Whirlygig

 I seem to be living upon the shiny surface of the present. There does not seem to be any reason for living in the past, does there? Live for the moment, I say to myself. Seize the golden day. Or grasp the nettle. Whichever is what is to be.

Indeed, I wander into the street from a place the past calls my humble home. I wander memory-less if not mindless through avenues of mansions, an area of town far richer than I can ever imagine existing alongside the poverty I myself seem to suffer so stoically. But imagination is not a requirement. All is here and now before me, each front door polished up by servants with bunny-cloths.

I remember a vocabulary from the past, as filtering through the clumsiness of any present skills that comprise my ability to express myself in words. Surely, being who I am, I must be illiterate. Stands to reason. But I somehow sense a noisy fairground whirlygig that traps me like a static cage of colourful riders and mounts frozen in time. Protecting me from the past, as well as imprisoning me in the present. Yet, I tell myself time and time again that Time is a friend not a foe. Keep that, at least, in the forefront of the mind, I say. Or the nettle will grasp you, instead!

I approach one of the mansion’s buffed-up doors, struggle along its steep donkey-stoned steps gleaming red in the ever-present sunshine, grasp the door’s golden goblin-headed knocker and let it drop with a thunderous ricochet that continues to ring with the effects of a raging ear-drum infection. But how can I possibly know what I do know about the past so as to be able to express such conclusions of cause-and-effect in the present? The question remains unanswered, because the door opens on freshly-oiled hinges and a servant, still grasping her bunny-cloth, motions me to enter without even asking me my business. This takes the wind from my sails. I have no intention to prove anything about the past, but why else do I go along with this particular train of events?

I am introduced to a pipe-smoker wearing a monocle in the library, one whose face is unclear through the billowing fug. Skin too thick to see what he really is. I shake the proffered hand. In the distance, I hear the carousel music that seems gentle enough not to be incongruous with the posh vicinity. But I shake my head clear of such hallucinations, knowing now that I might be deaf. And I am taken by the servant with the bunny-cloth who then (still wordlessly) dresses me in a pinny and shows me how to oil the hinges of the front door. I wonder what cleaning job is next. But the future is just as slippery as the past, as both waltz silently around the happy perfection of the moment. I hope next for the other servant to show me how to make a bunny-cloth make a mirror squeaky-clean.

###

“I see the sea, but can the sea see me?” The voice sounds physically close to my ear but, when I turn to see who whispers such sweet nothings, nobody is there. I turn the other way in case the voice’s owner has gone behind my back. A stranger stands there with a glass of water in his hand, holding it out to me. I know it is water because strangers can only offer water to other strangers to drink. This to avoid skullduggery. Filtered clear, spring-like, untampered with. I take the glass. He smiles as he nods me to quench my thirst. I surreptitiously sniff it a split second before I sip it. Then a gulp as the next mode of intake. Lastly, a long, breath-held quaffing. Until the glass is emptied to its last drop. I smack my lips in satisfaction. The stranger smiles. We seem no longer strangers to each other. But friends of recent making.

He takes me by the hand towards the edge of the sea, where it can see me. The sea is short-sighted. The sand starts hard-ribbed as left by the tides, but it is soon pulpy enough to make footprints. I throw the glass into the sea.

He shouts. He is angry.

“The sea’s monocle!” I shout back, stork-legging like a latter-day Jacques Tati, as the ground surrounds me with its dizzying whirlygig of horizons, some man-made, others sea-edged. The man makes me dig where the sand is pulpiest. Despite the light-headedness, I manage to reach the finger-holes of a human skull. I shrug my shoulders and try to throw this into the sea, too. But the whirlygig has made me throw it backward not forward. Straight at the man’s caved-in face.

A groundswell of mixed emotions. The sea is the only witness. Unreliable, of course. The shattered ribs of a wreck poking through it. History is a series of challenges and responses via a filter whose lenses are baffles allowing a two-way flow in either direction. Tides ebbing and flowing into each other. I sip suspiciously, then hold my breath ready to quaff a million million spinning strangers.

###

When I wake, it’s a bunny-cloth I find in my hand, and not a skull in sight to clean. And  the carousel I heard was evidently at the seaside and not in a posh vicinity at all, a carousel that vigorously whirled rather than taking me upon a gentle waltz.