In a form of continuation from here: https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/fictoniatures-3-by-df-lewis.html
MEANWHILES AND MEANTIMES
(1)
Don Quickshot had assumed control of everything, including the main port. The previous owner then went missing as soon as the deal was signed, causing his senile wife, beautiful daughter Maria and half-witted son to be thrown into near ruin: with only the guarded respect of the other islanders bolstering their waning spirits. Maria often found herself, thereafter, standing signal watch upon her father’s erstwhile private wharf. Even in the endemic coastal fogs.
The new man whom Quickshot placed in charge of the Island was called Felix. A handsome man. A cunning man. One who kept his boy friend under nightly house arrest — rather than allowing him, some said, to be adversely affected by the Island moon. There were, of course, the various islanders who gradually went missing, yet nothing could be laid at Felix’s door. He had emasculated the police force, in any case, and their investigative duties were conducted with a diffidence that made Maria’s idiot brother appear suitable for high political office on the mainland.
Maria knew her way about the emotions of others with a fine-tooth comb. One in particular loved her, nay, adored her. That was Clement, the butcher. He was young enough to be of some use to Maria — and that was not merely his supply of cheap briskets and spare ribs. In fact, he wanted her to live at the butcher shop where he could lard her all over on cold winter evenings, when the cruel cut of the moon scythed the night sky with its rhythmic whishing sound. But, no, this Maria needed to return to the old mansion, parts without roof, where her ancient mother and mind-bottled brother awaited the comfort of her company. “Bring them, here, Maria – there’s room enough.” He pointed to the ceiling, as if beyond its yellow-stained stipple lay the palace of her dreams.
“No, Clement. Felix and his boy friend would take over the homestead soon enough — and what would my father have said about it if he came back?”
Maria’s voice was deceptively gentle, yet underlaid with a stroppier edge than the Island moon could possibly wield. Clement gazed at the inscrutable face. What could he say in response to such unquestionable beauty? Nevertheless, with the sound of cracking meat-bones in the cellar outdoing that of the sharp icicles crepitating outside the window, he said with a faltering tone: “Your father will never return: he can now be little more than the beefen sides down under this shop: you know that: I know that: and, above all, Felix knows that.”
Maria could not weep although she found her eyes doing so.
The wonky lad, meanwhile or meantime, struggled with the lid of the water butt. His mother had said she wanted its ice breaking. Why she needed the ice breaking he had not thought to ask. Ice breaking was tantamount to cracking open the hardest veener of reality itself. How he was to do it with his scrawny arms presented a further mystery. He might need to await Maria’s help. And, yes, why did he need to do it now, of all things, when the ice would be at its sturdiest and thickest, with the moon itself little more than a shard of frozen sky, albeit with the shine come off its newness. He saw it still retained white daylight in its horn, even if well past the shadow-tide.
He took the axe which he had dragged from the shed and brought it down with a splintering crunch — causing the surface of the butt’s ice to craze over with a map of unknown lands. No sign of the Island’s shape in the patterns, he mused, upon examining the convoluted geography which far outstripped the fantastical archipelago of thoughts in his mind. During this lull, he thought he could hear footpads beyond the susurrus of the homestead’s trees — no doubt Maria returning from her dalliance with butter boy Clement. The lad smiled. Clement was always kind to him — unlike that sallow, high-boned individual Felix sent round to collect the tithes. Yet when a lengthening howl ricocheted from earth to heaven and back again, he knew one thing for certain: it was not his sister Maria returning.
Felix sat honing his fingernails by his picture window. He had billeted this building near the wharf as the Island often received night deliveries here by junk. He stared out, uncertain where sky ended and sea began. Not one single pinprick of light. Yet there was a sheen that covered the whole vista which, he knew, was thrown by the unseen moon behind him. He guessed nevertheless that it was a new moon.
Felix, meanwhile or meantime, shivered. He really must turf out that family from the near mansion and start re-roofing parts of it.The father had so long abandoned them, he was not likely now to return to seek retribution on Felix, should Felix park his bivouac there. The daughter Maria would be a hard wench to benchmark, he thought. Best to let them moulder away. At least he knew where they were. He lifted up the cross hanging at his throat and kissed the macho messiah figure carved upon it. He felt it squirm, as if icons had learned to fear the monsters they were intended to protect against.
“Yes.” Felix heard knocking, even before it actually sounded out.
“Can I come in and see you?” The voice was of several throat noises rather than the fluid ones tongues could make: like wickerwork talking.
“Yes.” The same word, but a second meaning.
In walked a creature it would be most people’s misfortune to meet. Felix saw that the messiah shape had blunted back into the very knots of the crossgrain. The creature’s tumescent cod-piece was larger that his whole buttock area: face hidden by a harlequin-mask, yet eyes piercing enough to bore to the back of Felix’s skull, charring the retina en route.
“Yes.” A third meaning.
“The moon is brand new, Felix, not engorged,” weaved the wicker words.
“Yes.” A fourth.
“Well, as that is so, there is no harm in me stretching my legs in the fresh air, is there?” The creature left before hearing the reply.
“Yes.” The second again. Or possibly a fifth.
Maria, meanwhile or meantime, was being escorted home by Clement. Not that she thought she needed protection. It was more the ritual of the last night kiss: like fresh sweethearts: ignoring, for one delicious moment, the frenetic love Clement had already given her above the slabs of textured blood that hung in his cellar. Almost a game of role-playing, stirring the dry loins into one last gasp of passion. Tonight was the coldest night of the year: thus, the most clear-sounded. They could even hear her brother’s flailing axe as he grappled with the ice monster: a common sound these days in fulfilment of their mother’s latest peccadillo.
She leaned up Clement’s body for the peck. He lowered his face to where his mouth needed to be and sucked at Maria’s cheek. A little known fact that some people had two cheeks on either side, one under the other, with a gossamer-thin air pocket between. The lower one was a clandestine cheek, a cheeky little cheek, and he laughed on thinking of it in this way. Rolling the fictons around his mouth as if they were swallowable victims of our gullibility.
“What are you laughing at?” Her voice was a more overt blade of sound, as if further honed by the geomantic moonrib above.
“Your under-cheek – I wish I had one.” Clement prodded his tongue into his own and swabbed around for remnants of loose meat.
“Under-cheeks are nothing but trouble, Clement — things collect between and I’m forever using the douche.” There was an added squeak to each word, as if she demonstrated her cheeks’ valve-like quality.
The scream they heard was blood-curdling. An unrehearsed scream. One that came from a freight of frights rather than a single self-indulgent fright. It was from the direction of Maria’s homestead. Clement ran on ahead, being fleeter of foot. She hustled in his wake as best she could, fearing her brother had gouged his foot accidentally with one fell axe-swing at the ice monster. But they lost their way in some coastal fog.
The old woman, meanwhile or meantime, sat at the motionless spinning-wheel, tired of thinking. Being senile did not mean she had lost all common sense, however. Her two children were dim enough to outdo any of her own foibles. Maria was always with Clement above his meat-cellar: and love made a young mind even crazier than the already crazy thoughts it contained. She peered through the salt-streaked window and saw her son in combat with an imaginary ice monster — yet again. But Clement and Maria would be coming to the rescue, both ready to adminster a heated blow-job upon the ice monster with the now empassioned breath they’d kept stifled up in their cheeks from their own erstwhile kisses.
The ice creature had chomping jaws slavering in the bonelight. Her son, despite his sluggish reactions, had managed to break off an ice stake and thrust it into the monster, towards the heart, from behind its plumped-up ‘gentle’. The erupting jam dyed the snow a startling black, and steamed. The monster twitched and, once dead, twitched again.
Then, the old woman saw an elderly dead arm forcing its way from beneath a patch of newly poached snow nearby… The earth is the best meat-cellar of them all, she thought. Shrugging, she returned her attention to the spinning. “Am I the sanest castaway of them all on this island ?” she asked aloud. She examined the palms of her hands. “Yes,” she replied, with a sixth sense.
(2)
My mother had a proper wind-up gramophone which revolved the dog-and-horn label at breakneck speed. I could hear it spinning from our garden. That year, winter seemed to last all of it. Icebound chinks of daylight between the interminable snowdarks, lasting for weeks on end, until I even lost count of the months. In what hindsight proved to be the very middle of that boundless season, the water butt in the garden was impregnable. The pre-forms of ice had solved their own irreversible jigsaw overnight. Mother was frantic. Cooking in the copper-bottomed pot was simply not on. The boiler was overheating, too. I would have to sick up last night’s supper to lubricate the friction of the ill-judged mansion’s various processes. I’d rather brave the crackling elements outside and take the wood-chopper to the butt, than put up with mother’s nagging me to do just that. Meanwhile, thoughts took up less space than time. A relative and I had fallen in love at the funeral — so-called cousins come together for this rare occasion: a funeral for someone or other, whom very few of those attending seemed to have known. Whoever had suddenly died was now a dead body still unsalvaged from a light aeroplane that had sunk to the bottom of the icy ocean. Hopefully a quick painless death that sensible people pray for themselves, before too late.
When Charlotte had heard that I was coming to the funeral, she could not help cringing. She’d only once seen me as a snotty-nosed kid wielding a heavy-duty catapult and latterly a clumsy ice-axe for ice-monsters, with my blazing shock of hair and freshly grazed knees; but, when she saw me again across the empty grave, it was tantamount to love at second sight. I had apparently filled out into the dishiest male she’d ever laid eyes on, my finely chiselled face in a setting of sharp man-of-the-world garb, the flash of my smile lighting up the gloomy afternoon like low autumn sunlight glinting between the huddled skeletons of trees. It was a wonder what empathy could manage in my self-confidence stakes. I, too, only had eyes for Charlotte. The last time I’d seen her, she was a prim and proper little madam, in best bib and tucker, with tightly coiled ringlets and Lilian Gish mouth – and a glance that could shrivel as much as it could stiffen. Now, she stood amid the boring, strait-laced, mourning members of her family, a real stunner with the low cleavage of her black dress and the wild, wild eyes rolling to and fro between the sky and my face, like the champion marbles that used to sparkle in my hand when I’d been a short-shinned lad in the back schoolyard, a gauche stripling that in many ways I still was at heart!
Her inbuilt sexuality was not in the least tasteless for the current formal occasion of bereavement, but a bequest to life. I realised there must be a God of sorts, a pantheistic being through whom life followed death as surely as death followed life. Momentarily, I forgot the concerns of my business life: I may even have been tempted to give away the fortune I’d made from Commodity Broking to the first destitute who crossed my path — but that financial glitch only lasted a few seconds, whilst the holiness of sexuality would remain with me forever and ever.
Gradually, as the funeral service droned on, the staring eyes of Charlotte became locked with mine like antlers. A sensitive bystander may have witnessed our ghosts — wispy, curvaceous inner forms of ourselves, both with probers and containers — glide from our carnal bodies and then, whilst wrapped in each other’s limbs, settle into the grave, as if the grave were the most inviting four-poster bed possible: then pulling the demure wraith-like curtains together with a mischievous flourish. The congregation dispersed piecemeal, as the workmen started to fill the empty grave and to stabilise the headstone that everybody had signed, as if it were a greetings card or plaster cast. Best wishes for the future. Get well soon. Many happy returns of the day. Good luck in your new home. Condolences on your bereavement. Chocks away, old boy.
Charlotte and I were not seen at the wake — an unsurprising fact because everybody thought we had been tragically killed as victims of a childhood accident in the ice. Which in many ways we had!
One guest — if he had been recognised, which he wasn’t — would have reminded the gathering that some deaths, by ficton-picks, are salvageable. Meanwhile, meanwhiles mounted.
Mother continued to encourage me from behind the mansion’s frosted window which had been stuck on its sashes since I could remember. She waved and gesticulated in blurred outline. I could not catch her voice, although it was evidently shouting at the top of itself, from the evidence of her head’s shape. But I did hear, in a muffled staccato fashion, the sound of the record as well as its spinning: a modern version of a ditty whose title I’d forgotten — sung by a young choirboy who was now dead, but whose voice was frozen forever on a plate of black grooves, until the day someone accidentally broke it. For some reason, I considered it natural that I could hear the record but not my mother’s catcalls. Earlier in my life, I met a certain Sarah. I was, as ever, trailing a personality in my wake, like an advertising plane. I was the sort who, whilst in somebody’s company, seemed perfectly natural, convincing and generally a good egg, but, in hindsight, striking others as boastful and a bit of a wide boy. Yet with others, I was still a wonky lad. Empathy rampant, again, no doubt. Indeed, I knew that it became easy to think ill of me behind my back, to such an extent I was soon subject to every form of recrimination. Then, once seen again, others would be all over me, drinking in my every word, forgetting that the aftertaste that emerged from the heady wine of my conversation would later turn rancid in their mouths. In any event, Sarah fell head over heels in love with me or in love with the up front image she had of me. She particularly enjoyed the way I’d arrive in rhyming couplets:
Hiya, it’s Peter Peter Poet Eater,
Come to see his little Rita.
She never understood my badinage, but it seemed to fit the mood – or created the right mood for itself.
We’ve gotta to go real steady,
Until our love is ripe and ready.
The verses were not even any good. Sarah thought she could have done much better. Yet the day always appeared to brighten up around me like a cosmic halo.
My off-the-peg kisses were more spontaneous than those made-to-measure tonguing affairs Sarah’s previous boy friends always assumed she enjoyed. It was often a peck on the cheek, merely that, but it seemed to her worth all the kisses in the world for that one moment of halted time. Then, my hand fitted around hers like a perfect glove and, swinging this clenched fleshy parcel up and down, we fulfilled the promise of the day. But, then, we had to say goodbye until the next time. Our eyes met in parting, exchanging tear for tear and, finally, pushing up her coat collar above the ears, she’d skid her way home through the icy autumn leaves. Then, gradually, my image slipped and she felt emerge a shadow which was never otherwise evident. She made home, she knew not how, for the streets were blurred by the driving drizzle. But, once home, without even bothering to make a cup of Horlicks, she snuggled deep under the ribbed electrically-heated bedding, her consciousness easily fulfilling the duties of sleep. Her nightmares grew gross with a reality that they could not possibly have had but, nonetheless, she did live through those horrible visions. The monsters were obviously theatrical, terrifying in their fancy-dress skins, false teeth and heavily pitted make-up. It was the very theatricality that made her feel they were real, not phantasms of the night as they should have been — that, and the fact all were modelled on different versions of me. When she later told her friends that she could hear me speak in her dreams through her ears, they nodded understandingly, for they too had met me, past whom they could put nothing.
Here I am, Peter Peter Poet Eater,
Come to see his little Rita.
It didn’t seem to matter that they were not our real names.
We’ve gotta go real steady
Until our love is ripe and reddy.
I then peeled her, easing off the skin with a long fingernail, starting with the frayed edges in her nether region, since I probably resented her implied criticism of my verses.
She woke screaming, as my jawful of teeth met within her. My tongue flickered where the fluttering of her heart should have been felt instead. And each time on waking in a cold sweat, she determined never to make the next date. She guessed she needed a boy friend, like most, who’d be nasty to her face, all mouth and trousers up front, someone whose memory would not later corrode on the back of her tongue. That was what a woman deserved, a man with no illusions nor false echoes. But it was never to be. When Sarah saw me again, she’d fall for my overt charms and walk hand in hand through the shopping malls once more, ignoring those obviously jealous looks of her gossipping friends. And, in my company, she was not scared of the shadowy creatures who often wolf-whistled under their breath from the dark shop doorways just after the ordinary late night spendthrifts had gone home — because she knew in her heart that I was one of them, the only one to come out into the open, so far. And her heart would flicker with mixed excitement. Nevertheless, today, mother’s water butt was threatening. Not in any sense of movement, but merely horrific with its aura of steadfastness. As if a prehistoric monster had slept alive for countless centuries, only about to be awoken by the kiss of the chopper-blade. I lifted the butt’s slatted lid, being careful not to dislodge the precarious gutter pipe feeding it. With no roofs at all on the island mansion meant there were very few gutter pipes at all, you see. And the ice was in several ridged layers, as I imagined the world to have once been millenia ago. There was only sufficient light from the brown duffle-coated sky to discover that I could not see to the butt’s bottom. I was sure, however, that the curdled cloudiness moved sluggishly as if in some fortune-teller’s crystal ball. But, in my mind, I was clambering the central hills that pre-dated Sarah, if not Charlotte. In fact, when I looked round, in the early stages of my excursion, I could see the industrial market community nestling against its central factory complex, the terraced streets fanning out, not in the strictly geometrical grid as I had been taught in the local school, but more in a convoluted maze of back-alleys and double dead-ended culdesacs. The tall chimney rising steeply from the very centre of the Factory was spouting black-clogging smoke into the icy sky and, then, across the surrounding hills, only for it to separate out into deserter armies marching across the sunless blue sky. The island had grown as big as Australia overnight!
I tried to shake free of both poetry and preconception. Even doggerel. I had actually forgotten my own name for a few seconds as I surveyed the imposing scenery. I was now old enough to leave home. My mother was off, at that time, in the island’s capital city, full of a million castaways, acting out her second wild honey-moon, having departed by the steam railway which was the only real route out of the coastal town. From even where I stood on the last brink, before entering the more unexplorable hill regions, I could see the train adding its own billowing smoke to the steely air. It wound between the less forbidding escarpments on an endless fishbone track of which our old wives would gossip in hushed huddles. They hinted that the trains did not turn up at Station in the distant city, having lost themselves somewhere between here and there, just like these thoughts I was undergoing amid the back-doubles of my brain. Lost through the empty roof of my head.
However hard I tried I could not pretend to lack pretensions. I had to sit down to recuperate. My ambition was to beat kids navy blue. I wanted to be a teacher, since I had always thought schools were too soft. I hoped the desks would shrink, with the kids still in them, tightening down upon their bones, the metal stanchions being rivetted extensions of young spines and the ink-scored desklids, with a life of their own, munching away at the kids’ shorn heads as they bent in silent prayer. I had always thought there were creatures lurking within the impenetrable darkness of the school blackboard that, on Judgement Day — when all the ticks and crosses were added up — were to jump out en masse and take over the souls of the poor little darling pupils. I enjoyed scaring the likes of the girls with such thoughts. Even Don Quickshot and his crony Felix, rampant school bullies as they were.
Thus, I was leaving home, not before time, to go to Teachers’ Training College, and I was walking, rather than trusting to the train. It was not long before the ancient view of the island’s coastal town was left several crossed brows behind and, as I crested yet another untrodden sky-line, I saw the sharp icicle-like pinnacle of a spire, poking from what was no doubt the midst of a forgotten village. Nobody had warned me that I might have to dodge around such communities, on the way to the city. I suspected that in-breeding in such places would have a lot for which to answer. I was intrigued. I persuaded myself nearer, against my better nature. I peered over into the gully where a few tied cottages surrounded a massive cathedral-like edifice more akin to the size and nature of St. Paul’s Cathedral than a typical country church. Seemingly as a result of my glance, thousands of blackened birds (if they were birds) scattered off its mighty dome into the blue sky. I could vaguely hear the hymns of the villagers from within the pillared building, a Dies Irae fit to scare God Himself, and a blasting organ which scattered several more packs of wings to shuttle into the fast curdling air. A chorus boy’s shrill cooing soon ensued, however, with notes made from audible ice. By then, empathy had unveiled that my mother had reached the city, despite the train losing a wheel at a place called Buzzard. However, she became lost on the Underground system. It can only be hoped by means of a weakening empathy that the consolation of her love for me kept her body and soul together, as she continued to scan the deviously geometrical grid of the Underground map for some clue as to her release from the darkness and from the even darker people with dire glowing eyes like whom she herself may soon become. Her greatest consolation, however, was the faith that I, her son, would soon make the world a brighter place. She had a miraculous vision, between of me being shriven by the One Great Teacher of them all, before a massive blackboard altar (which, thankfully, she did not realise was the business end of a tunnel leading to the worst form of imaginable Hell). To make me a messiah embossed upon a trinket necklace. But, if the truth were told, pointy-winged schoolkids flocked from the sky and proceeded to tear most of my body into tiny little bits. Tossing these around between them like bullies’ prize-takings, they effectively taunted and teased me with my own body-parts. Then they scuttled off, yipping and crowing, into the tunnel towards the Dark Playground. I looked towards this same mother who had eventually escaped the sucking tunnels that were the horizontal chimneys of an even bigger place than Hell. Today, she pointed a distorted finger at the ice-chopper which dangled between my feet and hips. The record was evidently stuck, for the voice piped up plaintively in repeated unison with the gusts of snow. I wielded the chopper and, closing my eyes tight, brought it down headfirst into the bound ice. Whether the braying was in my head, I could not tell. But I felt shock troops move up my arm towards the brain in shuddering stages from the heel of the palm where the handle bit. A shower of sparkle-edged splinters flew into my face. The ice was only at first slightly dented, where the blade had entered, despite the force of my stroke. One last salvageable thought, however, reared its head higher than any monster could. I was to be married late in life, following a whirlwind romance with one of the girls of my dreams. Be it with Sarah or Charlotte or illicitly with Maria, whose butcher boy husband had carved himself to a deeper sleep than most.
I’d ceased to have much truck with women, having found them overbearing and, in the main, quite unbeautiful. So, when I met Janiseed, with her sweet smile, I felt that the rest of my life would be as nothing without her and much of my past would begin to make sense, too. She even blotted out memories of Sarah and premonitions of Charlotte. Maria was not even alive any more, I guessed. Indeed, Janiseed was at the afternoon tea dance in a floral frock, dragged there, apparently, by Miss Hutton, who had previously spent most of her waking hours (to the point of desperation) concerned with how to trap me in her increasingly threadbare web of feminine wiles. Imagine her disappointment, bordering on despair, when I took up with Janiseed — the protegé she’d spent hours of otherwise valuable coffee mornings persuading to get out more, spruce herself up and dance a jig or two to the Palm Trio, even if it were arm in arm with Mrs Hutton herself. As I had often noticed, tea dances seemed to be exclusively feminine, even when I was there to break the pattern. I never understood why women wanted to dance with each other. Perhaps they felt safer. Then, that fateful Wednesday afternoon, I took Janiseed right from under Mrs Hutton’s nose and launched her upon the gleaming dance floor as if virginity was only skin deep. Mrs Hutton, who had been a widow as long as she could remember, watched us glide to the lilting music, jealous of both Janiseed and myself at the same time. Mrs Hutton’s emotions were so mixed, she turned redder and redder, until, by the end of that tea dance, she might have been recognised for a boiled beetroot at an identity parade. The Palm Trio had by now packed their instruments into battered cases and prepared, mumblingly, for their departure to a night spot where they were due to play tunes on behalf of ex-models, painted to the nines, in a salacious quarter of the town.
Mrs Hutton agreed to be Matron of Honour at the wedding, but not before she took us apart to say: “You know what you are doing?”
“It’s about time I settled down,” I said, examining Janiseed’s tiny hand that I still managed to retain, following the end of a dance.
“But after only a dance or two!”
“I know, Mrs Hutton, it’s quick, but when you know it’s right, what’s it matter how long it took?”
The object of my intentions merely blushed a delicate pink. Mrs Hutton’s complexion had long since resumed its greyish tincture —she was being plain practical, since the two jealousies she felt for Janiseed and myself had by now cancelled each other out. She became Godmother in fact of our first offspring. Meanwhile, Janiseed had her own mountain of meanwhiles. Her dreams she believed to be her own. She never told anybody about them, least of all me. I had soon discovered that she had no character to speak of — not that Mrs Hutton hadn’t warned me. But neither I nor Mrs Hutton realised that her life was mainly spent elsewhere, in those dreams, unadmitted even to herself. The night she dreamed of giving birth to Charlotte, she was semi-conscious for most of the labour, willing the bundle of flesh to get a move on into the open but, equally, seeing into the future of all her children. Charlotte would grow up a lovely girl, much in her mother’s mould, despite still being a foetus with no obvious signs of beauty or otherwise. Mrs Hutton would do her duty, both toddling along to church, whilst I stayed at home making a fuss of my china doll wife. If I’d known then that Janiseed’s own mother was the same Sarah of my past, I may have taken a different course with the mapping out of memories. But then, other children would arrive, a brood of little me’s, each so little different from the others, Mrs Hutton would believe they were all twins, despite the gaps between.
“You will have to stop!” she announced to me, one day.
“How can I, Mrs Hutton, when she wants me so much?”
“There’s family planning. Sometimes I think you two have got a pair of thick skulls fit for each other. How often have I told you — every time you do it, does not have to end up in another pink parcel!”
“I know, but she says that we cannot kill our young even before they’re conceived.”
“That’s balderdash, and you know it!”
But Janiseed saw her children grown up. The dream was so realistic, she felt she knew each and every one of them, all their foibles, their pains, pleasures and hopes. As a mother, she was behind each set of their eyes, urging them towards a goal even she had not yet quite formulated. But, a dream, given half the chance, turns to nightmare, expunging all attempts to shake off its autonomous relentlessness. The children’s heads were skinned to the very bone, so that there were deep neatly sliced shelves of red gristly flesh around the middle of the neck where the bodies proper ended. They spoke and laughed as if the skulls were real faces. The syncromesh of bones attempted to mimic expressions while emotions, in turn, travelled to the front, via the visibly pulsing brains. There was not enough of Janiseed to divide up between them, with all so eagerly seeking her love. Mrs Hutton organised the funeral. I was there, of course, but I was so distraught, I could not even face mourning. The seventeen baby-sized coffins slid behind the crematorium curtain, even before the Palm Trio had managed to tune up its specially rehearsed dirge. But the wake was a civilised affair, small beetroot sandwiches and even smaller talk. There was very little dancing, but plenty of tea. And, today, the snow cascaded so that I could hardly see if mother’s shape was still framed in the window. Perhaps she’d gone to take the pick-up off the record. I shrugged to indicate the pointlessness of attempting to prove anything. The butt’s barrel would rive asunder — there was no fluid down below anyway. It was packed solid throughout like a perfectly-fitting coffin. We might as well melt kind snow than something as brutal as this ice was turning out to be. If she saw me shrug, she gave no sign of it. The weather was by now becoming even more inclement and I fully expected to do a quick change act with a block of standing ice, the conjuror’s climax instead of a cabinet with a body inside it. The butt’s chocks came away. And even my thoughts became skewed, just like the ice wrenching and groaning out of shape. There were several icicles like spiked fingers erupting from the slit I’d started in the iron-grey surface. Meanwhile, there was no meanwhile for me. Yet someone returned to the mansion and discovered the whole place was a roofless shambles and a half. The ruthless boiler had finally gone up, leaving mother no more than a shell of her former self, spun by the explosion like a juggler’s plate: its tethered centrifugal force ignoring all possible frictions. Someone needed relentlessly to wield the diamond-sharp edge of the chopper, gouging further black grooves in her, in a no doubt fruitless attempt to quench the onset of her high-pitched whining. But that was before there arrived a sense of the shuttle of pointy wings settling in around a shivering corpse, with icy flakes of unused memory continuimg to splinter off a non-stick brain. How did I kill the ice monster? By blowing gently on it with my warm breath? Telling it stories about things in my life? Boring it soft? Or did it kill me by the biting torque in gears of ice? Perhaps even the dead have doses of empathy. Thus, none of us are victims and only happy endings reside between lost meanwhiles and meantimes. Any under-cheeks, yes, notwithstanding. Yes, in its sixth sense.
***
THE ONE TO WHOM WE ALL PRAYED
I didn’t dare open my eyes, did I? I truly believed that by opening them, I would be struck down by the one to whom we all prayed. The whole classroom of us had them squeezed tight, while the schoolteacher, whose eyes would also be folded over, conducted a gloomy intonation of a communal prayer to that same one to whom we all prayed. A formful of infants, all with lidded peepers, hands pressed palm to palm before the nose, some actually touching the hooded nostrils with the side edge of thinly cushioned thumb knuckles.
How did I know all this, if my own eyeballs had eye-lashed wings of flesh covering them? The simple answer was that all the other pupils would be struck down by the one to whom we all prayed, if they weren’t doing what I said they were doing, wouldn’t they? Teacher informed us that prayers needed to be said with our souls’ well-heads overgrown with the controllable excess face flesh which the one to whom we all prayed had seen fit to grant us — to allow us to dam out the conflicting light, so that we could ‘see’ only its unique light. But not daring to open my eyes didn’t imply that it was a physical impossibility to open them at the deepest moment of such worshipful prayer.
One day, the temptation became greater than the fear instilled by Teacher. I could not resist experimentation — even if damnation was a side effect. Death was almost preferable to not knowing. And so, that sunny day, as lessons drew to an untidy close, with clouds of chalkdust choking off our childish pleas for yet more plasticene, I vowed to release my eyesight at the optimum point of prayer — and this vow, to me, was even more sacrosanct than my faith in the one to whom we all prayed, holier than our holy prayer to Him.
Usually, we ended the school day by lifting our chairs upon the desktops, after we’d said our prayers. The consequent wooden clatter was a sharp dispersal of the prayer’s calm contemplation. Yet, sunny day or not, the prayer never seemed to reach the anxious Amen. Teacher’s face droned on about Goodness and Sacrifice and Creatures Great and Small — as if Teacher knew I was watching and couldn’t finish the prayer until I stopped watching or died or both.
My now ever-wingless eye-sockets watch along the spiders’ choking cobwebs in chalk-clung beams of sight — a stony gaze, from an increasingly knurled face, squinting from either side of the large moth-eaten moth’s wings pressed together like praying hands — until my eyes mis-soar like docked angels within a cat’s cradle called Hell, a Hell that is a single moment of unending prayer and uncontrollable excess flesh.
But as no victim, I swept through future life with my eyes fully open. Loving even the freshness of every unplanned turn or lost ending. But not before having first written, as some form of trigger, the above cloying words about the excesses in which eyes are sunk. Words for the one to whom we all prayed to read and learn.
***
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A REVENANT AND A GHOST?
Madge sung as she spun.
Motes of dust were hanging in air’s limbo…thus frozen by the laminar flows of her faultless treadling upon the wheel.
The seasonal storms stung her cottage window with salt, as the oil wick grew gloomier. Madge’s singing, like her spinning, was loomed upon the rote of memory — and even the darkness encroaching her parlour from the sea could not sway her mindless efficiency.
Abruptly, the wheel snagged and halted, as if something had become lodged between the wooden spokes. Her revery disrupted, Madge thought she had just seen the dead — or the dead had just seen her. She shuddered, while the wind whined and pretended to be a thousand Hell’s demons wildly spitting upon the panes.
She idly speculated that either the wick had turned the dimness pink or the very morling wool being spooled upon the floor by the wheel’s extruder had already been dyed by its donor sheep. She began to imagine the coiling strands were shredded threads of various husbands’ remains…those various husbands she had shorn of their manhood over the unreckonable years. All victims of birth, as she was, too. Soon to be avenged by some fiction called death.
A retributive revenant, she finally assumed, had left his disembodied hand in the spinning wheel, during a state of temporary semi-materialism, the blood from a wrist stump dripping upon the spun wool. She smiled at this now more likely explanation — for well she might, the revenant having failed in its vengeance.
Madge threw the barely warm hand into the fire grate as potential kindle and resumed her mindless crooning to the wheel’s relentless hum.
She did not even bother to remember whether she had recognized the familiar feel of its sweaty grip.
#
She squatted on the stool before the fire dreaming that she no longer existed or, at best, she was a revenant herself returned to find her stool empty. Perhaps, she had never lived at all and the series of men wedded to her between drowning tragedies had been no more than betrothed to a lick and a promise. She did not question how such words came to her in this state of rarification.
The sea’s Sound was softer tonight outside her cottage. On those earlier occasions of storm when the fishing-boats trailed nets like wings and roller-coasted the waves, she was accustomed to stare through the fucus-spattered panes for a sign of her latest husband’s bobbing torchlit homecoming: no hope of catching the squelch of his thigh boots through the salty puddles. But now, tonight, with the fire having doused its crackling, she may have even heard his breathing at the distance of a speck on the runnelled horizon.
She had surrendered the merry-go-round of marriages after the feather-toed creatures of the sea had failed to return her last one. She had been granted simple mementoes of all previous husbands — a cheek-flap or a nuggetted finger or barnacled toe. Sometimes, the bits were delivered late, half-decades late. Tomorrow, the delivery may be a man’s sea-weathered privities on a silver tray, like an aborted Innsmouth lobster.
She wept. The privities might be those of him six husbands ago: the only one who had serviced her better than she could herself.
The weeping made little noise, like a corpse’s. And as dawn broke, the knocking was fainter than the wings of an angel-fish; quieter even than the many squelching tip-toes that preceded it.
#
I once witnessed Madge’s standing — in my own crazy way likening her figure to a shrunken, blackened lighthouse with its one failed eye-beam flowing, then flapping down the torso like shadowy wings of a cloak.
She was barely visible against the darkening storm-cloud that fed upon a cross-section of the sea as straight, long and narrow as the distant horizon. It was strange that only a few minutes had passed since the sun first turned into a solitary purple bruise of a cloud.
She was awaiting, I assumed, the return of her husband who usually had to fish the sea until the last daylight was sucked back by the surfacing wreck-fish: no raw deal on better nights than this when the giddiheads of thundercloud were nowhere near. But, today, she must have wondered why he was braving the onset of foul weather. The need for catch was surely not desperate enough for such ruthless measures. True, the salt-wine had scrawny fruit for fins and bones, those days. Nothing but a mouthful of scales for breakfast…
Wait, what was that shape at sea darker even than the storm?
I crawled nearer to Madge’s skirts to catch her low mumbles. I cupped my fan-nerved hand to my ear…
“Ne’er-be-lickit is my belly’s tongue,
Cradle-clothes are stuffed within me,
Winding-sheets swaddle a love unsung,
And a funk-willie’s my man’s chimney…”
She faltered in her tuneless Crooning, since the shape had by now become obvious to her, too, If I had known the end of her song of childlessness, I would have continued it. Instead, I made it up as I took up the strain…
“Hog’s lard, fear-babe and pricker-roach,
Sea-shade, blub-bring and earth-fly,
I must boil the sea, let them poach,
‘Cos gulpswollen is my birth-eye.”
The sea soon regurgitated its prey before the storm broke. I helped Madge drag it back through the sand-puddles to the cottage where we put it to bed together, like parents tucking in their only child.
Her tears were dry. I wondered if she even noticed me helping at all.
Clambering to the window sill, I could see the storm had nurtured the tallest, most imposing lighthouse ever, sweeping the sky with a god’s flashbulb eyes. I sang, wordlessly this time, in the hope it would lull Madge into a dreamless sleep. Eventually I nuzzled up to her, to ease a bout of the shyfryngs. Seeing, my solitary birth-eye in the darkness, I assumed she knew I was the embodiment of all the babies she never had.
***
THE MANSION AT THE MOOSEY MUD-FLATS
Ever since I got a bit better from my illness, I’ve wondered who the hell all the people are in my mansion. Once upon a time, seems like yesterday, I could look at the faces that occupied the place and recognise them for what they were. Matched them up with the photos in the family album. They’re now overgrown versions of my children – toddlers made adult. And more ancient people still, ensconced in the parlour, who give me the creeps, true, but they were once relations of mine, at least one representative for each generation. As I say, every damn room is crawling with strangers. Except one who is the spitting image of my wife who pretends to care for me — fetches me my medicine, scoops off the incontinence and even curls up beside me when the window floods the room with darkness. She smiles as if she knows no wickedness. Calls herself by the name that my dear wife once bore. Yet this woman is older, wrinklier and far more evil.
Soon, I’ll be well enough again — perhaps to leave the mansion for a basinful of fresh air, as my mother once put it. Long since gone, my mother. Along with the other people I knew and trusted. No doubt under the ground here at the Moosey Mud-Flats near the mansion, embraced each with each, slithery, slippery, brown-smeary limbs entwined. That’s where they’ll put me if I don’t look out. Just a few minutes ago a surrogate of my daughter, high as the doortop, came in masquerading her ability to play a game of charades without it being Christmas. They can’t fool me any longer. I’m getting much better. I can see people for what they are. And what are they? Chancers. Accidents of mind and matter. Creatures with which my delirium once peopled the place. Sloughed from dreams. No more, no less.
A sweet knock at my bedroom door. Can this be my daughter proper? In school uniform. It sounds to be her knock, other than the fact it continues to rat-tat, relentlessly, like a mouse in the wall. Why does she not come in? Surely, she must realise that I’ve not found my voice from where I lost it at the onset of my illness. I thump up and down on the mattress, in the hope that the springs will speak out. It’d do me a power of good to see my daughter again, instead of her grown-up version, instead of that thing who wifes it about as if she owns my body and slops me out wherever she damn well chooses with those awful awful tepid suds. Not listening to me. Not heeding my requests for an outing or, at least, a foray into the downstairs parlour. Says I’m not well enough. But who are those strangers down there, my dear? I can pretend with the best of them. I humour her. Make her believe that I believe her pantomime. Yet none of this explains the gentle rat-tat-tat. Like a fairy’s machine-gun. Or like Elfin farts.
Finally, the door swings wide on throaty hinges. I can’t see well enough beyond the end of my chin, but I gauge its shape smaller than the normal visitor. As if one of my family has not grown up at all. Stunted. Dwarfed. A midget-sized thing that scutters under the bed. Sweep, sweep, I hear the dusting. A skittering beast hired simply to swab the floors? Surely not. Must be something, though. Can’t be the delirium again, now I’m so much better. Or maybe an echo of delirium. Yes, that’s it. A slight relapse. Nothing more. Got to expect it at my age.
How old am I? Not so old as some of my visitors, for sure. I can still recall first coming to the Mansion at Moosey Mud-flat, with all the excitement of youth in my eyes and a sweetheart on my arm. The neighbours, bless their hearts, were so kind. Took in the washing when we didn’t see the rain. Or hear its rat-tat-tat-tat on the kitchen roof. Dug up the spuds for us, when we forgot. Sponged off the mirrors when they got smeared with hot breath. Even sluiced us down when we stank. You see, love was our all. We had eyes for nothing else. Domestic details were, after all, simply not for us. My wife then was so beautiful. When it was her bathtime, most of the old codgers came to watch. Cooed and whistled with delight. But only the women were hands-on. With me, too. Tut-tut-tutting at my bodily predicament as they coaxed me into the suds. The men jeered and pointed. So, perhaps, thinking about it, they were not so good as neighbours. Just chancers, themselves. Fingers and thumbs of fate.
The thing under the bed has gone. Whither, I don’t know. Indeed, the low mumbling hubbub downstairs where the others gathered has abated. For all I know, I’m alone in the whole mansion. I’ll have to get up, soon, since nobody’s going to bring me a hard-boiled egg and bread soldiers. The gutter leaks, splitter-splatter into the water butt. Tit-for-tat. I gave them all life. Now they pay me back with death. A fair exchange?
The sounds of Moosey Mud-Flat are distinctive. Slosh-slop. Caw-caw, as brown-smeared birds squawk and mis-soar. Crack, crack … croak. God be thanked. I’ve found my voice. Dollop,twang, I delve into the mattress — to spread the tepid fetid spawn. Symbiosis. Parthenogenesis. Words with no meaning, words I cannot even spell. Like delirium. Brekekex coax coax.
Later Coda
The days have come, the days have gone. The roofs have detached themselves and become rocs in the cellar. Listen to these words and they will all make sense. Read them off the page and their meaning all falls apart. At least I am still alive, a victim to no-one except myself and, oh yes, to the stickiness of my fictions frogmarching me inside them to the only mushy muse of a mud-flat left.
***
CONSOLING THE ELBOWS
It was dark and I could not work out which room I was in. I saw a misshapen thing lying on wooden floorboards. I heard a piercing sound coming from upstairs. As I reached what I thought were the stairs, two fiery eyes peeped down. Suddenly a woman came into view with the misshapen thing dangling upon her. Her hair was dusty and her fingernails made spiralling motions in front of her. Her breath sounded as if she were using stuffed cauliflower instead of lungs. She followed me to the kitchen and asked me to go with her outside into the smoky air.
“No” I simpered, “not into the smoky air, since I’m a non¬smoker.”
“If you were a non-smoker,” she said, with a voice that sounded as if it were using something in her lower stomach as a vent, “how can you see me, let alone the misshapen thing? You must be disgracefully steeped to the gills in druggy smoke.”
“Please,” I whined, “please don’t speak so loud. If my preceptors should hear…”
‘They should have beaten out your junkie ways yonks ago, since tonight you are actually speaking to one of your own hallucinations!”
“It’s better than talking to someone else’s hallucination,” I said. Reaching into my handbag, I removed the oblong box. Poe had an oblong box, hadn’t he? His was a coffin, mine contained coffin nails.
I removed a cigarette from the packet. As well as being a non-smoker, next I’d claim to be a virgin. If only the preceptors knew…
There was a sound. Someone rising from a bed upstairs, perhaps. If I was caught out here, lit cigarette between my lips (albeit a mere tobacco one), well, the consequences were better not considered in advance. The upper dormitory window suddenly blazed with light. As one of the preceptors was fast waking up, I scuttled into the shadows of a dark tree where a moon’s shadow was the strongest — and lit a second cigarette. The glowing end would match the other one already alight and, hopefully, cause the face at the attic window to think they were the smouldering eyes of a fox or something like a fox but taller.
Then the door of the mansion gashed yellow and, in the luminescence thus created, I looked down and saw that the misshapen thing was attached to one of my legs. It reached out a willowy appendage, grabbed one of my cigarettes and began to puff smoke.
The angry preceptor had by now discovered my hiding place and forthwith dragged me towards the mansion — where I just knew I was to be punished by being shackled in its lowest cellar. My greatest punishment, though, was when I felt myself in the pitch darkness, realizing that the misshapen thing was an integral part of my body — and always had been.
I love the intricate, semi-understandable fiction of those women writers as my preceptors who were either Elizabeth Bowen or Elizabeth Bowen’s contemporaries who wrote in her vein. Dialogue was Ivy Compton-Burnett to the nth degreee, often murkily fustian but, on clearer days, clear as clouded crystal. Intervening prose of description and scene-stetting and mind-setting and passion-posing was dense at times but, at others, crepuscular with emerging meaningfulness. Words which stretched you. Thoughts that imbued you with thoughts you dared not earlier think you could even have the capacity to think. It made me want to write further fictions that their pens had not had time to write. Days of the heart where plots bleat for escape. Heat of the death in a night’s hotel. A house in a city called Eva Trout. Eva she was the one I’d love. A country where maps were made like her face. Fictions stuck to her elbow. Ley lines gave form and favour to a sweetheart’s beauty. This was the fiction I needed. A fiction that fabricated a real-life lover I would not otherwise meet. Even a misshapen form.
“And now you have made me, what next?” she asked, splitting from the page like a woodknot made proud.
“Let’s explore the place you live.”
I looked around at a city I knew was like Paris but was not Paris. It had canals like Venice, museums like Vienna, statues like Florence, lakes like Maggiore.
“What here?”
“It made itself as a sort of non-sequitur in admiration of your own gratuitous serendipity.”
“Your big words are too clumsy for real thoughts.” She looked even prettier as she mewed this plaint.
“Real thoughts don’t touch the sides … least of all the sides of paper. They flow along wordless channels like these mock gondolas.” As I spoke, and as if she had not seen them, I indicated, with a pretty finger, the ghostly craft that threaded the ever-developing veins of my city.
“Even if your words are plain and simple, being used in complicated structures of thought and meaning does not absolve you.” Eva, now thinking herself autonomous enough to stalk off into parts of the city I had not yet created, toppled into a canal I had only just deemed possible. She sleeked off into the splintery rainbows of false tides, before I could catch her in my all-weather, all-fable net. A Trout become Tench.
Perhaps it was the ghost of Elizabeth Bowen herself. One who was frequently photographed when smoking a cigarette. But do ghosts have scales and eyes in the sides of their heads? Human ghosts, surely, don’t.
The city faded around me to the north. To the nth degree.
The only victims are those who never read this. The missing misshapes of the universal soul.
***
FRICATIVES
You’ve only had a wicked dream,” she said, with a kiss upon wide-eyed Simpson’s shivering brow.
Simpson looked up at his kind-hearted mother, wondering if, one day, she’d be proved wrong — but, now, tonight, then, forever, he was happy enough to trust her … otherwise he would have died of fright without first having the grounds to grow old enough, old enough to understand. Meanwhile, or much earlier, or never at all, in a London office, a cleaning-lady said: “I had a good go at the thing last Monday.” And whatever the ‘thing’ happened to be, she was just leaving as I arrived for work at the office. I acknowledged her — in my usual flick-tail fashion — and busied myself with the day’s dockets. They had piled up since the evening before. No rest for the wicked, I thought — an expression I never fully understood, one which ancient housewives used on washdays. I always remember my father, too, as he painstakingly painted ‘best-by’ dates on our own pet hens’ eggs. Whilst, soon, my colleagues would be arriving brimful with horrific stories of British Rail and London Transport. I always tried to arrive before the office was strictly open. That obliged the likes of Beryl and Jeremy and Claudette (and Simpson, of course) to say a good morning to me first, since I had already become master of my own castle when the others had not even lowered their own draw-bridges to get in. It took the embarrassing edge of the day.
That silly biddy of an office cleaner (or batting-lady as they used to be called in my younger days), what on earth had she meant by a “good go at the thing” last Monday? She was all mouth and padding. I surveyed my desk. The blotter was spotless and the squat jars of creamy correcting-fluid lined up like soldiers on parade. I lifted the telephone handset — yes, it faintly smelled of that hygienic spray which the batting-lady applied to it during her regular Monday morning shiftwork. The dockets themselves were paper-clipped and neatly splayed in a semicircle as if a conjuror had made one sweep of a deck of trick cards. Additional oodles of creamy white correcting-fluid as a mix of Tippex and Snopake were left in a large basin for future larger-scale use upon the accounts ledgers. What she must have meant as ‘having a good go at the thing’, then, was that she had bottomed-out the drinks vending-machine. It had stunk to high heaven the day before yesterday. Nobody had dared use it. Except Simpson, of course: the office idiot. Simpson would say anything for a laugh: like there were “black thingies doing the breast-stroke” in the lemon tea. Then, jump-start Jeremy had perked up at the expression breast-stroke and obtained a drink for himself, which he gulped with one inverted hiccup. “Life itself is a risk,” wide-boy Jeremy had said to silly-arse Simpson. “You could get killed crossing the road soon as miss a blink.”
I laughed at the double-barrelled nicknames which I meaningfully threw around about my office colleagues like invisible gravestones. But, whatever the case, I usually preferred the vending-machine’s hot chocolate but lately most of its ingredients were revealed as congealed at the bottom of the plastic beaker. And, amid these dregs, I had re-imagined events from the night before, events which had involved drain-pipe Simpson (he was a drip) and a beat-nick girl who was at first a stranger to him.
=
“What shall I choose for horse’s dovers?” she had asked pointblank.
Her escort, cock-eye Simpson, looked askance for a fleeting moment, then, with the irritant of light dawning, suggested the prawn cocktail. “I dunno, I feel like something garlicky and, yes, cheesy, with a touch of tomato.”
The stranger-looking girl giggled as she brushed a sprig of hair from in front of her heavily made up eyes, as if that helped concentration. Simpson peered quizzically at the menu. He’d seen menu cards before, but these were tantamount to body-size! It did serve as a blind or even draught-excluding partition. He could kill shock-jock Jeremy for landing this female stranger on him tonight of all nights. Hallowe’en was a night Simpson usually spent at home with his mother and, instead, here he had to conduct a form of baby-sitting. Or should he call it baby-eating? (Looking after her babyish needs whilst he was eating, you see.) He laughed at his own silent joke.
“Did you say something, Simpson?” asked the girl stranger.
“Oh, no, I was simply rehearsing the order.”
Simpson’s lame reply passed muster okay, but he blushed to the roots of his hair—and beyond. Her voice piped up again: “What are you having for horse’s dovers?”
He winced at the repetition of the clumsy childish joke expression for hors d’oeuvres. He winced even deeper upon noticing that she had tucked her linen serviette into the top of her dress, hanging over her small bosom, hemmed corners in her lap. It already bore a noticeable stain.
“Oh, I think I’ll go for the seafood tureen,” he answered, in a humouring tone.
Outside could be heard the shouts of trick-or-treaters echoing down the street. A train trundled underneath the restaurant — a regular sound in this part of London. Despite its position, however, the restaurant was posher than the usual ones Simpson patronised. The waiters were polite, if officious, and one particular handsome fellow had passed a tiny crumb-hoover over the tablecloth as if it were some ritual to rid the settings of previous eaters. Such devices irritated Simpson, as did those scalding flannels ridiculously packaged in cling-film which Indian Restaurants handed out following their curry and tandoori concoctions, as if the finger-bowls were not enough. Yet, no such exoticisms in this place. This was a meat and two vedge joint, if an up market one. Here, apron-string Simpson could have brought his mother — someone who ever moaned about bean shoots and other such “foreign muck”. Surreptitiously looking around the side of what seemed to be an ever-growing fold-over stand-up menu card, Simpson indeed decided there was not much to choose between the girl and his mother. What was age between people like that?
“Oh, I don’t think I can eat much tonight.”
Now she says! Why ever suggest coming to a restaurant, in that case? Loud-mouthed Jeremy had a lot to answer for. Simpson, even Simpson, had taken out more companionable Great Aunts than this slice of female near-humanity was proving to be! He laughed again. Absurdity was sometimes preferable to common sense. Indeed, some events were more memorable because of their negative points. And what was existence without the stickability of memories? Bad memories were preferable to none. Black letter days, if not so good as red ones, stood out — became landmarks in an otherwise waste-ground of amnesic blandness. Or had he got his red and black confused? Death was the ultimate amnesia, of course, without which there could have been no life in the first place.
=
And as I continued to re-live that dream-restaurant scene by scrying the office beaker’s dregs, I was wondering why beakers were called beakers, but then buxom Beryl bustled in, wielding heavily cosmeticked cheeks.
“The buses were at a standstill right across London Bridge—and I could have walked quicker,” she said with a toss of her aspirin-crushed-upon face. Beryl was younger than her plumpness portended. She often referred to her husband as if she were about to change him for a newer model. Characteristics piled up in no logical order. Beryl all over.
Stork-leg Claudette was said to have a man at home, too. As far as looks were concerned, Claudette was a different bar-room talking-point altogether. Thus, she easily managed to provoke jump-start Jeremy. A case of mutual sexual harrassment: a self-perpetuating series of back-biting and back-scratching. And, believe it or not, wide-boy Jeremy actually thought himself to be sexy with that cheap medallion dangling upon a blatantly hairy chest. All mouth and trousers was Jeremy. A man’s man. Or various words to that order.
The first phone to ring was always on my desk, a phone sleeping, as it were, with one ear cocked. Then, if it wasn’t placated, it hunted round the other phones in a strict order, an order set quite arbitrarily by the original engineers whose blueprints turned out to be little better than pink blancmange. I failed to understand why everybody else was so damn inefficient. I picked up the beast with one fell swoop of my arm in a well-rehearsed arc. “Yes?” I had had never been taught telephone etiquette. It was jump-start Jeremy reporting in sick—as he had done, it seemed, every Monday morning since Kingdom come.
In the meantime, chirp-cheap Claudette had arrived late, shaking out her frilly umbrella from a sudden shower, as if the umbrella were a large vampire-bat fresh from skinny-dipping. She looked round to see if she was the last to have arrived.
“How was it this morning, dear?” Buxom Beryl didn’t even look up from her under-sized newspaper, as she offered small talk to stork-leg Claudette.
“We got stuck in a tunnel for half an hour,” Claudette replied, her pretty face seeming smudged with smuts of soot. Beryl tutted so loudly, I thought it was someone breaking combs under the desk. That village idiot is late again, I said to myself, in reference to Simpson. He was beyond a joke. I would have to report him upwards, before long.
Claudette was combing out her long locks, with swishing sighs. She evidently wanted to look as nice as possible before venturing into the ladies’ rest room to put the finishing touches to her demeanour with the help of a full-blown mirror and buxom Beryl’s loan of cosmetic.
#
Meanwhile, I returned to the beaker’s dregs and the strange girl in the restaurant also blamed loud-faced Jeremy for this evening. Simpson was fast becoming a dead bore—always dithering with pointless thought. There had never been any question of horse’s dovers, of course. Prawns were never red enough. Pinkness was worse than no colour at all, to her mind. Why couldn’t he have a sense of humour? Still, she had a lot to learn from others, even from daft cases like Simpson and she abruptly brought him back into the land of the living with her considered choice for her main (and only) course (or entrée as they called it here).
The better class of waiter whom the restaurant employed had made the decision from among all their life-size menu photographs far more difficult. The waiters were indeed all relatively young and good-looking. The waiter picked was eventually escorted into the kitchen by the leathery head chef, for his neck to be tapped with one of those new-fangled gold-plated spigots restaurants seemed to provide these days. But then, a solitary trick-or-treater made a raucous sally into the body of the restaurant, in search of donations for his bonfire. He sported a Dracula mask, a mask looking remarkably like Jeremy’s face.
The girl shrugged and looked to simple-sample Simpson for even simpler enlightenment. She was bereft of the hidebound niceties that longevity instilled. Consequently, Simpson threw off his “village idiot” soul and thought thoughts with a sudden dawning of dark pleasure, thoughts that the girl probably was a real tasty starter of a once dead girl. He signalled to a disused waiter who was a bit too long in the tooth to be toothsome and asked for the A La Carte menu.
=
Meanwhile, back in the land of the wicked, my office phone, having broken into a feat of renewed trilling, I pretended to have heard the fax machine by the window break into life and wandered over to it, evidently to see what was written on the slippery paper which would have slid from between the rollers. In this way, the phone ceased on my desk and started ringing on wide-boy Jeremy’s.
Big-bosomed Beryl raised her head lackadaisically and began to stare at the shrill creature with a look sufficiently old-fashioned to make a prize-fighter curl up in his corner. There was very little point to her consternation since the blower’s pesky pinecat screeching, if unanswered, would soon renew its petulance elsewhere. So, she picked up the nearest phone extension by its wildly whipping tail at the first suspicion of the tongue-click which prefigured the full-blown spat of stinging sound hunting over to her desk. And, finding the fax machine had not given birth, I wondered why people called phones blowers. There was no accounting for words. A close squeak. Beakers. No rest for the wicked in the 1970s.
Beryl’s face was ashes. Claudette’s a picture of cosmosis interruptus. Evidently shocking news had been imparted via the phone. They were pointing madly at Simpson’s empty desk and then at the offending drinks vending-machine. I creased up. The machine had been gargling for days, as if whatever creature lived inside it had drunk all the variously flavoured fluids for itself and was about to explode through the narrow dispenser. I abruptly had a very strange imagining — by means of an instinct drawn from word association rather than from a grasp of reality — an imagining that jump-start Jeremy moonlighted in drag, masquerading as the office cleaning lady each Monday morning with a disguise more impenetrable even than buxom Beryl’s cosmetic face-mask. Better than that vampire mask I had seen him wearing in the dregs. But what about poor simple-sample Simpson? Bottomed out beyond even a joke’s joke, now. No rest for his wicked belly. There was the sad sound in the office of comb-teeth snapping one by one. And, months later, Simpson entered in clothes that reminded me of those I had worn only the day before.
=
“Surprise! Surprise!” he said.
“Hi, Simpson, sit yourself down and have a nice cup of tea,” I said, in turn offering him a seat beside the framed picture of his dead mother, the latter being a present he had given me. Simpson and I had become fast friends, ever since the office redundancies. In fact, we had previously been rather kept apart by the job … both of us preferring to be homebirds, watching TV or doing odd jobs. Better than negotiating the realms of commuting any day.
“Thanks for the Birthday present,” he said, stirring the tea I had soon prepared.
“It’s nothing. Don’t think any more about it.”
I noticed he was sporting all the items of clothing I had only wrapped yesterday … before leaving the parcel on his doorstep. He replaced the cup on the saucer, stood up, preened himself and strutted his outfit with a quick flourish.
“I thought you’d like them,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, “but I’m afraid they must have been frightfully expensive.”
“Well, to be absolutely honest, Simpson — they’re slightly body-soiled and I managed to haggle the price.”
“Oh, they seem OK.” He gave his own length the once over, as if expecting to see stains he’d previously missed.
“They look much better in a mirror,” I suddenly said for no accountable reason, staring at the black wallpaper. He smiled, recognising something his mother always used to say, no doubt. It was as if his mother made me say things from the grave … despite her having been cremated.
Later, I switched on the TV — not for Simpson and I to watch it as such but for it to act as a sponge for our otherwise awkward silences. There was a film on but neither of us followed it. Well, strange to look back on it now, but the film almost followed us. Two characters, with a few seconds delay, mimicking our strained faces and clumsy gestures … and Pinteresque exchanges. Then the weather forecast came on and I decided to speak my mind for the first time that evening: “It’s getting a bit hard on my pocket, you know, Simpson.”
He nodded. He seemed as if he knew exactly what I meant — but, for the sake of something other than completeness, I elaborated: “All these clothes I keep buying you as presents … the cost is leaving me well—how shall I put it?—embarrassed.”
He nodded, this time with a gaze of mystification. I continued: “Buying necessaries for two is stretching my resources to their limit. It’s not my fault that your mother only left you a small annuity.” He looked away and pretended an interest in tomorrow’s coastal temperatures. A cold snap coming, apparently. But the map on the TV screen was of no country I could recognise.
=
Knocking Church Street was usually a quiet place, although it slightly cheated by having sleeping policemen humps to deprive the rat runners and back doublers of their self-indulgent conduits of least resistance. Office commuters were evil people at the best of time. Luckily there were fewer and fewer offices these days to draw them into the city. Simpson remembers his mother saying (when they lived on Knocking Church Street): “A good marriage is one where each of you have clothes that can only be worn if you have to have help in dressing, for example, a top where the buttons are at the back…” As a child, he would nod. As a grown-up, he would repeat his mother’s sayings.
I would react with wide eyes and cooing noises. Bearing in mind its name, it was inevitable, I suppose, that Knocking Church Street ended up completely demolished … towards the end of Simpson’s childhood, a period when puberty was a burden rather than an awakening. He still possesses an old map with Knocking Church Street shown. It was an oval street. Never ever been anything like it, since or before. An endless street of terraced housing, two crescents in one, with odd numbering…
=
I was interrupted from my revery by my stomach bubbling. I hadn’t eaten for ages. But I decided to ignore it. Simpson was fiddling with the TV trying to find something else not to watch. He never seemed to return to his own home. He used my place as if it were his. “Pardon me,” I said. The noise in my stomach was getting worse, almost flatulent, starting to interrupt my speech as I tried to pursue our earlier conversation with words which I meant to be as cruel as they sounded: “You’d take the clothes off my own back rather than open your wallet…”
I dared not look down, since my stomach noises were fast resembling that of a pet dog or, even, a wild beast. Indeed, I felt such a creature gnawing my toes. “…and I now find,” I continued, “that you can afford to go to the pictures every afternoon—and seeing all those horror films can’t be good for you…” Cinemas seemed a waste of time to me. The films they showed always became old ones that TV later showed when nobody was watching. Meanwhile, the noises were attached to me in some way as if the stomach itself was an autonomous animal. I wriggled in my seat.
I could only see two bloated noses. Cold as ice. Death was such whatever the heat. Even eggshells melted on the last sell-by day of them all. Cremated dreams. Huge menu cards protecting sight of them.
Simple Simpson switched off the TV and put on my fur coat. It was time for him to go to the pictures. I hoped the cinema screen would also be black and the films projected on it even blacker. That would serve him right. I expect he meets buxom Beryl on these trips to the pictures. I wonder what happened to that eyelid-batting Claudette. She must still be young enough to be office-bound. Each sleep’s clumsy commuting back into consciouness remained a rancid starter, a beakerful of curdled black blood prefiguring the day’s tasteless banquet. Or, worse still, she might be married, despite the man’s death itself, to that jump-start Jeremy, and caring for his creature comforts. Combing that wide-boy’s broken locks. Filing his wayward teeth. Grooming his goatee. Waxing and oiling his scrawny chest. Pampering his bready thighs. Blowing gently upon his belly-button. Preening his prawn starter.
But I no longer possessed a mind where to wield such surreptitious surrealism, indeed no thoughts at all with which to fill out the necessary forms and dockets for the well-ordering of my soul. Indeed, my last thought was being thankful that I never became a parent myself — with nobody thus burdened with carrying the relay baton of my existence by means of the resurrection of my mind’s meanderings amid the cold dregs of an uncertain future. Or, perhaps, my very last thought was thinking of that strange, if now very familiar, girl in the restaurant with trains trundling below — a girl not so strange as to be a complete stranger to me of all people. I was me and I was everyone. Fictives and plosives laid end to end like the then future’s streaming of consciousness as well as of old TV programmes.
Blood, they say, is God’s own correcting-fluid.
***
Continued here:
https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/victims-fictionalised-by-purging-torque_16.html
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