CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/victims-fictionalised-by-purging-torque.html
***
THE BATTLE OF TWO WARS
When she was evacuated to Wales, Beatie expected everything to be all wine and roses, full of songs in the mountains, country cottages and a strange lilting language which she had only heard in childhood dreams.
The war had pounded long and hard upon the city, hitting nearly everything and only missing St Paul’s Cathedral by the skin of its teeth. She had often lain awake at night listening to the bombs coming nearer. Each wake woke a different war. Even when a fitful sleep finally overtook her, the dull thuds became the manners of a devil, as she crossed those dream lands that such a devil had come to control between each of these wars.
Despite bidding farewell to her best chum Alice, Beatie was delighted when she was bustled off on a steam train to far Wales. But her despondency was equally great when, on arrival at a snowy Kidwelly station, she saw the industrial landscape exceeding even the worst fears created by her travels in the dream lands.
She was taken in a trap to a Boarding House which she had been told in London was run by a family called Ribber. As an old mansion, it stood tall and gloomy, like a sore thumb sticking up from the never-ending terraced houses. It faced the railings of a factory that was evidently concerned with some undercover war work involving smoke belching day and night from its tall chimneys.
Surprisingly, Beatie had to sign the guest book, which was an enormous ledger on the receptionist’s counter. And, as the man who drove the trap, Jack, wished her good luck on swinging out through the revolving doors, she absent-mindedly browsed through the names of the other guests. This seemed a stake-out for single gentlemen — or so their outlandish signatures indicated.
One or two of those names gave her spine a running shiver. And most of them, although mere names on the face of it, conveyed a gamut of insidious fears. Furthermore, being the only female guest, that fact would no doubt bring problems in itself.
She suddenly realized that the names, or some like them, must be echoes of those always memorial ones enunciated at the back-end of her recent nightmares. To cap it all, she heard an air raid siren suddenly hiccupping into life which, unless it was a false alarm, made a mockery of the whole journey to this godforsaken place.
It was indeed a false alarm. The next morning, after a thankfully dreamless sleep, brought an entirely new aspect. The sun was melting the snow. The railings opposite were sparkling. The tall chimneys only puffed desultorily. And workers with red spotted kerchiefs and bright blue dungarees trooped from the factory gates, with an odd wolf whistle and guffaw breaking their otherwise silent departure.
Until then, Beatie had seen nobody except the bell-boy of the Boarding House. He was indeed an overgrown boy, with just the beginnings of a bum-fluff beard and a voice croaking on stiffening vocal cords. Quite abruptly, her attention was drawn to a gaggle of guests leaving through the swing-doors below her. She could just see the revolving wings flicking in and out of the entrance, since her bedroom bay window protruded over the pavement. Their voices were in undertones. They all wore flat caps and she was quite sure one of them muttered “Jack’s in the salt-cellar, Gammy ga ga.” A more outlandish statement it would be hard to invent, but it struck an uncanny chord.
If she had followed them, she would have discovered that they were heading towards the pub down the road, which opened early, in view of it being war-time. She looked across to the factory and was startled to see a huge bird-like creature settling on one of the chimneys … a monstrous vision with flowing dewlaps and wattles of wrinkled skin. Upon its bony, knobby legs, it poked its saw-like beak into the top end of the chimney, evidently inhaling the now more fulsome fumes blasting from the furnaces below. The sun glinted off the creature’s carapace and … yes, off the metal wings of Spitfires that were now heading towards it, having emerged from the clear sky without warning. One crashed into the creature’s under-hide, another skimmed through its blood-red coxcomb and careered off only to explode in a thousand bright splinters of fire somewhere amid the factory complex. Yet another dived suicidally between the yawning beak-halves and was snapped into two like toffee crunch … just like that. Beatie looked away in horror … and when she eventually returned her tentative pricking gaze there was nothing extraordinary to see, just the factory chimney releasing little pathetic puffs like smoke-messages from a bemused Red Indian tent.
Beatie put the vision down to a migraine. Her only option, however, was to believe her gut-feelings that she had been truly evacuated mind and body … so that she could carry out some far more dangerous (and infinitely more important) war-work than being a land-girl or simply sitting it all out in the shadow of St Paul’s Dome which was now at least another world away.
=
The Anchor Arms was full even at eight o’clock in the morning, for this was the time when shifts changed. Fred had not bothered to look in this morning, as he had been tipped the wink that the incubators in the processing-plant were on the turn and, being nightwatchman on the day shift, they needed his immediate attention. But all the others whom Beatie had seen recorded by signature in the ledger were there boozing away and smoking fit to outdo the chimneys. One sat in his favourite position by the piano, dreaming of the days he once fell in love with the tub-thumper who used to play Russ Conway medleys on that very joanna. The others chatted incessantly about the new girl evacuee at the Boarding House. They sniggered as they grew drunker and the pub talk took a ludicrous turn; and, finally, they stumbled off to work at the factory.
Outside, they glanced back and saw her face still at the bow window of her bedroom, now smiling beneath her tears. There were deeper myths hanging over South Wales in those days than was ever contemplated by the history books – of Great Old Ones in Llanelly who shuttled between the stars and of their roof roosts here and there, on worlds old and new. The pub-type talk continued as they slaved at stoking up the incubators.
And as they slaved, they chanted “Jack’s in the salt-cellar, Gammy ga ga.” Soon, they would open up the hatches at the front of the autoclaves. Fred had hinted that their contents would soon be ready for the big fling and, thus, the decoy and subterfuge of the other World War could be abandoned.
Beatie was still at the window like a poster stuck to the glass. Her face smiled broadly, for the big bird had evidently escaped to the inside of her head, where it was growing more complex, even more unbelieveable. And, as her face smiled, it was clear that she, more than anybody, knew exactly what was going on.
At dusk, she left the window and joined her fellow guests in the dining-room for a stew of lights, grits and melts, everybody no doubt stirred into attendance by the bell-boy’s vigorous tub-thumping of the dinner gong. She told the others with a straight face that she had been sent from London, a spy … but for which War? She explained that War fought War in the battle for the right to exist in history, but the one where a man cooked his least favourite races in pressure incubators and fought on all fronts at once for the right to do so had no chance at all — too far fetched by half. But the battle of battles had only just been joined and Beatie herself only knew half of it.
The air raid sirens stuttered again that night. And as Beatie lay awake listening to them, she began to recall her playchild friend Alice — but then accidentally lost her way in a fitful sleep full of dreams and songs in the mountain, country cottages, bardic rounds and an Eisteddford … and the misshapen people-pulp that pulsed and palpitated in the factory stews, across the road from the Boarding House.
=
Kidwelly Fair was in full swing, as the Easter evening drew in. At some central control console, an unknown hand tilted a rocker-switch and all the twirling coloured lights were tripped from one end of the site to the other. Beatie stood back in awe and then began to wander between the side-shows. One stall-holder was particularly vociferous in attracting custom. Dressed like a playing-card Jack of Diamonds, he yelled: “Roll Up, Roll Up, throw rings over invisible things.”
Beatie knew that whatever crazy game she chose, her money would be ripped off and the Evacuation Authorities had not given her much in the first place. But, still, what was life if one could not enjoy it in one’s own silly way? As well as the pretty dolls’ clothes spreadeagled like anorexic angels across the tent-frame of the stall, she rather fancied as a prize the tall silver salt-cellar she could take back to the Boarding-House. She could just see the other guests’s faces.
In many ways, it would be perfect if Alice were here to see Beatie have a go, rather than still holed up in London Docklands, as Alice was. She glanced over her shoulder and looked at the fair’s Big Wheel, revolving slowly, like a vertical version of the Boarding House’s swing-doors. Lit up like a flying saucer, it seemed to roll across the site as if it were really a wheel. Best pay no attention to her faculties: common sense is much more reliable, if a rare commodity. She approached the Jack of Diamonds and proffered her tanner coin for a go.
“How many go’s will that give me?”
“There’s no set number, Miss, but you’ll know when the go is ended.”
“Will I indeed?”
She took the wooden rings, about the diameter of a fashion model’s thigh, and stared into the darkness beyond the back of the stall. She remembered the Jack’s sales pitch … how could she throw rings at invisible things? This was more than just an ordinary fraud. Who was to verify? It did not even have pretensions to fairness — like most wars.
Ah well, in for a tanner, in for a ten bob note. She floated the rings upon glide-paths that seemed likely to pay dividends, assuming there were indeed tall, tapering, translucent cut-glass vases standing behind the shadows as targets. With her tongue lolling out in concentration, Beatie continued to launch ring after ring and, as she did so, she listened to the distant hair-brain screams from the dodgems and the ghost-house and the rollercoaster and the Big Wheel and the thudding of Heavy Metal.
When the rings eventually ran out, Beatie found herself automatically bowling invisible discs into the air. She convinced herself she could actually feel them. Her mind was so entranced, she could hardly hear the Jack egging her on. But she had felt depressed when first coming on to the site. The bell-boy had scolded her only that morning for not leaving her bed unmade for him to make it. Then there was that silly argument about the cock in the back garden runs. Still, relationships were started and maintained on the thinnest of grounds. Bodies, though, had started to have a personality which could get in the way.
The afternoon had dragged, sitting alone with the fag-end of a love affair that had never been lit. She had unpacked her T-chest full of squashed tracing-paper, which always gave her a good feeling: the clean curves of the bone china her mother had entrusted to her safeguarding, almost translucent in their fineness: the flower patternings picked out in pastel shades, almost abstract, intangible: memories flooding back, memories of endless summers and infinite futures that were the past.
Now, back on a high, with the roar of the fair dinkum, she felt her own body launched like a wooden ring upon the lamina of the air towards the emptiness. Abruptly, without any noticeable shift, she felt herself completely enveloped in blackness; not a real surprise, however, more as if she had been blind since birth and would remain blind after death.
As time faltered, she gradually discerned spinning saucers, at first hazy white, slowly gaining definition as they neared her. But before she could reconcile the phenomena with any rationalisation, she began to realise that her skull itself was the frailest, finest porcelain target. And the first silver halo to arrive would have more substance than sense.
The fairground lights were immediately doused by the man on the rocker-switch at the first suspicion of an air raid siren.
=
Weeks later, the war almost forgotten, Beatie vaguely wanted to live in the countryside beyond Kidwelly, far from the old mansion that was now a Boarding House and the tall factory chimneys. Her mother had long since been swallowed up by the Hunnish occupation of London Town, so now the only option was for Beatie to find her own life, even if that entailed risking it.
The day was sticky — brown clouds hanging like sweaty duffles — as she walked the long drive to the front entrance of somewhere else. The windows winked in turn as each took shine from the hidebound sun, bringing her to believe that the place had a being all of its own. The “Room to Let” sign was askew. She fondled the money she had lately earned from working as a bar maid in the Anchor Arms. The gutters hung from below the roofs like spectacle frames crippled by recent air raids, even here deep in the country. The porch came out to meet her even before she had time to realise that she had reached the front door, her fist raised to crash down upon its split paint boards and set the fan-lights revolving in their sockets, like miniature swing-doors.
=
Her eyes were swollen above the cheek-bones, perhaps in readiness, because, she felt, whoever came to answer the door would be determined to out stare her like the blind security-officer at the factory opposite the Boarding House. The door of somewhere else opened even before she had a chance to adjust her blouse. She had assumed that the owner lived there merely to protect his property, rather than to use it as quarters in which to pursue existence. When she first caught sight of the upper floors, from a distance, rearing above the surrounding woodland environs, she was amazed, because the roofs leaned against each other, as if generations of childhood tree dens had been built on top of one another, growing from the slab walls like inflammable chimney stacks, each with wire sculpture jewellery that (she presumed) would bring in the programmes as soon as television was invented in the future.
“Yes?” The man who had swung the door wide, stood with legs apart, his face naggingly familiar, but his nose out of joint to any accommodation with the rest of his face. His spectacles were crooked, one ear being higher than the other.
“Good afternoon, I gather there is a room to let and I bring a letter of introduction from the Evacuation Authorities…” She held out the sealed envelope. She felt as if she had another migraine coming on, and she could hardly see since the sweat had dripped into her bulging eyes.
“Why are you crying, Miss?”
“I am not crying, Sir, merely hot.” She pointed to the sky where the sun was on yet another sprint towards a new hidey-hole. She could hear the underchatter from within the house which she took to be the Home Service on the wireless.
“Call me Jack, if you like.” The man took the envelope and tore it open with his red teeth, shredding parts of the actual letter in the process. “Tell me, before I read this letter, why are you interested in this room?” Beatie stopped short. She was about to say that she needed a refuge from a refuge. “I know, I know, you want to live here — for the character of the walls, the depth of the rooms, the ghosts in the attics, the landscape of roofs…”
She shook her head as if to free it from some encumbrance and politely returned down the long winding drive. She had indeed spotted a big wheel of flashing coloured lights in the dusk slowly revolving nearer from above the distant Kidwelly — and she heard the vague screams of joy and terror.
The one who asked others to call him Jack followed her for several miles even to the ragged coast, wagging his tongue and jabbing it at various distances to snag her clothes. But like the big bird, he was thankfully an intangible chunk of dot-matrix pre-echoed from the televisions that had not yet been invented. Beatie was somewhat relieved, as he had scared her out of her wits.
Nevertheless, she still felt the tweak of a beak inside her head tentatively poking the back of her eyeballs. She hiked deeper into the less well-known parts of South Wales — but now it did not seem to matter since she found herself hand in hand with the earlier Boarding House’s bell-boy. He was still panting from catching her up, his voice lovingly lilting with Welsh fricatives and plosives … and, what was more, Alice, in a frock of polka dots, skipped happily in their wake across the green hills. Hopefully, war had defeated war with a mutual backward beak swallowing each other.
***
AGENT OF FATE
The building had once been a skyrise block. It was now sprawling along the horizon, its central manse prodding the clouds with the short temper of a bed-ridden schoolmarm, its outhouses and stables creeping window- and entrance-less … from either side, curving gently to fulfil an ancient ambition of the shellac snake swallowing its own masonic tail.
He knew at once that this was the only part of the city which had been made independent of reality during the Third set of world wars. He had clambered here through stilted, stunted avenues of post-suburban civilisation, all the solitary inhabitants glued to screens which reflected even emptier versions of themselves. He need not bother them. He took no pleasure in surprising the unsurpriseable. Time travel was to them only second nature in the fictional worlds they now thought they lived through. He was just another hero in search of his heroism, this particular area of history being merely a way-station for other more interesting less insignificant times.
“Who are you?”
He was startled by the brightness in the fricatives of her abrupt voice. Wishing that he had managed to bring the same question to bear before she had, he surveyed her face: a wanton, vixen-like animal with loins so thickly bushed, he wondered why he had jumped to the original conclusion that ‘it’ was female.
“I am Anchor,” he answered. He nearly added, “Commissioned by the future to de-haunt that building,” if it had not seemed pretentious to do so.
It looked unaccountabley relieved.
He pointed to the co-joined crescent building, now etched in marquetry against the most stage-struck sunset he had ever seen. The edge of the sky was almost audible amid its various interfaces of tertiary colours: not one single sun, but several, all dipping together as a well-drilled chorus line, gradually silting into the dewy-eyed pastels and oils that this particular universe had seen fit to massage into its moving parts. All the suns eventually came together as one, to take the curtain call of night, its consistency fast changing from raw raspberry jam to wild honey. With a magnificent feat of prestidigitation, the combined sun was now wearing a black top hat which was courteously doffed for the final bow and, more quickly than Anchor anticipated, became as big as the whole sky’s bowl.
“Pretty, weren’t it?”
He nodded. He had not wanted to enter the building during darkness but now it seemed there was no alternative.
“You will come with me?” he stated, rather than asked. “To help clean it?”
It took his hand into its slenderly fingered paw and led him along an unmarked path. Its sparkling eyes told him that it could see better at night than him. His friends who work for Fate had obviously primed it and planted it here as his guide, and he was truly thankful for such sweet mercies.
The building had once been a large stately mansion. It was now unusual in one respect, something he had indeed already noticed but not sufficiently weighed. The side stables had no apertures of their own, which meant that they could only be reached via the main central manse itself. He imagined wicket gates leading from the grand entrance hallway into the bestrawn areas, where whatever unlikely beasts were reared did nuzzle and feed, hinnying gently to lull the other inhabitants towards sleep. The livestock was taken in and out via the ornate central doorway, since they had no stable doors to call their own. The marble staircases and costly parquetry must be peppered with their droppings.
He had learnt, before embarking on this mission, that he was due to reach a cross-section of reality which was entirely independent of history itself. Unscarred by the Third Wars, it was thus teeming with such refugees and dossers that could not bear the brunt of technology. It supplied haven, even, for those who could not gain purchase upon any credulity elsewhere; their outlandish exteriors were denied existence within most healthy precincts of time, since nobody really wanted to believe in nightmares. It was Anchor’s job to visit such pockets of resistance and rid them of the unredeemable creatures that inhabit them.
He had no illusions. He was not brave. Knowing that logic and common sense were fighting from his corner, how could he be defeated? Furthermore, he had a few old school-tie contacts amid the corporate machinery of Fate.
“I’ve got a key.”
He could have hugged it. It knew its lines very well. The double doors swung wide open even before it could insert the key. Things were working out almost too well (despite the early sunset). He was indeed cruising upon a clockwork of well-oiled domino ratchets.
They stepped amid the candle flames that might have been lit to welcome them. The stench inside was quite unbearable: a heady ripeness which they could almost see hanging in the wax light like honeycombs rotted right through. The dynastic oil paintings queuing up the winding gone-with-the-wind staircase dripped with a phlegmy-green pigment, particularly from the mouths and snouts of the depicted subjects. Each would-be smile poised upon a plosive.
“How do we get to the stables?” he asked, ever eager to get on with the job in hand.
It darted towards an antechamber and, by the time he had caught up, he found it scrabbling in the maw of a tall fireplace. The lizard-skinned ashes, he could just see, were sticky as fictons, and some dead flames were clinging to its behind like boiled sweets or burrs. He had always imagined corpse-fire to be more like flowers. This was the first time he’d seen such a phenomenon.
With a teeth-grinding noise, it removed the back of the engorged chimney. Giving him its tail to hold, he followed into what he now took to be the stables. There were snorts and snuffles from every quarter: lambent eyes played peeky-boo with each other: feelers tickled his face as if he were on an old fashioned ghost funround. How was he to see in such darkness, how cope with the exorcism of mutant reality with merely the sense of touch at his disposal?
“Are we in the stables, now?” he whispered.
“No, these are where the pets are kept. The wildstock is further into the side sheds.”
He knew he was not here to obliterate household pets. But he was now unsure whether it had learnt its lines correctly. Unaccountably, he half-mistrusted it, or was it ‘her’ after all?
With no warning, even to himself, Anchor took his Lewis-gun and sprayed a splatter of ectoplasmic pellets in all directions of the sane compass, willy-nilly. The gnawing purrs and drowsing undergrunts became squawks and squeals of outright terror. The eyes extinguished one by one, each with a gut-wrenching sob.
The noise screeched on: it could almost be seen as great swathes of darkness billowing with black flames: then tattering: finally silence.
It turned out, more by Luck than Fate, he had taken care not to hit his guide. But he could tell from the yellow wells that were its eyes rising up before him, that it was stricken with unconscious grief. He felt its tail tug him on. Now it was not speaking. A sort of female stony silence had settled on the story of their relationship … at least for a while, he assumed.
They reached the outmost stables by daybreak., tired and hungry. A silvery light filtered through the cracks of the wooden walls.
“But there’s nothing here …” Only straw and a small, empty manger, he noticed.
As he spoke, he swung his arms in unison, like a love-shy schoolboy.
It stared at him fixedly. Its cunning-looking features snickered. She tweedled her whiskery snout: the minx needed its rump smacking, he thought.
Abruptly, with a flash of its flanks, it leapt upon him, scrambled up his uniform (using silver buttons as gains of purchase), wrapped Anchor round the chest, with the fever of some passion he could not comprehend.
His most powerful weapon was the vast crosspult with a chunky lump of frozen ghost-vaccine sprung upon a band of elastic spirit-fire and several interlocking hair-triggers ready-cocked. Whether it was snooked accidentally into judder-recoil; or, whether, indeed, he himself tipped the balance in all conscious righteousness, he did not, nor want to, know.
He placed it in the single manger, where it flopped lifelessly. The gape in its furry belly slowly filled with what looked like raw jam. With reluctant tears gleaming in his dark eyes, he curled himself up in the straw nearby … waiting, waiting, waiting for Fate to send another agent of Fate to rescue him from these trammels of out-history.
With extreme tenderness, he used one of his own tentacle-shoots to shuffle some straw over the body in the manger. No human victims here, he thought. He was just another ‘it’ after all.
***
PAY THE TAXI-DRIVER
I’d just returned from a long holiday abroad in the early 2000s. One with a forgotten abrupt ending. Flagged the black cab at Heathrow. Didn’t really look at its driver as I clambered straight into the back. Who does? I felt refreshed and somewhat relieved to have completed my long planned Grand Tour of Europe before my prophecy of future history was fulfilled. Both satisfaction at a challenge met and a feeling that I was back home, even though I didn’t quite yet recognise the roads heading towards my home in West London. Who does? London is both home to Londoners and a foreign place until … well, that special home-coming into the immediate neighbourhood of your long established home in that all too familiar mews back of the park. Except when the taxi driver pulled up at the address I had given him, I still did not recognise where I was.
The terraced mansion itself was familiar, as if it ought to be mine, but the curtains were different and the front door was a few feet to the left of where it should be. I gazed from the back of the cab half-startled at the strangeness of the terraced array, half-believing that one was indeed my home. Nobody to check with inside, I knew. I’d never lived with anyone. Who’d want to live with someone like me, anyway: fastidious, habit-driven and so prim I wouldn’t know what excitement was even if it hit me in the face? Not that I hadn’t yearned for a holiday romance whilst away! Disappointment in the end, but a few near misses. I chuckled. I wasn’t uncouth enough. I wasn’t uncouth enough for love. Something told me that my mind was in a temporary file deep within the computer of my brain, as I turned attention back towards the current predicament.
The driver loomed large behind the black cab’s glass screen. I could see the back of his neck quite clearly and the fact he must have had a haircut in very recent days to reveal brown skin. I hadn’t yet seen his face, I realised. Funny what normal things could be noticed while truly strange things were going on unnoticed. For example, I hadn’t yet noticed that my own handbag had changed to one I didn’t recognise. I loathed its whole style and feel. Like some animal or reptile skin. It wasn’t my style at all. But, amazingly, as I say, I hadn’t yet noticed the alteration. I merely dug into it to find some loose change for a tip. I already knew that the fare showed exactly ten pounds on the taxi meter — a coincidence of round numbers that I somehow took for granted. And as I rummaged deeper in my newly foreign-looking handbag, a voice kept running through my head: “Pay the taxi-driver. Pay the taxi- driver. Pay the taxi-driver.” And this had been running through my head for several minutes before noticing it. Perhaps the voice knew something I didn’t. That I should discharge the taxi-driver as soon as possible. Otherwise I would be putting msyelf in some kind of danger.
I had no real inclination to leave the taxi as it did represent — perhaps quite paradoxically in hindsight — some zone of safety while I gazed through its window at the masnion that occupied the address I’d given to the taxi-driver. I knew instinctively he’d done his job correctly, negotaiting all the tangled streets of West London to reach this destination now before me. Or at least I think I knew this fact. Meanwhile, the taxi-driver had turned round in his seat looking at me quizzically — wondering why I had not yet made a move and, above all, why I had not yet paid him. Perhaps a more normal taxi-driver would have left his own position behind the steering-wheel and opened the back door of his cab … allowing me to alight. Then, suddenly, it dawned on me that I had no luggage, other than the handbag. How was this possible, having been abroad on holiday fo so long? Indeed, I recalled balls and events where I wore my best finery. I recalled large wardrobes in various plush hotels on the lidos and esplanades of Middle Europe, wardrobes which had been chockful of my stuff. I should have at least half a dozen brown-leather suitcases to house it all, to transport it all.
What happened next happened too quickly for me to be able to dwell on it at any length. The taxi-driver started to drive slowly and then gradually faster away from the side of the mansion to which I had earlier directed him, knowing, as I did then, that he must have the A to Z imprinted on his brain. Indeed, he hadn’t turned his engine off despite idling by the kerb for quite a while. I realised that I should have paid him when I had the chance, when that insistent voice in my head (which was still relentlessly imparting its advice even as the taxi increased its speed), repeated time and time again: “Pay the taxi-driver. Pay the taxi-driver.” It was perhaps too late to pay heed to the voice in my head. And perhaps it still is.
=
I find myself in a small sparse room. The taxi-driver — whom I’ve grown to know as Sam — visits from time to time and gives me food. The toilet facilities — that leave much to be desired — are just down the dark corridor outside the room. The food also leaves much to be desired. As does Sam the taxi-driver himself. He blames his own taxi somehow for what went wrong, not me, thank goodness. And incredibly not himself. His face is inscrutable. One would be none the wiser about him even given a description of his features or behaviour. They are just empty of meaningful recognition. He is like an unseen waiter who hovers around one as one chats to one’s latest hopeful holiday romance … as both his customers (the handsome prospect for a holiday romance and myself) sip cocktails by the harbour or the canal or rocky bay.
Yes, what was I saying? Sam blames the taxi itself, I gather. He drove it here, however, so I know whom to blame at least. Having had such a long holiday in relatively salubrious hotels in pleasant climates with breath-taking views, this was all a bit of a come down for me, or let down, downfall, downer … the words are down in the dumps themselves as they pass through my sluggish mind. But I am amazed how easily I have taken it all for granted. Including Sam’s presence as a shadowiness or background figure. I suppose I really need to blame myself. I did not pay him his fare after all, as soon as he drew up outside my destination.
I sleep most of the day. There’s nothing else to do. I dream of my earlier life — before I went on holiday — in the building where I had lived since I was born. The patchy jobs of work, with several now forgotten colleagues, some quite nice, I suppose, others not. I rather liked the atmosphere of department stores to work in and have often worked on perfume counters. I liked customers who just pay and go, and don’t involve me in conversation. Sometimes men talked to me — chatting up as they call it. But I was too unresponsive for any of them to stick. But that was before my current predicament.
Fitfully waking to the small room (bare other than for minimal sticks of furniture), I often think my earlier life is the real dream, but I soon wake up to the fact that this room is my true waking reality whilst my earlier home is the real dream. I often wonder, however, if there is another me in my earlier home dreaming of this me being in this room serviced by a taxi-driver called Sam. Wondering about such matters however doesn’t make things any clearer as to why I am so amenable to this situation and unthinking of the changes that have overtaken me.
Sam is my only anchor to the outside world — so I try not to upset him but treat him with kid gloves. He curses his taxi quite often, i.e. its undependability and petrol consumption and wear & tear etc. I recall one occasion where he complained of its tyres being flayed (‘flayed’, I think that was the word) by some foreigners in his street. I often sympathise and thank him for the meagre meals on wheels for which he is responsible. I thank him, also, for his smiles, even when I know he knows he never smiles. I thank him for his kind words, even though he only ever utters the minimum of small talk — none of which concerns anything that interests me, as news of the outside world would interest me; even talk of the weather (so imporatnt to my holiday) would have been an unexpected treat sufficient to brighten my whole day.
One can imagine my surprise, therefore, when completely out of the blue, Sam tells me he’d be bringing a visitor tomorrow. I nod, not quite believing him. Having said that I do feel surprised, and perhaps I shouldn’t be: as a visit from a third party seems natural in the course of some destiny that is laid out before me, bits of which I see gradually and piecemeal, forming a large kind of jigsaw path of crazy-paving that I shall walk along before long. The bare room takes on the path’s dimensions at times, till I blink, that is, and the path vanishes, leaving me alone again with only thoughts to keep me company.
=
Sam doesn’t bring a visitor. Instead, he leads me from the room, from the building that houses the room — and looking back I see a tall block of flats that could be almost anywhere — and his black cab is parked outside and he motions me to board. The day is a dull one, but the sky is nevertheless too bright and I can’t help squinting. I recall those truly sun-filled skies abroad, and I wonder whether the room in which I have been ensconced has not been darker than it should have been and if I’ve only just noticed this comparison when faced, as I now am, by the outside world.
“But I haven’t any money,” I say to Sam.
He nods, still unsmiling, but beckons me to board nevertheless. The drive takes a while. I don’t recognise any of the surroundings. Rows of residential housing, peppered with larger buildings – Royal Oak and King’s Arms and Queen’s Head establishments – along the way. One, I am sure, is my own mansion on its own without being part of a terrace of mansions. The traffic is heavy and petulant. Sam needs a haircut, I notice, from behind him. He seems to take driving as a matter of course and is not even rattled by some frightful driving from others.
Eventually he drives into the car park of one of those larger establishments along the way. It is a public house of quite imposing appearance. Sam ushers me into the lounge bar – which turns out to be quite empty. Only one solitary drinker at the bar who – judging by the attitude of the bar staff – seems a regular.
I sit at one of the tables as Sam goes up to the bar, without asking me what I want to drink. I feel hungry, too, but it seems too early for bar food to be available.
As he stands at the bar talking to a barmaid and to the regular, an old couple come in. It seems to be their first visit, as they are not aware of all the procedures that regulars would be aware of. They are indeed old but not old enough to be housebound — and this is evidently one of their rare excursions into the outside world to prove (to each other at least) that they are still alive. They are more interested in food than drink, I gather. I leave them to their own devices, whilst I return to my own thoughts. Where was I and why? It’s as if I’m haunted by a ghost. A ghost that uses my body and mind as its fixed berth. I wish I could shake it off. Holiday romances should not be quite so clinging, so cloying…
The old couple, by now, have managed to order their food. They sit at a table, side by side, gazing through one of the windows at the car park. I wonder if they drove here. I wish they had managed to visit a more scenic pub: one on the coast perhaps. Then, at least they could have stared at the moving panorama of the sea and pretended they were on holiday. Suddenly, the wife (I assume they are married) gets up, realising she hasn’t fetched the cutlery from where cutlery is kept, neatly wrapped in white serviettes, in a tray. She called back to her husband: “Want any sauce, Tom?”
You would think after all these years of marriage, she would know without asking.
“Yes, tomato,” he snaps back, without even thinking about it.
I feel tears in my eyes … but, Sam has now returned, carrying two drinks. His is a pint of pale ale in a straight glass. Mine is a pale amontillado sherry in a schooner.
He smiles – perhaps for the first time. But I can’t return it.
=
Later, back in the near bare room, I still feel very very frightened. I am now sharing this room with a foreign-looking woman who looks as if she once had an important job. And something crawls around her feet like a reptile, but it isn’t a reptile; it is something else altogether, but not sure what.
“Pay the taxi driver,” I find myself telling this woman. This time with an expletive abruptly inserted.
***
MISER
He arrived at the safe-house, expecting it to be dark by window and locked at door.
Jack’s long experience of such domains led him to believe in its claim to possess a secretiveness unplumbed by both police and crooks alike. Despite his own shortcomings, he, as a spy, was equally unplumbed. A spy, by whatever cause he stood, was outside the law… both sides of the law. That was not to say he would have been kept out of prison, if caught…but, even so, his identity would be preserved until being sprung from behind the bars by higher authorities than the police or common judiciary. Even when incarcerated for insanity, Jack was confident of his long term freedom as a sane person…
The welfare of every nation depended on his anonymity, even that of enemy nations. The job was part and parcel of a greater plan, a cog in a complex of unseen moving parts which even (or especially) Jack did not fully comprehend.
Whatever his expectations, the supposed safe-house was alive with a party in full swing. A safe-house, but more an old mansion than a house. All the windows blazed. Even from among the chimneypots — which were high upon the staircase smokestacks — spotlights searched the night sky…reminding Jack somewhat of the recent war, when sky-craft had been witnessed hovering close to the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
He decided he must have the wrong address. He had no address written down at all, for obvious reasons. Even the meticulously learned directions with which his mind had been troubled for several nights was lost in a mishmash of other considerations: such as the non-aligned codes in which the directions had been wrapped, the various and sometimes unpronounceable passwords, the convoluted briefs-of-mission each one of which contradicted the others — and last, but not least, the forged currency rattling in his heavy pockets which no country in the world had turned out to recognize. Such money-without-meaning meant he was beset with a belly-seeking hunger, a stiff-tailed tiredness, an all-consuming despair, a nagging requirement for solace and security. The safe-house, in this light, did not promise much, if anything at all: only, perhaps, the remains of a hot and cold finger buffet that the party-goers had already rifled for its best bits.
He took his doubts in hand and rapped smartly on the front door. Looking around, to see if the other mansions in the road showed signs of awakening at the noise, he was relieved that their darkly squatting shapes did not budge, not so much as a wink from a careless tweak of black-out curtains. So sleepy was his concern, he did not immediately see that his knocking had caused the door to swing wide on silent hinges.
The hallway was strewn with bodies, either dead or drunk. On beginning to clamber over their tangled limbs, he realized that some were indeed dead, others drugged to the green eyeballs. Some of the latter groaned, staring glassily as they dreamed of a ghost treading on their toes. One of them, he half recognized.
The steep stairs leading to the upper storeys, whence he could hear the strains of heavy rock-music and mindless laughter, had been left unlit. The carpet seemed to move underfoot, as if his tread had stirred a latent flickering life-force in its weave.
The party noise ceased, as suddenly as the cutting out of a piece of 1980s hi-fi equipment might have been. The party, he surmised, was a tape-recording of one: a useful front for a safe-house, a party…nobody would suspect that secrets were at the heart of such a midnight thrash. He felt more at ease with the situation. He must have had the right address all the time, despite the misgivings of memory.
But what of that residue of humanity littering the hallway? To demonstrate to any intruder that the party was wilder than was good for them? In other words, to discourage gatecrashers? Why the unlocked door? Obviously a double bluff, or even a triple one.
He rattled the loose change in his pocket, counting it with his sensitive fingers. Comfort could be gained from coins, whatever the currency. After all, people only believed in the potential of the coins in their pockets, not in their intrinsic usefulness as artifacts: and if everybody began to believe, the power effectively became real.
In the silence, he could hear the insidious drone of sky-craft, constant and underplayed. That was strange since, outside in the road, there had been no sign of them. It could of course be the house’s central-heating system, carelessly over-hauled. Jack shivered. That must surely be right, for it was colder inside than out.
His heart froze in its tracks. Someone was using the stairs from the other direction. Slowly, purposefully, furtively. Some of the bodies in the hallway must be sitting up: he could hear the shuffling bottoms. The front door swung back and forth in a fitful wind, punctuating the ever-reducing silence with a snare-drum beat.
Then a voice spoke (as voices often do)… neither from above nor below. A deep voice seemed to emanate from the very sloping wall along which the makeshift banister had been strung.
“Password?”
A simple question which, in normal circumstances, required a simple answer, as long as one was in the know. But which of the many passwords currently buzzing around, was his mind meant to use? He plumped on one: “Miser.”
He said it with a conviction he did not really feel.
The resultant renewal of silence was stunned. He was being assessed, mind and body. The password was no doubt being keyed into some computer…
“Ok proceed!” eventually sounded from the wall.
With a certain amount of relief, he continued to tread upstairs, each step no longer sensitive to the touch of his fect…deadfalls to secure haven in the upper reaches of the mansion.
“Wait!”
This time the voice was inside his head, as if he were wearing a pair of well-balanced earphones. He felt his bare ears in disbelief.
“Let’s see the colour of your money, miser.”
He had been in stranger situations so, with no further ado, he withdrew a deposit of loose change and held it out in front of him. With the other hand, he grabbed the floppy banister to stop himself losing balance from the alteration in his payload’s distribution.
The whole house seemed to judder to a halt, as if it had indeed been in imperceptible motion all the time.
Eventually, he reached the topmost attic where a parade of slot machines sat flashing wildly, eager for their own jackpots to drop.
One machine had an enormous vertical eye strobing. His coins did not fit. Despite this, white pods dropped into the winning trough, like grains of snow that had been boiled bullet-hard. In one spy scenario, Jack had been told to pop one in his mouth and suck it…
The bodies in the hallway were things-with-souls inside coffins of flesh — one looked like him, bubbling gently at the lips — he saw them through the squint-hole in the door — none of his coins fitted the slot in the door, so it remained locked — eventually the house flew off with a tongue of flame roaring from its coal cellar — hovering for a while before moving across the city, with the glint of a pilot’s goggles upon the chimneys — none of these thoughts fitted, being cogs in a mechanism far beyond the understanding of those that constituted it — he staggered to the bus station where he could doss down for the rest of the night – until he realized it wasn’t himself in the cockpit of his skull —
He fingered the loose change in his pocket, gaining a precious moment of consolation by so doing — “My dear sir,” he addressed the person in his head — but it was not quite right — there came no answer — he withdrew, by feel, the shiniest coin from his pocket and saw reflected in it a face with its eye so sunken the green brain could be seen pulsing instead of the eyeball — he lay on his back in the gutter and placed two old copper pennies upon his dimming sight — listened to the droning of the night — the hordes of gatecrashers on their way to the next party — the rustling of other spies pretending to be people — he wished he’d tried that finger buffet when he had the chance — what finger buffet? — “My sir!” he jabbed with his tongue — but it was still not quite right — the meaning of the mind and money — by means of money — mean with money — “Miser,” he whispered — then wondrous release — beyond even a triple bluff — evidently imprisoned within a time loop with the keys thrown away — reprogrammed to be a police spy in a drug bust — Jack’s sacred anonymity thankfully preserved — and he arrived at the safe-house, expecting it to be dark by window and locked at door.
And whoever created this circuitous story of Jack could have used far less words to tell it, certainly less of the more precious ones, and saved them up instead.
***
CONTINUED HERE: https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/victims-fictionalised-by-purging-torque_17.html
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