The clown was essentially white-costumed, even given the black hemispherical hat, the broken golden-hoop large enough to be a wide belt or sash, black slip-on shoes, bleached face containing tiny red lips and drooping black eyes …. sitting upon a huge domed mushroom mound …. awaiting the promised arrival of a blue tree embedded within a solid glass cone. Surely, a snow- globe to shake would have been better to amuse the clown or to amuse the children who might also arrive soon for Christmas – or, better still, another clown as company, bearing in mind the children were not promised to arrive at all. Anything was better than a wet ghost’s arrival to douse any laughter at all.
A smile threatened to shatter the real face the clown was wearing as a frozen-water mask. Thoughts of sadness often made clowns smile and a Christmas without children was one such thought of sadness. Broken thoughts were mended, mended ones broken. Labelled thoughts were unlabelled, later unlabelled ones labelled. Thoughts of optimistic puppets in the morning, thoughts of pessimistic puppets in the afternoon. Thoughts and threats of wet ghosts at all times from the roofless state of the mansions they once haunted. Thoughts of black humour when the time had come for going to bed. Wet thoughts at night to fill the dreams with more than just mushroom mounds to sit upon, all squished into pulp by morning. And by dawn, the more urgent thoughts of meltdowns and golden cummerbunds … then thoughts about promised arrivals being always late. Little different, the clown supposed, from never arriving at all.
The clown’s silent smile forced a love of lateness, accepting that the only promised arrivals were a blue tree in a glass cone and the clown-here-already-so-never-needing-to-arrive-at-all. The fact that both of these could never be contained within a single thought at the same time made it impossible to imagine such an unimaginable companionship. Not even fiction could attempt it. Even music, be it baroque or classical or modern or simply tinkling with snowflakes, failed to conjure such a dual impossibility. The clown’s smile meant there were no false hopes. The roads seemed impossible, impassable, too, the precipitation having formed a ground zero rather than a cone of scintillating light. Lateness was not just for Christmas.
It was the Lovecraftian time of day, which, for different people, is a different time of day. You would have thought I could have explained myself better. ‘Lovecraftian’ in this context is nothing to do with HP Lovecraft, the American writer of Horror Fiction and diehard sharer of correspondence containing all sorts of prejudice and old-fashionedness, but, rather, a time of day when people manipulate things towards emotional ends. And my optimum Lovecraftian time of day is late afternoon verging on dusk – dependant on the time of year. Especially when it rains so hard, its run-offs become sheets of actual tactile ghosts.
The sound in the chimney always came about now, scrabbling, panting in a lightsome voice, crooning more deeply sometimes of physical positionings in words only I could understand (so no point to mention them here); drops of clear runny ectoplasm followed the initial peppering of soot in the grate but also preceded the arrival of the chimney-sweep ghost from Dickensian London….
Today was an optimum conflux of such visions in great number/intensity and even greater susceptibility to being assuaged as dreams – together with an unusually early dusk caused by smog. I listened to the scratching in the heartlands of the chimneypiece, and then watched the soot start its dusting of nightmare’s cake with the choicest hundreds-and-thousands. Soon an abnormally large amount of colourless wetness employed to assist the ghost’s own passage splattered upon the soot making it seem more like sludge than residues of black-cane sugar.
Then one leg, smeared with its own signs of descent, waggled like – not a clown puppet – but an empty stocking. Only one leg. I was often forgiven the luxury of never remembering the routine so that it all came up fresh. The crafting of suspense as well as of love. I was always wrong, because there was a second leg that eventually flopped into view. Today, I am still convinced, however, wetter than ever, despite the routine. A very wet ghost indeed.
I was already water-proofed – having tucked myself under a disposable pakamac. Through the gloom, I watched further elements of the translucent figure unravel from the flue. It was not as if the flue was a spiral, but the figure itself shaped it that way by the manner of its sinuousity, hence the need to unravel. Filters often managed to filter them in and filter them out. Or down and up. I say ‘them’ because, I’m sure, it was never the same from day to day.
Today, it was less shapeless than routine portended. I recognised its vague approximation to its earliest form as a chimney-sweep. Its wetness, however, to my horror, was not an unconcentrated exudation of the pores but generated by the dual spigots of the baleful clownish eyes. Staring hard did not seem to be easy for it when also weeping, and so I managed to stare back unwaveringly. I have learnt there can be no sentiment during the manipulation towards love. It is a craft indeed, ‘crafty’ being a word that somehow is very apt; paradoxically canny, if also uncanny, while terms of engagement, then endearment, are agreed between us, then acted upon. A cone zero of concupiscent blue light.
It’s a shame, in hindsight. I regret my actions. By the time the creature has wound itself back into the upper flue, I wonder whether it was worth it. Having wrapped it in the pakamac, I give it many touches to prove its existence even now when touches no longer serve any purpose. I however manage to stuff it some way up the flue to give it a start, like an already landed Santa Claus giving a present to the next revenant coming down. Someone left the cake out in the rain.
Each unlovecraftian time of day, I lie asleep into late morning, like a slug-a-bed of the cosy old-fashioned past; I dream of a White Christmas and of the lower grades wielding their own shock-headed sweep-handles – and bunny-cloths, and making sure all steps leading to the front door are donkey-stoned, and sicknesses filtered back and forth so they can never settle, each of life’s corners wrung and swept. Indeed, while one may forget the way to wake up, one always does wake up. The last routine. I cannot have explained it better.
The mansion somehow knew it was a mansion rather than simply a structure of bricks, wood, glass etc. made to look like a mansion. I claimed that such a ‘knowing’ mansion was more prone to being haunted than a mansion that unknowingly stayed within the boundaries of building. I had always loved being an estate agent but could never remember being one! Until now. A real real-time story in the making.
In this day and age, it was difficult to sell property whatever its location location location — but with the right sort of atmosphere, there would be no stopping it…
A fine line to be drawn. The ghosts had to be optimum ones, not too meek, not to frightening. And ghosts with witness provenance to outweigh their wetness providence were much better than uncheckable hearsay. I groomed witnesses like other businessmen groomed their own CVs. My own CV was a clown’s, so it needed much tampering. Meantime, my first customer was the lady owner of Straight Mansion on the edge of town. She was not exactly desperate to sell the house. She was simply desperate for the house to stop owning her! I had suggested cooking up a ghost, as some clients yearned to be haunted.
“I do not need to cook up a ghost,” she snapped. She wore a hat and coat indoors and easily compensated for any pleasant customers that I had already met that day. “The ghost is already here. A very wet one.”
I frowned. Even a hint of dampness would outweigh any positive atmosphere provided by a genuinely verifiable ghost. At this point, there was a knock on the mansion’s door. Most prospective purchasers had already come and gone. With nothing to hook them, they had only promised to think about it and everyone knows that ‘thinking about it’ is tantamount to vanishing into complete nothingness or, at best, promises of coming back to look again. We both hoped nobody would notice the lack of a roof. So any late arrival at night was an added bonus, if indeed that was what this knocking portended.
The lady owner said: “Were you expecting anyone else?”
“No, but my office might have had a phone call and sent them straight over, knowing I was still here.” I was at the end of my tether. I needed to sell this house pronto. Failure would be the straw in the wind that broke a sole agent’s back. I took it upon myself to get up to answer the door, as if during this relatively small window of selling opportunity I acquired some sort of proprietary right over who came and went.
But, by now already entering through the door was a man with a brief-case who also assumed an air of proprietary right. He had crossed the threshold without any audible invitation to do so or any word of explanation. I stood my ground but then dissolved into a flood of tears at this unexpected sight of a representative from another estate agency wearing wellington boots.
The mansion contained a pet parrot and its owner, my lady client, wore a hat and coat indoors as well as out. Both these chatted to each other the day long, while the mansion itself stayed quite quiet, its windows staring out balefully towards the grey skies of December.
From a nearby mansion across the other side of some waste ground that ever sat beneath the cones of very wet clouds — a mansion that no doubt had its own (different) hang-ups — could be heard the quiet tinkle of Debussy on the piano. Further down the road, were two children playing up a tree, pretending to be parrots themselves, escaped parrots, squawking not in words but in tranches of meaninglessness that they imagined parrots to speak when not taught (parrot-fashion) real English words. The next game would be chimney-sweeping.
My client walked across the carpet towards a back window of her mansion and heard the apples on the apple tree in the garden dropping its pet apples one by one, with a relentless rhythmic thud thud thud, more Bowen than Debussy, as if betokening her own death with the ominous imagination of plodding ghostly funeral-workers from an otherwise impossible future.
As on most other days, she expected several visitors – but none of them ever came. She had a statue in the garden (near the apple tree) dedicated to all false expectations, a stone image of a clown with a blue cone, sculpted by a famous artist she once knew in better days when she lived in a different mansion on the outskirts of here.
Today’s expected visitor who unexpectedly arrived was me. The front door bell later rang again. It must be those damned children from down the road, she thought, running away even as their finger had barely left the bell-push rather than the visitors (old friends from the past) whom she expected to come. But she went to the door, hoping against hope that it was not Halloween. They had called her dead old dried apple-core last time. She opened the door tentatively…
“It’s a Witch, It’s a Witch,” squawked the parrot from its distant perch in the parlour.
Standing on the newly donkey-stoned step, was a man with a rusty round tin of what looked to be hardened half-used red polish that housewives used to spread on their prized dining-tables to make them shine like the best of memories. His cupped palm was extended towards her. I wondered how it all would end. With a thud thud, and a shadowy third thud.
The municipal wasteground outside was an eyesore, and, in better times, it was earmarked as land for development. Housing was probably the likeliest money-spinner but that was before money itself spun out of control. So my job in selling this mansion made all the harder, especially after its owner’s death in the previous paragraph.
Then populations moved from town to town in search of work, often only to be lost in the gaps between – so houses were no longer required, let alone mansions. This made some sense, I suppose, if one surveyed a place like the wasteground with rutted puddles and the derelict beginnings of construction. It was an area to ‘read’ as one would scry dead tealeaves left in a drained earth’s unwholesomeness — overlaying the older skid-marked stains around the inside of a chipped china teacup.
Any such ‘reading’ told of a future before which the real past somehow never passed.
The wasteground’s map of memories never stayed still, not because of seasonal entropy or the weathering of age – but a ghost, when unwatched, would switch puddles with other puddles or dismantle and re-erect things elsewhere, things that were otherwise permanently rooted to the spot … during the seeping gloom of seeming endless winters. A very wet ghost indeed.
I stumbled one day upon this pre-described wasteground when lackadaisically exploring what I quaintly called the future-that-never-came. Time without antecedence. Unless one consulted its statue of monumental sundial shaped like a cone pointing at the now blue sky, the rain clouds, some in torques like tornados, having cleared.
Floods still swelled, even when the clouds had gone. I was a writer, the only discipline left for the likes of someone who merely owned a fountain pen and a piece of blank paper that I had kept blank during the better times ready for use in the bad times. You see, I had fixed my own mansion’s roof when the sun still shone, but what a waste all that turned out to be when even homes themselves became homeless. Send in the clowns, having sent away the clouds. With ownership of one piece of blank paper, at least I always had the potential to describe the indescribable. But once it had all been described, all hope would have seeped away. So I shall keep it blank till the very last moment as measured by whatever points at zero.
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