The Mansion of Existence

 ’A Symphony in Three Movements’

There was no doubt in my mind that I was being stalked — and this was by a creature which, if it had been human, I would have, at all costs, tried to throw off my trail at the first opportunity.

There is nothing worse than someone who seeks an essence of hope from you for their own use while following you from street to street even as they try to seek attention from you beyond their initial attempt to converse on subjects with which you cannot at all sensibly engage. Even worse, when you cold-shoulder them, they continue to hang at a greater distance from you but still visible in pursuit of engaging you in conversation and feeding off your positive attitude to life. The very worst, however, is when they give the impression of vanishing (tail between their legs) into the night but you remain aware that they continue to keep you within their sights — surreptitiously — from behind each cold, damp corner. Still hopeful for your attention.

An essence of hope. A phrase that kept going around inside my head even while the sun was now doing its hidden-by-clouds routine. But I knew it was still there and I sensed that clouds could only veil rather than obliterate me from the follower’s persistent gaze. A stalker that stalked from the sky was at a decided advantage when compared to a landlocked one. A helicopter I could have handled, especially with the clattering noise it made. Or even a balloon with a basket, a finite and distinct craft as that would have been. But an all-pervading silent sun as stalker was a different ball-game.

I am home now in bed, thank goodness. Odd that I am now beset with hopes, hopes, two by two, as if entering an ark of hopes, pairs of hopes that I experience as if from outside of them, objectively recognising each pair of hopes as hopes but knowing that at least half of my mind is hoping them for real — quite unlike the sense of a stalking sun that was earlier so tangible and so unhope-like, nightmarish with more a heat-death than warmth.

The latest pair of hopes involved the old jacket part of my school uniform, then called a blazer. A blazer unlike the sun! It was from fifty years before and the badge on its front pocket denoted to which of the four School Houses I belonged. You had rediscovered your school badge, now detached from the blazer, in an envelope: and you were sliding it out into view, as if you had travelled back with it from the land-where-lost-things-lived. All your life, you knew, there had been things you had hoped for but sadly lost; other things that had been merely utilitarian and quickly forgotten after losing them; more things that you never had in the first place but they still claimed ownership by you; and a few things, oddly, that even claimed ownership of you. Or permutations of such things, residing in the land where lost things always resided. Like that school badge. And at that thought, you wept uncontrollably.

****

‘Claps of thunder, flaps of weather, flaps of leather, at the end of my tether.’ I sang to myself – like a sudden sun out of darkness, without rhyme or reason: well, there was some sort of rhyme, but you know what I mean – as I sat on the top of the double-decker bus. I sat at the front, hoping that boyhood would soon be something better, pretending that I was driving, holding the window safety-bar and pushing it in one direction or another but, I guess, I imagined it was a tiller of a canal-boat, because I pushed it to the left for the bus to turn right and pushed it to the right for the bus to turn left. 

‘Claps of thunder, flaps of weather, flaps of weather, at the end of my tether.’ Suddenly, the bus…

Before I tell you exactly what happened, let me reminisce for a while. The opposite of hope. On top of most buses in those olden days, there were signs saying things like “no spitting”, “no standing” etc. and on the back of each seat below a five-inch metal ratchment there was a sign saying “stubber”, although it acted both as a stubber and a serrated surface for red-headed lucifers. Each match a burst of a tiny sun. In view of that stubber, you can assume there were no “no smoking” signs. Also, there was a circular mirror-thing or porthole in the top right hand corner at the front. I often wondered what that was. An empty cold grey glass sun, as it were. Invariably, there were other passengers upstairs. Like today. I turned and flapped my tongue at them. I didn’t spit, though. I definitely didn’t spit, m’lord.



There was one particular man toward the back who bent forward in his seat and seemed to be rubbing the front of his forehead quite fast along the seat-back that was in front of him. And hence on its stubber. Back and forth, it went. Flaps of this, flaps of that.

 A few minutes later, I sensed something had happened behind me as I momentarily took my eye off the road ahead to check what that something was. A hubbub that was worthy of its name even though there was only one person who made this hubbub. The man’s head had burst into flame.

 I pointed to a sign close to the ‘no spitting’ one. “No butting”, I read aloud officiously. No butting, no cutting, no grubbing, no rubbing. 



Meantime, the side of the bus had scraped sickeningly along the side of an old mansion wall. I blamed myself. But blame was irrelevant really. Blame is often a waste ‘in extremis’. Blame is the opposite of hope.

 Eight small jagged pieces of the mansion’s roof cluttered a runnel, just in front of my personal bus windscreen up top.

I thought of a demon barber stropping his blade along my tongue. And a train window that had a leather tongue inside. At least a train needn’t be driven by passengers. Trains had a man at the front to do that, a man with a huge face covering the whole front boiler. Each coal in his tank engine another sudden burst of a less tiny sun. Followed by billows of steam. 

The last thing I think I thought was the circular mirror-thing in the top right hand corner of the bus’s top-deck – with a single huge vertical  eye blinking in it. Beady beady, greedy, greedy. 

Suddenly, the sparks milling through the open side-window caught me alight. A pity I couldn’t spit on myself.



Heaven and Hell are situated on the same storey of existence’s own mansion, not Heaven above and Hell below, as many seem to believe. So, for one of them you need to turn left to reach, the other right. But I did not know which was which. 

I hoped, yes hoped to strike lucky.

****

You were praying to whomsoever might listen to hopeful prayers for the sun to arrive. Was it there, with either the blended yellows and bird-speckled oranges or curdled greys and shades of white cloud, depending on the weather, to disperse the shifting blacknesses of night: thus providing both the prayed-to and prayed-for as a singular sun?

Praying to the sun for itself, you soon found your prayers answered by means of a tiny glimmer of non-night starting to stretch along the sea’s horizon from a pin-point where you guessed the sun was due eventually to rise. Somehow the bus ride had taken you here from the city. The next night, however, you assumed, the sun would not come at all – every hope gone – so, whose prayers would go unanswered, whose turn indeed would it be to expect the sun but never to see it, because the one who prayed had died or because the sun itself as the one prayed-to and prayed-for had died instead, or because the prayer had died upon your very lips even as you spoke it, all of us becoming a singular non-existence pre-dating the night itself? An essence of prayer’s hope extinguished. Or prayers crossing in the night like collisive ships.

But do Dawns and Dusks as well as Days and Nights themselves pray to higher levels of prayer-receipt — praying for their own very existence, praying to souls such as yours in the form of a prayer-answering service that was higher even than God’s when based on their belief that you did not believe in God, thus making you theoretically supreme in your own being, in your own mansion of existence? Or did prayers merely answer other prayers? The prayers and hopes of nobody. Collusive, as well as collisive.

And as the sun’s dawn finally rose as it always has done so far, you knew that any essence of hope is that hope is always followed or stalked but hope can never be fulfilled, never reached . For if hope is fulfilled, then hope is stubbed out. You waited at an empty bus stop.

Anagram

 

I offered you everything — security, choice clothes and various home comforts in my mansion but when we couldn’t reconcile what you wanted with what I wanted to give you, I then offered you actual hard cash to buy what you wanted. My theory was that you did not know what you wanted. I even paced up and down outside your flat, while you made up your mind. But you rang the police to tell them I was bothering you. And I received a caution and they told me that if I continued in my behaviour, then more serious repercussions would ensue. So I was now forced to watch my step and, self-evidently, I would have to decide the precise targeted manner of my next approach to you, but only after I had established what you really wanted from me. So far it had been like using a splatter gun. 

Let me step back, for a while. Even if you think you, the reader, have guessed what you really wanted, it was never as simple as that. Nothing is simple in life, especially between two tentative or shy lovers, be they man and woman, be they woman and woman or be they man and man, or neither or even both. 

I need to describe some things about myself to give at least partial context to what I might eventually find to satisfy your desires. I was born many years ago, but my story is about my life as a young person when I first met you who was, if anything, younger than myself. It was in the foyer of a theatre, with dimmed lighting either to enhance the romanticism of the moment or to soften the cold light of day carried by the milling faces around us, faces young as well as old. The ticket booth was the hub of the hubbub, if I can start having fun with my words. So far, I have been restrained in my descriptions. But my usual style is often one of playfulness mixed with darkness. I was third in the queue when I first became aware of you. You were a single queuing person away from me, and were already at the ticket-window, your voice rising as if something had gone awry, your ordered tickets not available or an unknown argument with the man who was spooling out perforated cardboard segments with seat numbers on each segment. Perhaps you had simply taken a dislike to him or he was someone you already knew, someone with whom you had a history. At first I was annoyed, being delayed by this altercation. But I was soon entranced by your backstraps and the flow of hair over your shoulders. I yearned to see your face, hoping it would soften the shrill tones of your voice, Yes, entranced by the hands that eventually handled the entrance tickets, tickets of entrancement in your entrancing fingers. I was soon to get know you better, but I should have guessed straight from the satart what one day you would want me to give you. Either my mansion or hard cash, or both. Your handbag, by the way, on your left arm was overstuffed with chocolates and mint humbugs together with old-fashioned penny-chews, pear drops, blackjacks and pineapple chunks. Imagine the noise you would make in the auditorium during the quiet moments of the show, I thought. But it completely slipped from my mind, as you turned your back to the the ticket booth, any altercation resolved, and I saw your face for the first time.

What was the show? I can hardly remember, because you have outshone my life from that moment on. I have since looked at contemporary information about it and gather it was a sort of opera about Akhenaten. It has the Latin word for birth in that name, I guess, and, yes, I was born, too, then, by simply seeing you. And we have since reminisced about our early days together, without detailing the hard facts of transient society going on during that period. How we ended up coincidentally sitting in the audience only a few seats apart. There was an empty seat next to mine in an otherwise seemingly full house. Probably someone who was too sick to come or was held up in traffic. This was because you evidently wanted a better view of the stage and decided to utilise that empty seat. The rest is history.

Since then, the whole affair has been rather one-sided with me doing all the running. Offering you things, and having them rejected. I started this rumination by telling you, the reader, about the situation between us. And I treat you as an audience in our studio theatre, two actors on a stage looking out at a sea of faces, waiting for the final outcome of our relationship. A chamber drama, as we face each other, with one of us sometimes looking up to see you and everyone else shifting in your seats, manoeuvring for better views, coughing and, yes, rattling sweets and crinkly wrappings. It is as if it is a mutual happening, a scene of intense passion where we both try to draw everyone into us as a collective conscious towards the props and words of our almost musical ‘dying fall’, our love on the wane, played out to the weakening strains of recurrent notes.

My last note that I have now passed to you, yet another billet doux, is one that I am confident you will not read as you have not read this about us, and it is tugged from the depths of my own equivalent version of a bottomless handbag, accidentally spilling out a sudden hoard of wrappings and coloured shapes. Things I have hidden there for whatever reason. Until now. And you smiled. With an accompanying sob. 

You left in silence after loud applause. And I expect for myself another police caution, and an injunction. Or hopefully a choice of segmented tickets to another show, another life. Another empty seat due to heavy traffic. You had always ruthlessly wanted my soul as well as hard cash, if not my worthless roofless mansion. And we all know what the letters of ‘mansion’ make as an anagram, don’t we? Sweet, eh?

Mansion in Metamorphosis

 

I imagined a couple of old people, who had lived a life of experience, a life of having their own children, now faced with a granddaughter, eight years old, a granddaughter they had not been told existed till now. But how could they say they knew how to bring up children if their own children had kept this secret from them? Good well-bred sons and daughters would not have such secrets from those who had borne and bred them, surely. And if there was one eight year old grandchild, there may be others of different ages. Different ages, within reason. Within the reason of sane numbers from a single generation.

But I also imagine that this so-called granddaughter of the old couple might be the tip of an iceberg. Thousands of eight year olds waiting to claim them as grandparents. Maybe millions, trillions, or an infinite number, all of them pieces of a whole, pieces of eight, all trying to join up and become a single eight, a single eight year old called … called by what name?

‘How many eights make eight?’ thought the male half of the old couple whom I was imagining, as he woke up from being awake in his mansion by the Murakami Shore. Sometimes, being awake was more indefinite, more blurred and dreamy, more dozy, more anything than the act of dreaming-itself-while-sleeping. Without being awake one could not visualise the dream being dreamt. This dream about having an eight year old granddaughter who seemed more real than the fact that his own children had never had children of their own. He had woken with the sense that he was a seasoned and experienced grandfather, yet his eight year old granddaughter outwitted him at every turn. She had outwitted him, it now seemed, by pretending she did not exist at all. 

I now imagined that he had memories of buying pink things at outset for the baby and then dolls and other things, until she wanted electronic gadgets to play with. He had always prided himself that he had been a very good grandfather to his own pieces of eight. But as he lay there, now fully awake, he could not even recall her name. The name of his pieces of eight. He sweated with sudden deep anxiety. He could not remember her face and at eight years old, children usually had developed distinct faces, their characters already partially formed, their bodies become a self-consciousness, their minds a distinct phenomenon of projection in the world. So how could he possibly have forgotten how she had grown up and the nature of the person she now was. And how one day she would yearn to inherit her grandparents’ mansion.

But she had become a nothingness that he tried to fetch back by opening and shutting his eyes, then turning to his wife, the grandmother of the child, the child he could only call pieces-of-eight as the only name he could muster. Pieces of eight, pieces of eight, like a parrot making sure it could still speak, if not understanding what it was speaking. Like a child slowly waking up from being a baby, and learning to talk, step by step. Except this experience for him was not gradual. He had woken up as a new grandfather — a sudden revelation. A sudden shock of self-identification. Pieces of eight, pieces of eight. His brain was now working overtime.

But now I imagined he had a period of regrouping after being asleep. He waved his hand back and forth in front of his eyes to make sure he was still awake. Then he managed to speak aloud as further proof of being awake.

“Are you awake, Silly Milly?” At least he remembered the name he had called his wife right from the opening gambits of their relationship generations ago. Such remembering was a start. It sounded as if she were still asleep. She surely would know whether they were grandparents, as well as parents. Maybe he had imagined it all. Imagined even the existence of his real children who had married but not had children of their own. Well, not yet, anyway.

“What did you say?” Milly motioned. Well, at least he was right about his own name. He did not have one. He stayed silent with happy relief. Quit while you’re winning, he thought. I am me. I am he who I believed myself to be. But how to ask questions about things he should already know? About his eight year old granddaughter whom they had probably been baby-sitting the evening before. Eight o’clock was her bedtime. He knew that. She had to be in bed by eight, or else. But he then remembered a nightmare when the clock never reached eight but hovered between six and seven on the cusp of eight forever. His granddaughter was far too clever for him. A smart cookie. Well any granddaughter belonging to him and Milly would bound to be smart. Someone who can even make the clock stay in a permanent state of it not being a child’s bedtime. He could now almost see her cheeky face as she mentally forced the big hand of the clock back and back. A kinetic power. That irresistible smile, very much like Milly’s smile, that odd chuckle, that disarmingly silly way of repeating words like a parrot. As she pointed at his wooden leg.

Wooden leg? He couldn’t remember having a wooden leg. He lifted the bed quilt cover in the dawn light and peered down into the darkness that it covered. He tried to put his hand down to feel his legs one by one. One by one. How many legs did he have? Was he in a Frank Kafka story? Woken up as something with eight legs? A sudden revelation. A shock of self-identification. If I continued to imagine him, as he lay there, beside his smiley wife Milly who had gone back to sleep, having shrugged off his attempts at a silly conversation about pieces of eight. Eight is the perfect number; on its side it is a leminscate of infinity, an endless figure of eight. Once having been a maths teacher, Milly now dreamed of the number eight. Other numbers are available.

Eight creatures faced him, as he pulled the homemade quilt higher to his chin. A parrot with eight colours like its own quilt of feathers, a giant spider, a pink elephant, a computer tablet that seemed alive with an electronic voice responding to human voices, a baby’s cot like a mouth opening and shutting with its barred cage of teeth, a large doll (from the his mansion in Victorian times) that now believed it was alive not dead — this doll sitting on the lap of the girl who in turn was holding a clock the lugubrious tick-tock of of which she continually seemed to count the ticks and tocks however large the number of ticks and tocks she might eventually reach, plus one other creature that he failed to recognise but worthy to be one of the pieces of any nightmare. But had he counted these creatures correctly; were they more or less than eight? Each time he tried to count them, he was distracted or outwitted by the girl whom he assumed to be his granddaughter and whose own counting made him forget his own numbers. As if senile dementia had finally arrived, he thought.

I had stopped imagining all this. It was all happening without me. It was as if I had never existed at all. And only the re-reading — or even the re-writing — of this account might prove it had been myself creating it from imagination. But no longer. And what happened next was beyond my control. It was down to the so-called grandfather either to wake up or die. That would be the only way it would stop. Or the only way the clock would start again. In time for bedtime.

Meanwhile, each of the eight creatures in turn explained to the so-called grandfather their existence, their hopes, their dreams. The doll, the elephant, and the others, even the clock joined in with a voice separate from its ticking. The girl herself stayed counting off the clock’s undercurrent of ticking, her face as blank as a child who had not yet formed its own face, nor its own personality, even after eight years of life. Yet he now felt more confident. The creatures obviously respected him, as if they knew he was their maker. He could no longer be outwitted. He was in control of his own life. And just before he fell asleep, perhaps for the final time, the girl smiled as if at someone she truly loved as a granddad. Like a small human being blooming into maturity with a sudden release of life’s power as a separate person. A new limb to replace the phantom one. Pieces of eight became an everlasting whole. A life rewritten as the double loop of a smile.

Other lives are available. Other creatures of nightmare, too, one by one, and still counting — indeed, the so-called grandfather still counting his legs, but he got stuck at six just as Woolf’s Ramsay was ever stuck at Q in the alphabet.  It was a paradox that Zeno eventually got to Z.

Elbows & Cakes

 I’ve never been able to make cake. My father, however, was a dab hand at it. He always called it Welsh cake, with him being Welsh, I guess. He has passed on now to where cakes welcome new tenants onto Heaven’s hillside, cakes forever made, forever eaten, a constant cake, a cake cake, in fact. Let them eat cake, sing the angels. And God has let it be so. And there I leave my father in his land of the fathers.

But others of us pass onto a different hillside, a different lower case heaven, but still it‘s one with constant cake, and most after-lives are tantamount to being  cake, a perceived spirituality, one based on a faith in cake-ism. Each of us an ingredient in the great big mixing-bowl, trickled down into it as a would-be trickle-treat that some mistakenly believe is upper case Heaven. This being the place where angels, with no known gender, mix and mingle within the flow of eggs, flour and whatever else entails growing a cake, but each passer-on brings one extra ingredient to the so-called cake, a cake that often seems impossible for us to eat and even eats us! A cake of no known gender, sifting our eggs, grating our tubes, into one composite cake of angels. Layers of battenburg with soul-fluids between — a wondrous massive mix, with skin peel and lots of loving. 

I suddenly stopped day-dreaming. It is peculiar what the word ‘cake’ has evoked in my mind. Told to write about cake, this is what I have written. I had been forced to write about cake by some duplicitous writer’s group to write quickly, smartly, without prior thought, using the upper case title of Cake. A proper Proustian cake, I hoped it would be. But parts of me, I am now starting to disown, the moving joints and other elbows of my body joining together as one, more a meatloaf than a cake, a dream of melted consistency and baked log, oozings of cream along with pangs of love-sweetened lust. A huge panoply of trussed existence that only being cooked by some power source of this lower case heaven can produce, it being a culinary process triggered by death, a rationale for eerie ghosts as well as enviable spirits. Globs of jammy substance, still trickling down, trickling down, having once corroded the living veins with hot-flush prostate tissuing, and then interleaved with dark brown chocolate cushions, or at least I hoped it was chocolate. Bony ribs were ground down for the meatier logs intended for those who prefer the savoury rather than the unsavoury, but somehow that does not sound quite right, and I wish to edit that bit if I ever live long enough to publish this snap-judgement flash creative work. Minced body-middles to make the consistency softer and more al dente at the same time. A lava bread, a loofah, a sponge, a trifle, even a proper fruit flan for the all night pudding party of the soul …. if only I could go back to change things and to help everyone who are still alive to trickle up instead of trickle down. 

Yup yup, I can now see a mighty mountainous ever-lasting never-ending whoopee whopper of a, yup yup yup, superbly prehensile upper-case Angel Cake with elbows like me. Indeed, I often had problems with my elbows, not both at once, but each separately, as if they took it in turns to irritate me. Not pain like arthritis but more a sense they were alive, separate thinking beings colluding to frustrate anything I  wanted to do. Their thoughts hurt somewhat, however, their mental machinations simulating bones grinding and cakes baking.

I was tested to the limits, unable to mention this to anyone for fear of them thinking me mad. I speculated on obtaining professional advice, but from where? A GP or a shrink? Or even a religious person of some sort? You were certainly out of the question, in fact the last person to consult. 

I  tried googling the word ‘elbow’ along with some of my symptoms, as people had increasingly become prone to self-diagnosis following the onset of the internet. And people did indeed become subject to the strangest maladies, some quite surreal as a result of their searches. Mostly in their heads. And that is where I firmly placed the symptoms of my malady — in my head!

But such googling did also elicit much obscure information about elbows, such as their use in literature, poems and stories and novels, and, also, cakes. For example, the 20th century fiction writer Elizabeth Bowen had recently been found to use them quite effectively, and that, some thought, was because of her name… The EL of her forename and the BOW of her surname. Or was that a coincidence?

The elbow paths on which the internet took me often ended up with details about coincidences; how people instinctively used coincidences as cushions when tested to the limits of their own fallible humanity and the otherwise randomness of life. Not that they consciously thought about it. These were factors and mansion machinations not within their heads but within their bodies. And for elbows, please read knees, in some folk. But rarely wrists or waists. Never ankles or knuckles. Mostly elbows, it has to be said. But what about the finger-joints, I suddenly find myself asking, as I use them to knead the pastry for a pie?

Well, my story is a complicated one, so I shall simplify it. By ending it here. Other than to inform you that the mindless finger-joints seem to have become part of some conspiracy to test my limits of intellect and will-power. And so this story using elbows as metaphors indeed was forced to end there. Because I have no Voice App on my computer, and, what is more, the fingers have just elbowed me out of consciousness altogether by strangling my neck and they seem to be typing something else.

And so I fully recovered without any memory of what was already told and I  now happily plays tennis most of the time. And we should continue knocking our covered elbows together in covid’s memory, I feel, rather than the mere shaking of hands. Lockdown in a mansion with chocolate cushions is so much more bearable than squatting in a small bedsit with bedbugs in the blankets like raisins and currants.

”….standing up very straight to cut the cake, was like a doll stitched upright into its box, apt, if you should cut the string at its back, to pitch right forward and break its delicate fingers.” — ELizabeth BOWen

The Missing Missing

 He stared coldly at the old photo of the gold necklace – whether gold or gold-coloured he wasn’t sure, then in real life or now in the photo. The photo was in black and white. He knew, however, that the necklace had a missing link when the photo was taken and — as part of his regular duty of care regarding his late parents’ property — he examined the necklace’s glittery existence in the dim light of the photo.  Yes, he had stared it at yesterday, as he stared at it the next day, as maybe he will still stare at it tomorrow. 

The link was missing on all previous occasions of his memory, even before the photo was taken.  The necklace had always possessed a missing link within his living memory.  Twenty one large circles of interlocking gold links – when there should have been twenty two. His Mum once told him that it should have twenty two because her late husband (his Dad) had bought it for her 22nd birthday, when she was still beautiful, she claimed, with a laugh.

One day, not long after that birthday, a link snapped and her now late husband joined the whole necklace back together again in his shed, his wonderfully appointed shed; he had used cutting and welding equipment to create a necklace of twenty one links, thus discarding the unreliable broken link (without mending it).

When their son inherited all his mother’s goods upon her own later death, the whole necklace itself was found to be missing, but he had managed to find the old photo and. counted the links meticulously so that he could remember the same necklace she had always proudly shown him.  He remembered her fetching it from its click-tight box (she never wore it) and placing it in his tiny upraised palms just for a minute or so of reverent silence – of wordless but mouthed counting – then replacing it in tissue paper for its latest in a long line of ‘hibernations’. He was not born till she was twenty-three.

The photo proved there had indeed been only twenty-one links when the photo was taken.

Today, though, the day after yesterday, he was stunned to count twenty-two links in the photo,  He counted again, sure he had made a mistake.  No, he was right, definitely twenty-one links. He had somehow hoped that proof of its earlier existence by means of a photo would help find the necklace itself. He could not rationalise why this should be so. But now he wondered if this was the right necklace. Or even the right photo. But it had the right mansion in the background.

The missing link was missing.  Or, rather, upon further consideration, the missing link was not missing.  He wasn’t sure.  He was never sure, it seemed, in the light of today’s events.  If it were missing, there must be a gap the size of a link.  Then the missing link would be simply missing as opposed to being not missing, but still there. He then examined the photo in more detail. Was this indeed the right photo album. And he began to look through later pages and found several more photos of the same necklace. Too many or too distant to count the links in each one. Why were there so many photographs of the same necklace? All with the same mansion in the background.

 The strange journey through the album took his mind away from the mystery and he started thinking of things going missing … hoping his world-weary worries would go missing, too.

He needed his late Mum’s placid logic and the comfort of her Nursery Rhymes she used to recite to him when he was a child.  He could even imagine his Dad banging things in the distance from his Dad’s beloved shed.  He had died longer ago than his son felt he was able to remember.  But a comfort nevertheless. Each person in his life was now missing. Seemed to calm him down. At least he could not argue with himself. Being alone was some sort of comfort. Best to make the best of things. The best of missing things,

He again recalled his Mum telling him how his Dad had repaired the broken necklace – making an unbroken necklace whole again, if it was not exactly, as a result, the same necklace. 

His Dad had a kind soul and his son hoped he had inherited that, too.  With steady grey-iron eyes and a skill for making things and unmaking things, his Dad had once demolished his shed when it grew too old to be a shed.  He somehow remembered that his Dad had not demolished it with a sledgehammer but meticulously plank by plank – even though the planks were rotted through and quite worthless: extracting each nail with the clawed end of a hammer in a devotionally meticulous slowness – even though the nails were rusty and beyond use. Making each tiny part of the shed go missing till the whole shed would finally give up the ghost.

His Dad had sworn there were fifty planks in the shed – he knew this as he had once made it himself.  But now laid out on the lawn there were only forty nine planks, enough to make his Dad cry. He remembered his Dad taking a photo of the planks spread across the lawn. He remembered the photo had grey grass and a greyer sky, with their mansion in the background. Even the sun was another shade of grey. 

He could remember putting the necklace over his own head as a boy – the twenty-second link just giving sufficient slack to allow it over his head which the previous twenty-one links hadn’t possessed. 

There was no catch. 

It was a necklace that was donned and doffed like this without any mechanism (for breaking its circle then completing it again) once it was around the neck.  He had worn the necklace – for the very first time – with childish pride.  He remembered his beloved parents were watching him. Taking a photo of the end result of the whole event. That photo had since gone missing. 

Well, now he knew that was a false memory. The photo never went missing as it had never existed in the first place.

He tried to think of a link, some clever end that would bring matters back to their beginning, the son’s story of a  life lived – thus making a whole.  The whole felt very untidy.  It couldn’t be a whole because it had actually grown a gap as large as the missing link, leaving his life just hanging there forever at a a loose end.

That was before the thing he imagined around his neck began to tighten with a series of single clicks. He became the missing link, someone who had never existed at all, the phantom child of childless parents, parents with nobody to whom they could leave their goods.  Every life has a catch somewhere. And we all go missing in the end.

Such thoughts were enough to make any good man cry, as he knocked on the door of Heaven.  Then, in frustration, he hung the missing photograph onto one of the door’s planks, one of the nails he used happening to be hammered straight through the blurred grey neck around which the 22 carat gold necklace had once sat. And he then remembered the missing mansion, because, long before any photographs had been taken of it, it had been slowly dismantled into a ground zero, his Dad having counted each brick and each defenestration along the way — a dismantlement beginning with the basement, but leaving, till last, the roof-ridge where the wife and mother sat as if she were waiting to be rescued from floods.

Safe Mansion

 There was a collection of handles on the wall. To put any collections at all on walls was something I never understood at the best of times, like animal heads as trophies or various varieties of fork obtained for show rather than use. Forks with long or short tines. Forks more like garden implements than cutlery. And forks tuned for different purposes of music or memory.

Paintings, of course, were fully intended to go on walls, to be viewed separately as well as cumulatively within the room’s context. Most paintings were framed to give some comfort zone between them and the room. Every room has its own context, you see. Some call that context atmosphere or decorative personality. A room with its own original or inherent quality as a living-space. Or a room whose very sense of existence as a room was force-fed by human intervention with such collections on the walls or other imposed alterations.

Well, all forks had handles on today’s mansion wall. Except, of course, one variety of fork. A variety that had tines but no handle and called a Dunsany fork after its inventor. Often used in the old days as a childhood mouth-clamp to prevent irregular growth of the jaws. But more often used today – when fine-tuned – to sit as a specialist bridge on a violin. So, on further reflection, it would be understandable to have the history of forks upon a wall, just for show, educative as well as visually aesthetic. More of a sculpture as art-installation than a painting, of course. To repeat myself from elsewhere these generic items with tines entailed muck rakes, turnip snoflers, faggot forks (with just two wide-set tines or prongs), dung probers, dock extractors and a species of fork that had two tines or prongs but not so wide-set as the faggot fork, more about the distance between my eyes.

But to have on your wall just the forks’ handles or, now I’m thinking about it, the handles of many different implements, all without their business ends? That was slightly more eccentric than seemed acceptable, don’t you think?

He looked daggers at me as if I were the mad one in ill-timedly broaching the subject of decorative discrete handles at all. And he possibly feared that he was mad, too, in listening for as long as he had listened to me going on about collections on walls. He was the Lord of the Mansion, as it were. A man of some standing who used to work in the cabinet office. I had been invited for an audition as his potential biographer of the time he was Covid minister and I had taken my nerves in hand – as, like many writers, I was untutored in social skills – and arrived, brief-case in hand, full of proof statements as to my experience being a writer-up of lives, some dead, a few still living. The subject of wall-collections had arisen because I had commented upon the collection this Lord had on his own wall. I treated the subject as a sort of ice-breaker or app-decoder. I had decided to eschew mention of the otherwise safe mansion’s lack of ceilings or roof. Much less security than even a safe house with wide open doors.

“Handy things,” I said, nodding towards the wall collection. “How many have you got?”

“Three hundred around,” he said, in an irritated voice. I could read in his eyes that I was not going to get the job. I could go for broke.

“Are they all handles to safes?” No answer. “Safes with combinations?” No answer. “How do you remember all the codes?” No answer. “Are some of them pretend safes with nothing behind?”

I must have crossed some politeness threshold. I was shown the door. I don’t suppose anyone ever wrote my biography. My memory of the mansion and its silent music was now shrinking even as fast as I did myself. If not a biography, at least you have this very memento of words by someone else that is more than what most people like me get written up about themselves. A memento of how I spent the rest of my days in deep-tined darkness picking at a lock from inside with the sharp end of my elbows, because I no longer had hands. No mean feat.

Grey and Blue Sky Thinking

 The clown was essentially white-costumed, even given the black hemispherical hat, the broken golden-hoop large enough to be a wide belt or sash, black slip-on shoes, bleached face containing tiny red lips and drooping black eyes …. sitting upon a huge domed mushroom mound …. awaiting the promised arrival of a blue tree embedded within a solid glass cone. Surely, a snow- globe to shake would have been better to amuse the clown or to amuse the children who might also arrive soon for Christmas – or, better still, another clown as company, bearing in mind the children were not promised to arrive at all. Anything was better than a wet ghost’s arrival to douse any laughter at all.

A smile threatened to shatter the real face the clown was wearing as a frozen-water mask. Thoughts of sadness often made clowns smile and a Christmas without children was one such thought of sadness. Broken thoughts were mended, mended ones broken. Labelled thoughts were unlabelled, later unlabelled ones labelled. Thoughts of optimistic puppets in the morning, thoughts of pessimistic puppets in the afternoon. Thoughts and threats of wet ghosts at all times from the roofless state of the mansions they once haunted. Thoughts of black humour when the time had come for going to bed. Wet thoughts at night to fill the dreams with more than just mushroom mounds to sit upon, all squished into pulp by morning. And by dawn, the more urgent thoughts of meltdowns and golden cummerbunds … then thoughts about promised arrivals being always late. Little different, the clown supposed, from never arriving at all.

The clown’s silent smile forced a love of lateness, accepting that the only promised arrivals were a blue tree in a glass cone and the clown-here-already-so-never-needing-to-arrive-at-all. The fact that both of these could never be contained within a single thought at the same time made it impossible to imagine such an unimaginable companionship. Not even fiction could attempt it. Even music, be it baroque or classical or modern or simply tinkling with snowflakes, failed to conjure such a dual impossibility. The clown’s smile meant there were no false hopes. The roads seemed impossible, impassable, too, the precipitation having formed a ground zero rather than a cone of scintillating light. Lateness was not just for Christmas.

 It was the Lovecraftian time of day, which, for different people, is a different time of day. You would have thought I could have explained myself better. ‘Lovecraftian’ in this context is nothing to do with HP Lovecraft, the  American writer of Horror Fiction and diehard sharer of correspondence containing all sorts of prejudice and old-fashionedness, but, rather, a time of day when people manipulate things towards emotional ends. And my optimum Lovecraftian time of day is late afternoon verging on dusk – dependant on the time of year. Especially when it rains so hard, its run-offs become sheets of actual tactile ghosts.

 The sound in the chimney always came about now, scrabbling, panting in a lightsome voice, crooning more deeply sometimes of physical positionings in words only I could understand (so no point to mention them here); drops of clear runny ectoplasm followed the initial peppering of soot in the grate but also preceded the arrival of the chimney-sweep ghost from Dickensian London….

Today was an optimum conflux of such visions in great number/intensity and even greater susceptibility to being assuaged as dreams – together with an unusually early dusk caused by smog. I listened to the scratching in the heartlands of the chimneypiece, and then watched the soot start its dusting of nightmare’s cake with the choicest hundreds-and-thousands. Soon an abnormally large amount of colourless wetness employed to assist the ghost’s own passage splattered upon the soot making it seem more like sludge than residues of black-cane sugar.

Then one leg, smeared with its own signs of descent, waggled like – not a clown puppet – but an empty stocking. Only one leg. I was often forgiven the luxury of never remembering the routine so that it all came up fresh. The crafting of suspense as well as of love. I was always wrong, because there was a second leg that eventually flopped into view. Today, I am still convinced, however, wetter than ever, despite the routine. A very wet ghost indeed.

I was already water-proofed – having tucked myself under a disposable pakamac. Through the gloom, I watched further elements of the translucent figure unravel from the flue. It was not as if the flue was a spiral, but the figure itself shaped it that way by the manner of its sinuousity, hence the need to unravel. Filters often managed to filter them in and filter them out. Or down and up. I say ‘them’ because, I’m sure, it was never the same from day to day.

Today, it was less shapeless than routine portended. I recognised its vague approximation to its earliest form as a chimney-sweep. Its wetness, however, to my horror, was not an unconcentrated exudation of the pores but generated by the dual spigots of the baleful clownish eyes. Staring hard did not seem to be easy for it when also weeping, and so I managed to stare back unwaveringly. I have learnt there can be no sentiment during the manipulation towards love. It is a craft indeed, ‘crafty’ being a word that somehow is very apt; paradoxically canny, if also uncanny, while terms of engagement, then endearment, are agreed between us, then acted upon. A cone zero of concupiscent blue light.

It’s a shame, in hindsight. I regret my actions. By the time the creature has wound itself back into the upper flue, I wonder whether it was worth it. Having wrapped it in the pakamac, I give it many touches to prove its existence even now when touches no longer serve any purpose. I however manage to stuff it some way up the flue to give it a start, like an already landed Santa Claus giving a present to the next revenant coming down. Someone left the cake out in the rain.

Each unlovecraftian time of day, I lie asleep into late morning, like a slug-a-bed of the cosy old-fashioned past; I dream of a White Christmas and of the lower grades wielding their own shock-headed sweep-handles – and bunny-cloths, and making sure all steps leading to the front door are donkey-stoned, and sicknesses filtered back and forth so they can never settle, each of life’s corners wrung and swept. Indeed, while one may forget the way to wake up, one always does wake up. The last routine. I cannot have explained it better.

The mansion somehow knew it was a mansion rather than simply a structure of bricks, wood, glass etc. made to look like a mansion. I claimed that such a ‘knowing’ mansion was more prone to being haunted than a mansion that unknowingly stayed within the boundaries of building. I had always loved being an estate agent but could never remember being one! Until now. A real real-time story in the making. 

In this day and age, it was difficult to sell property whatever its location location location — but with the right sort of atmosphere, there would be no stopping it…

A fine line to be drawn. The ghosts had to be optimum ones, not too meek, not to frightening. And ghosts with witness provenance to outweigh their wetness providence were much better than uncheckable hearsay. I groomed witnesses like other businessmen groomed their own CVs. My own CV was a clown’s, so it needed much tampering. Meantime, my first customer was the lady owner of Straight Mansion on the edge of town. She was not exactly desperate to sell the house. She was simply desperate for the house to stop owning her! I had suggested cooking up a ghost, as some clients yearned to be haunted.

“I do not need to cook up a ghost,” she snapped. She wore a hat and coat indoors and easily compensated for any pleasant customers that I had already met that day. “The ghost is already here. A very wet one.”

I frowned. Even a hint of dampness would outweigh any positive atmosphere provided by a genuinely verifiable ghost. At this point, there was a knock on the mansion’s door. Most prospective purchasers had already come and gone. With nothing to hook them, they had only promised to think about it and everyone knows that ‘thinking about it’ is tantamount to vanishing into complete nothingness or, at best, promises of coming back to look again. We both hoped nobody would notice the lack of a roof.  So any late arrival at night was an added bonus, if indeed that was what this knocking portended.

The lady owner said: “Were you expecting anyone else?”

“No, but my office might have had a phone call and sent them straight over, knowing I was still here.” I was at the end of my tether. I needed to sell this house pronto. Failure would be the straw in the wind that broke a sole agent’s back. I took it upon myself to get up to answer the door, as if during this relatively small window of selling opportunity I acquired some sort of proprietary right over who came and went.

But, by now already entering through the door was a man with a brief-case who also assumed an air of proprietary right. He had crossed the threshold without any audible invitation to do so or any word of explanation. I stood my ground but then dissolved into a flood of tears at this unexpected sight of a representative from another estate agency wearing wellington boots.

The mansion contained a pet parrot and its owner, my lady client, wore a hat and coat indoors as well as out. Both these chatted to each other the day long, while the mansion itself stayed quite quiet, its windows staring out balefully towards the grey skies of December.

From a nearby mansion across the other side of some waste ground that ever sat beneath the cones of very wet clouds  — a mansion that no doubt had its own (different) hang-ups — could be heard the quiet tinkle of Debussy on the piano. Further down the road, were two children playing up a tree, pretending to be parrots themselves, escaped parrots, squawking not in words but in tranches of meaninglessness that they imagined parrots to speak when not taught (parrot-fashion) real English words. The next game would be chimney-sweeping.

My client walked across the carpet towards a back window of her mansion and heard the apples on the apple tree in the garden dropping its pet apples one by one, with a relentless rhythmic thud thud thud, more Bowen than Debussy, as if betokening her own death with the ominous imagination of plodding ghostly funeral-workers from an otherwise impossible future.

As on most other days, she expected several visitors – but none of them ever came. She had a statue in the garden (near the apple tree) dedicated to all false expectations, a stone image of a clown with a blue cone, sculpted by a famous artist she once knew in better days when she lived in a different mansion on the outskirts of here. 

Today’s expected visitor who unexpectedly arrived was me. The front door bell later rang again. It must be those damned children from down the road, she thought, running away even as their finger had barely left the bell-push rather than the visitors (old friends from the past) whom she expected to come. But she went to the door, hoping against hope that it was not Halloween. They had called her dead old dried apple-core last time. She opened the door tentatively…

“It’s a Witch, It’s a Witch,” squawked the parrot from its distant perch in the parlour.

Standing on the newly donkey-stoned step, was a man with a rusty round tin of what looked to be hardened half-used red polish that housewives used to spread on their prized dining-tables to make them shine like the best of memories. His cupped palm was extended towards her. I wondered how it all would end. With a thud thud, and a shadowy third thud.

 The municipal wasteground outside was an eyesore, and, in better times, it was earmarked as land for development. Housing was probably the likeliest money-spinner but that was before money itself spun out of control. So my job in selling this mansion made all the harder, especially after its owner’s death in the previous paragraph.

Then populations moved from town to town in search of work, often only to be lost in the gaps between – so houses were no longer required, let alone mansions. This made some sense, I suppose, if one surveyed a place like the wasteground with rutted puddles and the derelict beginnings of construction. It was an area to ‘read’ as one would scry dead  tealeaves left in a drained earth’s unwholesomeness — overlaying the older skid-marked stains around the inside of a chipped china teacup.

Any such ‘reading’ told of a future before which the real past somehow never passed.

The wasteground’s map of memories never stayed still, not because of seasonal entropy or the weathering of age – but a ghost, when unwatched, would switch puddles with other puddles or dismantle and re-erect things elsewhere, things that were otherwise permanently rooted to the spot … during the seeping gloom of seeming endless winters. A very wet ghost indeed. 

I stumbled one day upon this pre-described wasteground when lackadaisically exploring what I quaintly called the future-that-never-came. Time without antecedence. Unless one consulted  its statue  of  monumental sundial shaped like a cone pointing at the now blue sky, the rain clouds, some in torques like tornados, having cleared.

Floods still swelled, even when the clouds had gone. I was a writer, the only discipline left for the likes of someone who merely owned a fountain pen and a piece of blank paper that I had kept blank during the better times ready for use in the bad times. You see, I had fixed my own mansion’s roof when the sun still shone, but what a waste all that turned out to be when even homes themselves became homeless. Send in the clowns, having sent away the clouds. With ownership of one piece of blank paper, at least I always had the potential to describe the indescribable. But once it had all been described, all hope would have seeped away. So I shall keep it blank till the very last moment as measured by whatever points at zero.

Torque of Turbines

 Some may call it a mansion, others a house, even, rarely, a bungalow, but sometimes I forget which is which. I was shown a locked door leading into the hall corridor where was situated one of the mansion’s locked rooms. But, really, hand on heart, did a locked door make a locked room what it was? Necessarily, did one lead to the other? I knew he was  the owner of the mansion and, as an unspoken secret between us, there was also the further knowledge that I was willing to buy the mansion and he was willing to sell the mansion … if the right price struck both of us simultaneously as the same right price. It was as if our respective (perhaps vastly different) perceptions of the locked door represented each other’s facial expression upon shaking hands … and the locked room was something we both concealed behind those very expressions.

So, the locked door was where reality met unreality, as it were. A two-way filter. One leading to the other and back again. Thoughts that were not in keeping with what I was really thinking. No wonder my tongue got carried away with its own flag-waving.

A room as an echo of its door was soon to be put to the test…

“This is the locked door to the late Mrs Archer’s room,” he told me, as he banged thunderously on its panels.

“Trying to wake the dead?” I laughed. I bit my tongue to remove the unfeeling quality of what I had just joked about unwittingly. A key to removing nonsense from reality.

He was an enormous man, made from ill-seasoned forest timber, as he towered over me…shaggily. I understood his day job was at sea on the turbines. Could such unequals as us ever strike a bargain? I tried to keep the question from my eyes. Business, in a housing slump, was more a game of poker than a straightforward transaction. He echoed my laugh. He had told me to call him by his forename rather than Mr Archer. I supposed this to be a mock friendliness to mask mixed emotions – the bittersweet feeling he must still possess about removing this house from a future where he had expected to continue living with his wife…until she had died so unexpectedly.

Neither of us spoke as we watched each other. Laughter had died to the last echo of the ceiling beams. Against any possible better judgement, I expected to hear a key scrabbling at the lock from the other side of the door… I was, however, small enough to clamber through the keyhole … into the vast locked room. Only so vast, because I was so tiny. Mr Archer had lifted me and inserted me slotwise toward the darkness beyond the door. Halfway, my tongue managed to slip the tumblers one by one, as if I were the solution to every possible puzzle tree. He entered through the now open door, seeking, in utter denial, his departed wife. And he found me already primed to ignite a disease of toxic fundaments – ready to strike a deal for the next lease along the pecking order of infected conveyancing. The Spanish Flu killed many millions in 1918. Covid killed a few more in 2020.

###

The living-room was crammed with a lifetime’s knick-knacks and keepsakes in a jumbled order as orderly as one could imagine it to be. But Mrs Archer who had ‘ordered’ it wouldn’t need imagination to do so: she knew. Perhaps her mind was jumbled – thus making the jumble seem orderly to her. I looked at her. This was her living-room. She had lived in it for sixty years until she grew as old as she was that day; the husband of a distant lifetime whom I had once met and knew by his forename, was quite gone, but, for her, less gone than simply gone. But who pre-deceased whom, I continued to wonder.

The jumbled order comprised many photographs of children and grandchildren, dusty ornaments, encyclopaedic books – plus nods to modernity with a pile of music CDs and a TV screen that seeped grainy colours into each other through lack of proper reception, on a low volume because even at a high volume she wouldn’t have been able to follow it properly. The place was a shrine – a place where, against all hope, hope still existed. The mind’s own mindset did tune better than the TV signal despite her own jumbled words when speaking. The thoughts were clear, the words were not.

Tapped into dual waste systems of disposal, she was her own living-room, pure and simple – where everything was self-contained if not self-perpetuating – and there were trolleys and zimmers galore to support her vagaries of movement, followed, necessarily, by visits from local authority nurses and carers and, perhaps, from the odd visitor like me. Time runs on as if it runs on forever for all of us. Each with their own jumble that they deny is jumble or they claim is jumble whichever rings truer amid each day’s self-restraint or self-pity. A projection inward or outward amid an ancient shrine of now.

I left the house, after kissing her farewell, silently wishing for her a comfortable self with whom she could continue to live. Later, it was imagined silence or simply felt silence when her TV flickered into the whispering background of the air’s deafness, if not of her own deafness. She heard nothing as she quickly flicked through the newspaper I’d brought for her to read after my departure. Meanwhile, she ordered jumble around her in the half-light of an Autumn dusk; and it was obvious that she would soon struggle to use a trolley to reach a light-switch and draw the curtains. Then, suddenly, she heard the sound of heavy steps.

But I had gone. She must have known it couldn’t now be me. A miracle she heard the steps at such a low threshold. This was an imagination that peopled jumble with a roomful of living solid souls. Or a belief stronger than imagination that jumbled people into a single solitary figure who, after kindly drawing the curtains, stood silently – wrapped in glistening wings like a Christmas present.

###

It was with the same heavy steps that I walked the lower promenade for perhaps the last time after many years of thus brushing my existence each morning along beside the sea’s edge: free-lance constitutionals as well as more specific errands such as shopping or (before I retired) regular work in the pier’s town. Today, the pleasure pier itself, as ever, grew larger as I approached the area where stood the abandoned Amusement Arcade, a dirty yellow building of some considerable magnitude, with a decided ramshackle tackiness that was not, in turn, a condition ramshackle enough to have yet crumbled against all the buffeting that the sea’s weather threw at it over many years. It was just a grizzled seediness that stood prouder than I thought it had any right to be, even (or especially) with its tall skull-totem denoting the erstwhile entrance to Arcade of Amusements inside.

I laughed as I looked out to sea for perhaps the last time. I had forgotten about Mrs Archer and what I might have done. And played with an Amusement involving a locked door to see if that reminded me. It took an old penny to see a skeleton emerge from a cupboard. Outside the Arcade was a strange previously unseen structure on the horizon beneath a random set of black-and-blue, bilious clouds that had the sun barely breaking through. Was it sail-less schooner on the spice-trade trail to distant Samarkand? But the distant structure was stock-still. I knew it had been in the same position for some days, but I now forget how I knew that for a fact when I hadn’t seen it before in any position at all. Or a gibbet? Or a skeletal ghost of a pirate radio-station from the Sixties when these very inshore non-territorial waters provided airway sources for illegal pop music? Or a crane like those small mechanical cranes that used to be in the ancient Amusement Arcades hopefully to pick prizes clumsily, its handles for young kids to grapple with or crank up and down? A kid like I once was.

A kid walking always with heavy steps towards being grown-up. In those days, the prospect of being grown-up was like a sort of death. Because death as defined in the dictionary never existed at that time: quite beyond even the powers of imagination or of dread. Being grown-up was enough to be going on with. An end in itself. Perhaps.

Life is an abandoned Amusement.

###

The mansion was set back from the road and, although I enjoyed reading horror stories, there was no possible way I could conjure any weird or ghostly atmosphere from this place. It was somebody’s idea of a joke. And I knew who that someone was. You see, I had an email yesterday from an old friend called Archer, who I called by his surname as that was what he was called at school and the email had a photograph attached, a photograph of his parents’ mansion in the suburbs of the city half-hidden by trees but clear enough to reveal the most unprepossessing building it had been my misfortune to notice, to be made to notice, if you see what I mean, because my friend knew I dabbled in landscape painting on a (if I say so myself) talented but amateur basis – and he wanted me to paint his parents’ house so that he could give the painting to them (framed) for Christmas. Paint it from the photo, he said. He’d give me a good price for this commission. To buy time, I emailed my friend and said it was impossible to paint it from the photo he had provided, especially with the trees in the way. Could he give me the address? I’d visit it (I vowed to myself) so as to wreak some real atmosphere from it for my painting.

 My friend didn’t really appreciate horror stories, as I did, but I’m sure my imagination, when in full view of the house, would compensate for any lack of imagination from the mansion itself! Buildings with genius loci were far and few between. But an artist surely could create a spirit of place (albeit a creepy one) for any setting where, in reality, a spirit of place did not exist. Imagine my disappointment when – after making a difficult bus ride mixed in with office commuters on their way home – I approached the mansion down its leafy avenue. A central position between like-minded residences. I first had to ensure I got hold of the right place so I had to peer at the gates for the correct address-number before committing my artist’s gaze towards the potential subject. You may have indeed imagined my imagination, but it was nothing compared to my real feelings. You may safely read between the lines. You surely can imagine the place for yourself as easily as you imagined my initial feelings about it. No need for me to describe it with words. In any event, I actually needed to preserve all my artistic strength for (later) painting it for real, with paints and paintbrush. I was not intending to erect an easel on the surburban pavement, mind you. Commuters still tramped either side of my stationary figure towards their own residences along the avenue as the dusk thickened. They clasped brief-cases and cast sullen glances towards one they assumed to be an inexplicable loiterer. No, I would weigh the mansion within the balance of my surveying, then remember it as I rode back on the bus so as to attach its residues of last impressions to further interpretations of the photo once back in my studio. But I was disrupted from the image’s steady imprint upon the sensitive backdrop of my prospective memory by one of the commuters brushing past me more roughly than the others – only to disappear up the garden path towards the very mansion in question. It was then I suddenly realised that the memory  I had of the actual residence did not match my memory of the photo. You see, it seemed to have no roof in one of those memories, unless this was a visual illusion.

The shape up the garden path did not look old enough to be one of my friend’s parents. Perhaps, I had got hold of the wrong residence after all. Had my friend given me the wrong address-number? Even the wrong avenue in the wrong area of the suburbs? I took the photo (that I had earlier printed from the attachment my friend had sent by email) from my wallet. I had not wanted, for artistic reasons, to compare it directly with my real-time view of the house but, now, I had little option. I needed to cross-check the trees and gate colour and distant walls of the half-hidden house. And whether indeed it had no roof at all.

Perhaps the shape of the commuter I had seen disappear up the garden path was my friend’s younger brother (if he had a younger brother at all) who still lived there with his parents. To my amazement, I was stirred from such unverifiable speculations by the photo itself showing a mansion that was quite different from the mansion I remembered being depicted in it when I first saw it on the computer screen and now showing a mansion that strongly resembled the very mansion up the garden path of which I was now being led by the commuter with the brief case who soon reached the front door – evidently a locked door and he had no key. All this I assumed from the body language. A locked door to a mansion with no roof.

I heard the front door bell ring. Meanwhile, I felt myself become more and more exposed in this embarrassing position, lurking in the front garden, uninvited and eventually misunderstood. I tried to merge with the shrubbery. If a meanwhile can have its own meanwhile, I did have the self-possession to maintain a critical gaze towards the mansion because – come what may – I still intended to paint the unpaintable, viz. a residence so ordinary beyond its size, even the windows sunk back into their frames with a sense of paranoia. It would have seemed out of place in any picture-frame, out of place on any chocolate or jigsaw box. I would go as far as to say it would find no window of opportunity in even the least self-respecting of any photo album. In extremis, it would find no place anywhere – as mansion or mansion’s image.

Yet, despite all these factors, it did at least have the security of a locked door. And a bell that rung but was never answered. I heard heavy steps behind me – as if I was in turn being followed – but by somebody who did not have the same surreptitious grace as me to maintain a low profile within the shrubbery. I had proceeded on tip-toe. This person had heavy steps. I had the human feelings of fear and obtrusiveness. I was something that could not be avoided by power of sheer bodily existence. The one with heavy steps was a ghost, no doubt – because, when I turned, there was nobody there behind me and, when I turned again, there was nobody at the front door. In any event, thank goodness for that locked door. It was something that made the mansion a family house. Impenetrable but truly there. I had begun to wonder, you see. But still uncertain of my own position, I threw all caution to the wind and tore the photo into several pieces and then threw them after the caution. Imagine my dismay when I suddenly realised that the attachment was still attached to the email in electronic space. And I returned with more heavy steps down the garden path led by the prospect of painting the unpaintable, having just failed to describe the indescribable. And what commission I might have committed inside. Later, there was no bus waiting for me.

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First, that mysterious ‘thing’ out at sea in the resort where I now lived appeared more distantly on the horizon than another of my photos indicated. It’s been there a few weeks: something I spotted on my near-daily constitutional between Holland-on-Sea and Clacton. I compared it to many things … but in truth it’s probably some sort of crane because I have since realised the nature of it in a wider context. The North Sea, day by day, has indeed since then become peppered with more strange contraptions, crane things and non-crane things, some small, some large, some stubby pins of striated silhouette along the horizon, some things moving positions between one day and the next, some stubbornly fixed … the whole expanse turning into tantamount to a giant deep-flooded building-site.

I now gather via some news-osmosis that they are building a wind farm of turbines out there. How does one gather the wind, though? Reap it? Rape seed oil it? Where’s the wind’s stockpile of winter feed for the cruel months ahead? One of the contraptions out at sea does indeed look like a giant ploughshare, another one a giant (although tiny to me on the shore) feeding-trough (full of mussel stew?). Over the years, I’ve heard the wind moaning down my chimney like a beast of burden troubled by its berth in the sky … by its need to be milked. The sea’s waves themselves are configured in my imagination like giant lemmings, finishing each of their lives upon the edge of the present moment in a collapsing spray … escaping the windfarmers and their cull. But the more I think of it the more my thoughts touch the blurred margins of fiction, a fiction that is possibly realler than truth, as most fictions surely are. Shorely are. I laugh as…

…once upon time, a windfarmer whom I only knew as Mr Archer — who had recently been billeted in the residence next to mine and mysteriously replacing my previous neighbour without weather warning or explanation other than convenience of the state machine — spoke to me not only of the state farming the winds, as they were, but manufacturing more winds than were naturally formed by the weather – a gusty cycle of fronts, the first set of perpetual-motions known to man. Farming methods that blow into existence the wind that it later farms, one feeding the other, leading to a huge time-frame of wind and winter: tossing what I’ve always seen as the living, breathing ‘sea-monster’ into a set of furious moods that eventually become a single mood that we, as people, will soon share by shore or by ploughshare. My new neighbour called Archer was worried and hoped I would write about it on my blog so that everyone would then know the repercussions of farmly flatulence that was about to bring every stink-gull home to roost from the funnels of sea-stench, a stench previously disguised by careful godly weather-systems that had the human good at heart, ie. benign weather-systems that would soon be swept away by state-kindled miasma and force-ten farts. Heavy steps towards another locked door of woke dreams. The heavy footprints of new beasts of burden rearing from new-born monster waves to trample our real arable and dairy farms with the cloven hoofs of gale and stink-gull. 

This must be stopped! Halt the wind farms, I say! Before it is too late. Let’s live instead in a better fiction than this, a fiction which art our true heaven. Not, I claim, a heaven becalmed upon a Sargasso Sea, as such, but one at least beached upon a balm-breezy death that we can favour with our eager anticipation for its softly flighted glider-angels. Rather that, I say, than fear for a storm-tossed death of utter nothingness mis-fictioned with imaginary fright-hurricanes, all in turn sown with braying hoof-herds and croaking stink-gulls with fishy Lovecraftian tentacles hanging from their beaks. And a woman called Mrs Archer who happened to be my wife now staring at me from the roof of our bungalow, surrounded by solar panels. The equivalent to a  Mansion’s Torque of Turbines creating wind instead of using it.