’ve refused the gift and probably stayed to make a match.
But as this particular moonstruck Tom rowed himself back to the ship, the gentle rippling of the oily sea as music to his ears, he determined to retain at least some of the girl's wisdom for the benefit of the Officers' table ... and for later life, when, by then, Old Tom's house in the Home Territories would be crumbling around him...
*
Old Tom nipped each problem in the bud, either by hiring a handyman or, at the last resort, actually getting his own hands dirty. Yet today, he felt like a little boy with a digit in a dam, as he stood in the garden probing the pointing of some external bricks with a chiselly fingernail. The whole place teetered on the brink of something far worse than collapse. Its wooden stilts were becoming as good as one with the morass whence they grew. And, with unaccountable abruptness, he remembered that European ex-girlfriend from the ancient days of his youth when at sea with the spice trade.
First thing's first. His wife had left him, but on second thoughts that was probably the best of it. Or, on first thoughts, was his wife yet to meet him? No, what really bugged Tom was the speed with which he seemed to be heading towards that selfsame death about which a younger Tom had been so coolly detached and philosophical. The house was simply symbolic of such personal ruin. The house was also instrumental. Entropy had a lot to answer for. Not that Tom understood such strange English words.
He removed his finger from the bare brickwork and sighed. The roof lifted up slightly where the gutter divided pantiles from stucco, revealing the grabbing paws of an oriental teddy-bear: a giant version of the friendly old creature that had once shared Tom's playpen. It beckoned some Pandora to put her fingers in the toybox that Tom's house had suddenly become. Not that Tom was Pandora, nor tall enough to reach that far up. He realised that the loft was full of his old playthings. The rocking-horse. The easel and paintbox. Whip and multicoloured top. Wooden hoop. Meccano set. Pick-a-stix. Jack-in-the-box. Spice-rack.
He took one last look at the stilts, literally daring them to topple and ran towards the French windows. But he was refused entry by a large tin soldier who creaked rustily as it aimed its bayonet at Tom, saying:
"This is private property."
The soldier's grimace was painted on and his voice was more a thought process than that audible irritation of the air which speech tended to be.
"Yes, you are quite right," announced Tom, "it's mine!"
"This house belongs to the gods of dilapidation and decay. You no longer have any jurisdiction over it."
This last statement was not the soldier's but a more bouncy voice emanating from a closed box behind him. The soldier was equally startled by the intervention from such an apparently unviable source. How could boxes talk? Unless ... unless ... it was a Jack-in-one. And, no sooner contemplated, the lid flicked up and a rubicund clown-on-a-spring laughed up and down like a boomerang yoyo.
Tom was at least certain about one thing. He was not dreaming. He did not need to draw blood from a pinched arm to prove that point. The whole episode was, in truth, nothing more than symbolic. And symbols were dreams made flesh. Metaphors had real meat. Similes actually were what they were like. Nothing could be simpler - nor more complex. Even entropy took a back seat. Words taken as read.
Tom smiled as he proceeded with what he felt to be stilts down the garden path. Indeed, his face was on a swing-leg easel: a walking portrait that lived forever, since the acid in the air was merely for things that breathed and for people who believed only in paintings that wore and tore. And as he reached crazy-paving's end, where fence divided real fairy-tales from false accounting, he turned round to admire his house. The girl on the roof was playing cat's cradle with the television aerial: a girl he would recognise, if his old age was not now even older than the person it aged. His smile became the sob it was. He failed to realise that Pandora was the girl he'd once loved before he was her husband and she his wife, neither becoming the person they were meant to be - because metaphors kicked the bucket when they no longer meant anything whilst similes simply compared truth and non-truth, without coming off the fence. But the sentence was too long. A life sentence.
The teddy-bear tried to regain the slit-eyed rag-doll that he had once loved. Tom screamed from the island of his playpen for yet more toys. Playpens were worlds unto themselves. Doll's houses, too. And the properties of life and death were private properties - both in law and physical insularity. Occident met orient, in the same way as death met life, cancelling each other out. Not that Tom could now understand anything, let alone such symbols. He put anything complicated, and hence meaningful, as far from his mind as possible. He forgot, too, that, when he had looked again, he had witnessed the girl thrashing about as she was skewered on the TV aerial, her melted blood trickling into the gutters and down the soggy stilts. Her space was spice.
A voice pitifully gurgled: "Blimey, mate, help me down!"
Tom shrugged. The girl was evidently in renewed birth throes. Left on the roof by a giant stork.
In his universe, opposites, once met, were male-merged and filed - and an Ex-Lover was always the Next-Lover...
“Pretty good, at his age, eh, sweetie?”
Jackinthebox words, not Pandora’s.
(first published The Ex Files Quartet Books 1998)
Wednesday, September 01, 2004
Old Scratch
The City streets were never-ending, as if a puzzlehead cartographer once had a fidgetty day with the marking pen, not taking it off the cartridge paper as a sort of Dare.
I should have known it would not be easy to lose myself, when there were no corners to negotiate. Old Scratch was on my tail and I found it the devil’s own job to shake him off. And, you see, Old Scratch had been queening it a bit in the Old Women’s Tree part of the city - until I came along in an attempt to expose him as a pretty low and common denominator. I did not know his face but, from the police records which I remembered somehow studying, I was sure I would recognize the rhythmic pace of his following footsteps and ill-disguised snort of his lungs. I guessed he would be uglier than an eviscerated corpse half-floating in the whipping-crust outside the Warwolf Arms gentlemen’s excuse-me.
As I escaped down the street, hoping to find at least one side-alley forgotten by the cartographer and thus dodge the searing limelight of Old Scratch’s bulging, flameshot eyes, I spotted an urchin running towards me from the opposite direction of the limitless distance where the mapmaker had evidently confused perspective with phantasy. We squatted on the pavement, regaining our breath in snorts.
“What’s your name, ragamuffin?” I asked, trying to conceal the gabnash of my teeth and gums.
“Gunstock.” The boy was no older than I had been at his age, though he acted as if he had the knowledge of the whole cosmos upon his narrow shoulders.
“Gunstock? That be a ‘trestin’ name. Are yer runnin’ up the street for any good reason?” My voice cracked. I could well believe I had not used it for centuries. I was astonished, too, at my crude dialect. I was in fact only to recall one reincarnation in which I had seen fit to talk. I kept looking over my shoulder to see if Old Scratch was lurking behind the back of my mind. And there was a corner shop just extending its awning like a tongue, opening for the afternoon session. Funny - I’d thought it was early closing day in this neck of the woods. The shop sold gobsuckers, the window being dressed with aniseed balls, penny chews, blackjacks, pear & acid drops, pineapple chunks, bullseyes, throatstoppers etc., I was convinced the shopkeeper would be finger-grating at his large bald pate to fill the lemon sherbets. He may have been Old Scratch himself in sudden disguise. I turned back to the urchin who now held out his begging-hand, with an expression on his grubby face indicating that he thought me a clench-fist.
“I’m not goin’ ter give yer any-fing, Gunstock, ‘cause I can’t even buy meself a clump-sole.” I showed him the undersides of my shoes, next to useless without the hardened leather-flesh of feet to supplement them.
‘You be pie-powdered,” the boy enunciated painstakingly.
“I be not so dirty as I look, young ‘un,” I claimed, rising from the swill-gutter and tapping the precocious witmonger on the shoulder. It was meant to be a friendly gesture, but he flinched, his whole existence seeming to bodyjack before my very eyes. Good heavens, it was Old Scratch himself I’d touched, for I saw the underfurrows of age unshrining, as if he had a different flavour inside. His soul was wither-wrung, and I read words in his sticky mouth like sweets dissolving on the blotchy haft of a misshapen tongue and slicking a putrid throat which I could peer down if I stayed long enough to do so.
As the wacky cartographer had the space with which to work, he hived off some backstreet areas just to give them map room. Good job, too, seeing I was now in the relatively disease-free uncharted yard complexes of the city where the pubs were open all day. I ambled into the Warwolf Arms, as jolly and carefree as I could pretend, ready to order a tumbler of fizz for my narrow-billed lips and the sucking-sides of my throat. The landlord held out a webbed hand for payment of tuppence-ha’penny in exchange. Reddening to the bottom, I fumbled in my britches for my purse had been confounded with the umbilica of my intestines or, even, it was not there at all. Gunstock must have been a nifty pycke-purse. I could only find my Share Certificates in the Pinny-Winkles Company that had gone out of business when they first invented firearms.
I scrammed as quickly as I dared, with the first mouthful of fizz still bubbling against the shaft of my grisly clanker-clapper which waggled from the depth of my gullet. I hadn’t savoured the look of the likes of the landlord, anyway, nor the foul-slanted cut of his jib, what with his humbug eyes and a speckled spray of spittle with every word from his lop-sided mouthful of lips. He looked a trifle too much like Old Scratch - and now, knowing the city streets better, the wanderer in me somehow tried to get lost on a quest not unconnected with acting out dreams.
I would travel on the underground railway and alight at any random station with an unlikely name. Not a believer in aids such as the city map, I intended to wend the endless terraces and semi-avenues, loop closes, test cul-de-sacs - try, against all the odds, to abandon myself to the city’s mystery. Come dusk, which was usually earlier than I expected, I would succeed in finding, in the old nick of time, another underground station by which means, because of the oversimplified out-of-scale poster map therein, I could lead myself back to Square One - emerging into the darkness of the streets I had grown to know.
But, like the underground map, nothing was ever what it seemed. I had been lost for unconscionable hours, yet through the sapping drizzle, I saw with some relief the blurred sign for Angel Crescent. Shaking from my exertions, I allowed myself to be trundled down the empty half-lit wooden escalator, knowing that the untended lifts were simply asking for trouble and that the gaping hole of the spiral steps was trouble asking for me.
Later, as I clattered along upon the deserted train, I wondered why such a small station had possessed a triple choice of descent. Eventually, reaching a familiar station, the silver escalator was far longer than I recalled it, stretching, it seemed, limitlessly above, with a strong wind funnelling down upon me. I gathered the black overcoat about me without asking what black overcoat?
Others, descending in the parallel trough, watched me quizzically as I passed them upwards. They evidently found the slow speed sufficient and my demeanor more interesting than the tiered advert posters. Even the photos of people in underwear did not distract them from me. I felt my face blush, dreading that the icy looks I suffered would suss out what I wore under the black overcoat. It was as if they picked my pockets with their eyes, snipping the purse-strings to my heart. Each coin was a silver bullet.
I suspected that the oldster who followed me through the reincarnations had no respect for the law of any land we traversed, whilst scratching a living simply from breathing. But, at long last, the escalator delivered me, via the barrier, into some semblance of open air. Nobody collected tickets, only a slowly swivelling chair. The cold sponge of darkness was a shock to my system, especially as the set-up of back-doubles which I faced was confusing. I always considered deja-vu to be a fiction, which would make more sense without the use of the word “always.” But now I depended on deja-vu to find my way. Only the night before, I had dreamed of these surroundings. Each turning and line of houses were gentle reminders. I thanked God for small mercies, because it would have been far worse in a completely out-of-the-way area. I was at least on someone’s common ground.
The windows were mostly dark. Some, dully lit. As I rounded each corner, shadowy figures slammed doors, as if they had been lying in wait for me, only to make this obvious point of unwelcome. Curtains fluttered as did my own sodden eyelids. Silence was just the swishing of rubber blades on a windscreen. My engine gunned - and died.
I had drawn to a halt halfway down a road of high-rises. I had never owned a vehicle other than myself yet, uncannily, the treads of my clump-soles squealed as I applied the wet weather brakes. Braces tightened against my upper frame, pulling the belt to which the braces’ crocodile clips were affixed like a band of hot iron. My sock-suspenders cramped my calves, turning them rock hard by guying the pinions of my searing sinews. My briefs cut into the groin, lifting and separating. The holster seared a diagonal line between the shoulder-blades and one burst breast. The implement I toted within the holster had a hair-trigger too delicate for unwieldy fingers: a lady’s Jewel-studded automatic: ready-cocked, feather-alert, for beggars, muggers or other ne’erdowells.
The house, outside of which I had broken down, was between two high-rises, a Victorian Detached with twin attic towers and steeply stacked chimneys. The floral curtains in one bedroom were ostentatiously tweaked. I tried desperately to recall the cutpurse dream from the night before, which was fast becoming a key to this night’s reality. But having reached such a point, I had woken, irretrievably...
Thus to set off again, mapless, upon the low-lying tracks towards station names, some not even appearing on the official simplified grid of coloured lines - which lines were not only out-of-scale but also inconsistently out-of-scale. Many of the direction angles were misleading too. But, tonight, the dream could not be shaken off, determined as it was to become real. The drizzle became sleet, as the door of the house opened and a couple of hooray-henries and their skittish molls galumphed down the steep porch-steps, pranging sticks against the metal banisters as if they were once tearaways now made good, clumsy muggers made citybright, urchin beggars made legal, ne’erdowells turned into prancing dogooders.
The black cab into which they disappeared with slamming doors snorted off. I heard them shout a destination (in the posh side of the city) to the shadowy driver propped up at the large wheel. I scratched my head. I thought the tail-lights vanished towards the rough end of town, where dark Limehouse hunched against the horizon, made even darker by the now cascading sherbety-white snow.
Dream or double-dream, I was past caring, yet something told me that he who had once been the hooray-henries’ chum sat waiting, with back leant against night’s warehouse wall. Thick as thieves, he was. I lightly touched the hardware I wore, confident with its presence. As I fingered the tiny nipple with its iron aureole, fire thrilled along my arm. Shivering, I negotiated the guttering street, determined this time to reach the end of the dream - or remember whom I feared so that I could now make avoidance plans - or, at least, find another underground sign that would allow me to regain my bearings. Eventually, I thought I made out ‘Gold Street’ on the sign. I prayed it would have an escalator and lifts and stairs, to cover the strange odds that only Fate could offer, it seemed, in dream. I felt extremely cold without the black overcoat that I suddenly recalled once had my shadow body inside it.
Now, as luminous as the snowlit moon, I reflected off the black glass wall of an anonynous city office-block. I was indeed a trifle too much like the one who followed me, but even more like the one who followed him.
No tongue to speak with, we drew our weapons on the moment’s spur, and I waited to see who would touch the trigger first. The scribblings of crack-deep scratches over the black face-plate was the first I knew I was no longer there or, even, anywhere. Not even in the Warwolf Arms.
(Published 'Shadowdance' 1994)
I should have known it would not be easy to lose myself, when there were no corners to negotiate. Old Scratch was on my tail and I found it the devil’s own job to shake him off. And, you see, Old Scratch had been queening it a bit in the Old Women’s Tree part of the city - until I came along in an attempt to expose him as a pretty low and common denominator. I did not know his face but, from the police records which I remembered somehow studying, I was sure I would recognize the rhythmic pace of his following footsteps and ill-disguised snort of his lungs. I guessed he would be uglier than an eviscerated corpse half-floating in the whipping-crust outside the Warwolf Arms gentlemen’s excuse-me.
As I escaped down the street, hoping to find at least one side-alley forgotten by the cartographer and thus dodge the searing limelight of Old Scratch’s bulging, flameshot eyes, I spotted an urchin running towards me from the opposite direction of the limitless distance where the mapmaker had evidently confused perspective with phantasy. We squatted on the pavement, regaining our breath in snorts.
“What’s your name, ragamuffin?” I asked, trying to conceal the gabnash of my teeth and gums.
“Gunstock.” The boy was no older than I had been at his age, though he acted as if he had the knowledge of the whole cosmos upon his narrow shoulders.
“Gunstock? That be a ‘trestin’ name. Are yer runnin’ up the street for any good reason?” My voice cracked. I could well believe I had not used it for centuries. I was astonished, too, at my crude dialect. I was in fact only to recall one reincarnation in which I had seen fit to talk. I kept looking over my shoulder to see if Old Scratch was lurking behind the back of my mind. And there was a corner shop just extending its awning like a tongue, opening for the afternoon session. Funny - I’d thought it was early closing day in this neck of the woods. The shop sold gobsuckers, the window being dressed with aniseed balls, penny chews, blackjacks, pear & acid drops, pineapple chunks, bullseyes, throatstoppers etc., I was convinced the shopkeeper would be finger-grating at his large bald pate to fill the lemon sherbets. He may have been Old Scratch himself in sudden disguise. I turned back to the urchin who now held out his begging-hand, with an expression on his grubby face indicating that he thought me a clench-fist.
“I’m not goin’ ter give yer any-fing, Gunstock, ‘cause I can’t even buy meself a clump-sole.” I showed him the undersides of my shoes, next to useless without the hardened leather-flesh of feet to supplement them.
‘You be pie-powdered,” the boy enunciated painstakingly.
“I be not so dirty as I look, young ‘un,” I claimed, rising from the swill-gutter and tapping the precocious witmonger on the shoulder. It was meant to be a friendly gesture, but he flinched, his whole existence seeming to bodyjack before my very eyes. Good heavens, it was Old Scratch himself I’d touched, for I saw the underfurrows of age unshrining, as if he had a different flavour inside. His soul was wither-wrung, and I read words in his sticky mouth like sweets dissolving on the blotchy haft of a misshapen tongue and slicking a putrid throat which I could peer down if I stayed long enough to do so.
As the wacky cartographer had the space with which to work, he hived off some backstreet areas just to give them map room. Good job, too, seeing I was now in the relatively disease-free uncharted yard complexes of the city where the pubs were open all day. I ambled into the Warwolf Arms, as jolly and carefree as I could pretend, ready to order a tumbler of fizz for my narrow-billed lips and the sucking-sides of my throat. The landlord held out a webbed hand for payment of tuppence-ha’penny in exchange. Reddening to the bottom, I fumbled in my britches for my purse had been confounded with the umbilica of my intestines or, even, it was not there at all. Gunstock must have been a nifty pycke-purse. I could only find my Share Certificates in the Pinny-Winkles Company that had gone out of business when they first invented firearms.
I scrammed as quickly as I dared, with the first mouthful of fizz still bubbling against the shaft of my grisly clanker-clapper which waggled from the depth of my gullet. I hadn’t savoured the look of the likes of the landlord, anyway, nor the foul-slanted cut of his jib, what with his humbug eyes and a speckled spray of spittle with every word from his lop-sided mouthful of lips. He looked a trifle too much like Old Scratch - and now, knowing the city streets better, the wanderer in me somehow tried to get lost on a quest not unconnected with acting out dreams.
I would travel on the underground railway and alight at any random station with an unlikely name. Not a believer in aids such as the city map, I intended to wend the endless terraces and semi-avenues, loop closes, test cul-de-sacs - try, against all the odds, to abandon myself to the city’s mystery. Come dusk, which was usually earlier than I expected, I would succeed in finding, in the old nick of time, another underground station by which means, because of the oversimplified out-of-scale poster map therein, I could lead myself back to Square One - emerging into the darkness of the streets I had grown to know.
But, like the underground map, nothing was ever what it seemed. I had been lost for unconscionable hours, yet through the sapping drizzle, I saw with some relief the blurred sign for Angel Crescent. Shaking from my exertions, I allowed myself to be trundled down the empty half-lit wooden escalator, knowing that the untended lifts were simply asking for trouble and that the gaping hole of the spiral steps was trouble asking for me.
Later, as I clattered along upon the deserted train, I wondered why such a small station had possessed a triple choice of descent. Eventually, reaching a familiar station, the silver escalator was far longer than I recalled it, stretching, it seemed, limitlessly above, with a strong wind funnelling down upon me. I gathered the black overcoat about me without asking what black overcoat?
Others, descending in the parallel trough, watched me quizzically as I passed them upwards. They evidently found the slow speed sufficient and my demeanor more interesting than the tiered advert posters. Even the photos of people in underwear did not distract them from me. I felt my face blush, dreading that the icy looks I suffered would suss out what I wore under the black overcoat. It was as if they picked my pockets with their eyes, snipping the purse-strings to my heart. Each coin was a silver bullet.
I suspected that the oldster who followed me through the reincarnations had no respect for the law of any land we traversed, whilst scratching a living simply from breathing. But, at long last, the escalator delivered me, via the barrier, into some semblance of open air. Nobody collected tickets, only a slowly swivelling chair. The cold sponge of darkness was a shock to my system, especially as the set-up of back-doubles which I faced was confusing. I always considered deja-vu to be a fiction, which would make more sense without the use of the word “always.” But now I depended on deja-vu to find my way. Only the night before, I had dreamed of these surroundings. Each turning and line of houses were gentle reminders. I thanked God for small mercies, because it would have been far worse in a completely out-of-the-way area. I was at least on someone’s common ground.
The windows were mostly dark. Some, dully lit. As I rounded each corner, shadowy figures slammed doors, as if they had been lying in wait for me, only to make this obvious point of unwelcome. Curtains fluttered as did my own sodden eyelids. Silence was just the swishing of rubber blades on a windscreen. My engine gunned - and died.
I had drawn to a halt halfway down a road of high-rises. I had never owned a vehicle other than myself yet, uncannily, the treads of my clump-soles squealed as I applied the wet weather brakes. Braces tightened against my upper frame, pulling the belt to which the braces’ crocodile clips were affixed like a band of hot iron. My sock-suspenders cramped my calves, turning them rock hard by guying the pinions of my searing sinews. My briefs cut into the groin, lifting and separating. The holster seared a diagonal line between the shoulder-blades and one burst breast. The implement I toted within the holster had a hair-trigger too delicate for unwieldy fingers: a lady’s Jewel-studded automatic: ready-cocked, feather-alert, for beggars, muggers or other ne’erdowells.
The house, outside of which I had broken down, was between two high-rises, a Victorian Detached with twin attic towers and steeply stacked chimneys. The floral curtains in one bedroom were ostentatiously tweaked. I tried desperately to recall the cutpurse dream from the night before, which was fast becoming a key to this night’s reality. But having reached such a point, I had woken, irretrievably...
Thus to set off again, mapless, upon the low-lying tracks towards station names, some not even appearing on the official simplified grid of coloured lines - which lines were not only out-of-scale but also inconsistently out-of-scale. Many of the direction angles were misleading too. But, tonight, the dream could not be shaken off, determined as it was to become real. The drizzle became sleet, as the door of the house opened and a couple of hooray-henries and their skittish molls galumphed down the steep porch-steps, pranging sticks against the metal banisters as if they were once tearaways now made good, clumsy muggers made citybright, urchin beggars made legal, ne’erdowells turned into prancing dogooders.
The black cab into which they disappeared with slamming doors snorted off. I heard them shout a destination (in the posh side of the city) to the shadowy driver propped up at the large wheel. I scratched my head. I thought the tail-lights vanished towards the rough end of town, where dark Limehouse hunched against the horizon, made even darker by the now cascading sherbety-white snow.
Dream or double-dream, I was past caring, yet something told me that he who had once been the hooray-henries’ chum sat waiting, with back leant against night’s warehouse wall. Thick as thieves, he was. I lightly touched the hardware I wore, confident with its presence. As I fingered the tiny nipple with its iron aureole, fire thrilled along my arm. Shivering, I negotiated the guttering street, determined this time to reach the end of the dream - or remember whom I feared so that I could now make avoidance plans - or, at least, find another underground sign that would allow me to regain my bearings. Eventually, I thought I made out ‘Gold Street’ on the sign. I prayed it would have an escalator and lifts and stairs, to cover the strange odds that only Fate could offer, it seemed, in dream. I felt extremely cold without the black overcoat that I suddenly recalled once had my shadow body inside it.
Now, as luminous as the snowlit moon, I reflected off the black glass wall of an anonynous city office-block. I was indeed a trifle too much like the one who followed me, but even more like the one who followed him.
No tongue to speak with, we drew our weapons on the moment’s spur, and I waited to see who would touch the trigger first. The scribblings of crack-deep scratches over the black face-plate was the first I knew I was no longer there or, even, anywhere. Not even in the Warwolf Arms.
(Published 'Shadowdance' 1994)
Monday, August 30, 2004
A Smidgeon Too Short
I prod the numbers slowly with an unaccountable desire that push buttons had not elbowed out circular dials. There would be something indefinably delicious in waiting for the finger-slots to unwind after each number - thus delaying the impossible.
And it is the impossible call I happen to be making.
I have abandoned my family on an impulse of rage and desperation. No real flashpoint - simply years and years of marital give and take leading to the inevitable down-beat crescendo of departure. Having watched the children grow into near adults, I could no longer bear the thought of witnessing the descent of two real adults like me and my wife into the second childishness of acrimonious, if concealed, senility. And, with no exagerration, the word senility rings true, amid the blurred dreams of existence that my mid-life crisis has become. And it is surely wishful thinking to call it mid-life at all - unless such wishful thinking should actually be classified as pessimism. Whatever the case, it all rings true.
The phone is indeed ringing, too: back in the old homestead, where so many joys and sorrows flowed under the bridge of sighs ... memory being a ghostly fluid more like red air than that honest-to-goodness blood which is said to flow thicker than water. My thoughts are only a smidgeon short of senility, I realise, as I listen to the impotent ringing tone in the ear-piece. Nobody at home. But they are always at home at this time on a Saturday, aren't they? But that is when I am there, of course.
The bedsit where I have ensconced myself is in a randomly chosen town up north. The map I used is in the smelly dustbin outside. Nothing like home. There are strange seedy neighbours only the other side of walls little better than cereal boxes. They grunt, without speaking. The toe-capped neighbour above is someone I have not seen because he does shiftwork, although the evidence of his existence which he left in the toilet was only too apparent. The communal kitchen is a greasy, dingy affair with one ill-positioned power point and a gas-stove that may have seen better days, but probablly not. Nobody dares to leave their comestibles in such a kitchen. A far cry from my suburban semi in Surrey.
I may have to cry. I open the window, horn my hands and hollow, thus hoping that West Yorkshire and Surrey are closer than the map. Trusting that the window at home is also open to catch the strains of my pigeon chest. Indeed, I feel as if I have birdbones - a mutant poultry critter who ended up here, because the National Health Service has no room for me in its asylums. Where do they put monsters these days, if they should be born? My own children are beauties of their type. It is strange though - I cannot remember what they look like and, in the sudden passion of leaving, I did not think to pack photos.
It has only been a couple of days. But much can happen in a few minutes. People can go under buses. Have brain haemorrhages. Strokes. Amnesia. Love turn to hate. But, equally, hate can turn to love just as abruptly, even before you are able to say Knife. The phone is picked up at the other end and a familiar voice answers: "734921" - the numbers reeled off in a rhythm that is immutably Marie's.
"Marie?"
"Donald! Where are you?"
I can actually hear my son practising his flute in the background, something that brings me right down to Earth from the spectral clouds of senility with which I have mispeopled my Heaven.
Just as the phone was answered down south, one of my plug-ugly neighbours poked a head round my door, evidently in need of a cup of sugar. Why neighbours always want such an item is beyond me. Sugar is the worst thing anyone could consume, short of perfect poison.
"Hold on..." I have said to Marie, absently placing the handset whence it came. I wander over to the heavy-duty sideboard which is positioned under the net-choked window. I hear rain flashing. The huge electric advertisement hoarding outside pulses red. I feel as if I am being uninvented piecemeal - like circular dials on telephones - even as I stand here in two minds.
There was a full bag of sugar already in this bedsit when I arrived, if I remember correctly. I will soon get rid of the intruder, perhaps forever, by giving it all away in one fell swoop.
Meantime, whilst headless chickens can flap on, they cannot use telephones. Nor wing off messages. Nor write, come to think of it - even in pidgeon English. I am evidently a few moments too late to beat senility at its own game - and, listening to my neighbour shambling off with sweet ill-gotten gains, I replace the handset with not a further murmur.
(Published 'Oasis' 1994)
And it is the impossible call I happen to be making.
I have abandoned my family on an impulse of rage and desperation. No real flashpoint - simply years and years of marital give and take leading to the inevitable down-beat crescendo of departure. Having watched the children grow into near adults, I could no longer bear the thought of witnessing the descent of two real adults like me and my wife into the second childishness of acrimonious, if concealed, senility. And, with no exagerration, the word senility rings true, amid the blurred dreams of existence that my mid-life crisis has become. And it is surely wishful thinking to call it mid-life at all - unless such wishful thinking should actually be classified as pessimism. Whatever the case, it all rings true.
The phone is indeed ringing, too: back in the old homestead, where so many joys and sorrows flowed under the bridge of sighs ... memory being a ghostly fluid more like red air than that honest-to-goodness blood which is said to flow thicker than water. My thoughts are only a smidgeon short of senility, I realise, as I listen to the impotent ringing tone in the ear-piece. Nobody at home. But they are always at home at this time on a Saturday, aren't they? But that is when I am there, of course.
The bedsit where I have ensconced myself is in a randomly chosen town up north. The map I used is in the smelly dustbin outside. Nothing like home. There are strange seedy neighbours only the other side of walls little better than cereal boxes. They grunt, without speaking. The toe-capped neighbour above is someone I have not seen because he does shiftwork, although the evidence of his existence which he left in the toilet was only too apparent. The communal kitchen is a greasy, dingy affair with one ill-positioned power point and a gas-stove that may have seen better days, but probablly not. Nobody dares to leave their comestibles in such a kitchen. A far cry from my suburban semi in Surrey.
I may have to cry. I open the window, horn my hands and hollow, thus hoping that West Yorkshire and Surrey are closer than the map. Trusting that the window at home is also open to catch the strains of my pigeon chest. Indeed, I feel as if I have birdbones - a mutant poultry critter who ended up here, because the National Health Service has no room for me in its asylums. Where do they put monsters these days, if they should be born? My own children are beauties of their type. It is strange though - I cannot remember what they look like and, in the sudden passion of leaving, I did not think to pack photos.
It has only been a couple of days. But much can happen in a few minutes. People can go under buses. Have brain haemorrhages. Strokes. Amnesia. Love turn to hate. But, equally, hate can turn to love just as abruptly, even before you are able to say Knife. The phone is picked up at the other end and a familiar voice answers: "734921" - the numbers reeled off in a rhythm that is immutably Marie's.
"Marie?"
"Donald! Where are you?"
I can actually hear my son practising his flute in the background, something that brings me right down to Earth from the spectral clouds of senility with which I have mispeopled my Heaven.
Just as the phone was answered down south, one of my plug-ugly neighbours poked a head round my door, evidently in need of a cup of sugar. Why neighbours always want such an item is beyond me. Sugar is the worst thing anyone could consume, short of perfect poison.
"Hold on..." I have said to Marie, absently placing the handset whence it came. I wander over to the heavy-duty sideboard which is positioned under the net-choked window. I hear rain flashing. The huge electric advertisement hoarding outside pulses red. I feel as if I am being uninvented piecemeal - like circular dials on telephones - even as I stand here in two minds.
There was a full bag of sugar already in this bedsit when I arrived, if I remember correctly. I will soon get rid of the intruder, perhaps forever, by giving it all away in one fell swoop.
Meantime, whilst headless chickens can flap on, they cannot use telephones. Nor wing off messages. Nor write, come to think of it - even in pidgeon English. I am evidently a few moments too late to beat senility at its own game - and, listening to my neighbour shambling off with sweet ill-gotten gains, I replace the handset with not a further murmur.
(Published 'Oasis' 1994)
Monday, August 23, 2004
Revenants and Provenants
Madge sung as she spun.
Motes of dust were hanging in air’s limbo...thus frozen by the laminar flows of her faultless treadling upon the wheel.
The seasonal storms stung her cottage window with salt, as the oil wick grew gloomier. Madge’s singing, like her spinning, was loomed upon the rote of memory - and even the darkness encroaching her parlour from the sea could not sway her mindless efficiency.
Abruptly, the wheel snagged and halted, as if something had become lodged between the wooden spokes. Her revery disrupted, Madge thought she had just seen the dead - or the dead had just seen her. She shuddered, while the wind whined and pretended to be a thousand Hell’s demons wildly spitting upon the panes.
She idly speculated that either the wick had turned the dimness pink or the very morling wool being spooled upon the floor by the wheel’s extruder had already been dyed by its donor sheep. She began to imagine the coiling strands were shredded threads of various husbands’ remains...those various husbands she had shorn of their manhood over the unreckonable years.
No…a retributive ghost, she finally assumed, had left its disembodied hand in the wheel, during a state of temporary semi-materialism, the blood from its wrist stump dripping upon the spun wool. She smiled at this now more likely explanation - for well she might, the revenant having failed in its vengeance.
Madge threw the barely warm hand into the fire grate as potential kindle and resumed her mindless crooning to the wheel’s relentless hum.
She did not even bother to remember whether she had recognized the familiar feel of its sweaty grip.
#
She squatted on the stool before the fire dreaming that she no longer existed or, at best, she was a ghost returned to find her stool empty. Perhaps, she had never lived at all and the series of men wedded to her between drowning tragedies had been no more than betrothed to a lick and a promise. She did not question how such words came to her in this state of rarification.
The sea’s Sound was softer tonight outside her cottage. On those earlier occasions of storm when the fishing-boats trailed nets like wings and roller-coasted the waves, she was accustomed to stare through the fucus-spattered panes for a sign of her latest husband’s bobbing torchlit homecoming: no hope of catching the squelch of his thigh boots through the salty puddles. But now, tonight, with the fire having doused its crackling, she may have even heard his breathing at the distance of a speck on the runnelled horizon.
She had surrendered the merry-go-round of marriages after the feather-toed creatures of the sea had failed to return her last one. She had been granted simple mementoes of all previous husbands - a cheek-flap or a nuggetted finger or barnacled toe. Sometimes, the bits were delivered late, half-decades late. Tomorrow, the delivery may be a man’s sea-weathered privities on a silver tray, like an aborted Innsmouth lobster.
She wept. The privities might be those of him six husbands ago: the only one who had serviced her better than she could herself.
The weeping made little noise, like a corpse’s. And as dawn broke, the knocking was fainter than the wings of an angel-fish; quieter even than the many squelching tip-toes that preceded it.
#
I once witnessed Madge’s standing - in my own crazy way likening her figure to a shrunken, blackened lighthouse with its one failed eye-beam flowing, then flapping down the torso like shadowy wings of a cloak.
She was barely visible against the darkening storm-cloud that fed upon a cross-section of the sea as straight, long and narrow as the distant horizon. It was strange that only a few minutes had passed since the sun first turned into a solitary purple bruise of a cloud.
She was awaiting, I assumed, the return of her husband who usually had to fish the sea until the last daylight was sucked back by the surfacing wreck-fish: no raw deal on better nights than this when the giddiheads of thundercloud were nowhere near. But, today, she must have wondered why he was braving the onset of foul weather. The need for catch was surely not desperate enough for such ruthless measures. True, the salt-wine had scrawny fruit for fins and bones, those days. Nothing but a mouthful of scales for breakfast...
Wait, what was that shape at sea darker even than the storm?
I crawled nearer to Madge’s skirts to catch her low mumbles. I cupped my fan-nerved hand to my ear...
“Ne’er-be-lickit is my belly’s tongue,
Cradle-clothes are stuffed within me,
Winding-sheets swaddle a love unsung,
And a funk-willie’s my man’s chimney...”
She faltered in her tuneless Crooning, since the shape had by now become obvious to her, too, If I had known the end of her song of childlessness, I would have continued it. Instead, I made it up as I took up the strain...
“Hog’s lard, fear-babe and pricker-roach,
Sea-shade, blub-bring and earth-fly,
I must boil the sea, let them poach,
‘Cos gulpswollen is my birth-eye.”
The sea soon regurgitated its prey before the storm broke. I helped Madge drag it back through the sand-puddles to the cottage where we put it to bed together, like parents tucking in their only child.
Her tears were dry. I wondered if she even noticed me helping at all.
Clambering to the window sill, I could see the storm had nurtured the tallest, most imposing lighthouse ever, sweeping the sky with a god’s flashbulb eyes. I sang, wordlessly this time, in the hope it would lull Madge into a dreamless sleep. Eventually I nuzzled up to her, to ease a bout of the shyfryngs. Seeing, my solitary birth-eye in the darkness, I assumed she knew I was the baby she never had.
(Published ‘Gypsy Blood Review’ 1993)
Motes of dust were hanging in air’s limbo...thus frozen by the laminar flows of her faultless treadling upon the wheel.
The seasonal storms stung her cottage window with salt, as the oil wick grew gloomier. Madge’s singing, like her spinning, was loomed upon the rote of memory - and even the darkness encroaching her parlour from the sea could not sway her mindless efficiency.
Abruptly, the wheel snagged and halted, as if something had become lodged between the wooden spokes. Her revery disrupted, Madge thought she had just seen the dead - or the dead had just seen her. She shuddered, while the wind whined and pretended to be a thousand Hell’s demons wildly spitting upon the panes.
She idly speculated that either the wick had turned the dimness pink or the very morling wool being spooled upon the floor by the wheel’s extruder had already been dyed by its donor sheep. She began to imagine the coiling strands were shredded threads of various husbands’ remains...those various husbands she had shorn of their manhood over the unreckonable years.
No…a retributive ghost, she finally assumed, had left its disembodied hand in the wheel, during a state of temporary semi-materialism, the blood from its wrist stump dripping upon the spun wool. She smiled at this now more likely explanation - for well she might, the revenant having failed in its vengeance.
Madge threw the barely warm hand into the fire grate as potential kindle and resumed her mindless crooning to the wheel’s relentless hum.
She did not even bother to remember whether she had recognized the familiar feel of its sweaty grip.
#
She squatted on the stool before the fire dreaming that she no longer existed or, at best, she was a ghost returned to find her stool empty. Perhaps, she had never lived at all and the series of men wedded to her between drowning tragedies had been no more than betrothed to a lick and a promise. She did not question how such words came to her in this state of rarification.
The sea’s Sound was softer tonight outside her cottage. On those earlier occasions of storm when the fishing-boats trailed nets like wings and roller-coasted the waves, she was accustomed to stare through the fucus-spattered panes for a sign of her latest husband’s bobbing torchlit homecoming: no hope of catching the squelch of his thigh boots through the salty puddles. But now, tonight, with the fire having doused its crackling, she may have even heard his breathing at the distance of a speck on the runnelled horizon.
She had surrendered the merry-go-round of marriages after the feather-toed creatures of the sea had failed to return her last one. She had been granted simple mementoes of all previous husbands - a cheek-flap or a nuggetted finger or barnacled toe. Sometimes, the bits were delivered late, half-decades late. Tomorrow, the delivery may be a man’s sea-weathered privities on a silver tray, like an aborted Innsmouth lobster.
She wept. The privities might be those of him six husbands ago: the only one who had serviced her better than she could herself.
The weeping made little noise, like a corpse’s. And as dawn broke, the knocking was fainter than the wings of an angel-fish; quieter even than the many squelching tip-toes that preceded it.
#
I once witnessed Madge’s standing - in my own crazy way likening her figure to a shrunken, blackened lighthouse with its one failed eye-beam flowing, then flapping down the torso like shadowy wings of a cloak.
She was barely visible against the darkening storm-cloud that fed upon a cross-section of the sea as straight, long and narrow as the distant horizon. It was strange that only a few minutes had passed since the sun first turned into a solitary purple bruise of a cloud.
She was awaiting, I assumed, the return of her husband who usually had to fish the sea until the last daylight was sucked back by the surfacing wreck-fish: no raw deal on better nights than this when the giddiheads of thundercloud were nowhere near. But, today, she must have wondered why he was braving the onset of foul weather. The need for catch was surely not desperate enough for such ruthless measures. True, the salt-wine had scrawny fruit for fins and bones, those days. Nothing but a mouthful of scales for breakfast...
Wait, what was that shape at sea darker even than the storm?
I crawled nearer to Madge’s skirts to catch her low mumbles. I cupped my fan-nerved hand to my ear...
“Ne’er-be-lickit is my belly’s tongue,
Cradle-clothes are stuffed within me,
Winding-sheets swaddle a love unsung,
And a funk-willie’s my man’s chimney...”
She faltered in her tuneless Crooning, since the shape had by now become obvious to her, too, If I had known the end of her song of childlessness, I would have continued it. Instead, I made it up as I took up the strain...
“Hog’s lard, fear-babe and pricker-roach,
Sea-shade, blub-bring and earth-fly,
I must boil the sea, let them poach,
‘Cos gulpswollen is my birth-eye.”
The sea soon regurgitated its prey before the storm broke. I helped Madge drag it back through the sand-puddles to the cottage where we put it to bed together, like parents tucking in their only child.
Her tears were dry. I wondered if she even noticed me helping at all.
Clambering to the window sill, I could see the storm had nurtured the tallest, most imposing lighthouse ever, sweeping the sky with a god’s flashbulb eyes. I sang, wordlessly this time, in the hope it would lull Madge into a dreamless sleep. Eventually I nuzzled up to her, to ease a bout of the shyfryngs. Seeing, my solitary birth-eye in the darkness, I assumed she knew I was the baby she never had.
(Published ‘Gypsy Blood Review’ 1993)
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
The Island
Don Quickshot had assumed control of everything, including the main port. The previous owner then went missing as soon as the deal was signed, causing his senile wife, beautiful daughter Maria and half-witted son to be thrown into near ruin: with only the guarded respect of the other islanders bolstering their waning spirits. Maria often found herself, thereafter, standing signal watch upon her father's erstwhile private wharf. Even in the endemic coastal fogs.
The new man whom Quickshot placed in charge of the Island was called Felix. A handsome man. A cunning man. One who kept his boy friend under nightly house arrest - rather than allowing him, some said, to be adversely affected by the Island moon. There were, of course, the various islanders who gradually went missing, yet nothing could be laid at Felix's door. He had emasculated the police force, in any case, and their investigative duties were conducted with a diffidence that made Maria's idiot brother appear suitable for high political office on the mainland.
Maria knew her way about the emotions of others with a fine-tooth comb. One in particular loved her, nay, adored her. That was Clement, the butcher. He was young enough to be of some use to Maria - and that was not merely his supply of cheap briskets and spare ribs. In fact, he wanted her to live at the butcher shop where he could lard her all over on cold winter evenings, when the cruel cut of the moon scythed the night sky with its rhythmic whishing sound. But, no, Maria needed to return to the old homestead where her ancient mother and mind-bottled brother awaited the comfort of her company. "Bring them, here, Maria - there's room enough." He pointed to the ceiling, as if beyond its yellow stipple lay the palace of her dreams.
"No, Clement. Felix and his arse-stoker would take over the homestead soon enough - and what would my father say if he returned?"
Maria's voice was deceptively gentle, yet underlaid with a stroppier edge than the Island moon could possibly wield. Clement gazed at the inscrutable face. What could he say in response to such unquestionable beauty? Nevertheless, with the sound of cracking meat-bones in the cellar outdoing that of the sharp icicles crepitating outside the window, he said with a faltering tone: "Your father will never return: he can now be little more than the beefen sides down under this shop: you know that: I know that: and, above all, Felix knows that."
Maria could not weep although she found her eyes doing so.
#
The lad struggled with the lid of the water butt. His mother had said she wanted its ice breaking. Why she needed the ice breaking he had not thought to ask. Ice breaking was tantamount to cracking open the hardest veener of reality itself. How he was to do it with his scrawny arms presented a further mystery. He might need to await Maria's help. And, yes, why did he need to do it now, of all things, when the ice would be at its sturdiest and thickest, with the moon itself little more than a shard of frozen sky, albeit with the shine come off its newness. He saw it still retained white daylight in its horn, even if well past the shadow-tide.
He took the axe which he had dragged from the shed and brought it down with a splintering crunch - causing the surface of the butt's ice to craze over with a map of unknown lands. No sign of the Island's shape in the patterns, he mused, upon examining the convoluted geography which far outstripped the fantastical archipelago of thoughts in his mind. During this lull, he thought he could hear footpads beyond the susurrus of the homestead's trees - no doubt Maria returning from her dalliance with Clement. The lad smiled. Clement was always kind to him - unlike that sallow, high-boned individual Felix sent round to collect the tithes. Yet when a lengthening howl ricocheted from earth to heaven and back again, he knew one thing for certain: it was not his sister Maria.
#
Felix sat honing his fingernails by his picture window. He had billeted this building near the wharf as the Island often received night deliveries here by junk. He stared out, uncertain where sky ended and sea began. Not one single pinprick of light. Yet there was a sheen that covered the whole vista which, he knew, was thrown by the unseen moon behind him. He guessed nevertheless that it was a new moon.
He shivered. He really must turf out that family from the homestead. The father had so long abandoned them, he was not likely now to return to seek retribution on Felix, should Felix park his bivouac there. The daughter Maria would be a hard wench to benchmark, he thought. Best to let them moulder away. At least he knew where they were. He lifted up the cross hanging at his throat and kissed the macho Christ figure carved upon it. He felt it squirm, as if icons had learned to fear the monsters they were intended to protect against.
"Yes." Felix heard knocking, even before it actually sounded out.
"Can I come in and see you?" The voice was of several throat noises rather than the fluid ones tongues could make: like wickerwork talking.
"Yes." The same word, but a second meaning.
In walked a creature it would be most people's misfortune to meet. Felix saw that the Christ shape had blunted back into the very knots of the crossgrain. The creature's tumescent cod-piece was larger that his whole buttock area: face hidden by a harlequin-mask, yet eyes piercing enough to bore to the back of Felix's skull, charring the retina en route.
"Yes." A third meaning.
"The moon is brand new, Felix, not engorged," weaved the wicker words.
"Yes." A fourth.
"Well, as that is so, there is no harm in me stretching my legs in the fresh air, is there?" The creature left before hearing the reply.
"Yes." The second again. Or possibly a fifth.
#
Maria was being escorted home by Clement. Not that she thought she needed protection. It was more the ritual of the last night kiss: like fresh sweethearts: ignoring, for one delicious moment, the frenetic shafting Clement had already given her above the slabs of textured blood that hung in his cellar. Almost a game of role-playing, stirring the dry loins into one last gasp of come. Tonight was the coldest night of the year: thus, the most clear-sounded. They could even hear her brother's flailing axe as he grappled with the ice monster: a common sound these days in fulfilment of their mother's latest peccadillo.
She leaned up Clement's body for the peck. He lowered his face to where his mouth needed to be and sucked at Maria's cheek. A little known fact that some people had two cheeks on either side, one under the other, with a gossamer-thin air pocket between. The lower one was a clandestine cheek, a cheeky little cheek, and he laughed on thinking of it in this way.
"What are you laughing at?" Her voice was a more overt blade of sound, as if further honed by the geomantic moonrib above.
"Your under-cheek - I wish I had one." Clement prodded his tongue into his own and swabbed around for remnants of loose meat.
"Under-cheeks are nothing but trouble, Clement - things collect between and I'm forever using the douche." There was an added squeak to each word, as if she demonstrated her cheeks' valve-like quality.
The scream they heard was blood-curdling. An unrehearsed scream. One that came from a freight of frights rather than a single self-indulgent fright. From the direction of Maria's homestead. Clement ran on ahead, being fleeter of foot. She hustled in his wake as best she could, fearing her brother had gouged his foot accidentally with one foul axe-swing. But they lost their way in some coastal fog.
#
The old woman sat at the motionless spinning-wheel, tired of thinking. Being senile did not mean she had lost all common sense, however. Her two children were dim enough to outdo any of her own foibles. Maria was always with Clement above his meat-cellar: and love made a young mind even crazier than the thoughts it contained. She peered through the salt-streaked window and saw her son in combat with an imaginary ice monster - yet again. But Clement and Maria would be coming to the rescue, both ready to adminster a blow-job with the hottened breath they'd kept stifled up in their mouths from erstwhile empassioned kisses.
The ice creature had chomping jaws slavering in the bonelight. Her son, despite his sluggish reactions, had managed to break off an ice stake and thrust it into the monster, towards the heart, from behind its plumped-up sausage of sex. The erupting jam dyed the snow a startling black, and steamed. The monster twitched and, once dead, twitched again. Then, the old woman saw an arm forcing its way from beneath a patch of newly poached snow...
The earth is the best meat-cellar of them all, she thought. Shrugging, she returned her attention to the spinning. "Am I the sanest castaway of them all?" she asked aloud. She examined the palms of her hands. "Yes," she replied, with a sixth sense.
(Published 'Night Dreams' 1995)
The new man whom Quickshot placed in charge of the Island was called Felix. A handsome man. A cunning man. One who kept his boy friend under nightly house arrest - rather than allowing him, some said, to be adversely affected by the Island moon. There were, of course, the various islanders who gradually went missing, yet nothing could be laid at Felix's door. He had emasculated the police force, in any case, and their investigative duties were conducted with a diffidence that made Maria's idiot brother appear suitable for high political office on the mainland.
Maria knew her way about the emotions of others with a fine-tooth comb. One in particular loved her, nay, adored her. That was Clement, the butcher. He was young enough to be of some use to Maria - and that was not merely his supply of cheap briskets and spare ribs. In fact, he wanted her to live at the butcher shop where he could lard her all over on cold winter evenings, when the cruel cut of the moon scythed the night sky with its rhythmic whishing sound. But, no, Maria needed to return to the old homestead where her ancient mother and mind-bottled brother awaited the comfort of her company. "Bring them, here, Maria - there's room enough." He pointed to the ceiling, as if beyond its yellow stipple lay the palace of her dreams.
"No, Clement. Felix and his arse-stoker would take over the homestead soon enough - and what would my father say if he returned?"
Maria's voice was deceptively gentle, yet underlaid with a stroppier edge than the Island moon could possibly wield. Clement gazed at the inscrutable face. What could he say in response to such unquestionable beauty? Nevertheless, with the sound of cracking meat-bones in the cellar outdoing that of the sharp icicles crepitating outside the window, he said with a faltering tone: "Your father will never return: he can now be little more than the beefen sides down under this shop: you know that: I know that: and, above all, Felix knows that."
Maria could not weep although she found her eyes doing so.
#
The lad struggled with the lid of the water butt. His mother had said she wanted its ice breaking. Why she needed the ice breaking he had not thought to ask. Ice breaking was tantamount to cracking open the hardest veener of reality itself. How he was to do it with his scrawny arms presented a further mystery. He might need to await Maria's help. And, yes, why did he need to do it now, of all things, when the ice would be at its sturdiest and thickest, with the moon itself little more than a shard of frozen sky, albeit with the shine come off its newness. He saw it still retained white daylight in its horn, even if well past the shadow-tide.
He took the axe which he had dragged from the shed and brought it down with a splintering crunch - causing the surface of the butt's ice to craze over with a map of unknown lands. No sign of the Island's shape in the patterns, he mused, upon examining the convoluted geography which far outstripped the fantastical archipelago of thoughts in his mind. During this lull, he thought he could hear footpads beyond the susurrus of the homestead's trees - no doubt Maria returning from her dalliance with Clement. The lad smiled. Clement was always kind to him - unlike that sallow, high-boned individual Felix sent round to collect the tithes. Yet when a lengthening howl ricocheted from earth to heaven and back again, he knew one thing for certain: it was not his sister Maria.
#
Felix sat honing his fingernails by his picture window. He had billeted this building near the wharf as the Island often received night deliveries here by junk. He stared out, uncertain where sky ended and sea began. Not one single pinprick of light. Yet there was a sheen that covered the whole vista which, he knew, was thrown by the unseen moon behind him. He guessed nevertheless that it was a new moon.
He shivered. He really must turf out that family from the homestead. The father had so long abandoned them, he was not likely now to return to seek retribution on Felix, should Felix park his bivouac there. The daughter Maria would be a hard wench to benchmark, he thought. Best to let them moulder away. At least he knew where they were. He lifted up the cross hanging at his throat and kissed the macho Christ figure carved upon it. He felt it squirm, as if icons had learned to fear the monsters they were intended to protect against.
"Yes." Felix heard knocking, even before it actually sounded out.
"Can I come in and see you?" The voice was of several throat noises rather than the fluid ones tongues could make: like wickerwork talking.
"Yes." The same word, but a second meaning.
In walked a creature it would be most people's misfortune to meet. Felix saw that the Christ shape had blunted back into the very knots of the crossgrain. The creature's tumescent cod-piece was larger that his whole buttock area: face hidden by a harlequin-mask, yet eyes piercing enough to bore to the back of Felix's skull, charring the retina en route.
"Yes." A third meaning.
"The moon is brand new, Felix, not engorged," weaved the wicker words.
"Yes." A fourth.
"Well, as that is so, there is no harm in me stretching my legs in the fresh air, is there?" The creature left before hearing the reply.
"Yes." The second again. Or possibly a fifth.
#
Maria was being escorted home by Clement. Not that she thought she needed protection. It was more the ritual of the last night kiss: like fresh sweethearts: ignoring, for one delicious moment, the frenetic shafting Clement had already given her above the slabs of textured blood that hung in his cellar. Almost a game of role-playing, stirring the dry loins into one last gasp of come. Tonight was the coldest night of the year: thus, the most clear-sounded. They could even hear her brother's flailing axe as he grappled with the ice monster: a common sound these days in fulfilment of their mother's latest peccadillo.
She leaned up Clement's body for the peck. He lowered his face to where his mouth needed to be and sucked at Maria's cheek. A little known fact that some people had two cheeks on either side, one under the other, with a gossamer-thin air pocket between. The lower one was a clandestine cheek, a cheeky little cheek, and he laughed on thinking of it in this way.
"What are you laughing at?" Her voice was a more overt blade of sound, as if further honed by the geomantic moonrib above.
"Your under-cheek - I wish I had one." Clement prodded his tongue into his own and swabbed around for remnants of loose meat.
"Under-cheeks are nothing but trouble, Clement - things collect between and I'm forever using the douche." There was an added squeak to each word, as if she demonstrated her cheeks' valve-like quality.
The scream they heard was blood-curdling. An unrehearsed scream. One that came from a freight of frights rather than a single self-indulgent fright. From the direction of Maria's homestead. Clement ran on ahead, being fleeter of foot. She hustled in his wake as best she could, fearing her brother had gouged his foot accidentally with one foul axe-swing. But they lost their way in some coastal fog.
#
The old woman sat at the motionless spinning-wheel, tired of thinking. Being senile did not mean she had lost all common sense, however. Her two children were dim enough to outdo any of her own foibles. Maria was always with Clement above his meat-cellar: and love made a young mind even crazier than the thoughts it contained. She peered through the salt-streaked window and saw her son in combat with an imaginary ice monster - yet again. But Clement and Maria would be coming to the rescue, both ready to adminster a blow-job with the hottened breath they'd kept stifled up in their mouths from erstwhile empassioned kisses.
The ice creature had chomping jaws slavering in the bonelight. Her son, despite his sluggish reactions, had managed to break off an ice stake and thrust it into the monster, towards the heart, from behind its plumped-up sausage of sex. The erupting jam dyed the snow a startling black, and steamed. The monster twitched and, once dead, twitched again. Then, the old woman saw an arm forcing its way from beneath a patch of newly poached snow...
The earth is the best meat-cellar of them all, she thought. Shrugging, she returned her attention to the spinning. "Am I the sanest castaway of them all?" she asked aloud. She examined the palms of her hands. "Yes," she replied, with a sixth sense.
(Published 'Night Dreams' 1995)
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