Like a suicide pilot, he had climbed to the top of a tall chimneystack, below which the mock mountain-slopes of the mansion’s roofs ranged to the nearest horizon — and he wondered if he was meant to jump. Robin knew he had to keep quiet, maybe tell a few old drinking chums at the pub — because, the sooner uttered, the sooner forgotten. 

The evening had been blowy since about six, but when the storm actually hit home at ten, everybody knew they were in for a rough ride. Robin had just tucked his kids in, telling them that wind in England , even on the East coast, could not hurt anybody. Denny looked up with her large innocent eyes and swallowed his words, along with the dregs of the orange juice.

“Night, night, Daddy,” she squeaked, snuggling under the covers, as if nothing could harm her now.

“Night night, dear.”

Baz in the last room along the corridor made a teenage grunt as Robin knocked to say goodnight to her. Cilla in the middle room was already asleep, so Robin only lingered a few seconds after tucking in the thick bobbly sheet around her neck. It was no ordinary wind. By midnight, as he lay in his own bed, he could feel the mansion vibrating around him. The windows shook as if they were desperate creatures thrashing to escape their frames. In the distance there was a crash which on an ordinary evening would have sounded like an aeroplane nose-diving into the suburban streets. The chimney roared like a giant hoover. There was something churning around inside the blocked off chimney breast. It groaned like a prisoner in the condemned cell, wailed pitifully and, in evident panic, leapt up and down the inside of the disused flue, a crazed monkey-rat.

“Daddy, Daddy,” he heard from within his head: a plaintive call that had no direction. He blocked his ears, but still heard the call that had no direction. He blocked his ears, but still heard the call, sharper now, almost rabid. It seemed to be a creature that could not escape the walls of his skull, the sound bouncing from left to right and back again in horrific stunted stereophony.

The storm in fact left no sign of its damage. Robin wouldn’t have believed it anyway if he’d seen trees down, with their roots shamelessly exposed. No, there was indeed no wind in England sufficient to harm anyone or anything. But that idea about having three children was really something. Weird. But like all ideas, as soon as remembered forgotten — and he went off to the pub to have a chat about chimney breasts. He wanted one of his do-it-yourself chums to come round and remove one for him.

But, somehow, he lost himself along the way. The wet pavements ran yellow with the city night. He idled at the corner of Crescent, waiting, waiting, never ceasing to wait for an excuse to wait … until he was moved along by a dark faced policeman.

“Move along, move along, that’s all I get! I’m waiting for … yes, for a girl friend, and how will she find me?”

“Where’s she coming from?”

Robin thought hard and eventually muttered: “Frinton-on-Sea.” He moved along, away from the policeman, speaking to the slanting shadows of the lamp-posts, not waiting for their replies. He thought they were more policemen stalking him out of their precinct. Abruptly, he reached an unlit area, indicating the outskirts of the city, but there was just sufficient residue of illumination at the back of his eyes to see a narrow slick guttering down the back wall of some factory. He relaxed and listened to its slurps, knowing that the policemen would not venture this far after minor prey such as Robin. Neither would the girl friend.

=

“It’s the thought that counts,” said Densil.

“Well, I thought of giving lots and lots of lovely presents but decided against it,” countered Basil, whose sense of humour was lost on Densil. The pair of them travelled together towards Robin’s mansion for Christmas, where, apparently, Robin had arranged all kinds of Dickensian activities — including an artificially frozen lake for ice skating.

The tall chimneys rose like the Devil’s fingers pressed into an iron sky, as the car gasped its last exhaustfuls along the winding drive. They were heartily welcomed by Robin who was disguised as Santa Claus. Robin’s three daughters were particularly becoming as reindeers with mock antlers and bodies tantalisingly decked with incomplete animal skins.

“I’m glad you could come. Let a servant see you to your rooms. And as soon as you’ve washed the road off, come and have a heart-easing scoop of punch in the lounge.”

Robin sounded as if he were reciting a speech learned at a time when he didn’t understand it.

Densil and Basil were soon ready but not before arguing the toss about who had priority in the shared bathroom. Densil ridiculed the fact that Basil’s room was chock-a-block with variously sized boxes neatly wrapped in a pink silky paper bearing a holly and robin motif. Basil must have sent them on earlier, with the intention of piling them under the Christmas Tree for the other guests to “ooh and aah” at. Basil countered by saying they were simply full of scrunched-up tracing paper. This was the best ploy since he knew Densil would not believe him if he claimed they were not his parcels at all.

Having returned downstairs, they discovered the lounge tenantless, except for an angry coal fire spluttering in the huge hearth. The punch bowl stood on the sideboard with contents looking like lumps of fruit-peel in blood slopping from side to side — as if a servant had just placed it there and vanished (up the chimney?)

Suddenly, there was the zithery sound of girlish laughter from the garden outside. The window was blocked by a large shaggy Christmas Tree, as yet undecorated, so Densil and Basil looked at each other, bewildered. And were they meant to help themselves to the punch? Thinking their host was more hospitable than most, they shovelled the punch into two of the glasses that hung on hooks around the bowl. They gulped it, whilst they tried to gain a better view through the window upon the back lake. There was a sleigh being drawn across it — a red figure waving and at least three tall reindeer lifting their legs high. The sleigh’s boot was overspilling with pink parcels. Whether it was the effect of the punch conjuring up solid burps like bodily innards, Densil and Basil no longer had a Christmas spirit. Days were short around the winter solstice, and all went black like dead ice that cannot melt.

It is a pity dead bodies cannot really enjoy being undressed by others, as live ones do. That is perhaps a godsend, however, since they would not particularly relish being roasted afterwards. Robin — who was not quite the calibre of host Densil and Basil had originally thought (which proved something) — raised his glass of punch, now so red it had become blacker than the Devil’s version of Christmas Eve. Surly servants dragged in the feather-light parcels and the giggling reindeer curled together before the roaring fire, playing brittle games of cat’s cradle and pick-a-stix, amid the cosy Yuletide cheer and fellow feeling. Tomorrow, being Christmas Day, the presents could be opened. 

=

The sky lit up with a thunderflash, frightening Robin with a vision of his own face reflected in the puddles. It was not raining, but it seemd that recently it must have torrented from the biggest darkest black cloud that some called night. His thoughts of strange transactions at his mansion were items he could not himself quite fathom. He took after his mother who had also been a thinker and had taught him the correct way to cross a thought, looking both ways, then marching straight across without fear of the monsters encroaching from the wings. Smiling, he wished he had been older and his mother younger, then they could have courted each other. She would not have kept him waiting. She may even have borne him three lovely children of his own to cherish. She’d always wanted grandchildren.

He went towards the wall to sniff the redolence of the slurry scumming down it. No smell, but that, Robin decided, proved nothing, for his nose was bunged up to the nostrils with its own characteristic stench. He placed his little finger in the flow and tentatively placed its tip to his tongue. Quite sickly sweet, with an under-flavour reminiscent of seaside rock mixed with his late father’s home-made wine, and a consistency of curdled milk. The storm had evidently passed over without even one gust. The highly coloured lemon wedge of the moon was dodging between the scuttling patchwork of night’s covering. Standing on tiptoes, he stretched up his hands, ignoring the lancing pain set in motion along his arms by the jagged glass embedded in the top of the wall, and levered himself into a position whereby he could see over it. His own mansion looked more like an asylum, with one of its tall chimneystacks limned coldly against the whitening and spreading of the misty moon.

He was grasped by the scruff of the neck as he toppled over inside the grounds. He heard a screech in his ear and a face of running boils peered closely into his. “When you crossed the road near St Paul’s, you didn’t look both ways, did you?” The words of the creature hissed out, as a policeman, far off his proper beat, whistled as he passed along on the other side of the wall…

=

The skylights blazed. The best-boy waved. The lens-shifter dropped the tea tray. The assistant gaffer lurched into the wardrobe … and Robin’s Show began. Millions of TV sets were switched on all round our green and pleasant land to watch the nightly trip into good conversation and famous faces. Someone, looking like Robin, sat opposite, with a wide open plate of a face. The frothing tankards of special brew seemed to breathe and pulse in time to the underground steam train rattling away beneath them … en route between stations that had closed their entrances for fear of too many war evacuees herding along the platforms and brimming over on the tracks. There were not enough outlets for the smoke.

Robin’s companion indicated he was dying to relieve himself and, whilst crossing, uncrossing and re-crossing his legs, he propounded the theory that if cows are left unmilked for too long, they explode and thus do away with the butcher’s art. Robin, his eyes pure white and sightless, announced: “Good evening, Ladies and those in the Gents…” A light chortle took itself one by one across the studio audience. “My guests tonight you may not be too familiar with, but, after tonight, who knows?” And as he and his two guests tugged and pulled at each other in the guise of actually shaking hands, the audience suddenly realised that he and the guests were joined at the waist.

“Now, Basil and Densil, what can you tell me about boils? Sorry, I didn’t mean to say that — can you tell me about what you actually saw?” (Could it be that the famous TV chat show host and his guests were speaking in perfect unison? On a live, unrehearsed show?)

 “This is a historic moment, dreamfolk, when host and guests are one —  tune in, blow on the screen to brighten it up and turnstile your private parts ‘gainst unseasonable interruption. The great dome of St Paul’s Cathedral had bigger got, ’cause of the war. They needed it like that to deflect the bombs on to the houses. But I was the one who thought of putting up high-rise office blocks a-straddle it by Ludgate Circus — to stiffen it further, for not only did the alien monsters plan to float in like giant hang-gliders and use it as the basin for their further entrenchments into our green and pleasant land — but they were to lead in wider, more shadowy storm critters with long skinny legs which would eventually brood on our roofs to hatch out those that cringed within — that’s you and me, folks. We needed protection, but the high-rise blocks took on a life of their own, bred other high-rise blocks, nurtured nasty natty men who paraded themselves in mock of us, dealing in shares, stocks, trusts and junk bonds. Those towering office monoliths sprouted arms with mighty hammers that pounded at our poor St Paul’s dome until they cracked its big end like a skull…”

The audience silent grew, for what they had feared would now surely happen — and their favourite host waved a fond farewell. The pupils of Robin’s eyes began to prick out as he heard thousands upon millions of clicks that indicated the switching off of millions of TV sets across the land. Bedtime drew on apace and the early 1990s nation could unravel its private parts for a while in needed exercise, prior to making tourniquet knots of them ‘gainst night piss. Getting purchase by means of the chimneys, the thin winding monster-legs tightened around mansions, houses and homes, as the last tube train hissed to a halt below the foundations of the city. The creatures brooded long and hard, since nights doubled-up on themselves then, and days were just selling themselves short, peddling Futures and Derivatives as leveraged and hedged  in the black markets of despair.

Robin had of course taken Basil and Denzil under his wings. After all, he’d need such protection himself, one day. Basil was half dead. His left leg was knotted with what looked like small green onions. One arm hung by a thread but still maintained a semblance of manipulative skills, as if it were assuming piecemeal a life of its own.

Indeed, Robin had next to no tolerance for the incursions which the world did manage to make, particularly in view of his own shortcomings that hindered fending off such insidious skirmishes. Indeed, he could always sense when strangers were afoot in the mansion by the unfamiliar smell of foreign flatulence. After years of living together with Basil and Denzil, any infiltration of their friendly flatulence by enemy gases often proved to be the unmistakeable evidence of surreptitious attack from the outside world.

Towards the beginning of Basil’s and Denzil’s death (and despite increasing undercover work by strangers), the pair of them grew even closer together. It was pathetic but beautiful to witness. Eventually, of course, it was into the grave they eventually crawled. And Robin was naturally left to cope with the residual strangers. Post-medical teams. Overtakers. Intoners of old-fangled religion. Bible-bashers. Ministering demons. All mostly hot air.

 “Get thee gone to Jaywick Sands!” they’d said. And so, Robin became the TV reporter commissioned to employ the forces of the media to stimulate action against the increasing use of seaside resorts as sewage outlets. Swimming was like being force-fed, they’d said. But whom did he aspire to,persuade! And was there to be an election instead? And, if so, on what platform would he  stand?   Not even Robin was sufficiently compos mentis to appreciate the true importance of what he said, which was this: “I think we should get us to Frinton-on-Sea.” And his disciples all got up en masse and frantically sought a paddle- train to catch as it churned away from the endless dripping marshes. But not quite en masse, for Basil’s ghost didn’t want to come. He preferred to meditate and gently suck the involuted teats on the inside of his costume, gently puffing smoke. Denzil’s own version of a ghost said he would have preferred Buenos Aires, but Frinton, he had to agree, was, on the face of it, next best. So off they traipsed, most of them, alongside Robin in his quest for love and beauty. Then, they heard in the distance the lonely drone of an aeroplane. Robin abruptly found himself thankfully, if peculiarly, alone. He saw the aeroplane crash at approximately four o’clock. It banked steeply over the marshes, then just seemed to splutter to a halt, smoke billowing from the cockpit. No sooner seen, it sliced into some far-off trees with a splintering roar. He couldn’t believe it. He must be the only person around these parts to see it happen. It was literally hours since he had viewed St Paul’s with its dome nesting in a distant valley. His mansion was also discernible at the edge of a reservoir. Robin felt responsible somehow, as if merely looking at the aeroplane had caused the accident. Worse than that, it would be up to him to scramble across the squishy terrain to see if there were any belated survivors. Would it not be preferable to forge straight back to where he recalled St. Paul’s being and raise the alarm there. That would get the experts on the job. Better than him making amateurish, mock-heroic attempts at rescue himself. Caught upon the prongs of a dilemma, he decided to do neither; he merely sat on a tussocky weed, pulled out his pipe which always seemed to help and puffed away, assuming that the world and all its troubles would wait for him to catch up.

The smoke continued to spout from amid the shattered trees. Robin was horrified when he arrived there. The flaming trough which the nosecone of the plane had divotted was at least a highrise-block deep. There were a number of passengers still trying to clamber out, despite the ferocity of the sporadic fire around them. But it just couldn’t be! The whole scene was beyond comprehension. The survivors appeared to be flickering shadows actually part and parcel of the living flames. Not even TV pictures alongside his report would make anyone believe this news story. He had indeed tried to reach St. Paul’s but, by getting lost, found the crash-site instead, deceived into thinking that the smoke was emanating from a town’s central factory chimney. The plane itself seemed to have disappeared altogether. Surely it could not have taken off again, after allowing the maimed and half-dead to disembark? Robin squinted into the sky where he could just discern the skeleton of the wrecked aeroplane gliding with the large black birds.

He pulled out his pipe again and proceeded to fry a new-laid egg upon the scorching earth. Embedded in the semi-hemisphere of the yellow yolk bulb was the translucent body-shape of a miniature human still twitching. Thank goodness things couldn’t get any stranger. In due course, he slowly rose to his feet. The fire-pit created by the crash had gradually relinquished its imitation of a long vertical volcano, but dark perforations and fragile black sculptures of ash still floated upwards intermittently from the erstwhile core. Robin wondered how, why and if he had seen a plane crashing in the first place. No doubt they would tell him at St. Paul’s if there were any flights missing. But would he ever reach even within sight of the dome at the leisurely pace he now assumed? He deposited the bony carapaces of some insects into the stained bowl of his pipe. All was silent as he teetered upon the brink of his own thoughts … except for the gentle nuzzling voices inside his head calling “Daddy! Daddy! Can we open our Chrissy presents now?”

Robin felt the balance of a hand upon his shoulder and, turning, he found it was that damn policeman, off his beat again.

***

DARK BREAKFAST


Paul thought it must be common practice to have early slow breakfasts.


He didn’t mix readily with his peers at school, so he failed to realise that most other families tumbled from their beds in a state of utter disorientation, rushed disorganisation and bitter bleary-eyed reluctance.


Although his own family was, from his standpoint, the supreme model for all others, such a philosophy of Platonic Forms was, in truth, founded on the slow shifting sands of human imperfections: long since abandoned to the unattainable dreams of a disguised antiquity: its cards dealt out face down to an aspiring human posterity by other families merely to find the jaws of raw animal instincts tearing them to shreds like gulped breakfasts.


In Paul’s household, there were no blaring radios giving out the pips on the minute nor the mindless chitter-chatter from the disc-playing heroes of older local time. Nor was television allowed until Songs of Praise on Sunday evening. The fastidious alarm clocks tinkled gently at about four eh em, giving Mother time to prepare breakfast. For her, this was the best part of the day — downhill from there.


Paul yawned. He did not find it as easy as Mother, but on the very first shift of gears in the bedside clock’s innards, he jabbed the lever at the back of the heavy-duty case to prevent even the slightest tinkle and he rose with straight back from the bed, his brain in serene underdrive. Mother’s alarm was set an hour earlier than his: he could smell the breakfast wafting up the stairs.


Hearing Father stir in the next bedroom, Paul hastily donned his white trunks, serge suit and horn-bill glasses. Indeed, life took shape around him, the hall light beginning to filter more and more into his room from the landing. This part of the day, he called the Needle’s Breath…


Downstairs, in the brightly lit dining-room, the meticulous table was already laid for high breakfast. The whitest linen tablecloth still showed its proud creases, the cutlery glinted from over-shining, the porcelain crockery wafer-thin. A steaming samovar of infusing tea rested on its plinth, the cereals already poured into the bowls. A jug of milk, still warm from the cow, hid behind the rack which was stacked to bursting with tall toast, the crusts rounded like church arches. 


He dreaded the entrance of Mother, for she would no doubt ask him if he had done “big lots” … and he had not … not today. Even Regularity had to have an odd day off, now and again.


Paul felt the top of his left arm. The BCG injection still hurt a little. Father had accidentally jogged him there yesterday. He wished there were some Cream Crackers on the table which he preferred to toast as a vehicle for the Golden Shred. The golliwog on the lid of that variety of marmalade had recently lost the features of its face, as if the manufacturers pretended that it was not a person at all, but merely a rag doll in silhouette.


Life, whilst becoming more civilised, had turned too modern, too.


Father came in. He was a big man who had not yet shaved. “Good morning, Paul,” he said in a religious tone of voice. “Good morning, sir,” came the response. No toilet questions about “big lots” from his father. If Paul had attempted to commence an unrehearsed conversation or to dabble in small talk, Father would have used his favourite expression: “Tell me tomorrow.” It was always: tell Father tomorrow.


Mother then arrived with the large oval plates balanced precariously on the inadequate tray. They had been carefully warmed through and tingled to the touch. So far, they were empty. She scooted back to the kitchen for the comestibles.


Paul pitied his Mother. Routine was her faith, but that left very little time for life. He suspected she had awkward times of the month: not that she realised Paul knew anything about such matters while he himself wondered how he had gained such knowledge. One night recently he had a nightmare about his mother’s essence flowing back up into her lungs — why her chest sometimes rattled and curdled in the mornings, he mused, and why she submitted to coughing fits in the Necessarium soon after the 4 a.m.  breakfast.


His preoccupations were interrupted by the second arrival of Mother. The serving-dishes contained smoking kippers, lightly boiled eggs rolling about (each day with a newly painted Easter-like face), wedges of black pudding, thick-cut rashers of back bacon, coddled kidneys stuffed with sweetbreads, and tomorrow’s fresh milk…


Paul captured a recalcitrant egg after chasing it round the plate and then enthroned it triumphantly into his makeshift egg-cup (the giant’s thimble from his Blackjack board game). He cut his toast into planks: egg soldiers. He wondered how much longer he would live, following the recent salmonella scare. Killer “big lots”. And other strange boyish preoccupations.


Later in life, he would often recall such occasions with a sense of postboding. Dark Breakfast, he called them. A single everlasting Platonic Model of a Breakfast out of many.


Paul was only a pucker-arsed kid, in those far-off days. And he believed his mother would never die. But if she did, it would only be a case of bacon’s self-perpetuation and black-pudding.


One of the dark mornings, though, after Father skulked off to work, Paul saw Mother’s eyes weltered with tears, her face drained of waking. “I’ve got something to tell you, Pauly — about me,” she said.


“Tell me tomorrow,” said Paul, with new-found manly pride.

***

THE LEAKY INCONTINENCE OF FICTION

Every time I try to write a new fiction, an old one evolves instead. An old fiction that hasn’t been written before, if that makes any sense, therefore eschewing any mention of mansions, gruesome guestrooms, raw muckies, plain ghosts, ghost hunters, precarious roofs, dark attics, white ceilings, shadowy thirds, vertical eyes, sticky fictons, victorious victims and tombs of elderly couples whose likenesses are carved praying or sleeping upon stone beds.

No old fiction of mine can possibly contain these leitmotifs. However, I am accused of implanting them in some old fictions by means of a crafty revising to make the fictions look new. And a sense of guilt follows me around as a result, as if these old fictions are now angry with me for such retrospective doctoring.

So these old stories, in revenge, have been implanting me with my own old nightmares as I try to sleep on what has become little better than a sticky futon. Disturbing my sleep, making my bladder even weaker, increasing any leaky incontinence with sporadically sluggish flows, making me toss and turn with co-vivid or lucid visions while dozing, inducing me to pick up my tablet to see if I can anchor myself there, and then they visit upon me intermittent bouts of sweating, increasing the anxieties about my various health conditions, and much more.

Let me be clear — most of my recent fictions are new, and few of them are old. But I can’t convince them. They have got the bit between their teeth. And so they hunt on like old fashioned office telephone networks as used by those working in open plan desks. I sometimes get up in the middle of the night, not only for a leak, but also to go to the window and look out at the distant glowing dome of St. Paul’s with things crawling all over it. But I live in Clacton, I scream!

Even this new fiction itself, that I am just finishing writing, claims to be old, and has joined with the other old ones against me.

***

ELBOWS AS LEITMOTIF 

One leitmotif many have told me is missing from the previous leaky list, not the concept of leaky lists themselves, but Elizabeth Bowen’s elbows, not to speak of it also being the most beautiful word in the English language as cited by the Singing Detective. Deirdre indeed often had problems with her elbows, not both at once, but each separately, as if they took it in turns to irritate her. Not pain like arthritis but more a sense they were alive, separate thinking beings colluding to frustrate anything she wanted to do. Their thoughts hurt somewhat, however, their mental machinations simulating bones grinding…

She was tested to the limits, unable to mention this to anyone for fear of them thinking her mad. She speculated on obtaining advice, but from where? A GP or a shrink? A random person chosen in the street? Or even a religious person of some sort? And the questionable list goes on.

Her husband was certainly out of the question, and if you knew her husband, you would not be surprised how he would be the last person to consult.

She tried googling the word ‘elbow’ along with some of her 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 Deirdre firmly placed the symptoms of her own malady — in the head!

But such googling did also elicit much obscure information about elbows, such as their use in literature, poems and stories and novels. For example, as I have already hinted, the 20th century fiction writer Elizabeth Bowen who has 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 Deirdre 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 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?

Well, the story of Deirdre 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 a new leitmotif 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 Deirdre fully recovered without any memory of what was told about her and she now happily plays tennis most of the time.

***

“In the first world war trenches, there was very little trouble with dog muck.”


Posted on 

THE LESSER KNOWN FACTS OF MODERN HISTORY

Cissy Horn sat on buses and read minds as well as books she had never read. Not in the ordinary way of the prestidigitators and fortune tellers, but actually being party to them, experiencing them as a surrogate and, unlike the people whose thoughts she read, knowing their outcome (without the need of predictive powers); understanding, too, their role in the context of alternate destinies and enduring their repercussions rather more than the originator would, even into the otherwise untenable future. I knew all that, because I could read her mind.

The bus trundled nearer St Paul’s, evidently trying to hit as many future potholes as it could. Cissy was on the top deck, at the front, pretending to drive it, as she once did as a kid. She grabbed the silver window bar and pulled it in whichever direction she thought the bus was going to head. Or she did actually drive it for real by this means?

She looked around, to see if anybody was watching her. Who had heard of a thirty-nine-year-old woman (a mother of three and ex-wife of two) steering a bus from the front of its top deck? There was only one other passenger right at he back, who seemed to be writing (a difficult task on a bus in full flow) and ignoring her. Otherwise, there were the empty pairs of handlebar seats, glinting in the late afternoon sunshine.

The conductor was ascending the stairs, already turning the inner tumblers of his ticket puncher in eager anticipation of the long white ribbon he would produce specially for Cissy. Whistling in unconscious embarrassment, he approached and cocked his head for the destination she required.

‘St Paul’s, please,’ she enunciated in as sophisticated a voice as she could muster.

Then they came to her. The conductor’s thoughts crowded in like ticket strips in overspill, and it took her quite a time to differentiate one from another through the lack of perforations. They caused memories of her own past to seep down the drain of used time, whilst replacing them with another’s memories, however ill-thought out.

He was a chimney enthusiast.

He had made a study of those terraced cottages in Battersea, now sadly demolished, which were dwarfed by their own chimney stacks on the roof: the prime size of flues for updraughts to work efficiently: the cleverness of the Victorian skyline in elongating the smoke-travel by the use of pots, thus enhancing, if only slightly, the environment: the silver spikes of costume jevellery that future people were to erect upon their chimneystacks, all pointing in the same direction, towards the enemy: the coming generations who would never know that chimneys once had something to do with coal: the seven-foot ‘tallboys’ in distant Leicester: the buildings that suffocated when the chimneys finally disappeared, sunk into mansion roofs, their windows swelling out into oversize breasts: the roosting-posts of large dark birds: and spiky-haired creatures emerging… The thoughts were too numerous and somewhat garbled to categorise or even take seriously.

Cissy tried to regather herself. It had only taken a split second to absorb a life-time’s obsessive knowledge. The conductor was flicking through the dials of his machine, finally producing enough paper tape for a hat band and ribbons for a bumper girls’ tea party.

She was now receiving thoughts he had never thought at all. They were memories of his forebears instilled into his very fibre at birth: his father as humble ironmonger: his father’s father as sewer-hunter and seller of dog droppings to the tanneries: the glue factory outside the maternity hospital where he was born: the friends he never met because they were killed in the war: and so on.

She could not bear it. She decided to leave the bus to its own devices and staggered against the rhythm of the bus towards the head of the stairs, knowing that she’d missed her stop anyway. The stairs seemed an endless spiral downwards, as if Hell were a machine. 

An old lady was attempting to come up, toting piles of shopping under both arms. And Cissy saw visions of two world wars, one just gone, one about to start, where memories and premonitions were as one. There was evidently someone on the lower deck the old lady didn’t want to meet, hence her long clamber up the swaying staircase. It was her son who had been too young for the first war, but she feared not too old for the next. Cissy felt the blind tears at her own eyes and the sorrow in her own heart that caused them. The old lady, Cissy knew, had been fooling herself and the son had really absconded in wild youthful enthusiasm to the first trenches, only to return to haunt the lower decks of buses the City over, along with his dead counterparts. No wonder people rode these days on the top deck.

“Oi, Miss, you’ve only paid the fare to St Paul’s, not to the dogs’ home!” the conductor snapped from behind, startling her with ideas of chimney fires and Victorian urchins who were made to climb them, their skin hardening into leather, elbows into sore points: not sent to sweep them, perhaps, but to shoo off the chimney ghosts.

On the swaying stairs, Cissy imagined she was in a vertical charcoal tunnel, as she saw faces with vertical eyes in the flames below her. There was a pile of what looked like droppings on a sooty ledge, glistening as the inflamed sun inched into the open hole of the sky.

Cissy Horn jumped off the entry/exit platform of the still moving bus, pumping her legs against the impetus, only just avoiding a particularly slimy ghost of a dogpat. As the inscrutable lamplighter lit the wicks in the street gas mantles, much like the soldiers cupped hands round their ciggies in the trenches, she walked on, feeling handsome in her uniform, and puffed on her pipe. It was as if she had decided upon a course at birth, only now, at this distance, panning out. Ready for a war at every street corner leading to a smoking St. Paul’s.

***

LAUGHTER IN THE DISTANCE AS EARWORM

The room was unaccountably quiet – in a way that made it seem more spooky than it was. Charlie sensed that there should be more noise, as he watched the people in it miming conversations. They were trying – very successfully as it happened – to keep quiet for someone who was ill upstairs. Charlie knew this fact because Susie – he thinks her name was Susie – told him that this was indeed the case.

“Who’s ill?” Charlie had asked. He asked it again because he was now talking – whispering under his breath – to someone else. This time he didn’t even guess her name.

“I thought Susie already told you,” this new girl answered – so quietly that Charlie had to read her lips.

There were at least twenty people in the room. Some were still coming in, others leaving, a few neither. A ghostly gathering – and growing ghostlier by the minute, Charlie thought. He laughed to himself. It was hard to explain the purpose of the room, let alone of the meeting itself. The room was a cross between a lounge (or what they used to call front room, sitting-room, drawing-room or parlour) and a neutral waiting-room at a doctor’s or dentist’s surgery. The electric fire with too few bars actually seemed to make the room feel colder than if it weren’t there at all. Psychological, Charlie assumed.

He felt as if he were the only person of elbow and substance in the whole place. The others acted so low-key, he wondered if they existed at all, barely negotiating the bad reception on a TV screen as they came and went.

Charlie recalled he had earlier met a lady called Isabel Barnett – a name that sounded slightly familiar to him but he wasn’t old enough to check out a sufficient length of past time to judge whether it were a name that prefigured his own tenuous existence. What’s My Line, the only inscrutable clue he could muster.

This lady, Isabel Barnett, was in fact the hostess who had greeted Charlie at the front door – a heavily made-up face with billowing gold-trimmed drapes below. A mouth like a brightly pursed rose-bud rather than one that was defiantly clamped shut behind lip-stick.

“Come in, Charlie,” she had said. He remembered her welcome like the back of his hand…

“I thought Susie already told you,” the girl repeated, bringing Charlie back to the present moment.

“Told me what?” he had forgotten.

“Who’s ill upstairs.” This time her voice was not even silent miming. Pursed lips had become gritted teeth, merely with the implication of articulated words.

Charlie was now in the kitchen. He was used to spending most of the time at parties in the kitchen talking to those who happened to be passing through to get a drink or some more food. Charlie found the kitchen the best place at any party. A sort of Way Station.

This was not one of those parties, however. It was a gathering of hushed whispers, some bordering on a silence beyond silence itself. Even the silence of the grave was subsumed by shifting earth or the conversation of worms. There was no music coming from the waiting-room or lounge. And there was no booze, only cups of tea that clinked on their saucers like percussion instruments in a fastidious invisible prelude. A delicate intaglio of glances and tunes underhummed from some memory of a signature tune in ancient wireless days. Not forgetting the cucumber sandwiches.

Charlie soon returned to where most people found themselves. As soon as he realised this wasn’t a party as such, the kitchen and its passing inhabitants lost all their fascination. Mutual, he thought.

Isabel Barnett smiled at him from where she was standing alone. Susie had vanished, probably to the kitchen, now that Charlie had left it. What was the point, he asked, in holding a party where someone was ill upstairs?

Suddenly, as if in some oblique reply to his question, he heard laughter in the distance. The distance was vertical … which was strange as, more often than not, distance tended to be horizontal. Vertical in this case was, however, unclear, viz. whether it arrived from above or below – but it certainly was laughter. His own eyes changed their own landscape to portrait, at such a thought.

 Unmistakeable as laughter when cutting through the studied silence, despite its own tones of snigger and ponderous giggle. So ponderous, perhaps, it was beneath the threshold of most normal hearing. Charlie guessed this was the ill person laughing upstairs. Laughter is a much better deal with death than groans of pain. He laughed at his own thoughts and found himself suddenly in the company of Susie again. Every girl here was called Susie, or was that just his imagination? But imagination more customarily multiplied than reduced. Isabel Barnett was more an elderly single lady than a girl – yet still a mother figure – and Charlie could often see her fading into the background whenever she was caught watching him … watching him watching her. Unless she was fresh from shop-lifting, as most ladies seemed to be doing these days?

“Who’s ill upstairs?” This time it was a question, rather than Susie telling him he’d already been told who exactly was ill upstairs … or downstairs, depending on the floor where the question was asked.

“How should I know?” said Charlie. This was obviously not the same girl as he was talking to earlier … or even the nameless girl before Susie who had, reportedly, told him who was ill upstairs.

Susie offered a kiss. At first, Charlie assumed it was destined to be a mere peck. But it was more than this – and indeed at-close- quarters was where one was supposed to be at parties, Charlie knew. Yet he was shy. Nevertheless, he allowed her to press her breasts into his chest – and both of them hugged each other with barely perceptible gulps and gurgles and intermittent excuses of breath-taking or coughs on bodygas or embarrassed laughter.

Isabel Barnett stared at them. Charlie knew this fact instinctively and he remembered, with a shiver, who exactly was ill upstairs or even near to death, in fact – as he continued to hear laughter in the distance. It amused him, placated his worries. He had to grasp the nettle, take life in both hands, as he led the girl called Susie upstairs – away from Isabel’s increasingly distant tutting and clucking. Not even in two minds about it, he wanted to hear Susie’s laughter louder still.

No point in being in a Whodunnit if you knew who was about to do it, thought Charlie. Stifled laughter as the mystified ghosts dispersed from around both culprit and guilty victim as they climbed the stairway towards the attics. It was the mansion’s future central-heating laughing, he thought. Laughing linearly at a  supposed joke about redundant chimneystacks on the roof. Until, this line of laughter turned to pain in his nose, like a future circuitously viral noseworm.


  HERE 

https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/old-and-new-fiction-miniatures-mixed-2.html

CONTINUED