My Story

My story was a Mystery. That sounds glib, but it’s true. It turned up one day in my red Silvine memo book that I kept in the inside pocket of my jacket.  Nobody else had access to it. The handwriting, true, was similar to mine, but I could tell or thought I could tell that there was something about it that made it somebody else’s handwriting.  Imagine my puzzlement bordering on shock.  On a trip to the tall buildings of the capital, I silently read it to myself while sitting on an underground train between the Oval and Elephant & Castle. The lights flickered from time to time and, beneath me, the seat juddered. I had pulled out the memo book to find a telephone number.  Why here? My mobile wouldn’t work underground. Well, certainly not in the 1970s. Wait a sec. Nobody had a mobile in the 1970s.  I looked at it quizzically. Not much larger than a packet of 20 Senior Service. Suddenly, it trilled like a blackberry bird.  I had no idea what to do with it. I only remember this now as I’ve suddenly rediscovered my memo book again at the bottom of a drawer. It is now 2011 – and I hardly remember why I needed to go to London that day forty odd years ago. Perhaps I’d find a clue inside where I might have noted down some of my journeys for the disinterest of posterity.  I walk into the bright garden and sit in a ready-erected deck-chair. My story. Still a Mystery. It is couched in my handwriting of today, matured slightly from what it had been when I was younger.  Except there are some unattributable block capitals. Suddenly I heard a dying trill and felt a juddering and the sun flickered. THE END

Benny's Bingo

Benny had been in charge of the Bingo Hall for 42 years when it happened. In the early days, he was the caller of numbers: proud to set a modern trend by calling only the bare numbers themselves with no silly rhymes as had been the erstwhile rage. Then he had to have a throat operation to rectify all the wear and tear caused by the old smoke in the Hall.  He then couldn’t even hold a conversation with himself which he’d often voice alone. The Bingo Management  allowed Benny to stay on as manager – with his experience in keeping the books balanced and the balls lop-sided. He hired a buxom lady-caller – someone who spent her time floating on a deceptive mill-pond inside her mind and maintaining a fixed baggy look under her brow like the Lone Ranger’s mask.  She only came to life upon opening the mike and staring steelily at all the ancient ladies with their thickly indelible marking-pens and the rough coloured paper that the numbers were printed on.  “33 – Blonde and free;  55 – Sexy alive; 69 – Body wine; 77 – Bed in Heaven...” With all these innuendoes, Benny asked her (by handwritten note) to keep her numbers bare – no need to embroider them. But when she later slipped in a non sequitur: “42 – Rabbit Stew...” that was it for Benny. You see, Benny had a fatal attraction for Bunnies.

Shifting Vigils

        A: Who told them?

B: I can’t remember. It seems to be common knowledge.

A: Who are these people called common and who the hell told them!

B: Well, you nearly died. Something needed to be said, didn’t it? Somebody needed to be told. We needed to get your family together to say goodbye.

A: Huh! A death bed scene is not the ideal way in which I’ve seen myself dying. Certainly not when watched by that so-called family of mine.

B: So, you wanted to die suddenly in your sleep?  Or in a fatal accident?

A: Anything’s better than lingering.  .....Though, thinking about it, lingering would have irritated that family of mine more than finding my dead body in a bed. Hmm, perhaps a death bed scene would have been the best thing, a really looooong death bed scene, with the need for shifting vigils.  Shifting vigils, yes, I like that thought!

B: Lingering is something we all do I suppose ever since we were first born?  Lingering on the edge of something none of us can really explain.

A: I see life as a sort of pride before a fall.  The pride is a sort of denial about death. The fall, death itself.

B: Death, in whatever form it takes.

A: Death itself is a life thing. A sort of long painful life process. The state of death after death is not really death at all.

B: If there is a state of existence after death at all. Nobody has proved there is such a state, either by going there and coming back or fetching someone dead back. A lot of charlatans showing that state of existence ... exists – but there has never been any real scientifically rigorous proof.

A: Some say that a few people get so near to death, they experience or, at least, see in the distance what after-death experience looks like after they die. I believe that I have been very near to becoming that near – as near to the ultimate nearness as this gap between my finger and thumb.

B: Going back to what you said about pride. I find that quite interesting. Life as a phenomenon of pride: the ability to uphold or balance the precariousness of life. A pride in that confidence in balancing the unbalanceable. Or a confidence in that pride.   A confidence-trick.

A: Are my family still here?

        B: Yes, they’re all in the sitting-room next door.

A: Probably drinking all my drink, knowing them.

B: Drinking for some people is a way of underpinning that pride or confidence to balance life against death, I suppose.  Anyway, shall I bring them in, now?   I hope they will be able to see me or at least hear me call them in.

A: You mean fetch them back for the rest of the Wake?

B: Yes, the wake or the deep sleep?   The black pit of the deepest possible sleep or the wake left by some unknown tide of endlessness.

A:  Wake or sleep, deep or endless, they’re all the same to me now that life’s balance or pendulum has stopped swinging , stopped at least for me.

B: Ha! The Pit and the Pendulum.

A: The Pit and the Pride, more like.

B: The pity in the pride, more like.

Weirdtongue cruelly sawn, its stump pumping red

Horrasy, Horrasy, the Hawler's dead!

A Poetry of Proverbs

        .

        “Pride comes before a fall.”

“Do you think it’s dangerous, then?”

“Of course, it’s dangerous. Put one wrong foot wrong when doing something like that turns doing it at all into the wrong foot itself and then you’ll have fallen into that huge black pit some call death.”

“You were always so damn poetic! It’s just that if I don’t try I shall never succeed. I know I’m good at it.  I think I’m in fact the best in the world at it.”

“How many people have tried it before you? You can only be the best at something if others have also done it and done it badly. Being the only one to have done it does not mean you are the best, because someone else may be better at it than you, but has not been bothered or foolhardy enough to do it.  And I’m not trying to be ‘damn poetic’ there, as you put it. Just realistic.”

“You always had a flowery turn of phrase.  ‘Poetic’ was the wrong word. Poetry is cleverer than mere floweriness. I don’t want you to think I’ve ever thought you clever at anything! Ha Ha.”

“Point taken, Sandy! Oh, hello, John, I didn’t hear you come in. Sandy and I are talking about her doing it at last. What do you think. Pride comes before a fall? Or only fools can get near enough to joke with death? Ha ha. I like proverbs, even if they don’t mean anything!”

“Yes, I heard what Sandy said to you. No wonder she’s now blushing. Errr. A blush in the cheek is to brush the cheek of death.  That’s another new motto for you!”

“John, you know full well that Peter hates the thought of me doing it. You could at least give me some encouragement.”

“Give you some encouragement to die, Sandy? Is that what you’re asking me to do?”

“Well, if you know that I’m bound to try doing it, whatever you two say, your encouragement is better than your discouragement. You’re only wanting to feel less guilty if it all goes wrong by discouraging me when you simply know I am definitely destined to do it.  Encouragement may help me do it successfully. Discouragement may increase the risk of me failing. Think of it logically. .... Peter!  What are you doing? Let go of my wrists!  John, what are you going to do with that rope?”

“It’s for your own good, Sandy.”

“Yes, Sandy. Sorry. We’re being cruel to be kind.”

“But what’s that! MMMMMMMMMMMMMMM...”

“Well, that’s that then, John.”

“Did we really need the gag as well? She can hardly breathe. She could only have done what she intended to do with her hands. Well one of her hands, really.”

“The writing or typing hand?”

“Yes, or the hand that draws a thin blue line in the sand against false criticisms. Ha ha.”

“But the gag is for her own good, too. She might have been able to shout loud enough for her critics to hear!  They might be lurking next door with their evil tangles of unspooling threads!”

“Yes, but they might be able to read her mind, though, even at a distance. Things can pass over vast areas these days with all that damn webbery in the air!"

“Yes, you’re right. We’d better finish the job. We don’t want them knowing that she intended to publicly complain about the nature of their reviews of her novella, do we?  That would have been dreadful. Something worse than death, in fact.  Critics hate being criticised. They’d chase authors into Hell itself, rather than put up with being criticised themselves.”

“So, if death can’t put a halt to it, then, there is no point in following a gagging with a deadly daggering, as they say. It’s best just to let her experience near-death as long as possible till her mind goes awol and she forgets or wipes clean that she was utterly determined to complain in public about their devastating reviews. They can’t possibly read an empty mind. Lingering longer abashed is better than precarious pride." 

“Yes, give Sandy till Autumn, I say.  A mind in endless fall is worth a million fell swoops.”

“MMMMMMMMMMMM...”

DIALOGUE - A Near-Death Experience

.

"Who started this?"

“I didn’t. I think it was you.”

“Well, I can’t remember anything before you said you have been deceiving yourself your whole life.”

“I can’t remember talking about self-deception. Didn’t you mention that you had started to love Johnny – for his sake, not yours?”

“I don’t think that’s anything to do with self-deception.”

“I do. You think you love Johnny only because he has got used to you loving him and your withdrawing it now would make you unhappy because it would make someone you once loved become very unhappy, so you have blotted out that you really have stopped loving him, and so you actually feel that you still love him as a consequence of something I can only call a subconsciously induced self-deception.”

“Look at me, do I look like a liar?”

"Well, no proper liar looks like a liar. I see a woman who has blonde curls turning slightly to grey, still pretty, and a personality that has made you my best friend since before... Well, I don’t think there was ever a time when you weren’t my best friend.  Our mothers wheeled us side by side when we were babies, don’t forget.  As far as I know, you have never lied. Except, that is, perhaps, those lies you tell yourself.”

“Johnny was your boy friend first, don’t forget. Don’t you think there was some element of deceit on my part during that period of him leaving you for me?”

“No. It was a natural process. I was never suited to Johnny, nor he to me. You did us both a favour.”

“I haven’t told you this before. But I seduced Johnny.  My intention was to steal him away from you. I had no idea you weren’t suited to each other....”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. I’m glad I’ve got it off my chest now. Perhaps you have deceived yourself that you weren’t suited to each other when you discovered he loved me more than he loved you.  I’m sorry.  Truly sorry.”

“Why tell me now?”

“I don’t know. And while we are on the subject. When we were in our pushchairs, parked next to each other on Market Hill outside Tesco, I stole your rattle.”

“I don’t remember."

“Perhaps because I was slightly older?”

“Hmm.”

“Old enough in fact to lean over and release the brake on the backwheel  of the pushchair... Are you listening? ... But I didn’t actually release it, but only very nearly did. ........ Where’s Johnny?”

From the Hearth

First published in the anthology BENEATH THE GROUND edited by Joel Lane (Alchemy Press 2003)

FROM THE HEARTH by DF Lewis

Only those who follow the story can understand how frightening the road they tread.  Susanna understood this when it was too late.  Following the road, she found it became a tunnel where the sky was worse than Hell.

            Today, though, she often wondered why the actual road where she lived was lower than the rest of them in an otherwise flat Essex town.  Whilst standing at its top corner, she could still see a range of chimneystacks sloping down into distance.  Perspective was everything.  Even the past had perspective.  She was a wild-witted girl of whom advantage could easily have been taken, had it not been, in those more innocent times, for an over-protective step-father.  An industrial working-class town where heads often nested in honestly persil-clean pillows, heads that sweetly squeaked and squawked, pretending that their bodies only existed for fondling.  Susanna's family was close-knit half the time, wildly ill-suited the rest.  Dysfunction with a purpose.  They tried to thrive on leisure, despite the work ethic that awaited them once they crossed the threshhold of the front doorstep straight on to the blurred chalk of the road's hopscotch lines.  Susanna's menfolk drew dole as if it were a throwaway sky-line where even angels (with oodles of self-righteousness) floated around painting pastel-shaded frescos upon otherwise ugly weather fronts.

            Tom was her half-brother.  Grizzled and grown-down to a tussock from a promising start as a stripling.  Pamela her real mother.  And, yes, her step dad, Donald, the one with the wide whiskers and wraparound beer brims.  His hat, too, was larger than life.  Played the snooker balls as if they were dam busters.  Which reminded Susanna that Tom was currently outside in the road scuffing his best shoes with yet another game of football amid his gnarled cronies of childhood.  Often kicking around a bristly youth called Hugger or, if Hugger were not available, a knurled mini-millstone—enough to jar even willowy calf-bones.

            Susanna had only a few god-given graces.  Anyway, lacking a finish to her breeding began to serve a purpose when her best friend happened to become a certain Lucy, a coincidentally separate individual, albeit one with sufficient similarity to engender inseparability.  Lucy was a red-eyed droopy-lip of a wench who seemed rather resentful of having only one best friend in the shape of Susanna.  Both yearned for the more meaningful companionship of the proud-looking sporties in an older class—those who wore gymslips like flags of war.  After all, it was wartime, and the most patriotic spirit in those days resided within such middle-of-the-road communities.

            Susanna and Lucy, therefore, by lack of other influence, were gradually attracted towards darker, direr affairs than polishing boys' faces.  Susanna had inherited, through some miscegenate unaccountability, books and papers from step-dad Donald's attic, an attic which seemed deeply unvisited because nobody else knew of its existence either by angle of exterior roof or potential of perspective.  Brother Tom and step-dad Donald had spoken of it, though, as if they suspected the existence of realms beyond man's understanding—spoke of it in barely audible words of one syllable (most of them mispronounced).  Yet, with inadvertent intention, the two girls were somehow directed towards this attic where they were to discover mouldy documents speaking of worlds even lower than the basement—a dark sphere of imputed eeriness more in keeping with the Gothic Humours than the workmanlikeness of the local trades.  Both girls were remarkably precocious as far as the written word was concerned if not in the more spoken sides of their physical nature.  The itches they needed to scratch they did more by reflex than salaciousness.  Their singing in unison was perfect. 

            In any event, some particularly mouldy words in the attic's documents spoke of toad creatures harbouring themselves beneath the town's China Factory ... stating that some of the more decorative crockery was based on fitful sightings of these creatures, creatures that had recently drawn too near the surface.  The fact of the factory workers' children being sent away, soon afterwards, was both a mystery and an all-too-clear sign that sirens were about to wail of war.

            The toad creatures, of which the attic's mouldy configurations told, were nurse-like to the bottom of their Earthen natures—so much so, the two girls yearned to visit them and gain an inkling of how properly to nurture others.  They did not want to grow up into the thrusting womenfolk they might otherwise have been destined to become during the more modern future. 

            At first, they delved along the road's alleyways that—according to the tracks the attic's tract told them to tread—traced a downward path, below the basement, to where the bravest toad creatures were said to prick their ears.  Susanna and Lucy tried to crack jokes and enact a life of hockey-sticks and mild matriculation to ward off any encroaching eeriness.  They had, indeed, since our first acquaintace with these two girls, become delegate Prefects at school—against the very base natures coursing through their inherited veins.  Both step-dad Donald and brother Tom had, independently, long since vanished on imagined forays in North Africa or towards the Antipodes.   Mother Pamela boiled soup interminably, often misrepresenting it as stew—a fact which caused Susanna to suffer from imputed anorexia before its time.  Lucy, too, loved to suffer with her friend and, thus, refused the more filling platefuls at her own home so that she could share the scraps and swill which mother Pamela dished up on faded and chipped crockery.  This thinness of diet, it was reported, allowed the two girls to squeeze through gaps others couldn't even see.

            There was a local belief which was so very local it was held solely in that part of the town or, even, just in Susanna's road itself.  Up was down.  Down was up.  Then was now.  Now was then.  Admittedly, it was the loose-lipped gossip of a belief which, perhaps, nobody fully construed.  This belief was often voiced abroad when digging the local allotment; probably in preference to War Talk proper which, as primary sources maintain, often did cost lives during that inimitable make-do-and-mend era.  It was as if Faiths grew and flourished from the very chimney smoke.  The cleaner the flues, the more that clarity prevailed.  The sootier, though, to the point where the smoke was close to becoming tangible curds of tar, crazy extrapolations were spoken with the straightest possible faces.  The darker it was, the dafter the beliefs became.

            It has already been known that there was a boy called Hugger—a village idiot with no village to call his own.  He saw two extremely thin girls but wondered whether he was seeing double because, in his eyes, different parts of the town shimmered out of perspective with each other and most roads felt as if they were already underground.  He promised to accompany them, on the final foray, after several dress rehearsals, to the very cellar where he told himself (if in different words) that the tops of some of the toads were embedded in the concrete like turnips.  How Hugger knew about the mouldy parchment in Susanna's attic was never satisfactorily explained but that was because the girls forgot they had already told him to keep this a secret, there being a requirement for someone else to keep the secret to make it a better secret, a secret worth keeping.  The more who knew the secret ... well, there was an optimum level before the secret was officially out.  And there being three of them was certainly enough to make it a secret more secret than most.  By leading them down, Hugger was merely re-enacting a story he thought he'd already been told.  This was where the frights let themselves be known, irrespective of any force wielding such frights.  Fear came from not being warned or even propely made to be afraid.  Fear was strongest where there was nothing of which to be afraid.  It can be sensed only in words, not in deeds, activities or even threats.  Especially not in any real atmosphere of darkest horror.  Intimations of a wicked reality were scarier than even that wicked reality itself could be.  And the sense of fear grew and grew, merely as the words grew and grew, as Hugger, in the guise of a Sweep, led his water babies down to a deep cellar of chimneys-tops, their pots sticking up from the ground whence cataracts of smoke churned and choked.

            "Hold my hand, Hugger."

            Susanna could hardly see him in the gloom beneath the imputed floorboards.  Lucy could hardly see her own face in front of her hand.  Hugger could see neither of them—though often he lived up to his nickname and gave them childish sooty cuddles to guarantee their presence.  He had shown them how to lift the trap which revealed the dizzy steps and, wordlessly, he made them follow through ... a quest which, until they knew its meaning, held no meaning at all.

            "Toad creatures, they are what the attic mould foretold," thought Susanna.  Lucy even said it ... with a short sharp laugh to relieve the impending terror ... but Hugger was uncharacteristically quiet, his hunched shape growing darker and darker as it led the way ... holding the sweet fingers he thought to be a girl's. 

            Earlier, the three of them had gone into a huddle and discussed the quest.  If this is being heard (as opposed to being read), one may already have overheard their mindless, middling lightness of laughter.  The words were spoken in between, as if learned parrot-fashion from someone more omniscient than themselves:

            "There seems to be an awesomeness, almost a religion..."

            "Yes, yes, the war has angels you know ... many think they see them in the sky as if the gas ovens give birth to birds as well as to dry stews..."

            "What's all that to do with the toad creatures, Hugger?"

            He turned and spoke as if he spoke for the very first time: "The attic mould must have blotted the paper there ... and 'toad' may have to be read as 'road' to get the full sense."

            "Road creatures, Hugger?"

            "Yes, Man is naturally the wanderer, the refugee..."

            Susanna and Lucy nodded in unison.    The talk went on for hours.  Mother Pamela could be heard shifting beds upstairs.  The monochrome snapshots of step-dad Donald and brother Tom in their gold-tooled holders glinted in the semi-blackout which the world still allowed.

            Meanwhile, the trio of shadows—bordering on silhouettes—delved deeper into the bowels of the road.  Hugger knew he was almost alone.  His mind came to the forefront, if only by some false perspective.  Always destined to be the protagonist, he drew sympathy and identification.  Hugger was a hero, not an idiot.  The girls were just two of the Song-Lines he followed.  He loved their legs and the growing shapeliness of their being.  He had watched them fondling each other, when they thought nobody could see.  Love was often like that.  He wondered, as a strange non-sequitur, about the aboriginal heart of the matter ... as he negotiated the lowest reaches that Mankind could ever reach without Hell itself kicking in.

            The darkness was wet to the touch.  The girls had now re-established themselves with a growing provenance, relegating Hugger to a corner of their consciousness.  The ground was littered with human heads, the blackness blurring their various racial leanings.  The girls somehow knew, without being told, that the rest of bodies below the heads were embedded vertically below even this furthest reach of surface existence, their various legs stretched out in wide frozen stride or mean limp.  The girls watched Hugger start kicking these heads to check how well the necks prevented them from becoming separate footballs.  The resultant cracks, throbs, bleats and squelches thankfully filled the girls with more wholesome thoughts, visions, even, of the toad creatures they'd originally hoped to see—honest-to-goodness horrors which would have made them shudder with mere fright or simple disgust

            Susanna woke with a start.  A siren wailed far off.  The first of many.  She heard Tom, Donald and Pamela scuttling to the basement air-raid shelter.  But she stayed in the safety of her own bed, hugging her knees as if that would ward off an inevitable past.  Flashes, as if passing under chimneys of light in an otherwise endless tunnel of nightmare, made her dark shape fitfully invisible.  Lucy had failed to return to any degree of visibility at all, however.  Never hugged her own curvy ley-lines.  Never been told the frightening story in the first place.

            Listen, though, and you will hear your own black heart.  You don't need ears for that.

Breaking Dawn (2)

The first voice: “Every time I wake up I feel awfully anxious, but it tends to get better during the day, as other things take my attention.”

The second voice: “I’m the same, really, and it plays havoc with my stomach. I can’t even face dry toast first thing, but I try to force it down as I hear it’s good for nervous acid.”

The first speaker was hidden by the shaft of sunshine – like a heavenly girder sloping through the window – as she (evidently a ‘she’ from the voice) now made a point of ceasing her belly-aching from the armchair: 

“But it’s so much nicer with the sun out, and there are so many even worse troubles at sea. Other people have to put up with things far more serious than my own worries, I always tell myself.”

The second speaker was equally unseen because I seemed to be looking through his eyes (evidently male not only judging by the voice but also from my view of the trousers on his legs which were just above my lowest sight-line).  He spoke with a slight slur. A bit early in the morning for that, I thought, as the sun was surely not yet over the metaphorical yard-arm.   

“It doesn’t help me,“ he said, “when i think of other people’s troubles. They cannot have any effect logically on how I feel about my own troubles.  Millions are currently dying at this very minute in the world, some naturally, some violently, some peacefully, others in pain. What possible bearing can those unknown deaths have on me.  Anyway, I agree that a nice day helps...” 

I looked along with him towards the breaking dawn, as the single sun-shaft twirled around swirling dust-motes and around the now real, if impressionistic, face of the woman in the armchair, as she spoke again:

“Pain can be shared, pain should be shared.”

And the face’s impression became even less defined by the light-filled raindrops from its eyes.  Sadness without gravity.

And the dawn had finally broken. Broken within or from my own eyes, too.

My faltering voice had already broken.  Broken for good.  Dry as unspreaded toast.

Breaking Dawn

It came as a shock that Avian Influenza was back in the breaking news.  It was the day I made a visit to the National Gallery not far from where I lived in London.  I wasn’t entirely sure whether it housed ‘The Laughing Cavalier’ and, if I had a computer, a computer that actually worked, I could have looked it up I suppose before I went.  One fact of which I was sure, however, was that ‘The Laughing Cavalier’ was not the painting’s correct title; it had been christened that by some future Victorian lady.  Its eyes (or, rather, his eyes) not only follow you around the room, they also follow you, perhaps, through time itself.  A knowing, smirking look that told each one of us something. Something like: trust in me and I’ll save you. Or: I am nothing but chemical pigments, so despair!

Dawn was breaking, like a Turner, before I reached Trafalgar Square. The taxis looked as if yellow yolk had spilled all over them. It made me think this wasn’t London at all, but a  different city that did not otherwise exist. I was driven by some unknown purpose. Taken a sickie from work. It was almost as if I then thought that ‘The Laughing Cavalier’ was a form of lucky charm, a talisman in tangible form, to ward off the onset of doom.  Whatever else it might have said with its eyes. 

I imagined a chicken soul. A tiny spirit of existence that was obsessed with eggs.  The dawn by now had become slugs of orange marmalade crawling along the roof-ridges and draping the top of Nelson’s Column (i.e. Nelson himself) with pithy residue from God’s lemon-squeezer.

I cursed. I could see the Gallery was not yet open. Foolishly, I imagined everyone else had, like me, been up for hours.  It felt like lunchtime to me.  I asked a passer-by whether the Gallery contained ‘The Laughing Cavalier’ because, if not, I would be able to kill time with a task satisfyingly useful: like tracking it down elsewhere. I was ignored as if I were considered 'persona non grata'.  With some dismay, I suddenly realised the painting might not be in London at all. But in some upstart city like Amsterdam or Madrid. Upstart. The word had ‘art’ in it! I laughed with self-mockery as I opened my earlier packed lunchbox while sitting near the stone lions and the fountains.

Swarms of pigeon-life swooped around in synchronised patterns because some tourists illegally scattered breadcrumbs for them in the square. That reminded me that the news had only broken late yesterday, the news about the re-awakening of Avian Influenza or H5N1 as some called it. Many of these torurists may not even have heard about it. I liked the expression Bird Flew. I laughed again. This was no laughing matter. When you eventually read this and see how I spelt ‘Flew’, you won’t laugh, either. Unless you never  get to read this...

Eventually, I saw the doors of the National Gallery being opened. Dawn, had, by now, finally broken.  And the oranges and yellows were slowly fading to grey.  Like a painting that had sat too long in the sun. Hung in a window that got too much exposure to the prevailing heat of a long hot summer. I replaced the uneaten Marmite sandwich in my box and I called across to one of the Gallery wardens standing on the outside with a cigarette in his mouth.

“The Laughing Cavalier?”

“Wallace Collection,” he shouted back.

I shrugged.  At least the wings’ communal shadow might protect this painting of the city from the desiccations of light. Its moving column of darkness following wherever I looked.

(written today and first published here)

The Pilot Looked Round

The stiff key – or what I thought to be a stiff key – became sticky in the lock and bent out of true as I tried to turn it.  The place I was trying to unlock seemed more like a barn than a cottage but I had already convinced myself – based on earlier-read literature – that it was comfortable inside. Well, as a cheap place for a weekend break, pretty basic, but still acceptable with a real bed.  No need for heating at this sticky time of the year, I thought, as, despite having bent out of true, the key released the tumblers one by one in slow motion sound. 

Inside was dark. No lights.  I cursed as the switch by the door made no difference at all – not even a short-circuit flash. Despite the lateness of the hour, there was still enough natural vision to read the notice just inside the door: “The pilot is under the sink in the kitchen”. This was the shorter of two notices. The other one was full of small print relating to the temporary tenancy. 

I presumed it meant the pilot light. 

I lingered for a while looking back through the open door at the wonderful view of rolling hills. I found the key still in my hand – strangely in two bits, as if I had just carried out, absent-mindedly, my own version of a Uri Geller trick of softening metal with the will-power of my tender fingertips.   I’d better find the pilot light under the kitchen sink before it was too dark even to find the kitchen.

The rolling hills had merged with the twilit sky even as I gazed at them back through the open door. The moon had carved its horn-shape into Heaven’s ebony under-roof. Words that had taken over my mind, as if I were a poet, not someone who had very little vocabulary before entering this edifice of text, let alone the holiday cottage or pitch-black barn. 

I felt my way along the wall, meeting protuberances that I would not care to describe or guess their nature despite my increased word-power to do so.  I desperately tried to stop my new gift of imagination running away with itself.  Normally, I could not even imagine anything beyond my immediate selfish needs. 

Eventually, I found what I guessed to be the kitchen – judging by the smell of rank food. But then I stumbled into what could only be described as a bed. Soft covers – too soft – my fingers going through the material and its under-stuffing with uncomfortable ease.  But then I found the sink – drip, drip, drip, said the tap – so loudly I wondered how I hadn’t heard it before now. Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle, said the drain beneath the open plug. I bent down to open the cupboard where I imagined the u-bend to be.  Even if I found the pilot-light, how would I ignite it? With a hiss of flame or the mere click of a switch – as the whole place would hopefully, at best or at worst, spring into flumes of gaseous gloom, a gloom capable of outshining the darkness that had by now set in with an impenetrable shroud, thick enough to touch. 

I saw the back of someone’s head under the sink, strangely luminous with smooth brylcreemed hair glistening off the reflection from my eyes, eyes still storing depletions of hillside sun that I had kept inside the hump of my own head.  Slowly, that head looked round – as if on a revolving plinth like one of a seaside array of novelty clowns. 

I struck a sudden match, snapping this unexpected find in two, but not before allowing the flame to ignite one of the nostrils – and bright red eyes broke open not only from the head in question but from scores of other heads around the walls like Hallowe’en pumpkins.

This was not going to be a holiday easy to forget, I thought, my absent mind now returned to simple words and simple thoughts. I was ever the simple soul...

In the glowing blood-light, he staggered back to the disintegrating plumpness of the bed-covers – tired of the dreams. He twisted the key in the lock and let sleep do the rest.

Shifting Sands

When the sands started shifting I knew it was the end.  But to know anything is an end one needs to exist beyond that end to be able to see it for what it is – or was.  That day I met Edna was one such end – as well as beginning. Beginnings and ends can be very close indeed and still keep their identities either as a beginning or an end. Beginning: the sight of a vehicle looming from the corner of your eye – middle: collision – end: death.  All in a few seconds. Except, from what I said earlier, death as an end is not an end in itself unless you view it from afterwards as an end.  Therefore, death is not an end.  It’s something else altogether. An end’s end, perhaps. But not the end.  Not an end in itself.  Not an end you saw as a whole process of a verifiable end after it has ended. And only you can verify it. Anyone else verifying it is merely hearsay.

Before I get you too confused, I’d better tell you more about Edna.   She was sitting on one of those many back-support bench-type seating-arrangements of ribbed solid plank-wood that are plentiful along the promenade looking out to sea. Not that the bench itself looks out to sea, but the people sitting on them.  The protruding pier just off to the right. 

A middle-aged woman (with no name at that stage). Too young for me, and I didn’t really think it appropriate for me to engage her in talking so I prepared to walk on. But then I heard a helicopter off to the left – outlandish clattering growing louder and louder – presumably the air ambulance or a coastguard patrol. It was so low I feared it was going to ditch, but it eventually clattered off towards Jaywick, with no obvious reason for its manoeuvres in hindsight.  I looked back to the bench and Edna had vanished, presumably lost forever in the ocean of strangers with which the world is mainly populated. Some of that ocean is close by in your own neighbourhood, the rest in far reaches of the world you will never ... reach.  A literally man-made ocean with its own inexplicable, often dangerous, tides across cockle-beds or shingle or ribbed beach or sieved granulations or rocky coral.  

But in addition to that ocean of strangers there are usually local inlets or lakes or rivers of non-strangers. Friends or lovers. Colleagues or drinking pals. People you know or have met however briefly  – even just seen in the distance.  Like Edna.  

Thinking about her, Edna probably doesn’t count as a real meeting or encounter, because she would have had to look at me, too. Just an exchange of passing glances would have sufficed for it to have been qualified as a proper encounter. But, as far as I was aware, I had looked at Edna, but she had not turned to look at me. 

As I continued my walk along the promenade towards the pier, I started musing again about Edna. Suppose she had looked at me while I was preoccupied by the noisy manoeuvres of the helicopter? I can’t imagine that would have been the case as I guess everyone was looking at the helicopter at that stage rather than at each other. But that is only a guess. Edna may have scrutinised me closely, even at some length. The incident with the helicopter, I now recalled, lasted at least a few minutes.  Time enough for Edna to get as close as a couple of dancers about to embark on a waltz at the local palais. Skin-pore close. 

I shook my head and shrugged.  I was getting carried away.  The relationship with Edna had begun and ended with my pointless glance of appraisal at a nameless middle-aged woman sitting alone on a bench looking out at sea.  There I go again. A bench doesn’t look out at sea. It’s the people sitting on it that look out at sea. Watching the tide come in and out across the rattly shingle. Wondering which tide would be the last one. Which cloud in the sky the last one that you would ever see skimming above? Feeling eyes boring into your back, and not daring to look round. 

Shingle isn’t like shifting sands. But my lap rucks oh too easily without even daring to move the bent knees within it.  Not daring to move is equivalent to being on the brink of it being impossible to move.  To move or turn. Ever upon the quicksand of hesitation. Ever on the benchmark of differentiating trial and error. Ever upon each edge of the end.   

The tide faintly sweeps in like some soft machine.

A Vignellarette

A Vignellearette is a short prose fiction exhumed and /or edited from the past by the serendipitous / synchronous needs of the present.

Haunted Manor

They lived here for real many centuries ago. Today, they are ghosts. Right now, under my nose. Or, rather, if the truth is known, they live for real today and many centuries ago their ghosts lived here. Real people as the eventual fulfilment-in-flesh of their earlier ghosts. In many ways, that seems to be the most logical order of things. For centuries, people have believed we precede our ghosts, while all along ghosts preceded us.  But that begs a question – where is here? It is Haunted Manor on the road between Colchester and Chelmsford – once well known for receiving visitors on day trips, but, today, a near-forgotten hulk where the old family – now on hard times – manages to cling on. I am their only member of staff: a man-with-many-tricks-of-the-trade, they call me. A do-it-all who haunts the Manor in body, mending broken things and, if the truth be known, breaking things so that I can mend them again. Indeed, I do jobs not only for the old family but also for the even older one – trying to match up the old with the less old when and where they happy to coincide in the same part of the Manor. That’s what I call mending things: introducing people to themselves – across time. 

You may wonder whether I have managed to coincide with myself across the centuries in the Manor that haunts the older version of itself. Except when it was older, it was, of course, newer. Which goes for us all, I guess. And tonight is the night when I shall mend myself. I shall discover the broken body with the knife I placed into its chest so very long ago. And then I shall slowly, ever so slowly, withdraw the knife – trying not to hurt him, watching the smile return to his mouth before I can even realise he is trying to smile – trying to smile at me. And as he does so, I feel tears arrive in my eyes – and I plunge the same knife into my own chest. And the noise of traffic from the A12 slowly fades.

(Unaltered off-the-cuff speed-writing exercise at the Clacton Writers Group tonight.)

Two Cans of Lager and a Packet of Crisps - II

The man walked into the pub. It was just an ordinary day and he had no reason to think otherwise. To be called ‘the man’ rather than by his own name was rather extraordinary, however. Not that he felt himself to be part of a story as an anonymous man. He felt real. He wanted a drink. Felt it in his undeniably long unquenched thirst. The person he was with wanted a drink, too, the man somehow knew. And a few crisps wouldn’t go amiss. A foregone conclusion that they’d share a single packet with their drinks. He walked to the bar and asked for two cans of lager and, of course, a packet of crisps.  Except he garbled ‘lager’ and it came out as some other word closer to another word for a secret or private language. 

“Cans?” queried the pub landlord. “What do you mean, cans?” 

The man was stumped. He had not expected such a reply. It seemed very important, indeed life and death, to receive cans of lager that they could pour for themselves into empty glasses.  The precision dismantling of each tab with a ‘sizzz – sizzz’ was something almost ritualistic.  Something that they had already done and here they were  - purely to fulfil having already done it. So watching lager being served in any other way was like an act that would likely cause the world to end. 

Another man – during all these singular thoughts from the man already thinking them – had by now arrived at the bar, not the now missing person whom the first man had originally been accompanying, but someone else altogether, someone utterly new, someone with a badge indicating he was a lover of - if not an expert on - real ale. A CAMRA member, in fact.  He already had his own clean empty glass, with a design on it from some beer festival.  In fact, given the absolute truth, this was not a pub at all but a beer festival in a church hall.  The first man had assumed it was a pub because there were all these people – mainly other men – standing around gripping straight glasses swilling with all manner of room-temperature strains of brown, tan and near-black.

Our first man wanted a dimpled glass anyway. One with a handle.  Life and death.  The world would stop spinning if he was forced to drink from a straight glass. 

“What’s CAMRA mean?” he asked the other man, while inspecting his badge. 

“It’s a word meaning a room you can’t get out of. You must have heard of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play IN CAMRA?”

At that point, the person who had arrived with the first man was suddenly aware of his own existence in a room full of others he did not recognise and who stared at him upon him suddenly appearing as if out of nowhere where nobody had stood beforehand.  

He wanted to know what possibilities there were.  What choices he had.  What he could do.  He assumed he must know who he was but if he’d thought hard about it he would have realised he had no idea who he was at all.  Who am I?  A question he did not even begin to ask. 

But what could he do?  That was a question he felt potentially able to ask. In the jargon, what could he accomplish – going forward? 

“Can...?” he began to ask with a deceptive feeling of filling out his existence with a full body. “Can...?” he began to repeat. But he never finished his empty question even on the second attempt as he vanished as fast as he had appeared. With a singular double-sizzz. 

Someone else altogether, someone utterly new, mischievously blew up an empty crisp bag and popped it.  The room, meanwhile, remained at room temperature.

My most recent real-time reviews

(22 Jun 11): The Mauve Embellishments – by Charles Schneider

(22 Jun 11): Link Arms With Toads! – Rhys Hughes

(1 Jul 11): Allurements of Cabochon – by John Gale

(4 Jul 11): The ‘Star’ Ushak – by Louis Marvick

(7 Jul 11): Dying to Read – by John Elliott

(9 Jul 11): Old Albert: An Epilogue – by Brian J Showers

(11 Jul 11): The Bestiary of Communion – by Stephen J Clark

(13 Jul 11): ‘The Exorcist’s Travelogue’ – by George Berguño

Endless Chronicles

An excerpt from my review of 'The Exorcist's Travelogue' by George Berguño (Passport Levant / Ex Occidente Press) HERE:


A Chronicle of Repentance

“…, and disrobed me with invisible fingers.”

A chronicle can never begin or end, I sense, as someone needs to tell a chronicle, and its beginning and its end are only restricted by what that teller can tell by dint of knowledge or his/her own finite life being within rather than overlapping the period in question of which he tells. But can a chronicle fill in its own gaps (such gaps being at either end as well as partway through) by dint of parthenogenetic imagination. But to save one’s body from ultimate torture in Hell by giving it just a part of that ultimate torture in life is a fool’s errand, a misguided absolution by either one’s self or chronicle of self. And the carnal needs of one person are often simply satisfied by fulfilling the carnal needs of another. But all humanity is connected by desire – for, without desire, they may not have existed in the first place. Eternity through desire, each of us passing the baton of life to another. But, one day, you may give birth to an invisible body on an empty stage rather than just a body, say, with its fingers invisible by having been burnt off in that partial attempt to avoid Hell’s torture. That ultimate creation of invisibility in the guise of something that you deem as real: a creation by those creatures one hated in life, those Pigeons from Hell flying across your last balcony. This is not what I found in this story. This is what this story found in me. (14 Jul 11 – another ten hours later)

Defragging the Past

An excerpt from my review of 'The Bestiary of Communion' by Stephen J Clark (Ex Occidente Press) HERE.

IX. “…the audience were the true source of the illusion.”

Forced to return tonight by the need to fulfil some renewed urge to read before going to bed - it is as if the foundling House has leaves of Vegetation towards a snowy Narnia – but here a filmic, painterly, weird, East European, self-contained, undidactic ambiance of fantasy not a Christian Allegory - a fantasy that reminds me of the day as a youth I always visited the cinema and they customarily had ‘continuous performances’, where the section of the film you watch after being shown to your seat by the usherette’s beaming torch is what you end watching just before you leave, say, from film’s midddle to middle, and you have had to work backwards to visualise the film in the correct order, by changing things, skipping motives, forgetting sadnesses, ditching happinesses, defragging politics and logic and history and desecration and holocaust … in some strange ritual of half-shafting screen-lit darkness, red embers and billowing cigarette smoke – and blindly snogging couples. (My erstwhile vision, not the book’s, but uncannily it is this book’s vision …later, perhaps. But tomorrow never has today’s vision.) (12 Jul 11 – another 3 hours later)

Death and the...

Nobody can barter with Death.

Johnny tried his hardest: giving his own Death all sorts of options as to how to kill him but with the only proviso that if the option that Death chose turned out to be wrong then Death would leave him alone forever. Death thought it was on to a winner. It had never tried to barter with a human subject before and found it an amusing game. Why not give this Johnny-me-lad a bit of fun, too, just a chance of avoiding Death and befriending an Impossibility called Immortality? Give him this fun, and then snatch it away, with Death ever having the trump card: because only Death could choose how a human died and therefore it would choose an option that would later be fulfilled by the destiny of certainty. Johnny believed in free will, however, even in Death’s free will and consequent fallibility.

Johnny’s wife – Dymphna – was not kept in the loop. Johnny’s big mistake and Death’s good fortune. Johhny had not shared secrets with Dymphna for many years – and a habit extended forever is a habit that by-passes Death – or so went the religious tracts in the only water-tight religion that existed among the gullible race of humans. Not telling Dymphna about his pact with Death was all part of the scheme he hatched. Because he knew Death was a blabber-mouth and would itself tell Dymphna – thus breaking the vicious circle that kept that Impossibility called Immortality at bay. All manner of cause-and-effect and virtuous or vicious circles were at play here. Johnny was no fool. But Death, reading this, had got more and more confused. Until one night – a lucky break for Death – Johnny had a dream that he told Dymphna everything, i.e. that he had bartered with Death and that Death had chosen Mental Breakdown as the cause of Johnny’s own death: a strange choice to make, but Death liked to give itself challenges.

“You can’t die from Mental Breakdown,” said Dymphna in the dream.

“What if I top myself?” said Johnny – in the same dream.

The logic of it was that Suicide was the real cause of death, while the Mental Breakdown itself was merely the Proximate Cause, a term used in Insurance Law.

This put at least nine cats among the proverbial pigeons.

Death did not approve of Euthanasia, of course. And that, coincidentally, was Dymphna’s second name.

Johhny’s still dreaming. A different dream now, with an easy entry doorway from the previous dream that had contained Dymphna, but now a dream with no exit doorway. Perhaps, a prolonged dream of being dead – stretching towards forever forever: a sort of dream that only a rare form of Mental Breakdown in alliance with Sleep could cause. A concept beyond the scope of any religion ... or political correctness regarding insanity ... or the necessity of Pascal’s wager.

This left Death in the doldrums and Dymphna both married to and widowed by the same man. And me left with no real ending, the worst fate of all.

Death and the Lost Gambit. Titles are always best last.

The Stereograph

An extract from my real-time review of 'The Mauve Embellishments' by Charles Schneider (Passport Levant 2011) here.

The Stereograph

“Yes. He had heard a fragment of a rumour many years ago at a slide collectors convention in Blackpool.”

Blackpool, or Menton? Seriously, I’m sure I’ve now reached a genuine Weird fiction classic, as if I’ve been led craftily towards this story by the previous ones so the shock is processed to the fullest. The obsession of collecting, to the point of not even sharing the primest item in the collection with oneself! Collecting and death in symbiosis. The secret of parthenogenesis reached but only for those of us who can ‘gestalt’ the twin paintings or illustrative leitmotifs affixed-within-white-space to this text. A rorschach of extreme identical opposites. Clark Ashton Smith eat your heart out. (27 Jun 11)

TO BE CONTINUED

Castle Cesare

An extract from my real-time review of 'Link Arms With Toads!' by Rhys Hughes (Chomu Press 2011) here.

Castle Cesare

“From the balconies of our highest turrets the entire firmament was accessible to our curiosity…”

But do we ever reach the last balcony? Not according to this story, as the hero protagonist – in a 2oth century East European literature flavour of a mediaeval fable – becomes a cross between the ‘Russian Doll’ hero (my expression not the story’s) from ’333 and a Third’, plus Robinson Crusoe, Lemuel Gulliver, Doctor Who and a solar-systemic Phileas Fogg and ‘you’ or ‘me’ by fictionatronic empathy with an orrery degree in endless imagination…… Indeed, I can’t imagine how big Rhys’ imagination must be to create this insular-picaresque fiction (seriously), but it seems central to some fabrication ‘magic fiction’ that I shall christen here, officially for the first time, ‘fictionatronics’. A fabrication that only Rhys can bring off. Ever chasing the noumenon but thankfully never reaching it because, if reached, it would become less than its unreachable essence. (27 Jun 11)