CONTINUED FROM: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/08/torque-tales-2-by-df-lewis.html
***
MYSTERIOUS MANSION
It was intended to be a holiday home. Yet, as the years went by, it became, by default, my main abode, while my flat in the city grew its own ghosts without me.
It seems laughable now, but, when I bought ‘Mysterious Mansion’ from a distant Aunt who was emigrating further away in the world than I could imagine any mysterious place being situated from England, I did not question that name she had given the house. ‘Mysterious Mansion’ was indeed a mysterious place, in hindsight, and probably seemed appropriate, situated as it was in the corner of some common ground that was in itself quite a few miles from the nearest village, with woodland and hedges between it and the shops. Having said that, there was another abode situated within that common ground, on the other side of it, in fact, next to the access gate and just perceptible from my window. Common ground may be a misnomer – I call it common ground because there were disputes regarding ownership of it outside of the land occupied by the two houses themselves, or so I heard.
Whether such an interface of disputed freeholds could subsist legally, I was determined one day to ask my solicitor friend when I saw him next. But when I did see him, the whole matter had gone out of my mind, because life is often like that, especially when in your sixties as I was then.
There was a single woman living in the house opposite, I soon gathered, when taking my first holiday break under the roof of this mysterious place. We waved to each other but it did not seem right not to have a few words face to face. She was quite attractive, dressed to kill, in fact, and she advised me about various delivery and shopping logistics for our two abodes. I offered her help when I was staying in my abode as any man worth his salt would.
Looking back on it, she must have been off duty on that first occasion because, next time I occupied ‘Mysterious Mansion’, I saw her in a police uniform, being collected by a colleague in a police car. Over the next few years, I saw her both in her off-duty ‘dressed to kill’ mode and in her day-job mode as a very smart policewoman, with all the paraphernalia that police personnel seem to carry with them these days. I was indeed astonished by the contrast between the two modes. As a policewoman, official walky-talky phone jabbering in her ear, truncheon in its neat belt-pack. And as a woman-about-town with a posh handbag and high-heeled shoes. In the latter mode, she was often collected, by someone I guessed to be her boy friend in a small white van, but in this day and age one wonders about the true relationship and why they didn’t live together … or whatever.
I did not pry … except recently when, after a long period of staying in ‘Mysterious Mansion’, during which time I had even forgotten that I should be returning to my city flat to cope with my normal life, we had a rare conversation. She was picking some sort of wayside fruit from the bushes near my house as I happened to be inspecting a fence after the previous night’s storm.
She seemed neither the woman picked up in the boy friend’s van or the police constable collected by the smarter official vehicle with the blue light on top. She now looked more matronly, with an apron and hair untidily loose. More kindly, in fact. With a wicker basket instead of her posh handbag. Maybe there had been more years than I realised since I first saw her. And we all change gradually.
“Not at work?” I asked.
“No, it’s a long story – but I’ve left the police force.”
“Oh dear… Or should I be congratulating you?” I laughed nervously.
She spoke about a situation which I couldn’t really follow. Something about losing her handbag – or about losing something she had lost from her handbag – and then, strangely enough, something she had somehow lost in her handbag – I’m still not sure which of these or if any of these.
“Well, it’ll be good to have a break from work. Have you any plans?”
She nodded – presumably acknowledging the first part of what I had said but ignoring the question.
She delved, plucking, into a deeper part of the hedgerow.
Had I told you that the common ground between our two abodes was mainly grass? It was the sort of scrubby grass that never seemed to need mowing. I often wondered if it was done when I was back in the city at my flat.
Had I told you, too, that I fancied the young lady? Not so young now, though. But it seemed off-putting, knowing about her being a policewoman. I’m sure you will know what I mean by that. Also knowing about the man in the van. I had never asked her about him. Until now…
“Has your friend been able to help?” I asked towards the back of the woman as she leaned into the hedge.
It was then I saw she was swishing a police truncheon at the undergrowth, beating a path further into mysterious places. She must have had it in her basket.
She called back to me without turning: “I’m looking for what I lost.”
“Can I help?” I asked. “What is it exactly?”
I admired her round fulsome behind, with the tied bow of the apron strings tagging down cutely in a countrywoman or housewife sort of fashion.
But then that caused me to recall the type of handbag she used when in her glamorous evening wear. In fact, over the years, she had used several different handbags, all in high top fashion. Like many women, she seemed to collect them and often replaced them before they were worn out. Each a handle-bag to fit a pretty hand.
Manufactured with different materials, some animal and some synthetic, bearing delicate chains and baubles of stylish quality on the outside, often jingling as I heard her walk from her house towards the white van when it came to collect her.
As she eventually became immersed in the hedge to the very point of vanishment, I saw at the corner of my eye the pulsing blue light so common in our English cities. And heard the same single siren from two different directions at once.
Unaccountably, I shed a tear. A mysterious place is ever inside a woman’s handbag. With many back-storeys to dig through. Except if things were chopped and changed too often to count as evidence. Like tantalisingly hunting for ghosts that weren’t there. Or fathoming the changing of gender stereo-types in the context of social history. Each a too easily triggered jingle as a signal of virtue or vice.
***
A PRONOUN’S SHAME
Hannah became irritated when she was told one day – in relative middle age – that her name spelt the same backward as well as forward and she realised that she hadn’t realised this before. For ‘irritated’ please read ‘inexplicably distraught’, but that only became evident in hindsight.
Then – in some bizarre method of transcending the eventual despair – she found herself frantically examining words to see how they looked backward and it soon extended towards an obsession about anagrams. She couldn’t even read words without trying to shuffle their letters in as many permutations as possible and, before long, she couldn’t read anything properly even if she skimmed the text in an attempt to override her lexicographical tics while absorbing its meaning – a sort of enforced dyslexia where no dyslexia had existed before.
Writing words was OK but as soon as Hannah had typed them she then found the letters dodging about like flying insects – even words she had handwritten in joined-up letters designed to anchor each to each. She literally witnessed each letter uncurl, uncoil, dislodge, dehook, defuse – even to the extent she could watch the arms and legs of her attempts at linguistic glue unstick themselves with increasingly audible clicks, rips and hisses. To the atonal backdrop of sharpened flutes.
Hannah, of course, blamed whoever had called her Hannah – and then blamed the person who had first drawn attention to the palindromic potential of words, leading to a glut of tugging anagrams at every corner whether meaningful or not.
Her ‘disability’ meant she couldn’t hold down a job. Office work was obviously out. Even manual jobs were difficult as, without prior warning, here or elsewhere, she had begun to see objects as the words that described them, each business end, lever, handle, aperture or torque of the thing leaning or twining or twitching as if the thing itself thought she were dreaming about it rather than seeing it for real. Things now twisted into the increasingly fluid words that were used to label them, all of them made for Hannah’s world alone, thank goodness. Or is it your world, too?
One day, her body itself came apart as each of its sections pulled into swarms of competing fixed and unfixed motives and whims. Her arm became an a and r and m, like a fleshy tattoo. The tattoo was her arm. Then, as we all watched, she visibly became an anagram of her body, a palindrome and rejigged jigsaw at several levels of a twisted language that ran amok like earworms. Each anagram, though, cancelling each other out into a presumably welcome nothingness.
She screams as I try to join up the letters of her soul – and in the right order of words and meaning.
“Nah, Nah,” were the only sounds we all eventually heard. “Nah Nah,” again and again — like a police siren with the ear-drumming pain of a relentless refrain. Several competing versions of Hannah now yearning never to have been born … yet, while still bearing her refrain’s name, she sadly couldn’t die without becoming a pronoun first. Shame.
***
THE SILENT ONE
“It was very much like being mad, only it was worse because one was aware of it.”
– from ‘The Secret Sharer’ by Joseph Conrad.
It was 2010. I was on a coach, surrounded by several other people, one who apparently was my wife of 40 years’ standing. I was in the window-seat – silent.
I wasn’t always silent, but usually silent. I called myself ‘a silent one’ because I was generally silent except when stirred into conversation for the sake of social ease or the obtaining of life’s necessaries or pleasures.
The coach was travelling to Russia via various countries and I should now get to the nub of the situation by saying it was a holiday trip. That much I gathered. The coach group stayed in pre-booked hotels in various cities. However, I sensed that everyone else was there for my benefit, creating this situation just for me, while pretending that they were independent of me, in fact strangers to me – all on their own holiday trip rather than acting as a backdrop for the only real holiday trip: mine.
The only ‘non-stranger’ (in inverted commas) was my supposed wife of 40 years’ standing. The other people – as the days went by – became less and less as strangers as we mingled at mealtimes and at communal tours of various sites of interest. The two drivers of the coach (who took it in turns to drive or to do paperwork to cross various borders or to serve drinks as the coach travelled along through much tedious scenery as well as interesting cityscapes) became very ‘familiar’, in all senses of that word.
How I had gathered that this was all a set-up – just for me – remained a mystery for the early part of the journey but like the co-passengers and the drivers becoming gradually ‘familiar’, the mystery clarified itself – equally gradually – into a distinct mystery, then a known quantity, finally something that I could consider to be a certainty of fact.
I noticed surreptitious glances between the eyes of various passengers as if sizing me up, laughing behind their faces, keeping up the pretence with obvious pleasure. My so-called wife kept a very steady role and I must say she was the best actress of them all.
I often wondered if the whole world outside the coach was in on the act. Many of the roads in Poland had coloured panels to protect houses from sight of the traffic or from its noise. But as I sat in the coach I wondered if it were the houses we needed protection from – or at least me needing protection from the knowledge that all outside the coach was one-dimensional, even the tiny orange bus balanced on the horizon. But that was too fanciful even for me. So I began wondering how long I had been ‘a silent one’ – so-called – this centre of attention who everyone tiptoed around in apparent ignorance of my specialness while all the time scrutinising my every move, even my slightest tic.
I seemed to remember – deep somewhere in my mind – that once upon a time I was full of chatter, completely at my social ease with everyone while serious facts as well as ‘small talk’ tripped over my tongue. I even remembered my name in those times – Tinup.
I remembered little else since I had become ‘a silent one’. My so-called wife was the only person I recognised from those early misty times – presumably Mrs Tinup. Perhaps I shall never know, never remember, never become ‘me’. Never again.
At that point in my thoughts, the coach reached the border with the Russian Federation at Belarus. According to the coach’s Sat Nav display there was nothing beyond the border – either the Sat Nav system didn’t work beyond the border or there was some other significance. Time would tell. Although I didn’t say much, there was a lot of excitement within me about the trip and what would befall us beyond the ex-Iron Curtain.
Often I felt I needed to assert my character. I did say things from time to time just to be polite – but I tried to plough my own furrow of silent motivation. Despite this and the other passengers’ studied nonchalance about me, I did feel them nudging me in certain directions when they saw me moving in a direction that they did not want me to take. These nudges were not at all apparent but I was certain they were there. My so-called wife’s nudges were more direct, more obvious, and I swam with their tide. We should have stayed in England, a trip to London perhaps, not been there for years since the war. But which war?
II
As we left the Russian Federation, I suddenly looked at the passenger who was more silent than the rest. Quite anti-social I thought. I am, of course, what people call an alpha male, and I was the undisputed alpha male on this coach trip and he was, by contrast, the omega male.
The rest of the passengers called me the Daddy of the group. They didn’t really call him anything at all, although his wife told me he was Tinup and she was Mrs Tinup. And, as his own wife did, the coach’s drivers also called him Tinup, not Mr Tinup, not whatever his first name was. The Russian guide – called Violetta – who told jokes on the coach’s tannoy during boring parts of the journey had often referred to a stock character in her stories, one called Tinup – and we all wondered if she was ridiculing him on purpose.
Now that we had left Russia, Tinup was even more silent, as if we had all sucked in the residual parts of his personality. We noticed that his wife talked to him less and less which probably pleased him – because much of what she addressed to him were complaints or nags. Or so we noticed.
By the way, as alpha male, I was spokesman for the group, hence the ‘we’ that I have adopted in these notes. However, I decided one day, at one of the coach’s comfort-stops, to secretly share a few words with Tinup when I saw him alone near the foreign toilets waiting for Mrs Tinup. He stood looking absentmindedly into a shop window containing Russian Doll souvenirs.
This all happened before the coach left Russia, but I’m only remembering it now for the first time. I must say it felt like talking to another version of myself, someone I might have become given other circumstances of life. He must have been unutterably shy. I am quite the opposite, as proved by me being the Daddy of the passenger group. The two drivers, of course, were in ultimate control, but they were only alpha males by virtue of their job. They probably only acted bossy, because they were paid to do so.
“Enjoying the holiday?” I asked Tinup.
He nodded and, breaking his silence, said: “Yes, but it’s a bit like hard work having to leave each hotel with the suitcases packed each morning so very early.”
That was an enormous speech for Tinup, needless to say. Surprised, I merely nudged him on the arm and passed on, leaving him to wait for his wife.
Being an alpha male, I don’t normally see the subtle expressions of other people. I cannot empathise. All I can think of are my own needs and how to satisfy my longing to control other people not only for my own benefit but also, it has to be said, for their benefit. So, I surprised myself when I began to notice gradual changes in Tinup – a self-confessed ‘silent one’ – as the coach trip progressed. Every time he said something, his head grew slightly larger. You might laugh but I became convinced of this. In hindsight, I probably had an obsession with Tinup – and with his slowly expanding head. Not only that, but the skin on his face gradually became pastier, until one day I imagined it would be white and pulpy. My theory was wrong, however. Alpha males are not always right and I have since ceased to be an alpha male as a result of this realisation. Tinup taught me a lot even if he didn’t do this on purpose. Even when he was silent for days on end, his head still grew slightly larger, his skin slightly pastier. The speed of this process was therefore nothing to do with his relative silence. Silence did not seem able to control it either way. I determined to have a quiet word with Mrs Tinup, in case she hadn’t noticed this process, fearful as I was that Tinup was suffering an illness. An illness abroad is an illness doubled.
She did not seem to understand, however.
III
By the time we reached Helsinki, I had gradually become so worried about Tinup that it was affecting me unduly – causing me to be silent, too, for long periods of anxiety. And as you will not be surprised to learn, there is no such thing as a silent one who is also an alpha male.
I cannot remember the exact circumstances of the coach trip’s ending. It sort of tailed off in Calais before we crossed the Channel. I said goodbye to Tinup and Mrs Tinup after tipping the two drivers. We exchanged details as many coach holiday friendships do in the normally unfulfilled future promises about keeping in contact, unfulfilled even with the relative ease of emailing.
Tinup did not have an email but he gave me his real address, and I gave him mine. Mrs Tinup and I looked at each other, knowing that this would be the last time we would see each other. Thus is life.
But time has bends and corners that life itself doesn’t. That’s the only way I can explain it, much like a coach trip of the mind. So, a number of years later, I visited – on impulse – the Tinup address while being in the area, I forget why. Imagine my surprise that Mrs Tinup had married one of those coach drivers from the Russian trip, one who had by now retired from conducting such trips. He was still full of himself, all mouth and trousers. If I had once been an alpha male, he was – and still is, I guess – a being I could never hope to become. A man with no chink in his armour at all. All smiles and confidence. I didn’t stay long. I don’t think either of them remembered me from the trip – but they were polite enough when I showed them photos of the coach group on holiday all those expanding years before. I noticed my own face was half-concealed by other faces.
Before leaving, I pointed to Tinup’s face in one of the photos – a silent one, a rare breed with whom I now empathised rather than sneered at. Mrs Tinup nonchalantly pointed to an armchair in the corner which was in half-darkness and as if looking upon it stirred whatever it contained into non-silence, I heard a slight pulping noise and saw the very wide shape of whiteness: a face without features. Sometimes more a real mucky orange than white. Soft and puffy enough to be a secret sharer. It was as large as the slow-punctured dome of St Paul’s would have been after landing in the Kremlin grounds with a single columnar arm silently moving up and down as if to salute the alpha male who worked there in 2010 and still worked there now in 2023.
I left silently, my mind tongue-tied by unpronounceable Russian letters.
They lived here for real, many centuries ago. Today, they are ghosts. Right now, under my nose. Or, rather, if the truth be known, they live for real today — and many centuries ago their ghosts lived here first. Real people as the eventual fulfilment-in-flesh of their earlier ghosts. In many ways, that seems to be the most logical order of things. For centuries, people have believed we precede our ghosts, while all along ghosts preceded us.
But that begs a question – where is here? It is Haunted Mansion on the road between Colchester and Chelmsford – once well known for receiving visitors on day trips, but, today, a near-forgotten hulk where the old family – now on hard times – manages to cling on. I am their only member of staff: a man-with-many-tricks-of-the-trade, they call me. A do-it-all who haunts the Mansion in a real body, mending broken things and, if the truth be known, breaking things so that I can mend them again. Indeed, I do jobs not only for the old family but also for the even older family – trying to match up the old with the less old when and where they happen to coincide in the same part of the Mansion. That’s what I call make-do and mend. Helping people meet their own ghosts – across time.
You may wonder whether I have managed to coincide with myself across the centuries in the Mansion that haunts the older version of itself and me. Except when it was older, it was, of course, newer. Which goes for us all, I guess. And tonight is the night when I shall mend myself and my guilt. I shall discover the broken body with the knife I placed into its chest so very long ago. The knife still sticking out of it like a handle. And then I shall slowly, ever so slowly try not to hurt him, while watching the smile return to his mouth before I can even realise he is trying to smile – trying to smile at me. And as he does so, I feel tears arrive in my eyes. Noise of the traffic outside on the A12 highway hiding the sound of what I did next. Just a careful twist and turn like a surgeon, then nothing.
The way at last to begin hunting for the ghost is by actually finding it first?
THE END OF THE ‘TORQUES’ SERIES
A third series of fiction miniatures has commenced here:
https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/lost-endings-1-stories-by-df-lewis.html
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