Continued from here: https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/more-disconnected-minitures-2.html
FICTONS
I always returned to the Regency Cafe. There was nowhere else like it.
Many of my friends said they didn’t know where it was and even after I’d given them exhaustive directions to meet me there after dark, none of them arrived, later telling me that they had searched high and low, turned right where I’d said, and equally left where I’d also said, but no sign of the Regency Cafe. It contained lots of fictons as a part of a circuit maker, I assured them, but they seemed not to understand me.
The fact my friends were thus ignorant of it was quite beyond me because, of an evening, its music (usually Edith Piaf) echoed loudly down the surrounding side-streets. Its lights shone out and yellowed the wet cobblestones like old-fashioned diseases. How could you miss it, I wondered.
Still, there were times when even I found it more difficult to locate. I put this down to the weather – because the elements often alter the way the land lies as well as one’s own frame of mind. But I always did find it in the end. Those were usually the evenings when a big football match was being held in the city, with the consequent lack of customers drinking black coffee.
The city was ever full of mist. One wondered if the floodlights penetrated sufficiently to pick out the players and the ball.
The air could be seen to coil upwards at street corners. This was indeed a feature of our city, something to do with disused underground railways, I’d always thought. And the multiple fictons that made the place something different from what it was by attaching themselves like burrs to otherwise common street furniture.
My mind was wandering. I had no set goal in life. The visits to the cafe were, believe it or not, the highlights of each dark afternoon which imperceptibly turned into night. When my friends didn’t turn up, I began to suspect they were not friends any longer or, even, that I never had any friends at all.
The steaming coffee urns were a comfort to watch, however, as was the waitress who tended them. They had a beautiful shape. I’d never seen urns like them. The steam hissed gently, the tenebrous fluid gurgled, as the whole of my life scried before my very eyes within the dissolving coffee grounds.
One day, the waitress looked beautiful herself. I’d never really examined her closely. I knew her general demeanour was one of the positive things of life. But there it had ended. So, on a particularly misty afternoon, with the street fictons more than a little active, more active even than the thermals, I turned my eyes towards her, as towards a recently polarised magnet. The other customers had already become shadowy glimpses bent over lonely cups in every corner. She became the fixation: a paramount image of one I should have loved all these months, rather than ignored. I needed to speak to her: and she opened her mouth as if to speak to me just as kindly…
There were hearty slaps on my back. My so-called friends had at last discovered the Regency Cafe having been led there by the fictons I had left like a trail of breadcrumbs and I spent the rest of the night entertaining them amid the loud French music. I hoped none of them would ever come again.
The following dark afternoon, there was a waiter on duty. He told me that the waitress had left the cafe … for good.
***
YELLOW TEARS
Gutger Kyle was to be our spokesman.
…
“Why him?” I asked, pointing towards the framed yellowy photograph on the wall of our bedsit.
…
“Why not him?” asked Lucy.
…
“That doesn’t seem to be a good reason.”
…
Lucy and I were ensconced in our love-pad, one where we’d not yet made love but one where we would make love one of these days, given the correct ceremony of foreplay or negotiation by a third party. We’d rented the place to live together. An unspoken purpose, till there was someone purposeful enough to speak it. But what would a single man and woman rent a place for, other than to live together? And being sound of limb and mind, what else could living-together mean if it were not loving-together? To live is to love had long been a maxim of mine. But to live together was doubly so. Yet, then, neither of us had accounted for Gutger Kyle.
When we first moved in on that dark, rainy, soggy-leaved Wednesday afternoon, the name Gutger Kyle was unknown to both Lucy and myself. Only gradually did the person behind the name impinge upon our consciousness. But everybody’s name, at the end of the day, is a pseudonym for the body. So we should have not been surprised at the outcome, should we?
Lucy had certainly never heard of him before nor, obviously, met him in any shape or form. Me likewise. I suppose it being a furnished bedsit would help us both disown ownership of the photo. But why was this particular photo hiding its own shape of size on the chintzy wallpaper? – wallpaper pasted up on the plaster, no doubt, at the behest of the even chintzier landlady – who recommended the bedsit to us by its view of suburban roofscapes. But ….London…. was full of such scenes, I’d thought. Wet shades of grey, as the evenings drew in.
Several weeks passed before we put two and two together, which was never easy when there was only two of you to start off with. The photo was the same as that on a hardback’s dust-wrapper – one of several motheaten books the landlady had left leaning against each other – presumably for show, since nobody, surely, read proper books in this neck of the ….London…. woods. Except, perhaps, Lucy and I. They seemed to be cast-offs from the time when Boots the Chemist issued you with library tickets as well as phials of cure-all medicine. Foxed and thumbrinted, with a strange label that centuries couldn’t unstick. A squashed insect halfway down page 57. Something worse squashed on page 102. The tome in question with the photo was, of course, by Gutger Kyle, or how else would Lucy and I have known his name? Called GHOSTS A MILLION it was. Another by the same author was THE BLACK SPOOK. Another one – what was it called? – THE HAUNTED TIREDNESS. And THE GRUESOME GUESTROOM and a fictoniature called WILD HONEY. In fact, as I began to cast my eyes through them, I felt I knew the style of the prose already. Or was that the benefit of hindsight? Whatever the case, I, too, can write just like Kyle. Rubbed off on me. Got my word-wings caught in that damn honey!
In any event, judging by the bibliographical details inside the title pages, Gutger Kyle was more prolific than his lack of fame could explain. However, the most astonishing matter, to Lucy, as well as me, was the smell of the Kyle books. Many book-lovers and word-worms maintain that an intrinsic feature of a book’s aesthetic value is the manner its ‘nose’ can remind one of better days, endless summer holidays, the wonder of childhood, bee-buzzing meadows, the nuances of nostalgia or the cloying of chintz. A cross between mustiness and turmeric. Cough linctus. Newness and oldness combined. And permutations of redolence. Speech-marks and spokesmoke. And whatever. There are no right words. Or all words are right. But redolence is the best. It springs to mind. The only way to convey the colour red in smell? Maybe. Or yellow. Or thick thick dandelion wine. Or liquid bees. Or, even, earwax.
.The book which smelt, according to ….Stanley…., strangely – so strong, so strange, it brought back memories you’d never had. The book was by Gutger Kyle, yes. Entitled. YELLOW TEARS.
Incidentally, ….Stanley…. was the landlady’s – he told us Kyle rented our room in the thirties – hence his photo on the wall – but did that follow? – would Lucy’s and my photo be put up, when we left? – yet I never asked the question – I needed someone else to ask. ….Stanley…. was a spiv. He sold things on – how shall we say? – like photos, I suppose, to people who didn’t want to be taken. He set children on stuffed donkeys. Gave adults the organ-grinder’s monkey to hold. Then snapped them. Clicked his fingers and waited for the money to turn itself into foodstuff for him and Mrs Ladle (the landlady). He said he had known Gutger Kyle. Took the very photo on the book jacket. And on the wall. All those years ago, when ….Stanley…. first started out as portrait painter of the single brushstroke. And Kyle was a young writer, without a publication to his name.
The time came, however, when Lucy and I started to smell the books purely in the hope of osmosis regarding the plots. But eventually we stopped not reading them: the only way I can describe our negative approach to fathoming their content. In fact, I tried to read them aloud to Lucy,in moments of desperate foreplay. At the same time, I was intent on not looking at the pages, in case I was infected by something in the shadows of the words and in their appearance on the yellow-mapped pages. We spent many a night making the small hours smaller, whiling them, not away, but back, as if summoning up a past that would not have existed if it weren’t for us in that past’s future: a future created by our very perusal of the pearls of wisdom which a certain Gutger Kyle had once decided to disseminate in the guise of ghostly miniatures. In short, we laid ourselves open to the serendipities of life and, hopefully, love.
Soon we read more into those books and, if it were not for the blur of memory tinged by dream, I’d be convinced that Stanley and the Landlady were merely characters in the fiction rather than the real people who were our neighbours in the house that some would call her decrepit mansion. Skylady and fancy man.
A story – one in an anthology that included several famous writers such as Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Lawrence Durrell, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Bowen, Robert Aickman, Walter de la Mare, Charles Dickens, as well as unknown ones such as Gutger Kyle – was particularly disturbing. Kyle seemed to have condensed his usual free-fall style that often ranged wide in plot, place and people into a more hard-core vision, where word was plot, white spaces and wide margins place and monsters people. In any normal sense, one couldn’t relate to it other than as a pure poem which happened to be prose. I often glanced up at the photo as I read the story aloud, wondering how anybody could write like that, particularly a human being, one, presumably, with frailties and a brittle bone covering the brain.
Lucy listened breathless. I needed to breathe, however, in view of imparting the words from the page via my voice-box into her eyes – which eyes, in turn, spoke volumes as to her frightened reaction.
….
….
….
Halfway through there was a sudden knock on our door.
….
….
….
“It’s only me!”
….
….
….
Evidently Mrs Ladle.
….
….
….
“Yes?”
….
….
….
Lucy broke her breath-fast with this single word.
“There’s been a phone call. Didn’t say who they were but it was a crossed-line, too, and one of those calling mentioned your names … but then it went dead – and I wondered if you were expecting a call and would know who to call back…”
Mrs Ladle’s voice was muffled by the closed door. I placed the anthology upon the bed-quilt and walked over to grab the handle, in the hope of instilling some sense into the end-game of her visit. Getting rid of the interruption was an art form in itself, even if a hard-nosed priority. I forget exactly the outcome but, apparently, ….Stanley…. was worried about anonymous callers. He called them undergrunts. He and the landlady were ex-directory while, by virtue of being tenants, Lucy and I were tantamount to nameless as far as most of the outside world was concerned. The Poll Tax authorities were sublimely ignorant of our existence, and aborted telephone calls seemed more sinister than the possible people making them.
Mrs Ladle had disappeared by the time I had opened the door to her, because she’d heard ….Stanley…. shouting – or, rather, banging the dinner gong in the downstairs hall.
….
….
….
“I wonder what all that was about,” I said, returning to the anthology.
….
….
….
Lucy shrugged. I wanted her to kiss me.
….
….
….
I forget exactly the outcome, as I said, but, somehow, we had lost all enthusiasm for the Kyle story and its faltering synchronicities. In fact, the dream it described was interrupted by the relentless ringing of a phone which woke the story’s protagonist – as I was to discover upon reading it to the end a few weeks later, when Lucy was out job-hunting. It transpired that the protagonist was a monster just like the monsters in the nightmares from which it had been woken up.
.While failing to fathom my own motivation, I jumped up from the bed – where I usually sat for want of an easy chair – and peered under the photo on the wall. It took Lucy’s absence to allow me to show off my bravado in such an act. Otherwise, I may have failed, with her watching, which would have been the worst of both worlds. Good job she was out job-hunting at the time, then. Well, beneath the framed image of Gutger Kyle (the image that had bedevilled our waking lives together, without us really realising it) was the oblong of wall it had covered for – how many years?. And there resided the faded imprint of the same image. Yet, instead of the sepia of the ancient photo, it was a sort of negative, not black and white, rather shades of grey. Shades of grey. That rang a bell. Ghost were shades of grey. But, no, it was more a mirror image where the mirror itself was as insubstantial as the reflection upon it. Nevertheless, it was proud from the wall – previously sunken, no doubt, into the inset frame’s back, the one I’d just lifted up – as if the image was trying to escape the plaster. And, indeed, underneath, the wallpaper was neatly cut away, revealing this nether face, uncluttered by chintz. At the eyes, there welled waxen pearls of sorrow, gummy to my yellow touch.
.My description fails because I am no mirror. I am more that type of insubstantial mirror I was actually trying to describe. Lucy would understand.
Of course, I questioned Mrs Ladle about it. She asked me to tell her ….Stanley….. He was the one, she said, who saw to all the odd jobs. Not her.
….
….
….
Lucy never returned. Evidently got a job. Or so I was told by a mutual acquaintance who had a foot in both camps. As to Gutger Kyle, I never bothered to lift up his photo again, in case it had all been a dream. I needed to cherish madness while I could: to help me get over Lucy.
I conducted some research in the local library regarding Gutger Kyle. He did straddle, as I suspected, the turn of the century. He wrote many novels and was, at one time, as famous as those who remain famous now. He struck up a fleeting relationship with the authoress Ivy Compton-Burnett but as that is omitted from her biography, I wonder if it was true. In fact, that might be where I went wrong: believing what I read in books. That his novels were miniatures instead?
.Lucy would understand. I can hear her breathing in the wall. Walls can collect sounds as well as memories. Places are people. Plots are pasts without a future. I’ll have to get Mrs Ladle’s ….Stanley…. up here to see to the pipes, I guess. He says he wants to take a very old photo of me.
…
The job Lucy got, I hear, is one of being a real person. Or, at least, a spokesperson. Well, it’s a promising start. Pity we never made it together, though. Instead of just sitting around the place idly ripping tears into the mansion’s yellow wallpaper.
********************************************
JEAN’S SOIRÉE
“A thousand writers should be killed annually,” said the man on the tube.
He looked up from the book to see to whom he had spoken.
I was not going to be the culprit so I pretended to turn back to my own laptop book.
But, too late, because, briefly, our eyes locked like oysterish antlers.
Strange words had captured us for their own. And, as if hypnotised, we left the carriage together at a stop neither of us had intended.
He told me he would like me to meet his girl friend Jean. I told him that perhaps I could make overtures in her flat.
Until then, I didn’t know I was a composer.
“Composers, too,” he said. “But they should be strangled every time one is born.”
We both laughed upon reaching the rain-swept blackness that was recognisable – or, at least, conceivable – as the upside.
The escalator faded away as our memory of it was expunged by the encroachment of more important memories.
Jean, however, was to remind us of it.
We had, by now, arrived at her flat where I would learn, eventually, that the most important memory had always yet to be remembered.
“Have you wondered why there is frequently a strong wind down that escalator…?” she smilingly asked one of us, whilst knowing that her pouting features and pinprick dimples endeared her more to the other.
“A thousand painters should be hung, drawn and quartered every day,” was the sudden non-sequitur of someone else – previously unnoticed as he sat near Jean’s television set. “At least,” he added with the utmost emphasis.
When the night lengthened (almost into itself as if daylight was growing more distant at both ends), the four of us got on famously. Not talking the night away, but more its opposite.
We covered the various art forms, stating why each of us loved music, painting, novels, poems, operas, plays, symphonies, sculptures … but hated those who created them.
“You know,” Jean said, “there’ll come a point in the lifetime of the planet when there’ll be more people that have died than there are yet to live.”
Despite her clumsy use of words, the other three nodded in agreement, knowing she had made a point that actually justified the execution of artists or, indeed, of anybody else even with the pretence of artistry. It could also be seen – with a blinding flash of intuition – that the moving staircase image could be applied to concepts, such as existence, as well as to the tangible things that existed.
“Constructive illness is the opposite of euthanasia,” I said, this being my contribution to the tail-end of the discussion.
“Suicide bombers are members of the deconstructionist school…” the man near the television set started to say.
“Only when an art gallery – let us say, for the sake of argument, the Tate Gallery – can actually itself become a work of art when it’s devastated by a bomb,” announced the man I had originally met on the tube. It turned out to be his parting shot, as, soon after, he departed Jean’s flat along with the man previoulsy near the television set.
Jean and I kissed as I unbuttoned a garment that was tantalisingly brief – as was the subsequence we both shared. I suppose, when and if I remember the occasion, I will decide that I was rather put off by Jean’s tattooes … and the way her spine moved up and down. Her eyes tasted like shellfish.
The rest of that night was spent watching the programme that the man previously near the television set had also been watching. It seemed to be on endless repeat.
The only way to know when morning had broken was upon hearing the first tube’s sporadic passage under the block of flats, like the end of Sibelius’ fifth symphony … or the beginning of my first. Then, thankfully, the words let us go.
***
TO PROVE A GODSEND
Though I never lived during that kingdom of war – the one that rained in London – I could easily imagine the colourlessness (or, rather, variegated brown) in every wet afternoon, prefiguring the contrast of night’s man-made lightning.
Séances were being held amid the chintz of every blitz-free sitting-room; tears being shed in every outhouse; tender hands held, over and over again, in every city square and every park.
Well, for every every, one amen. For every every, a new Cæsura.
I shook my shoulders – not a shrug as such; more of a shudder. I tramped the back-end streets, wondering if I had been transported in time to those very afternoons when shapes in fragile freedom from the night’s shelters (the Underground included) became the slowly nudging together of lightly-fleshed ghosts in the hope that something worthwhile or tangible would emerge by this serendipity of touch. Ghosts, I guessed, were to be everybody, even you and me.
This was to have been a poem. But it felt like a story, with all the trappings of a plot, albeit missing a beginning, a middle or an end, if not all three. I could have gutted this story of its protagonists, but then nobody would have been there to report its waywardness.
I met Nadia in a park where courting couples were more colourless than most, if less tearful. She was someone with whom I assumed an immediate mutuality. She smiled, wiping away her tears with a burnt hankie. Collateral damage, she said, from last night’s bombs. I didn’t take umbrage at her false modernity. I knew she joked; this was then, not now.
A fleeting image of an evening when Nadia and I did walk under a fleet of doodlebugs – and suddenly a thing like a plum-pudding bursting with a fiery sauce came down and a lot of glass fell out of the windows on to us.
“Good job we were not there”: my first ever set of words to Nadia upon meeting in the park. My second: “Ghosts were simply in the future.”
“Ghosts will forever be in the past,” were my sweet Nadia’s last.
The end of times
Truth tell no rhymes
And so we went
Ever Godsent
***
THE SILVER TEALEAF
The Nursery was tinkly quiet.
The child in bloomers and sailor tunic crawled under the claw chair, peering quizzically at the smouldering log fire. He imagined that the army of tiny sparks, earlier marching up the sooty back of the chimney, had now been massacred in a terrible conflict with their bigger forebears higher up in the house.
Soon, the tea tray would be carried into the nursery by the bent figure of his nanny. He was too young to appreciate the silver strainer and the fine service of bone china, but the cakes were always superb, oozing butter cream at every aperture. If he had known lemonade, this would have been preferred to the pale brown water that he could never swallow ’til he’d blown on it for several minutes.
Furthermore, there were always dead black insects lurking at the bottom of the cup which made him dread the last few sipfuls. Nanny would blame the strainer; by holding it up to the light of the chandelier, it cast crazy scintilla all over her wrinkled face.
This particular night, the tea things did not arrive. Nor did his nanny.
Most adults can sense tears coming on as soon as the swelling sorrow reaches the brim of the fragile beaker of the soul. But, with children, the sump of such tears ever fills their weaker teetering vessels to the point where the vast lake surfaces sway like the decks of those storm-treader ships of their dreams.
She must be dead or, at best, dying: a single tiny teardrop at her one good eye like a silver tealeaf.
The light of the tinkling chandelier faded as if someone was turning a dimmer-switch somewhere else in the large rambling house. The child was dying, too, as he couldn’t live on outside her mind.
The fire crackled in the silence.
***
Half A Sixpence
The lady intoned familiar nursery-rhymes with a plaintive smile. The child lifted its poppy face mock half-heartedly to the heaven of this mother’s face and stammered out: “Mummy I love you so much I love you even more than all the money in the world … plus sixpence.” There was much giggling at the in-joke’s addition of sixpence — then followed by the near religious wireless occasion of “Listen With Mother” on the BBC Home Service. Are you feeling comfortable? Then we shall begin. Once upon a time, the world was covered in houses and mansions. On each there stood a climbing-frame which was called a Roof, after its inventor’s name. There were forces normally outside our reality that fancied these Roofs as roosts. They arrived from the sky — clucking Old Ones as kites with flapping wing-spans that were out of proportion to the rest of their bodies. And with no bellies if truth were known. These entities tended to perch and preen themselves, but only when darkness was darker than their own bodies. It was their scrabbling claws on the slates that gave them away to the slumberers within. Some knew these indeed to be the Old Ones from a mythology beyond the reach of the previously oldest mythology. The child half-slumbered in its narrow cot. The nursery fire had long since diminished to the smallest petal of flame and, as the coals’ house of frozen ashes crumbled into the grate, with a dying whimper, the half-child heard the tell-tale scuttling across the Roof to the bedroom’s bay window. “The Fictons are struts on which Roof contraptions are built” came the whisperingly curdled message from the slate-shuffling entity’s wrinkled lips in an alien language and thus mistranslated, whilst pursing its deadly sucker down to the frost-crazed glass of the bedroom window. And the half-child, half-slumberer whispered back: “Tick tick tick tick…” like the deadened beat of the near unwound nursery clock. “Thrupenny bit the Cat”, the half-child continued to intone, as if inventing a brand new nursery-rhyme refrain of its own, on the hoof, as it were. The Old Ones thus somehow took fright at the horror which under-breathed the half-child’s voice and the dire implications that were therein held for Mother Earth. And the single most ancient of the Old Ones took vast wing from the half-child’s Roof, heading for even older parts of mythology and reality — and squawking fit to wake up the world, it led the less vast wings of its compatriots as if they were the flirtatious tail of an infinite kite. They despaired at the fate of those human beings left behind, dreaming as they were beneath Mr. Roof’s crazy shingled contraptions. And maybe the houses and mansions themselves knew something more about these matters. Whatever the case, the world dies a little bit extra with each entropic tick of the clock. That is what we call life’s own dream and nightmare’s truth — give or take an odd half-sixpence.
***
LOVE’S SMALL BAIT
In the beginning was the graveyard: a place that normally would have served better as an ending. I lost my innocence in that lakeside garden of death. Yet death was not death until I created the death in death simply by my act in life … like bait. And yes, of course, I was fully aware that a graveyard was the most appropriate venue for wooing death; but since I knew more about death’s intentions than I had any right to know, what alternative had I other than to sneak out one night, ensuring that the garden gate didn’t sound out? Only a graveyard’s moonful darkness, in the end, could extend death’s possibilities.
Death was no easy target. Like a woman’s, death’s prerequisite for physical passion was love. Indeed, death and myself had already undergone a relentless period of ‘courting’: a word I used as part of my resistance to calling a spade a spade. Given death’s passion for nothing-but-the-best, death became nothing and the best. Visibility merely subtracted from death’s existence. Death had to be worked at: worried and teased from the unsurrendering past. Only digging would suffice: through one of the loosened earths; towards a baited bite of vicarious ancestral fire.
The graveside lake was magicked by the moon. The wind tickled the trees; the same wind teased the silvery carpet of watery light. The small boat emerged from the rippling shadows, its crew member silent with the breathlessness of expended energy. The shape raised their moon-dripping oarblades to allow the previous effort maximum play on conflicting forces … of which a floating corpse was one. It lay just below the water’s silky sheen like an impression of a full-length oil painting. The face grinned upward, set thus by the moment of death itself. The legs wagged gently to and fro as if it were really swimming. The arms, weighted by the jewellery on the hands, acted as a couple of claw anchors snagging upon the lake’s pearl-pebbled bottom. The dress was weedy and sufficiently clinging to its shape of sex.
As the moon went under a cloud, the corpse’s body vanished in a conjuring-trick so sudden any chance audience would be momentarily stunned into utter silence. The crew member had indeed failed to identify the corpse as their own erstwhile body; so they could not yet claim they had hunted down their parent-in-death and, as the small boat disappeared, the bank’s reedy clumps gathered the ever-present wind like sarcastic elfin laughter.
The earth was of course easy to dig. Now, as if a thoughtful God were keeping vigil, the night’s weather was maintaining its pervasive mildness. I was so subsumed by my task, not even a ghost floating on the lake close-by could summon my attention to its non-existence. Meanwhile, my solid silver trowel made easy inroads into the peaty soil, but even with the watchful eye of a moon to oversee progress, there was no certainty as to a delver’s depth — other than the probes of my own fingers which consequently released the handle of the trowel whilst the other hand propped the body at the optimum angle upon bony buttocks.
It was not obvious when the trowel blade had met wood since there was no significant difference between the earthy mulch and the rotting coffin itself. But my testing fingers inadvertently threaded the empty eye sockets of my prey and such sightless crevices sucked upon what they considered to be skirmishing worms — but they quickly stopped because, surely, death had no need of true hunger. Yet I, the thin-headed ghoul with neat tie, knew how lucky it was to have been wearing gloves — even if such gloves were of the prettiest gossamer lace. And, with the sound of baying as of some gigantic hound riding the star winds, I somehow knew the solid earth had learnt its own miraculously skilful craft in the pressurised creation of floating corpses upon a lake of sodden rot to douse the flames within and without.
CONTINUED HERE: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/fictoniatures-2-by-df-lewis.html
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