Do Ghosts Dream Of Winding Sheets?

His sleep was a pure blackness that ever seemed to teeter on the edge of white. In any event, he assumed what he was experiencing was sleep. It seemed very much like it, except sleep consciousness was entirely new to him.

He stirred with the dawn cracking. The sun was not yet above the horizon, but its fanfare of known and unknown colours was.

Sleeping on the lush grass amid the daisies and beneath the stars was a perfect blessing - the weather never changed, the temperature held between the tolerances of night and day, the shades and hues both destructive and creative in their interchange. Strange that he could not recall falling asleep here in the first place and, even more strange, that he was not at all surprised waking up here.

The words in his ears were spelt with silence. He shook his head to make them sound inside. Eventually, he discovered that it was a girl’s voice articulating deathly secrets. He turned to squint into the rising rim of the sun’s birth only to find its bloodorange aura shimmering along the close reclining nudity of the one who spoke. Who wanted him to hold her.

The mystery deepened as, on top of everything else, he realised he had not been sleeping alone.



She woke dead. She felt dead. She was dead. The sun was just dipping below the horizon, shafting black sunbeams across the plain. Her consort in death held her in his arms, the love from his eyes still very much alive. Whilst the sun finally departed the Earth, snow descended in a groundswell fabric of minute stitched crystals to seal their eternal warmth.


(published 'Opossum Holler Tarot' 1990)

Misanthropy-On-The-Naze

The flashing coloured lights wheeler-dealed across the upright displays, further engendering misplaced hope by giving the punter the chance to pull the forelock of fate with the small mercy of manipulating the two-timing “flippers” at the side, returning balls into a whole new campaign of cascading, tricksy shenanigans: accumulating points towards an illimitable target, the biggest number you can think of, the size of which only God (and perhaps the owner of the amusement arcade) was aware.

But, now, the arcade is shuttered, the sea-front deserted and the heaving of autumn seas edging nearer to overflow, as the council cart, with a revolving pulse, yellows the night from its cabin roof. It’s touring the streets, with its bewhiskered paddlewheels churning up the gutters, freeing them from the sludge and detritus of summer: discarded buckets, sandcastle unionjacks, rude hats, regurgitated fish ‘n’ chip suppers, mutant condoms fingering out into spider shapes, crystallized candyfloss, like sea-creatures’ abortions, and soggy saucy postcards, scrawled over with undehivered “wish you were here”’s, picturing enormous bums, even bigger boobs and triple entendres...

Outside the Hotel Despond, there stands two men, once holiday-makers, no doubt, but now deserters from overdue homecomings and from the inevitable return to the treadmill that keeps their families in sunday dinners and the annual visit to the seaside.

Towards the top of the hotel, the electric sign still flashes on and off, certain of its letters missing. It fills the street with an intermittent red haze, illuminating the men’s faces, revealing their stone expressions and surly resignation. One of them curls his lips as he takes another drag from his last cigarette of the season, and says: “They’ll be battening down in Misericordia, by now...”

A third man has now approached them and, in theweaving lights from both hotel sign and sweep cart, he can be recognized as one of those accessories to the End of the Pier Show which, every night during the summer, entertained the pre-bingo audience … with clattering joanna and cheap talent competitions.

This man was the ventriloquist, a semi-professional, who spends the rest of the year working for the council on the sweep carts. His mouth does not move as he speaks: “It gets me through the endless winter, dreaming of all the hot summer fun we had, you know. Do you remember Ol’ Ma Manning? She showed her knickers twice a week, for a free go on the housey-housey. There were numbers all over them, all the sixes, clickety-click, seventy-six, sunset strip, hangman’s noose, Blind Pugh...”

The other men nod, but do not listen, for they are preoccupied with the dirty weather that is now threatening to come in off the sea -they wish they were back in Misericordia or Parsimony, further inland, where their children, even now, stare into the night, wondering when their daddies will come borne; their mummies have told them that they are still on holiday, perhaps the silly buggers have one more End of Pier Show to enjoy, the last of the season and, then, they will creep home, heads bent, to the duties to which all men must face up.

The ventriloquist has taken out his dummy and the rain drips down its plastic face.

“A gottle of geer, who wants a gottle of geer?”

The two men, bemused, disappear into the public convenience nearby which, by tomorrow, will be the last facility to be barred up for the off-season. One more night of relative comfort in the cubicles, one more night before decisions will need to be made.

The council cart is returning on the opposite side of the street, a lightship floating across the shimmering, swelling puddles; it will pick up the ex-ventriloquist at the corner of Litany Street, if he is not careful.

He listens to the rumpus coming from the end of the pier. The fat woman is playing a Russ Conway medley, the gap-toothed sit-down comedian is telling third generation ma-in-law jokes, Ol’ Ma Manning is getting all eager in her seat waiting for her big moment, the audience is clapping half-heartedly, for they’re only there for the bingo...

The seas are becoming heavier now like an army commissioned as an impatient vanguard of winter. The ex-ventriloquist speaks quietly, but the storm is growing steadily so noisy that he can hardly hear himself: “There’s something special about the sea. That’s where we all originally came from, after all…”

And, as if hypnotised by the mind-reading act that he always had to follow on to the stage, he strides along the planks that creak in the wind. Between their gaps, he can see blackboiling pools revolving within each other...

Through the useless turnstile, towards the darkened theatre, he is counting backwards from the biggest number he can think of ... and his dummy leads the way, on short stumpy legs.



Someone or other threw the switch on the hotel sign, and went to bed for the winter. The council workers locked up the public loo, one night earlier than normal, got back on board the sweep cart and drove it further inland, its yellow pulse gradually withdrawing its reflections from the empty sea.



(published 'Peripheral Visions' 1991)

Raw Air

Can anybody's life be called ordinary? To the person living it, each passing moment should be all important. Even the scrubbing of a dirty new potato ready for lunch must be felt for what it truly is - a precious moment of rare life, to be cherished as a gem of priceless sparkling beauty.

"Make sure you do those potatos properly. Last time I gave you a job in the kitchen, I spent the rest of the week clearing up your messes!"

The voice came and went, like a bird of prey that merely pecked at my carcass, then, thinking better of it, soared back into the blue sky, blotting out the glorious sun for just a nonce.

It was Christmas Day. There WAS something special in the air but, equally, it was not like Christmas Days I remembered as a child: those were so special, all the people I saw that day would seem to have a halo glowing above their heads. But today was not significantly unlike any other. In fact, we all decided to split up, get into our various vehicles and tour the local towns and countryside, before lunch, it being such nice weather for the time of year.

The turkey was already "doing" inside the oven, plus the bag-pudding hissing above the steam, my potatos ready-scrubbed in their milky liquid and, finally, but not least, of course, the various items of alcoholic beverage lined up in the fridge eager for consumption. I noticed that the stuffing was still on the kitchen table and not safe inside the turkey's gaping belly ... but I did not draw attention to this, for fear of delay to our trips.

Many people were out and about, and I was relieved they all looked as ordinary as myself. My own particular husband and children harnessed themselves into my car, all excitedly chatting about their Christmas presents (many of which had been brought with them on the trip, no doubt only to be discovered several months later when I got round to clearing out the back of the car). I was a great collector of secondhand books, so I'd not been given any of these, for most people think Christmas presents should be new things. Somebody HAD bought me a new paperback, but it was a science fiction novel I would never want to read, if I had not read it already from the public library.

The other families staying in the same house as us for the seasonal weekend, including my own parents with their new children, drove off in their jalopies, even before I'd had the chance to start mine. We were all to return here by "lunchtime" (a moveable feast, if ever there was one). I was glad I was not ultimately responsible for its production. (Perhaps I SHOULD have told someone in authority about that stuffing). I was eager for a drink, but driving.

We soon became lost in the first town we encountered (the one we were staying in). Because of the recent bomb threats, most of the roads that the public could use as short-cuts through the garrison areas were fenced off. Not all of them, since we saw soldiers toting their Christmas slop buckets between barrack-rooms in some of the less sensitive military demarcation zones. In any event, the maps were sufficiently confusing to send us on a wild goose route through the smaller town of Bulstrode. But once there, we scaled the climbing alleys, till we reached the market square.

I do not know whether my family noticed it was becoming less and less like a proper Christmas Day. There were a few stall-holders calling their wares in the square. The one that surprised me most was an old fellow with a brazier selling off portions of fish and chips. "No time spent in waiting for drinks", he called. I did not quite understand the drift of his sales pitch - maybe, today of all days, he was giving the drinks away free or, at least, speedily, while they were still piping hot.

I was delighted to see in one corner of the busy square a man selling secondhand books. Tomes of various sizes were spread around him on mats, some huge purple encyclopaedias and entrancing little matching volumes no doubt containing rare fictional gems. I could not wait to get my hands on them.

My attention was temporarily drawn by the others in my party to the fact that some of our fellow guests at the house had turned up at the same place, evidently also confused by the shut-down garrison and the undependable maps of the area. They were haggling with a shopkeeper at the entrance to his open-plan emporium. From this distance I could not actually discern what he was selling and indeed what they were buying. They had not yet noticed us. My mother must have been among them since I could hear her voice right across the square.

At the same time, I spotted Auntie Enid wandering through the crowds in another part of the square. SHE was not staying with us for Christmas, so it was surprising to see her as lost as the rest of us. If I recall correctly, Auntie Enid was a relation that everybody seemed to acknowledge, but nobody knew exactly who she really was. The nature of her relationship with the rest of us was to remain a mystery of the tenable universe. She bore an uncanny resemblance to the Queen. I waved at my mother to point out the whereabouts of Auntie Enid, but she had evidently already seen her and decided that it was impractical to leave the others to make herself known. My mother had not yet seen me. By the time I turned back to the secondhand books, the man had already cleared them away, surrendering any hope of likely customers on Christmas Day, and scarpered, mats and all, whilst the going was good.

One of my children was by now tugging at my person, pointing eagerly into the blue sky. Why I took it for granted, I do not now understand, but I was not surprised to see that the child was indicating a peculiar-looking flying craft. It seemed like a huge piece of electrical equipment, one of those components sold in shops which I always thought were for experts or, at least, for people who were clever with their hands. It spread its spindly wings on ratchets, even as I watched, its insidious roaring making most of the people in the square to block their ears. It was buzzing very close to the tops of the buildings and, as it careered towards us, I saw it was literally enormous, bigger than a jumbo jet. Then, from another quarter of the sky, there came another monstrosity like a floating steel works complete with chimneys and silos. It must have crept up on us, unawares, for I now only noticed its crescendo of booster-engines for the first time, as it thundered close above our unprotected heads, blotting out the sun for more than just a nonce.

The two craft darted off together as if they were playing tag, towards what I took to be the direction of Colchester; and we could now view them as smaller contraptions, emitting bumble bee noises as they made flirtatious sorties over the Essex marshes. As they gathered speed to make a re-approach to the outskirts of Bulstrode, the roars sporadically returning to our ears, they clipped wings: it was an accident, I was sure, but my husband said they were fighting. How he knew, I have no idea. In fact, I had no time to question him, for the two craft scattered apart, cartwheeling out of control, and with a pair of ill-timed skull-cracking crashes they made a messy landfall elsewhere in Bulstrode, beyond the unsuspecting rooftops. Thickly plaited plumes of dense smoke streamered into the sky. And I cried. I still do not know why I cried, but it seemed the most appropriate thing to do.

I then saw that the shop where my mother had stood with the others was in ruins, evidently collateral damage of the engagement.

My mother was never to know about my duplicity with regard to the turkey stuffing.

We drove home in silence and convoy, easily finding the way. My husband was missing. One of my children was hopefully with him. Unaccountably, Auntie Enid was with us. I cannot remember much of what happened when we returned to the house, but I certainly now felt selfish in having kept that job of potato scrubbing all to myself. For one fleeting moment, I thought there was a faintly shimmering halo above Auntie Enid's head, as she dished up the food. I cracked myself open a cold beer. It would soon be time for the Queen's Speech.




"When she was a child, her only Christmas presents were an orange and a sparkling silver threepenny bit in a stocking. She was far more excited about those than ever children these days feel about the most expensive new fangled science fiction hardware..." Rachel Mildeyes (THE SAYINGS OF PETAL FRANCES)


Published 'Gothic Light' (1991) part of which was recorded directly from a dream.

Absent Without Leave

A collaboration with Anthea Holland


Harry fingered the stripes as his boot-burst toes circled the irregular Summer detritus of sedge and mulch.

A pond or pool that was stagnant. No scent of water lilies hung on the summer evening air; no reeds or rushes bordered its banks. Green slimy growth covered the undertow.

Cold for Summer, though, Harry thought as he knelt at the edge. Despite the warmth of the day, little of the sun’s rays would penetrate the thick branches of the ancient oaks that surrounded the pond. Cold oblivion, what bliss.

‘But smelly,’ a little voice reminded him. ‘Do you really want to smell like sewerage?’

‘Won’t care, will I?’ he responded casually. ‘It’ll all be over for me.’

He stood up and shrugged his shoulders out of his jacket. No point in ruining a perfectly good suit.

The plane appeared from nowhere. He hadn’t heard it coming; it was suddenly overhead, its thunderous roar reverberating around the tree circle. He threw himself to the ground, scared shitless, burying his face in the muddy marsh ground.

The jet - for surely it must have been a jet from the Air Force base - was gone as suddenly as it came, leaving a pregnant silence behind. Harry lifted his head slowly, stickily, from the mud and gradually stood up, as embarrassed as if a crowd of people had seen his craven action.

He picked up his jacket.

“And you thought you were going to drown in twelve inches of stagnant water?” he questioned.

"Six inches," said the little voice, now in full hearing, as a long grey glistening back rose to the surface of the turgid brine - making Harry think that the pondbed itself was raising its profile. "Six, quickly becoming nothing," it said, persisting in a commentary upon its own birth.

The creature was in full to empty view, hardly breaking the murky meniscus.

"Who are you?"

Harry stuttered inside but spoke quite smoothly aloud.

The question hung about on its interrogative hook, as a whole series of imputed jets filled the stagnant air with a fleet of shadows and roars.

"I'm whoever you want me to be," the voice eventually stated. "I can be your worst nightmare or your most delirious dream. Which do you want? Think carefully, now, there is only one chance."

Harry thought carefully. He wasn't quite sure what his worst nightmare was.... Then again only a fool would ask for that option surely. But then he was a fool - amongst other things. Only a fool would attempt suicide drowning in a mere foot of fetid water, a pool for a fool.

Perhaps it was all he deserved - this worst nightmare idea. He was a good-for-nothing, low-life character.

He knew that was right, he'd been told it often enough.

But still, his worst nightmare ... what dossier of domestic doldrums could he conjure that out of?

No, better to conjure up his most delirious dream - except if he asked for that - and got it, wouldn't that give him a reason to live?

And hadn't he lunched out for the last six months on the fact that he had no reason to live?

Lunched out; evening dinnered out; night-time drunk out; and outlasted all his friends with his constant harping on his total nothing-ness.

If he were nothing, the pool creature was definitely something else. And the jets tessellated the sky like a patchwork storm, thundering more than a million twisters. Was this death? Even God had to keep an air force handy. Then silence as furlough fornicated with desertion.

"I'm whoever you want me to be," repeated the voice, in a storm that was the eye of a calm.

He looked up and wished he were a tree with tap-roots.

The pool was scummed over with grey Autumn.

Absent without leaves.


(Published 'Roadworks' 1999)

Estate Duty

I HAD BOUGHT the house on the assumption that it would be a good investment. But, so as to maximise the tax advantages, I actually ought to live in it, as my accountant told me rather late in the day.

“Can’t I pretend to live in it? I don’t really want to move out of London into those godawful mountains.”

“When you sell it, you’ve got to be able to prove that it is your main residence, so as to avoid Capital Gains Tax,” he had replied.

“Well, can’t I take the man from the Inland Revenue for a visit and show him all the ruffled covers on the bed!”

We both laughed.

“Will I have to prove that it’s my toothbrush in the bathroom?” I scoffed.

“No, but to be serious, he may send investigators into the village to test out their gossip.”

“Good grief, man, is that what we pay our taxes for, so that they can run the gauntlet of the countryside, snooping into all our affairs?”

“If you had your way, they wouldn’t be getting any taxes....”

“A vicious circle...that’s what they are. I try to earn an honest crust, work my heart out for a bit of comfort and then what happens? The man from the Revenue travels all the way to Frixton and pops his head into the local newsagents to see who I’ve been sleeping with!”

* * *

Frixton was hardly a village. It nestled between the two great peaks of the Panjandrum (as it was called in the local parlance), a group of about a dozen red brick houses that would have seemed more at home in an industrial setting. The slate roofs and the TV aerials on oversized chimney stacks rose glinting into the mist that so prevailed one could even pretend that there were tall factory chimneys beyond the reach of the sight, instead of those real towering unscalable rocky pinnacles which, from time to time, emerged spectacularly with the infrequently bursting upon the scene of the sun.

For one who spends all their time in financial matters, I’ve always considered myself nifty with a turn of phrase. My business letters have been considered more colourful than most, to say the least. So, please excuse me if I get carried away and leapfrog the words. But, please don’t forget, I’m the sort who only writes about real things. I’ve got less fanciful notions in my whole body than you, who read this, have got in the quick of your fingernail.

The house which, through a whole chain of agents, I had turned out purchasing was a strange affair. I had been told it was going for a snip...in the circumstances. Those countless meetings in countless banks’ offices, arranging the finance, the mortgaging, the re-mortgaging, the back to back loans and ‘bed and breakfasting’ of my gilt portfolio, were all over. I was now proud owner of Frixton Grange, once residence of the man who had founded Frixton as a sort of folly...but, that was before the sniff of survivalism had hit the country. The global tensions, I was told, far from relaxing as some would have us believe, were tightening their grip on the population’s subconscious. And Frixton, I was also told, would be the Mecca for such survivalist claptrap, the illogical consequence of which would be property values there topping the sky before the next decade was out.

It was just another investment to me....

The Grange itself, when I first saw it....

Stop, I’m getting ahead of myself again. The journey from London involved twelve changes of train, each one more dilapidated as a form of transport than the one before. It was going back in time, almost. I did not drive because I had been warned that you could not get anywhere near Frixton in a car. Only a train would do.... The last lap saw me sitting in a juddering carriage, speculating on the use of the thick leather strap swinging from side to side on the grimy window. Before you tell me, I’d better make it clear that I’m not old enough to remember those types of train that once steamed between all big cities. I’m one of those young get up and go individuals who are making it so big these days. So, this train was the first I’d ever come across, much to my surprise that any still existed at all.

You could actually feel it straining to lift itself into the mountain areas and, as it teetered along by the steep drops, I could see that any enclaves of population were becoming sparser. I had already informed the train driver that I wanted to disembark at Trusthoe Halt which was supposedly within hiking distance of Frixton along some pretty suspect footpaths.

“I never stop ‘tween here and Ilston Junkch.... I don’t even know if the bye-laws allows me to stop a train at all ‘long those tracks.”

“But its says on this map that there is a Halt...and one of my agents got off there a few months ago, he told me.”

“No-one I knows has stopped a train at that there Halt for at least fifty year. Your mate must have done what we call a bounder. Broke a leg, no doubt!”

At that point, I handed over a wad of mixed denomination notes. The driver didn’t even bother to count them and said: “I’ll slow down a bit...so be on your mettle.”



* * *

I’ve made most of my money by investing in ‘smokestack’ economies. I don’t know why I thought of that as I jumped clear of the trundling train on to the rickety wooden contraption no doubt laughingly called a platform. Perhaps someone will take time out to explain to me when I have a bit of time - probably after I’m dead! Anyway, I ended up clinging to the damned contraption for dear life, watching the backside of the hissing monster as it disappeared into the low sun.

The timing had gone all awry, for I was now faced with the prospect of a trek in the darkness across completely unfamiliar country. I settled myself down for the night under the ‘platform’, where life was so sparse there were no rats lurking nor even insects...thank goodness.

By morning, the sun had disappeared. The murky mists to which I was soon to grow so accustomed coiled across the head of the path I was due to follow. But, by judgement rather than luck, I managed to reach Frixton more quickly than I anticipated. In fact, it was only just around the corner...so much for those misguided fellows back in London who had directed me.

I wandered in a speculative mood along the only street that Frixton boasted, simply to find it was not a street at all, but the flat roof of the Grange! I had inadvertently come down upon it from an unlikely direction which, I was later told by the keeper of the only shop, could be the route that had been used by the original settlers of Frixton but since forgotten.

The Grange, as I was soon to discover, was actually built between the two skirts of the Panjandrum peaks. So, all it needed was a roof, which happened to be a flat one...which, as a genre, you all know, is not the best architectural feat of mankind, by a long chalk! So much for a tax avoidance planning investment! The whole thing probably leaked!

I clambered down precariously, trying not to ladder my stockings, for I had not brought many spare pairs with me.

Eventually, I managed to reach the door in the rockface which, O light and joy, the key I had been supplied fitted. But, gloom and doom, it did not turn. Those accursed agents again! They had a lot to answer for.

I managed to get in because the screws in the door hinges were merely finger tight.

And I had to live here! God forbid. I crawled into the only bed I could find, because I was dog tired, after a particularly fitful night under the ‘platform’. Pleasantly surprised to find the sheets already warm, I was equally stirred to the bottom of my entrepreneurial soul to find I was not alone in the bed.

“Hello, my dear, I hope you don’t mind me being here. But a job’s a job, and the Inland Revenue Authorities who employ me are hard taxmasters....”

His voice was hard and, unlike the train driver, he was certainly not queer.


(published 'Sol' 1997)

He felt as if

He felt as if he were about to go completely mad. There were only a few moments, if that, to communicate his last sane thoughts. He chose the medium of writing because there was nobody within sight nor sound of him. The trouble was it was far too late to communicate anything worthwile and, even when he first put pen to paper forming that large illuminated curlicue ‘H’ with all the cherubs flying in and out of its struts, he was already pretty stark raving bonkers.


(published ‘Psychopoetica’ 1991)

The Builder-Dragons Of Planet Ishgilia

Planet Ishgilia was exactly 30,000,000 years old that day. Beasts gathered at the Anniversary Point in readiness for the festivities; mostly fire breathing dragons, ones with short memories, originally exported to Ishgilia in man-made mindlessness (from St George’s Land on Earth) to work as labourers on the Anniversary Point’s construction.

During the last century or two, indeed, mountains on the dark side of the planet had effectively vanished, as sizeable cross-sections of them were transported by the dragons to the Anniversary Point - via a tunnel that their breath had fire-bored straight through the planet to bypass the mid-marginal ice caps.

Only the evening before, Magri had watched the banana shape of Ishgilia’s sun dip behind the completed Anniversary Point, feeling much satisfaction in a job well done. As Human Foreman of the Terrain for the Furtherance of the Building of the Anniversary Point, Magri had gazed lingeringly at what he could only call, in his Earthen terminology, a giant statue or ornamental stone marquee. Dying sunlight had embossed its massive silhouette, while the shuttle wings of last minute builder-dragons clambered over it - their saw beaks wreathing smoke upon the background of brightening stars. Hundreds of them, Magri had thought: hundreds scrambling to finish the tremendous pounding and moulding of cataclysmic sculpture.

That had been yesterday. Now the sun was high and elongated in the clear blue sky - literally minutes from the precise moment of Anniversary. Magri recalled the thoughts that had drifted through his mind since the previous night and, as he watched the multitude of smoking dragons entering the Anniversary Point’s ground level gate of gaping black, the image of Belinda , gorgeous blonde-head and sweet mind-shape (the actual words with which Magri tantalised himself) provided him with exquisite pain, abandoned as Belinda had been back on Planet Earth, consigned as a slave to the Inevitable Wheeling of the Universe - whilst he, Magri, equally susceptible to the unseen moving of mysterious cosmic forces, was pursuing this geomantic mission on Planet Ishgilia.

Chief Dragon approached , interrupting such sentimental musings. The planning and negotiation had been an overweening preoccupation for the duration of Magri’s prime years and, secretly he cursed those who had manipulated such involvement on his part - whoever “those” were. Still, everything had its compensations. He fumbled with the stubble of his burnt cheek as he returned the dragon’s tail-flick salute. Magri had never grown fully accustomed to these wonderful creatures: with their grimy armoured scales, great jointed limbs, smouldering orifices and huge, yet human-like, eyes. Their likening to lizards had been mere subterfuge.

Chief Dragon waddled towards Magri and reported, in grunting tones - barely audible on Magri’s side of the timbre threshold - that the birthday festival was open and in full swing. Wasn’t Magri coming to take part in the fun? Magri shook his head as if to convey that there was no business for him within the Anniversary Point. His job was finished. The absence of Belinda as a reason was left unsaid.

Disappointed, the dragon stumped back towards the Anniversary Point. No doubt it sensed some affection for the two-legged man and cast a second tearful glance at Magri’s handsome blue-robed shape standing alone. Indeed, Chief Dragon could now not face the uproarious stamping and buffets of the multi-coloured fire-dance herding from corner to corner of the Anniversary Point’s vast catacomb. How could he enjoy the side-splitting, leather-beating fandangoes when Magri remained outside emanating sad vibrations across the plain : a plain that stretched illimitably in featureless abandon around the Anniversary Point’s pinnacle of towering landmake. Chief Dragon knew that Planet Ishgilia died around them all. It had read that on Magri’s graven brow - and it disappeared into the Anniversary Point’s gate with no further backward look.

Magri heard the distant thumping of eager dragon-feet. Three of the creatures suddenly emerged from the entrance in a flurry of activity, and he soon realised that two dragons of a male persuasion duelled for the affections of a female one. The latter could be distinguished by the many nippleless paps drooping from the underside of the body. The male dragons spat sparks at each other before the two unwieldy bodies met in clumsy collision. Then, the conflict grew more violent as the flailing appendages and fast-champing jaws clashed and curbed. Chunks of dragon-flesh ripped off, leaving crimson gashes on both sides - and, before long, one had chewed through the opponent’s limb: a rather gruesome stance standing there with the fire-bubbling extract crunched between it’s steam-spitting jaws.

Magri turned his back, reminded of a similar incident back on Earth: the reason for his mission to Planet Ishgilia and the abandonment of his sweet, sweet Belinda to an unfathomable Elsewhere.

Try as he might he could not recall Belinda’s reaction to his departure. He had been her hero, of course, and this fact confirmed itself once again in his mind, he swivelled on the balls of his feet to view the dragon’s fight. The two male protagonists slumped together in a dead pile - bits and pieces of chopped purple arrayed about them - with the female’s teardrop-curds sliding over her useless paps.

From such bitter sorrow Magri lifted his wet eyes to the bright banana-shape that started to dip in the deepening sky. He knew that his vantage point was one of magical destiny - since, no sooner had he found himself gazing at the magnificent, if mutant, sun-star, it faltered and dimmed. Then it died. Simply that.

Simultaneously, from within the Anniversary Point, the thumping of the dragons ceased - as if conscious of the planet’s near death - a magical realisation of the universe’s mastery amid their drunken cavortings, an inevitable sorrow sparking from joy.

A spectral effulgence, the source of which was a mystery to Magri lit the abandoned plain in the shadow of the elongated sun’s residual stain. And, black against such a wan saviour glow, the magnificent Anniversary Point soared into universal night. He wept for this memorial, pitying its looming omnipresence. He knew that it would stand solitary and bleak on a dead planet for an eternity of forgetting - a massive black shape thrusting mindlessly into deeper, more forbidding, black. He prepared to surrender himself to a cold aching demise beside the Anniversary Point: the huge statue whose construction by gullible dragons Magri had organised.

Magri watched, as fiery smoke began to curl from the cavernous nostrils of a massive stone nose. Magri knew that the huge smile was just a stone mouth’s quirk. The odd pitiful dragon grunted, as it managed to struggle out through the Anniversary Point’s left ear: disturbing the silence for a while, quite irrespective of timbre thresholds.

Magri meanwhile recalled another Belinda, one with soft lips.


(published 'Odyssey' 1996)

Soft Furnishings

She leafed through the “Soft Furnishings manual”, whilst eyeing her own flat’s scanty sticks: giant corpses of insects in most but name. She herself was comfy, if anorexic - the meat on her skeleton still providing sufficient compensatory cushioning for her sedentary way of life. Meals were no longer commonplace - yet she often wandered into the kitchen, if only for the exercise. It always seemed to be raining outside, penetrating her tinnitus with its own brand of splattering. The television set had been lost somewhere in the flat, yet she still retained its remote control. Searching for lost things was pretty pointless, because they would only lose themselves again - once a propensity; always a propensity. And her own slow mouldering would never be reversed - not until she regained the old spirit spark, that smidgin of red-blooded joy which once resided in her soul. The manual flicked over, page by page: the drapes, swags, loose covers, pouffes, plump pillows, antimacassars, frills, fringes, tassels and so forth were depicted in the same range of three or four pastel shades as if their world was bereft of primary colours. An artist had evidently touched up each photograph with such thin veneers of mauve, pink and lime. Within such an environment, she could even give credit to ghosts - in a rose wine décolletage of velvet or drifting wisps of revealing lace or satin-corrupted tints of flirtatious gossamer or flimsy body-hugging skeins of enticing silk. Again, she eyed her own flat, itself full of tawdry hangings, behind which hid most of the elbowy furniture. Her bed, however, was revealed in its pee-stained lop-ended glory - mattress tufted by nights of sleepless terror. She knew it would soon be past her bedtime - yet again - and perhaps forever. And, as darkness drained even the gloom of its meagre differentiation, she tottered up from the foot-stool where she had been squatting with the manual. From the gutted sideboard she picked up the coffin-shaped contraption and pointed it towards the netchoked window - and pressed the hardened pad of her index-finger upon a coloured button - which, as it happened, would have activated fast-text in the old days before losers won. The sound of rain became stitched with the last words, the last rite of passage. And she watched bright blood draining from her own near-exhausted sump for the final time - leaving only the loose covers to complete the walk bedward.

(published 'Tears In The Fence' 1996)

Blessed In Oils

“It’s easy to imagine the subject of this painting being alive. Merely look at the face, the brown eyes shining through near tears, a hint of blusher in the petal cheeks, the nose only slightly too large for perfect beauty, the mouth with shapely lips on the point of moving in speech…”

The guide was pointing to a large oil canvas, in a gold-studded frame, mixed sprays of flowers subtly implanted within the abstracted margins.

“The girl it depicts, as you can see, has been wonderfully caught, no older than it takes to have the beginnings of womanhood in the lines of dress. And, indeed, the dress is a work of art all in itself - drapes of creamy silk, edged with the frailest lace that paint has, in my view, ever conveyed, and a bodice diagonally crossed by embroidered tulips, each stitch finely wrought. See the undulating curves created by her legs, as she sits inside that marvellous dress, all part of a dream that the painter has, perhaps inadvertently, captured with merely a few instinctive flowing movements of his brush.”

His words were designed to bring out items in the painting that were not there, but one could indeed see them, if only for a few fleeting seconds, which was plenty time enough in the short lifetime of the audience.

“But, I suppose, it only makes it sadder, this being such a fine, living image of a beauty with brown eyes, that whoever she was is now dead, nothing but dust, since scientific examination of this work has proved beyond all reasonable doubt that it is by an artist at the turn of the last century…”

A lady in the audience sobbed. She seemed to have a similar hairstyle to the young girl in the painting; natural flowing curls of rust-brown hair, its final heavenly composure dependent upon the deft positioning of lemon-white ribbons, which the artist had neatly concealed beyond the abstract margins.

The guide tried to see who had sobbed. But the crowd had closed ranks.

He continued, more tentatively: “The artist? He will always remain a mystery, for the painting has a unique style, vaguely reminiscent of the preRaphaelite school, but harking back to all styles, all ages. And, being unsigned, undated, with no background documentation, in a frame unlike any other, I’m afraid the world of art can only stand and gaze in admiration which, after all, is the only thing one can do when faced with the nearest to perfection I, for one, has ever witnessed.”

The crowd was drifting off piecemeal, the sobbing lady lost among them. They remembered seeing nothing upon the canvas except a rather self-conscious still-life exercise in yellow flowers. Their petals appeared as if they were drooping even when the artist was in the process of recording them upon the canvas for an age and a posterity which, he must have known in his heart, could only appreciate fleeting images.

“Only those with brown eyes are able to see Heaven,” the guide muttered to himself before becoming merely one more member of the departing crowd.


(published ‘Silver Wolf’ 1993)

Tales Of Touching Love

(i)
I see a ghost.

Yes, I literally see a ghost. What is more, judging by its behaviour, it also sees me, sweeping in haste as it does across my path in the form of a rucked bedsheet. Its mouth and eyes are formed by scorch marks. The rest is merely accidents of fold and tatter.

I attempt a cursory communication, expecting it to ignore me through fear or snootiness. Unaccountably, it does not occur to me to be afraid or, even, incredulous.

It seems to be on another plane of existence altogether. Whether that is a result of a decided antipathy towards the fundaments of mine or its own pride of place elsewhere, I’m unsure.

Everybody has heard of ghosts. Very few can claim to have seen one. Even fewer have actually touched one.

I am in the hallway of a large public museum, just before it shuts down for the day. In fact, an officious old janitor has already warned me of the standard opening hours, and was it really worthwhile purchasing an entrance ticket for just half-an-hour?

Like a bus conductor of the old school, he punches out a long spool of thin paper from his contraption with a handle. As he departs to continue his shutting ceremonies, he gruffly tells me not to get lost. And off he goes with his scowling walk.

It was then that the encounter with the ghost transpires. Inadvertently, I touch it, sensing the delightful tingle of silk bedcovers – an act which causes it to leave a trail of slimy white ectoplasm in its wake, congealing upon the marble floor. I fear the janitor will probably blame me for the mess, taking a dim view, as he will, of such goings-on.

So, I escape the museum, fearing the janitor more than the ghost. But I sense the spectre following me into the street and, upon twisting my neck, I indeed see it dissolve into the early evening sunlight.

I am strangely sad.

I hear a voice shouting and I discern the jobsworth janitor gesticulating vigorously. He holds a white bundle which he must think I left behind on the museum steps. But no, he is not shouting at me. He doesn’t want the ghost to make an exhibition of itself, with all its clothes off, I gather. I laugh out loud at this thought of the janitor’s material concern for the wraith.

I’ve got no heart to dwell further on such matters, since the phantom evidently fell in love with me during that timeless moment of human contact inside the museum. In short, it felt, it was conquered, it came (in more ways than one)… and it went.

(ii)
“Brother, this weather’s getting real close.”

I turn to him and see that the sweat has made brown inroads into his starched detachable collar.

He points towards the horizon with a wide sweeping of arm and finger where the impending storm has produced a straight division between impenetrably dark cloud and blue sky.

Our pilgrimage is on its last legs. The silhouette of a human-sized crucifix is barely visible on a hill at the leading edge of the storm, amidst the continuous bright bubbling of thunderheads. But we do not blame God for this last-minute hurdle in our attempt to bring our pilgrimage close to Him.

Suddenly, in the middle distance, I spot a white-cloaked figure, bent forwards more at the knees than the waist.

“She’s heading this way.”

How my companion already knows the figure’s gender, I cannot fathom. It’s quite beyond me.

The black crackling sky skews swiftly above, soaking us in sheets of raindrop stitches. To the very bone, it feels.

One bright shaft of lightning slants through my companion’s chest, pinning him to the ground, as it were, with a golden girder.

He squeals like a stuck pig.

The cruel lightning gradually dissolves into trans-substantiality and eventual invisibility.

I hold my companion upon my lap - not so much to comfort him but, with a churchly blessing, to bring a realisation of death’s simultaneity to his shrinking soul.

A further lightning shaft slides through my own body from the dark underblankets of the incontinent sky, cross-sectioning itself in more colours than I have seen in common prayer or, even, in spiritual trance.

The figure arrives from the middle distance and the silk garment it wears barely touches my cheek in a timeless moment of delicious tingling.

I can hear the soft voice whispering sweetest nothings in my ear. I know I cannot die better than with such endearments. Better far than the dry-as-dust spell of churchly blessing called Last Rites.

Unlike my companion in pilgrimage, I have at least fallen in love once during my life, even if such love is to endure for less than one second.

And two spirits touch hands with a shimmering shiver that merely takes an immeasurable moment in a heaven called mindless love.


(published ‘the kore’ 1994)

Tears Without Meaning

I was walking around in a part of the world I'd never been before, early for a business meeting as I was: a sunny day, too. A nice estate of houses back of Main Road where you might not have expected houses at all, let alone an estate.

A tiny girl on a tricycle asked: "Are you the postman?"

"No," I answered with conviction and assurance.

"I told you he wasn't," said a little boy nearby.

I walked on confident that, although not particularly sad, I would later find myself crying bitterly about the event.


(published 'Psychopoetica' 1989)

Three Stories Darned Merely By A Thread

(i)
I was rather pleased with the socks which Daisy gave me for Christmas. They were grey, yet when I examined the pattern more closely, I discovered it was constituted of ill-defined diamond and lozenge shapes, like the scales of a rather inscrutable, deep-water fish hiding under a rocky outcrop. Browny green tinges were also in the weave and an uncertain blue: slippery to the eye whilst rougher than morling wool to the touch. In actual fact, despite the roughness, the socks were reasonably comfy to wear.

I modelled my feet for my own admiring gaze. Despite the reticent nature of the socks, I felt sure I could strut like a real toff when sporting them down town. The good-time girls would sure to be flocking in my wake.

Yet I was usually the soul of discretion. So, when I removed the socks to lay them neatly in my drawer, I wondered if I had thought about good-time girls at all. That wasn't like me. But my undressed feet did look decidedly sexy. I had never noticed that before.

The next day, I decided to wear Daisy’s presents - presents in the plural because, after all, there were two of them in the single pair. It was to be their first official promenade in the outside world. They laid side by side in the drawer, outdating the rest of my socks which had been my companions for years, some of the older ones like dish cloths or with ladders and holes which I often concealed surreptitiously from view by artfully twisting the hose and heel. In any event, I threaded the new socks upon my already bared feet, in the way Daisy rolled on her stockings ... with a slow sensuality

I rather wished I owned a pair of my father’s sock-suspenders that he used to wear in the good old days. They would have completed the act and tightened up my calves nicely. Suddenly, I heard the babble of good time girls on the landing outside my bedroom door

“I love you,” Daisy said.

“I love you, too,” I replied.

“That's not right,” she said.

“I do love you’,” I maintained.

“No, what I mean is that it’s not a logical reply to my original statement. I said ‘I love you’ and if you wish to follow on with an expression containing the use of the word ‘too’, you should have said ‘I love me too’”

“I don’t agree, since the ‘too’ referred to ‘love’ rather than ‘you’.”

A third voice, a childish one, piped up: “You both love something called you.” Then another childish voice: “Meanings are never clear, especially when mere words are used to thread them.”

There was a deathly hush, during which Daisy stared at my feet. Then I decided to tell her about the dream I had about the good-time girls - with one of whom I had fallen in love.

“I did love someone else, once,” I announced. “It was a girl in a dream. It didn’t seem important at the time because I myself had become the girl I loved in the dream, a good-time girl. I didn’t have the use of a mirror, so couldn’t be certain if she was me. But, looking down, I could see a dancer’s petite feet.” Daisy stared coldly, as I continued to speak. “Anyway, that was not all, because there was a show in the dream. I think it was West Side Story where I had the star part - a huge production with all the singers and dancers being transported around a spherical stage upon a complicated elevator system. The audience were like gods outside the globe of action, up and down and around. I was so well rehearsed (without of course recalling such rehearsals from prior to the dream) that my songs and dance movements were second nature. And the audience loved me. Their applause was deafening at the end of each of my set pieces. The round curtains swept in and swept out, as I was taken on yet another carousel ride. It was as if the universe was one huge proscenium arch. And, in the dream I knew I was both beautiful and brilliant. My steps were wondrously light and in time with some heavenly choreography. I could hear my own voice trill out in glorious tones, without even trying. And my body was ogled by tiers of faces. Not a dry eye in the house ... nor an itchy foot.”

Daisy looked down at her legs: sausage-loaves of purple wickerwork corseted by an intricate suspender-belt contraption, each ending in a dull pad. She waggled the pads like freshly landed fish. She sensed hooks tugging at the sole flesh of her under-insteps: a pain that shot along her legs like acute inversions of sciatica or a spinal trapped nerve. She hoped that they would fly off at the ankles to relieve her of such excruciating agony. Yet a harness of flesh and gristle guyed them to the shins with a pain which became literally unbearable, the pinions of sinew noisily ripping.

But was it her? Or was she no longer there, merely her feet upon a different person’s legs? Even she would fail to recognise her own empty face, a face that was swiftly becoming mapped all over with crimson ligaments, ligaments that laddered into the cheeks and jowls from the feet upwards.

I faded behind a blur of tears, as if I didn’t exist, which I suppose I didn’t. But, I am confident Daisy knows that - somewhere - there’s a place for me. A place for us. Somewhere, a time for us.

The trouble is: the pain’s mine.



(ii)
Angels, as well as cowboys, were part of the childhood culture where I lived. You can still feel their games pulsing under the very cobbles. Indeed, I could easily recall the uniformly terraced streets which played fast-and-loose with ley-lines as well as with strict geometry. And around each bend was a game of hide-and-seek simply waiting to be played. There were tags and tassels, too, where good-time girls kicked thin legs out of short tented run-ups or floral hand-me-downs. Boys had socks down to their ankles...

Hopscotch and leapfrog - Red Indians disguised as tomahawk-wielding tearaway urchins - no end of laughter, no end of tears - no end of pretend make-believe - no end of criss-crossing cul de sacs and blind alleys - yes, Angels, Cowboys and Tomboys, too. I had fond memories of a particular tomboy, but I couldn’t fix a name to her face. She was the only girl with whom I ever made best friends, in the same way as you could be best friends with another boy. The two of us played pistol-packing when even the empty street corners returned fire.

There was some common ground close by - West Side Park, if I remember correctly - where indeed bushes were hiding-places. Long hissing clicks could be uttered with tongue, teeth and grimacing smiles in the shape of gun-sound and I, in later years, would re-enact such mockeries of snake-shot, pointing my barrelled fingers (thumb as handgrip) at the television - but no firing-device, other than an all-purpose trick of a trigger that only memory could pull. The remote control of the past. The particular event of which I, now in my dotage, want to summon to a contemporary version of reality was when I and that tomboy girl played a gunfight to end all gunfights.

There are, of course, several imaginary friends scattered around West Side Park, that day, all firing silently on dead cylinders. The girl slowly swings on one of the tall slide’s under-struts, showing that her legs are getting longer, her socks shorter, She spurns the idea of yet another game of Cowboys and Indians, preferring the slide instead. Although a stickler for her sex’s right always to play out-of-kilter with dolls’ tea-parties, today she is also in the mood to be feminine ... for once.

“Come on. Daisy. You promised.”

I accentuate the two syllables of ‘promised’ with a sluggish conviction, whilst pronouncing ‘Daisy’ with a short slur. In those days, of course, I have no difficulty; in recalling her name.

“No. I don’t feel like it,” replies Daisy, “Go and have a shoot-out on your own.”

She purses her lips as she clambers higher on the slide, eschewing the more normal route by the steps provided for reaching to the top. “And you didn’t play-hide-and-seek with me yesterday, either,” she shouts.

“Didn’t I?”

“No, and I don’t see why I should play Cowboys and Indians with you today.”

“Let’s play hide-and-seek, instead, then,” I suggest, with very little enthusiasm in my voice. But we didn’t play hide-and-seek. Having abandoned West Side Park to our imaginary playmates, Daisy and I careered along the terribly similar streets in a game involving gangsters - escaping with pretend stolen property - making mock flights from shop doorways - each of us taking it in turns to be police and thief.

Yet all pretence came to an abrupt end, when we witnessed a real robbery ... a gutter gunfight. The throbbing of tommy-guns, the rattle of snakeshot. Sometimes the memory sounded like the Earth slowly doffing its coat, by rhythmically ripping the buttons off one by one.



Years later, feeling older than if I were dead, I struggle up in my chair to peer through the net-curtained window. I have lived in the same house - the same street - even the same town … child, chap and chairbound.

What was that girl’s name all those years ago? Daisy West, wasn’t it? I shrug. Who cares? She was probably one of my imaginary friends, in any event - so not worth the thought-pattern she was printed on. So. who cares? Certainly not me.

However, I am able to go back in time, even if it means resorting to a form of mock deja-vu. Each heartbeat was a resonant harmonic of heaven’s gate opening and shutting...

We cower behind the sharpest corner in town, occasionally peering round it, as the shots began beating out. We see two shapes in tall black overcoats, faces stitched over with what look like grey socks backing out of a newsagent shop.

It was a pity we never saw each other after that day - otherwise, we would’ve come to some mutual agreement to keep our stories straight or at least in tune with the same beat... leading to a much needed, yet never accomplished, catharsis of the soul.




“We hid behind the corner of the street but the blokes with guns soon saw the sides of our heads, I reckon. We ran and ran and ran till we could run no faster... but we kept ending up at West Side Park again...”

“You then both kept running back to where you started from? Did he lead you? Or you him?”

Leading or following, who cared, thought Daisy, but she answered:

“Me him ... I think.”

“So you think you led him.”

“I led him or I followed him. One of the two. But it was me who did it.”

“Why, Daisy?”

“‘Cause he’s more stupid...”

“Yes?”

“I always did things, not him.”

“Was someone chasing you?”

The policewoman sidled a glance across at her male colleague seated in the corner of the interview-room, as if she knew he hoped they would be on the same beat tonight. Their eyes locked and unlocked.

“Come on, Daisy,” the policewoman resumed, “who was chasing?”

“Chasing? No, not chasing us, ‘cause the blokes in black coats were looking for us.”

“Looking for you?”

“Yes - sort of.”

“Why, Daisy?”

“Because we were hiding, I suppose. If people hide, other people have to seek them. Stands to reason, don’t it?”




“I did it.”

“Did what son?”

“I killed Daisy.”

“How did you do it?”

“With a gun. I shot straight into her head.”

“Where’s the gun now?”

“I dropped it in a dustbin.”

“Where? Which dustbin?”

“Can’t remember. Maybe in West Side Park.”

The policeman shrugged at the policewoman. They would soon be off duty. In any event, there was no park called West Side in the town where they’d found him wandering. No child reported missing, either. Best just to send the kids home with red ears.

“Why did you shoot - what was her name - Daisy?”

“I shot her because I had no reason to shoot her. I wanted to see if I was mad enough to kill someone, when I didn’t need - didn’t want - to kill someone. It was a sort of test. So, I now know I must be mad. And you can put me away where no one can find me again. And I’d’ve beaten it.”

“Beaten it? Beaten what?”

“Beaten the game.”

“What game, son?”

“The game of doing something without wanting to do it.”

“So you saw a robbery?”

“Yes, two blokes in black coats - I’ve already told you.”

“Which shop had they robbed?”

“The one near West Side Park.”

“But there is no such park,” said the policewoman’s voice. She bit her lip and remained silent.

The old man bit his lip and remained silent. He was so old, he felt he had never been a boy. Imaginary playmates were full of life. Or was he becoming confused? Life was full of imaginary playmates. Tomboys and Indians. He felt himself all over as if seeking his manhood. He pulled up his dish-cloth socks. GOTCHA! he screeched with the residue of his voice. He pointed his barrelled fingers (thumb as handgrip) at the corner of his head - and he put tongue to teeth, combining a croak with a whistle. He looked out of the window. Two shapes in tall black coats were always hanging around in the street. Sizing him up, no doubt.

The twigs on the bushes in West Side Park click sluggishly with the sudden arrival of a hissing wind. A red pool becomes a rabbit-eared shadow upon the concrete at the side of the slide, a playground slide where Daisy once perched on its struts. Like a stage...

Perched so very precariously...

A pair of Angels in police overcoats saunter past.



(iii)
The deepest domestic well in England was situated in a domestic garden- but few knew it was there and even fewer knew how deep. Of course, nobody knew what was at the bottom of that well - unless, of course, one counted Bern Stine: the oldest person most people would ever come across, given the chance to meet him in the first place. He had many anecdotes to tell of the time before he became factotum to various houses in the area and of when he served in the war, as he called it, of the world’s beyond. His favourite tale, which Daisy and I, having played all evening blotting up the late sun, pleaded for him to recount, was one about beetles. Quietly breaking wind - a habit to which we had grown accustomed without giggling - Bern lowered his voice to match their rapt attention...

"The nights were hot, me dears, hotter than any in England. The noise was full of separate darknesses - insects as big as your fists, fluking about like inky birds, swarming in to make the sounds of the sounds one already heard. You know what I mean?”

“No, Bern,” lisped Daisy, “tell me again.”

“Well, there have to be things to make things. Say, there was no shadows, there’d be nothing there to cast them. Same as there’d be nobody, if there was no noise to sound that nobody out.”

Daisy nodded, condescending to understand.

“But, Bern,” I piped up, “would there be no Earth if there were no holes in it like our well?”

“Of course not, boy. Like old socks, things without holes in it is nothing in the first place. Even stones have pores, you see.” Bern pointed beyond the orchard where the well was sunk. “On those hot, hot nights you felt the nearest you could get to the world’s core without scorching.”

“Oh, Bern,” said Daisy, forgetting that she had just comprehended, “are there always beetles wherever you don’t look to see them?”

Yes - thousands upon thousands clucking and climbing on top of each other, like tiny yellow crabs - but you must realise, they’re always barely beyond the eye’s corner and, if you look directly at them, they flit to the other corner between blinks.”

“But if they cluck, why can’t we hear they’re there and follow them around ... with our eyes following our ears?”

“Come on, children, how many times do I need to tell you? They’re always where you don’t hear ... and smell ... and touch - ever just ahead of your head.”

“Children!” It was Daisy’s mother calling us in for high tea; she didn’t like us staying in the garden after dark, especially on long evenings like this one: in fact, she preferred us not to be outside of the house’s jurisdiction at any time of the day. We did not usually require much persuasion, because tea was our favourite meal. Toasted cheese golden-eyed by a poached egg - washed down with a piping hot tea infused from dock leaves and fresh well water.

Bern’s parting words sped us on our way: “The yellow beetles come here at the turn of each century... and seek out dank berths, like culverts, disused drains, broken sewers and, yes, wells.”

We bustled into the house, not hearing the end of Bern’s customary words - as if we had ripped off a love-letter’s cruel valedictory because we knew it would spoil the rest of it when we came to read its earlier endearments.

Nobody grown-up admitted to believing in the existence of Bern Stine when someone called Bern Stine was spoken about. In fact, we even found it difficult to encourage most people’s belief in the existence of the house’s various maidservants, chambermaids, kitchen staff - let alone Bern the factotum.

“There’s a letter for you today which the postman left on second post,” said Daisy’s Mother, looking at nobody in particular. She was often absent-minded, especially when eating - as if mastication was all she could deal with.

Daisy and I glanced at each other in a bemused fashion whilst her father nodded slowly, saying: “The tea tastes as if it’s boiled from tap water”, a statement which showed that he joined in with the silent in-joke about there being well water available, a joke which never subsisted beyond the snigger from Daisy’s grandfather - who sat in his chimney-corner rocker. The grandfather took his tea at a different time of day - on his own, or as on-his-own as talking to himself allowed.



With the two children having departed for their high tea, Bern stepped across to the twilit well, where its over-frame dangled a knotted rope ... and he stared into the hidden depths, believing his own tale about its bottomlessness as a skulking-place for pre-migrating insects. He had seen no grown-up venturing into the orchard garden for decades, so Bern thought everybody except the children must be dead.

Indeed, Bern and Daisy’s grandfather used to be old cronies, drinking pals at the Star, a pub which was situated too close to the house for clear-minded comfort. Indeed, friendships were frequently too short-lived, as far as Bern was concerned.

Bern was willing to offer a friendship forever, whilst others only, at most, for life.

He shrugged as he cranked the handle of the well, hearing the wooden pail clanking against the tubular brickwork below. He knew there was no water slopping out. What he had earlier lowered down there was a letter - and now there would be a reply to fetch up.

Unknown to us, Daisy’s grandfather believed in the existence of Bern Stine and, what was more, believed in the other servants. Indeed, he cast more than a single daily glance towards the twinkling backs-of-knees as maids scooted from room to room on endless light chores. He inwardly scorned the middle generation for their lack of time, for their seeing only what they saw, for their thinking only what they thought. The middle generation, as represented by Daisy’s parents, actually failed to acknowledge his presence itself, despite the tea-time nibbling noise coming from his chimney-corner.

They were not letters as such that Bern tugged up and down in the well bucket. Darkness now engulfed the nettles which he had to negotiate in order to reach the well head.

Shadows upon shadows, he thought, were the best way to describe the onward onset of twilight.

No, not a letter. Never letters to and fro. The transaction via the well tunnel was concerned with provisions. Food being passed to someone (or to something) down there who wouldn’t otherwise he able to eat - as Pip had once smuggled food for Magwitch. A supply chain. Sooty and sweep.




Chimney-corners were little better than attics or cellars or lofts or oubliettes, thought Daisy’s Grandfather, as he kept a beady eye on the rest of the family attacking their Welsh Rarebits with relish. He was simply given smelly leftovers, given to him by the most cursory arm movement of a buxom maidservant, who only happened to be passing. Her mouth was gashed into a false smile, as if she knew it would cut him to the quick. He suspected that her cleavage hid a tantalising titbit for which a hungry pet might beg.

The well may have been deep but domestic it wasn’t. The house had originally been built with the steel socks of plumbing already threading its man-made cavities - so why the necessity of Bern lugging a slop-bucket back and forth from a winding-hole in the garden? Such were the thoughts of somebody that nobody could substantiate.

Daisy’s Grandfather rose slowly from his rocker, hobbled round the nearside elbow of the wall which formed his inglenook and stared pleadingly up the chimney-flue - and, seeing the empty light at the end of the vertical tunnel’s tower. He prayed for something to bring down a rare edible snack to keep him going.

Daisy and I tripped out into the Springlight for new games amid elisions of mind - only to discover that Bern Stine had vanished, as he had always vanished even before having a state that actually was capable of vanishing. But what was that group of antlered shadows amid the orchard trees? Pippin scrumpers? Fruit-stoners? Tinkers? Pedlars? Beggars?

We shouted to scare them off. We belonged here, so we had the right, if not the strength, to scare off intruders.

Yet when we saw the dark overcoat wrapped around the stuck body, we wondered whose body it was. The shadows scuttled away to realms where things could cast them.

“An angel policeman?” I suggested.

"Who knows?” answered Daisy.

We realised, eventually, that it was not a coat that was dark. It was the body’s flesh with bruises risen to the surface in maps of black blood. Archipelago lands where undead creatures had ended up residing, thought a thought. An antipodes of antibodies, thought another.

“It’s time for tea, children.”

No answer.

“Fetch some water from the well when you come, children!”

No answer.

“Hell and High Water! I’ll have to fetch it myself. You must think I’ve got more than one pair of hands!”

No answer.

I was the only child left. And I was older than most. I struggled into the garden from a house-far-too-big-for-me, the chimneys of which were far-too-high-even-for-the-longest-flues. For show, I toted a broken pail through the nettles towards the well. I hoped my socks would last out the rest of my ever-shortening life. I hoped, nay, prayed that my own stumpy arms were less stumpy than the grey vein-knitted arms that would stretch from the well upwards to my own seeking fingers...

The house knew something about it, but there was no sight of a smile upon its wall. Never been on the mains, even in its heyday, by the look of it. More of a potting shed than a proper place to live. Or a bereft beach hut. Probably infested with the touch of fingermice and knuckly yellow beetles. The sound of applause ... and the smell of leftover cheesy feet.

Various children, some with the same names, slid restlessly between the cylindrical sheets, put to bed too early on a long summer evening and they wondered if their waking dreams could ever get mixed up.



“Tales may barely tally, whilst Death be the only proof that Life beyond Dream exists.”
Rachel Mildeyes from STOLEN ARCHETYPE vol vii The Good Time Girls



(published ‘Strix’ 1998)

The Maze Zone

Tomsk actually got more glue inside the hollows of his own nose than on the clown's plastic red conk, as he tried to stick it on.

Tomsk was a clown of long standing. Barroli wondered how anybody could make such a fist of nosing himself up, let alone a full-fledged circus performer such as Tomsk. But, then, of course, Tomsk was getting old, wasn't he? And Barroli hoped to take over from Tomsk as chief clown, a position which meant that he, Barroli, would no longer have to clown about so clownishly clownish. In fact, Tomsk, as chief clown, was eligible to wear a wickedly white staring face and pointy hat - but such an inscrutable image was one that Tomsk unaccountably avoided as far as possible bearing in mind the plonker of a bright red conk he was trying to stick on.

Barroli wouldn't be seen dead in such garish colours when he took over Tomsk's mantle - just a subtle smudge of black rouge (if rouge could be black) on each dusted cheek - plus a plain pierrot's hat or, at best, a harlequin's. Whatever the case, Barroli had his hatching to do, plans to unfold, varicose blueprints to pore over...

Barroli shook his head to clear it of thoughts. Clowns couldn't afford thoughts: too demeaning by half to the thoughts as well as to the clown who thought them. He watched Tomsk finish gumming up his his nose with loud snorts of impatience.

When a clown reached senility, such senility had double the force of ordinary people's or, seen from the diametrically opposite direction, half of it. Tomsk was so senile, nobody noticed: it simply merged with his clowning: an optimum senility, albeit a severe one. But there came a time when each facet ceased to offset the other - at which point slapstick turned into something far more dangerous than simply breaking a few bones when horseplay got out of hand in the circus ring.

Barroli feared that Tomsk was reaching beyond the Golden Mean of a clown's senility. He saw it in Tomsk's eyes, those pinpricks of life which the encircling audience, on curves of exponential delight, were too far away to see properly. Tomsk's eyes already looked as if they were nipples upon the sagging breasts of his facial muscles. But now the whites were blackening whilst the pupils became more an emptiness than a colour. The subtle mascara of Tomsk's seniority merely accentuated such physical quirks rather than alleviating them.

Barroli ceased scrutinising Tomsk so as to look into the mirror at the round blotched canvas of another face: his own.

He, too, had darkened his eye-liner to suit his own advancing years. Yet, unlike Tomsk, the bulbous nose was something that became increasingly unbearable to wear. It did nothing for his self respect. Soon, he would be too old to take over from Tomsk...

There was a rap on the dressing-room door which indicated the imminent call to duty. From the distance, both clowns could hear the ensemble drawing to the brassy finale of the elephant's cake-walk - amid the officious shouts of the ring-master. Tadman was a blighter. He had no finer feelings for clownship. He merely endured their buffoonery, for the sake of the unbearable littl'uns in the front row of the audience.

Tadman thought circuses were all about animal acts and trapeze tricks. Clowns, to him, were not even light relief. As Tomsk once said, in one of his more lucid moments, a clown's rightful purpose was really for dark relief - but, surely, one couldn't expect anyone like ring-master Tadman to appreciate the arcane arts of mockery and mummery.

The rap repeated itself. Same rap, different knuckles...



Although city-minded from cot to crabby middle-age, ring-master Tadman often felt like a disfigured peg in a regular hole. If it weren't for his weak ankles, he'd've hiked from the city centre circus to the countryside, whatever the distance ... through the winding urban back-doubles and bewildering T-junctions and double-deadended ratruns.

He suspected to be taken advantage of - looked up in the telephone directory - tracked to his inner city den - hounded till kingdom come. But someone out there might have transport that they're willing to lend him or, at least, helpful advice as to how Tadman could leave this godawful precinct. A ring-master could not be too careful. Enemies watched from in as well as out the circle...

He could now easily imagine someone thumbing through the directory’s paper-thin pages - F.D. Tadman - F.R.P Tadman Jr. - F.Z. Tadman - which one to plump for, this person with eyes squeezed shut and wielding a pen that waved about above the print like a guided missile having second thoughts. But a circus caravan with a P.O. Box Number was all Tadman had to go on himself for where he lived.

It is important that he did not attract any undesirables. Not even the clowns knew his whereabouts when not in the circus ring. Or especially the clowns. Tadman's optimum choice for someone to help him would be a nice lady with no obvious habits - one who owned a city flat as well as a country cottage and, oh yes, a set of wheels (preferably with a cog-easy motor attached).

The city was a real maze. It never ended. It never began. Office blocks concealed blind bends. Traffic choke-ups barricaded the streets - with jam and blood overflowing even the sidewalks. There had once been a wide river running through the middle of the city. Either the city council had built so many bridges, nobody knew whether the river was there any more - or it was always just around the next hair bend, where the pelican lights flashed the word "CAKE!" instead of "WALK!"? Few citizens actually cared ... as they witnessed yet another accident victim peel itself off the road surface.



Eventually, the clown's dressing-room was empty of any vestige of life, save perhaps the disorder of discarded bandages that Tomsk and Barroli had used as masking-tape - this pile budging imperceptibly in mimic of something that aspired to exist, given a stronger draught to stir it.

The mirror was unpeopled, too, yet, if the mirror could hear, it would've heard the distant laughter and the rhythmic clumping of the drums, as its erstwhile pair of companion reflections made fools of the other lesser clowns with custard-pies and trick doors ... assuming Tadman didn’t intervene.

###

Men who dress up as women were called Magic Playboys. Tadman tried it once, but no-one offered him a seat on crowded buses or opened doors or laid their coats upon a puddle - so he gave up the habit.

The buses never left the city. Tadman had never found one bold enough to advertise a route beyond the sprawling outskirts. The puffers shunted in and shunted out of the main line station, their headboards suspiciously blank. Tadman got on one such puffer once. He knew it was not going far, since there were no bog-easies on board for a leak. He cut short his trip at the first halt which turned out to be merely round the corner from the circus Big Top - which was convenient, he supposed, but that was hardly the point. Lucky to rediscover his shake-down from that unusual angle of approach, simply armed with a P.O. Box Number as he was.



Tomsk saw Tadman through a mishmash of his own eyes and mind, made double by overlapping. He discerned Tadman's whip snaking through the air, as if the ring-master thought the clowns were no better than animals from the menagerie - or worse. Tomsk's vision was never good but now it was a blurred dream sequence where everything was monstrous, nothing normal. He picked up a yellow slobby thing and launched it towards what he thought was Barroli's rear-end, daring not to throw one at Tadman, too. Nowhere in circus history had a ring-master become involved in clownish antics ... well, never Tadman, in any event. Not unless he'd done it once in disguise.

A little boy in the audience couldn't help laughing. He was meant to laugh, he realised, whilst his eyes cried not with tears of laughter, but with a finer brew of self. He watched the clown with the red nose and pointy hat staggering in a series of straight lines - which made the little boy feel ill at ease in view of the perfect circle in which the performance took place.



Tadman once rented out a room in his caravan to a Magic Playboy. The latter said he wouldn't bother Tadman with the hissing movement of silk frocks. He'd spend most of his time in the nude and would only dress in regalia when Tadman was out.

"But what'll happen when you go out?" Tadman asked.

"I'll dress in the storm porch."

It seemed strange using a caravan’s porch as a vestry, but who was Tadman to question? But that The-Lion-The-Witch-And-The-Wardrobe act every morning did snag Tadman's nerves.



Tadman gave Tomsk the slightest flick with the business end of his whip - more in fun than spite. Barroli made faces at another section of the audience, the members of which made faces back - whilst the little boy watched Tomsk's face become unmade.

Indeed, Tomsk's face erupted upon a basinful of jelly slime as if a head of phlegm had been building up for years behind the red nose - and had at last strained the skull's seams to bursting point with a custardly slug-stew that incubated various curded cultures of green, black and shades of green and black between.

The little boy covered his eyes with his hands, knowing in his heart that the slapstick had not only got out of hand, but out of head, too. The little boy didn't wantanyone to see his tears. A monstrous shape crawled on its stomach along the ring's radius towards the little boy’s position in the audience.



The city was a queer place. The streets were all one, really. No escape. Tadman had seen paintings of the countryside in art galleries. He yearned for its green touch. It must exist - somewhere.

And, of course, not to be forgotten was something everybody had forgotten. But never mind, since Tadman just had to answer the door bell. It wasanother of those Magic Playboys who said he had left his motor running in the next cul-de-sac. Was it convenient for him to look round the room quickly, so he could decide whether to take it. Tadman sensed the Magic Playboy spoke in code.

"I don't let it out any more."

"That's strange. I saw it advertised. This caravan is P.O. Box No. 174, isn't it?"

Tadman told him that it was decidedly not P.O. Box No. 174 and, even if it were, he'd not tell the likes of a Magic Playboy or, if he did tell him, Tadman would disguise it into a bigger better caravan quite out of a Magic Playboy's rental range. Tadman quickly drew the large culottes across the door and returned alone to his inner pad. Tears unaccountably sprung to his loose lashes. He should have asked the Magic Playboy how much mileage his motor had got left and whether it could have taken them both, as well as the caravan, beyond the outskirts of the city.

Tadman's bewildermazed back-run of a mind suddenly knew that his own thoughts were disguised even from himself.



Barroli naturally expected Tomsk to return to the dressing-room, but Tomsk never did. So Barroli gummed himself up in a regalia of black bandages - the resultant mummified mummer waiting patiently for its own humanity to be healed. But, then, the mirror abruptly cracked as near down the middle of the shiny surface as it was geometrically possible to do - and became the only trick door that worked tricks for real.



Tadman lived forever - or, at least, someone with squeeze-eyes masquerading as Tadman did. Ringleader, as well as Ringmaster, he organised drag-racing trips along the city's Ring Roads. Nobody could heal his humanity, sad to say.



Nobody knew what happened to the little boy in the circus audience or whether he managed to escape the Maze Zone.



(published ‘Strix’ 1997)

A Map Of Memories

Joseph Collins’ latest obssession was the litter that peppered the paths and roads of our city, so much so, he eventually wanted the outside to be even cleaner than his own lounge carpet. The littlest tab from a beer-can wedged between the pavement slabs was enough to knock him off his rocker in the neatest rage. He did not actually give himself the task of removing the detritus, but, possessing a pocket-sized narrow-feint notebook - one that was purchased for 37½p from his favourite emporium with the ancient aroma of childhood treats - he was able to enscribe an aide mémoire - almost a map - of where the different throwaway items lay or lodged. He then gave this notebook to long-suffering Annie, expecting her to venture out late at night with dustpan and handbroom - but, of course, not before she had done the housework at home.

Fortunately for Annie, his obsession only raged for a week, during which time she managed to pull the wool over his eyes by taking herself off to the makeshift shed at the bottom of the garden. She spent the small hours there when she was meant to be scouring the streets. Furthermore, this being a very windy period - trade winds gusting fitfully upon the gulf stream - the assorted flotsam and jetsam were naturally made into fresh meaningful patterns by break of light. Joseph was then able to draw up revised maps of what he considered to be a quite different crop of litter.

Upon this obsession eventually becoming merely a memory, Annie still escaped to the shed, come bedtime. She really liked the comfy deckchair she had set up there and, being an unusually mild winter, it was preferable to sleeping with Joseph’s snoring log of a body next to her. And who could have blamed her? He had told her that his new preoccupation was to count her body hair and, with tweezers, pluck out sufficient to bring the grand total remaining to exactly one thousand. Annie threatened to fetch her mother home, since her mother would have lots of old woman’s long curly sort of hairs that he could pluck. But Joseph was on to a new plane of obsession: imitating the state of death, like a ventriloquising corpse. He should have gone on the stage (and he did after Annie finally left him) and on the stage there was plenty of mileage in such acts, since the stand-up comedians had lost their voices in face of the competition from television.

When the applause sounded out, Joseph tried to count each individual clap - including those of the two one-armed chaps sitting next to each other in the front stalls. The more popular Joseph became - advertised as the only comic who could die every night - the more difficult it became to differentiate the various constituents of the audience’s ovations. However, when his popularity eventually waned, the audience threw ill-separated mushy leftovers from their shopping-bags upon the voiceless dummy which he had left as scapegoat and decoy on the stage - whilst Joseph himself crouched in the prompting-booth desperately trying to itemise the muck that spilled over from the stage. The two ladies, who looked uncannily similar to his memory of Annie and her mother, did not throw anything at the stage, but only because they had nothing to hand except, of course, their wigs.



Many years before, more than even Joseph could count, he courted Annie, with a vengeance. She need weaning from her own beliefs...

“Can you be more specific?” asked the priest.

“I don’t know how I can, because God is the most unspecific thing to talk about,” the woman’s voice replied.

“Just try, my dear, and I’ll be listening.”

“Promise you’ll be listening then, Father Arthur, even if I close my eyes and think there’s nothing in existence except myself.”

“I promise - don’t worry your little head about whether I am here or not - I’ll be listening come what may.”

“How long can you give me, Father?”

“Till you finish, Annie.”

“How can anyone actually finish talking about God?”

The Confessional grille separated the two voices. The fitful silence of the church was overbearing. The trappings seemed to move of their own volition as the rippling light stained the flags.

Joseph, hearing the voices in the distance, knelt upon a hassock amid the pews, making pretence of prayer. But he knew he had brought Annie here and was waiting for her interview with the Pope’s puppet to finish. Joseph was scathing of anything religious except God Himself. Joseph wondered if Father Arthur could sleep at night. Annie’s words from behind the purple drapes were not undergrunted but sharp-keyed and precise enough to reveal a relentless self-unwrapping which she punctuated with the clicking together of her stilletoes. Joseph’s own tongue clicked to himself in unison. His own ears burned in Hellfire.

“God is in everything,” continued Annie. “I often feel Him inside me, larger than life. In the clouds, too. Are you still listening? I hope so. So if God is in everything, each one of us is in turn a part of God. Even the greatest sinner owns a little bit of God.”

There was nothing in response from Father Arthur. Annie’s voice itself was strangely squeaky, almost unreal in the heady incense-laden air. Joseph progressed on all fours down the aisle towards the Confessional, knowing he would need to figure in her words sooner or later. After all, he was her sin, so surely he had the right to be party to its absolution.

Joseph recalled the horn-rimmed glasses he had tenderly removed from her face, rather than risk breaking them. Her eyes had spoken of a nudity far more significant than that of a whole body’s bareness: even greater than death’s final disvestment. Joseph had licked the tears away. She must have then realised that the virginity she had painstakingly preserved for God Himself was in mortal danger. He had ridiculed the spuds in her ankle socks, when he removed her spinsterly shoes. She was remarkably open-hearted with the goodnight kiss she had granted him. Tomorrow, she would confess this failure towards God - then she and Joseph would be free to marry and have children. He had helped burn her nun’s weeds in the back garden, making the sky accept the smoke like a blessing. He shook his head in an attempt to eliminate this memory.

Without premeditation, Joseph tugged aside one half of the purple drapes. He wanted to put his side of the story. The thus revealed Father Arthur turned with the abruptness of a ventriloquist’s dummy.

“What do you think you’re doing, Joseph?”

“I belong in this confession. I need to clear up the litter of its loose ends.”

“Another’s sins are for God’s ears alone.”

Joseph winced. So, the Priest was the wearer of God’s ears, was he?

“But her sins are me.”

“You have no right...”

“Do you mean I have neither a right to be her sin nor to be party to its absolution?” Joseph’s ironic tone was lost on Father Arthur.

“Joseph, let go! You’re so compulsive!” chimed in Annie from behind her side of the drapes. “Leave us, your turn will come later. I need to understand God to the very bottom before I surrender Him for you. You will own the rest of my life, so let me have these last few precious moments with God my once intended.”

“God is always with you, whatever you may offer Him, be it the whole of your being or just part of it,” said Father Arthur, turning back to the grille with the crack of brittle bones. “You are not surrendering God, merely postponing Him.”

With a lump in his throat, Joseph closed the drapes, to conceal Father Arthur who, if his face bore any emotion at all, was riven with mindless fright. The words belied the priest’s ashen demeanour. God could no longer ensure that the lips synchronised - nor the sin absolved. As a feminine grunt of sorrow sounded, Joseph opened the other side of the drapes to remind him that there was nobody there, or nobody as a whole - only a squirming pile of maggoty meat glistening in the light which slanted like translucent girders from the stained gass windows. Joseph went home to tidy up the rest of Annie.



Uncountable years beyond, Joseph drove along Brown Street, hoping to find it led into the road he wanted. The map said it did. So, hope was a bit unnecessary. He wore a mackintosh whatever the weather, mainly because it had huge pockets. His mission on this drizzly day was one of ghost-spotting. This was his latest obsession, ever since Annie returned to him as a memory - a memory he had failed to recognise until it had donned its wig. But then it disappeared.

So, yes, he believed in ghosts. Black ones. White ones. Smoky grey ones. He had heard told of a whole clutch of sickly ones in a cul de sac which led off from Brown Street. Whether they actually laid about on the cobbles coughing or had a roof over their heads in the two-up-two-downs was uncertain.

He was unexpectedly forced from Brown Street into one called Lloyd Street Gardens which did not seem to be on his map at all. It seemed to be the only way he could drive following the one-way arrows - not a proper cul de sac, because he could see an escape route where two back-alleys joined forces, further down. Albeit narrow, he could see it was possible to take the width of a car.

He pulled up outside some well-kept terraced housing, with bowls of flowers in their bay windows. The exteriors had been spruced up with front doors which would have been far more suitable for posher joints. Some sported storm-porches that Joseph was convinced were bigger than some of the rooms inside - or, in one incredible example, roomier than the whole house itself. A broad-shouldered lady stared at him from her postage stamp of a front garden. Joseph stared back. But why stare so hard?

He gained confidence from his high-collared, knee-length mackintosh. There was nothing she could have on him. In fact, he probably knew more about her than she did him, because he had seen where she lived. That gave him even more confidence.

He strolled over, stretching out the map: “It says Tipping Street down here...”

She continued with her gardening, which consisted of prodding the soil with a dibbler and dropping a large seed into each hole. The biggest seed Joseph had ever seen. He started humming a song called Four thousand holes in Blackburn Lancashire in mock lilt. He could see she had not been at it long, nor had she much more to do.

“It says Lloyd Street Gardens up on the side of that house,” he said, as if it were her fault.

“Tipping Street’s just round the corner,” she said as she stood up again, hands placed on the small of her back.

Wisps of wig had fallen over her eyes which she did not bother to brush aside. Joseph scratched his head as he pored over the map. It was admittedly a little out of date, but all these streets looked pre-first world war in any event, and they probably didn’t have televisions in the parlours - despite the wire spokes decking the chimneystacks.

“You’ve got to go down there.” She pointed with her own wiry finger along a side road that he had not previously noticed. “Turn left at Bold Street, follow along Byrom for its full length, and the road forking both ways is Tipping.” She hesitated. “The car will do you no good, though.” She took one of the fat seeds from her apron pocket, placed it under her tongue and, in an irritating fashion, as some people do, sucked noisily upon it like a boiled sweet. Joseph returned to his car, not bothering to say anything further to the likes of such a creature. He cursed, upon spotting a traffic warden who was now peering at his windscreen. The double yellow lines had been painted under the tyres of his car’s nearside wheels since he had parked it.

“I won’t be troubling you,” he said, “I’m just off.”

“Hey, wait a mo-mo, I’ve a good mind to lay a ticket on you, mate.” She too jabbed with her sharpened spoke of a fingernail. Joseph thought: give them a uniform and they think you’re desperate for a dose of good old humiliation!

“I”ve only been here thirty seconds,” he remonstrated.

“Thirty seconds is a long time to someone who is dying,” said the seed lady who had left her garden to join them. “Yes, mister, you might think it boring to wash a potato in the kitchen sink, under the rattling cold tap. But you should cherish every moment, every eye and nodule of its substance. You should savour every second of life for what it is and relish, as I say, even the scrubbing of an earthy spud, for such chores are tantamount to Heaven on Earth.”

She screeched at a small girl she called Annie who was smearing her face with dirt at this very moment halfway down the otherwise empty street.

“I simply wanted to get to Tipping Street and my map says it’s here.” Joseph held out his map - which he suddenly remembered was home-made.

“You must have it upside down.”

Joseph raised his head to stare back at the perpetrator of that last statement. He still had the security of his mackintosh. There was a fibrous green shoot starting to protrude from one of the women’s left nostrils. Joseph had had enough. The women had really got his goat. They were lucky he wasn’t a mackintosh flasher. And as he drove down Brown Street out of that part of town, missing little Annie by the skin of her nose, and having left both the parking ticket and the map in the outlandishly deep gutter, he thought he saw coils of black smoke wreathing along the terraced roof-ridges, meeting flourishes of white smoke from other chimneys. Newly lit fires. Ancient fires. Clean-as-a-whistle chimneys. Ill-swept chimneys. Foul flues. Sweet-as-a-nut flues. Whatever the case, they all produced their variety of smokes and so forth. Joseph determined he’d write a serious history of television aerials. Or hair styles. Or the romantic avenues of déjà vu. It was amazing how things changed shape from time to time. Even beyond recognition. And he winked left, suddenly knowing who the seed lady was. Or, even, who he was. So exhausted, he couldn’t think properly. Yet he retained enough hope for his car to reach beyond Lloyd Street Gardens towards his home. Choke still full out.



But true stories concern more than just one. Joseph never knew Hugger, but their fates intertwined remorselessly.

The bouncer died at his doorpost. The crowd of joysters remained oblivious of his predicament, if predicament’s not too lightweight a word for being trampled underfoot into an ugly early decease as a stand-in for a corpse. The dance band played on, in dire need of at least a single brain to share. The wild-eyed drummer, for one, witnessed the accident in its raw state - yet he maintained a relentless tattoo upon the tomtoms, as if he wanted to stir the voodoo-man who he supposed crouched within all such barrels of beat. The skin-pounder was probably “on” something - and that wasn’t simply a drum-stool.

Then, an older yet unwiser Joseph made his flourish of arrival in the ballroom - the one who came every month: the heart and soul of the party, and that didn’t count the rest of him: the man whom everybody feared as they pretended to like him. And he saw straightaway that the bouncer, amid the jungle of legs, was deader than his doornail.

“Ey, Jo, ows fings?” asked Hugger, a sucker whose nose had come off from too much snorting. A village idiot with no village to call his own.

“Looks as if old Father Arthur’s sitting out this dance?” Joseph pointed at the extrapolated body-bag which would have been crying out for absolution, given the chance to postpone reincarnation elsewhere.

“Blymee, Jo, dya fink ees ... ded?” The questioner never worried about having the nickname Hugger, for obvious reasons. His speech, too, was bereft of nasal resonance, making the meaning something he’d lost from the tip of his tongue before thinking it, let alone saying it.

“Yep, Father Arthur’s dead, OK, Hugger - and he gives Last Rites here as well as being a bouncer, doesn’t he?” Joseph, never at a loss for words, very rarely asked questions, unless they were rhetorical ones. Didn’t fit with his new found unmackintoshed image, otherwise.

“Cor ... eck ... corz e duz ... oos goin bleedin elp im up to find God, then, Jo?” asked Hugger.

Joseph shrugged, before taking his place on the floor, where people of whatever persuasion could watch him swaggering through a jitterbug as if he were his own dancing-partner, his own self being someone whom he really fancied beyond even the wildest masturbatory dreams of celebratory celibacy. Meanwhile, Hugger, who was kinder than he looked, if thicker than he sounded, crouched down to listen to the bouncer’s mouth. Eventually, Hugger cradled the ex-priest’s head in his arms. The cringing at the smell of incipient body-rot was, of course, a case of reflex rigor mortis rather than anything else. Which could have well been the end of everything, except Joseph, as ever, had to have the last word. Or was it the last dance? Whatever the case, Hugger, for once in his life, wasn’t a gooseberry during the smoochy number that the dark shapes of fused couples performed amid the slow-flickering revolutions of shattered light.

You see, the dead bouncer, propped up as Hugger’s dancing partner, even won the spot prize - a great big green patch having spread ever wider from the corpse’s belly-button which a virulent case of heavy-snogging had inadvertently revealed from below his vestal dungarees.

Joseph’s newest obsession of acting out personalities that didn’t suit him was fast fading and he snatched the corpse from Hugger and French-kissed it. The voodoo drums were quietly drumming still, even at the deadest dead of night with all punters gone puff. It went without saying, too, that pied pipers and piebald pounders always returned to their raw state - until another month, another dance, another set of loose-limbed lovelies and, hopefully, a bouncier bouncer at the doorpost.



Hugger was not exactly a “village idiot”, more a slouching shadowy shape that threaded the blind alleys of the city - both by day and night. Friendly, too. Too friendly, by half. Hence perhaps the nickname. Women in particular avoided him like the plague. He was cared for by an Aunt in Lloyd Street Gardens. An ex-Traffic Warden. She’d simply discovered the tousle-headed urchin in their dustbin where he had crawled for shelter during a particularly smoggy night.

No memories. No hopes. Hugger simply existed without trying: it was difficult to die without trying. But the Aunt was decidedly pleased with the foundling who had readily wrapped his arms around her neck - as if a strangely affectionate angel had dropped from Heaven.

“More a demon that’s slithered from Hell!” said a gossiping neighbour. But, thankfully, nobody was within earshot when this neighbour made this unwarranted statement - except Hugger himself squatting in the coal bunker nearby and he could not follow the spoken word. But even if he failed to differentiate such sounds, nobody had guessed Hugger could actually read the same words in print, especially with the Aunt being mostly illiterate - thus keeping overtly written tracts from his reach in the confines of the backstreet hovel, other than the possible exception of an odd soup packet which none bothered to read.

There was indeed no story about Hugger’s life: not even an eerie one around a campfire. His life began. It subsisted. It ended. Supposedly.

Nobody kept a record of Hugger’s doings, because nobody in the vicinity could write. Except Joseph. And he only wrote statistics and exhaustive studies of chance. Joseph, now living under the motorways, as an obsessive dosser, had evidence for only one further glimpse of Hugger - the rest of Hugger being mere surmise. Failing all else, surmise is surprisingly dependable. Joseph’s new subway home was where pedestrians used to undercut from one side of the city to the other - assumed to be the longest walk-through subway ever built. The mazy motorways above it barely intersected without sprawling further than their own hard shoulders and the glittering array of white and red jewels darting up and down them went as far as any eye could see. Hence the need for a foot-tunnel. The Council, however, had, of course, forgotten about it, thus allowing a gathering of the underclass and the undead to incubate there amid their own self-perpetuating litter - a close community stringing along in a series of Chinese whispers. Real foot-passengers no longer used the underpass, taking their chances with the hoovering hordes of traffic above. People in the smoky cars should have their bumpers felt: because it was far safer down there.

Joseph and his cronies would never have harmed head or tail of any drifter coming into their enamel burrow, but simply helped him or her along by means of rumour-mongering and ground-swelling. In subsequent years, Joseph and the other subwayfarers, becoming accustomed to their privacy, cherished their near oblivion by resting quiet. Fulfilled simply by not needing to be fulfilled. Sublimely content. And one day Hugger stumbled down there. He happened to crouch by Joseph’s particular clutch of cronies, with his eyes still bright from being outside in the sun. Hugger had started making friends by cuddling each one in turn.

Wanting him to be under no llusion as to the conditions, Joseph pointed to the make-shift corner of the tunnel that had grown even darker than the rest of the place. A glistening black lobster-like thing pulsed there and clucked. Only one piece of yet uncounted muck among several.

Hugger could not see as well as subway stock could, because his pupils had not yet sufficiently swollen. Yet, Hugger seemed to think he knew what the pulsing piece of muck was, and Joseph corroborated by describing its evolution: once a little girl, with soft cheeks, who caught a common cold. And Joseph told Hugger that incurable illnesses, even mild ones like the common cold, could, through its very incurability, eventually turn the whole sufferer into the illness itself: not much more than a stewed knot of snot maggots. Hugger nodded, knowingly, as if he had actually understood Joseph’s logic, and left. Hugger was not to be one of the underclass, after all.

Joseph was confident Hugger did not leave so as to reveal subway secrets but to make them even more secret. A secret couldn’t exist, after all, without somebody to keep it.



The Aunt welcomed her Hugger back. She had taken advantage of his absence to have the attic decorated for his own bedroom, using a wallpaper with a rock-pool design - where he lived happily ever after, despite giving him pens to suck but, thankfully, no paper. She yearned for a daughter to keep him company, but the Aunt had a hysterectomy episode instead.



Hugger became to be called the winder man - “cos I cleen winders” was his stock answer to everything. Mrs Collins was, of course, rather more select than the way her winder man happened to speak. She was a widow, not a rich one, because, unlike other husbands, her own husband had failed to make it big in waste management during the Thatcher years. She had unfond memories of those days, and the eventual loss of her husband had made her feel happier with even less.

One day, she sat and sewed in her Tipping Street parlour - without really thinking. Most widows didn’t dare think any more because, if they did think, their thoughts would be unwelcome. She might have thought of that pestering priest who often came round to gold-dig in her muckheaps. Looking for the green shoots of recovery, he had maintained.

She suddenly looked up and spotted Hugger smearing his chamois leather across the parlour winder - and smiling. He smiled, not at the window’s widow sitting and sewing, but at the frostily reflected image of his own face in the glass. Yet, she assumed the smile was for her. The Autumn day had started as clear and sparkling as a new polished mirror, but fog, like smog used to be, returned for a second bite of the stagnant air, closing in at the loose end of the grief-littered afternoon. The houses opposite were blurred, resembling the ready-mades which an impressionist could cut out to patch up his painting. The trees became abstract splodges of brown and green, the sky a backdrop for an old silent movie. She returned Hugger’s smile. She considered Hugger hers because the whole world was hers - well, at least the world that she saw at any one moment through her eyes. Indeed, the world, through her eyes, was quite different from the world Hugger saw through his. She turned a blind eye towards her long-lost little Annie Junior. The girl had played in the cold streets, because there was no television to keep her at home (like other girls). Nothing to prevent her from going missing, possibly abducted...



Hugger had left, not without dropping his invoice through the letter-box, on the assumption there was nobody in the house. The widow sighed with a combination of relief and regret. A breeze on the brink of a wind fast dispersed the bad breath of old fog, which had infiltrated even as far down her chimney as the parlour itself. Smoking her out.

She coughed behind her handkerchief. The houses opposite would have been much more clearly defined if it were not for the young darkness swirling between the various versions of vision that addressed their roof-topped shapes.

The young man returning from college, clutching the same satchel he had as a child, saw everything one way. The late-delivery newspaper-boy saw everything differently. Hugger’s Aunt, with choke full out, sniffed snootily and saw nothing but her sooty prey. Hugger himself, on his ladder, rubbing at the oblong eyes, was indeed seen by many bystanders as a shifting shadow that had absorbed most of the darkness into itself rather than wait for night to hide it, the shadow thus failing to realise that such a method increased its premature prominence as a silhouette.

Through her own newly buffed window, the widow perceived the shape of the winder man on his ladder, scraping the muck off the roofs opposite - the same stock of accumulations that had made fortunes during the Christianity era. Then, there was bright coition of such yet untidied muck and a chimney’s sudden suck-out of sparks: and the TV aerials bent and wilted like stick-insects melting - or like ghosts with wire spokes for bones. Her wispy hair, like ghosts of maggots (or seeds), tried to tug free one by one: to escape a body that now counted for nothing. An empty skull called Annie Collins.

Applause fluttered and flittered with a million almost visible wings.


(published ‘Palace Corbie’ 1999)