Continued from here: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/fictoniatures-1.html
PENCIL-SHAVINGS
The still unmarried Prince did not wonder what the lady was doing in the Palace courtyard. Yet why should he have wondered what the lady was doing there, when he did not usually even wonder about anything in life? Indeed, he did not wonder at the huge paving-slabs of the courtyard and how they could have been transported to the courtyard before they made that courtyard into a courtyard; nor did he wonder at the birds that did not seem too scared to perch in the courtyard at the sun-kissed fountain’s edge; nor did he wonder at his own mother the match-making Queen’s nettly insistence that he left his room regularly to cross potentially romantic paths with the ladies who were allowed, against all historic wisdom, to enter the courtyard for simply passing-through it as a short-cut as well as — in this particular lady’s case today – for sedentary solitude.
But the Prince had stopped not-wondering, seeing that the lady seemed to be sketching the bird-edged fountain with her sketching-pencil, sitting akimbo, as she was, astride a sketching-stool before a sketching-easel with a sketching-pad upon it. Indeed, the Prince was now so intrigued he did not need the Queen’s encouragement to leave his viewing-seat in the Palace’s viewing-balcony and to venture down the spiral slab steps to the slab-baked courtyard where he intended to tiptoe towards the sketching-lady and take a sneaky look at the sketch she was sketching with the longest sketching-arm imaginable.
His toes stirred the sketching-lady’s pencil-shavings with a crackly swish and she looked round, thus causing the extreme arm’s length pencil to skid skewedly across the sketching-pad’s topmost sketching-sheet upon which she had been sketching. The lady straightways fainted and taken on a stretcher by the royal gardeners to the local well-woman clinic. The Prince returned, through the pencil-shavings, smartly to the balcony simply to wonder at wonder.
The birds scattered to the four corners of the air as the fountains’s faintest edges faded into the shimmering heat … and the Queen, whose lot in life was not a lot she loved a lot, realised that she was at a loss for words and, upon later learning of the day’s events, announced that all these many pencil-shavings could not possibly be enough to enable making even half a single match!
What did he find crossed-through on the pad, you ask? Simply, the most intricate sketch of an elbow that he could possibly imagine.
***
JACK JUMBERLACK
Back of Ruffet Wood, there lived a family that knew only of themselves.
Such self-sufficiency could usually be told only in a fairy stories, but here it was real. The Jumberlacks, for that was their name, had lived here for centuries within centuries. The First Father was older, he claimed, than the oldest tree he ever remembered hiding behind. Indeed, the day he first met his wife-to-be and took her back to the small wooden house in the clearing was also beyond remembering. She may have indeed been older than him.
The resultant children had, in turn, discovered mates with whom to couple outside the reach of their own memories. The First Father and Mother had simply nodded knowingly, as each of their children had eventually fallen in love with a chosen stranger. Everyone shrugged, too, at the mystery of the exponential growth, not only in the family, but in the wooden house which, as if nourished by the leaf-loam, towered higher each day, just like the trees.
The last in line, so far was young Jack Jumberlack, who, if he had only realised, was in search of his own partner, confident that, when the day of his maturity dawned, she would be there … emerging like a dream-child upon the sun shafts in Ruffet Wood.
Jack was tall for his age and he lived in the highest attic of the wooden house. When he was due to seed his wife with his own children in the soon-to-be-forgotten future, new attics would by then have groaned into growth beyond the present roof limits. Jack’s own toddlers would play seeky-find among the chimneystacks, while wooden slopes slowly formed new roof-contraptions above the old.
But, until then, Jack Jumberlack had to make do with his own company. He knew the secrets of playing seeky-find on his ownsome, since those other Jumberlacks last up the ratchetting ladder of generation had already outgrown such childhood games. So, Jack often dodged behind the widest, tallest tree — the one that was still the oldest beyond any memory’s reach — and then dart up into the branches before he had the chance to change body. Looking down, Jack Jumberlack spotted Jack Jumberlack crouched in misspent hiding!
“Yoo hoo, found you!”
And Jack joined Jack in shrill boyish laughter: only to slope off as a single Jack, to milk the large-headed cow which only had one bent horn. Which was one too many.
One day, out of nothing, beyond sight of the wooden house’s only window, Jack Jumberlack saw something hiding amid an incipient tree growth. It looked like a worm, with a human face, coiling around the sapling’s tenuous existence.
In innocent joy, Jack called out: “You who! Found you!”
He plopped the wriggling creature into his mouth, knowing that supper would be late, if not never. It was such a delicious flavour, he dreamed of Handsome and Petal.
Later, when he told his mother, she smiled wickedly.
“Never fear, Jack Jumberlack, it will harbour within you and grow limbs like yours, but shapelier — grow a face like yours, but sweeter and prettier — and it will use your own body like a glove puppet … until the cocoon breaks and love comes.”
But nobody actually said these unlikely words of enlightenment, so Jack of course did not hear them. His mother had indeed been somewhere else all the time, no doubt coupling, as was her wont, with a creature owning a voice so hideous, it was more like tree bark than sound.
In any event, Jack Jumberlack had left his real self behind another tree in Ruffet Wood, during one of those misbegotten, misbegodden games of endless seeky-find. So it was not Jack Jumberlack at all who had not heard the words that had not been spoken by his absent mother.
The real Jack Jumberlack was, of course, to find himself again when the time was ripe. And eventually — when the wooden house creaked and groaned in the night — the First Father died in the arms of the First Mother, pleased that indeed time was at least ripe for him. But, death being an orphan of birth, it was easy to forget how darksome it could become beyond Ruffet Wood. And how lightsome, too, thus happily belying all that went before.
***
A RESTLESS NIGHT
It sprung from the direction of the bedroom window, only visible by being darker than the impenetrable darkness itself. He flinched, expecting whatever it was to cover him with a further blanket on his bed. He wondered why he was awake in the first place; but perhaps the Thing had released the smallest sound before shedding itself. The room was as he usually liked it: without even a glimmer of light, the way he dreamed his sleep would one day become: without the disturbing images that often fleet across the dozing mind’s eye, either to be forgotten in the flurry of life’s waking business or merely half-remembered, only to join up with its other (perhaps better) half, come the following night, when the whole would become a new half of an even more important harrowing. And so forth, until the one true Sleep finally takes over late in the day of life. The circle completed
He certainly felt warmer. The Thing had spread itself over the top of his duckdown, its deep black surface rippling like a pond with a sea’s consistency.
The bed should have been the safest place to stay. As a child, he’d considered it a sanctuary against those fears that lurked underneath it and in the corners of the room. He’d crawl down deeper, knowing in his heart of hearts that even the worst bomb of all could not harm him, even if it made a direct hit on the house.
Now, older, with all the hang-ups that adult versions of children can so easily suffer, even the bed lost its glamour as a safehouse. The creature of his nightmare had become part and parcel of the bedcovers themselves.
Secretly, he knew, deep down within himself, as far as he could get from the surface of his body, was a soul, a pinprick of essential spirit, which his whole life heretofore had been spent in protecting. That tiny core was him: the rest was mere masquerade. Others, less knowledgeable than him, had not protected these little fellahs, these tiny bits of themselves, had not realised the dire necessity of so doing, and had consequently lost them in one careless moment of body-letting. Such sparks, thus released, would then wander the universe until they found new vehicles for their manipulative ambitions. Tonight, a soul which had once lived upon the Earth inside a body and escaped one morning of flatulence and bleary-eyed unalertness, had decided to seek reunitement with matter and had found purchase in the heavy bedroom curtains: and finding some unnatural skein of near-vitality in the material’s woof, it had pounced like a huge moth up onto the next rung in the cycles of existence
But two souls cannot live in one human body.
Most things are possible, except the impossible, and even that becomes possible in time. Never, though, can one body have more than a single master.
#
He woke with a panic. The window was shining with the beginnings of dawn: the impermeable drapes had parted raggedly at the middle, as if a sleepwalker had gone off half-cock in the reasonless desire to undraw them, only managing to crossthread some of the rings along the rails by tugging down instead of across. The waker could not see whether the sash was up or down. He’d wanted to sleep till noon, but the unseasonable rip of light had evidently stirred him. And the cold, too, since most of the covers had slewed off him in the night. He tried to recall a dream he was having just before rudely waking. It certainly figured the curtains, but he couldn’t be sure. He turned over and was relieved to see his wife drowsing peacefully. More beautiful than he ever remembered her.
She suddenly opened her eyes upon him and screamed… …then laughed.
***
BOWEN’S DEBT
I could see she needed to speak to someone in her own class. Years a lady, and now she had to resort to nightly shake-downs on patches of dusty floor that considerate souls would mete out by the inch. Her name she said was Madame de Charlemont, but I doubted if that was her real one.
“Can I call you Claudette?”
“You may, if that were really my name.”
“It seems to fit. You’re like something out of Proust or Colette or Katherine Mansfield or William Trevor or Anita Brookner.”
“Or Baudelaire or Mallarmé… No, No, why should I have to come out of anything at all but Piaf?”
I could see she was irritated, perhaps at my not mentioning Elizabeth Bowen. The mane rippled like a sea, the face her beach of damp powdered sand. The hair was indeed greyer than fair, propped up at the front like a hedge in a nineteen forties style, ill-fastened at the sides with beetling hair-clips. However, it was the look, the content rather than the form, that intrigued me most.
My attention slipped to the voice. I tried harmonising my own tones and registers of speech with the contralto echoes of her; it was as if the sound was not taken from the chest but from her past, when she’d held audiences in the palm of her shell-like hand.
“Can I help you in any way?” I ventured.
I had discovered her inside a two-bit cafe near to a nameless place (an area between two well known tourist attractions of the city). She was sitting in front of a large wall mirror; so at first I thought there were two of her; twin sisters upon a sheen’s breath, as the Poet once put it. Their elbows tangled by time, I thought.
I sat myself at the next table, so close I could easily stare into her wayward eyes; the sea had already withdrawn leaving glistened pools upon them. She was picked out by the awkward late afternoon light that entered between the posters on the cafe window. I simply knew she knew that I wanted to talk to her. And vice versa. Too old to be a pick-up, I should have had no qualms. Too old to be picked-up, she eventually answered me with not even the slightest turn-away of the head.
“You could only help me, if you’d met me twenty years before.”
Before what? The remark was even more cryptic in the foreign language she spoke. I shrugged it off for what it was; a dream talking; hope expanding into the past as well as into the future, but merely skirmishing with the seedy present moment.
“You’d think they’d clean up this city for the tourists, wouldn’t you?” It felt like taking pot-shots with words: hoping at least that the target would stop wavering about.
“Yes, I stood in some finds…” She held up her dainty foot at a sharp angle so that I could see the real mucky underneath the high-heel shoe. I was astonished someone of her age could balance on such dagger- points, like a filler novelty act in an anachronistic vaudeville.
“Were you indeed a famous singer, Claudette?”
“More famous than some. But now I’m just an entry in a thousand discarded diaries.”
“Will you sing a song I’ve written?’
I held out a tattered score. I’d carried it in my back pocket for as long as I recalled owning the pocket.
“In here!” She turned to look at the waitress who was scowling at us from over the steamy counter.
“Why not? It may bring others in, and surely they need more clients than simply the two of us.”
She saw what the score was. I thought I caught a half-smile hovering in her look. “I see it’s called ‘Claudette’,” she said.
“In this city, one ceases to be surprised at coincidences,” I answered.
She stood up. I then knew she was a Diva: because common songstresses of the old school usually squat sing. I, for one, croon above my own finds.
She was not quite so old as I had originally believed. The dress shone upon her pedigree flanks. The breasts relayed the blurring flow of shimmer and sea light. She hummed her voice into tune, as the Poet said, like a coterie of ambivalent musicians using colours as well as sounds for the ultimate accompaniment. But I never really understood poetry.
…
I tapped my fingers on the unpercussive table, finding it difficult to keep up with the other rhythms of the city around us, for the surface was tacky with ancient meals. I opened my mouth, as if that would encourage her to follow mine in a composer’s lip-reading, a listener’s sight-reading.
She eventually sat down without singing the song, though I could have sworn there had been at least something in the air (not my song, but one that had been written by one of her past lovers).
“Did you not like my song, Claudette?”
“I liked it very much, my dear.”
I turned to the waitress, seeking confirmation that Claudette had not sung it at all.
“It’s got a nice tune, Mister, I’ll say that for it…” The waitress’s voice was coarser than the Diva’s, despite being younger.
I turned back to Claudette, for somehow I knew I would love her more than any song could sing. But she had already disappeared into the gathering mysteries of the city’s night. I heard the distant tolling of the engulfed cathedral and shuddered.
“But you need a lady to sing it rather than your gruff voice,” the waitress continued, as she sat back into the coffee-coloured gloom of the counter. I barely heard her trying to mimic my song.
I looked into the large mirror hung by the claws of bent nails, but its steamy surface swam with an uncertain gloss: Usher’s tarn dimming in the man-made light of early evening.
I swayed out into the quiet street on alcoholic points, wondering why her real name had gone from my mind. Nameless or no, I’d always love Madame de Charlemont. I always had.
The past’s song is as future debt to eventual silence.
***
TACHYONS AND STICKY FICTONS
I have a feeling, a strong feeling that the hallway is darker than yesterday and an even stronger feeling that tomorrow it will be darker still.
A door shuts elsewhere in the mansion, as I wait by the foot of the stairs, waiting to hear the patter of feet along the landing. I have waited so often, at this time of early evening, that I have almost forgotten the purpose of it all.
It’s very well and good having strong feelings about things: all my life, I have not exactly imposed my views on matters, but more or less waited for events to turn out the way I just knew they would — it comes to the same thing I suppose. But my Father used to wag his finger at me from behind his Times; and I, ceasing momentarily from staring at the armies of sparks marching at the back of the fire, would smile knowingly at him, at the same time as placing toasted slippers upon his curling toes.
Now, I’m older, of course, but Father’s not. I feel he’s still the same age, only a few years ahead of me now. Mother was a tall lady — and, if my memory serves me right, if she were standing here at the foot of the stairs like me, waiting, her head would almost reach the top of the landing.
But landings are peculiar places: lights flashing on and off as members of the family dodge in and out of each other’s rooms and, when the Great Clock chimes Midnight (the Father of the House plodding from the study to his bedroom), the unbroken darkness settles in for the duration. Then there are no landing-beacons (nor dinner gongs) to help them home in.
If it weren’t for my comings and goings, doings and undoings, not even mornings would bother to disturb the floating cities of dust. Nor the sticky fictons of dream or nightmare. Further tachyons of imagination, notwithstanding
So, I was positive I heard the pattering start from a distant part of the mansion at the closing of another door. It only took me a moment to take two breaths before I saw the tiny girl appear in the gloom at the head of the stairs. I could hardly see her open, innocent plate of a face … and I knew I would only feel compassion if I actually could see the eyes. I’m certain, though, she will not come nearer, at least for a while, and a while is longer at this time of day than at any other.
“You’ve made it then?” I called up.
No answer, as I knew there would be no answer. There can only be questions towards the end of dusk.
“Are your little feet curled up like casters?” I called up again, without thinking.
She is a Singer … and, inevitably, with a needle that can only make extremely long hemming stitches. My great great grandmothers are treadling away in the rooms beyond the broom cupboards, and the machines they treadle are living extensions of their bones. They’re all around me now, the forebears of the mansion, Father made of even taller shadow than Mother.
The waif whom I call Little Bobbin does start to descend the stairs, her arms stretched out sideways like a trapeze-pole; and her voice gradually becomes clear … a thin piping tune that I believe to be only one remove from weeping. Her shape of fictons as a burr of truth between each dream-note. Squirming, I felt my toes curl, too.
I have a feeling, a strong feeling that the hallway is darker than yesterday and an even stronger feeling that tomorrow it will be darker still. But feelings are never always correct. Because today, I seem to shed a new light upon my own darkness.
***
LOST THRILLS
The two small boys crouched in the nursery dark, daring.
They imagined ghosts where they knew in their hearts that there were none at all. They called up demons with childish spells, but the spells only served to increase the darkness. Their eyes squeezed tight shut so as to admit dreams and, even, spoken memories in dancing colour…
“The dwarfen shapes shambled from the dark landing to the bedroom in Indian file, seeking to bid farewell to the candlelit corpse. Yet the peeking eyes could barely discern the top edge of the draped body above the coffin’s side. They saw, however, that a large picture of a pre-Raphaelite angel, in stylized prayer, was upon the inside of the raised lid — the custom in those parts to comfort the dead. The whispering voices sounded ghostly as they paid their last respects to their father. But there was in fact only one mourner in the room. Their father’s body suddenly sat bolt upright in the coffin with a startled grin, as the squat shades of the erstwhile orphans dispersed. “I loved you all.” His deep voice reverberated through the house. The angel smiled, a single silver tealeaf at one eye that may have been a tear, as their father laid back in the stuffed satin with a final fading sigh.”
The boys then abruptly summoned their mother talking through their own filters of future growth as souls …
“I don’t think the conjuror even belonged to the Magic Circle. He told me on the quiet — since I was the organiser of the my sons’ party — that he didn’t hold with professionals. There was a rag taggle of kids squatting on the floor, their knees pointed out like waist ears. Most of their energy had already been expended on games of hide and seek, blind man’s buff, hunt the thimble, postman’s knock and others, less well known, like chase a ghost, catch a bogeyman by his toe and dead man’s bluff. So, they were ready to be enchanted — if not, in themselves, enchanting. The conjuror performed the usual tricks with string, silver rings, boxes and even sawed the household cat, supposedly, into two. But what really astounded me were the kisses. After tugging yards and yards of regatta flags from his mouth, extruded from his inmost innards, it seemed, he started blowing kisses at his audience, x’s upon x’s, fluttering in the air like moths with four wings. The children, including my two sons, laughed and clapped, regaining much of their impetuous excitement in the process — until the kisses landed like bee stings or sticky fictons. They scattered into the garden, quite hooting with delight, I was pleased to see. What a great climax, I thought, sending them off with such a feat of prestidgitation — which was more original than bags of sticky sweets and balloons any day.”
The boys did not understand their own thoughts so decided to try their luck with yet another party – but this time they were mystified with whom their own squeezed eyes made them empathise…
“As soon as the blind man asked the question about a meeting-place, we knew it was a good question, in view of what we had actually asked him. We stared between his eyes as if he had a third one which he employed to embarrass people. We knew he was a magician, but whether he was a conjuror who pulled punches at children’s parties or a full-blooded practitioner of the black arts, we were then unsure. So we decided to answer with as few words to incriminate us as possible. But silence is rarely golden. It weighs heavy in the balance of meaning. And when he broke it, he took the very non-sequitur out of our mouths: “No news is good news.” He then proceeded to pull our lop-eared innards out through our mouths by a feat of prestidgitation which took our breath away – but kept us alive to feel the pain by the sheer will power of his eyes in ours.”
Which of the two boys felt sick, neither knew, but surely at least one of them was on the brink whereat death and life grapple…
“The paper blind was sun-yellowed with age; the house had suffered so many deaths in the family, it had been lowered for at least five years of the previous ten. When it was the boy’s turn to sleep his last sleep in the sick room, the blind’s roller was faulty and it kept springing back up with an outlandish clatter. His mother repositioned it when she brought his lightly boiled egg and bread soldiers, only for the roller to twizzle violently in the middle of the night like a lost demon flapping. He wondered where his brother was and why he never visited. He imagined the window as the only eye in the world with an eyelid on the inside of its eyeball. On the point of death, he found himself facing down into over-lidded darkness, smile to smile with the corpse of his father. During a moment of remission, the boy stood at the open window of the sick room, admiring the way the orchard garden had been landscaped since the onset of his illness. The shapes were steeped in dark magic. He turned to his mother and said, ‘It’s strange how time flies.’ She smiled sweetly, took his hand in hers and became a beautiful angel who glided through the window, tugging him like a paper kite. The boy’s tatters couldn’t fly since his mother had earlier placed pennies on his eyes.”
The two boys dreaded where they were being taken by the fantasising of their minds. Perhaps to middle age and a death neither really deserved — because they were good children and deserved at least fourpence for their pains. Yet it was bathtime, the worst time of the evening…
“I stood in front of the bathroom mirror. I knew my brother was watching me from inside the bath, so I made a big show of the blood I could make from the corner of my eye. Sticky fictons of it, blacker than liquid coal, dripping slowly to the lino tiles like candlegrease in a witchcraft ceremony. My brother very rarely fell asleep in the bath, not least of all because it was very dangerous. However, he had been working late on a particularly mind-numbing task and the long hot soak was soporific. The first time he woke, the water was sloshing about him as if he were a corpse trying to revive itself. The brother he had dreamt of seeing had disappeared. On stepping out, to dry himself, there was a peaty sludge on the floor which made him skid over. The next time I woke it was to the impenetrable steam of the bathroom. I felt my own wrists in sudden fright. Bony and pulse-slow. The last time I woke, the bathwater was cold and still.”
Abruptly, the door opened and a shape interrupted a shaft of golden light from the landing. “Time for the tea party, boys.” Thank goodness for the return of normality, at last. They would be able to play proper games, like dominos or ludo or, even, snakes and ladders, after tea and be kissed by their father on his return from work. And such were so much better than horrible mind games in the dark. And their mother and sister were even now waiting for the two boys to arrive so that they could tip up the steaming samovars of golden tea into bone china cups. Yet the voice announcing tea, although familiar, was a trifle out of true. Either too deep or too high — or, strangely, both. “But don’t forget it’s bathtime first and make sure you scrub your skin off!” The voice laughed, as the door shut with a determined clink of latch.
There were ten summoning bones where his fingers and thumbs should have been, but he had nothing to feel them with save his tongue. And, like the most frightful conjuring trick of all, he realised there had only ever been a single boy in the penny dreadful blackness of the nursery — quite beside himself with terror.
Later Coda
But now in later age, filtered by a somehow pleasant hindsight, I wonder who it was that won the tontine game that night. My brother or me? Ludo or dominos, were far too boring, not enough cut and thrust, and even story-telling lost its daredevil thrills eventually. The cat yawned having not be sawn in two.
***
A STUDY IN BROWN
The upright piano looked secondhand even when it was brand new: consigned now to the Utility Room, because the family had lost interest in its finger-marching goodness. Their words.
Countless children had been put through its paces, only to abandon it for the more customary rituals which preoccupied modern teenagers. Their short legs had once pumped at the pedals trying to keep it afloat amid the skies of childhood fantasy, only to fall to Earth in a sliding scale of long-limbed puberty. They escaped into the feel of the modern moment — via the consecutive eras of the nifty Fifties and the sexy Sixties — expunging wireless programmes such as “Music While You Work” and “Mrs Dale’s Diary” so as to make room for the rest of their memories.
Meanwhile, in that same untransfigured past, these children’s ancestors were on dinner-break — sitting, in regimented expectation, at the Factory Canteen tables, awaiting another soon-to-be-ancient wireless programme called “Workers’ Playtime” to begin. It was due to be broadcast on the BBC Light Programme at 12.30 on the dot from this very canteen.
“It’s a load of old tommy rot!” said George, gesticulating with a brown-smeared bottle of HP Sauce being poured over a plate of sticky fictons.
The man seated alongside him before a plate of runny fried egg and limp chips tried to ignore the contentious remarks. George wondered why workmates in canteens often sat alongside each other, leaning over the trestle table with clunking cutlery — whilst the toffs in the “white collar” restaurant down the corridor would tend to sit opposite each other, conducting a conversation superficially structured, polite and civilised, yet a conversation which was fundamentally unadventurous. Those, like George, of a “blue collar” persuasion in the canteen would conduct more sporadic interchanges, unembarrassed by silences, veering from side to side between misunderstandings, teetering upon the edge of anger and recrimination, but always searching, probing, broaching subjects of deep workmanlike lore.
A true description. Not George’s words, though.
In any event, the stand-up comedian was already preening himself on the makeshift stage, waiting for the mikes to go live. The theme music was tuning up, being played direct from Broadcasting House.
George’s conversation began to misfire. He was settling into fictons and chips, his tongue finding it more and more difficult to unsnarl itself from the curdled fat. “Only yesterday,” he stammered , “Jean caught her fingers under the piano lid. We got that ol’ joanna so that we can give our kids some sort of proper music … to keep ’em up with the toffs. But it’s all going to come to nowt…”
George’s listening neighbour stared quizzically at his fork. A sliver of crinkle-edged eggwhite on its midspoke became almost a holy relic.
The comedian’s patter tannoyed from the stage: “Oi! Oi! Guess what happened to me on the way to the factory? I met me ol’ mate Wilfred Pickles. He said, ‘Have a go, Joe!'”
A stooge with an outlandish clown’s nose interrupted the comedian, bundling towards the upright mike: “But your name’s not Joe, Joe!”
Raucous, uncoordinated laughter and banging of pudding spoons echoed around the starlights of the canteen’s giant Meccano rafters.
“Give ’em the money, Brian!”
“I’m Barney, Mr Pickles, not Brian.”
The last bit was repeated by the audience in rehearsed unison. And the timeless jokes rattled on through the air, followed by an unseen hand slowly running its fingers upon tingling keys which, finally, emerged from a million ghostly wirelesses in a million empty front parlours.
Then an announcement and timecheck in King’s English.
In those days “brown study” meant a moment or two of deep meditation. George’s brown study was workmanlike but with a deeper meaning than mere words…
He had been known for donkey years as a jolly good, all round egg — a dependable regular who often treated himself to an extra half on top of what he called his “medicinal” pint of best bitter. His missus sent him round to the pub, of course – and a more understanding spouse it was difficult to imagine, even though she had the ulterior motive of getting him out of her hair for an hour or two. So that she could listen to the wireless in peace.
Brian knew George quite well. It was Brian’s brown study that used words in uncommon usage. He counted himself one of George’s pals. A straighter fellow you’d go far to meet was George. He did the march-past on Remembrance Day. Just a shade over middle-age, when Brian first met him. George entering the Autumn of George’s life with as much grace as it is possible to muster in such circumstances of what one could only describe as encroaching oblivion. Brian knew, when he got to George’s age, he’d go to pieces, more like. So, Brian admired George’s equanamity, as it were, his urbane nonchalance, his avuncular, if taciturn, charm. They often sat side by side in the works canteen.
George had grown-up children of his own, he told Brian, who visited him now and again, but not frequently enough for his liking. Still, George understood. Youngsters had busy lives, these days. They must have had commitments to others of their own age. Why should they concern themselves with “oldies like me”?
Brian would nod, not necessarily in agreement, but merely to acknowledge that he knew what George was saying. In fact, Brian had once been one of those “youngsters” who’d rather spend his time in a pub with relative strangers than visit his own folk in the Fen Country. It is peculiar how family ties can loosen up over the years. Brian had been a staunch loyalist to the clan back home — that is, until he left to go to the Big Smoke. Then, Brian had wondered why blood-links were so important. He could not be proper friends with members of his own family in normal life.
Thus unrooted, other people’s ideas helped to raise Brian’s two feet from the ground. He gained wordy ambitions. But, thank goodness, he spotted the danger signs before it was too late. He avoided being an intellectual by the skin of his teeth. Or at least he hoped so, and still does. Despite the words he uses to describe his own thoughtful brown studies.
In those days, Brian positively had to sit at home in his digs, during those quiet moments of self-hypnosis, and convince himself that he was still one of the Fen folk, a home-spun youth who had no more in his top storey than the usual junk in trivial clutters. His mind flittered, at one moment, from almost philosophical exploration of his own thinking-patterns, then at another, to a perhaps forced colloquial remonstration against any such pretentious crap.
Anyhow, Brian does indeed remember George, that chap in the works canteen, that steadfast man in the pub who always insisted in having his beer in a straight glass. George often sat at what he called the Old Joanna and jammed tunes straight through from ears to mouths. George. A good solid name for him. It couldn’t have been invented better.
Then, the surprise…
It still surprises Brian to think of it. It wasn’t exactly as if George had moaned, like others of his generation, about the young people of the day, like the lager louts and the self-seeking yappers in the City and the so-called football hooligans — and, of course, the ungrateful young blighters of George’s own spawning who sat in their colour supplement lounges lined with mock bookspines, staring at endless suds on a flickering box.
No, George did not indulge in such diatribes, as Brian’s own father did, for example. Brian’s father swore blind that civilisation as he knew it was crumbling and the home-grown enemies were “worse than the bleedin’ Nazis!” No, George was not quite like that. So, it should not have been a surprise when George came into the pub one evening with a ring in his left ear!
Brian’s own father called lads with such jewellery “Nancy Boys” whom a few years “under the wing” of a sergeant-major on National Service would soon lick into shape. Therefore, for George to appear with his lobe threaded by that extraneous bit of metal amid his cronies in the pub Snug was quite unbelievable. One of the dead-eyed dart throwers who frequented this particular bar threw straight off the board, instead of the treble nineteen for which he was aiming. The landlord of the pub over-pulled a pint of Bitter, its froth disappearing into the system that later appeared as Mild.
“What’s it for, George?” Brian asked, pointing to the ring that was of the type Brian remembered his mother calling a “sleeper” to prevent the pierced hole from fleshing over. George tentatively put a finger to his lobe, and smiled. Just that. At first, Brian thought about dropping the subject. But then he blurted out: “It suits you.” George turned a brighter shade of crimson, as if he were about to have a stroke. It was as if the pubful of drinkers had received a message from a hidden force in the Universe, since everybody grew quiet as dead mice. Even the dart-throwers launched their arrows more gently into the cork. Words were useless. Even canteen-talk was out of the brown study window.
“Thank you, Brian,” George eventually replied. “It’s God’s way of branding us his beasts of burden and to remind Him which is which.”
Brian supposed if he’d looked closely enough at the ring in George’s lughole, he would have seen a microscopic number etched. Indeed, George did not seem to notice he had caused quite a stir, but later that night, Brian dreamed a brown dream that the whole side of George’s head had been embedded with a sculpture, a large star-shaped contraption that could have served as a tightly meshed drain-cover, and it sparkled in the putrescent pub lights. George was also wearing burnt umber shades, but more a lop-sided version of the hi-tech binoculars Dan Dare used to wear on the front of the Eagle comic.
George died peacefully in his sleep. His missus told the mourners this as they trooped into the terraced house to commiserate. “I knew,” she said, “there was something peculiar when he didn’t go to the pub for his usual pint.” Which, in hindsight, was even more peculiar, since he had died the very morning after his last visit to the pub wearing the ear-ring. But none cared to broach the subject with his missus in the circumstances.
So, all George’s friends, one of whom Brian was proud to number himself (the youngest, in fact), marched past his open coffin in the front parlour — a ritual moment of remembering and forgetting. That was the tradition, those days. They were relieved rather than surprised that there was no ring in either of his ears, nor any sign of piercing. Just a hint of a smile on George’s steadfast lips. And no words.
That night Brian had another brown dream about George. This time, George being dead, the dream seemed realler than the one about the huge device that threaded his skull. This was dream was more in words than pictures: the first time a dream had come to Brian in this way. The way it told Brian about itself was that just beyond the deadish volcano of Noog, whereby the brown River Bandshow flows, lies the land of Wireless. Nobody knows of its existence except those, if any, who live there.
The houses move up Archer Hill, its central plinth, like turtles intent on breeding. Upon the brown brow of that hill squats the fort that was built to defend the town from any unlikely marauders and, within the fort, King George sits enthroned, if it is a throne indeed upon which he sits. He’s become a surly man, with a brigand’s moustache and ploughshared brows, staring unbelievingly into the middle distance with eyes that, if once steel blue, are now of seeping copper.
King George abruptly shouts and momentarily stirs from his own dream, a dream that is within Brian’s dream; the pity of it being that there is nobody near to hear his shout except himself. He does not answer, retracting his tortoise-head into a new shell of convoluted dreams. Or ghosts. Or fictons.
At no real distance from the fort, there is a courtyard, out of bounds to the townsmen, if townsmen there are. Its slabs are crazed over with moss-tracks that have long since created their own jigsaws of reality, so abstract and indefinable there are no further words to be used about them. No words at all.
The courtyard’s periphery is bounded with high ancient walls, crested with jagged shards of brown beer-bottle glass that give to the bladdery sun a thousand versions of itself, many of which outlast the night that always seems to follow. If darkness be brown, then this night congeals faces rather than hides them.
The twists and turnings of the Old Town verging upon these courtyard walls are a maze which only one particular child can solve with paper and crayons one special Christmas morning … and that child died several years ago anyway, its parents having earlier sailed off down the brown Bandshow, the last to leave Wireless before the final trap was sprung.
Within this maze of broken-signed inns and disused laundries, there stands the forbidding tenantless prison (identical to the fort in shape and design) into which the townsmen, if townsmen there are, yearn to enter, if they can only find its giant rusting keys, so as to complete the circle of curtailment; for they find the town walls are not prison enough for them.
One night, when the rusty stars themselves came down and dodged like fireflies between the skid-marked roofs, touching them with gildenspires, the patroller of the prison, known as Walkman, donned his night head-dress and skirted the walls of the King’s fort, believing that this was the prison he was meant to frog-march round amid the toad shit.
Beneath his streaming hair, Walkman listened to the dead phones of night that threaded his curlicue ear-lugs and filled him with tight-fisted silence, to such an extent that he did not notice the crackling of the distant Noog volcano on the sky-line which was meant to have no guts left to honk. Nor did he hear the majestic fart from inside the fort — as loud as any coastguard’s gun. King George had spoken. Too late, he had stirred for the very last time. A dying breath, that fart. His last word. His last ghostly smelly breath.
Thus, Walkman, the prison-keeper, did not hear the distant crashing of the prison walls. The rusty keys had finally turned against him. And all the townsmen, if townsmen there were, withdrew into a freedom of mere flesh constraints.
One firefly spark remained, its only hope being that Walkman would lead it beyond the bounds of Wireless. A stench still wafted from the fort, so vile it veiled the coming light of dawn; but Walkman could not sense it through the brown hangings of his nostrils.
The last firefly spark extinguished, as Walkman was spiked upon the jagged wall of his own body’s protruding bones which, if he had cleared it, would have allowed him to leave Wireless.
The ultimate horror was that King George’s dream-fetters remained upon him, even within death … if it indeed was the King who was trapped inside his own corpse-keep, and not someone else called Walkman (or even Brian). And George landed into the nifty Fifties feet first and with a bit of a headache. He always felt a bit queasy after travelling through the time locks: there had been a big delay in 1939 and a rough ride until the relatively calm waters of 1945. Now, there was just the residue of war fever in the air, making his veins tingle — but, by putting his mind into a slower gear, he found he could take a panning shot of the Phoenix Eras that most remember as their childhood.
It is true to say that George was not a through and through sympathiser with the people he surveyed. He had been brought up outside of time, and it is rumoured beyond space too, as he had the mark of what some would call Jack the Devil in his face — piercing eyes of hidden depths — hooked nose with gaping bristly nostrils — chin jutting below a mouthful of corrugated teeth — and a tunic that had been innocently customised and derived from those commonly worn by certain members of Hitler’s entourage in the two decades immediately prior to George’s arrival back on the dry land of history.
The strains of “Oh, What A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts” were ringing from the British Legion Hall. Being Saturday night, most of the backyard houses had emptied out and resorted to the weekly social, for an attempt at re-living the camaraderie and bonhomie of the war years. “Roller bowler bowl, roller bowler bowl…” The singsong rang out into the benighted streets, along with the endless rattle of the tinkling joanna, everyone’s favourite biddy pedalling hard to the tunes it played. One among them had evidently won the football pools.
George was frog-marching down the dark black and white street eager for a bit of colour-injecting, whilst savouring the challenge of a new age. Things then were not black and white, as the newsreels depicted, but various shades of brown. And having been taught that there is nothing more modern than the present, he was surprised at the rather utility, makeshift appearance of the Fifties lifestyle. It needed, he thought, colour and slickness, together with an importation of firescreens from the theatres to the front parlours — fast information, fast food, fast sex, to prevent the wasting of that scarce commodity called time. The streets needed light, the importance of which had been lost amid the air raid blackouts.
Above all, words were needed, words worthy enough for worlds to wield.
As George marched, he dug up metal arms from between the roots of Earth, these having been sprung beneath the pavements in an alternate universe now encroaching on this one. He proceeded to raise them and illumine their topmost bulbs with his breath, also seeing fit to make them parallel with the goalposts etched against the horizon of allotments. Some were later to call that vertical. Give or take a few inches.
Yet, Brian suspected this was George masquerading as someone else, or vice versa, more likely. The suspicions were well-founded since Brian was the one who once sat disguised alongside George in the canteen, when George was truly George, not this hybrid George who had learned too many words from the future and who was brown-beaten and brainwashed with the Daz of coming times, when wirelesses would be tweeters and woofters. It was 9.10 a.m., on one of those aimless mornings most only just recall, and the opening bars of the “Housewives’ Choice” theme spilled from the wireless into the parlour. George had forgotten for a while his role as burnisher of the inevitabilities of the latter half of the Twentieth Century. He had crossed, as only time travellers can cross, into a new way of life and sang along with “Music While You Work” as he steam-ironed his unsuspecting wife’s slacks.
Times already moved along predetermined channels — or had it all gone wrong already? Had George flitted on to another time, another place? Or did he eventually die an unnatural death caused by a shrapnel-crazed footpad in a blind alley behind the British Legion Hall — whilst the voices roared in crescendo: “Oh, What A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts…, Roller Bowler Bowl…, A Penny A Pitch…”?
In Brian’s ears the song rolled on, but it soon faded into other times, other climes. And the night always came earlier in the Wastes. George had decided that he would live here, ever since he had lost a card-gambling match at the heart of Future City. He forsook all his worldly goods in one fell turn of the card: it had been make or break, and Destiny had come down on the side of the latter with an unequivocal conviction. George had suspected that Fate had always kept this one moment up its sleeve as a cheating trump card.
The shadowy hands had come out across the baize card-table: George had not dared look at the competing faces again, as the fingers had flickered like hungry tongues in the gas light, lapping up the denominations of currency into the mouths of their palms.
Inside his shack, with all the untamed sounds of night growing outside, he stared at that one playing card. It was before him on the green-felt fold-over table, the surface of which bore the stains of ill-eaten food, as well as the skid marks of angry copper coins. He had retrieved the Jack of Spades from that final game in Future City, as a souvenir. Not that he wanted to remember the cruel cut, but merely let it act as a warning symbol that no good could come of fighting against Destiny. Ear-marked by Fate.
The Wastes, a dark patch of land which must have once been several smallholdings of scrawny pickings, stretched from one particular nowhere to another … though, the nowheres, to George, were only such when compared to the once busy streets of Future City. Here there were simply abandoned smallholdings and shaggy-cabbaged allotments.
Outside the door of his shack, there sloped a disused football pitch, the wireless goal-post stumps daggering the sky’s underbelly … with crossbars long since dislodged by the near-miss goals of bad-loser ghosts, only teams by virtue of their insubstantial white strips. But divots of earth showed that such teams had once been more than just haunters of George’s dreams.
Put a cross in the graph-paper box, he thought, if you feel that the result will turn out to be a tie. An “X” was also a kiss of lips so soft they reminded him of a love he had taken to his heart, only to find them an ownerless puckered mouth. Or an “X” is the mark of a mistake that his first true love (the teacher at infants school) had appended to his clumsy attempts at arithmetic. Or an “X” betokens the clothes exchanged and cherished for their frills and lace trims. But, hopefully, “X” marked the spot where he’d dig up Death.
George watched from his shanty window long after the dawn should have arrived, begging that neither team would score. He merely needed this particular draw to complete the jackpot on the coupon. But, then, he heard the distant braying of a mob in unison — the chant of “‘ere we go, ‘ere we go, ‘ere we go” and “Roller bowler ball…”, as an unlikely goal was put away by Destiny’s striker, the net belling out with its trawling catch.
George felt his head to ensure it was still stationed upon the tee of his neck. It would soon grow light, he assumed, The Wastes would one day be a City again, he mused. Turning back to the Jack of Spades, it was like looking into a lady’s funfair cosmetic hand-mirror. George’s head was perfectly poised, as Jack’s shovel-ended club took its swing. Crowned him with one fell swoop. At least, George no longer needed to be trapped as this last survivor on a desolate brown pitch once called Earth. And, hopefully, Destiny had nowhere else left to dig.
Then, perhaps, reborn from primaeval mulch to live the Life of Brian. A Study in Brian. Wireless and unplugged.
===
CONTINUED HERE:
https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/fictoniatures-3-by-df-lewis.html
No comments:
Post a Comment