The House of Extra-Mural Studies had darksome towers rearing at each corner and Hyacinth Manning had promised to have me initiated there by its top Faculty. She picked me up at the gondola derrick, but she seemed different by night from what I remembered by day - for she was now literally dripping in her late husband's jewellery and sporting a waxen moustache she evidently (but mistakenly) considered to be fashionable.
We strolled, hand in hand, along the sidewalks, kicking dents into the kerb-paddlers who floated near enough to warrant such treatment, their exhausts really zoning us out, but we suddenly found ourselves amid the terracings of a night market, where some demonsters were demonstrating their wares to us few curfew-hoppers who were still about.
Hyacinth felt the thickness of one demonster's ornamented billy-bob.
"Try it!" she was invoked by the demonster and, if I had seen him by day, I'd've thought that the world'd gone crazy. Yet now, by night, he seemed to fit in better, since he wore a moon-mask and preened himself in black cockerel tights. To my growing horror, Hyacinth took the whole billy-bob into her mouth and gulped deeper than a simple swallow, whilst the demonster became grinnier than a round smile.
"Quicker than fast food," she scoffed - and we trended towards what we thought was the Main Street, following an esoteric streetwise slope of the land, eventually ending up, via several unaccountable ley-lines, in sight of the House of Extra-Mural Studies, the four topmost turrets of which vanished into the dark-choked sky. Yet the intrinsic body of the building was barricaded against us by wide canals and by the still inhabited two-up-two-down terraced back-to-back houses which belched chimneyfuls of smog from several silhouetted sets of stairway smokestacks.
"Well, we know where it is, but how to untangle these blind-alleys, rat-runs and back-doubles to get there?" I pondered.
Hyacinth shrugged and forged on, with me in her wake.
The grinny demonster hopped from zone to zone, dropping the more unsavoury parts of its body into the sidelines: but as soon as one part went the way of its predecessor, another grew for chucking.
By the time of which I speak, the citizens had grown accustomed to such busy busy busy critters riddling the streets with turnippy tumours as well as more dicky-dory appendages. Yet they welcomed this offure for their gardens: for, once planted, such demonster discards zip-sprouted as interlocking cauliflower-trees bearing, within days, great big dollops of putrid fruit.
"Enough to keep us going in these hard times," would say my old Ma, as she harvested the over-rich ruptures and melonheads from the meshed and mushy vines of her own particular zone. And, indeed, only the demonsters could straddle the zones. One zone was was as distant from any other zone by time rather than space - and, naturally, it was the commodity Time of of which the citizens such as Hyancinth and I (and my old Ma) had scant supply. "Give me just one hour extra before I do die," continued my old Ma, "and I'll use it to do good for others - but things being like they are, I've got no time even for myself." She was no doubt announcing this to her neighbour as they both tried to lean over the zone fence to gossip from opposite directions.
"Times are hard here, too," came back the usual response from a woman who patted her hair-style in an attempt to prove the existence of something or other. The demonsters took such conversations from zone to zone, zip-betweens toting message pads like there were no tomorrows.
One day, the demonster that Hyacinth had made more grinny than a circular Cheshire cheese entered burn-up on a specially energetic gambol between two tight interfaces. Thus, in transit, it dropped its scorched beer-belly into a field that was close by where my old Ma was pegging up my old Pa's pants on the washing-line, despite him having, in one zone, already died whilst, in another, he wasn't yet born.
The sight of something falling thus from the sky stirred my old Ma into saying something to at least somebody. "Blimey, another flipping flying saucer!" she told my old Pa's ghost which was probably just the wind ballooning out the pants into some figment of shape. A fresh wind, at that, for a change, she thought - with a grin.
The zones nudged each other in the night, like an audience at a saucy film. And from the tightening ancient furrow between the erosion of two chafing histories, there bloomed a bloatful of blood atop a mighty tree-stalk of mottled knotted flesh - one which threatened to encroach on another universe altogether. Infant demonsters clambered it like a school of zip-spiders, apparently zoned out and seeking a more likely reality. Their arcane cries of "Oo-Fo! Oo-Fo!" echoed endlessly down the corridors, betokening a game they used to play only in jungles.
Hyacinth and I, needful to say, never reached the House of Extra-Mural Studies or, to be more precise, we are still looking for it. It's day by now, of course, and everything around us takes on the customary tawdry welter of last night's meals brought back on a tide of nausea. The back-to-backs huddle looser and, eventually, we can see a possible way through a yardful of step-ladders - to the rear of the House of Extra-Mural Studies.
Yes, the sun's spiked on one of its towers like a lump of orange phlegm. Hyacinth's moustache runs down her chin like a Bogarde of Bogies in a blind Venetian beach-alley. This gives her the appearance of a child in fear of its parents, having gobbled up all their chocolate. Her jewels are now seen for what they are, simply slave-chains. Her tongue slips the prison of her mouth and scuttles along the kerb-gutter like a demonster's sickest afterbirth. Naturally, this prevents her speaking and, entirely dislocated, she dashes herself against the wall of the House of Extra-Mural Studies - without avail.
A prison always keeps its walls firmly shut to prisoners. Even a Zone Manager, as Hyacinth was training to become, can end up spider-whipped against the bricked-up bars, if a forced entry is attempted. Yet Hyacinth is more grinny than a demonster. I'm quite grinny, too. Stoics to the last. Being the person she is, Hyacinth's destiny is to be entrapped on the outside - among all the mixed-up kids and unredeeming lunacy that being on the outside inevitably entails. As for myself, if I weren't so grinny as an oval oo-fo, I'd be weepy, thinking of my old Ma who wanted me to become a better person than my old Pa - and, really, being a good person actually means being one. Equally, death can only follow life.
(published 'Hallow*Zine' 1996)
www.nemonymous.com
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Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Both Sides Of Midnight
There must have been a full moon the day I was born. If it were not for the screaming, the doctors would have heard themselves tell each other that it couldn't be judged where my body ended and my mother's began. Her extraordinarily fulsome pubes and my fur, at the best of times, were difficult to distinguish apart, even by stroking, let alone at eye's length. And, growing up, you see, dear soul, meant my memory became longer and longer, its starting-point disappearing, as it did, beyond the womb itself - like a limitless umbilical of dead-end thought: dead at both ends.
Some people are so moribund towards the middle of their life, they may as well have died properly in some otherwise unplanned schoolyard playtime accident in their youth. But those, like me, who live life to the full, do not have sufficient time to worry about such concerns. I always knew, without even trying, exactly what sort of creature I was. Life, you see, was not only constituted of waking hours but also sleeping ones. I lived existence to the full, not merely life. I gritted my teeth and stared God full in the eye and expected Him to pray to me, whilst at my school, they taught us that praying should actually be the other way round. I laughed. Yes, I laughed - not out loud, but behind my praying hands, as lessons came to the end for the day, and we were told to perch our tiny chairs upside down on the desks - ready for the school caretaker's broom. My chair, however, I always balanced legs down on the sloping desk, the way God meant it to sit - more precarious, true, dear soul, but much more thrilling to see whether it toppled before Miss Crossbrow saw my wicked prank.
I had a special school friend whom I tutored in my ways. Harry was his name. There was often a pinafore-frocked girl tagging along with him and she was called Tara. Neither of them, of course, possessed the nature of the thing that I'd been born as. Neither of them, come to that, suspected anything untoward from their point of view with regard to myself - nor that on some days I slept even less than simply not sleeping.
Yes, on nights when dreams became real, instead of placing my palms flat together in mock prayer to God, I coiled them into conch shapes and horned through them - a baying, a howl, a wail, a roar, a siren screech: or all of these things at once. But now I'm older, wiser and fully aware that, if I am to go on living an existence worthy of you, dear soul, I need to make human dreams as real as mine: so that their dreams can later flesh out my own dreams when the need comes - since it is true, you see, that without such sustenance, I must eventually release hold of the umbilical universe, having by then only brittle claws to cling on with.
Harry married Tara. I sometimes wonder if it was my doing thay they fell in love in the first place. With my presence making them second best to each other, this factor became common ground between them.
Later, I grew to need their protection as a couple. When the three of us were still ten, I whispered secrets in their ears, first to Harry, then to Tara, secrets which inevitably became their own secrets from each other, dire secrets, deadly secrets, secrets that bound them inextricably to you, dear soul. Thus, I should not have been surprised when they invited me to live with them as their lodger, after the marriage. But they had, by then, forgotten the childishness of secrets transferred at playtime in the schoolyard. Humans always devalue their past that way. Only special creatures like you, dear soul, can remain endebted to your circle of durations: pasts, presents, futures, all wheeling around the moment that is none of these things, the continuous moment of fear and sorrow, the core moment which the evil of joy cannot possibly besmirch.
Yes, Harry and Tara became my step-parents, in all but name - and their own eventual children were my siblings despite these siblings calling me Uncle. It was as if Harry and Tara instinctively felt some responsibility to the lost soul that had once befriended them when they needed it most amid the dream-ringed islands of childhood.
If Harry and Tara remain mere names for cardboard cut-outs, I shall not be able to cast them into the roles I have in store for them. Even actors need the underpinning of their own personalities to bring to their parts. They require strengths and weaknesses: the latter to prove them real, the former to stiffen the vessels they will provide for my dreams, dreams that might otherwise burst like bubbles. So, yes, dear soul, we must spend some little time fleshing out Harry and Tara.
Meanwhile, I escape into the monthly punctuations of my endless night. But you have no need, dear soul, to be put through such ordeals. You simply watch, for your own benefit, seeing the creamy-pink skin choking and sprouting wiry fluff, as if the pores are lakes of sea and the flesh an intertissue of connected islands ... and the monsters bristle their backs: a hirsute archipelago of antipodal angst. Yet you feel my teeth with your finger-ends, fast finding my fangs with your claws. Swabs of tangled hide corrode your throat, worse than gagging on cotton-balls. Pubes forest out into bouquets of undead passion-flowers. You hear the Devil bending your ear: not praying to you, as God sometimes did, but urging, exhorting, whipping you up into a frenzy of fur...
Harry and Tara, inside the house, hear you howling from the other side of the parlour window. They shrug. They believe all their children are tucked up safely together in the nursery upstairs. Like most people nowadays, they stay home at night, for the simple fear of going out. The television keeps them indoors, not only through the sheer delight of its entertainment but also with its frightening depiction of the so-called evil that lives outside both sides of midnight.
The beast they hear every month within the precinct of their garden is, they believe, just another case in point: probably one of the many unemployed on a drug gig. Tara shrugs. She has shrugged so often, her shoulders are level with her once beautiful eyes. She turns up the volume of the mind-snatching television and then, as if in challenge, tries to speak above it:
"There's never anything on."
Self-evidently, there is at least something on. What she means is that there's nothing on she wants to watch, but watch it she does, nevertheless. Harold nods in agreement. He has nodded so often, his nose is in his lap.
He says nothing: Shall I try another channel?
And without waiting even for a silent reply, Harold remotely zaps out, eyes glazed, mind in suspended animation ... finger pumping uselessly upon the numbered pads of the remote control. The scratching on the parlour window goes unnoticed. The rising shrieks from the nursery, too. A nightmare of rough schoolyard play. Followed by a dream of Father Christmas coming down the vestigial chimney like Red Riding Hood in drag. The Soot Queen.
I could no longer foist myself on Harry and Tara - nor blame them for the strange twists of reality dressed up as imagination. They'd never be able to be vessels for anything but themselves. I wanted to smash through the couple's double-glazed windows and somehow prove I wasn't snug as a bug in a rug with the rest of their children upstairs - although, dear soul, you were up there, weren't you, aren't you? Nuzzling those very children: disguised as a pet puppy dog with praying paws - a chip off my old furry block. You were to be a Christmas present from Santa Claws. And, with a smile of near compassion, I snuck away into another part of the benighted suburbs to find stronger story characters than Harry and Tara.
The Lady of Night: your real mother of death: she opens her largest valve and draws in the umbilical blood-vessel upon which you've been threaded since that terrible day in the schoolyard when your neck snapped beyond redemption of either pretend play or priest. The Lady of Night pushes your huge bristly outer innard so that it is now within you: whilst snatching out the previous contents of your body, dear soul, to make room for it - those human contents that made a simple kind wolf into a person-tainted monster.
Meanwhile, having found more human creatures to flesh out elsewhere, I wonder whose soul you wield now, dear zombie.
(published ‘Enter The Realm’ 1994)
Some people are so moribund towards the middle of their life, they may as well have died properly in some otherwise unplanned schoolyard playtime accident in their youth. But those, like me, who live life to the full, do not have sufficient time to worry about such concerns. I always knew, without even trying, exactly what sort of creature I was. Life, you see, was not only constituted of waking hours but also sleeping ones. I lived existence to the full, not merely life. I gritted my teeth and stared God full in the eye and expected Him to pray to me, whilst at my school, they taught us that praying should actually be the other way round. I laughed. Yes, I laughed - not out loud, but behind my praying hands, as lessons came to the end for the day, and we were told to perch our tiny chairs upside down on the desks - ready for the school caretaker's broom. My chair, however, I always balanced legs down on the sloping desk, the way God meant it to sit - more precarious, true, dear soul, but much more thrilling to see whether it toppled before Miss Crossbrow saw my wicked prank.
I had a special school friend whom I tutored in my ways. Harry was his name. There was often a pinafore-frocked girl tagging along with him and she was called Tara. Neither of them, of course, possessed the nature of the thing that I'd been born as. Neither of them, come to that, suspected anything untoward from their point of view with regard to myself - nor that on some days I slept even less than simply not sleeping.
Yes, on nights when dreams became real, instead of placing my palms flat together in mock prayer to God, I coiled them into conch shapes and horned through them - a baying, a howl, a wail, a roar, a siren screech: or all of these things at once. But now I'm older, wiser and fully aware that, if I am to go on living an existence worthy of you, dear soul, I need to make human dreams as real as mine: so that their dreams can later flesh out my own dreams when the need comes - since it is true, you see, that without such sustenance, I must eventually release hold of the umbilical universe, having by then only brittle claws to cling on with.
Harry married Tara. I sometimes wonder if it was my doing thay they fell in love in the first place. With my presence making them second best to each other, this factor became common ground between them.
Later, I grew to need their protection as a couple. When the three of us were still ten, I whispered secrets in their ears, first to Harry, then to Tara, secrets which inevitably became their own secrets from each other, dire secrets, deadly secrets, secrets that bound them inextricably to you, dear soul. Thus, I should not have been surprised when they invited me to live with them as their lodger, after the marriage. But they had, by then, forgotten the childishness of secrets transferred at playtime in the schoolyard. Humans always devalue their past that way. Only special creatures like you, dear soul, can remain endebted to your circle of durations: pasts, presents, futures, all wheeling around the moment that is none of these things, the continuous moment of fear and sorrow, the core moment which the evil of joy cannot possibly besmirch.
Yes, Harry and Tara became my step-parents, in all but name - and their own eventual children were my siblings despite these siblings calling me Uncle. It was as if Harry and Tara instinctively felt some responsibility to the lost soul that had once befriended them when they needed it most amid the dream-ringed islands of childhood.
If Harry and Tara remain mere names for cardboard cut-outs, I shall not be able to cast them into the roles I have in store for them. Even actors need the underpinning of their own personalities to bring to their parts. They require strengths and weaknesses: the latter to prove them real, the former to stiffen the vessels they will provide for my dreams, dreams that might otherwise burst like bubbles. So, yes, dear soul, we must spend some little time fleshing out Harry and Tara.
Meanwhile, I escape into the monthly punctuations of my endless night. But you have no need, dear soul, to be put through such ordeals. You simply watch, for your own benefit, seeing the creamy-pink skin choking and sprouting wiry fluff, as if the pores are lakes of sea and the flesh an intertissue of connected islands ... and the monsters bristle their backs: a hirsute archipelago of antipodal angst. Yet you feel my teeth with your finger-ends, fast finding my fangs with your claws. Swabs of tangled hide corrode your throat, worse than gagging on cotton-balls. Pubes forest out into bouquets of undead passion-flowers. You hear the Devil bending your ear: not praying to you, as God sometimes did, but urging, exhorting, whipping you up into a frenzy of fur...
Harry and Tara, inside the house, hear you howling from the other side of the parlour window. They shrug. They believe all their children are tucked up safely together in the nursery upstairs. Like most people nowadays, they stay home at night, for the simple fear of going out. The television keeps them indoors, not only through the sheer delight of its entertainment but also with its frightening depiction of the so-called evil that lives outside both sides of midnight.
The beast they hear every month within the precinct of their garden is, they believe, just another case in point: probably one of the many unemployed on a drug gig. Tara shrugs. She has shrugged so often, her shoulders are level with her once beautiful eyes. She turns up the volume of the mind-snatching television and then, as if in challenge, tries to speak above it:
"There's never anything on."
Self-evidently, there is at least something on. What she means is that there's nothing on she wants to watch, but watch it she does, nevertheless. Harold nods in agreement. He has nodded so often, his nose is in his lap.
He says nothing: Shall I try another channel?
And without waiting even for a silent reply, Harold remotely zaps out, eyes glazed, mind in suspended animation ... finger pumping uselessly upon the numbered pads of the remote control. The scratching on the parlour window goes unnoticed. The rising shrieks from the nursery, too. A nightmare of rough schoolyard play. Followed by a dream of Father Christmas coming down the vestigial chimney like Red Riding Hood in drag. The Soot Queen.
I could no longer foist myself on Harry and Tara - nor blame them for the strange twists of reality dressed up as imagination. They'd never be able to be vessels for anything but themselves. I wanted to smash through the couple's double-glazed windows and somehow prove I wasn't snug as a bug in a rug with the rest of their children upstairs - although, dear soul, you were up there, weren't you, aren't you? Nuzzling those very children: disguised as a pet puppy dog with praying paws - a chip off my old furry block. You were to be a Christmas present from Santa Claws. And, with a smile of near compassion, I snuck away into another part of the benighted suburbs to find stronger story characters than Harry and Tara.
The Lady of Night: your real mother of death: she opens her largest valve and draws in the umbilical blood-vessel upon which you've been threaded since that terrible day in the schoolyard when your neck snapped beyond redemption of either pretend play or priest. The Lady of Night pushes your huge bristly outer innard so that it is now within you: whilst snatching out the previous contents of your body, dear soul, to make room for it - those human contents that made a simple kind wolf into a person-tainted monster.
Meanwhile, having found more human creatures to flesh out elsewhere, I wonder whose soul you wield now, dear zombie.
(published ‘Enter The Realm’ 1994)
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
Backseat Dreamer
Many of the vehicles had been abandoned with no regard for the white lines that marked out the allotted spaces in the carpark. The snow that had covered the area had subsequently melted, thus giving an excuse for careless parking.
A shapely woman in a scanty frock approached the barrier, whereupon the ticket-dispenser machine thought she was a thing on wheels and handed her a reminder of the date and time printed on a stiff hard-to-lose card. She forthwith flicked it away into the darkness, as if participating in one of those ancient school-playground cigarette-card games—the blind-man's buff version.
She remembered that she sought a car (one with its headlights switched on) and a registration-plate matching the letters and numbers tattooed on her left breast—a combination she'd meticulously memorised the night before. If she ever turned into a nameless corpse, her compatriots would be in no doubt that it was her. The whereabouts of such a corpse would indicate the successful outcome of her mission—or not.
Yet none of the cars were alight. They simply squatted there like extinct baby-pods of prehistoric monster berserkers. She wandered in and out, unworried as to the floweriness of her own thoughts' language. She had been brainwashed only to take the illogical for granted. Amid the haywire aisles of scattered metal, she peered through the windows to ascertain the nature of any occupants and, if there were any, whether they were still alive and communicado. Not that she really wanted anything but an empty car. But the confusion derived from her training to seek that for which she did not seek, in the hope that such obliquity would lead her—by accident—to the thing she actually sought without knowing she sought it.
The sky had just started to activate sprinkler-systems of disabled snow, which seeped as sleet into her skimpy clothes, making her shiver...
The headlights came on suddenly. Not merely one or, even, two. All the cars broke their vows of silence and erupted into a life which, if the very beginning of the world had been witnessed, this would appear to be its obverse at the very end of time. An abrupt awakening as a prelude to death. She was caught in the cross-glares, eyes blinking, heart thumping, her mind full with memories of those shafts of twirling lateral light stirring the war-stricken night of her youth.
Having used confusion as a subterfuge for clarity, she could hardly recall how she had clambered into one of the cars and driven it from the car park. Even without the all-important card, the barrier had lifted of its own accord, knowing that, if it had not, it would have been smashed to smithereens. Even stones did bleed in certain phases of the cold blue moon.
She steered quickly through the slanting icicles of rain, her high-heeled feet playing the engine like a bass organ. She knew the bomb in the boot may also have had a life of its own, its short fuse matched to her own feminine one.
The streets through which she drove were completely unfamiliar but, at the same time, she knew exactly when to take certain turnings. Glancing in the rearview mirror, she thought she could discern the dark shape of someone sitting in the backseat. Yet, darkness, when it saw fit, could take whatever fumbling form it wanted.
Ah, there was a bridge: a mock-gothic affair which the street lighting moulded from almost nothing, so as to allow the river (or was it a railway track?) to be traversed as the crow (a very special crow) would drive. Was she mad? She felt an embodiment of someone else's dream. She felt calm, as she was certain that she had been warned about the encroachment of such madness. Madness was what made the job so dangerous. She would need to compare notes.
Driving to a halt at the brink of the bridge, she turned to see who may have been backseat-driving. But nobody there, only a pile of what appeared to be unwanted rubble from a building site.
She left the car and walked round to the rear where she could see tyre-tracks in the snow leading up to the back-wheels. The sleet had in fact resumed its snow disguise after settling. The marks were more akin to skids, as if she'd screeched to a halt and, on returning to the front, she saw why: the inky cut was just out of sight beyond the gaze of the headlights. The bridge was a cartilaginously cantilevered mass of pulsing flesh, ribbed further with engorged veins, parts fluted with perfectly linear tumours, other areas haphazardly sown with knobbly cancers beyond even the manufacture of crazy modern sculptors in clay or any other medium, and the pinions and stanchions upholstered with scarlet haunches of clumsily sawn meat—all being wrapped by snow and, conversely, dyeing it.
Tentatively, she first-footed upon the near edge of slimy gristle. It moved under her, as if hurt by her stilletoes. She shuffled forward, testing all the time, because the snow made nonsense of the structure's hidden strengths—like walking on a hammock, but with underlays of breathing, if not burping, animal-fat.
Halfway across, she looked back at the car, which immediately doused its lights as it trundled engineless in her wake. She was thus left invisible to anybody keeping watch. They could only guess whether she had reached the other side, before the boot blew...
Morning brought communal waking, with news of yet another car-bomb outrage. "Carnage leads nowhere," said the Prime Minsiter on the wireless. Nobody, however, appreciated the kindness of the terrorists in arranging for the mayhem to pre-date the bombblast. It lent a certain inevitability, if not an excuse.
Beneath the snow, there was a conical piece of rip-edged flesh with a coded message (D679 BBY) branded upon it. It was never discovered, so nobody would have to face such mystery; nobody would need to explain how a dream could leave bits of itself in the real world. Whatever the case, no party admitted responsibility.
(published 'Rictus' 1994)
A shapely woman in a scanty frock approached the barrier, whereupon the ticket-dispenser machine thought she was a thing on wheels and handed her a reminder of the date and time printed on a stiff hard-to-lose card. She forthwith flicked it away into the darkness, as if participating in one of those ancient school-playground cigarette-card games—the blind-man's buff version.
She remembered that she sought a car (one with its headlights switched on) and a registration-plate matching the letters and numbers tattooed on her left breast—a combination she'd meticulously memorised the night before. If she ever turned into a nameless corpse, her compatriots would be in no doubt that it was her. The whereabouts of such a corpse would indicate the successful outcome of her mission—or not.
Yet none of the cars were alight. They simply squatted there like extinct baby-pods of prehistoric monster berserkers. She wandered in and out, unworried as to the floweriness of her own thoughts' language. She had been brainwashed only to take the illogical for granted. Amid the haywire aisles of scattered metal, she peered through the windows to ascertain the nature of any occupants and, if there were any, whether they were still alive and communicado. Not that she really wanted anything but an empty car. But the confusion derived from her training to seek that for which she did not seek, in the hope that such obliquity would lead her—by accident—to the thing she actually sought without knowing she sought it.
The sky had just started to activate sprinkler-systems of disabled snow, which seeped as sleet into her skimpy clothes, making her shiver...
The headlights came on suddenly. Not merely one or, even, two. All the cars broke their vows of silence and erupted into a life which, if the very beginning of the world had been witnessed, this would appear to be its obverse at the very end of time. An abrupt awakening as a prelude to death. She was caught in the cross-glares, eyes blinking, heart thumping, her mind full with memories of those shafts of twirling lateral light stirring the war-stricken night of her youth.
Having used confusion as a subterfuge for clarity, she could hardly recall how she had clambered into one of the cars and driven it from the car park. Even without the all-important card, the barrier had lifted of its own accord, knowing that, if it had not, it would have been smashed to smithereens. Even stones did bleed in certain phases of the cold blue moon.
She steered quickly through the slanting icicles of rain, her high-heeled feet playing the engine like a bass organ. She knew the bomb in the boot may also have had a life of its own, its short fuse matched to her own feminine one.
The streets through which she drove were completely unfamiliar but, at the same time, she knew exactly when to take certain turnings. Glancing in the rearview mirror, she thought she could discern the dark shape of someone sitting in the backseat. Yet, darkness, when it saw fit, could take whatever fumbling form it wanted.
Ah, there was a bridge: a mock-gothic affair which the street lighting moulded from almost nothing, so as to allow the river (or was it a railway track?) to be traversed as the crow (a very special crow) would drive. Was she mad? She felt an embodiment of someone else's dream. She felt calm, as she was certain that she had been warned about the encroachment of such madness. Madness was what made the job so dangerous. She would need to compare notes.
Driving to a halt at the brink of the bridge, she turned to see who may have been backseat-driving. But nobody there, only a pile of what appeared to be unwanted rubble from a building site.
She left the car and walked round to the rear where she could see tyre-tracks in the snow leading up to the back-wheels. The sleet had in fact resumed its snow disguise after settling. The marks were more akin to skids, as if she'd screeched to a halt and, on returning to the front, she saw why: the inky cut was just out of sight beyond the gaze of the headlights. The bridge was a cartilaginously cantilevered mass of pulsing flesh, ribbed further with engorged veins, parts fluted with perfectly linear tumours, other areas haphazardly sown with knobbly cancers beyond even the manufacture of crazy modern sculptors in clay or any other medium, and the pinions and stanchions upholstered with scarlet haunches of clumsily sawn meat—all being wrapped by snow and, conversely, dyeing it.
Tentatively, she first-footed upon the near edge of slimy gristle. It moved under her, as if hurt by her stilletoes. She shuffled forward, testing all the time, because the snow made nonsense of the structure's hidden strengths—like walking on a hammock, but with underlays of breathing, if not burping, animal-fat.
Halfway across, she looked back at the car, which immediately doused its lights as it trundled engineless in her wake. She was thus left invisible to anybody keeping watch. They could only guess whether she had reached the other side, before the boot blew...
Morning brought communal waking, with news of yet another car-bomb outrage. "Carnage leads nowhere," said the Prime Minsiter on the wireless. Nobody, however, appreciated the kindness of the terrorists in arranging for the mayhem to pre-date the bombblast. It lent a certain inevitability, if not an excuse.
Beneath the snow, there was a conical piece of rip-edged flesh with a coded message (D679 BBY) branded upon it. It was never discovered, so nobody would have to face such mystery; nobody would need to explain how a dream could leave bits of itself in the real world. Whatever the case, no party admitted responsibility.
(published 'Rictus' 1994)
Friday, July 22, 2005
And More
The reflection in the mirror
Turned her stomach. A scrap of paper,
As if stuck to the glass—
She could reach to peel it,
But felt nails clinking on the hard surface.
Tantalisingly beyond reach.
Even in backward mirror-script,
She could sense its stomach-turning.
Man came into the bathroom, a stolid individual—a fireman
Of the first water, with brylcreemed hair.
The marriage had indeed been a series of fire-fighting.
The odd burst of flame from a once moribund fire in the old days' coal-grate. The sudden ignition of a garden bonfire after hope had been given up of it ever catching. The chimney fire streaming smoke and setting all the local kids a-goggling—as they ceased, momentarily, their game of hopscotch or hide-and-seek. The conflagration that beset a local factory—a memory from childhood that would remain beyond the reach even of the final fire of all: a seething furnace which nothing at all could douse.
The marriage and more.
Now old, the man still retained
Deep respect for anything untoward.
Alert for any emergency. Lack of imagination
Prevented him being scared of anything.
Sanity was his watchword.
Approaching the mirror,
Devastated to see the reflection
Of a woman's face—blushing
To the roots.
He no longer had stomach for it.
Wife cremated only yesterday;
Not even left a suicide note.
And more.
(published 'Edgar' 1999)
Turned her stomach. A scrap of paper,
As if stuck to the glass—
She could reach to peel it,
But felt nails clinking on the hard surface.
Tantalisingly beyond reach.
Even in backward mirror-script,
She could sense its stomach-turning.
Man came into the bathroom, a stolid individual—a fireman
Of the first water, with brylcreemed hair.
The marriage had indeed been a series of fire-fighting.
The odd burst of flame from a once moribund fire in the old days' coal-grate. The sudden ignition of a garden bonfire after hope had been given up of it ever catching. The chimney fire streaming smoke and setting all the local kids a-goggling—as they ceased, momentarily, their game of hopscotch or hide-and-seek. The conflagration that beset a local factory—a memory from childhood that would remain beyond the reach even of the final fire of all: a seething furnace which nothing at all could douse.
The marriage and more.
Now old, the man still retained
Deep respect for anything untoward.
Alert for any emergency. Lack of imagination
Prevented him being scared of anything.
Sanity was his watchword.
Approaching the mirror,
Devastated to see the reflection
Of a woman's face—blushing
To the roots.
He no longer had stomach for it.
Wife cremated only yesterday;
Not even left a suicide note.
And more.
(published 'Edgar' 1999)
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
The Princess And The Rose
A collaboration with P Jeffery & B Lewis
Published 'Broadsword' 1995
The princess, wandering amid beds of bright flowers and along avenues of cool fountains, paused to place her nose to the delicately involuted petals of a rose. In the soft earth at her foot was a double slotted depression, as though a pig had rooted amongst these royal bowers. I felt sure that the princess had failed to observe the mark. Lurking in the shadow of the trellis where the honeysuckle twines, I observed all. Such is my station.
For sixteen seconds, and the twelfth part of a seventeenth, the princess paused, nose to petal. I measured the time by the pulse at my wrist. All has to be set down to twenty-four decimal places in the royal accounts. Once, I recall, old Scalthwaite had forgotten to carry a nought - well, the less said about him the better.
The princess passed on her way, and it was time for me to leap from cover. Four seconds later, the slots were obliterated and the spilt rose pollen swept away. A droplet of fountain spray clung to the wrong leaf. That, too, I righted.
When she stopped by the lily pond, I was under the water, staring up. If she saw my eye, unwinking, she must have taken it for a fish. A willow leaf circled downwards. More mess to which I must later attend. As she walked towards the house, I levered myelf from the pond - not forgetting to ensure, of course, that its surface was left exactly as I had found it.
I knew she would not turn back, because she never did. Despite her carelessness, she was most precise in her habits. One walk around the garden and it was time for her slumber. Never would she discover me fussing in her wake - since that would make her late for Scalthwaite who kept a strict reckoning of her whereabouts. In her world, the timetables were more awesome than anything - even than God. But that didn’t mean she could skimp on her allowance of minutes for praying to God, of course.
But suddenly, she spotted me climbing from the pond and returning an autumn windfall to its stalk. I was aghast. How would she view me? I knew myself to be uglier than most misplaced things.
“Why have you been cleaning up after me for all these years?”
Her voice was even lovelier than her face, if that were possible. It was the first time I’d heard it.
“Because - I love you, sweet princess.”
I noticed that she winced as if my voice were tree bark become sound.
“Follow me,” she instructed. “At least you seem to be experienced at that.”
Her soft steps took me to the lily pond where she wrapped me in her smooth arms. However, she had trodden accidentally upon her beloved rose. She screamed as she saw the petals drop slowly from the flower’s crimson heart. Her body shook with horror, threatening, 1ike the beautiful bloom she was, to crumble in the process. Crying, I stroked her hair in the crazy belief that it might revive her - but clumps came out in my hand. I shall never forget the way she smiled her last smile as I scuttled off to allow Scalthwaite and some other servants to carry her inside. But he had overestimated the number of servants required, in view of the lightness she was fast becoming.
A smile is not the mouth. It’s what a mouth does. So a ghost is not its body. Merely what a body does. I grab my broom and decide to answer this renewed call to duty for the residual moments of my own life, because now I truly sweep what makes me weep - watched, if only by her smile.
Saturday, June 18, 2005
Saturday, June 04, 2005
Billy Belly
It was during that afternoon of October 31st in the Year of our Lord when evenings drew in with a particular vengeance.
"Let's play hopscotch."
"No, hide-and-seek's will be better, especially today."
If Sam allowed them to do so, Idle White and Pauline would argue for the rest of the afternoon into the evening, ending up with them not playing any games whatsoever. So, it was usually up to Sam to mediate.
Today was a case in point.
But first Sam needed to write a letter:
Dear Auntie Beryl,
I'm writing a thank you letter to thank you very much for the Hallo Ween mask. I really injoy playing with it. I keep it in the toy cubbird at night. Hope you are well. Love, Sam xxx
Sam's mother had checked the spelling.
"How about playing Dares, eh? That’ll be better, won’t it? I dare either of you to make faces at big fat Billy Belly." This was Sam's suggestion, today.
"You're always saying that and I'm fed up with Dares." The little boy who responded to Sam's suggestion was indeed Idle White who wore a duffle coat despite the unseasonable balm. Idle White knew their Mums wouldn't call them in until after dusk had started the process of blackening the sky.
The city wasteground was lit by one tall light - and by a couple of not-too-distant Belisha beacons whose orange pulses disguised the children's blushes during a rude game which they often played last thing ... just before they sensed the onset of their respective Mums' cooing roundelay of Come Home. Hide-and-Seek had taught them such tricks of the trade, what to hide, and what to seek, and what to find, and where to do it.
"I'm fed up with Dares, too," announced the piping tones of Pauline in a yellow pinafore dress. "And, Sam, I'm really more fed up with you inventing big fat Billy Belly - he never comes - and so why ever do we do Dares, if there's no-one to be scared of?"
Sam winced: he hated having his Billy Belly bluff called.
“He’ll bound to come today!” Sam said with some false earnestness.
Eventually, however, hopscotch was decided upon. Sam agreed to chalk out the grid, for the other two. He couldn't actually play since he had to have an early tea, because his Auntie Beryl was coming to visit. But first Sam needed a pee. He disappeared into one of those dark spots on the wasteground which served so well amid bouts of Hide-and-Seek - and during his own soporific gushing, he heard underlaid the lonely droning of a distant aeroplane circling the city before landing at the new aerodrome across the other side of the city. Billy Belly. Billy Belly. I like jam and jelly. He hummed absentmindedly. He often concocted such rhymes that made far more sense than those nonsensical nursery ones his mother used to tell him on her knee, before the blazing log fire amid the sacrosanct evenings of his infancy. Billy Belly had become mixed up with Jack Horner and Jack Sprat and Lucy Locket - and Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of...
A pail of what?
The voice was silent, yet it didn't require actual saying to show it was being said rather than imagined. Ghosts spoke like that, since they didn't exist. And English only existed as long as those using it also existed. Ghosts could not exist. But, of course, monsters did. Especially today. And Monsters were topped up and down with blood, bones, bellies, balls...
Sam chose to ignore his fears and clambered from the oily oubliette, half done, still buttoning his flies. He could not endure things bluffing him.
By the time he returned, Idle White and Pauline had already started chalking the grid on a large oblong piece of concrete that once must have been a runway when this area was an aerodrome. The widening of the sun upon its dying dip was rhythmically accentuated by the belisha beacons - making their orange faces like monsters in real life rather than like those black and white ones they saw in the local Picture House.
Idle White and Pauline blared looks at Sam, flushed with a substance not dissimilar to the results of Sam's recent kidney tap. It was as if the pair of them accused Sam of treachery. Almost as if they'd already seen Billy Belly and he wasn't at all frightening.
A little later, when dusk was almost over and the hopscotch grid still incomplete, Sam drifted off behind the derelict shape of the Control Tower. The wind forked his hair, since nights were often stormy. He found the mask that he had hidden under a nettle bush for safe-keeping. He gathered stings like other children did stamps. He sucked the fleshy part between his finger and thumb, preparing to mount it with a sticky hinge.
Made easier by Aunt Beryl’s gift, this procedure was part and parcel of a transmutation that Sam himself failed to understand, stemming, no doubt, from an erstwhile game of Dares that had gone horribly wrong in the 1940’s before Idle White and Pauline had been old enough to play out so late. That was when Sam played with other kids. With other boys walking on earth-shadowed shins. With other girls of white-thighed abandon. And with some of indeterminate sex who could never stop playing the last game first.
Tonight, though, Idle White sighed with relief on completion of the hopscotch grid. Numbered 1 to 10, box, double-box, box, double-box, box, double-box, box. The belisha beacons lit the litter-strewn arena with shifting desolation and despair, in-built emotions that children rarely noticed. They failed to imagine the thriving concourse, as it had once been. Ever since the new aerodrome had been built, this previous one had been allowed to go to rack and ruin.
Pauline laughed hollowly, as Idle White threw the puck towards the head of the grid. She prepared to hop. Dangled her left leg as if it didn't belong to her...
Then came the cooing of their mothers.
Time had caught up with the children, and they had not even begun the hopscotch, let alone the more dubious games. It was strange, however: home was in the opposite direction to the cooing. How could that be? Pauline shrugged. Where was Sam? The city became a weird place once the sun had set. Especially tonight.
It was as if the world were wheeling faster - or slower. Or, at least, differently, disorientatedly. Such words were not in her vocabulary, but the thoughts were in her mind, nevertheless. She felt Idle White take her hand as they left the hopscotch grid behind.
Meanwhile, there was a single coffin behind the disused tower. Nailed down. A double-coffin, next to it, gaping open. Two shapes of darkness got out together. Despite their age, they maintained a vestige of their erstwhile marriage. A pair of ancient schoolkid sweethearts (precursors of children such as Sam, Pauline and Idle White) ever sought at least a smidgen of their first explorations and the first uncoverings of the means of love.
Special Hallowe’en monsters, too, waddled free. Despite having stayed hidden for the rest of the year, they retained forbidden memories of interlocking crosses, some like metal aircraft floating in the sky, others embedded in limechalk. Yes, they waddled free...
But Sam, Idle White and Pauline eventually reached their respective homes and their mothers used speech with which to converse...
"Why home so early, Sam - did you have a quarrel?" asked Sam's mother, upon his arrival.
"No, it was cold when the wind came."
Sam smiled at his mother, then at Aunt Beryl. He'd really wanted a scarier mask. Perhaps he'd ask for a chain-saw next Hallowe’en, instead. Better than pumpkin pie. Aunt Beryl smiled back obliviously. "Oh, thank you for your nice letter, Sam," she said, "I've put it in my tresshore cubbid for when I'm old."
"You're nice and early," said Pauline's mother in another house.
"Yes, the wind got up," said Pauline, meaningfully.
"Well, as tea's not ready yet, why don't you go and play upstairs?"
"Yes, I'll tidy up my album." Pauline felt something turn over in her stomach as she rushed for the lavatory.
"Goodness, you're back soon," said Mrs White to the idol of her eyes, in yet another house.
"Billy Belly came."
"Idle! Didn't I tell you you're not to have such fanciful notions - it's bad for you. There's nobody called Billy Belly. Sam made him up. That Sam's a queer boy, at the best of times. He puts these silly ideas in your head. I don't think you should be playing with someone so much older than you."
He nodded, without answering, other than in thought.
But, Mama, your rong, Billy Belly duss live.
Billy Belly. Billy Belly. I love jam and jelly.
Belly Billy. Belly Billy. I love Jack and Jilly.
Billy could've gulped a whole pail of blood for tea, given half the chance. A lonely plane droned far-off, as the idol of Mrs White’s eyes later climbed the little wooden hills to Bedfordshire. He vowed to punish that Sam for failing to scare Pauline - but what could you expect with Sam merely wearing nothing more frightening than a silly trick ‘n treat mask, sticky-plastered hands and a stuffed anorak?
Yep, I cun't wate t' go get that dammed Sam - soon's his backs bent chorking new hotchpotch lines for me and sweet Porleen.
But that would have to wait till next Hallowe’en. Not so big and fat, Billy Belly held out his arms-within-arms and made roaring noises as he continued to fly up the stairs tread by tread towards his glove-puppet’s truckle bed. Tomorrow, Idle White would be back on his own strings. And in his own bed.
(published ‘Bats & Red Velvet’ 1995
This was a prequel to Ertz
"Let's play hopscotch."
"No, hide-and-seek's will be better, especially today."
If Sam allowed them to do so, Idle White and Pauline would argue for the rest of the afternoon into the evening, ending up with them not playing any games whatsoever. So, it was usually up to Sam to mediate.
Today was a case in point.
But first Sam needed to write a letter:
Dear Auntie Beryl,
I'm writing a thank you letter to thank you very much for the Hallo Ween mask. I really injoy playing with it. I keep it in the toy cubbird at night. Hope you are well. Love, Sam xxx
Sam's mother had checked the spelling.
"How about playing Dares, eh? That’ll be better, won’t it? I dare either of you to make faces at big fat Billy Belly." This was Sam's suggestion, today.
"You're always saying that and I'm fed up with Dares." The little boy who responded to Sam's suggestion was indeed Idle White who wore a duffle coat despite the unseasonable balm. Idle White knew their Mums wouldn't call them in until after dusk had started the process of blackening the sky.
The city wasteground was lit by one tall light - and by a couple of not-too-distant Belisha beacons whose orange pulses disguised the children's blushes during a rude game which they often played last thing ... just before they sensed the onset of their respective Mums' cooing roundelay of Come Home. Hide-and-Seek had taught them such tricks of the trade, what to hide, and what to seek, and what to find, and where to do it.
"I'm fed up with Dares, too," announced the piping tones of Pauline in a yellow pinafore dress. "And, Sam, I'm really more fed up with you inventing big fat Billy Belly - he never comes - and so why ever do we do Dares, if there's no-one to be scared of?"
Sam winced: he hated having his Billy Belly bluff called.
“He’ll bound to come today!” Sam said with some false earnestness.
Eventually, however, hopscotch was decided upon. Sam agreed to chalk out the grid, for the other two. He couldn't actually play since he had to have an early tea, because his Auntie Beryl was coming to visit. But first Sam needed a pee. He disappeared into one of those dark spots on the wasteground which served so well amid bouts of Hide-and-Seek - and during his own soporific gushing, he heard underlaid the lonely droning of a distant aeroplane circling the city before landing at the new aerodrome across the other side of the city. Billy Belly. Billy Belly. I like jam and jelly. He hummed absentmindedly. He often concocted such rhymes that made far more sense than those nonsensical nursery ones his mother used to tell him on her knee, before the blazing log fire amid the sacrosanct evenings of his infancy. Billy Belly had become mixed up with Jack Horner and Jack Sprat and Lucy Locket - and Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of...
A pail of what?
The voice was silent, yet it didn't require actual saying to show it was being said rather than imagined. Ghosts spoke like that, since they didn't exist. And English only existed as long as those using it also existed. Ghosts could not exist. But, of course, monsters did. Especially today. And Monsters were topped up and down with blood, bones, bellies, balls...
Sam chose to ignore his fears and clambered from the oily oubliette, half done, still buttoning his flies. He could not endure things bluffing him.
By the time he returned, Idle White and Pauline had already started chalking the grid on a large oblong piece of concrete that once must have been a runway when this area was an aerodrome. The widening of the sun upon its dying dip was rhythmically accentuated by the belisha beacons - making their orange faces like monsters in real life rather than like those black and white ones they saw in the local Picture House.
Idle White and Pauline blared looks at Sam, flushed with a substance not dissimilar to the results of Sam's recent kidney tap. It was as if the pair of them accused Sam of treachery. Almost as if they'd already seen Billy Belly and he wasn't at all frightening.
A little later, when dusk was almost over and the hopscotch grid still incomplete, Sam drifted off behind the derelict shape of the Control Tower. The wind forked his hair, since nights were often stormy. He found the mask that he had hidden under a nettle bush for safe-keeping. He gathered stings like other children did stamps. He sucked the fleshy part between his finger and thumb, preparing to mount it with a sticky hinge.
Made easier by Aunt Beryl’s gift, this procedure was part and parcel of a transmutation that Sam himself failed to understand, stemming, no doubt, from an erstwhile game of Dares that had gone horribly wrong in the 1940’s before Idle White and Pauline had been old enough to play out so late. That was when Sam played with other kids. With other boys walking on earth-shadowed shins. With other girls of white-thighed abandon. And with some of indeterminate sex who could never stop playing the last game first.
Tonight, though, Idle White sighed with relief on completion of the hopscotch grid. Numbered 1 to 10, box, double-box, box, double-box, box, double-box, box. The belisha beacons lit the litter-strewn arena with shifting desolation and despair, in-built emotions that children rarely noticed. They failed to imagine the thriving concourse, as it had once been. Ever since the new aerodrome had been built, this previous one had been allowed to go to rack and ruin.
Pauline laughed hollowly, as Idle White threw the puck towards the head of the grid. She prepared to hop. Dangled her left leg as if it didn't belong to her...
Then came the cooing of their mothers.
Time had caught up with the children, and they had not even begun the hopscotch, let alone the more dubious games. It was strange, however: home was in the opposite direction to the cooing. How could that be? Pauline shrugged. Where was Sam? The city became a weird place once the sun had set. Especially tonight.
It was as if the world were wheeling faster - or slower. Or, at least, differently, disorientatedly. Such words were not in her vocabulary, but the thoughts were in her mind, nevertheless. She felt Idle White take her hand as they left the hopscotch grid behind.
Meanwhile, there was a single coffin behind the disused tower. Nailed down. A double-coffin, next to it, gaping open. Two shapes of darkness got out together. Despite their age, they maintained a vestige of their erstwhile marriage. A pair of ancient schoolkid sweethearts (precursors of children such as Sam, Pauline and Idle White) ever sought at least a smidgen of their first explorations and the first uncoverings of the means of love.
Special Hallowe’en monsters, too, waddled free. Despite having stayed hidden for the rest of the year, they retained forbidden memories of interlocking crosses, some like metal aircraft floating in the sky, others embedded in limechalk. Yes, they waddled free...
But Sam, Idle White and Pauline eventually reached their respective homes and their mothers used speech with which to converse...
"Why home so early, Sam - did you have a quarrel?" asked Sam's mother, upon his arrival.
"No, it was cold when the wind came."
Sam smiled at his mother, then at Aunt Beryl. He'd really wanted a scarier mask. Perhaps he'd ask for a chain-saw next Hallowe’en, instead. Better than pumpkin pie. Aunt Beryl smiled back obliviously. "Oh, thank you for your nice letter, Sam," she said, "I've put it in my tresshore cubbid for when I'm old."
"You're nice and early," said Pauline's mother in another house.
"Yes, the wind got up," said Pauline, meaningfully.
"Well, as tea's not ready yet, why don't you go and play upstairs?"
"Yes, I'll tidy up my album." Pauline felt something turn over in her stomach as she rushed for the lavatory.
"Goodness, you're back soon," said Mrs White to the idol of her eyes, in yet another house.
"Billy Belly came."
"Idle! Didn't I tell you you're not to have such fanciful notions - it's bad for you. There's nobody called Billy Belly. Sam made him up. That Sam's a queer boy, at the best of times. He puts these silly ideas in your head. I don't think you should be playing with someone so much older than you."
He nodded, without answering, other than in thought.
But, Mama, your rong, Billy Belly duss live.
Billy Belly. Billy Belly. I love jam and jelly.
Belly Billy. Belly Billy. I love Jack and Jilly.
Billy could've gulped a whole pail of blood for tea, given half the chance. A lonely plane droned far-off, as the idol of Mrs White’s eyes later climbed the little wooden hills to Bedfordshire. He vowed to punish that Sam for failing to scare Pauline - but what could you expect with Sam merely wearing nothing more frightening than a silly trick ‘n treat mask, sticky-plastered hands and a stuffed anorak?
Yep, I cun't wate t' go get that dammed Sam - soon's his backs bent chorking new hotchpotch lines for me and sweet Porleen.
But that would have to wait till next Hallowe’en. Not so big and fat, Billy Belly held out his arms-within-arms and made roaring noises as he continued to fly up the stairs tread by tread towards his glove-puppet’s truckle bed. Tomorrow, Idle White would be back on his own strings. And in his own bed.
(published ‘Bats & Red Velvet’ 1995
This was a prequel to Ertz
Saturday, May 28, 2005
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)
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)
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
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)
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)
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
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.
"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.
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
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)
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)
Thursday, April 21, 2005
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)
“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)
Friday, April 15, 2005
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)
(published ‘Psychopoetica’ 1991)
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
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)
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)
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
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)
(published 'Tears In The Fence' 1996)
Saturday, March 19, 2005
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)
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)
Thursday, March 10, 2005
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)
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)
Monday, February 28, 2005
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)
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)
Thursday, February 17, 2005
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)
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)
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