Continued from here: https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/victims-fictionalised-by-purging-torque_16.html
AGAIN, THE VERTICAL EYES
I said I would write about the countryside yet, when I thought about the countryside, many images came up far too cosy to cope with. You see, I relished people more — people with fractures in their thought-bones, gaps between the logic of their ligaments, missing links between one joint and the next. Joints joined to joints making a limb with nothing between the joints that we could possibly otherwise call a limb. But still a limb to go about upon to describe the one I love.
But I said I would write about the countryside and so my duty was to do just that. The flowers were sweet centred, soft-smelled, petalled with kisses, wispy in the wind. The grasses were spread out like loose lawns, through which I tripped like a nature poet with words in my sack and gentle thoughts in my head. The sky was clear blue, laced with imaginary clouds, yet no sun to speak of. Perhaps it hadn’t risen or had just set, but it was still as bright as if the sun were high shining. Not even the vertically blackened eye of a static eclipse could solve the conundrum.
Yet my countryside was the same as your countryside. Just as describable, just as pleasant and langorous, simply just as perfect for a nature poet’s treatment with pen and pensive brow. Nevertheless, in my countryside, there were undercurrents missing from yours. Or, at least, as far as our relative descriptions of it portended. Yours remained sweet and lovely and full-scented with thyme and honey, buzzed by bee and bobbed by bird. Even your shadows were explicable, beneath the full-blown sun.
In my countryside, lack of sun brought out shadows that were merely shadows in your countryside but more like shapes in mine. An armadillo with arm-ratchet poked a proboscis into view from under a shrub or tree-shade. You, meanwhile, looked in vain for any such worrying signs in your own countryside. In mine, the longer your eyes became accustomed to the different quality of light, the more you saw things you wouldn’t want to have seen even in a nightmare.
“Hi!” you said.
I simply knew you must have left your own countryside to visit mine, because boredom had set in with all the nice descriptions with which you had saddled yourself. In my countryside, description itself could take wing in the form of huge birds of prey that your starlings, thrushes, robins and chaffinches had now become.
Although we had yet to get to know each other properly, I knew you’d become my love, the longer you stayed. Indeed, my countryside, as I had described it, would make you seek my arms as a form of protection. I took your elbow between my testing fingers and then felt the upper muscles move beneath the skin like separate creatures. I touched your petal lips with mine. You shrank back.
“I hate your countryside. It is too bright, despite the shadows thrown by an invisible sun.”
Of course, I had put the words into your mouth. This is my description after all. If you had managed to lure me into your own version of countryside — one with velvet dawns and light breezes and deep green foliage and lush-thick rivers — you might have been able to make me say simply anything … like I love your countryside, with its sun-free acres and climbable bark … like I love you, too, with your flower-tressed hair and lithe, supple limbs of human willow. As soon as the words had left my mouth, I saw you cower back into a dark patch of mildewy shadow, eager for consorting with whatever wielded the cantilevered limbs from this willow’s trunk.
As for me, I retreated from my countryside to your countryside, although your description of it was not complete, unfinished because of your own exchange visit to my countryside. I quite enjoyed the gaps you’d left. You being the biggest gap of all that your countryside now sadly nursed.
Yet, I could fill these missing spaces with more than just the interfaces of kissing, as I dreamed of you wandering amid the crueller countryside of which my description had bestowed a bequest to our hopefully meeting again, meeting halfway between the shifting surfaces of other countrysides, countrysides that ratchet within a moving carapace of … of what? … plain poetic pleasure? … exquisite pangs of unrequited love? … indescribable joy of creative writing? … academic satisfaction in extending our interest in nature study? … spirituality of giving our Creator true credit?
I ask you which side of which countryside I should describe. And by trying to fill the gaps bored into the sky by boredom, each such attempt of mine becomes a whack-a-mole of each vertical eye that sprouts out above me.
***
AN ENDURING DUSK
I fell in love with the picture as soon as I had entered the room. Strangely enough, it was the frame that first attracted me (because there were several other artefacts in its vicinity vying for my attention); it trailed golden vine leaves between studs of even deeper, finer gold. Evidently wood, but spiritually real gold. Gorgeous marginalia, true, but nothing compared …….
Once drawn into the actual canvas itself, I was enchanted by a little mid-Victorian girl playing by a stream, with a hoop leaning against her — but no way could she have bowled it across the rutted field towards the archetypally haunted mansion where her mother at the open door beckoned her to come in. A dusk scene with clear skies, presumably, but, above all, its intrinsic charm was quite inexplicable. Perhaps, the mystery derived from the red flowers spotting the girl’s pinafore or the twined green tendrils curling like eels from between her feet towards the mother or the fact I thought I could actually hear the sound of the gurgling stream.
I acquired the painting along with the mansion and, luckily, the vendor did not add much to the asking price to cover it. She was a just-widowed lady of advanced years retreating, she said, to her daughter’s to while away the evening of her life and, so, would have no room for such a large painting. Strangely, it was the only painting in the whole mansion. The rest of the place was functional and blandly decorated.
“You sure your daughter won’t want it?” I asked mock-concernedly for I could not bear the idea that I might lose such a potential prize.
“No, dear, she’s never been a lover of this particular painting.”
=
When you live with someone for a long time, you begin to discover traits and quirks that you did not even begin to suspect during the earliest honeymoon days. It’s only the test of time that will reveal if those changes (each one small in itself, but taken as a whole may well represent a complete sea change) can mature into something that you can continue to love and cherish — or whether these minute changes are ingredients that will eventually turn the whole meal into a mess of stinking offal.
As with a person, so with that painting.
The mother by the mansion door was in a patch of deepening shadow, I noticed. I could have sworn that when I first cast my eyes upon the canvas, the face had been lit up by the horizontal beams of the setting sun. But now the sun was vaguely further behind the trees, I thought. The girl’s face was now infinitesimally nearer to the surface of the stream as if to catch her own reflection before the light finally faded. Her hoop was not a hoop at all! It appeared to be more like a brown snake, thicker on one side of the circle, thinner at the other, like an endlessly ingrowing whip. The red dots on her pinafore was some substance seeping from the flesh…
I must not give the wrong impression. It was only over a long period that such changes emerged. I would get up in the middle of the night, not being able to sleep or because I had been fitfully dreaming of the eventual end result of the painting if I didn’t do something about it. I would storm downstairs, only to be relieved to see that it was not as bad as I thought.
But it was always slightly different every time I looked at it. Until I could imagine that the vines of the frame were beginning to implicate co-existence with their cousin tendrils in the picture.
The girl became more aligned with the dark stream, more like an unwholesome, unnatural beast than a human, her flesh flowing as one with it.
The mother was nothing but a stain of darkness or had she gone in, shutting the door after her, despairing of her daughter ever returning from her twilight play?
But, eventually, when the moon came out, I turned its face to the wall.
=
If anyone visits me (and the visits of my many friends who used to flock to my social events in my younger days had now begun to tail off, as they often do when you get older), but, if anyone did come, they would question me about the painting with its back to the room.
And I would tell them that it was none of their business! I would play the grand piano loudly to stop them hearing the gurgling tinnitus of its stream in my ears.
=
Later Coda
That used to be the tale’s climax, but today I decide to turn the face of the painting back to its front again. I was old in the original timeline of the tale, true, but today I am even older, although I could then never believe becoming quite this old. I suppose such senility gives me a foolhardily courage I have not been able to achieve otherwise. Most tales of haunted paintings — in the ghost stories of once thriving mansions wherein the roof was always fixed when the weather was at its best — tell of slight creepy changes each time one looks at it, and there is ever some sort of linear development between each sighting. But now I broach a tale that breaks all ground, a tale that is nevertheless true, because I can vouch for it. You see, the painting now depicts a mansion with its roof awry, lifting upon a hidden hinge as if a dolls house with its own volition. It is dusk with clear skies, that at least holds true. And in its grounds can be perceived a tomb of what I assume to be a married couple, a monument that mostly one would find inside ancient churches. But stone monuments normally have such a couple’s younger bodily selves laid out on top, with as much beauty as can be coaxed into sculptural verisimilitude. But this tomb bears the couple carved as very elderly with hands held in prayer, not skeletal as such, but certainly on death’s door. Whether it is primed against future weather, only the enduring dusk can I trust to tell me. And, oh yes, by the relatively light hoop leaning against it that surely would otherwise have been blown away. But I now note the mansion itself has no door at all, having been overlapped by the craquelure of walls.
***
GOLDEN DAWNS
John Bello told her that when they played noughts and crosses together she would have to wield the mistake and he the perfect circle. He even hinted that each time she engraved the intersection on the old wooden desk-slope, someone somewhere bore a natural death. For him, of course, the joining of endless curve with endless curve was tantamount to another one being born elsewhere.
Why she had to carry what she considered to be a burden upon her slender shoulders, he never explained. Equally, when they were younger, he never quite chose the right words for their act of see-saw. Into the late gossamer twilights that seemed to abound during those limitless summer holidays, they would alternately break and join the shafts of hill sunshine with their joyful pivoting, young lives very much in the balance.
The two of them being of unequal weights, she never really understood how that ill-knotted plank could take him towards the touching blue sky and, then by turns, tug her evenly towards those same parts where earth’s pull thinned out. Again, Birth and Death were assigned his and hers respectively, as each made their own characteristic landfall upon the springy turf: he with confident reliance on the synchromeshing muscles and bones of the legs, as smooth as if his blood were oil; she with shapely limbs splayed almost to the snapping point of thin bones.
She was given her real name only at the age of twelve. This was the person she would need to grow into, John Bello told her.
“But why? I am surely me already.”
His voice grew deeper in reply. She could never recall exactly what he said. His words, she was sure, were about magic in the hills; past destiny fanning into parallel and crossover realities as far as the eye of memory could see; a greater destiny even than that which circumscribed Space, Time and Mind with its perfect revolved hologram of convoked circles; and the centre of it all, the Fulcrum where the one God and the one Goddess arched.
The schoolyard echoed with the happy frightened cries of short-shinned boys and thigh-wheeling girls. The teacher hid his intrusive gaze as the Bello lad walked hand in hand with that girl who always sat anonymously at the back of his history class. He sometimes inadvertently overheard the conversation of Bello and his girl, but could not fathom why young children should prattle so dreamily: “Golden Dawns” were for books with wide empty margins and stiff paper pages, weren’t they, and so were such expressions as “the mystical beauty of night upon ever-bosoming hills” and “the pale people within our skins”. These were so far-fetched upon the tongues of mere kids, the teacher even doubted whether he had heard them properly. Surely, he could not have invented the words himself.
One day, he kept a number in for detention. Even so, there was no explanation for the extension of twilight beyond a certain point. The narrow beams of dusty sunshine still sloped across the double-desk at the back. John Bello and the girl were bent intently over the grain, their compass points at crazy angles. The teacher did not dare recriminate them, because of the sparkles at these points.
He felt his flesh crawl further when he saw the other children put up their hands. How could he ever explain? But, then with relief, he examined the attendance register for their class, so meticulously maintained by their form teacher. The boy John Bello had a series of black crosses stretching endlessly from the edge of his name, instead of the red circles of which all the other names boasted.
His relief was tinged with mystery, however, for the lines in the register he kept for his own class marched along with red herring-bones, with only an odd black circle here and there to sully perfect symmetry.
When the detention reached its inconclusive dismissal, he wished he’d counted them in before he counted them out. At his high desk, the detention teacher rocked gently to and fro, if not up and down, somewhat preoccupied. Meantime, night reclaimed its own particular reality of light’s absence for what it always was. At least this story’s author has had the altruism to airbrush its intended ending’s rounding off of events that would have otherwise over-balanced us all into darkness, too.
***
DO GHOSTS DREAM OF WINDING-SHEETS?
Strange that he could not recall falling asleep and even more strange that he was not at all surprised waking up.
Clement’s sleep was a pure blackness that ever seemed to teeter on the edge of white. In any event, he assumed what he was experiencing was sleep. It seemed very much like it, except sleep consciousness was entirely new to him.
He stirred with the dawn cracking. The sun was not yet above the horizon, but its fanfare of known and unknown colours also stirred.
Sleeping on the lush grass amid the daisies and beneath the stars was a perfect blessing — the weather never changed, the temperature balanced between the tolerances of night and day, the shades and hues both destructive and creative in their interchange. He woke to find his mother staring at him for snoozing off.
“Don’t you believe in ghosts any more, Clement?” asked his mother, while fingering the tiny cross hung at her throat — as if she believed it would protect her from those very ghosts.
The room was still crowded with other members of the Victorian family — a funerary gathering, with too many children under the age of ten for comfort. He grimaced at the thought of the ensuing hours of small talk and big arguments. Yet, despite the numbers, there was currently a deathly hush, as the grown-ups balanced the chinking of their cups against the nibbling noise caused by inconsequential cucumber sandwiches, underlaid with the snickering of the log’s flames from the hearth.
The children maintained an uncharacteristic modicum of good behaviour, even including the boy who had dared wear a bobble-hat at the earlier ceremony. They were crouched on the floor peculiarly staring at an empty corner of the room.
Twins Archie and Annabel had given up squabbling, once one of them at random had been given what Clement considered to be a rather vicious clip round the ear by their otherwise prim and proper mother. After all, in those days, punishment was worth the effort.
Clement had arrived at the funeral on his own. His mother lived in the opposite end of town, pretending to her neighbours that she had always been a celibate Spinster, thus concealing the evidence of Clement as fruit of her non-marital loins. Indeed, she had ignored her son during most of the day’s proceedings — other than the initial pleasantries which she had a way of making quite unpleasant.
Clement surveyed the others. They surveyed him, too, with the usual embarrassment that people have about returning silent stares. Most of them were unmentionable creatures whom Clement would not have even granted a second glance in the town’s market. The simple fact that they once had blood-ties with him in various devious ways surely did not make them worthy of consideration. He would rather be friends with those donkeys on the sands, when his mother took him to the seaside every Whitsun. But now he wished to get back into his dream of lush grass.
“Ghosts, mother?” he said, as if the words fitted in with what had already been said earlier. He fingered his cufflinks, echoing her earlier perfomance with the crucifix.
“Yes, Clement, you were always going on about ghosts. If you’re so clever, where’s Auntie Rita now?”
His mother swept the room with her heavily braceleted arm, as if to conjure up some wraith masquerading as the remnants of that day’s buried body. She ignored the steely glances from some of the grown-ups who evidently condemned her tactless remark.
Clement had found it difficult to remember who Auntie Rita had been. Some long-lost distant relative born not only on the wrong side of the blanket but also quite the wrong blanket? One who wanted to be called Auntie because of some perverse logic as to respectability? Or was she his mother’s sister, as simple as that? Whoever she was, he laid the blame at Auntie Rita’s door for today’s irritations. At least, when attending a Christening, one could curse the baby in question. Or, at a wedding, stick pins into metaphorical dolls of the bride and groom. But at a funeral, the proximate cause of yet one more family gathering was already dead. But, he knew, as the old saying went, there was no rest for the wicked.
With corpses as scapegoat as well as subterfuge, families, like nations, had wars, bitter, twisted and, yes, mercenary. Why would they all be haunting the living-room, otherwise? If not for the reading of the Last Will and Testament…
So that explained the gentleman in half-moon glasses who sat uncomfortably on the sofa between Archie and Annabel. The family lawyer, no doubt. But the man also had the stigma in his eyes and the caste of complexion which typified the rest of the room’s crawling life. Clement winced at his own words. He hadn’t chosen them. It was as if someone else described the scene. Clement was no culprit — he was sure. Yet the family did stem from a particularly nasty form of ethnic cleansing that had transpired in Old Europe, before Clement’s birth. Yet nobody had heard of ethnic cleansing in those days, that, at least, was true. But it gave him no excuse for racial slurs.
“I don’t believe in ghosts any more, Mother.”
Clement had broken another icy silence. Her accusation could not have remained unchallenged. Who knew what concertina of destinies would have been set in motion, otherwise? The supposed lawyer coughed — either because he had a frog in his throat or he genuinely wanted to let slip the dogs of war with the Will of the deceased. It turned out to be a frog, since the man pawed at his own chest as if he fought for breath — or someone else’s breath, Clement unaccountably thought, in a moment spawned by anachronistically surreal humour.
Still the children silently stared at the empty corner of the room but one of them was eventually instructed to fetch the lawyer a glass of water. Upon recovering, he maintained that a piece of cucumber had gone down the wrong way.
Gone down the wrong way?
Which was the right way? contemplated Clement, as he fingered his own throat and discovered the tiny cross he always had hanging there, against his better judgement. Habits died slowly — and a habit, inculcated in the younger Clement by his mother, was particularly hard to kill. Not that he believed in God any more. Well, not that God in whom his mother appeared to place so much faith.
The children were now becoming more and more fractious. Who could blame them? The whole affair was being drawn out to unncesssary lengths of fitful silence. At least, their encroaching wheedles and whines relieved the heavy atmosphere. Nobody had dared broach the Will, not even the so-called lawyer — a man who looked remarkably like Clement’s biological father when he was younger. Yet, Clement’s father had been rumoured to be a cleric: or a lower-rank verger or sexton or, maybe, at a push, a curate or something. Certainly not a deacon. Some scandal had come upon his father when Clement was too young to appreciate the repercussions. A minor peccadillo with a female creature which flaunted itself on the seaside rocks (near the donkey-rides).
Clement couldn’t believe in ghosts. He never would. He didn’t dare.
He snatched the long toasting-forks from either Archie and Annabel (he was unsure which shape was which) and jabbed and spiked the air of the dark living-room to kill whoever was there munching green cucumbers. He then squatted in the empty corner and tugged harder at the cross’s chain, hoping it would make him vanish like Auntie Rita.
Strange that Clement could not recall falling asleep after having been the central character in a story completely divorced from this its supposed ending, although the story’s questionable title may have already known something about it. And it was even stranger awaking as a ready-made orphan at the very point of birth, indeed awaking from between earthly loins and beneath sun’s kind warming. And coiled in and around by ironically lush ghostly shoots. Gone down the wrong way, it seemed.
***
VICTORIAN VICTIMS
If anyone entered this mansion, I could only hope to remember the type of person involved and the thoughts judged in isolation from being that person. Impossible to pigeon-hole. Yet an insulated dream which knew itself — at least somewhere — to be real and boundless.
Once this person stepped within the mansion, I knew it was myself. Not a mansion as such but a walk-in wardrobe that was within it, one that I could never have afforded the space to own. And I could perceive the dulcet care of lighting that a gentleman about town may have confessed was intended for liaisons rather than garment storage. The two long mirrors failed to hype up or eke out any illumination.
There were no garments; they had been stripped out along with their clothes-horse frames, tie-racks and sock-drawers of ill-defined usage. No see-through drip-dry shirt-tails to assist the inner light’s ambition to brighten. The tapestry that I then realised had once concealed cross-hangers as if a draught-excluder or wind-break had slipped not only from in front of the open wall but from the memory I now used. Indeed, many things not there, nor even thought about nor considered worthy of noting their absence, I’m sure. But there was a dead tree lying on the parquet floor. Seeping open its own flayed and palsied bark. Not the corpse of a soldier as I first unaccountably assumed, but a genuinely slumped trunk reaching into the darkest regions of the wardrobe, leafless branches out-splayed like a thousand knotted limbs grasping at nothing: crumbling where the damp had reached its due existence of further nothingness. Rotting by root and tip. Indeed its minor rootlets were further limbs, more sveltely ‘living’ than the branches. Yet rotting, nonetheless.
The major roots were tantamount to things I once feared growing in my own body. No possible description of such huge coiled menaces, hidden by their own minors, as they were. Yet vaguely sensed in the wardrobe’s body mirrors on each side wall.
I stooped to touch the dead tree’s bark or, rather, its upper sutures — or, rather, I didn’t stoop at all, but squinted in the sedated light — to see the shape more clearly, without daring to approach it. Merely to touch it with my eyes, as it were, while failing to see that these eyes were the most dangerously vulnerable entry to my soul, anyone’s eyes ever being loopholes.
The dampness had reached such depths, I spotted a tiny lake amid the runnelled surface of the bark — even a pocket sea. I yearned to saw through various branches to allow irrigation to drier areas where tiny wooden mouths seemed to pock out with airlets or minuscule bubblings. I fondled the nail-file in my pocket, wondering if its serrations would prove sufficient purchase. I clicked my heels on the parquet, in a tantrum of powerlessness. Purple crosses had been carved into words upon the bark and equally stained with some verjuice that my tongue knew, more intimately than my nose, was rhino-gomenol, despite various trajectories of these two bodily senses were conflated with surrogate touching. I could not read the sad words thus chiselled which no doubt noted some tryst beneath the tree’s wide bower in happier times.
The tree’s pulpy ridges pulsed but, then again, they were dead, completely dead. As if the floaters in my eyes – fed by deeper heartbeats – lent their own life to what they witnessed. Back and forth our sight ever does travel, nobody owning its visions. I raised my hand tentatively to the wardrobe’s dimmer-switch. A voice spoke that the mansion was made that way. From dead wood.
The dubious direction of the next mansion approach derived from a sense of both its inner and outer address, as well as this being both a game and a serious quest. Which of these options became appropriate would remain uncertain for some while, I felt – but I was at least sure I approached the next mansion almost instantaneously, even possibly in advance of a few other mansions that had once appeared chronologically prior to this current locking by me into a new set of falling tumblers. The next mansion in fact was, as a whole, its own built-in wardrobe!
I was faced, on its back wall, with – not photographs or frozen televised shots of soldiers – but soldiers depicted in a tapestry, albeit with no obvious weft or woof in the fabric. The stitches or weaves were slipstreamed, nevertheless remaining proud from the surface upon which they had been laid down like rich chintz: soldiers that once (in a previous or subsequent mansion) had been photographed when old (beyond indeed the age of film) but now even older like Mediaeval icons. Each of their eyes stared out at the face in the mansion’s opening frame, like a gold coin … or a military medal. I cringed, as if they deemed me unworthy of my own personality’s currency or exchange-rate protagonism. Then I noticed that the soldiers did not bear Xs like wounds or stigmata – Xs that had crossed them out in earlier lingering images once foretold by a previous mansion. Here, the soldiers themselves crossed out the crosses by means of their tunics, but crosses still vaguely seen through the woven arteries of their bodies like wrong marks or slipped stitches in the knitting or falsely identifiable co-ordinates where treasure was buried … except the cross itself constituted the treasure and the uniform plateau of flesh above marked its spot.
The smell, I noticed, was simultaneously anger and incense, a strange heady contagion of eucalyptus, a cold cure like rhino-gomenol, and the rankness of confession.
Beneath these images of soldiers were wickerwork baskets containing the ripe seeds of ancient sanitary processes – as if positioned there to catch all the droppings of the tapestried soldiers.
I laughed – I who had backed into this telling wardrobe tableau – roared with hysterical mirth. Among the droppings were true pigeon-holes. Not those pigeon-holes that existed as familiar doorless mini-oubliettes that cross-hatched the back wall of many a mansion or wardrobe or post office sorting-room … but, instead, they rested and nested in ordure, singular nothingnesses like a solo game of Narnian noughts and crosses that is often played whilst abluting. Other pastimes I discovered on this quest was the board game Mansion Monopoly and the ingenious card game Victorious Victims.
***
EVERGREEN
Douglas walked the whole park but failed to find one bench upon which to sit. Surprising to think of it, there seemed to be nobody else out taking a stroll this sunny Sunday morning, for an inner city park such as this one.
Memories are made of a whole series of fleeting images, often cohering mistakenly into a false picture of the past and rarely do they readily come together and form a reality that is close to the truth. But, for Douglas, this was one of those rare days. He had risen at the break of dawn, exactly 5 o’clock, give or take a few minutes. There being no reason to wake at this ungodly hour, he decided that was reason enough for him. A late riser by nature, he was surprised at his own agility of mind as he dressed before the open window. It was going to be a beautiful day, one of those unbroken periods of blue, orange and green. He gazed at the cluttered roofs opposite and imagined that the tiered chimney-stacks were elatedly stretching higher into the silk of the sky.
He breakfasted of a raw egg whipped into goat’s milk and thin bread that had curled at the edges under the grill. His wife, who had been sleeping in a separate bedroom, could be heard snoring. She’d probably only come in a couple of hours earlier from a night out with her friends. He wondered whether he should wake her with a nice cup of tea, as a peace offering, but decided against it. He would go for a walk in the nearby park, clear away the few remaining cobwebs from his eyes and, perhaps, on the way back, treat himself to one of those Sunday newspapers that come with a colour supplement.
The front door slammed behind him, just as he remembered forgetting the key. He cursed. He would now be dependent on his wife letting him back in.
The sun had now revealed itself for what it was, resting upon the terraced roofs of the street broadside to his own. It was an exploding citrus fruit balloon kept from floating away by the spikes of the ancient TV aerials. As it rose even higher, it seemed to spread along the slates like the jowls of a circus clown called Marmalade.
As he passed into College Street, Douglas suddenly thought that none of this was actually happening. Or, if it was, none of the rest of his life had happened at all.
The park was further down College Street than he remembered it. Its original gates were now the entrance to a factory making raincoats. They were locked, of course, being Sunday. Further along, there was a large rambling mansion called Evergreen, which appeared to bear a roof entirely made up of chimney stacks, making him think that all the rooms inside must be complete with at least four open fireplaces each, with the consequent number of chimney breasts. Some of the smaller rooms would have fireplaces staring eye to eye, breast to breast, with no room at all for family evenings round the piano.
He raised the knocker from the heavily soot-stained wood of the front door, but then let it drop with a shudder: it had been carved from coal and depicted a devil’s face…
He ran on down the road towards where he hoped the park gates would be found.
The railings enclosing the treed area looked as if they could go on forever, the ribs of their shadows shuttling across his face. The iron gates turned up at the corner of Bay Crescent, much taller than the railings to prevent people climbing over when the park was meant to be shut. Luckily, they swung open to his touch.
Douglas knew something was right. He had been feeling natural ever since he got up at that earlier ungodly hour. It was as if all the strangeness that had permeated his life heretofore had dissipated under the relentless heat of the strengthening sun. The trees closed ranks as he passed between them, hiding the park benches but not preventing the direct gaze of the sun to find him. In the distance, he heard police sirens, wail after wail, as if the emergency was never ending. Or could they be fire engines, racing to a chimney fire? Surely not on such a hot day.
Finally, he sat down with his back to a tree trunk. He could just see the distant steeple of a church, pointing like an old-fashioned rocket ship toward the open heavens. Distantly, he could hear its bells ringing … for this, he recalled, was Sunday, the last time he bought a newspaper.
He loosened his fingers. One actually came off in his hand at the root but, luckily, did not bleed. Douglas relaxed. It was good to feel so right. Pity he had not woken his wife with a cup of tea, after all.
***
COMIC RELIEF
The bathroom was quiet. She who found it her daily activity to clean it had left en route for the kitchen floor, for she had plenty of girders of the metaphorical bridge to paint and, before this sentence reaches its end, she will likely die from sheer exhaustion!
The man had been sleeping off the morning, so that by the time he emerged, yawning, from the bedroom door, the raw edges of the day had been papered over by his own wisecracks … and by the evening mood that even now seeped into the early afternoon simply by thus adumbrating it here.
He entered the bathroom and decided to trim his stubble beard into the wash basin. The scissors needed to be found, first, and she who was by now sopping out the muckenders and utilities elsewhere was called back to the bathroom to take account of such a loss. Orange scissors, bottle opener, sellotape, hammer, string, fuses … were all kept in a cupboard nobody ever knew existed; nobody that is except the woman who was by now another job away, shovelling away the night soil from under his bed or teasing out the tapeworm from the middle child’s bottom drawers or blowing on the TV screen to brighten up its dim, flickering image…
The scissors? Yes, can’t you look properly, they’re behind the built-in wardrobe. It only needs a demolition expert to find them!
Sarcasm won’t get you anywhere, so he’s resorting to pulling out his bristles one by one with blunt, rusty garden shears…
Don’t make a mess in there, I’ve just cleaned it out. I don’t want hairs all over the place — the water sinks slowly out through the plugging already as it is, and I bet it’s a whole load of your hairs.
The man shrugged and jokingly offered to ask the hairy little bugger to shift itself, either up or down, it didn’t matter, as long as it cleared itself away and make it snappy!
He’d had a day off from work to do his hair, what with the several applications and consequent rinsings, the fixing up of the drier, the magazines he’d had to buy to read under the hot air, the plug-work with the sink, the baking towels, the blow-waves, the scalp friction, the split ends to mend, the convalescence and after-care, the setting out of the combs, the brushes of varying torques and grades, the oils, pomanders and talcum puffs, and finally the endless staring into the mirror, evidently mulling over the balding process that surely had been in full spate for many a year…
He watched the last lot of water slowly spiral out through the plug-hole, perforated to prevent the exit of lumps larger than a processed pea and to bar the entrance of anything that cared to come back. Today, the water, even on this last lap of rinsing, was dark, curdled and steeped in breaking suds. Deep down somewhere in the bowels of the plumbing system, whatever blockaded the passageways and outflows was forcing the fluids back up in great gurgling spouts. Even the very first wash had backed up sufficiently far to force itself through the perforations with the consistency of a thick soup riddled with wriggling nets of hair. It came up at him like a beard in search of a face…
At this time, the woman was scraping the walls away from all the wallpaper in the chalet bungalow they called their mansion, as if in some desperate attempt to purge herself of boredom…
But then, she heard the man bundling about in the bathroom like a creature at war with a giant soggy towel. A substance remarkably like a tide of mushed peas slewed across the landing and began to droop over each step of the stairs…and she heard flapping things that must have had massive wings settle on.the upper roof ridges of her mansion; they had flocked in, attracted by the smell, for a mighty feed.
This mansion hunched up on itself and lurched into the forest to be violently sick somewhere on its own. Upside down with its now farted-off roof.
He stared wildly into the broken mirror at his own upside down eyes. All he could do now was scream! For half the morning would now be spent looking for the damn scissors; and the woman who could find them was away house-hunting in a collapsing climate. Not funny, after all.
CONTINUED HERE:
https://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2023/09/old-and-new-fiction-miniatures-mixed.html
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