The blue blanket, in its role of makeshift curtain, clung to the surface condensation of the window. It bore an archipelago of stains, imaginary worlds where the non-sleeper was able to cruise ... during those endless hours at dawn and dusk, when his thoughts woul otherwise have slipped back into the viler self-made geography of his mind.
Only yesterday, he had met the one person who would ever mean anything to him, if indeed people CAN have a meaning. He still heard her voice in this very room: “It’s time to say bye bye, Tom.”
There was no reply he could summon.
He had found her in the small supermarket down the road, where the few cans left over from the last rush looked lost amid the empty spaces among the shelves. He was after tomatoes which, in cans, were so different from those of a fresh variety ... in their blood soup looking for all the world like bodily innards. He told her that he was making lunch for himself and that he already had more than enough to go round two mouths.
As they left, the checkout man said, “It’s a rum old do, innit? Nobody can eat nothing, these days, with all the scares.”
Tom smiled knowingly. “People’d rather starve than risk an unknown disease that can eat away at their bodies...” he suggested, after an enbarrassing silence.
“Yes, I’ve had to put Government stickers on everything ... It cuts into the profits so.”
They left together, hand in hand ... for what had people in common but companionship in such times? They carried on a fitful conversation until they reached his flat. Realising that the key had been left unintentionally inside, he forced entry, at the same time trying to conceal the ease with which he did this. He did not want her to know that his occupation was tantameunt to squatting. These days, nobody did anything to to earn a living, for even money could not buy what one really needed in life.
Lunch was to be from a casserole he’d had simmerring for months. She turned up her nose as he revealed the churning brown gruel with unrecognisable lunps floating. He took the ladle fran the wall, stirred it noisily and then returned it to the oven.
Even sex was out of the question, because she’d watched the news, the same as everybody. Nothing was safe, he agreed. They did take a few nibbles at each other in the kitchen, which was almost erotic.
“Dad’s told me that Mum died from him you know?” she said, as she walked over to inspect the blanket. Towards the bottom, it was fraying, each teased-out fibre ending in a slowly forming bubble of dew.
“Have a go, if you want. I don’t need any till tonight,” he suggested gratuitously. The water authorities had long since been privatised and it was said in some quarters that they had pumped undiluted acid rain to the taps, in the hope that nobody would end up noticing.
Tom then understood that falling in love was not a lost art. How could he have offered her a suck of the blanket, otherwise?
“Come in...” He lifted aside the grubby lip of sheet, demnonstrating how dark and warm it nust be within. “We don’t need to do anything dangerous, just cuddle and comfort...”
“No, it’s too late. How do I know I can trust myself?” Her voice shook with emotion. She recalled the exploratory nibbles in the kitchen, still sucking on the bit of spare ear-lobe which she pressed against her bare cheek-lining with the tongue.
As Tom picked his teeth with a fingernail he’d only cleaned out fully that very morning, he could hear the distant wail of sirens. Ambulances steered clear of starvation cases, because the drivers wanted to avoid both the temptation and danger inherent in near-dead bodies. Thus, irrhythmically, they could be heard on their endless course on the ring-road ... their fuel caps open to the streaming air ... for when the pandemic chemical stews filtered back through the ragged rainless clouds of black smoke, everything but everything buzzed and honked.
The terrible tragedy was that she kissed Tom goodbye, tongue to tongue. Tragic in more ways than one, since he then couldn’t say how much he loved her before they separated.
He slept soundly for once and dreamt of man-made disasters, himself on the point of becoming unmade man ... only to be woken by the blanket flopping to the floor, too heavy for its hooks.
And the light flooded back.
Published 'Peeping Tom' 1995
www.nemonymous.com
Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Creeping Carpet/ Cathy Come Home / London Christmas Story
THE CREEPING CARPET
As I was walking up the stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He didn't even comb his night-strewn hair. His face was neither ugly nor handsome. His figure without even a sign of portliness or lean. His clothes were drabber than they were smart; so drab the darkness hid them in further folds of themselves. His voice picked out words from silence, words which meant little more than the creaks of the floorboards. His touch was like touching one of my own hands with the other. I put him down to nothing but a haunting thought. Or, perhaps, at least, the ghostly residue of some man who had been an ancient infant chimney-sweep.
When I reached the top, I looked back to see his back backing off down the stairwell, disappearing into nothingness—if something could disappear that was never there in the first place. I lowered myself into half-a-kneel, half-a-bend, all mixed with a crumpled crouch, and picked up from the tousled stair carpet a loose strand that must have floated there from his head of night-strewn hair. I held it closer to my child-young eyes and watched it scribble like the filmic interference on old celluloid, in words that meant nothing to my childish mind beyond their mere articulation as softest carpet-slipper sounds.
"What you doing dear?" asked my mother, as her tall figure half-filled the slanting yellow shaft of a half-opened bedroom door.
"Following myself up the wooden hills to Bedfordshire," I said as plaintively as possible. After all, I had an image to maintain.
"Don't be a soppy aporth and go to bed. It's high time you were in dream land."
My mother's voice was the only one that could hold sweetness as well as righteous anger.
I dropped the hair that wasn't there. I let out my lungs with breath blacker than the sooty air and sucked in a new draught, one that was tinged with the yellow still left there by my mother's now shut bedroom door.
I was suddenly a child again, one that no longer needed any image to remain perfectly my mother's own.
But upon trying the doorknob of my childhood lair, I found it wasn't there. Only a mop of tousled, tangled air.
====================
CATHY COME HOME - A Collaboration with Anthea Holland
At a point in the distance the trees merged with the horizon, a dark rim on the pan of the world. The bowl of hope was empty, the dish of dreams devoid of anything but the dregs of a nightmare.
The flatness of the landscape reminded him of the desert. Not that the desert had been flat, far from it; the sand scalloped into shapes beyond the imaginings of the finest sculptor. But it had been arid - like that flatness that lay before him in the future. The trees that he could no longer discern were nothing but a hiccup in the digestive system of existence.
He turned and looked over his shoulder whence he had come. Nothing much there, either. A few streams perhaps, but he had passed them without noticing them, so they counted for nothing. Once or twice a flower had bloomed, only to be flattened by his size 10's. The wildlife along the way had scurried into holes and burrows to avoid his deadly gaze.
Even wildlife with roots had scurried! Or so it seemed. There was one particular form of orchid that managed to move from place to place of its own volition. Dragging its roots behind, in hope of a new seedbed to mulch it. A rare plant. A rare disease, too, imagining that such a plant could exist. Yet indeed it was no fever of his brain that told him he was following one such specimen between the now featureless horizons. Duneless and dour.
Of course, a rare orchid would never be able to survive in the dry terrains he now crossed. It was wishful thinking or just sheer bravery on the plant’s part to act as his guide. Only desiccation could be its ultimate fate. Sacrificing its life for his. Still, rare orchids only lasted a blink of an eyelid in the scheme of things, at the best of times. He shrugged. It wasn’t sacrificing that much, was it? Rare beauty was ephemeral to the nth degree.
Like Catherine’s rare beauty. She had not been a lover of exotic blooms. She simply relished the act of pressing ordinary wild flowers into scrapbooks. Wild flowers were all very well in their place - in fact he thought they should be protected and nurtured; nothing was improved by removing it from its natural habitat, he thought, including man. Take him, for example - and he wished somebody would, now that Catherine had relinquished her claim - he was not improved by being in this desiccated landscape. No, he should be in his rightful place; armchair by a log fire, a book in his hands, a glass of beer at his side and preferably with Catherine at his feet. Or, better still, with the same log fire but on the rug in front of it - with Catherine, naturally.
A sound made him look down to catch the tail end of a rat scurrying beneath a rock. A rock that surely hadn't been there a moment before. But then he was used to rocks cropping up unexpectedly in his life - all designed to trip him up, he was sure. It was only the sound the rat had made that had saved him from tripping over this one.
Rats. They kept appearing in his life as well. Always when he least expected it; when he believed his cup of happiness was full to overflowing, some nasty rat would come and drink the contents of his vessel while his back was turned.
One half was dream. The other was real. A hybrid of waking and sleeping. The free-wheeling orchid and memories of Catherine by the log fire were in the dream. The rats were real. The desert was real. Desert rats. Still, he’d seen rats in his local park back home – and during his seaside holidays in North Essex, too. That had only been too real.
He decided to allow the dream to take sway. It seemed preferable; the dream took place in a desert, a different desert. But Catherine, a different Catherine, not the dream one, was in a deckchair, sun-bathing, or rather, sun-burning. It was like looking at chicken roast. She was quite naked, her voice emerging from above curvier dunes than the desert could ever boast.
“It’s nice here by the sea,” she said. The sea was so far away. The whole universe was global-burning. She pretended to be on a pier in a cool sea breeze. She watched, she said, children playing on the beach. Scurrying around like rats in a panic.
He resumed his walk towards the nearest horizon, intent on a quest, the purpose of which was lost in the dream he wasn’t now dreaming.
The him that was a dream had a spring in his step; the tree-lined horizon now taking shape so that he could see the moving forms beneath them. Catherine was there, he knew - not the sun-scorched version, but the languid on the rug one. His heart-beat quickened as he increased his pace until he was running - and yet the horizon seemed to be no nearer; the forms beneath it no better defined.
The real him was also moving forward, but slower. For him, too, the horizon was becoming clearer and the trees more defined. Beneath them the shapes that moved were less friendly than Catherine - although the solar-cooked version might be there, he supposed. But it wasn't a sight he really wanted to see - except for the small part of him that sought revenge.
Revenge is sweet, they say, and so were the fruit gums that he dug around for in his pocket. He was sure there was a couple left. Eventually he located one trapped in the seam and covered with fluff and other detritus that defied definition. Aware (because his mother had told him) that you had to eat a speck of dirt before you died, he put the whole thing in his mouth, hoping that the speck of dirt might speed him to a death that he had been seeking. It seemed a preferable way to go than facing what lurked beneath the trees - which he seemed to be approaching remarkably quickly considering the slow movements of his feet.
It was a doll. The china cheeks mottled by the browning of history. The rubbery-looking limbs mapped all over with an unfathomable geography, peppered as it was with cack-handed archipelagos. There was a pustule or bubble on the doll’s china neck as if the sun was beginning to frazzle it. The toy gums were caked with gooey colours. The bone china teeth or dentures were browner than the staining on the cheeks. The eyes jaundiced. The face pointed like a rodent’s.
Dead orchids were crumpled in the vicinity and he sniffed the residue of some ritualistic mass suicide on their part. Their tiny roots like centipede legs wilted and flickered in the breezeless air. These had once been the trees that had seemed to merge with the horizon, given the perspective of contourless distance and its misalignment of terrain. Also given his own inchworm proportions. He threaded the eyes. Riddled the dark sands. A rare specimen. A squirming speck of size 10 dirt.
Catherine, having woken, lazed back in a log-chair on a log-pier above a log-fire. The deck swayed. But that was a different dream. And only perspective in dream was a measure for how real waking was. Embarking on a voyage to ancient China or far-off Cathay.
======================
LONDON CHRISTMAS STORY
Are you sitting comfortably--since I am beginning. My name is Felicity and I am the happiest woman in the world. Why? Well, because ... WHAT’S THAT NOISE ? How can I tell you about my happiness when there's so much noise? Is it workmen drilling? Or sirens wailing of another war? Sounds a bit like a fuss about nothing, as usual. Well, come closer, my dear. I am happy because I love you. Why don't you look surprised? Why are your eyes so small? I am sincere. Come closer, since you don't seem to be hearing me. Oooh, my mouth is now so very close to your ear, I can see all the white hair sprouting in and out. The noise is deafening and I'm afraid I shall have to shout. I am suddenly feeling very lonely. Please ignore that person staring through the window. And that other one. Men in church-dome hats. I think we should pretend to ignore them, at least. The noise I hear in the chimney is certainly far too early for Christmas. In fact, almost a whole year to elapse. Ah well, the workmen seem busy hammering at my door. I turn your head. I kiss your cold old lips. What are those noises I sense clip-clopping on the roof-slates; certainly not the dear dear rain. I am indeed so happy. I think YOU are your own best present.
“In the old days, children were delighted by the merest stocking of fruit and coal, and Christmas plum pudding could be sown with any loose shrapnel like threepenny bits or tanners.” Rachel Mildeyes (THE GOOD OLD DAYS vol viii. Storyville)
As I was walking up the stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He didn't even comb his night-strewn hair. His face was neither ugly nor handsome. His figure without even a sign of portliness or lean. His clothes were drabber than they were smart; so drab the darkness hid them in further folds of themselves. His voice picked out words from silence, words which meant little more than the creaks of the floorboards. His touch was like touching one of my own hands with the other. I put him down to nothing but a haunting thought. Or, perhaps, at least, the ghostly residue of some man who had been an ancient infant chimney-sweep.
When I reached the top, I looked back to see his back backing off down the stairwell, disappearing into nothingness—if something could disappear that was never there in the first place. I lowered myself into half-a-kneel, half-a-bend, all mixed with a crumpled crouch, and picked up from the tousled stair carpet a loose strand that must have floated there from his head of night-strewn hair. I held it closer to my child-young eyes and watched it scribble like the filmic interference on old celluloid, in words that meant nothing to my childish mind beyond their mere articulation as softest carpet-slipper sounds.
"What you doing dear?" asked my mother, as her tall figure half-filled the slanting yellow shaft of a half-opened bedroom door.
"Following myself up the wooden hills to Bedfordshire," I said as plaintively as possible. After all, I had an image to maintain.
"Don't be a soppy aporth and go to bed. It's high time you were in dream land."
My mother's voice was the only one that could hold sweetness as well as righteous anger.
I dropped the hair that wasn't there. I let out my lungs with breath blacker than the sooty air and sucked in a new draught, one that was tinged with the yellow still left there by my mother's now shut bedroom door.
I was suddenly a child again, one that no longer needed any image to remain perfectly my mother's own.
But upon trying the doorknob of my childhood lair, I found it wasn't there. Only a mop of tousled, tangled air.
====================
CATHY COME HOME - A Collaboration with Anthea Holland
At a point in the distance the trees merged with the horizon, a dark rim on the pan of the world. The bowl of hope was empty, the dish of dreams devoid of anything but the dregs of a nightmare.
The flatness of the landscape reminded him of the desert. Not that the desert had been flat, far from it; the sand scalloped into shapes beyond the imaginings of the finest sculptor. But it had been arid - like that flatness that lay before him in the future. The trees that he could no longer discern were nothing but a hiccup in the digestive system of existence.
He turned and looked over his shoulder whence he had come. Nothing much there, either. A few streams perhaps, but he had passed them without noticing them, so they counted for nothing. Once or twice a flower had bloomed, only to be flattened by his size 10's. The wildlife along the way had scurried into holes and burrows to avoid his deadly gaze.
Even wildlife with roots had scurried! Or so it seemed. There was one particular form of orchid that managed to move from place to place of its own volition. Dragging its roots behind, in hope of a new seedbed to mulch it. A rare plant. A rare disease, too, imagining that such a plant could exist. Yet indeed it was no fever of his brain that told him he was following one such specimen between the now featureless horizons. Duneless and dour.
Of course, a rare orchid would never be able to survive in the dry terrains he now crossed. It was wishful thinking or just sheer bravery on the plant’s part to act as his guide. Only desiccation could be its ultimate fate. Sacrificing its life for his. Still, rare orchids only lasted a blink of an eyelid in the scheme of things, at the best of times. He shrugged. It wasn’t sacrificing that much, was it? Rare beauty was ephemeral to the nth degree.
Like Catherine’s rare beauty. She had not been a lover of exotic blooms. She simply relished the act of pressing ordinary wild flowers into scrapbooks. Wild flowers were all very well in their place - in fact he thought they should be protected and nurtured; nothing was improved by removing it from its natural habitat, he thought, including man. Take him, for example - and he wished somebody would, now that Catherine had relinquished her claim - he was not improved by being in this desiccated landscape. No, he should be in his rightful place; armchair by a log fire, a book in his hands, a glass of beer at his side and preferably with Catherine at his feet. Or, better still, with the same log fire but on the rug in front of it - with Catherine, naturally.
A sound made him look down to catch the tail end of a rat scurrying beneath a rock. A rock that surely hadn't been there a moment before. But then he was used to rocks cropping up unexpectedly in his life - all designed to trip him up, he was sure. It was only the sound the rat had made that had saved him from tripping over this one.
Rats. They kept appearing in his life as well. Always when he least expected it; when he believed his cup of happiness was full to overflowing, some nasty rat would come and drink the contents of his vessel while his back was turned.
One half was dream. The other was real. A hybrid of waking and sleeping. The free-wheeling orchid and memories of Catherine by the log fire were in the dream. The rats were real. The desert was real. Desert rats. Still, he’d seen rats in his local park back home – and during his seaside holidays in North Essex, too. That had only been too real.
He decided to allow the dream to take sway. It seemed preferable; the dream took place in a desert, a different desert. But Catherine, a different Catherine, not the dream one, was in a deckchair, sun-bathing, or rather, sun-burning. It was like looking at chicken roast. She was quite naked, her voice emerging from above curvier dunes than the desert could ever boast.
“It’s nice here by the sea,” she said. The sea was so far away. The whole universe was global-burning. She pretended to be on a pier in a cool sea breeze. She watched, she said, children playing on the beach. Scurrying around like rats in a panic.
He resumed his walk towards the nearest horizon, intent on a quest, the purpose of which was lost in the dream he wasn’t now dreaming.
The him that was a dream had a spring in his step; the tree-lined horizon now taking shape so that he could see the moving forms beneath them. Catherine was there, he knew - not the sun-scorched version, but the languid on the rug one. His heart-beat quickened as he increased his pace until he was running - and yet the horizon seemed to be no nearer; the forms beneath it no better defined.
The real him was also moving forward, but slower. For him, too, the horizon was becoming clearer and the trees more defined. Beneath them the shapes that moved were less friendly than Catherine - although the solar-cooked version might be there, he supposed. But it wasn't a sight he really wanted to see - except for the small part of him that sought revenge.
Revenge is sweet, they say, and so were the fruit gums that he dug around for in his pocket. He was sure there was a couple left. Eventually he located one trapped in the seam and covered with fluff and other detritus that defied definition. Aware (because his mother had told him) that you had to eat a speck of dirt before you died, he put the whole thing in his mouth, hoping that the speck of dirt might speed him to a death that he had been seeking. It seemed a preferable way to go than facing what lurked beneath the trees - which he seemed to be approaching remarkably quickly considering the slow movements of his feet.
It was a doll. The china cheeks mottled by the browning of history. The rubbery-looking limbs mapped all over with an unfathomable geography, peppered as it was with cack-handed archipelagos. There was a pustule or bubble on the doll’s china neck as if the sun was beginning to frazzle it. The toy gums were caked with gooey colours. The bone china teeth or dentures were browner than the staining on the cheeks. The eyes jaundiced. The face pointed like a rodent’s.
Dead orchids were crumpled in the vicinity and he sniffed the residue of some ritualistic mass suicide on their part. Their tiny roots like centipede legs wilted and flickered in the breezeless air. These had once been the trees that had seemed to merge with the horizon, given the perspective of contourless distance and its misalignment of terrain. Also given his own inchworm proportions. He threaded the eyes. Riddled the dark sands. A rare specimen. A squirming speck of size 10 dirt.
Catherine, having woken, lazed back in a log-chair on a log-pier above a log-fire. The deck swayed. But that was a different dream. And only perspective in dream was a measure for how real waking was. Embarking on a voyage to ancient China or far-off Cathay.
======================
LONDON CHRISTMAS STORY
Are you sitting comfortably--since I am beginning. My name is Felicity and I am the happiest woman in the world. Why? Well, because ... WHAT’S THAT NOISE ? How can I tell you about my happiness when there's so much noise? Is it workmen drilling? Or sirens wailing of another war? Sounds a bit like a fuss about nothing, as usual. Well, come closer, my dear. I am happy because I love you. Why don't you look surprised? Why are your eyes so small? I am sincere. Come closer, since you don't seem to be hearing me. Oooh, my mouth is now so very close to your ear, I can see all the white hair sprouting in and out. The noise is deafening and I'm afraid I shall have to shout. I am suddenly feeling very lonely. Please ignore that person staring through the window. And that other one. Men in church-dome hats. I think we should pretend to ignore them, at least. The noise I hear in the chimney is certainly far too early for Christmas. In fact, almost a whole year to elapse. Ah well, the workmen seem busy hammering at my door. I turn your head. I kiss your cold old lips. What are those noises I sense clip-clopping on the roof-slates; certainly not the dear dear rain. I am indeed so happy. I think YOU are your own best present.
“In the old days, children were delighted by the merest stocking of fruit and coal, and Christmas plum pudding could be sown with any loose shrapnel like threepenny bits or tanners.” Rachel Mildeyes (THE GOOD OLD DAYS vol viii. Storyville)
Sunday, February 04, 2007
A Merriment of Souls
Nobody knew whence Cheriso came but they were convinced of his destination. The planet next door.
There was a loose lease in force despite that planet's inaccessibility. Few, indeed, had travelled there in the last century, mainly because of the belief - whether grounded in fact or fever - that the hot star had grown hotter or the planets had moved a little closer into the invisible corona. Indeed, the planet next door was, of course, that much closer to the sun.
In any event, Cheriso was the one they hoped to break the duck. His rocket, although amateurishly constructed, at least looked fitter and leaner than any of its predecessors.
Cheriso had Christened the planet next door Mirth.
He thought it should have a name. Apparently, in another solar system, dark years away, every single planet - even the uninhabited and the uninhabitable ones - had, he maintained, a name. Here, however, he was surprised to see that even the planet on which the people lived was called, well, it was called simply the planet next door to the planet next door.
"You won't get far in that..." said the Uncle, pointing at Cheriso's lop-sided craft.
"Far is too far," replied the inscrutable Cheriso.
The Uncle was older that the last attempt to reach the planet next door as Mirth had then been called. A beautiful girl gazed at Cheriso with wide eyes, oblivious of her own thinly disguised charms.
She had always called the hot star Fun.
Suddenly, Cheriso, interrupting such backward thoughts, said to the Uncle: "Well, I got here in that!" He strode towards his leaning rocket, adjusted a chock and strapped himself into the harness as if he were about to take part in a rodeo.
"Hey! Cheriso, there is a difference between a ringmaster and a ringleader," shouted the Uncle with a grin; and he walked off with the girl in tow. Only one of them gave a backward glance as Cheriso lit the fuse at the base of his steel steed and eventually merged with the speckled merriment of the benighted universe.
The clouds were thought - by the villagers of Essex - to contain shapes that were heavier than air. Not a religion as such but, nevertheless, a faith in impossibilities as truths. As for me, I'm a villager who questioned everything - one of the very few who can tell a mock reality when he sees it. And I shall now speak of the most bogus of all...
In the old days - when I was younger - I, too, naively gulped a different belief with each swallow - even when someone maintained that the newly published dictionary had missed out the word "gullible".
I had things either in tow or after me.
But, at the time, I didn't believe anything. I soon learned my lesson - and I was proud of it.
So there was no difficulty when Arabella knocked on alternate doors of the village and asked whether the householder in each one thus knocked upon had seen the ... or, at least, felt the presence of ... creatures which lived in the clouds.
As it happened, I was the last one that woke up from his or her sleep that momentous night. I simply told her that even parts of normal daily life were, in themselves, dubious, let alone tall tales of creatures in the clouds. There were no fixtures, let alone commodities such as futures.
She pulled me by the hand into the outside to look at the sky. All I saw were stars. And no clouds at all (unless they were too far away to be seen). I quickly scuttled back indoors, because, secretly, I'd seen something like a silver pin or flashing sword.
Since I had been the last but one house that Arabella had seen fit to visit, I took her inside for hot soup. I had some simmering on the hob for just such an eventuality.
She was pretty enough but I did not believe in love lasting beyond the first look. So I had never got married.
"What's that on the carpet?"
She pointed at my shadow lolling behind me like a bloodstain - evidence for moveable murder or a dry feast for vampires, I nearly said aloud but didn't since Arabella was a simple girl. In fact, most of the villagers were simple. None could fathom my complexities, least of all sweet Arabella.
"What's the village like these days?" I asked, ignoring her question and hoping to encourage her to speak without my intervention, although agoraphobics as intense as myself were even disturbed simply by talk of the outside.
"Well, they've built it up a bit more, and the library has been refurbished..."
I nodded. I remembered it well from the old days when I was similar to every other villager, which meant slightly more than half.
"The square has got dustier - with the seasons drier and the sand from Clacton-on-Sea being borne on the winds. The shapes in the clouds..."
I hoped she would pause at that point since the soup should be supped while it was still piping hot. But she managed to continue speaking through mouthfuls of pea-green slime.
"...some say Great Old Ones are lurking up there ... sewn together by God's needle."
"So someone's been reading the Necronomicon again, eh?" I asked with some grasp of the ancient art of interruption.
"It's still in the library..."
She paused now for real, not for a fresh spoonful, but because she dared not tell me that villagers had been withdrawing the Necronomicon unstamped-out by the librarian. I could read all that in her wide, bowling eyes. Her legs crossed and uncrossed in a rather becoming fashion but I kept myself more or less fixed upon her upper face. The only truth was in eyes - they could tell me far more than any mouth or gesture.
"Are the others still there?"
What others? And where? The secondary questions were unvoiced since Arabella guessed I meant the books in the basement instead of the more accessible ones in the main body of the library - because they were even more arcane, recondite, abstruse, esoteric, occult or simply more dangerous than the Necronomicon itself.
As we thought silently, there was a tangible feeling in the air of impending doom. This was the first time I had felt it so strongly since abandoning myself to a claustrophobic cure for disbelief in the existence of the outside world. Simply because Arabella was a representative of that very outside did not entail any diminishment of my faith in open-mindedness, an open-mindedness so intense I often found myself searching horizonless dreams for brooding nothingnesses bubbling like soup at each centre of infinity ... a soup that coagulated within cores, cores unto themselves.
I shook my head. Craziness had no place in me. If I were crazy, then there was nothing upon which I could depend. I could not hang my hat even on the hook of my mind, in such circumstances. To gain some purchase on any smidgen of reality whatsoever, I began to visualise the library building as I remembered it, facing out upon the dusty village square.
The feeling was so strong, I felt Arabella's small hand inside my big one, tugging me with barely perceptible gusts of breath filling her rosy cheeks. Yes, there, the library, with its two old-fashioned turrets, one containing the erstwhile school bell ... the one that had tolled a token of a more ancient tugging, when I myself was as young as Arabella. In those days, it had not seemed strange to be led by the claws of a tentacular beast who was a human being in disguise - where only the perspective of adulthood made me realise that disguises, like basements, were never-ending.
Cheriso stood at the library door. A smile on his face.
"I knew you would come, Uncle," the youth said.
And the old man spread his fingers as if to encompass the whole world. The girl lightly kissed his deep-lined face, before she left to enter the library with Cheriso. The old man could see they were becoming closer than he had ever managed with another human being.
In the dusty square stood a silver fountain. It had been there years, hadn't it? He approached it, determined to vanish within its folds.
He yearned for the Heaven next door but one, where he could be merely himself, no longer a figure of Fun.
The book was slammed shut with a dusty explosion. The ancient couple entwined twigs for bones and chuckled merrily at the unexpected ending.
There was a loose lease in force despite that planet's inaccessibility. Few, indeed, had travelled there in the last century, mainly because of the belief - whether grounded in fact or fever - that the hot star had grown hotter or the planets had moved a little closer into the invisible corona. Indeed, the planet next door was, of course, that much closer to the sun.
In any event, Cheriso was the one they hoped to break the duck. His rocket, although amateurishly constructed, at least looked fitter and leaner than any of its predecessors.
Cheriso had Christened the planet next door Mirth.
He thought it should have a name. Apparently, in another solar system, dark years away, every single planet - even the uninhabited and the uninhabitable ones - had, he maintained, a name. Here, however, he was surprised to see that even the planet on which the people lived was called, well, it was called simply the planet next door to the planet next door.
"You won't get far in that..." said the Uncle, pointing at Cheriso's lop-sided craft.
"Far is too far," replied the inscrutable Cheriso.
The Uncle was older that the last attempt to reach the planet next door as Mirth had then been called. A beautiful girl gazed at Cheriso with wide eyes, oblivious of her own thinly disguised charms.
She had always called the hot star Fun.
Suddenly, Cheriso, interrupting such backward thoughts, said to the Uncle: "Well, I got here in that!" He strode towards his leaning rocket, adjusted a chock and strapped himself into the harness as if he were about to take part in a rodeo.
"Hey! Cheriso, there is a difference between a ringmaster and a ringleader," shouted the Uncle with a grin; and he walked off with the girl in tow. Only one of them gave a backward glance as Cheriso lit the fuse at the base of his steel steed and eventually merged with the speckled merriment of the benighted universe.
The clouds were thought - by the villagers of Essex - to contain shapes that were heavier than air. Not a religion as such but, nevertheless, a faith in impossibilities as truths. As for me, I'm a villager who questioned everything - one of the very few who can tell a mock reality when he sees it. And I shall now speak of the most bogus of all...
In the old days - when I was younger - I, too, naively gulped a different belief with each swallow - even when someone maintained that the newly published dictionary had missed out the word "gullible".
I had things either in tow or after me.
But, at the time, I didn't believe anything. I soon learned my lesson - and I was proud of it.
So there was no difficulty when Arabella knocked on alternate doors of the village and asked whether the householder in each one thus knocked upon had seen the ... or, at least, felt the presence of ... creatures which lived in the clouds.
As it happened, I was the last one that woke up from his or her sleep that momentous night. I simply told her that even parts of normal daily life were, in themselves, dubious, let alone tall tales of creatures in the clouds. There were no fixtures, let alone commodities such as futures.
She pulled me by the hand into the outside to look at the sky. All I saw were stars. And no clouds at all (unless they were too far away to be seen). I quickly scuttled back indoors, because, secretly, I'd seen something like a silver pin or flashing sword.
Since I had been the last but one house that Arabella had seen fit to visit, I took her inside for hot soup. I had some simmering on the hob for just such an eventuality.
She was pretty enough but I did not believe in love lasting beyond the first look. So I had never got married.
"What's that on the carpet?"
She pointed at my shadow lolling behind me like a bloodstain - evidence for moveable murder or a dry feast for vampires, I nearly said aloud but didn't since Arabella was a simple girl. In fact, most of the villagers were simple. None could fathom my complexities, least of all sweet Arabella.
"What's the village like these days?" I asked, ignoring her question and hoping to encourage her to speak without my intervention, although agoraphobics as intense as myself were even disturbed simply by talk of the outside.
"Well, they've built it up a bit more, and the library has been refurbished..."
I nodded. I remembered it well from the old days when I was similar to every other villager, which meant slightly more than half.
"The square has got dustier - with the seasons drier and the sand from Clacton-on-Sea being borne on the winds. The shapes in the clouds..."
I hoped she would pause at that point since the soup should be supped while it was still piping hot. But she managed to continue speaking through mouthfuls of pea-green slime.
"...some say Great Old Ones are lurking up there ... sewn together by God's needle."
"So someone's been reading the Necronomicon again, eh?" I asked with some grasp of the ancient art of interruption.
"It's still in the library..."
She paused now for real, not for a fresh spoonful, but because she dared not tell me that villagers had been withdrawing the Necronomicon unstamped-out by the librarian. I could read all that in her wide, bowling eyes. Her legs crossed and uncrossed in a rather becoming fashion but I kept myself more or less fixed upon her upper face. The only truth was in eyes - they could tell me far more than any mouth or gesture.
"Are the others still there?"
What others? And where? The secondary questions were unvoiced since Arabella guessed I meant the books in the basement instead of the more accessible ones in the main body of the library - because they were even more arcane, recondite, abstruse, esoteric, occult or simply more dangerous than the Necronomicon itself.
As we thought silently, there was a tangible feeling in the air of impending doom. This was the first time I had felt it so strongly since abandoning myself to a claustrophobic cure for disbelief in the existence of the outside world. Simply because Arabella was a representative of that very outside did not entail any diminishment of my faith in open-mindedness, an open-mindedness so intense I often found myself searching horizonless dreams for brooding nothingnesses bubbling like soup at each centre of infinity ... a soup that coagulated within cores, cores unto themselves.
I shook my head. Craziness had no place in me. If I were crazy, then there was nothing upon which I could depend. I could not hang my hat even on the hook of my mind, in such circumstances. To gain some purchase on any smidgen of reality whatsoever, I began to visualise the library building as I remembered it, facing out upon the dusty village square.
The feeling was so strong, I felt Arabella's small hand inside my big one, tugging me with barely perceptible gusts of breath filling her rosy cheeks. Yes, there, the library, with its two old-fashioned turrets, one containing the erstwhile school bell ... the one that had tolled a token of a more ancient tugging, when I myself was as young as Arabella. In those days, it had not seemed strange to be led by the claws of a tentacular beast who was a human being in disguise - where only the perspective of adulthood made me realise that disguises, like basements, were never-ending.
Cheriso stood at the library door. A smile on his face.
"I knew you would come, Uncle," the youth said.
And the old man spread his fingers as if to encompass the whole world. The girl lightly kissed his deep-lined face, before she left to enter the library with Cheriso. The old man could see they were becoming closer than he had ever managed with another human being.
In the dusty square stood a silver fountain. It had been there years, hadn't it? He approached it, determined to vanish within its folds.
He yearned for the Heaven next door but one, where he could be merely himself, no longer a figure of Fun.
The book was slammed shut with a dusty explosion. The ancient couple entwined twigs for bones and chuckled merrily at the unexpected ending.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Key Sites In 2007
**Key sites for Nemonymous**
http://www.nemonymous.com
(MySpace leading to links for general information and submission guidelines)
Nemo announcement forum (since 1999):
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/veils_and_piques/
Nemo discussion forum (since 2003):
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nemonymous/
Nemo wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemonymous
**Key Sites for Weirdmonger etc.**
http://www.weirdmonger.com
(MySpace for Weirdmonger)
http://www.myspace.com/megazanthus
(MySpace for DF Lewis)
WEIRDMONGER WHEEL:
http://free-blog-site.com/denemoniser/archive/2006/11/27/100780.aspx
GENERAL Discussion Forum (since 1999):
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/weirdmonger/
DFL Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.F._Lewis
http://www.nemonymous.com
(MySpace leading to links for general information and submission guidelines)
Nemo announcement forum (since 1999):
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/veils_and_piques/
Nemo discussion forum (since 2003):
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nemonymous/
Nemo wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemonymous
**Key Sites for Weirdmonger etc.**
http://www.weirdmonger.com
(MySpace for Weirdmonger)
http://www.myspace.com/megazanthus
(MySpace for DF Lewis)
WEIRDMONGER WHEEL:
http://free-blog-site.com/denemoniser/archive/2006/11/27/100780.aspx
GENERAL Discussion Forum (since 1999):
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/weirdmonger/
DFL Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.F._Lewis
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Ghost In The Machine
Gold glowed amid lizard-skinned ashes.
The youth, Simon, with one earring, knelt to warm his hands by the fire. It had been cold outside and his mother had said it would yet be half-an-hour before tea was high enough to be served. This was a common expression of Simon’s mother, one that he never understood.
His stonewashed jeans had such gaping designer-rips at the knees, the lower half of the legs seemed to be hanging merely by a thread. Upon kneeling, parts of his body were exposed that the heat would not normally have reached readily.
He had left his motorbike leaning in the alleyway alongside the otherwise terraced house. Knowing it was only recently bought, Simon was still worried that it might be unsafe in this less than desirable precinct of the city. The “L” plate shone out luminously even after the streetlights flickered off in the late evening (which they tended to do in that area): the plate being red on white, like the jelly and cream his mother had served in just such a design, on the day he passed his test.
He put his hands closer to the fire -- either because they were growing intrinsically colder at the extremities despite the heat or, as he really thought, the audibly crumbling ashes were losing all their ability to tender more than a smidgin of warmth. There was a low, insidious grumbling within the chimney-breast: a wind picking up at the back of the house, he surmised.
Suddenly, he thought the embers were glowing brighter: re-erupting wormcasts of flame. His hands floated like autonomous entities above the rising heat, thus becoming tantamount to translucent. Simon almost convinced himself that he was the angel his mother told her cronies he really was -- at heart.
With growing horror, he lowered his gaze to the knees shyly poking from the gaps in the jeans: like wedges of cut glass with a three-dimensional map of bloodstreams within. He tried to persuade a hand to reach up to his face, but no amount of will-power could accomplish such an amazing feat. Then, after he surrendered all hope, the hand, of its own volition, swept to the top of his head, where a residue of feeling in the fingertips informed him that he was actually touching a soft substance and, as he pushed harder, his own mind performed a consequent flip, becoming madder by the second as the substance grew softer...
His mother entered the parlour where she’d laid the fire earlier in the afternoon. She dropped the tray of tea-things that she carried at shoulder height, extended in front like an offering at an altar. The clatter momentarily brought what used to be Simon to just a smidgin off consciousness -- and he wondered fleetingly why his mother looked as if she had seen a ghost.
The motorbike itself haunted the alley, a red “D”, in¬stead of an “L”, upon a white plate glowing at its buckled mudguard.
(published ‘Gathering Darkness’ 1994)
The youth, Simon, with one earring, knelt to warm his hands by the fire. It had been cold outside and his mother had said it would yet be half-an-hour before tea was high enough to be served. This was a common expression of Simon’s mother, one that he never understood.
His stonewashed jeans had such gaping designer-rips at the knees, the lower half of the legs seemed to be hanging merely by a thread. Upon kneeling, parts of his body were exposed that the heat would not normally have reached readily.
He had left his motorbike leaning in the alleyway alongside the otherwise terraced house. Knowing it was only recently bought, Simon was still worried that it might be unsafe in this less than desirable precinct of the city. The “L” plate shone out luminously even after the streetlights flickered off in the late evening (which they tended to do in that area): the plate being red on white, like the jelly and cream his mother had served in just such a design, on the day he passed his test.
He put his hands closer to the fire -- either because they were growing intrinsically colder at the extremities despite the heat or, as he really thought, the audibly crumbling ashes were losing all their ability to tender more than a smidgin of warmth. There was a low, insidious grumbling within the chimney-breast: a wind picking up at the back of the house, he surmised.
Suddenly, he thought the embers were glowing brighter: re-erupting wormcasts of flame. His hands floated like autonomous entities above the rising heat, thus becoming tantamount to translucent. Simon almost convinced himself that he was the angel his mother told her cronies he really was -- at heart.
With growing horror, he lowered his gaze to the knees shyly poking from the gaps in the jeans: like wedges of cut glass with a three-dimensional map of bloodstreams within. He tried to persuade a hand to reach up to his face, but no amount of will-power could accomplish such an amazing feat. Then, after he surrendered all hope, the hand, of its own volition, swept to the top of his head, where a residue of feeling in the fingertips informed him that he was actually touching a soft substance and, as he pushed harder, his own mind performed a consequent flip, becoming madder by the second as the substance grew softer...
His mother entered the parlour where she’d laid the fire earlier in the afternoon. She dropped the tray of tea-things that she carried at shoulder height, extended in front like an offering at an altar. The clatter momentarily brought what used to be Simon to just a smidgin off consciousness -- and he wondered fleetingly why his mother looked as if she had seen a ghost.
The motorbike itself haunted the alley, a red “D”, in¬stead of an “L”, upon a white plate glowing at its buckled mudguard.
(published ‘Gathering Darkness’ 1994)
Friday, December 01, 2006
A Study In Brown
Published 'The Heliograph' 1997
The upright piano looked secondhand even when it was brand new: consigned now to the Utility Room, because the family had lost interest in its finger-marching goodness. Their words.
Countless children had been put through its paces, only to abandon it for the more customary rituals which preoccupied modern teenagers. Their short legs had once pumped at the pedals trying to keep it afloat amid the skies of childhood fantasy, only to fall to Earth in a sliding scale of long-limbed puberty. They escaped into the feel of the modern moment - via the consecutive eras of the nifty Fifties and the sexy Sixties - expunging wireless programmes such as "Music While You Work" and “Mrs Dale’s Diary” so as to make room for the rest of their memories.
Meanwhile, in that same untransfigured past, these children’s ancestors were on dinner-break - sitting, in regimented expectation, at the Factory Canteen tables, awaiting another soon-to-be-ancient wireless programme called "Workers' Playtime" to begin. It was due to be broadcast on the BBC Light Programme at 12.30 on the dot from this very canteen.
"It's a load of old tommy rot!" said George, gesticulating with a brown-smeared bottle of HP Sauce.
The man seated alongside him before a plate of runny fried egg and limp chips tried to ignore the contentious remarks. George wondered why workmates in canteens often sat alongside each other, leaning over the trestle table with clunking cutlery - whilst the toffs in the "white collar" restaurant down the corridor would tend to sit opposite each other, conducting a conversation superficially structured, polite and civilised, yet a conversation which was fundamentally unadventurous. Those, like George, of a "blue collar" persuasion in the canteen would conduct more sporadic interchanges, unembarrassed by silences, veering from side to side between misunderstandings, teetering upon the edge of anger and recrimination, but always searching, probing, broaching subjects of deep workmanlike lore.
A true description. Not George's words, though.
In any event, the stand-up comedian was already preening himself on the makeshift stage, waiting for the mikes to go live. The theme music was tuning up, being played direct from Broadcasting House.
George's conversation began to misfire. He was settling into the egg and chips, his tongue finding it more and more difficult to unsnarl itself from the curdled fat. "Only yesterday,” he stammered , “Jean caught her fingers under the piano lid. We got that ol' joanna so that we can give our kids some sort of proper music ... to keep 'em up with the toffs. But it's all going to come to nowt..."
George's listening neighbour stared quizzically at his fork. A sliver of crinkle-edged eggwhite on its midspoke became almost a holy relic.
The comedian's patter tannoyed from the stage: "Oi! Oi! Guess what happened to me on the way to the factory? I met me ol' mate Wilfred Pickles. He said, 'Have a go, Joe!'"
A stooge with an outlandish clown's nose interrupted the comedian, bundling towards the upright mike: "But your name's not Joe, Joe!"
Raucous, uncoordinated laughter and banging of pudding spoons echoed around the starlights of the canteen's giant Meccano rafters.
"Give 'em the money, Brian!"
"I'm Barney, Mr Pickles, not Brian."
The last bit was repeated by the audience in rehearsed unison. And the timeless jokes rattled on through the air, followed by an unseen hand slowly running its fingers upon tingling keys which, finally, emerged from a million ghostly wirelesses in a million empty front parlours.
Then an announcement and timecheck in King's English.
In those days “brown study” meant a moment or two of deep meditation. George's brown study was workmanlike but with a deeper meaning than mere words...
He had been known for donkey years as a jolly good, all round egg - a dependable regular who often treated himself to an extra half on top of what he called his "medicinal" pint of best bitter. His missus sent him round to the pub, of course - and a more understanding spouse it was difficult to imagine, even though she had the ulterior motive of getting him out of her hair for an hour or two. So that she could listen to the wireless in peace.
Brian knew George quite well. It was Brian's brown study that used words in uncommon usage. He counted himself one of George's pals. A straighter fellow you'd go far to meet was George. He did the march-past on Remembrance Day. Just a shade over middle-age, when Brian first met him. George entering the Autumn of George's life with as much grace as it is possible to muster in such circumstances of what one could only describe as encroaching oblivion. Brian knew, when he got to George's age, he'd go to pieces, more like. So, Brian admired George's equanamity, as it were, his urbane nonchalance, his avuncular, if taciturn, charm. They often sat side by side in the works canteen.
George had grown-up children of his own, he told Brian, who visited him now and again, but not frequently enough for his liking. Still, George understood. Youngsters had busy lives, these days. They must have had commitments to others of their own age. Why should they concern themselves with "oldies like me"?
Brian would nod, not necessarily in agreement, but merely to acknowledge that he knew what George was saying. In fact, Brian had once been one of those "youngsters" who'd rather spend his time in a pub with relative strangers than visit his own folk in the Fen Country. It is peculiar how family ties can loosen up over the years. Brian had been a staunch loyalist to the clan back home - that is, until he left to go to the Big Smoke. Then, Brian had wondered why blood-links were so important. He could not be proper friends with members of his own family in normal life.
Thus unrooted, other people's ideas helped to raise Brian's two feet from the ground. He gained wordy ambitions. But, thank goodness, he spotted the danger signs before it was too late. He avoided being an intellectual by the skin of his teeth. Or at least he hoped so, and still does. Despite the words he uses to describe his thoughtful brown studies.
In those days, Brian positively had to sit at home in his digs, in those quiet moments of self-hypnosis, and convince himself that he was still one of the Fen folk, a home-spun youth who had no more in his top storey than the usual junk in trivial clutters. His mind flittered, at one moment, from almost philosophical exploration of his own thinking-patterns, then at another, to a perhaps forced colloquial remonstration against any such pretentious crap.
Anyhow, Brian does indeed remember George, that chap in the works canteen, that steadfast man in the pub who always insisted in having his beer in a straight glass. George often sat at what he called Old Joanna and jammed tunes straight through from ears to mouths. George. A good solid name for him. It couldn't have been invented better.
Then, the surprise...
It still surprises Brian to think of it. It wasn't exactly as if George had moaned, like others of his generation, about the young people of the day, like the lager louts and the self-seeking yappers in the City and the so-called football hooligans - and, of course, the ungrateful young blighters of George's own spawning who sat in their colour supplement lounges lined with mock bookspines, staring at endless suds on a flickering box.
No, George did not indulge in such diatribes, as Brian's own father did, for example. Brian's father swore blind that civilisation as he knew it was crumbling and the home-grown enemies were "worse than the bleedin' Nazis!" No, George was not quite like that. So, it should not have been a surprise when George came into the pub one evening with a ring in his left ear!
Brian's own father called lads with such jewellery "Nancy Boys" whom a few years "under the wing" of a sergeant-major on National Service would soon lick into shape. Therefore, for George to appear with his lobe threaded by that extraneous bit of metal amid his cronies in the pub Snug was quite unbelievable. One of the dead-eyed dart throwers who frequented this particular bar threw straight off the board, instead of the treble nineteen for which he was aiming. The landlord of the pub over-pulled a pint of Bitter, its froth disappearing into the system that later appeared as Mild.
"What's it for, George?" Brian asked, pointing to the ring that was of the type Brian remembered his mother calling a "sleeper" to prevent the pierced hole from fleshing over. George tentatively put a finger to his lobe, and smiled. Just that. At first, Brian thought about dropping the subject. But then he blurted out: "It suits you." George turned a brighter shade of crimson, as if he were about to have a stroke. It was as if the pubful of drinkers had received a message from a hidden force in the Universe, since everybody grew quiet as dead mice. Even the dart-throwers launched their arrows more gently into the cork. Words were useless. Even canteen-talk was out of the brown study window.
"Thank you, Brian," George eventually replied. "It's God's way of branding us his beasts of burden and to remind Him which is which."
Brian supposed if he'd looked closely enough at the ring in George's lughole, he would have seen a microscopic number etched. Indeed, George did not seem to notice he had caused quite a stir, but later that night, Brian dreamed a brown dream that the whole side of George's head had been embedded with a sculpture, a large star-shaped contraption that could have served as a tightly meshed drain-cover, and it sparkled in the putrescent pub lights. George was also wearing burnt umber shades, but more a lop-sided version of the hi-tech binoculars Dan Dare used to wear on the front of the Eagle comic.
George died peacefully in his sleep. His missus told the mourners this as they trooped into the terraced house to commiserate. "I knew," she said, "there was something peculiar when he didn't go to the pub for his usual pint." Which, in hindsight, was even more peculiar, since he had died the very morning after his last visit to the pub wearing the ear-ring. But none cared to broach the subject with his missus in the circumstances.
So, all George's friends, one of whom Brian was proud to number himself (the youngest, in fact), marched past his open coffin in the front parlour - a ritual moment of remembering and forgetting. That was the tradition, those days. They were relieved rather than surprised that there was no ring in either of his ears, nor any sign of piercing. Just a hint of a smile on George's steadfast lips. And no words.
That night Brian had another brown dream about George. This time, George being dead, the dream seemed realler than the one about the huge device that threaded his skull. This was dream was more in words than pictures: the first time a dream has come to Brian in this way. The way it told Brian about itself was that just beyond the deadish volcano of Noog, whereby the brown River Bandshow flows, lies the land of Wireless. Nobody knows of its existence except those, if any, who live there.
The houses move up Archer Hill, its central plinth, like turtles intent on breeding. Upon the brown brow of that hill squats the fort that was built to defend the town from any unlikely marauders and, within the fort, King George sits enthroned, if it is a throne indeed upon which he sits. He's become a surly man, with a brigand's moustache and ploughshared brows, staring unbelievingly into the middle distance with eyes that, if once steel blue, are now of seeping copper.
King George abruptly shouts and momentarily stirs from his own dream, a dream that is within Brian's dream; the pity of it being that there is nobody near to hear his shout except himself. He does not answer, retracting his tortoise-head into a new shell of convoluted dreams.
At no real distance from the fort, there is a courtyard, out of bounds to the townsmen, if townsmen there are. Its slabs are crazed over with moss-tracks that have long since created their own jigsaws of reality, so abstract and indefinable there are no further words to be used about them. No words at all.
The courtyard's periphery is bounded with high ancient walls, crested with jagged shards of brown beer-bottle glass that give to the bladdery sun a thousand versions of itself, many of which outlast the night that always seems to follow. If darkness be brown, then this night congeals faces rather than hides them.
The twists and turnings of the Old Town verging upon these courtyard walls are a maze which only one particular child can solve with paper and crayons one special Christmas morning ... and that child died several years ago anyway, its parents having earlier sailed off down the brown Bandshow, the last to leave Wireless before the final trap was sprung.
Within this maze of broken-signed inns and disused laundries, there stands the forbidding tenantless prison (identical to the fort in shape and design) into which the townsmen, if townsmen there are, yearn to enter, if they can only find its giant rusting keys, so as to complete the circle of curtailment; for they find the town walls are not prison enough for them.
One night, when the rusty stars themselves came down and dodged like fireflies between the skid-marked roofs, touching them with gildenspires, the patroller of the prison, known as Walkman, donned his night head-dress and skirted the walls of the King's fort, believing that this was the prison he was meant to frog-march round amid the toad shit.
Beneath his streaming hair, Walkman listened to the dead phones of night that threaded his curlicue ear-lugs and filled him with tight-fisted silence, to such an extent that he did not notice the crackling of the distant Noog volcano on the sky-line which was meant to have no guts left to honk. Nor did he hear the majestic fart from inside the fort - as loud as any coastguard's gun. King George had spoken. Too late, he had stirred for the very last time. A dying breath, that fart. His last word.
Thus, Walkman, the prison-keeper, did not hear the distant crashing of the prison walls. The rusty keys had finally turned against him. And all the townsmen, if townsmen there were, withdrew into a freedom of mere flesh constraints.
One firefly spark remained, its only hope being that Walkman would lead it beyond the bounds of Wireless. A stench still wafted from the fort, so vile it veiled the coming light of dawn; but Walkman could not sense it through the brown hangings of his nostrils.
The last firefly spark extinguished, as Walkman was spiked upon the jagged wall of his own body's protruding bones which, if he had cleared it, would have allowed him to leave Wireless.
The ultimate horror was that King George's dream-fetters remained upon him, even within death ... if it indeed was the King who was trapped inside his own corpse-keep, and not someone else called Walkman (or even Brian). And George landed into the nifty Fifties feet first and with a bit of a headache. He always felt a bit queasy after travelling through the time locks: there had been a big delay in 1939 and a rough ride until the relatively calm waters of 1945. Now, there was just the residue of war fever in the air, making his veins tingle - but, by putting his mind into a slower gear, he found he could take a panning shot of the Phoenix Eras that most remember as their childhood.
It is true to say that George was not a through and through sympathiser with the people he surveyed. He had been brought up outside of time, and it is rumoured beyond space too, as he had the mark of what some would call Jack the Devil in his face - piercing eyes of hidden depths - hooked nose with gaping bristly nostrils - chin jutting below a mouthful of corrugated teeth - and a tunic that had been innocently customised and derived from those commonly worn by certain members of Hitler's entourage in the two decades immediately prior to George's arrival back on the dry land of history.
The strains of "Oh, What A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts" were ringing from the British Legion Hall. Being Saturday night, most of the backyard houses had emptied out and resorted to the weekly social, for an attempt at re-living the camaraderie and bonhomie of the war years. "Roller bowler bowl, roller bowler bowl..." The singsong rang out into the benighted streets, along with the endless rattle of the tinkling joanna, everyone's favourite biddy pedalling hard to the tunes it played. One among them had evidently won the football pools.
George was frog-marching down the dark street eager for a bit of colour-injecting, whilst savouring the challenge of a new age. Things then were not black and white, as the newsreels depicted, but various shades of brown. And having been taught that there is nothing more modern than the present, he was surprised at the rather utility, makeshift appearance of the Fifties lifestyle. It needed, he thought, colour and slickness, together with an importation of firescreens from the theatres to the front parlours - fast information, fast food, fast sex, to prevent the wasting of a that scarce commodity called time. The streets needed light, the importance of which had been lost amid the air raid blackouts. Above all, words were needed, words worthy enough for worlds to wield.
As George marched, he dug up metal arms from between the roots of Earth, these having been sprung beneath the pavements in an alternate universe now encroaching on this one. He proceeded to raise them and illumine their topmost bulbs with his breath, also seeing fit to make them parallel with the goalposts etched against the horizon of allotments. Some were later to call that vertical. Give or take a few inches.
Yet, Brian suspected this was George masquerading as someone else, or vice versa, more likely. The suspicions were well-founded since Brian was the one who once sat disguised alongside George in the canteen, when George was truly George, not this hybrid George who had learned too many words from the future and who was brown-beaten and brainwashed with the Daz of coming times, when wirelesses would be tweeters and woofters. It was 9.10 a.m., on one of those aimless mornings most only just recall, and the opening bars of the "Housewives' Choice" theme spilled from the wireless into the parlour. George had forgotten for a while his role as burnisher of the inevitabilities of the latter half of the Twentieth Century. He had crossed, as only time travellers can cross, into a new way of life - put on a frock - and sang along with "Music While You Work" as he steam-ironed his unsuspecting wife's trousers.
Times already moved along predetermined channels - or had it all gone wrong already? Had George flitted on to another time, another place? Or did he eventually die an unnatural death caused by a shrapnel-crazed footpad in a blind alley behind the British Legion Hall - whilst the voices roared in crescendo: "Oh, What A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts..., Roller Bowler Bowl..., A Penny A Pitch..."?
In Brian's ears the song rolled on, but it soon faded into other times, other climes. And the night always came earlier in the Wastes. George had decided that he would live here, ever since he had lost a card-gambling match at the heart of Future City. He forsook all his worldly goods in one fell turn of the card: it had been make or break, and Destiny had come down on the side of the latter with an unequivocal conviction. George had suspected that Fate had always kept this one moment up its sleeve as a cheating trump card.
The shadowy hands had come out across the baize card-table: George had not dared look at the competing faces again, as the fingers had flickered like hungry tongues in the gas light, lapping up the denominations of currency into the mouths of their palms.
Inside his shack, with all the untamed sounds of night growing outside, he stared at that one playing card. It was before him on the green-felt fold-over table, the surface of which bore the stains of ill-eaten food, as well as the skid marks of angry copper coins. He had retrieved the Jack of Spades from that final game in Future City, as a souvenir. Not that he wanted to remember the cruel cut, but merely let it act as a warning symbol that no good could come of fighting against Destiny. Ear-marked by Fate.
The Wastes, a dark patch of land which must have once been several smallholdings of scrawny pickings, stretched from one particular nowhere to another ... though, nowheres, to George, were only such when compared to the once busy streets of Future City. Here there were simply abandoned smallholdings and shaggy-cabbaged allotments.
Outside the door of his shack, there sloped a disused football pitch, the wireless goal-post stumps daggering the sky's underbelly ... with crossbars long since dislodged by the near-miss goals of bad-loser ghosts, only teams by virtue of their insubstantial white strips. But divots of earth showed that such teams had once been more than just haunters of George's dreams.
Put a cross in the graph-paper box, he thought, if you feel that the result will turn out to be a tie. An "X" was also a kiss of lips so soft they reminded him of a love he had taken to his heart, only to find them an ownerless puckered mouth. Or an "X" is the mark of a mistake that his first true love (the teacher at infants school) had appended to his clumsy attempts at arithmetic. Or an "X" betokens the clothes exchanged and cherished for their frills and lace trims. But, hopefully, "X" marked the spot where he'd dig up Death.
George watched from his shanty window long after the dawn should have arrived, begging that neither team would score. He merely needed this particular draw to complete the jackpot on the coupon. But, then, he heard the distant braying of a mob in unison - the chant of "'ere we go, 'ere we go, 'ere we go" and "Roller bowler ball...", as an unlikely goal was put away by Destiny's striker, the net belling out with the trawling catch.
George felt his head to ensure it was still stationed upon the tee of his neck. It would soon grow light, he assumed, The Wastes would one day be a City again, he mused. Turning back to the Jack of Spades, it was like looking into a lady's funfair cosmetic hand-mirror. George’s head was perfectly poised, as Jack's shovel-ended club took its swing. Crowned him with one fell swoop. At least, George no longer needed to be trapped as this last survivor on a desolate brown pitch once called Earth. And, hopefully, Destiny had nowhere else left to dig.
Then, perhaps, reborn from primaeval mulch to live the life of Brian. Wireless and unplugged.
The upright piano looked secondhand even when it was brand new: consigned now to the Utility Room, because the family had lost interest in its finger-marching goodness. Their words.
Countless children had been put through its paces, only to abandon it for the more customary rituals which preoccupied modern teenagers. Their short legs had once pumped at the pedals trying to keep it afloat amid the skies of childhood fantasy, only to fall to Earth in a sliding scale of long-limbed puberty. They escaped into the feel of the modern moment - via the consecutive eras of the nifty Fifties and the sexy Sixties - expunging wireless programmes such as "Music While You Work" and “Mrs Dale’s Diary” so as to make room for the rest of their memories.
Meanwhile, in that same untransfigured past, these children’s ancestors were on dinner-break - sitting, in regimented expectation, at the Factory Canteen tables, awaiting another soon-to-be-ancient wireless programme called "Workers' Playtime" to begin. It was due to be broadcast on the BBC Light Programme at 12.30 on the dot from this very canteen.
"It's a load of old tommy rot!" said George, gesticulating with a brown-smeared bottle of HP Sauce.
The man seated alongside him before a plate of runny fried egg and limp chips tried to ignore the contentious remarks. George wondered why workmates in canteens often sat alongside each other, leaning over the trestle table with clunking cutlery - whilst the toffs in the "white collar" restaurant down the corridor would tend to sit opposite each other, conducting a conversation superficially structured, polite and civilised, yet a conversation which was fundamentally unadventurous. Those, like George, of a "blue collar" persuasion in the canteen would conduct more sporadic interchanges, unembarrassed by silences, veering from side to side between misunderstandings, teetering upon the edge of anger and recrimination, but always searching, probing, broaching subjects of deep workmanlike lore.
A true description. Not George's words, though.
In any event, the stand-up comedian was already preening himself on the makeshift stage, waiting for the mikes to go live. The theme music was tuning up, being played direct from Broadcasting House.
George's conversation began to misfire. He was settling into the egg and chips, his tongue finding it more and more difficult to unsnarl itself from the curdled fat. "Only yesterday,” he stammered , “Jean caught her fingers under the piano lid. We got that ol' joanna so that we can give our kids some sort of proper music ... to keep 'em up with the toffs. But it's all going to come to nowt..."
George's listening neighbour stared quizzically at his fork. A sliver of crinkle-edged eggwhite on its midspoke became almost a holy relic.
The comedian's patter tannoyed from the stage: "Oi! Oi! Guess what happened to me on the way to the factory? I met me ol' mate Wilfred Pickles. He said, 'Have a go, Joe!'"
A stooge with an outlandish clown's nose interrupted the comedian, bundling towards the upright mike: "But your name's not Joe, Joe!"
Raucous, uncoordinated laughter and banging of pudding spoons echoed around the starlights of the canteen's giant Meccano rafters.
"Give 'em the money, Brian!"
"I'm Barney, Mr Pickles, not Brian."
The last bit was repeated by the audience in rehearsed unison. And the timeless jokes rattled on through the air, followed by an unseen hand slowly running its fingers upon tingling keys which, finally, emerged from a million ghostly wirelesses in a million empty front parlours.
Then an announcement and timecheck in King's English.
In those days “brown study” meant a moment or two of deep meditation. George's brown study was workmanlike but with a deeper meaning than mere words...
He had been known for donkey years as a jolly good, all round egg - a dependable regular who often treated himself to an extra half on top of what he called his "medicinal" pint of best bitter. His missus sent him round to the pub, of course - and a more understanding spouse it was difficult to imagine, even though she had the ulterior motive of getting him out of her hair for an hour or two. So that she could listen to the wireless in peace.
Brian knew George quite well. It was Brian's brown study that used words in uncommon usage. He counted himself one of George's pals. A straighter fellow you'd go far to meet was George. He did the march-past on Remembrance Day. Just a shade over middle-age, when Brian first met him. George entering the Autumn of George's life with as much grace as it is possible to muster in such circumstances of what one could only describe as encroaching oblivion. Brian knew, when he got to George's age, he'd go to pieces, more like. So, Brian admired George's equanamity, as it were, his urbane nonchalance, his avuncular, if taciturn, charm. They often sat side by side in the works canteen.
George had grown-up children of his own, he told Brian, who visited him now and again, but not frequently enough for his liking. Still, George understood. Youngsters had busy lives, these days. They must have had commitments to others of their own age. Why should they concern themselves with "oldies like me"?
Brian would nod, not necessarily in agreement, but merely to acknowledge that he knew what George was saying. In fact, Brian had once been one of those "youngsters" who'd rather spend his time in a pub with relative strangers than visit his own folk in the Fen Country. It is peculiar how family ties can loosen up over the years. Brian had been a staunch loyalist to the clan back home - that is, until he left to go to the Big Smoke. Then, Brian had wondered why blood-links were so important. He could not be proper friends with members of his own family in normal life.
Thus unrooted, other people's ideas helped to raise Brian's two feet from the ground. He gained wordy ambitions. But, thank goodness, he spotted the danger signs before it was too late. He avoided being an intellectual by the skin of his teeth. Or at least he hoped so, and still does. Despite the words he uses to describe his thoughtful brown studies.
In those days, Brian positively had to sit at home in his digs, in those quiet moments of self-hypnosis, and convince himself that he was still one of the Fen folk, a home-spun youth who had no more in his top storey than the usual junk in trivial clutters. His mind flittered, at one moment, from almost philosophical exploration of his own thinking-patterns, then at another, to a perhaps forced colloquial remonstration against any such pretentious crap.
Anyhow, Brian does indeed remember George, that chap in the works canteen, that steadfast man in the pub who always insisted in having his beer in a straight glass. George often sat at what he called Old Joanna and jammed tunes straight through from ears to mouths. George. A good solid name for him. It couldn't have been invented better.
Then, the surprise...
It still surprises Brian to think of it. It wasn't exactly as if George had moaned, like others of his generation, about the young people of the day, like the lager louts and the self-seeking yappers in the City and the so-called football hooligans - and, of course, the ungrateful young blighters of George's own spawning who sat in their colour supplement lounges lined with mock bookspines, staring at endless suds on a flickering box.
No, George did not indulge in such diatribes, as Brian's own father did, for example. Brian's father swore blind that civilisation as he knew it was crumbling and the home-grown enemies were "worse than the bleedin' Nazis!" No, George was not quite like that. So, it should not have been a surprise when George came into the pub one evening with a ring in his left ear!
Brian's own father called lads with such jewellery "Nancy Boys" whom a few years "under the wing" of a sergeant-major on National Service would soon lick into shape. Therefore, for George to appear with his lobe threaded by that extraneous bit of metal amid his cronies in the pub Snug was quite unbelievable. One of the dead-eyed dart throwers who frequented this particular bar threw straight off the board, instead of the treble nineteen for which he was aiming. The landlord of the pub over-pulled a pint of Bitter, its froth disappearing into the system that later appeared as Mild.
"What's it for, George?" Brian asked, pointing to the ring that was of the type Brian remembered his mother calling a "sleeper" to prevent the pierced hole from fleshing over. George tentatively put a finger to his lobe, and smiled. Just that. At first, Brian thought about dropping the subject. But then he blurted out: "It suits you." George turned a brighter shade of crimson, as if he were about to have a stroke. It was as if the pubful of drinkers had received a message from a hidden force in the Universe, since everybody grew quiet as dead mice. Even the dart-throwers launched their arrows more gently into the cork. Words were useless. Even canteen-talk was out of the brown study window.
"Thank you, Brian," George eventually replied. "It's God's way of branding us his beasts of burden and to remind Him which is which."
Brian supposed if he'd looked closely enough at the ring in George's lughole, he would have seen a microscopic number etched. Indeed, George did not seem to notice he had caused quite a stir, but later that night, Brian dreamed a brown dream that the whole side of George's head had been embedded with a sculpture, a large star-shaped contraption that could have served as a tightly meshed drain-cover, and it sparkled in the putrescent pub lights. George was also wearing burnt umber shades, but more a lop-sided version of the hi-tech binoculars Dan Dare used to wear on the front of the Eagle comic.
George died peacefully in his sleep. His missus told the mourners this as they trooped into the terraced house to commiserate. "I knew," she said, "there was something peculiar when he didn't go to the pub for his usual pint." Which, in hindsight, was even more peculiar, since he had died the very morning after his last visit to the pub wearing the ear-ring. But none cared to broach the subject with his missus in the circumstances.
So, all George's friends, one of whom Brian was proud to number himself (the youngest, in fact), marched past his open coffin in the front parlour - a ritual moment of remembering and forgetting. That was the tradition, those days. They were relieved rather than surprised that there was no ring in either of his ears, nor any sign of piercing. Just a hint of a smile on George's steadfast lips. And no words.
That night Brian had another brown dream about George. This time, George being dead, the dream seemed realler than the one about the huge device that threaded his skull. This was dream was more in words than pictures: the first time a dream has come to Brian in this way. The way it told Brian about itself was that just beyond the deadish volcano of Noog, whereby the brown River Bandshow flows, lies the land of Wireless. Nobody knows of its existence except those, if any, who live there.
The houses move up Archer Hill, its central plinth, like turtles intent on breeding. Upon the brown brow of that hill squats the fort that was built to defend the town from any unlikely marauders and, within the fort, King George sits enthroned, if it is a throne indeed upon which he sits. He's become a surly man, with a brigand's moustache and ploughshared brows, staring unbelievingly into the middle distance with eyes that, if once steel blue, are now of seeping copper.
King George abruptly shouts and momentarily stirs from his own dream, a dream that is within Brian's dream; the pity of it being that there is nobody near to hear his shout except himself. He does not answer, retracting his tortoise-head into a new shell of convoluted dreams.
At no real distance from the fort, there is a courtyard, out of bounds to the townsmen, if townsmen there are. Its slabs are crazed over with moss-tracks that have long since created their own jigsaws of reality, so abstract and indefinable there are no further words to be used about them. No words at all.
The courtyard's periphery is bounded with high ancient walls, crested with jagged shards of brown beer-bottle glass that give to the bladdery sun a thousand versions of itself, many of which outlast the night that always seems to follow. If darkness be brown, then this night congeals faces rather than hides them.
The twists and turnings of the Old Town verging upon these courtyard walls are a maze which only one particular child can solve with paper and crayons one special Christmas morning ... and that child died several years ago anyway, its parents having earlier sailed off down the brown Bandshow, the last to leave Wireless before the final trap was sprung.
Within this maze of broken-signed inns and disused laundries, there stands the forbidding tenantless prison (identical to the fort in shape and design) into which the townsmen, if townsmen there are, yearn to enter, if they can only find its giant rusting keys, so as to complete the circle of curtailment; for they find the town walls are not prison enough for them.
One night, when the rusty stars themselves came down and dodged like fireflies between the skid-marked roofs, touching them with gildenspires, the patroller of the prison, known as Walkman, donned his night head-dress and skirted the walls of the King's fort, believing that this was the prison he was meant to frog-march round amid the toad shit.
Beneath his streaming hair, Walkman listened to the dead phones of night that threaded his curlicue ear-lugs and filled him with tight-fisted silence, to such an extent that he did not notice the crackling of the distant Noog volcano on the sky-line which was meant to have no guts left to honk. Nor did he hear the majestic fart from inside the fort - as loud as any coastguard's gun. King George had spoken. Too late, he had stirred for the very last time. A dying breath, that fart. His last word.
Thus, Walkman, the prison-keeper, did not hear the distant crashing of the prison walls. The rusty keys had finally turned against him. And all the townsmen, if townsmen there were, withdrew into a freedom of mere flesh constraints.
One firefly spark remained, its only hope being that Walkman would lead it beyond the bounds of Wireless. A stench still wafted from the fort, so vile it veiled the coming light of dawn; but Walkman could not sense it through the brown hangings of his nostrils.
The last firefly spark extinguished, as Walkman was spiked upon the jagged wall of his own body's protruding bones which, if he had cleared it, would have allowed him to leave Wireless.
The ultimate horror was that King George's dream-fetters remained upon him, even within death ... if it indeed was the King who was trapped inside his own corpse-keep, and not someone else called Walkman (or even Brian). And George landed into the nifty Fifties feet first and with a bit of a headache. He always felt a bit queasy after travelling through the time locks: there had been a big delay in 1939 and a rough ride until the relatively calm waters of 1945. Now, there was just the residue of war fever in the air, making his veins tingle - but, by putting his mind into a slower gear, he found he could take a panning shot of the Phoenix Eras that most remember as their childhood.
It is true to say that George was not a through and through sympathiser with the people he surveyed. He had been brought up outside of time, and it is rumoured beyond space too, as he had the mark of what some would call Jack the Devil in his face - piercing eyes of hidden depths - hooked nose with gaping bristly nostrils - chin jutting below a mouthful of corrugated teeth - and a tunic that had been innocently customised and derived from those commonly worn by certain members of Hitler's entourage in the two decades immediately prior to George's arrival back on the dry land of history.
The strains of "Oh, What A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts" were ringing from the British Legion Hall. Being Saturday night, most of the backyard houses had emptied out and resorted to the weekly social, for an attempt at re-living the camaraderie and bonhomie of the war years. "Roller bowler bowl, roller bowler bowl..." The singsong rang out into the benighted streets, along with the endless rattle of the tinkling joanna, everyone's favourite biddy pedalling hard to the tunes it played. One among them had evidently won the football pools.
George was frog-marching down the dark street eager for a bit of colour-injecting, whilst savouring the challenge of a new age. Things then were not black and white, as the newsreels depicted, but various shades of brown. And having been taught that there is nothing more modern than the present, he was surprised at the rather utility, makeshift appearance of the Fifties lifestyle. It needed, he thought, colour and slickness, together with an importation of firescreens from the theatres to the front parlours - fast information, fast food, fast sex, to prevent the wasting of a that scarce commodity called time. The streets needed light, the importance of which had been lost amid the air raid blackouts. Above all, words were needed, words worthy enough for worlds to wield.
As George marched, he dug up metal arms from between the roots of Earth, these having been sprung beneath the pavements in an alternate universe now encroaching on this one. He proceeded to raise them and illumine their topmost bulbs with his breath, also seeing fit to make them parallel with the goalposts etched against the horizon of allotments. Some were later to call that vertical. Give or take a few inches.
Yet, Brian suspected this was George masquerading as someone else, or vice versa, more likely. The suspicions were well-founded since Brian was the one who once sat disguised alongside George in the canteen, when George was truly George, not this hybrid George who had learned too many words from the future and who was brown-beaten and brainwashed with the Daz of coming times, when wirelesses would be tweeters and woofters. It was 9.10 a.m., on one of those aimless mornings most only just recall, and the opening bars of the "Housewives' Choice" theme spilled from the wireless into the parlour. George had forgotten for a while his role as burnisher of the inevitabilities of the latter half of the Twentieth Century. He had crossed, as only time travellers can cross, into a new way of life - put on a frock - and sang along with "Music While You Work" as he steam-ironed his unsuspecting wife's trousers.
Times already moved along predetermined channels - or had it all gone wrong already? Had George flitted on to another time, another place? Or did he eventually die an unnatural death caused by a shrapnel-crazed footpad in a blind alley behind the British Legion Hall - whilst the voices roared in crescendo: "Oh, What A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts..., Roller Bowler Bowl..., A Penny A Pitch..."?
In Brian's ears the song rolled on, but it soon faded into other times, other climes. And the night always came earlier in the Wastes. George had decided that he would live here, ever since he had lost a card-gambling match at the heart of Future City. He forsook all his worldly goods in one fell turn of the card: it had been make or break, and Destiny had come down on the side of the latter with an unequivocal conviction. George had suspected that Fate had always kept this one moment up its sleeve as a cheating trump card.
The shadowy hands had come out across the baize card-table: George had not dared look at the competing faces again, as the fingers had flickered like hungry tongues in the gas light, lapping up the denominations of currency into the mouths of their palms.
Inside his shack, with all the untamed sounds of night growing outside, he stared at that one playing card. It was before him on the green-felt fold-over table, the surface of which bore the stains of ill-eaten food, as well as the skid marks of angry copper coins. He had retrieved the Jack of Spades from that final game in Future City, as a souvenir. Not that he wanted to remember the cruel cut, but merely let it act as a warning symbol that no good could come of fighting against Destiny. Ear-marked by Fate.
The Wastes, a dark patch of land which must have once been several smallholdings of scrawny pickings, stretched from one particular nowhere to another ... though, nowheres, to George, were only such when compared to the once busy streets of Future City. Here there were simply abandoned smallholdings and shaggy-cabbaged allotments.
Outside the door of his shack, there sloped a disused football pitch, the wireless goal-post stumps daggering the sky's underbelly ... with crossbars long since dislodged by the near-miss goals of bad-loser ghosts, only teams by virtue of their insubstantial white strips. But divots of earth showed that such teams had once been more than just haunters of George's dreams.
Put a cross in the graph-paper box, he thought, if you feel that the result will turn out to be a tie. An "X" was also a kiss of lips so soft they reminded him of a love he had taken to his heart, only to find them an ownerless puckered mouth. Or an "X" is the mark of a mistake that his first true love (the teacher at infants school) had appended to his clumsy attempts at arithmetic. Or an "X" betokens the clothes exchanged and cherished for their frills and lace trims. But, hopefully, "X" marked the spot where he'd dig up Death.
George watched from his shanty window long after the dawn should have arrived, begging that neither team would score. He merely needed this particular draw to complete the jackpot on the coupon. But, then, he heard the distant braying of a mob in unison - the chant of "'ere we go, 'ere we go, 'ere we go" and "Roller bowler ball...", as an unlikely goal was put away by Destiny's striker, the net belling out with the trawling catch.
George felt his head to ensure it was still stationed upon the tee of his neck. It would soon grow light, he assumed, The Wastes would one day be a City again, he mused. Turning back to the Jack of Spades, it was like looking into a lady's funfair cosmetic hand-mirror. George’s head was perfectly poised, as Jack's shovel-ended club took its swing. Crowned him with one fell swoop. At least, George no longer needed to be trapped as this last survivor on a desolate brown pitch once called Earth. And, hopefully, Destiny had nowhere else left to dig.
Then, perhaps, reborn from primaeval mulch to live the life of Brian. Wireless and unplugged.
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Baffle (37)
Words are living creatures, which you can feel or suck or set moving with a literary motive force; they are insects flying in the headlight beams and splattering the windscreen in meaningful and meaningless geographies of collision, until the writer neatly ranks them as dead insects on the page like print.
Monday, November 20, 2006
Baffle (27)
It was difficult to decide between the left and right baffles. So, I looked straight ahead and saw the triffid squawking: its head a turban of petals. Begging me not to understand. Blinding me to the blinkers it wore.
Monday, November 06, 2006
Baffle (12)
Flabbergasted, the sound wave struggled through the next baffle, convinced it was light not sound. But not enough light to light truth as it hissed through gritted teeth it was gas.
Friday, October 13, 2006
Fanblade 9
=========================
The Final Fanblade Fable
Turn right at the last page – avoid the epilogue and then there are four leaves left. Blank leaves. Fly-leaves. Old-fashioned books often had blank fly-leaves fore and aft as a rather posh transition from the hard covers to the text itself. As a child, Hiver Jawn used to write on these fly-leaves because, in those days, real paper stationery was expensive. It also seemed more permanent, more satisfying, to append his thoughts within a hardcover book instead of in those bright shiny red exercise-books with tables of weights & measures on the soft back cover. He used to put his name with the address ending “England, Great Britain, Europe, World, Universe” proudly written in his neatest hand on the first available fly-leaf. It always started off neatly. Then a short poem over which he agonised:
“I am a visitor to this world
I love the haze that’s hurled
Between the poles of the earth
And I love both sadness and mirth
I love everything there is to love
I even love you, my sweetest dove.”
Then a few philosophical thoughts, such as:
“If God made everything,
Who made God?”
Then a story or fable by Jawn himself, often featuring Lemuel Gulliver who seemed to fit suitably into the smallest space possible as well as into the largest. Followed by Jawn’s childish signature as an imprimatur, a stamp of authority that everything he had written was sacrosanct (if increasingly less neat) and everlastingly memorable, recorded between hardcovers before one had reached the pre-printed title page proper.
He rarely understood the book itself. Even if it was abridged for children. It was above his head, in close-printed ranks of dead insects in their Sunday best. There was often a frontispiece: a colour-plate depicting Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday or a logger in Canada being stalked by a Red Indian. The book itself never matched the wonder and promise of the frontispiece. So he skipped all the pre-printed pages – all 256 of them – until there were four leaves left: blank but stained by patches of yellow foxing – and he seemed to feel he was desecrating something when he scratched his fountain-pen nib across in anger. His mother had just scolded him for messing up the book and he would be sent to bed early without tea – so he scribbled harder – the ink spluttering in all directions – before she could stop him.
Later, having salvaged the book from the bin, he was able to work out a monster’s face slowly emerging from the depth of his scribble on the last four leaves. He did not know then that this was a good likeness of his own face when he became really old. Jawn hoped he’d never be old. Never grown up. And, looking up to see if his Mother was close by, he scribbled over the scribble. But the scribbled monster was still there – a scribble behind the scribble.
Maybe he still owns that book today. A memory of his childhood. He can now read the pre-printed pages – even enjoy them. ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ by John Bunyan. He notices that there is a childishly drawn beard on the young man’s face in the frontispiece – a long and straggly beard – perpetrated with yellow crayon, because a grey one was not available.
If God made me, who made God?
And the Venetian blind rattled like a wind-spun fan. No leaves left. No blades left to hone.
============================================
The Final Fanblade Fable
Turn right at the last page – avoid the epilogue and then there are four leaves left. Blank leaves. Fly-leaves. Old-fashioned books often had blank fly-leaves fore and aft as a rather posh transition from the hard covers to the text itself. As a child, Hiver Jawn used to write on these fly-leaves because, in those days, real paper stationery was expensive. It also seemed more permanent, more satisfying, to append his thoughts within a hardcover book instead of in those bright shiny red exercise-books with tables of weights & measures on the soft back cover. He used to put his name with the address ending “England, Great Britain, Europe, World, Universe” proudly written in his neatest hand on the first available fly-leaf. It always started off neatly. Then a short poem over which he agonised:
“I am a visitor to this world
I love the haze that’s hurled
Between the poles of the earth
And I love both sadness and mirth
I love everything there is to love
I even love you, my sweetest dove.”
Then a few philosophical thoughts, such as:
“If God made everything,
Who made God?”
Then a story or fable by Jawn himself, often featuring Lemuel Gulliver who seemed to fit suitably into the smallest space possible as well as into the largest. Followed by Jawn’s childish signature as an imprimatur, a stamp of authority that everything he had written was sacrosanct (if increasingly less neat) and everlastingly memorable, recorded between hardcovers before one had reached the pre-printed title page proper.
He rarely understood the book itself. Even if it was abridged for children. It was above his head, in close-printed ranks of dead insects in their Sunday best. There was often a frontispiece: a colour-plate depicting Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday or a logger in Canada being stalked by a Red Indian. The book itself never matched the wonder and promise of the frontispiece. So he skipped all the pre-printed pages – all 256 of them – until there were four leaves left: blank but stained by patches of yellow foxing – and he seemed to feel he was desecrating something when he scratched his fountain-pen nib across in anger. His mother had just scolded him for messing up the book and he would be sent to bed early without tea – so he scribbled harder – the ink spluttering in all directions – before she could stop him.
Later, having salvaged the book from the bin, he was able to work out a monster’s face slowly emerging from the depth of his scribble on the last four leaves. He did not know then that this was a good likeness of his own face when he became really old. Jawn hoped he’d never be old. Never grown up. And, looking up to see if his Mother was close by, he scribbled over the scribble. But the scribbled monster was still there – a scribble behind the scribble.
Maybe he still owns that book today. A memory of his childhood. He can now read the pre-printed pages – even enjoy them. ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ by John Bunyan. He notices that there is a childishly drawn beard on the young man’s face in the frontispiece – a long and straggly beard – perpetrated with yellow crayon, because a grey one was not available.
If God made me, who made God?
And the Venetian blind rattled like a wind-spun fan. No leaves left. No blades left to hone.
============================================
Sunday, September 03, 2006
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Bloggamazy
Future blogs about my latest informal thoughts or diary-room entries are now to be moved to the Megazanthus blog linked here:
http://www.myspace.com/megazanthus.
Knottier narratives will resume their appearance on this Weirdmonger blogspot, meanwhile.
http://www.myspace.com/megazanthus.
Knottier narratives will resume their appearance on this Weirdmonger blogspot, meanwhile.
Friday, July 21, 2006
Extremity in Fiction & Prejudices
'Prejudice' is, for me, thinking you won't like it, i.e. before trying it or having tried something in the past which has put you off seemingly similar things since then.
There are perhaps separate concerns about extremity in Horror Fiction:
(a) What is or is not literature - and do you like it? (Concerns with intellectualism and how you see these things).
(b) Does extremity in horror fiction prevent the genre itself (which contains 'quieter' horror) being successful by prejudicing many readers against it. And does it create a 'vicious circle' of extremity outdoing extremity to the detriment of the genre?
(c) Regarding the narrow field of readers who already read horror fiction avidly, are some of them prejudiced against extremity (or against 'quietness' indeed as the other side of the coin) within a genre of fiction (literature?) they already love?
(d) How do aspects of (b) & (c) fit into one's own considerations of (a) and how they affect one's approach to (b) and (c) and one's general reading?
Re 'readers' above, this also applies to 'writers' and their own practice and prejudice.
*
Art is as necessary as food and air.
Extremity within the Horror Fiction area of Art is not necessarily necessary within any one particular work but extremity of any kind is necessary within the potential armaments of Art. You're not forced to read or view the results, but the potentiality to shock must be available. Humanity and human existence and the human mind hang on humanity's perceived frailties as well as its perceived virtues (and Art is the finest mirror (often significantly cracked) for these perceptions): otherwise none of it would be human.
======================
GENERAL
There have been many postings since I made this blog's topic list but I hope it serves a purpose as linked from HERE
==========================
There are perhaps separate concerns about extremity in Horror Fiction:
(a) What is or is not literature - and do you like it? (Concerns with intellectualism and how you see these things).
(b) Does extremity in horror fiction prevent the genre itself (which contains 'quieter' horror) being successful by prejudicing many readers against it. And does it create a 'vicious circle' of extremity outdoing extremity to the detriment of the genre?
(c) Regarding the narrow field of readers who already read horror fiction avidly, are some of them prejudiced against extremity (or against 'quietness' indeed as the other side of the coin) within a genre of fiction (literature?) they already love?
(d) How do aspects of (b) & (c) fit into one's own considerations of (a) and how they affect one's approach to (b) and (c) and one's general reading?
Re 'readers' above, this also applies to 'writers' and their own practice and prejudice.
*
Art is as necessary as food and air.
Extremity within the Horror Fiction area of Art is not necessarily necessary within any one particular work but extremity of any kind is necessary within the potential armaments of Art. You're not forced to read or view the results, but the potentiality to shock must be available. Humanity and human existence and the human mind hang on humanity's perceived frailties as well as its perceived virtues (and Art is the finest mirror (often significantly cracked) for these perceptions): otherwise none of it would be human.
======================
GENERAL
There have been many postings since I made this blog's topic list but I hope it serves a purpose as linked from HERE
==========================
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Nemophile becomes Weirdtongue
I've now written an alternative first chapter of this free novel-in-progress, one more in keeping with the new title of Weirdtongue.
It is here: HERE.
===========================
It is here: HERE.
===========================
Saturday, July 15, 2006
Proust and 'Magic Fiction'
For some weeks I've been trying to formulate a new literary term: Magic Fiction (as an obverse of Magic Realism). Today, I had a Road to Damascus: Proust's work is the ideal example of Magic Fiction. I am still struggling with the definition of Magic Fiction by the means of brainstorming.
A discussion thread (two pages) dwelling on these concerns: HERE.
====================
A discussion thread (two pages) dwelling on these concerns: HERE.
====================
Friday, July 14, 2006
the nemOphile
My next novel has just started HERE.
This will involve the Weirdmonger, Blasphemy Fitzworth and Padgett Weggs but I hope and intend that it will be more real-based and less wordy (no chance!) and less cosmic/wild than my previous novels.
This particular posting is, of course, apocryphal.
This will involve the Weirdmonger, Blasphemy Fitzworth and Padgett Weggs but I hope and intend that it will be more real-based and less wordy (no chance!) and less cosmic/wild than my previous novels.
This particular posting is, of course, apocryphal.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Magic Fiction (continued)
I used the expression ‘Magic Fiction’ as a sort of obverse of a more common expression: 'Magic Realism'. I think the greatest exponent of the latter is Salman Rushdie. Giving real world historic and contemporary events a magic quality that only fiction can accomplish.
But then, I recently read ‘Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell’ which I consider to be a major work of something quite different from Magic Realism. Somewhere in this massive book (a passage I can never re-find!) is a section about fiction itself being used as a magic weapon in a war. And I saw magic not as the usual ‘occult’ or ‘mysticism’ or ‘fantastical’ or a book of spells like anything ending –omicon. It was fiction magic … magic fiction. This is what I’m trying to tease out as a discrete and new element in fiction. Nothing weird, nothing paranormal, nothing thaumaturgical. Perhaps (hopefully) a New Magic that is quite rational.
This Road to Damascus was coupled and 'inspired' by my own work on "dream sickness" in my 2005/6 novels, and all the paradoxes that that experience created reinforced my desire to use fiction as a battle against, say, ‘bird flew’.
It’s worked so far!
But then, I recently read ‘Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell’ which I consider to be a major work of something quite different from Magic Realism. Somewhere in this massive book (a passage I can never re-find!) is a section about fiction itself being used as a magic weapon in a war. And I saw magic not as the usual ‘occult’ or ‘mysticism’ or ‘fantastical’ or a book of spells like anything ending –omicon. It was fiction magic … magic fiction. This is what I’m trying to tease out as a discrete and new element in fiction. Nothing weird, nothing paranormal, nothing thaumaturgical. Perhaps (hopefully) a New Magic that is quite rational.
This Road to Damascus was coupled and 'inspired' by my own work on "dream sickness" in my 2005/6 novels, and all the paradoxes that that experience created reinforced my desire to use fiction as a battle against, say, ‘bird flew’.
It’s worked so far!
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
The Candlemass Stories
GRASS
CANDLEMASS
CANDLEMASS (2)
LEFT FOOT
LEFT FOOT (2)
SNAIL TRAIL
SNAIL TRAIL (2)
SILLY AUTOMATIC
CLIMB DOWN EVERY MOUNTAIN
CLIMB DOWN EVERY MOUNTAIN (2)
THE MISSING ARROW
GRASS (2) or THE MISSING ARROW (2)
True Horror Art is out-of-season dusty Christmas baubles hanging in a sepulchrally quiet gallery or museum complete with rows of study-cubicles or carrels and then you realise the carrels are pews and one who was born at Christmas stares down at you from the roof.
EDIT: (February 2nd 2010 - Candlemass): CANDELARIA: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?p=38732
CANDLEMASS
CANDLEMASS (2)
LEFT FOOT
LEFT FOOT (2)
SNAIL TRAIL
SNAIL TRAIL (2)
SILLY AUTOMATIC
CLIMB DOWN EVERY MOUNTAIN
CLIMB DOWN EVERY MOUNTAIN (2)
THE MISSING ARROW
GRASS (2) or THE MISSING ARROW (2)
True Horror Art is out-of-season dusty Christmas baubles hanging in a sepulchrally quiet gallery or museum complete with rows of study-cubicles or carrels and then you realise the carrels are pews and one who was born at Christmas stares down at you from the roof.
EDIT: (February 2nd 2010 - Candlemass): CANDELARIA: http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?p=38732
Missing Visitor
Those of you have read past Part (21) of THE VISITOR 1974 may be interested to learn that a section of this part (The Story of The Red Ocelot) was inadvertently missed out from it. This has now been restored.
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